Etherton frowned. "Won't he know the cell phone is a throwaway if he tries it?"
"There's a few other famous people on it too, mate. Like sheik El Habib, and singer Shakira. We bought five throwaway phones in all. The numbers are ours, so we'll block him if he tries them."
"Why not just send the girl or someone else to check?"
"They know things, Innes doesn't."
"And once David has Seacrest on the line?"
"Two men will be waiting in the stairwell. They're already on their way up. They went in with the cover party."
"What, you mean with hidden weapons?"
Malcolm nodded. "There's no cameras in the stairwell. It's already been checked."
"I'm not comfortable with this," David said, reluctantly, "even if Innes would be, if he knew the risk."
But Etherton wasn’t listening. "Where's Swann now?" he asked Wurley.
"En route. He'll only go up after it's secure."
Doug huffed. "Figures. No risk for him, even with Shakil dead, right?"
"We don't know that," Wurley said.
"Oh, I see. He's just not answering." Doug finally turned to David. "Are you okay with this?"
"I said I'm not," he repeated.
"What?" Malcolm looked directly at him, too. "What. . . do you mean?"
"I mean," David explained, looking away, "I'm through playing games."
An arm went around his neck from behind. Then, with the same unexpected suddenness, there was the cold steel of a pistol barrel pressed against the side of his forehead. "What did you say?" Peter, the bodyguard, breathed from behind his ear.
"I said. . . shoot."
The arm tightened.
Now he couldn't breathe.
"Jesus, hold on!" Etherton exclaimed, lifting his hands, fingers spread. "Why can't I make the call?"
Disturbed though he appeared to be, Wurley considered it, and then quickly motioned his approval.
Peter's arm loosened around David's throat. David coughed and swallowed, gasping air. Finally, Peter pushed him, propelling him to the opposite wall, where he turned and looked at the man. A thug, after all, he thought, assessing this newly emerged alter ego. Still, he realized the word did no more to describe the bodyguard than had scumbag described Cashman. Although it certainly tended to clarify the true nature of the situation.
"This isn't about finding evidence," he told Etherton while trying to catch his breath, “it's about revenge. His mind. . . was made up as soon as. . . as soon as he heard the theory."
"Whose mind?" Doug asked.
"Good point. If he'd thought of it first, he would have. . . would have financed his own aerial assault."
Etherton squinted at him. Confusion and disbelief registered on his face before guilt invaded and smoothed out the lines. "I'm sorry it's come to this," he said at last.
"Not your fault."
When Wurley's cell rang, the security chief answered, then motioned for Etherton to make his call. "He's in the elevator. Do it."
"I can't be here," David said. He took out his own cell phone, dropping it to the floor. Then he walked toward the door.
Peter blocked it. "Where do you think you're going?"
"Back up on the roof. . . to watch the fire, if that’s okay."
"Let him go," Malcolm instructed as Etherton telephoned Innes as directed.
Returning to the roof’s far corner, where the video camera had been placed, David sat down into the chair beside it, and looked up at Swann Tower. The fire there had mostly died. The smoke was already dissipating. Lights had even returned to some of the upper windows, while a company helicopter circled at the level of the breach. Opposite the Swann, the enigmatic face of Seacrest Tower reflected the brightest of distant flares like the compound eyes of a dragonfly, wings lifted in repose, quiescently surveying road kill in solitary semblance of innocence.
I can't be here.
He moved his lips, mouthing the words as the letters rose, receding before his mind's eye almost as if they were film credits filing up into a starry patch of empyrean sky. Hadn't he spoken the same words before on other nights spent alone in telescope domes?
I can't be here.
Feeling the enveloping dark, he was almost sure that he'd muttered the very same words in justifying his early retirement. An identical sense of inexplicable loss swept him now, as though the link to it was a circuit with a switch. Staring up at the stars once again, he tried to visualize his mother’s face more clearly, although she sat in an amorphous past which no longer existed except as a neural network of shifting pulses in his brain. . . a quantum reality in some relative relationship with his consciousness. That the switch to this repetitive cascade of thoughts might depend upon such a simple trigger seemed unbelievable at first, so he tried to blank his mind to confirm it, before realizing that thought itself had failed him. Or thoughts themselves, if cognition could be said to be alive: corporeal thoughts that worked like an artificial intelligence--a computer program that made perception and recollection spooky and prone to corruption, too. In remaking the past over and over, perhaps his memory traces had only magnified the errors they made, animating an attempt at self preservation by way of a genetic code. Like a virus had propagated and invaded his soul. Which meant that the past had never really existed exactly in the way he remembered it, and that the future had been an illusion as well. . . a neural construct, no more real than a politician's pipe dream.
By contrast, the present moment seemed unique and unfeigned. Distant flares and sirens proclaimed an obvious and solid distinctiveness. Even the pale yellow glow of the parking garage, and the ghosted reflections of movement along the highway--glimpsed as sweeps of light across acres of segmented glass--seemed, by comparison, pure and discernible, as telescoped to his retina.
He looked up and counted the stars, framed there through the drifting smoke. A dozen at most. His mind seized on the number and tried to connect the dots into a pattern, a constellation. He closed his eyes to thwart the attempt, instead.
No, not this time.
He waited for the compulsion to subside. Only when he was certain that it had did he open his eyes again. And what he saw was a point of light. One point amid others whose distance and genuine magnitudes he let remain unknowns.
Is there a planet around that star like the Earth?
Inescapable, the thought, born of habit. He let it live and die. Then, just as he did, the star began to brighten, inexplicably. Even as he stared at it, his next intrusive thought was how this could be. Was it because a veil of intervening smoke had drifted aside? If so, why hadn't the stars next to it brightened as well?
He felt his beating heart quicken, his pulse seeking pace with a new and enigmatic time. The transformation that then unfolded was a soundless shout across the bowl of sky, as the narrowly separated cloudbanks focused light as if like a lens meant just for him. When the star had reached the intensity of the moon, he knew the event to be more momentous than anything celestial ever witnessed. Reduced to a sharp point like the tip of a sword, the blazing star then performed its second miracle by piercing his mind clean of thought, and leaving only awe.
He heard an explosion dimly, in the nearer distance, but did not look for its source. His gaze remained transfixed above him, up into the tight funnel of light, as he waited for the end. Or the beginning.
Soon there were other explosions, and then other people who stood behind him. He did not look at them, either. He could not look away.
"What is it?" someone asked.
"The Burj Khalifa spire," another said, "it's gone!"
"No, no. I mean, what is that?"
Etherton's voice replied with incredulity, one hand now gripping his shoulder: "It's called a supernova."
Hearing the words, David felt a tear trace his cheek. And for the first time, he remembered peering up as a child at the stars, and being told by his best friend's father that they would appear the same when he was old, and that his children's children would
see the same pattern, too, which would never change until the Catalina mountains had been leveled by rain. The memory of their faces seemed so real that another tear fell.
"I can't tell what star it is, though," Doug said, "can you?"
He shook his head, once.
"I just can't believe it," Doug continued, ignoring the others, who moved about in a panic in his periphery. "It's in the Milky Way, though, I'm sure of it. Almost too bright to look at!" Laughter at his own observation. "You know. . .we're being bombarded right now with neutrinos. Gamma rays too. Of course there's nothing we can do. . . no way to escape. They go right through the Earth. . . right through, like it was nothing. . . Like we're nothing." A beat, a distant shout, the shriek of a siren, as he rambled on. "It can't be within a hundred-fifty light years, or it'd be burning off our ozone layer right now. Can't be Betelgeuse or Gamma Velorum or Eta Carinae, either. You think it's a Type two? Has to be. Do you know the odds of us seeing this, though? Astronomical, my friend!" Doug laughed again, giddily this time. "I've gotta call the mountain. . . they need to get ready. . . they need to know. . . you reckon they've even heard yet? How long has it been like this, do you think?"
"Not long," David replied.
"What? How do you know that?"
"I was watching the very star when it exploded."
David listened to the words as he spoke them. It was a simple statement, but one that he now realized had never before been uttered by anyone alive. Hearing it, Doug had no reply. He was speechless. Of course in 1987, as they both knew, a massive star had exploded in a companion galaxy--the Large Magellanic Cloud. But no one had actually seen it explode since it was too far away, and not visible to the naked eye. In four hundred years there had been no recorded supernova within the Milky Way, even much farther away, that could be seen through the dust lanes of the spiral arms. Even with four hundred billion suns, not one had been observed like this from Earth.
David took a breath, and finally looked into Etherton's face, to see the expression mirrored there. Like he'd just won the Nobel Prize and the Powerball lotto at the same moment. But it was better than that. He remembered another face.
Behind them another man came to stand, but without the same expression. The man David recognized as Gregg Swann seemed angry by comparison.
"What the devil is that?" Swann demanded, holding up one hand against the glare. "What is it you're. . .is that a flare?"
Etherton audibly chuckled. But when he spoke, his words were measured. "You've been upstaged," he replied. "So have the terrorists, whoever they are."
"What?"
Drawing his cell phone, Doug left them.
Swann turned on David. "What does he mean?"
David studied the man, feeling an odd sense of pity, now. "Did you know," he concluded, "that a million Earths would fit into the sun, but if the sun was shrunk to the size of a pea, then, on that scale, the other side of just our own galaxy would be as far away as the moon?"
"No, I didn't know that. Answer my question!"
He nodded. "Okay, then. I’ll put it another way. There's billions of galaxies that we can detect. Yet for you and Victor Seacrest the universe is flat, and no thicker than the silver coating on the back of a sheet of glass."
24
"You read about what all this is doing to the stock market?"
David turned toward the businessman seated next to him. Balding, in his mid-fifties, the short, stout man's pinstripe tie was loosened at the neck to resemble a noose. He folded his New York Times to highlight the referenced article, then handed it over. David took it, then punched on his overhead cabin light to read.
MARKET REELS ON DUBAI ATTACK
"Four hundred points isn't bad, considering, I suppose," the man said. "I wonder if Abu Dhabi will be bailing the city out this time, though. And how much more the Dow can fall before we're all broke."
"I don't follow the market anymore," David said, and turned the paper back to read the front page headlines. Below the fold, it read:
HOME GROWN TERRORISTS LINKED TO UAE ATTACKS
AP) Arrests are being made at a warehouse outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in connection with an investigation correlating the Dubai attacks with both a revolutionary arm of al-Qaeda and a rogue U.S. Army general court-martialed only weeks before his scheduled retirement. Gen. Richard N. Maynard, accused of aiding and abetting private defense contractors in Iraq in 2006, served one year probation on a Presidentially-commuted 20 year sentence after it was learned that he knew Sonoflo Dynamics had overcharged the Pentagon, bilking taxpayers of millions. Maynard is now admitting that he provided an al-Qaeda linked American terrorist group known as Reprisal with classified documents, allowing a breach of security leading to the theft and acquisition of military drone aircraft from a depot in the Green Zone outside Bagdad in late 2007. It now appears that Reprisal, in an unprecedented alliance with al-Qaeda and silent partner Sonoflo Dynamics Corp, hatched a plot to attack Dubai in presumed retaliation for 9/11, each with their own motives. On the one hand, al-Qaeda, which launched the attacks under camouflage from the Empty Quarter, had long been in moral opposition to decadent Dubai and its own alliances with "the great Satan," despite the kickbacks it enjoys. It would also gain the support of outraged moderate Arabs by linking the attack to American terrorism. For Reprisal's part, it could claim responsibility, and achieve worldwide recognition as a force to be reckoned with, while at the same time recruiting radicals within the West in opposition to Arab oil wealth. For its part, Sonoflo Corp, hired to develop additional prototype UAVs using military schematics, was paid with $6.8 million in laundered al Qaeda money, and was also promised a consulting contract in the rebuild by al Qaeda friendly members of Dubai's administration.
"Yours a pleasure trip?" the businessman asked, interrupting his read.
"That was the plan," David replied, looking up and thinking man plans, God laughs.
"Sorry to hear it. Where you headed now?"
"Back to Tucson."
"Arizona, eh. Similar weather, I suppose, minus the falling debris. Hope you weren't in one of those buildings that got hit."
David nodded. "Actually, I was."
"Really. Which one?"
"Swann Tower."
"Oh yeah, I heard about that guy. Gregg Swann. Family got killed, didn’t they? One paranoid SOB, they say."
"One of two, if truth be told." David turned the paper over. Above the front page fold, just below the masthead, the headline was:
SUPERNOVA RADIATION FEARS DEEMED UNJUSTIFIED
Seeing where he looked, David’s companion noted, "That's what they say, too. But if you ask me, we won't be living as long as we thought we would."
"We never do," David said.
A hand was thrust toward him. "Name's Brice Wexman, insurance adjuster from Omaha. Flew out here to deliver a double indemnity check, of all things. Company wanted me to ask a few extra questions. What is it you do, there in Tucson, Mister. . ."
David shook the hand, dutifully. It was damp and cold, the thick wrist knotted with hair like electrical filament. "I'm retired."
A look of surprise. "Gees, guess I'm in the wrong line of work. How old are you?"
"Old enough."
A nod and then a half smile as Wexman turned back to face the seat in front of him. "I know that feeling, anyway."
After a moment of guilt David admitted, "I was an engineer. What I am now is a changed man."
"Because of what happened in Dubai?"
He nodded. "And the rest of the universe."
Wexman blew out a breath. "Yeah, what's the odds of that. But you know what they say. Things like this happen in threes, if at all."
"I was number three, Brice," David confessed.
The adjuster adjusted his seat back a bit to assess him better. "Don't think you're alone in that. Freaked out my wife, too. She even called my boss, who won't tell me what she said. I got an idea, though. Oh yeah. Too bad there's no web cam in our kitchen, where she usually talks
on the phone. That's my hobby, by the way. They call me Wexman, the web cam man. I track at least two dozen cams with this special program I got, cycles through 'em ten seconds at a time. A beach in Rio, sidewalk cafe in Paris. Somebody's even got one set up in the slums of Jakarta. Day or night, doesn't matter. There's always something to watch. Get to see what it's like to live in those places, too. Like having these alternate lives. ‘Cause you only get one shot, don't you. Me? Mine's in Omaha, which never seemed fair. Knowing I could drop dead there, a total unknown, any second. And from a hundred different things. Know what I mean?"
"Yes," David replied, "I believe I do."
“Not that I’m weird or anything, mind you. At least not as weird as my neighbor. He watches TV all day, and doesn't even have cable. Old guy’s seen the fourth season of the Rockford Files about fifty times. Refuses to join some DVD club, either. Says by the time he reaches the end of the disks he's forgotten the beginning. Although they seem vaguely familiar.” Brice paused, shaking his head. “Nope, life ain’t fair."
"Nothing ever is."
"Or ever will be, most likely," Brice conjectured.
"You're right. Or ever was."
At La Guardia, with a dead cell, he placed a call through to Etherton from a pay phone. When the connection engaged, intervening static and a muted tone made it sound distant, like a link to the space shuttle. "Doug?" he asked, uncertain of the respondent's identity amid the crepitation.
"David? Been trying to reach you. There's about two dozen reporters asking us if we know who saw Rho Cassiopeiae blow first. Some amateur in Kazan, east of Moscow, is claiming he was watching through his eight inch reflector when it blew. Three other amateurs are making the same claim. You want in on this?"
"No," David told him. "How are you doing there?"
A muffled sneeze. "I'm okay. Gonna stay until Nasheed's funeral, in any event."
The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott Page 13
