“I don’t know,” I said. “Some obscure philosopher no one has ever heard of? Chinese medicine? The history of a lost kingdom in Manchuria somewhere?”
“The Holy Grail!” he said.
“I should have known. And what is it about the Holy Grail that has you all worked up tonight?”
I drank about half my glass in a single gulp, and Vitalius refilled it for me instantly. Slow down, I reminded myself. Don’t get too drunk. It was entirely possible that Father was only playing with me, plying me with wine as rapidly as possible so I would blurt something out.
“The cup Jesus used in the Last Supper, yes?” he said.
I already knew that well enough, but I didn’t want to make it too easy for him. “I thought it was some sort of fountain of youth thing,” I said. “Immortal Templars and whatnot. The hero has to pick the right cup.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Gavin. That’s not why I talk to you. And you know perfectly well that I am not referring to the Harrison Ford movie. What the hero must do is not to pick the right cup, but to ask the right question at the Castle of the Fisher King.”
I thought about referencing the Robin Williams movie next but decided against it. “So what’s the right question?” I asked.
“Whom does the Grail serve?” he said.
“Whom does the Grail serve? What does that even mean?”
“That’s the Mystery. No one knows, and no one has ever known. If we ask the question, we heal the Fisher King and restore the Wasteland. The Kali Yuga is over.”
“That’s a mixed metaphor. A mixed myth.”
My glass was empty again, but Vitalius refilled it without me even asking.
“There is only one myth. Just like that scene in The Exorcist, since you enjoy referencing movies so much. There is only one.”
He stared right at me, his eyes gleaming in the dim light in that disturbing way of his.
“Okay, so yeah. The cup Jesus used in the Last Supper,” I said awkwardly.
“If that is so, why is it that Wolfram von Eschenbach, the German knight and minstrel, referred to the Grail in no uncertain terms as a sacred stone?”
“A stone?” I said.
“A stone sent from heaven.” He stared right at me without blinking. I could neither look at him nor look away.
“That’s just like… Never mind.”
“Just like what?’ he asked, his eyes narrowing.
It was just like what Kumar had told me. Tungsten is originally a stone. An alternative name for tungsten is “wolfram.” Just like Wolfram von Eschenbach. Just like piling a huge amount of tungsten into a satellite and then… what? Sending it down from heaven to earth like a new Holy Grail?
“Oh, nothing much,” I said. “I lost my train of thought. We’ve been drinking this wine really quickly.”
Chapter 36
I didn’t hear anything more from Kumar for another several weeks, and I got the impression he was avoiding me in the hallways and the cafeteria. I knew the guy was scared, but if he didn’t find out something about the satellite for me, then I was up against the wall. With no way to make any progress on my real agenda, I was reduced to holding meaningless meetings and training exercises with my security crew.
Late at night sometimes I’d leave my room, moving quietly to avoid the attention of the mercenaries, and plug my laptop in somewhere in one of the common areas to use the Virtual Private Network. I logged into the Okuni_sagae encrypted email address the first time I did this and found a message for me from the Sōhei Faction.
Checking in.
That was all it said. I replied with a question: Why would anyone want to drop a bunch of tungsten from a satellite? And then logged off quickly and left the area, getting around the corner only a few seconds ahead of a mercenary patrol. I could hear their boots as I made my escape. I didn’t hear anything back on the encrypted email account, although I kept checking.
The changed atmosphere at the Quod Corporation headquarters was contagious. People upstairs started to quit their projects one at a time despite the unbelievably good pay and benefits. People downstairs seemed tense and self-absorbed, as if everyone knew something horrible was about to happen but nobody wanted to talk about it or even think about it.
The media was no longer quite as fawning toward the company or its president, and negative stories started to show up here and there:
Has The Quod Corporation Lost the Magic?
Rumors of Underfunded Projects and Cult-Like Behavior Dog the Mysterious Mr. Kohl.
But the fundraising money kept coming in. Vitalius knew his real audience better than anyone, and they opened their wallets wherever he went. I didn’t know how much money he was bringing in, but I did get a clue from Kumar in one of our very brief encounters. Passing me alone in the hallway one day he said “less tungsten,” so quietly I thought he had said “sex dungeon” at first until I thought about how unlikely that really was.
What he had just told me, effectively, was this: the fundraising efforts weren’t bringing in enough money to do the full version of whatever Holy Grail strangeness Kohl had in mind, but they were probably bringing in enough to do the minimal version. That was good to know.
Then the day finally came. I was taking a break, which involved trying to get the automated bartender to serve me a weak White Russian. It didn’t know what that phrase meant, so it poured me a regular White Russian with peach schnapps added.
“No, not a peach White Russian… Oh fuck it, I’ll drink it anyway.”
“I really hate that thing,” said Kumar. “How’s it going, Holder?”
He reached his hand out for me to shake, and I had to switch my Peach White Russian to my left hand to return the gesture. That’s weirdly formal, I thought, until he palmed me the key drive like a seasoned pro. Kumar had something for me, but I had to go ahead with the small talk in case anyone was paying attention.
“What’ll it be, Kumar? The usual?” asked the bartender machine.
“Sure,” he said with a sigh, and it poured him a spiced rum. Jesse Spindrift came in and immediately decided to hassle Kumar about drinking in the middle of the workday.
“What’s this?” he asked. “I know you’re not off-duty right now!”
Kumar slammed the rum down on the bar and scurried off. Jesse dumped it out in the sink with a disgusted look, before I could get the chance to tell him I would drink it myself now that Kumar couldn’t.
“You know, Jesse, I’m on duty too,” I said. I took a long sip of my disgusting drink, and he gave me one of his acidic looks.
“I don’t know why you fraternize with that man anyway,” he said. “Isn’t it against policy to be friends with the scientists?”
I shrugged. “I don’t really care if it is or isn’t. Kumar’s my drinking buddy.”
“That’s really all you’re going to say?” he asked.
“It’s all I’m going to say. No, wait, it isn’t all I’m going to say. I’ll say this too. I will talk to whoever I want to talk to, and I will contemptuously ignore anyone I want to contemptuously ignore. And you can bring that to HR if you want, I’ll verify it all.”
“What’s wrong with you, Gavin? Most men with your intelligence would be so thrilled to work for someone as brilliant as Mr. Kohl. But not you! All you do is mock him, and now here I find you getting drunk on the job!”
“I’m not getting drunk on the job, though,” I said. “My tolerance for alcohol is incredibly high.”
“This could end very badly for you,” he said darkly. “Or maybe not for you. For Kumar. If I decide to tell Mr. Kohl he’s been fraternizing with the…”
I punched him in the gut with my left hand, using an old dirty boxing technique called a shovel hook. He doubled over so hard he bumped his head on my own head, which would have been mildly irritating if it hadn’t been so funny. He dropped down to his knees, retching, and retching like he was trying to vomit or scream but couldn’t make either one come out.
I finished my dr
ink and put it down, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and leaned over him. “Didn’t even spill a drop!” I said cheerfully. “I hit hard, you know. I once killed a man just by hitting him in the head with a bottle. And that guy was a hell of a lot harder to kill than you would be.”
He just stared back at me. His eyes looked huge, like the eyes of a fish staring back at you from a fish tank. I seriously considered hitting him a second time, but a voice came over the loudspeakers suddenly. It was our boss.
“Quod Corporation employees, I have wonderful news! Quod Glasses are ready to go to market. Take the rest of the day off, everyone. It’s time to celebrate!”
Chapter 37
It was late at night, but all the lights were on. All the lights in the underground bunker were always on, at least in the halls and common areas. The only difference between daytime and nighttime was the amount of obvious activity. There were almost always some people who stayed up working, regardless of what hour of night or day. Tonight there were fewer of them than normal. The announcement that the company was going to market with its first product had lifted some of the tension in the air, at least temporarily. Everyone downstairs had gone upstairs to fraternize, and the fraternizing had gone on until after midnight. Around one in the morning, everyone who was able to go to bed had gone to bed – some of them alone and some accompanied. Everyone who hadn’t been able to make it to their beds had passed out upstairs, sleeping on their desks or on the benches of the cafeteria or wherever they happened to pass out.
I was absolutely sober, although not because I hadn’t had anything to drink. I spent the party being careful, sipping my drinks slowly as I chatted with Kumar and Barbara about random things I can’t remember. Then I went back downstairs, stayed in my room till it was almost three, then grabbed Kumar’s laptop and slipped out into the hall.
The important point here, as always, was to not run into the mercenary patrols. It’s not that I wasn’t allowed to be out of my room, or to go on the Internet from the common areas. It was the VPN. If anyone was paying attention and saw someone using a VPN from a common area, the obvious next step would be to find out who was out and about at the same time. If anyone remembered seeing me in that situation, I’d be all out of luck.
I listened carefully, established that there was no one moving around nearby, and went as quickly as possible to my usual spot. This was the closest of several public work areas, where employees were encouraged to work on new ideas in their spare time while sharing coffee and chatting with each other. If a new idea turned out to be interesting to Vitalius or the Ja Lama, it would get a project of its own either upstairs or downstairs and then there would be no more casual chat about it.
Someone was there when I got there, but it didn’t matter. The man was unconscious, slumped over his open laptop. I plugged in next to him, activated the VPN, and opened my shinobimail encrypted email address. I didn’t expect a message, but this time there was one. It was a reply to my last message to the Sōhei Faction.
Is Father talking about dropping tungsten from space? He must be planning a kinetic bombardment, a type of orbital strike. It’s strictly hypothetical, but theorists have been talking about it for decades now. Tungsten is very dense, so it can burst through any defenses if it’s moving fast enough. It has a very high melting point, so it’s not going to melt as it re-enters the atmosphere. The idea is to mount a tungsten rod inside a satellite – anything from a large dart to a telephone pole in size – and then drop it from orbit on a trajectory to hit a particular target such as a city or an enemy military position. Such a weapon would be incredibly expensive to get into orbit but would strike with the power of a tactical nuclear warhead when it hit. Like a neutron bomb, the weapon would leave no radioactive fallout. This type of weapon, sometimes known as “The Rod From God,” has long been rumored to exist as a top military secret, but no one has ever proved that it really exists. If it does, it could penetrate and destroy even the most heavily fortified underground bunker. If it landed on a city, it would cause horrific destruction. The satellite launch must be stopped at all costs. Quod Corporation has a rocket launch facility of its own in Texas. Destroying this facility of HIGHEST POSSIBLE priority.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up as if I had seen a ghost, and I found myself wishing I had gotten as drunk as everyone else. The woman from the Sōhei Faction had been correct. Vitalius was planning to escalate, all right. He was planning to destroy an entire city from orbit!
I wrote them back, keeping the message short and simple.
Will find out the date of launch and inform.
I shut down the VPN, but just as I was shutting my laptop down, I heard the boots of the mercenary patrol coming down the corridor. With no time to flee, I did the only thing I could think of and put my head down in my arms to cover my face. I was hoping to be mistaken for a passed-out drunk like the man beside me. The mercenaries approached, and one of their officers said “halt here.”
“Yes, sir?” asked a woman. They were obviously deciding what to do about the two of us.
“Never mind,” said the officer. “They’ll sleep it off.”
The patrol marched on, but I kept my head down and my eyes closed until the sound of their boots had faded in the distance. Then I retreated to my room and hid the computer in its secret spot before collapsing on my bed with a sigh of relief.
I thought I would fall asleep right away, but it didn’t work out like that. I couldn’t stop thinking, and when you can’t stop thinking, you can’t start sleeping. I was thinking about the information the Sōhei Faction had just shared with me and what to do about it.
If I was lucky, I’d be assigned to oversee the security for the official satellite launch. But there was still the matter of Kumar’s key drive, containing information stolen from the satellite’s guidance system project. In all likelihood, this information would be relevant in some way to the attack itself – if I was really lucky, it might even contain the target location. But I couldn’t read anything that technical if my life depended on it, and I wasn’t even sure it would be safe to have a look at it down here in the bunker.
I got back up, threw my own laptop open, and looked at the schedule to see if there was anything coming up in the DC area. If I had been that lucky, I could have handed the key drive over to either Emily Alvin or the Sōhei Faction to have a look at. But I was not that lucky.
Instead, as it turned out, we were going to Chicago.
Chapter 38
“How did you find out where I live?” Astrida asked. Her door was halfway open and halfway closed, and she was peering out at me from her dark apartment as if she didn’t know whether to shut the door in my face or open it quickly enough to knock me off the staircase instead.
“I’ve been following you on Academia.edu,” I said. “And, uh, doing research.”
“Cyber-stalking me.”
“I needed to talk to you. It’s a big deal. Not a desperate attempt to win you back.”
“Did you ever win me in the first place?” she said, but she opened the door.
I followed her into her apartment in Chicago and glanced around. What I saw had me worried. She seemed to be hanging around in the dark among empty Styrofoam take-out containers and dirty laundry.
“Are you okay, Astrida?” I asked. “I mean, how are you doing?”
“I lost a family member this year,” she said. “I’m not doing great. But there isn’t really anything you can do about it, Gavin. I’ll be alright.”
“Okay,” I said because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Do you want some tea?” she asked me. She ran a hand through her hair, and I realized she must not have combed it in days.
“I can only stay for a few minutes, and even that isn’t safe. I need your help.”
“Why in the world are you in danger again? You’re not even in the FBI anymore!”
“So you heard about that, huh?”
“It was all over the news! T
hat’s really when this… depression started. Not over you, though. That’s not what I mean. It was when I found out that Jim had been involved, and not only Jim but Andrew too.”
“That’s the whole reason I was suspicious of you in the first place,” I said. “You were linked to two of the suspects.”
“I get it. I get it, Gavin. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Until I get through this dark night of the soul thing I’m dealing with right now, nothing much does.”
“But this does,” I said, handing her the flash drive Kumar had given me.
“Another one of these? What is it this time?”
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But it probably has something to do with a satellite guidance system. There might be some data in there specifying a location somewhere on Earth. If we luck out, I mean.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then I have to try to get my hands on the same information some other way. A lot of lives are at stake here, Astrida.”
“Is that so? So you basically just want me to tell you what’s on here?”
“Yes, exactly. And the location information if there is any.”
“How can I get in touch with you?”
“Use my encrypted email address.” I handed her a slip of paper. “And then get that flash drive to Emily Alvin at the FBI. You can reach her through the field office here, but make sure it gets to her. Reference Operation Smiley.”
“Wow, Gavin. I thought you were out of business.”
“Never,” I said.
She actually smiled a little.
“A little project. Okay, Gavin. That’s not so bad. It might be exactly what I’ve needed actually.”
“And you always wanted to help me with a case. Well, here’s your chance.”
“Don’t push it too far.” But this time she really smiled before escorting me to the door.
When I got out onto the street, I walked briskly to the nearest payphone – they aren’t so common anymore – and called Emily Alvin. She didn’t answer the call, but I didn’t expect her to. I left a message.
Firebolt Page 12
