by George Lazăr
“When I made this recording only fifteen people had joined me. Now you, too, are being offered the chance to become a part of The Guardian Angel. Think about it! Out of all the people on Earth, you are among those who can buy some extra life. Not too much, and we don’t know for how long, but any instant won in the face of death is a victory. A triumph! And when you leave this world, you will do it with the thought that you have left behind the possibility that, one day, The Guardian Angel could defeat life’s biggest enemy, also thanks to you.”
Atalai lifted up his eyes, looked towards the ceiling, and spread his arms in a fit of infectious and convincing enthusiasm. He looked like a cross. After the moment of euphoria passed, he became serious once again:
“For reasons that have been or will be explained, you will never know who the other owners and beneficiaries of The Guardian Angel are. They won’t know about you either. I think I have made myself clear as to why we need your money. That is if you don’t prefer to spend it on the eternal life offered by religions, in case you believe in such things, or on some charities that will spend it on rescuing nature or something of the sort. I would rather you joined us, although you will quickly realize that the luxury of staying alive when you should no longer be alive is more expensive than it may seem.”
The recording ended; a bright light filled his field of vision and then disappeared. Bolden remained awhile with the helmet on, with white circles of light dancing in his eyes. Eventually he reached the helmet with his hands and the colonel helped him take it off.
“Interesting?” Folder asked after placing the helmet back under the seat.
“You haven’t seen this?”
“No, this recording is only for clients. I know that it’s personalized and the creator of The Guardian Angels speaks, but other than that, I don’t know a thing. We’re a rather compartmentalized organization.”
“But haven’t others you have contacted told you?” Bolden asked. “Even if you haven’t seen the recording, someone must have told you.”
“I am afraid you still don’t quite get it. You are my first and only client.”
Chapter 7
Bolden wasn’t too happy about the humble motel on Interstate 495, even though he had badgered the colonel into dropping him off there. He felt the need to gather his thoughts, alone, in a place where no one knew him. The luxurious limousine that attracted some attention from the truck drivers already waiting ahead of him at the reception desk.
“Think about it, Mr. Bolden,” Folder told him as he departed. “We will ensure your protection only until tomorrow. And, as I have told you, a major event is drawing closer...”
Without waiting for an answer, Folder bade farewell, giving a vague military salute as the tinted window closed and the limo pulled away.
Bolden looked around him but didn’t detect any indication that he was being watched or guarded. A military jeep filled a spot in the motel’s parking lot, but there was no one inside it. A bell rang when he opened to door to the reception desk, which seemed to be sharing space with a forlorn bar, but his arrival was greeted with indifference by the truckers nursing beers on their bar stools. Bolden walked to the bar and took a seat.
“Did you have an argument with the boss, son?” the old bartender asked. He put a cup of coffee in front of him, without asking, and Bolden pushed it aside.
“Whiskey,” he demanded. “Straight. And make it a double. In fact, bring the whole bottle!” he ordered, taking a stack of bills out of his pocket, from which he extracted a couple of one hundred dollar bills and threw them on the counter. “I want a room for the night.”
The bartender-receptionist picked up the money and brought what Bolden had asked for. He pushed the guest register towards Bolden, who scribbled something indecipherable in it. Bolden then took the glass and the bottle and dropped the key to the room in his pocket. He finding a table that suited him, he sat with his back to the truck drivers and his eyes on the dingy window through which poured the last rays of the setting sun. He poured himself a tall portion of liquor, his hands shaking and the neck of the bottle rattling against the rim of the glass.
He drank the whiskey as if it were water. It was a cheap brand, but it didn’t matter. By the time he filled his glass again, the trembling had disappeared. Danielle came to his mind once more. She was waiting for him in the Manhattan apartment, only three hours away by Interstate.
They were scheduled to go on a little vacation the following day, but Bolden didn’t feel capable of going to his own home, a sanctuary where – who knows how – the colonel and his men had been following his every move ever since he was a child. He needed to be alone to process everything he had just learned.
His voice on the phone would have immediately betrayed his befuddled state, so he texted Danielle instead, making up some vague excuse about urgent business, then promised to meet her the next day at the airport. Only after he had turned off his cell did he realize that he hadn’t added his standard “I love you!” tagline.
He didn’t immediately realize the baritone voice behind him saying “Hey, boy,” was directed his way. But the second time caught his attention.
Bolden partly turned around. A great lump of a man had planted himself behind him. Bolden thought that the extremely stretched, checkered shirt the guy was wearing was the only thing that was stopping the large belly, overflowing his filthy jeans, from hurtling down over Bolden’s head.
“Yeah, you, dude! Who do you think you are, sitting with your back turned to us like that? Huh?”
As he slowly got up, Bolden realized just how massive his aggressor was. He barely reached the man’s shoulder. The truck driver grabbed the lapels of his coat, slightly lifting him above the floor. His breath reeked of flat beer.
What followed unraveled as if in slow motion. At the bar, the receptionist pulled a telephone from under the counter and quickly dialed a number. Two of the truck driver’s drinking buddies stood up and walked in their direction, their intentions unclear.
The truck driver suddenly let go of Bolden, raised one hand and grasped his own neck, then the other one. His eyes almost popped out of his sockets, but the only sound that emitted from his throat was a feral rattle as he dropped to his knees. After a few more seconds of choking struggle, he collapsed on the dirty floor, senselessly vomiting a river of beer and bile.
“What the hell?!” the bartender swore, leaving the telephone and rushing in front of the counter. “It’ll take me all night to clean this mess!”
The truck driver got up sluggishly and was immediately caught by his buddies who helped him to his feet and propelled him towards the exit. The other two got up from the table after leaving a few dollar bills.
“He’s not a bad fellow, but he’s been drinking too much lately,” one of them whispered as he passed the bartender on his way out. “We’ve left money on the table. It should be enough to cover the ... trouble, too.”
“Pigs - that’s what they are, dirty pigs,” the old receptionist said the moment the door bell signaled that the troublemakers were gone. “They drink ‘til they drop.”
He got out a bucket of water and a mop and started cleaning the floor, still grumbling.
Bolden took his bottle and the glass and started walking, still trembling, towards the room he had paid for. He locked the door before turning on the light, then threw himself on the bed. His glass fell to the floor, not breaking but rolling under the bed, so he drank out of the bottle, sucking back long pulls in an attempt to slow his pounding heart.
As he calmed again, he confronted the obvious question: had he just survived the threat marked on Colonel Folder’s graph? Had his attacker’s sudden illness been a stroke of luck, pushing him onto a new line of probability, or had he been protected in some way he hadn’t recognized?
Or was it all just a big con-job?
Even drunk, his con-job hypothesis didn’t hold up to scrutiny. No matter how much Folder said he knew him, he couldn’t have predicted that
Bolden would have forced him to stop at this particular fleabag motel. And the truck drivers were already there when he entered, he was sure of that.
But was anything he had seen real? Much of it felt authentic, but as a rich man he was used to elaborate, phony pitches aimed at acquiring his money, and Bolden prided himself on being nobody’s fool.
He laughed harshly and pulled his pocket humidor from his jacket, extracting a hand-rolled Cuban that he lit with a paper match from a motel matchbook. The room filled quickly with yellow, pungent smoke. The red light of the smoke sensor on the ceiling started flickering, and its nagging interference angered Bolden. He swigged the last of the whiskey, rose unsteadily until he was standing on top of the bed, and then smashed the sensor with his whiskey bottle.
Fortunately, he reasoned, this was a fleabag hotel with a minibar, and staggered to it, removing every small liquor bottle on the shelf.
People had been trying to predict the future since they gave up walking on all fours. Romans sacrificed animals and raked their guts. The Greeks had Pythia of Delphi. There was Rasputin in Russia, Nostradamus in France, and just about ever religious prophet who took up a collection plate. The history of the human race was a story of magi, prophets, witch doctors, chiromancers, spiritualists, and, of late, scientists.
“Maybe it’s just something peculiar to the species,” he said to himself as cracked the top on a mini-bottle of vodka, downing it between two puffs on his cigar. “Maybe everything we do is just some way of holding the void at bay!”
He was drunk and loud, and the person in the next room banged on the wall, demanding that he shut up. Bolden responded by throwing the empty bottle at the wall.
The money, the houses, the cars: they could all disappear. So could the servants and Danielle, his employees and his friends. If Folder was telling the truth, then he was about to die because, enclosed somewhere, in some mysterious natural law, in some arbitrary cosmic technicality, the event had to happen. It made him fighting mad.
But what he was really fighting was the knowledge that he’d already signed the contract with The Guardian Angel, regardless what the organization turned out to be. He had signed it before receiving the black envelope, long before Folder had contacted him and before he visited the former military facility where a whole team was in charge of keeping him alive. He loved life too much to do anything less than everything in his power to live even one moment more than he had been destined, to taste once again, from the cup of nectar reserved for the extremely rich.
They’d chosen well by investing in him, and that knowledge annoyed him. Despite all his protests, there hadn’t been the slightest risk of his refusing, not even for a moment. The ritual of explaining and accepting that Folder had performed was only a part of the procedure meant to show him that he still had free will, that he still had the strictly theoretical possibility of saying “no” to life.
His life wasn’t more valuable than those of a billion others. The difference was, he could pay to weight the game in is favor.
Even if there was no way of knowing for certain, the existence of a device that foresaw the future seemed possible. The Space Elevator had once seemed an impossible project, too. Even now there were some who didn’t believe it was real, and that was understandable. A long wire, made of carbon fiber, stretching thirty-six thousand kilometers, weighing some hundred thousand tons. It wasn’t something human reason could easily accept. Yet the Elevator had become a part of people’s everyday reality, like suspension bridges over the Hudson River. News about the Elevator appeared ever less frequently on television programs because the gigantic structure had become a part of daily reality, like the Himalaya Mountains or Atlantis - the underwater city in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Elevator was known to the general public only through television programs, but once the space hotels were finished, the era of cosmic tourism would begin. Until then, he was carrying the waste produced by the Earth’s industries and then launching it towards the Sun via an electromagnetic Catapult.
It had all seemed like nothing more than dreams in the previous century. What dreams would seem like mundane reality in the next hundred years?
The Device didn’t seem that abstract any more. If it was made public, the new discovery would follow the same course, slowly making room for itself in the endless line of discoveries that constitutes “progress.”As if there was a sign somewhere indicating direction. Bolden let out a roar of laughter imagining the whole planet aligned, walking towards a vague, misty future.
And the colonel was right about the money. He remembered the barrel of the gun pressed against the back of his head in Paris and knew that he would have paid anything to remove it. Bolden couldn’t care less if, as Atalai had told him, his contract meant that his inheritance went to The Guardian Angel. He couldn’t spend his money once he was dead.
He got up, tossed the cigar in the toilet and flushed it. He fell asleep, or rather he fell numb, breathing the thick smoke still lingering in the room, tears trickling from the corners of his eyes until the motel’s ventilation system kicked in and aired out the room.
Chapter 8
Although he woke up a little after the break of dawn with his mind clouded and a terrible alcohol-induced thirst, Ian Bolden would remember the following hours of his life clearly.
He threw some water on his face and swallowed a couple of aspirins he found in a box inside the mirror cabinet in the bathroom. He dressed and left the room still dizzy. The man at the reception desk was the same bartender from the night before.
Bolden asked for black coffee and a taxi. Fifteen minutes later, still looking seedy and disheveled, he climbed into the back, looked at his watch and concluded there was no time for him to get home to Manhattan, pick up his bags and make it to the airport. He instructed the driver to take him directly to Kennedy airport, where he would meet Danielle.
He switched on his cell phone. He had several voice messages, but he ignored them to call his girlfriend. She answered at once.
“Are you all right? I called you several times, but you didn’t answer,” she said in her melodious voice. “What happened? Why haven’t I heard from you?”
“It was ...” he began as he reflexively thought up a lie, then thought the better of it. “I’ll explain when I see you, Danielle. I’m on my way to the airport. I’ll be there in … ”
He looked at his watch to give her a more accurate estimate, but there would be no further conversation. A hollow burst from one of the tires signaled a massive blowout, and the heavy Lincoln began to lurch and swerve toward complete loss of control. Only the light morning traffic prevented the pneumatic explosion from turning into an immediate catastrophe. The driver violently jerked the steering wheel to control the side-slipping as it spun across all three lanes of the interstate, and, cursing horribly, somehow managed to bring the vehicle to a stop.
It was an impressive performance, but the driver was shaken, and once he’d limped the damaged vehicle into the emergency lane, he pulled the key out of the ignition and fell into a breathlessly mumbled thank-you prayer to God.
Meanwhile, in the backseat, Bolden was unharmed and strangely relaxed. The adrenaline had chased away any trace of hangover, and he recovered quickly from the instant flash of regret at not signing his Guardian Angel contract that he felt in the first moments after the blowout.
Not only had he escaped death without the intervention of Folder’s field team, there was nothing the team could have done to save him and the taxi flipped into an oncoming tractor-trailer. He wondered how the probability of this accident would have looked on the Device.
“Thank you, God, thank you, God...” the driver prayed, annoying Bolden to no end. He grabbed the driver’s shoulder and shook him.
“Come to your senses, for God’s sake! We’re alive, and I’ve still got a plane to catch!”
The driver turned his head and looked at him with hazy eyes. He got out and inspected his car, which was OK accept for the bl
own-out tire and its mate, which had shredded during the wild spin they’d just survived.
Bolden stepped out and joined a small group of people who had stopped their cars.
“You’re not making it to the airport in this car,” the driver said. “Not today. I’ve got two flats and only one spare. But the important thing is that we’re alive.”
Bolden subconsciously bristled at the simple man’s moralizing.
“You going to JFK?” a chubby spectator with thinning dark hair asked. “Because that’s where I’m going, and I’d be happy to give you a ride.”
Bolden shook his fat, sweaty hand, not bothering to register the fellow’s name, then turned back and stuffed a handful of hundred dollar bills into the cab driver’s shirt pocket. With that bill settled, he followed the pudgy man to his new Chevy Suburban and climbed in alongside him.
His new driver was in a talkative mood, and Bolden concentrated on ignoring him as politely as possible. The man began with comments on the unofficial Chinese blockade of Taiwan, then segued into a monologue about the fiancée he was driving to pick up. She was flying in from Russia, where things weren’t going so well, either. Chechen terrorists were practically ruling Moscow, and several small countries in the Caucasus region that were once satellite republics were back to enthusiastic saber-rattling.
Bolden ignored the man’s prattle and thought about Danielle, who was probably worried sick. He felt his pockets, avoiding the seat belt he had cautiously put on as soon as he got in the car, but he couldn’t find the cell phone. He had probably dropped it during the wild skidding finish to his taxi ride, and wherever it was now, it was roughly 30 kilometers behind them. He considered asking the man in the driver’s seat if he could use his phone, then decided it would just be better to wait an hour and explain everything at the gate.
For the next 20 minutes, his brain sunk into a thick mist, his nerves unwinding. When the driver sounded like he was asking his opinion, Bolden gave him an encouraging, guttural reply that wasn’t exactly speech. The only thing he cared about now was getting to the airport on time.
