HL 04-The Final Hour

by Andrew Klavan

  For a dazed moment, I couldn’t remember where I was or how I had gotten here. Then the violence of the storm—the rain, the lightning, the thunder—and the danger of the day—the mad escape, the guards, the prisoners, the cops—slowly came back to me, broken pieces that fit themselves together inside my head like some kind of automated jigsaw.

  I turned and saw Mike behind the wheel. I remembered how he had come to find me in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the rain.

  Mike glanced over at me, his faint ironic smile hidden by the big black mustache. “Rise and shine, chucklehead,” he said.

  My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard. “Mike . . . I remember . . .”

  He turned serious right away. “Remember what?”

  “Everything,” I said slowly. “Or most of it . . .” It was still like a dream, still putting itself together out of half-remembered fragments. “I was in the Homelander compound. I snuck out of my room in the middle of the night. I was eavesdropping outside a barracks, trying to hear Prince’s plans. That’s when they caught me, strapped me to that chair. They had a couple of their goons torture me for information, to find out who I was working for . . .” I looked over at Mike as the whole memory came to me. He looked out the windshield at the road, his face expressionless, his thoughts impossible to read. “I knew I couldn’t stand the pain forever. I was going to tell them—about Waterman and the others, our plan to stop them. So I cracked the implant Waterman had had put inside my mouth. It released a drug that erased my memory, everything about the year before. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but the pain was terrible and I just didn’t think . . .”

  “No, no, that was smart,” said Mike. “That was the right thing to do.”

  “Maybe if I had toughed it out, maybe if I’d been stronger . . .”

  “Don’t be a chucklehead, chucklehead,” he said. “No one can stand up to that kind of pain forever. Not Chuck Norris, not John Wayne, not me, not you, not anyone. You did the only thing you could do. You erased the information so they couldn’t get at it. That’s why Waterman gave you that stuff to begin with. He understood.”

  Slowly, I nodded. If anyone knew about being tough, Mike was the guy. Never mind Chuck Norris and John Wayne. If Mike said he couldn’t stand it, then I guess no one could.

  “So that’s the story,” I said. “That’s why it seemed like I went to sleep in my own bed one night and then woke up being tortured, wanted by the police, all that. I’d destroyed my own memory to keep from giving up my friends. But now it’s back. My memory, my life—it’s back. I remember everything right up until the moment they caught me. And I remember something else too.”

  Mike glanced at me again, lifting one black eyebrow in a question.

  “Prince said the Great Death would ring in the devil’s New Year,” I told him. “And then he said it would be ‘right there, right where we hit them so hard before.’”

  “What’s that mean? The World Trade Center? New York City?”

  “New York, yeah. At least I think so . . .” Something teased the corner of my memory, but I couldn’t quite reach it. “I’m almost sure.”

  “New York at New Year’s,” Mike murmured. “With, like, a billion people in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop.”

  I looked out the window at the peaceful hills in the gray twilight. My stomach clutched with fear. So many people all together in one place.

  “Tomorrow night,” I said. “One day away.”

  “Well . . . ,” Mike said. “At least there’ll be a whole lot of security around New York on New Year’s Eve.”

  I shook my head. “I think that’s what Prince started with. That’s what they were doing the whole time we were in training. Planting Homelanders—native-born Americans—in places that would help them infiltrate all that security. Maybe they’re even part of the security system itself. That’s why Prince sounded so sure of himself. That’s what he had up his sleeve all along.”

  Mike made no response. He only said, “There’s our exit.”

  He guided the Jeep off the highway to the ramp. We came to a little town in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by hills. We passed a small strip of gas stations and restaurants. Then we left the town behind. We were on a small lane winding more deeply into the rolling grasslands. As the car meandered into nowhere, the last light of day faded into night.

  The last night before the New Year, before the Great Death.

  We were on a lonely road, not a light anywhere. I turned to Mike. I could only just make out his steady features in the green glow from the dashboard.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.

  “We’re almost there,” he said.

  “But . . .”

  “After you told me you were going to join the prisoners in their escape, I contacted every special ops guy I knew, every undercover source I had. I sent out the word through every network I have that I needed to get in touch with Rose.”

  “Rose? Did you? Did you get in touch with him?”

  “No,” Mike said. “I didn’t have to. Rose got in touch with me.” He glanced over at me. “He sent me to find you. They still need you, chucklehead.”

  He lifted his chin toward the windshield. I turned and followed his gesture.

  We had come off the road now. We were bumping down a dirt lane. Up ahead, in the glow of the headlights, I could see an empty field, the grass cut low. In the middle of the field there was a grassless strip of hard-packed dirt. It was a landing strip. A small Cessna airplane was sitting at one end of it.

  And Rose was leaning against the fuselage, waiting for us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Night Flight

  “Well, you’re out of the frying pan,” Rose told me. “But now you’re really in the fire.”

  His voice came over my headset as the Cessna moved through the night sky. The stars drifted slowly past at the windows. Sporadic lights appeared below and went slowly by.

  I was sitting up front in the passenger seat. The headset blocked out the noise from the pounding engine, but that pounding still surrounded me, surrounded everything. Rose’s voice was small and distant at the center of that rhythm, but I could hear his words clearly.

  “Washington has shut our mission down completely,” Rose went on. “Shut us down and shut us out. I was afraid even to try to get you protection for your escape, afraid they’d alert the guards—and that the guards would shoot you. The best I could do was post Mike out there with an off-road vehicle and the best surveillance equipment I could find so he could track you whenever you made your run for it. But all the same, you’re just plain lucky you got out of Abingdon alive. You have no idea how much danger you were in.”

  The pilot glanced over from the seat beside me. He was a small, thin man named Patel. He had black hair, large eyes, and an easygoing smile. When he heard Rose’s words, he jogged his eyebrows at me, up and down, comically. As if potentially getting killed in a prison break was just some big adventure. Then with a quick grin, he faced forward. He flew the plane low over the dark territory beneath. I guessed that he was intentionally staying below any controlled airspace. Now and then, we heard a voice from a control tower somewhere, but Patel never answered. He flew the plane without a word.

  Rose was sitting right behind me, right next to Mike in the cramped rear seats. His voice continued in my ear. “Already, since the escape, Abingdon has started to come apart at the seams. The guards are totally corrupt, some bought off by the Nazis, some by the Islamists. That guy Dunbar was running some kind of drug ring. Even the warden was in on it. The whole place was a cesspool.”

  “Gee,” I said, “and it seemed so pleasant on the surface.”

  I heard Mike chuckle. Rose didn’t chuckle. He wasn’t the chuckling sort.

  “So like I said, you’re out of the frying pan,” he went on. “But you’re no better off. Worse, maybe, if it comes to that. Now the cops are hunting for you all over the place. Washington denies you ever worked for them. An
d when I try to pass on your warnings, my bosses won’t believe me.”

  “They won’t believe you about the Great Death?”

  “They say they’ve got any number of threats centered around New Year’s Eve and that security is as tight as it can be everywhere. Even if they wanted to, there’s no way to amp it up any further.”

  “But Prince was counting on that from the beginning.”

  “He must’ve been, if he’s planning to go through with it.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  I heard Rose sigh over the headset. “Alone, pretty much. Or, at least, if we’re going to get some help, if we’re going to get anyone to take us seriously, we’ve got to figure out just what exactly Prince is planning. Without that, I can’t call in reinforcements. There’s nowhere to call them to.”

  “But I’m pretty sure it’s going to take place in New York. Isn’t that enough? Couldn’t we tell them—”

  “You’re ‘pretty sure,’” said Rose sourly. “That’s my point. And no, it’s not enough for you to be pretty sure of something or even to remember something. We have to prove it if we’re going to get any action.”

  I rolled that over in my mind for a moment as the plane moved smoothly over a small town. With the town’s streetlights and houselights glittering in the night, it looked like some kind of jewel lying on a black background.

  “So what are we going to do?” I said finally. “We’ve only got twenty-four hours left. If that.”

  It was a moment before he answered—so long, in fact, I looked over my shoulder at him. Then he said, “Well, for one thing, we’ve got to use the information we already have and try to pinpoint exactly where Prince is planning to go. And for another thing . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  The plane bucked and wavered as it flew through a pocket of rough air. The stars dipped and rose at the windows.

  “What?” I said finally. “For another thing, what?” This time, when I looked back at him, I saw Rose and Mike exchange a glance.

  “We’re hoping you can help us, Charlie,” Rose said then. “We’re hoping you’ll remember something that will help us.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you whatever I can . . .”

  They glanced at each other again.

  After that, no one said anything for a while. I sat there, staring out the window, thinking back over the memories that had returned to me, the memory especially of that conversation I’d overheard inside the barracks. Prince and Waylon and Sherman plotting out the Great Death. I had this feeling that I was missing something, some essential clue to the exact nature of their plan. I had this feeling there was something I knew that I didn’t know I knew.

  “What’s a C.O. device?” I asked. “I heard Prince say they were going to acquire it from the Russians.”

  “Yeah, we’re checking on that now,” Rose said. “Is there anything else? Anything else you remember that might help? Something specific about the location of the attack? The time?”

  I shook my head. “Not that I can think of . . .” But again, I had that feeling that there was something, something just beyond my memory . . .

  Rose fell silent behind me. He sat back in his seat.

  The plane trundled on. I tried to think back, page through my memories, but I couldn’t think of anything useful.

  After a little while, Patel turned to me from the pilot seat. He seemed completely unaffected by our conversation: cheerful and relaxed. He looked like he’d just been waiting for his chance to speak to me.

  “I hear you want to be in the Air Force,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “So you ever pilot a plane before?”

  “A couple of times. I took some lessons—you know, taking off and landing—but I never got my license. I never even soloed.”

  “Want to fly it now?”

  I sat up straight. It was the best offer I’d had in—well, for as long as I could think of. “Yeah, you kidding? Absolutely!”

  Patel let go of the pilot’s stick and let me take the copilot’s control, which was right in front of me. My feet found the rudders on the floor and my eyes scanned the cockpit’s instrument panels, trying to remember which digital readout was which and what they all meant. I followed the track laid out for me on the GPS, turning the plane slightly this way or that, remembering to work the pedals at the same time I turned the yoke.

  The feel of the plane came back to me quickly. Soon I was holding it steady, looking out through the windshield at the sky. It’s an almost magical feeling, flying a small plane at night. You feel like you’re sailing on a sea of stars. Best of all, for long, good minutes, it took my mind off things, off the heaviness inside me, the dread of what was coming next. It gave me a break from the tension that had tied me in knots for so long, ever since I’d been put in prison. Plus, it was fun.

  I had no idea how deadly serious it would be before all this was over.

  After a while, Patel took the plane back. “If it’s been some time since you took lessons, I think you better let me land it.”

  “Yeah, especially at night,” I said.

  The Cessna started to drop down through the darkness. I peered out through the windshield, but I didn’t see anything ahead of us. I could just make out the darker darkness of the earth beneath the sky. But there was no place to land.

  Then, a light gleamed and died. Patel corrected the plane’s course and headed toward it. I watched him as he pushed in the throttle, raised the flaps, slowed the plane so that its nose angled down and the plane sank out of the sky.

  The light flashed below again and for a moment, I could make out the shape of a small dirt runway in the middle of an overgrown field, just at the bottom of a small hill. The setting looked familiar to me somehow.

  “Where are we?” I asked into the headset microphone.

  Rose’s voice came back to me over the headphones. “Look to your right.”

  I did. At first I couldn’t see a thing. Then, against the background of the starry sky, an unmistakable shape appeared. It was a building, a house, with a large central tower and two smaller towers, one to either side.

  It was that quirky mansion that served as Prince’s headquarters.

  The plane dropped down slowly toward the earth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Reunion

  An odd feeling came to me as I walked into that crazy place again. It wasn’t exactly a feeling of nostalgia and not exactly déjà vu either. But the halls and rooms with their great curtains and enormous fireplaces and marble statues and staring portraits on the walls and shining knickknacks everywhere—it all felt familiar to me and I liked that feeling. I liked remembering. I liked having my life back in my mind again.

  Rose led the way, up the front porch and through the doors into the great foyer. Up the broad stairs and down the thickly carpeted hallway. Back to the room that Prince had used for his headquarters.

  As I stepped in, I broke into a smile—a tremendously painful smile, I have to say, because my face had stiffened up from all its bruises—but a smile all the same.

  There, swiveling around in the high-backed chair where I’d first seen Prince, was Milton One—Waterman’s tech guy. He was a youngish guy with a square head, Asian features. They called him Milton One because he was the inventor and operator of Milton Two, a security device that had come in pretty handy to me once not long before. He and all his friends had disappeared when Waterman was killed and I didn’t know where they’d gotten to. I’d worried they were dead. I was glad to see Milton One alive. I saluted him and he gave me a big wave hello.

  Then I recognized the others. There was Dodger Jim, Waterman’s tough muscleman. He was still wearing his Dodgers baseball cap. And there was the crow-faced woman—I never knew her name. She was the one who’d injected me with the antidote that started my memory coming back. They were hovering around Milton One, looking over his shoulder at a small computer he had set up on Prince’s enorm
ous desk.

  Despite my growing sense of dread, I was glad to see them. After the evil weeks in Abingdon, it was good to be back among allies.

  “How goes it?” Rose asked them.

  “Well, I have bad news and really bad news,” said Milton One casually. “Which do you want first?”

  “Gimme the bad news,” said Rose. “Let’s build up slowly to the really bad.”

  Milton One’s voice remained casual, but I could see by the look in his eyes that he was about to tell us something really gnarly. “Nothing is a hundred percent certain, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the fact that Prince has secured the device he was after.”

  I heard Rose let out a long weary breath.

  “Is that the C.O. device?” I asked him.

  He nodded wearily.

  “What is it?”

  It was Milton One who answered me. “C.O. stands for Cylon Orange. It’s a chemical weapon invented in the Soviet Union.”

  “When the USSR went down, their small supply of C.O. disappeared,” Rose said. “We always figured someone would try to sell it off to some rogue state or bad actors.”

  “And now you think Prince has gotten it?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Six canisters’ worth,” said Milton One.

  I remembered hearing Prince’s voice from the barracks:

  Six canisters . . . It’s more than enough. Six canisters can be carried by a single man. So nothing will stop it, even if it comes down to me alone.

  “What’s it do?” I asked.

  “The canisters hold the C.O. in an inert liquid form. You put them inside a device about the size of a backpack. When the device is activated, it injects an acid into the canisters that turns the C.O. into a poisonous gas, which is then sprayed out into the air.”

  I stood there silent for a moment, trying to get a picture of this in my mind.

  Then Rose added: “The whole point about Cylon Orange is its density. Six canisters is enough to wipe out four city blocks.”