“How tall is it again, Jon?” Her head tipped back, Georgia shielded her eyes against the sun's glare, despite her sunglasses.
“Twenty kilometers.”
Twice as high as subsonic jetliners fly.
“Obscene,” Georgia said.
“We'll fix that soon enough.” Janicks directed Nick to a motel a block off the highway. When Nick reached for the canvas bag, Janicks pushed away his arm, and lifted the bag himself.
As the sun set behind the mountains, and even as the stars poked out from the purpling sky, the top of the tower stayed illuminated. The terminator climbed the shaft as night swallowed it like a worm, until the superstructure at the top, its details invisible from the ground, winked out in a flash of reflection off its multifaceted glass. Its inhabitants called it the “Capital,” because it reminded them of the top of an ancient Greek column. As twilight turned to darkness, strobes set every 500 meters warned aircraft of the tower's presence.
“Sorrows,” Janicks said. “Inside. Close the door.”
Nick tore himself away from the tower, wondering what his wife would think if she knew he was near. Would Jason be excited to see him? What did Janicks want?
On the motel room bed was a flat, palm-sized device, the empty canvas bag, and a olive-drab metallic object shaped like a teardrop, the rounded end the size of a basketball. A faded yellow decal covered a portion. Nick recognized the trefoil warning of a radiation hazard.
“Fuck,” he said.
Janicks cocked his pistol. “Call your wife, Nick.”
The pieces fell into place.
“You knew all along,” Nick said.
“Cops everywhere are idiots. They are as dumb as the petty criminals they catch. Even the cops that go after so-called terrorists. They're mirror images of one another. Takes one to know one, eh? You thought you knew me, but you didn't.”
Was Janicks right? Was the BES arrogant enough to think it could fool a man as intelligent as Jon Janicks? Or did Nick's Bureau controller know that Janicks would unmask him? “When did you know?”
“Five minutes after you walked out the BES door. Everyone is after me. I heard from friends of friends that the BES had sent someone. I was going to kill you.”
“At the riot?”
“Then you got me out from under the Seattle cops. That was a close call for me, I'll admit. Keep your enemies close, the old adage says, so I brought you along.”
“It was my idea, Nick.” Georgia had removed the staser and held it on her lap. “It took a while, but I found you in the public databases, and learned that your wife works for SpaceLift. That's what we needed, a way to get in.”
“You're bait, Sorrows.” Janicks licked his lips. “Your ex is the key to the door.”
Nick felt humiliated. That was the hardest thing to take after the village incident. He felt guilty, to be sure, but the humiliation of failure was the thing that hurt most. “You're going to take down the tower with a nuke.” He glanced at the canvas bag. “The suitcase scenario.”
“You were closer than you thought when you joked about the Mk-54, back in Takilma. The Army decommissioned all the Davy Crocketts, but it still knew how to build them. Tilton was a specialist on the secret project to have some on hand, just in case. He was a clever man.”
As he said, Janicks murdered Tilton to cover his tracks. Did Nick's BES controller know about the home-brew nukes and didn't tell him? With intelligence routinely compartmentalized, it was possible. He couldn't hold it against her, but the mounting number of unanswered questions was maddening. “You asked me about breaking nuke codes.”
“A hint to keep you following the trail. I didn't want you running away in the night.”
Strung along like a puppy on a leash, Nick thought. “And the direct action at the wind turbines was a diversion, I suppose.”
“You're catching on, Nick. The cops will swarm over the area for days while we finish our task here. Now, call your wife.”
“She's my ex-wife.” What about Jason?
“I've lifted the mask,” Georgia said, “ We're listening in, so don't say or do anything stupid.”
“The electronic masking hid me from the world and the world from me.” Nick sighed at the realization. “Like putting a hood over a hostage's head.”
Janicks cocked his pistol. “Enough fucking around. Call Angela. Tell her to come here. Invite her for a nooner.”
Georgia snickered.
Nick didn't have the luxury to take offense. In his minds-eye, he saw his contacts app, and he dialed Angela. He made up an excuse about traveling through the area on business, sorry for surprising her, but was she available for lunch? No, don't bring Jason. Nick was only in town for a couple of hours. He didn't want to get him excited and then disappoint him by leaving right away.
“She's meeting me at the visitors center,” Nick said. “There's a cafe there.”
“Perfect. Good job, Nick.” Janicks grinned.
Twenty minutes later, the trio arrived at the SpaceLift site. The visitors center was outside the main security gate at the edge of a fenced perimeter around the tower. The heat of the day had settled in.
“We'll wait outside,” Janicks said. “No point in announcing to the world we're here.”
The center's glass walls and undulating roof resembled an airport terminal. A reader board outside the main entrance listed the shuttle and freight rocket takeoffs and landings from the launch platform. Per-kilo freight prices had come down so much, Angela said, that private launches were scheduled two years in advance. No one except the government ordered the big first-stage lifting rockets anymore. The investors were already building a second tower in India. The reader board grid dissolved into for-lease listings of the apartments in the Capital. Nick couldn't afford even one if he had 10 jobs.
Georgia sneered. “The ultimate gated community.”
Angela stepped out of a car. Every atom of Nick wanted to scream at her to run, and her look of concern didn't ease his fears for her. She knew something was wrong, and Nick had no chance to warn her away without risking injury or death at Janicks' or Georgia's hands. Though they saw each other occasionally by video, he hadn't been in her presence for years. Angela was more attractive than ever, because she had lost her girlishness and matured into a woman Nick doubted he could ever satisfy emotionally. He blinked to suppress his feelings as he puzzled a way out of the trouble he'd caused.
Nick and Angela greeted each other. He relaxed a bit when she said Jason was in school in the Capital, twenty kilometers above them. He'd be safe if he could stop the MEI. Janicks and Georgia sidled up. In the motel, both had showered and changed into business attire. Nick bathed as well, Janicks' gun on him the entire time.
“You're going to do exactly as I say, Angela,” Janicks said.
“How do you know my name?” Her eyes widened when she saw the pistol. “Who's she?”
Georgia remained silent. She shifted a black nylon bag on her shoulder. It held the nuke.
“Angela,” Nick said. “I'm sorry for this. I had to lie to you. This man and woman will kill us if we don't cooperate.” He didn't say that Janicks might kill them anyway, with either the nuclear blast or a bullet.
Angela turned pale.
“We're going inside the gate, and you're going to take us to the elevator, Angela,” Janicks said. “We're DoD officials and we're here for a security audit. That's the story. Clear?”
“Nick, these people are crazy. They'll never get past the gate.”
“We've prepared for this, Angela,” Janicks said. “Rest assured.”
“What do I say about Nick?”
“The truth.” Janicks shrugged. “He happened to be in town. He's an ordinary visitor.”
Angela followed Janicks' instructions. Nick's com connection showed the guards at the main gate accessing his credentials. He hoped his controller accounted for this possibility when setting up his aliases. He imagined a bloody shootout as Janicks and Georgia fought their way in. She
could take out the security bot with her staser.
The guards didn't even bother to check Georgia's nylon bag. The bot remained impassive. Nick could only guess that Georgia had hacked the security database to ensure a green light. He rejected as impossible the chance of inside help. The BES was as ideologically pure as any police force.
He couldn't shake a surreal twisting in his gut. Everything had come apart. He'd learned Janicks' ultimate goal—detonate a nuclear device at the SpaceLift tower, probably to bring it down—but he couldn't take what he knew to his BES bosses as planned. Were they able to monitor him through Georgia's masking? The passivity of the guards and the sec-bot argued against it.
An automated ground shuttle took them to the elevator foyer. No one else was in the shuttle. Janicks sat with Angela, the tip of his pistol pointed at her hip bone. Sweat trickled down the nape of her neck. Beside him, Georgia had her finger on the staser's trigger. The staser rested on the hidden nuke in the bag on her lap. The shuttle let them off at the elevator loading platform.
Nick couldn't resist craning his neck upward. He remembered the basics of the tower, a series of high-pressure inflated cylinders 230 meters in diameter one on top of the other like a legless millipede set on end. Each segment was made of Kevlar fiber-reinforced metallic materials. The foundation went several kilometers into the ground. No guywires kept the structure perpendicular; flywheels kept it stable. Far above, out of sight, hundreds of wind turbines powered the tower, the residential apartments, and the launch platform 20,000 meters away.
Janicks' idea was simple. Take out one of the sections, and the structure would fall over, just like the wind generators at Fortuna. But one or two people could not carry enough conventional explosives to damage a segment. A Mk-54, however, yielded the energy of 10 to 20 tons of TNT, enough to level a couple of city blocks. If Janicks could take out a big enough chunk of a segment, the tower would keel over at the weak point, the same way the leaning tree at Takilma snapped at the wedge excised from the trunk.
The elevator car arrived. Nick's mind raced to find an answer. How could he stop the Mother Earth Insurgency? Maybe Janicks wanted to detonate the device at the Capital. The explosion would be seen as far away as California, perhaps from space. Or maybe he wanted to hijack one of the shuttles to the orbiting Branson Hotel and blow it up. Janicks' psychological profile didn't suggest a suicide mission, but Nick didn't trust it now. The agent was sure of one thing: He and Angela would be expendable, sooner, rather than later. The elevator doors opened, and a handful of passengers exited.
“Daddy!”
How many ticks of the clock pass when you instinctively know your son's life is in danger? Nick was able to count them, though only three meters separated him from his son, and the eight-year-old boy, his curly hair bouncing like a beach ball, closed with him like a fighter-interceptor.
Janicks and Georgia turned their heads to the distraction, as did Angela, but Nick already had a plan. He knew how to take advantage of new tactical conditions. He placed his powerful hands on each side of Jason's chest, as if ready to lift him in an embrace. Instead, he handed him to Angela, and using his son as a counterweight, kicked Janicks in his chest, knocking him into Georgia.
Angela caught Jason awkwardly, stumbling away from the elevator. Janicks and Georgia, still carrying the nuke, fell toward the elevator door and caromed inside. Nick, off-balance, managed to snag the closing door with one hand and pull himself inside. The door closed behind him and he crashed into a padded seat.
The elevator rose, but not straight up. As the car cleared the shelter, Nick felt the vibration as the long, narrow, self-powered track, like a moving caterpillar without the undulations, carried the plumb-level car on its back at a 45-degree angle along the outside of the tubular tower. It spiraled upward, following an invisible trail on the tube's surface at a perpendicular rate of two and a half meters a second. A one-way trip to the top would take a little more than two hours if it weren't interrupted.
The car had two dozen seats arranged in two banks, with an aisle between them. Glass surrounded the car, except for the floor, the ceiling and on the tower side. Nick was at one end. Janicks and Georgia were at the other. Janicks' gun was at Nick's feet.
Georgia observed, “It's two against one.”
Nick showed Janicks' lost gun in his hand. “The odds are more even than you think.”
They were at a standoff. The car was too narrow for either Janicks or Georgia to flank Nick, who said, “The best you can do is cover Janicks while he arms the nuke.”
As if taking Nick's instruction, Janicks removed the device and its controller, which looked like an old-style smartphone. “Giving your life for a cause is a matter of timing, Nick. I didn't think my chance would come this soon.”
Georgia was the bigger chink in Janicks' armor. Could he chip at her loyalty? Nick said, “Is that what you want, Georgia, to die a hero for the cause?”
Flustered but uncertain whether to argue with her lover, Georgia fussed with the arming device at Janicks' order while he held the staser on Nick. She knew the procedures and the codes, but the BES agent saw the doubt and hesitation in the way her hands trembled. “You wanted to watch the boom, Georgia, not be in it.”
“This isn't a joke,” Georgia said. “The world is about to careen off the edge of a cliff. Someone has to stop people from taking advantage of the planet's pain. This tower is a monstrosity. It has to come down.”
Janicks had the smugness of the righteous. “You're the one who didn't expect to die, Nick.”
Of course he didn't plan things in that way. As a soldier, the risk of death went with the territory. He'd been the cause of enough in South Asia. Undercover, he'd only wanted to get information and feed it to his bosses, and let them worry about the next steps. He didn't expect to be the last redoubt between order and chaos, at least in a elevator car crawling up the side of the world's tallest free-standing structure. “I don't have anything better to do at this point, except try and stop you.”
Georgia announced that the bomb was armed. When the timer was started, they'd have one minute to get away from the blast. Janicks and Nick said little, glaring at each other like two suspicious alley cats.
“What are we waiting for?” Janicks said.
Georgia eye's flicked between her lover and Nick. “Jon, why don't we wait until we get to the top. The fireball will be seen for hundreds of miles. We'll have a chance to find shelter before the nuke goes off.”
She was grasping at straws, Nick thought.
“I want this tower on the ground,” Janicks said. “I can't think of anything more spectacular and terrifying than that.”
Nick detected the fear in Janicks. All along, Nick had tried, with small gestures—felling the tree, helping with the horses, ignoring a cold-blooded murder—to gain Janicks' trust. Though he'd been played, perhaps he had leverage. “Everyone knows there's injustice in the world, Jon. Why go silent?”
Georgia bit her lip. “I don't want to die, Jon. Who will fight after we're gone?”
Nick said, “I can speak up for you, Georgia, in court, if we survive this, and you're captured.”
“I don't believe in your corrupt courts.” Her point was sincere, but it rang hollow in the near-empty car.
Janicks' measured her attitude, and Nick observed doubts cross his face. He looked as if he wanted to take the nuke's controller away from her, but she gripped it tightly. “Georgia, Jon will sacrifice you just as sure as he will sacrifice himself and me.”
Outside the car, drones buzzed the windows, but there was no place to land and they weren't big enough to carry a rescue team. Whoever operated them could watch, but do nothing. Nick estimated an hour or more had passed, which meant that the car had risen halfway up the tower, ten kilometers above sea level, give or take. He had no time to take in the view. The cold would freeze a man in a few minutes, if he didn't die of oxygen deprivation first, or get blown away like a leaf in the stratospheric winds.
The standoff was exhausting. Nick was dehydrated and his muscles stiffened in his crouch behind the seats. He had no choice but to bide his time, waiting for the right moment. Life or death for hundreds of people, not just himself, Georgia, and Janicks, hung on his timing. And even then, he might fail.
Janicks also waited, perhaps silently persuaded by Georgia that a chance for life was better than a wasted death. Georgia was resolute in her own way; she could not oppose the man she loved.
The next few seconds ended everything. One of the drones, at the edge of its operational limit, wobbled and tapped the glass. Startled, Georgia dropped the controller. It tumbled toward Nick, but Janicks got to it first.
In the scramble, Janicks lowered the staser, and Nick saw his chance. He fired the pistol, striking the padded seat next to Janicks' head. The seat absorbed the bullet and its energy. Janicks laughed and touched the final key on the controller. A voice announced a countdown.
Georgia rushed for the controller in Janicks hand, and they struggled over it. She preferred life over death. Nick fired again, grazing Janicks on the neck. He yelped, instinctively raising his hand to his wound—the hand with the staser—and as it came up, it went off. A hole opened in the glass. The pressurized atmosphere in the car emptied like a balloon, blowing Georgia and the bomb through the opening. Caught in the high winds of the stratosphere, she flew off perpendicular to the tower before dropping away toward the earth.
Nick hung on to a seat, his body half out of the hole in the glass, while yellow oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling, teasing him with life-giving gas.
The Mother Earth Insurgency: A Novelette (Tales From A Warming Planet Book 1) Page 5
