“I’ve heard the name,” Evan said.
“He’s the Chinese version of you, Evan,” Cynthia said. He could hear the scorn over the phone.
“Can you find him?” Evan asked.
“No. There’s no trace of him anywhere online.”
“Mohammed Jawal, that’s what the little French fucker told us,” Evan said. The nightmare with Janis and the King Sleeper clouded over his initial desire to hunt this guy down and skull fuck him. “Thank you, Cynthia.” It was genuine, rare.
“Sober up, Evan,” she replied and was gone.
= = =
Cynthia hung up the phone. Sabot stood next to her with his hand on her shoulder.
“His ears must have been ringing. Why just me?” General Boen asked. He sat across the desk at her private request.
“Do you trust Evan?” she asked.
Boen crossed his legs and straightened his suit. “Not as far as I can throw him.” He was still furious at Evan for keeping the King Sleeper secret.
“I have information that I, as a private entity, do not have to share with you. With this information and a properly executed strategy, it will lead you to the King Sleeper. Evan wants war. It doesn’t have to end that way.”
“I hope you’re right,” Boen said. “What do you want?”
“Evan’s out, that’s all.”
“I can’t keep him out forever.”
“Not forever, just for this. You can throw me under the bus afterwards, I don’t care. But I trust you Earl. The King Sleeper isn’t good for you and he isn’t good for me.”
Boen wiggled his jaw while he weighed his options. Fuck Evan, Boen thought. The little prick only keeps secrets.
“Deal,” Boen said.
Cynthia told him what she knew and the strategy they formed together was intricate, yet executable, and beautiful in its trickery. Basically, why Boen liked his job.
= = =
Mohammed Jawal got a message from Xan in the Western Curse shareware to meet. Per their established protocol, Mohammed responded by inserting into the code the time and place.
= = =
Six hours after his meeting with Cynthia, General Boen was at JFK airport walking into an airplane hanger where they had transported John. While most of JFK’s runways had returned to nature, the government kept three operational. The mission would start in one hour. But there was another issue to attend to. And Earl kept his promises.
“They’re here,” General Boen said. Raimey began to stand.
“Hold on a second,” Boen said. “We almost had to force Tiffany to come here. When I sent soldiers to Florida, it was bad, John. I think you understand the hurt they’re feeling. They’re both confused. I explained the best I could, but you know, they don’t want to hear it from me.”
“Does Tiffany have cancer?” Raimey asked.
“Yes. She initially refused treatment, but she’s going now. It’s far along, but the doctors are hopeful.”
“So she understands why I did this,” Raimey said.
“Yes, but no,” Boen replied. “You’re this now.” Earl gestured at his giant frame. “But you’re still John Raimey. Be that today, the best you can, because you might not see them again.”
Raimey looked at Earl with sorrowful eyes.
“I’m sorry, John. But it’s the best advice I can give you. Come with me.” Raimey stood up and followed him out the large hangar door. “You have one hour and then we have to go.”
= = =
The prep for the mission had already begun. A stealth bomber had been pulled into an adjoining hanger. A team of mechanics worked under its belly, modifying the bomb bay to handle Raimey as a payload, and to create a livable space for the small insertion team that was coming with him.
Inside, they disassembled the plane’s current bomb delivery system and removed it piece-by-piece through the bay doors. Sparks cascaded down and countless voices yelled “careful” throughout the entire process.
Boen guided Raimey across the hangar and past staring eyes to the opposite end where a tall curtain cordoned off the area behind it. Boen stopped short.
“Tiffany is in there. Make this count.”
Raimey nodded and Earl pulled the curtain aside. Raimey stepped through. Tiffany sat in the middle of the room. She wore the light lead apron that everyone around him wore. Her eyes were red rimmed and wet. When she saw him, she withered and fell to her knees.
He walked over to her and knelt down, worry across his face, aching in his chest. He reached a hand out and quickly retracted. He could offer no comfort.
“I had no choice, Tiffany,” he said softly. She continued to heave, her head turned downward, her body cast in the darkness of his giant shadow.
“Tiffany. Please. Please. I didn’t know what to do. They told me about the cancer,” he said.
She turned up to him, still huddled over like she was waiting for a blow. Her lost expression was the same as he had seen in his dream. Terrified disbelief. A horrible lie vetted true.
“General Boen, Dr. Lindo, the President, they promised you would get the best treatment and that you both would be taken care of, forever,” Raimey said. She was still looking at the body before her, the giant metal shape that housed her husband, but her eyes would snatch a glance at his face and his face was his. Everything behind armor except his eyes that pleaded for her to accept him or at least speak. He was crouched over close enough to touch, his head two feet from hers, looking into her eyes.
She reached out slowly. Her hand first rested on the giant chest armor, gripping the top of it like a rail. Over it she could see his neck and the very top of his chest. She reached up to his head and he crouched lower to aid her. She put the palm of her hand on his cheek and then ran it over his face as if she were blind and this was their first meeting. He closed his eyes and took it all in. He remembered what General Boen had said: this touch, this interaction, this memory, could be the last he ever knew of the woman before him. His heart burst from the thought of it, but he willed himself into the moment, because no future moment is truly known.
“You should have waited,” she said, her voice barely a breath. “We could have made this decision together. WE are supposed to make these decisions together!”
Her hand dropped to her side. She turned away from him and looked out into the hangar, her eyes distant and unfocused. “You were going to apply for an online job, remember? There you’d be fine, able-bodied.”
“You’re sick.”
“We would’ve had a chance!” Tiffany yelled. “We would have been together! Dammit, John. What did you do? We can’t take this back. There is no going back!”
“They needed me, Tiffany. What I’m doing could save the world.”
“We needed you, too. They would have found someone else.”
John had nothing to comfort her. He loved her more than he loved himself. He cared for her and Vanessa enough to let the world burn ten times over, let the innocent die, just so they could live. He knew this. In some small way, his new form was that incarnation.
“I love you so much, Tiffany,” Raimey said. She finally looked at him again. He was knelt before her like a knight bowing to his princess.
“I love you, too. I just thought we had more time,” she said. She stood up and went to him. She kissed him on the lips and looked into his eyes. She kissed him again and then put her face against his, cheek-to-cheek.
“Vanessa can’t see you like this,” Tiffany said.
“But she’s here!” Raimey pleaded.
“What would a ten-year-old girl take from this? I can’t process this! Look at you! You’re a weapon! How can you comfort her? How can you—”
“Tiffany, please don’t go. This might be it. Where I’m going, I may not come back. I need to be around you. I need to see her. I know I’m asking too much, but please. Be angry with me later. Hate me later! For now, let’s be us,” Raimey said.
She stopped, her hand on the curtain’s edge. Her head tilted dow
n.
“I don’t hate you. I love you so much I want to die. But I’m so mad. I feel so betrayed. I know you did this with good intentions, deep down I know. But us, John! Us! We are a family. We should be fighting together. You crippled, my cancer, our daughter growing up. Those are our fights!”
“How could I fight, Tiffany! How could I?! I was nothing! I’m not smart, I’m not funny, I don’t have any money. All I had is gone!” Raimey howled. “I caused the cancer, I know I did. You never had a moment to breathe when I came back from the hospital. You never had a moment to think ONCE about yourself. I don’t want you two to fight. I don’t want you two to struggle. I want you two to have a life that will allow you to wake up and decide what you want to do that day. Not wake up and know that your day will be long and hard and it’s all MY FAULT!”
Raimey’s voice echoed throughout the hanger. He wheezed from the effort, from vocalizing his fears and his dead dreams. Of his struggle to do what’s right, coupled with the knowledge that his arms and legs weren’t enough for Uncle Sam. His life and family had to get thrown onto the altar too.
Tiffany was quiet.
“You didn’t cause the cancer,” she finally said.
“Please let me see her, Tiff,” Raimey asked.
She was quiet again.
“She won’t understand,” Tiffany said. “Earl?”
“Yes?” Boen was on the other side of the curtain.
“Could you escort me to get Vanessa?”
“Of course.”
Tiffany turned to John and looked up into his large, watery eyes.
“You can speak with her through the curtain. It’ll be better this way. I want her to remember her dad as a man. This is too much.”
Raimey nodded. She was right.
“Thank you, Tiffany,” Raimey said.
“I already miss you, John,” she said, a sad smile on her face, reminiscing of their time, knowing, as he stood in front of her, that all the good memories had passed.
She blew him a kiss and ducked through the curtain. Raimey waited. His heart beat like a drum. He finally heard his daughter’s voice as they crossed the room.
“She’s here,” Tiffany said through the curtain.
John told his daughter all the things that a child should hear. How she was special, how she changed his life. He told her about his childhood and his parents and how, while they loved him, they showed it in hard ways and how he promised to be a better dad and better husband when he was an adult. He told her about when he first laid eyes on her, about how beautiful Tiffany was, and when she held Vanessa for the first time, that memory seared in his mind. He told her about the first time she spoke and the one time she called someone an “asshole” when she was three and how he and Tiffany laughed till they fell while they tried to tell her it was wrong. He told her everything until it was hard to breathe and the pain became unbearable. Because that one-inch curtain between them may as well have been a vast sea. Because Tiffany was right. Vanessa couldn’t see him like this. The memories he had of her would be tainted by this encounter. The memory of her face, contorted into a scream when she saw that her dad had become the boogeyman.
They left. John sat down. Earl walked in and John waved him away. He felt nothing. But nothing had feeling. It was dull and numb and filled his entire body with a sadness so great, it felt like every cell was crying. He would never recover from this. There was no way to.
“It’s time, John,” Boen said.
Chapter 19
Mohammed walked through a replica of a space station found in 2001: Space Odyssey. He had seen the movie many times and the exacting detail of the replica impressed him: the bleach white hallways, the CRT screens for phone calls, the red lounge chairs. Hipsters dressed from various eras were scattered about. Earth and the stars swapped places again and again outside panoramic windows.
He saw the man that he knew would be Xan. He was small and Asian and he had sad eyes. Mohammed walked up to him. Xan didn’t turn. He watched the rolling stars intently.
“That was quite the trick you pulled on me at O’Hare,” Mohammed said. “If I hadn’t gotten so much in return . . .” He trailed off but the tone was threatening.
“I wouldn’t disconnect if I were you,” Xan said with a woman’s voice.
Mohammed immediately understood he had been ambushed. “Why?”
“If you do, you will die. Right now, the U.S. military, with another Tank Major, has surrounded your safe house. We work with them now. If I tell them you’ve disconnected without hearing what I have to say, they will come in and they will kill every last one of you.” Not Xan paused. “Do you know who I am?”
“Cynthia Revo.” He looked around the room as if that gave any measure of his true danger.
“I found your shareware program floating in my space,” she said. “It took a while. Clever.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re an educated man, Mohammed. In many ways I empathize with you. But I know, fundamentally, we’ll always be on opposite sides. Neither philosophy is very good at compromise.”
Mohammed listened.
“I don’t care about you. Right now, neither does the U.S. military. We need you to contact Xan.”
“Am I negotiating a plea deal?” Mohammed asked, disbelieving.
“No. This deal guarantees that you live one more day. You do this and Xan responds, we leave you alone for twenty-four hours. I suggest you use that time wisely and disappear.”
“How can I trust your word when history shows me all the ones that have been broken?”
“I’m not here for a philosophical debate. Today, right this moment, there are bigger fish to fry than you. This deal has a quick expiration. Sometimes you just got to roll the dice.”
= = =
Cynthia snapped awake.
“How did it go?” Sabot asked.
She smiled. “Mohammed will post the message in ten hours. He said it takes up to two for Xan to respond.”
“Perfect.”
There were no military teams around Mohammed’s safe house. A Tank Major didn’t hide in the shadows. For Earl and Cynthia’s plan to work, timing and luck were everything. But for Mohammed, the decision was simple. If the creator of a new universe hacked in and tricked you to meet her, and then she showed up as an exact duplicate of your funder, and then she told you that they knew your location and that you could choose to either die now or get a momentary reprieve for one small betrayal, no matter what cards she may be holding—it could be a pair of twos—you don’t call that bluff and push everything in.
= = =
While Xan used a live host to throw off his digital tail when he met with Mohammed, when he communicated with the shareware for the hundredth of a second it took to confirm location, he used no such precaution. Eleven hours after Cynthia had threatened Mohammed, Xan had replied. Cynthia grabbed the digital tail and quickly traced it back. It originated at an undocumented location in the middle of Beijing. She analyzed the data input and output of the surrounding area and like an x-ray—with fiber optic lines as the bones—she knew that a hidden Colossal Core wore one square mile of that region as a hat.
She contacted Earl and sent him the image file. She transposed the blue cords of data activity with a map of the region. The data paths circled the center like water down a drain.
“That’s a very populated area,” Boen said, concerned.
“No,” Cynthia replied. “It’s the most populated area. And it’s the market hub for that section of the city.”
“Shit balls,” Boen said.
“Shit balls, indeed.”
“I’ve ordered a satellite pass, hopefully that’ll add to what you’ve sent me. We need to know where to get in.”
“An x-ray pulse should show that,” Cynthia said. “You can hide a Colossal Core from peeping eyes by throwing some shacks on it, but it’s still a million tons of concrete and steel. Whatever’s over it is superficial.”
“Roger that,” Boen
said. “You ever think about joining the military?”
She heard the smile in his voice.
“There’s no money in it, Earl,” she replied.
= = =
John and the insertion team knew how quadruplets felt. They were crammed into the B-2’s modified bomb bay. Thirty minutes after he had seen his wife and heard his child, he was airborne. They were eleven hours into a thirteen-hour flight to Beijing. Three of the six soldiers that Eric Janis had trained with: Hostettler, Johnson, and Ratny, were on board. Ratny had been on leave when Janis went berserk. Hostettler and Johnson had been in a hospital recovering from gunshot wounds. There was no more room.
They were in a pressurized drop container that had a guidance system like a smart bomb. The toilet was a bucket epoxied to the floor. A small wireless monitor showed their progress. For the last hour, Hostettler had been fidgeting.
“I have to go,” Hostettler said.
“Noooo,” they all groaned, including John.
“Which one?” Ratny asked, optimistically.
“Not the one you’re hoping for.” Hostettler’s stomach gurgled in agreement. “When it gets down to it, probably both.”
“I could have been a pharmacist,” Johnson said, immediately unhappy with his life decisions.
John and the team didn’t have time to train together but they all bonded while Hostettler faced them, ass on a bucket, and crapped his brains out. The ventilation system was ill-equipped.
Chapter 20
The surgery requirements for the Shin battle chassis were much less intrusive than the American version. It was arms and legs; everything else remained. Because of the size of the Shin battle chassis—it was fifteen feet tall—they had some latitude on the soldier compartment. This allowed them to quickly prepare soldiers for the program.
Just like the American version, Xan’s spine was fused with a connecting rod into the chassis. Unlike the American version, which assessed g-load and compensated with thousands of points of data, the suspension device for the Chinese version was mechanical. Xan was mounted into the chassis with gas shocks that allowed up to two feet of up-and-down movement and a foot side-to-side. It was crude, but they would evolve the platform over time.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 29
