The Guardian Angel

by George Lazăr

“We think the human brain feels death in advance. Like we’ve all got some kind of Device programmed into our subconscious, and yours is telling you to get the hell out of here. Which is what you’re going to do. Right away.”

  Chapter 12

  Bolden quickly realized that The Guardian Angel’s permanent surveillance could be performed as discreetly as it had in the days before he signed his contract. The biggest visible difference in his life was the wrist-watch-styled unit he wore, a portable version of the Device given to him by the colonel. Other than that and a few Guardian Angel quirks, Bolden’s daily routine looked roughly analogous to the routine of any well-tended billionaire.

  Despite Folder’s advice, Bolden dove back into his business again. He started by paying visits to his companies. It was already an extensive portfolio before he went into seclusion, and since then the number had grown.

  At best, a visit meant a rock-star reception from the locals, followed by hours of monotonous presentations. He eventually tired of these dog-and-pony shows, finally convincing himself that despite the global recession, his investments were doing amazingly well, even as the world around them came unglued.

  The value of his assets had grown at an absurd rate, and to an anxious world, he seemed almost messianic: the investor who could do no wrong. His social secretary was the most over-worked woman in his private office, so he hired her an assistant. Bolden was invited everywhere, and created a sensation wherever he went.

  But things turned out differently when, on an impulse, he decided to visit the terrestrial end of the Space Elevator. It proved to be impossible.

  The Army was heavily guarding the artificial island located at the Equator, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The new island had already exceeded a hundred square kilometers and was still expanding. In the center, pointing straight towards the sky, stretched the Elevator’s cable. It consisted of a bunch of interwoven wires made of carbon nanotubes, anchored through extremely powerful electromagnetic fields, powered by the electrical current generated by the movement of the waves around its base.

  Because there had been so many attempts to sabotage the Elevator throughout its history, access to the island was extremely limited and casual visitors were forbidden. Bolden was shocked that they turned down his request, and did what he always did when he was stumped. He called the colonel.

  Folder arrived by helicopter and landed on the luxury yacht where Bolden waited just outside the circular restricted area established by the Navy. The press called the perimeter the Iron Circle, and it bristled with warships, submarines and aircraft.

  “Listen, Folder, don’t you have a family?” yelled Bolden as he stepped out of the helicopter. “You came as soon as I called you.”

  The colonel ignored the question and the remark. He leaned on the shoulder of one of the members of the staff who came to help him descend from the helicopter.

  “You can’t get in!” Folder reported, also shouting, as soon as he touched the deck. “They won’t even hear of it!”

  “The hell I can’t! I own shares in that project! They can’t keep me from visiting my own property!”

  “They can and they will,” the colonel said. “They’re using the provisions of the National Security Act, citing new fighting in Kashmir. India and Pakistan have been trading artillery rounds all week, and everyone’s in a testy mood.”

  “What? You’re kidding me! Kashmir?” Bolden asked. “We’re in the middle of the Pacific here.”

  “It’s escalating. An Indian warship exchanged fire with a Pakistani warship yesterday. They damaged each other, and disengaged, but it’s spooked everybody inside the Iron Circle, The military has tamped down access to Elevator Island. Frankly, I think the only reason you haven’t been arrested or sunk is that you’re the project’s major investor. Might be bad for business to kill you.”

  Bolden led Folder to one of the yacht’s luxurious cabins. They sat down in soft armchairs facing each and waited until a steward served them cold drinks.

  “Forgive me, but I still don’t see how any of that amounts to a threat to national security,” Bolden said.

  The colonel sipped his drink, looking around the cabin admiringly. An ingenious gyro-stabilization system kept the room from rolling or pitching, and the tinted windows pleasantly filtering the light while keeping out the noise of waves slapping the ship.

  “If someone sabotaged the Cable, it would wrap around the Earth. The impact would be terrible.”

  “Do I look like a saboteur?” Bolden laughed. “And even if I were, what’s the problem? The United States isn’t on the trajectory. And the cable would burn while it crashed through the atmosphere. I’ve seen several projections. The cable is practically impossible to sabotage.”

  “The consequences can’t be assessed,” the colonel insisted. “Tons of materials would fall to Earth. We don’t really know what would happen to the cable. It’s just too big a variable risk.”

  “But those scenarios are all for failure somewhere above, not from Elevator Island. That is where I want to go, not the geosynchronous station. If it were released from here, the risks are far less catastrophic.”

  At a loss, Folder decided to play the honesty card.

  “In fact, the greatest threat to national security is the economic collapse that would follow any destruction of the Cable. The Elevator is mostly paid for with American money, as you are well aware. Others have also contributed, that’s true, but only with a few tens of billions of dollars – something symbolic, for others to say there is also private capital invested in it, even though its only 1 percent of the funding. It’s Uncle Sam’s most expensive toy, it’s one of the only economic sectors that’s thriving at the moment, and if anything happened to it the results would tip this recession into a global depression that would make the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a summer vacation.”

  Only Bolden wasn’t a man who gave up anything easily.

  “But I’ve got billions of dollars riding on that elevator. If anyone has a right to inspect their operations, it’s me.”

  “It’s one of the most carefully managed, carefully protected operations in human history!” Folder protested. “If you want evidence of that, look no farther than the fact that they won’t let you in!”

  “Nonsense! Everything you’re telling me is a load of circuitous nonsense!”

  The colonel stood up, poured himself another glass, and fiddled with the cabin’s communications console. Elevator Island appeared on one of the screens.

  “The administration told me to extend their apologies to you for denying your request, and hand-delivered this recording. Watch carefully, Ian: for security reasons it can only be played once.”

  The cabin’s portholes tinted over to reduce the glare, and a projector established a glowing holographic field in the center of the room. In a moment the elevator cable appeared in the field, as thick as the trunk of an old baobab, stretching tautly into the clear blue sky. Bolden associated it with the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.

  Magnetic levitation trains, or Maglevs, prowled up and down the Cable like worms. The holographic field trembled as the image rose, its recording having been made from an ascending Maglev. Elevator Island grew smaller as the train gained altitude, and the docks and warehouses and cranes below merged into landscape. The recording went through a few rarefied clouds. For a while, it looked like the view from the porthole of an airplane, flying ten thousand meters above the earth.

  The train left the atmosphere and the artificial island below faded into the endless blue-green shade of the Pacific Ocean. Folder cleared his throat. It sounded unusually loud in the yacht’s great cabin. The recording of the Maglev’s journey reached its first stop, at three hundred kilometers altitude, where space stations were orbit. The image shifted to the end of the journey, at thirty-six thousand kilometers altitude, on the terminal station located at the geosynchronous point. It was close to where the waste sent by Green Clean was piling up and to the unfi
nished Electromagnetic Catapult that was going to throw them all towards the Sun.

  “You’re right,” said Folder without turning around. “If you were a simple human being, you couldn’t possibly sabotage the Elevator. But you are Ian Bolden, the man who cheated death. The military know about us, and about you.”

  He took a sip from his glass and added some more ice.

  “The Device was first designed for the Army. That’s where we recovered it. It was an abandoned military project. We took it over and adapted it for personal protection. But the Pentagon never just gives up an idea, particularly if someone else makes it work. We hand in reports periodically, and no doubt they have other ways of keeping on eye on us.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Think, Ian. They’re afraid of you. They don’t want someone with your risk factor to come anywhere near their precious elevator. They can deal with a single man, but there’s nothing in their arsenal that can counter the cosmic forces aligned against you, should a probability form while you tour their facility.”

  Chapter 13

  After government refused access to Elevator Island, something changed in Ian Bolden’s psyche. The thought of living like the paranoid quarry of a cosmic killer repulsed him, and he decided it was time to try a different approach.

  So Ian Bolden set out to defy death. He asked the medical crew to modify his features with the help of cosmetic surgery and then he pressed Folder to build him a complete new identity. He changed his haircut, grew a beard. Inside himself, he felt relieved he had gotten rid of his old identity as if, implicitly, the danger of death had disappeared with it. He still hadn’t decided fully whether Folder was lying to him or truly protecting him, but he wanted to find out.

  The investments the colonel made in the media turned out to be useful, allowing Bolden to disappear without arousing the suspicions of reporters, most of whom were already obsessed with the spiraling, interconnected disasters of the current global crisis. Worldwide recession had forced the planet to the brink of chaos. War seemed inevitable.

  Bolden detached himself from the turmoil. His anonymity gave him a new perspective on the world, one he had never experienced before. He traveled as an ordinary man, met ordinary people, and he talked with them about their ordinary and extraordinary passions, joys, fears and needs.

  Then he discovered extreme sports.

  At first it was only curiosity, but soon he became addicted to adrenaline. He’d throw a glance at the Device on his wrist and, if the probability remained low enough, he’d take on challenges that would cause even the most reckless of men to pause.

  He went skydiving and opened his parachute at a hundred meters above the earth. He entered illegal races on the German autobahn (where there were no speed limits) and on Russian highways (where no one abided by or enforced speed limits). It didn’t matter if he won or lost, so long as he lived intensely.

  In the exclusive and insular community of obnoxiously rich street racers, Bolden earned the nickname “The Madman.” A few tried to imitate his driving style, down to the discreet glance at his wristwatch right before a race, but most of them ended up disastrously.

  He went through deserted and inhospitable places, wandering from the Sahara to Tibet. He crossed the Pacific Ocean by sailboat and, in South America, motored deep up the Amazon from its vast mouth at the Atlantic Ocean.

  Bolden set out on hiking expeditions and wilderness adventures where his probability sometimes exceeded thirty percent. On more than one occasion he had to be intercepted by exhausted but frantic field teams.

  “Change is good,” Folder told him once. “It’s good that you’re changing places and lifestyles, but I am afraid you don’t fully understand what’s going on.”

  Folder had found him in the Etosha National Park, located on the Owambo plateau, in Namibia, on an illegal safari. Bolden shrugged his shoulders carelessly and shouted orders to the four black carriers that were accompanying him.

  “Sometimes, between two levels, even several years can pass without incident,” the colonel said. “But that’s not true for someone at your level. You’re living dangerously, Ian, and your time is already measured in months. The way you’re pushing your luck feels like a death wish.”

  It was, in a way, but his adrenaline addiction wasn’t something he could easily kick. His solution was to resettle in Pekulatan, on the Island of Bali, where he was adopted by a community of ex-pat surfers.

  During the day he rode waves on his red surfboard, dressed in his red neoprene suit. At night he sat with the other surfers, in front of their tents, drinking cheap wine and smoking opium. After a while, slowly and without pathos, some of them started telling stories about their adventures, both real and imagined. Most were stories of unrequited love and fortunes won and lost.

  More than once, Bolden was sure he was listening to the story of a film he had seen or of a novel he had read. Sometimes, the stories stopped, never to be resumed again, and the storyteller was left with a vacant look, lost in his memories. They talked softly, without being interrupted and almost without being heard. Their voices, succeeded one another in no particular order, like litanies, maintaining the same soft, fatalistic and resigned tone.

  One night he also told his story, although most of the surfers had fallen asleep or were watching the stars. He told them about the black envelope and The Guardian Angel, about that natural law that wanted to take his life or of his suspicions that he might still be the victim of skillful con men. It was an incredible story, but it didn’t even register with his burned-out companions.

  Only Tuana, a still-young native girl who had taken shelter near the surfer campground several years before, listened attentively. The surfers had come and gone, passing her on to the others like an inheritance - like a surfboard, a tent or an opium pipe.

  Although he had noticed before, he didn’t actually speak to her until the night he told the story of his lie. He stared at the dying flames of the campfire dancing softly in her enormous dark eyes, and she in turn peered directly back. She felt his loneliness and pain, even if she understood only part of what he said, and she instinctively soothed it, drawing him to her, opening her arms and legs.

  They didn’t notice the SH3-H Sea King helicopter until it descended thirty meters above the beach. The whirlwind started by its blades blasted everyone in the beachside camp with sand and the noise of its jet engines assaulted the befuddled surf-bums, who spilled out of their tents and bedrolls.

  Bolden scarcely had time for even a gesture before two men from the helicopter rappelled down to him, strapped him into a rescue hammock and clipped in from a quick exit. Strong hands pulled him through the open side-door of the chopper, manhandled him into a seated position on a forward-facing bench and stapped him in. Another man handed him a headset, and putting it on he heard Folder’s voice.

  At first it seemed strange that Folder wouldn’t have come along on the rescue, but that was before Bolden realized that the voice on his headset was coming from the front of the helicopter, where Folder, dressed in a pilot’s jumpsuit, leaned over the back of a seat as he spoke to him over the cacophony of the engine.

  “This is a bad one, Ian,” he said. “You have no idea what favors I had to call in to get you out of this one.”

  The helicopter gained altitude and headed out over the ocean. Bolden said goodbye to Tuana in his mind, thinking about how the money she’d find in his wallet would feel like a fortune to her – perhaps enough to get her through a year...

  “We measured the probability on a stationary Device,” Folder continued. “It’s much more powerful than that wrist unit you wear, and its calling for a major event in less than an hour.”

  “What’s the probability?”

  “More than 70 and rising steadily,” Folder replied. “Big general readings, too. Could be something like an earthquake and tsunami combo.”

  One of the pilots spoke on the crew intercom, something about arrival at the Roos
evelt in about an hour. After that, moving, kaleidoscopic stripes appeared under Bolden’s heavy eyelids, the noise of the engines acquired rhythm, and he drifted away from reality.

  Bolden had already forgotten about Tuana and the surfers, about the campfire, the stacked sets of waves, the perfect beach. He didn’t even ask the colonel if he had warned the authorities about what was going to happen. It never crossed his mind.

  ***

  Three hundred nautical miles to the south, the naval group led by the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, was drilling its way through a night submarine-hunting exercise. The SH3-H Sea King helicopter carrying Folder and Bolden had left the carrier two hours prior on a strictly classified special mission.

  Colonel Folder had managed to reach the group commander, Admiral Thomson, in the record time of only twelve hours. Getting this helicopter had required high-level authorization documents, but Folder arrived prepared. The admiral handed over the aircraft reluctantly, but since he had more important things to do, he gave them permission to take off and shifted his full attention back to the exercise in hunting submarines.

  The target was a decommissioned old SS 576 Hudson attack submarine. A private contractor, Telesystems, had installed, a robotic self-control system for the old Hudson. A war-room of submarine remote-operators aboard the Roosevelt had been giving the admiral’s underlings fits for hours.

  The skill and experience of the remote team became obvious soon after the exercise began. Their surprising performance was the first domino to fall. The second toppled when the prey turned hunter and attacked the USS Barrat, a frigate in the Roosevelt’s escort. Had it been actual combat and not an exercise, the Barrat would have been sunk.

  By the rules of the exercise, the frigate should have abandoned the war game. But a garbled order and a moment of confusion resulted in the launch of a live Mark 72, one of the most advanced torpedoes in the U.S. Navy arsenal.

  In just thirty-five seconds, the Mark 72 covered the thousand meters that separated it from the Hudson, but the target sub’s remote-control team aboard the aircraft carrier responded with quick cunning. They’d kept the old sub near a seamount to confuse the Navy’s sonar system, and they managed to avoid the torpedo at the last instant by blowing their ballast tanks and springing to the surface. The Mark 72 didn’t respond quickly enough and – doomed by its mass and momentum – plowed straight into the sloping wall of the unstable seamount and exploded.