AFTER I’VE TOLD HIM AS MUCH AS HE NEEDS TO KNOW, OFFUTT walks over to the sink, takes off his glasses, runs the faucet and splashes water on his face. He then slumps on the end of the bed.
We’re alone. His prison cell, two floors below ground, contrasts starkly with TVB’s. There’s the sink, a john, the bed and not much else. The walls seem to be impregnated with the stench of human waste. Only the chill air of the chamber stops it from overwhelming us.
I ask him how much Johansson knows.
‘He got access to the data for his war on terror. That’s all. He doesn’t know where the data comes from. No warfighter is ever made aware of the source. By the time it’s mixed up with all the other sources of raw intelligence, it’s washed clean, made to look like it could have come from anywhere.’ He looks at me. ‘So what are my choices?’
‘You don’t have any. When we’re done here, you, Hetta and I are going to head up to Camp David and brief the President. There’s a helicopter waiting.’ I pause. ‘Tell me about the cell.’
He laughs. ‘The cell? There is not just one cell. The Cube houses dozens. Maybe hundreds. I have no idea how many. Everything was compartmentalized. Ours was focused exclusively on the WMD threat. Others will have been assigned to specific targets, all high priority and inaccessible by other collection methods. We’re talking organized crime bosses, terrorists, Chinese and Russian strategic military planners, politicians … the list is probably endless. I just saw what I saw. My cell got a feed from the Canyon, same as all the others.’
‘So, you don’t know who would have targeted the President, or why?’
‘The only people who would have known are the people who assign the targets, people we never got to see, and the operatives within the cell itself.’
He massages the skin on the back of his burned hand.
‘Did he … suffer?’
‘Who?’
‘The President.’
I tell him: Yes. From a particularly debilitating dream.
‘When?’
‘More often than he’d like to admit.’
‘Starting when?’
‘Nine months ago.’
‘Then that’ll be the point of instigation. The Grid keys off events: intel we pick up on people or things that need verification when no other asset can provide it. If they were targeting him, something would have triggered a reason for wanting to get inside his thinking. You need to take a look at what was happening then.’
I get to my feet. Nine months ago.
The new administration had barely got started.
‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘There’s more. Calibration required me to ship out to the Canyon every few months. By now, Duke was there full time. Calibration was dull – it meant us wearing more sophisticated versions of the helmets they’d developed for the HITS concept demonstrator and for us to sit there for hours, while the computers were realigned and the engineers did their thing. The process could go on for a day, overnight sometimes, which is why it needed two of us, Duke and me. It’s hard to maintain that level of focus for long.’
He rests the back of his head against the wall and closes his eyes.
‘But on that day, the day before he ran, everything goes haywire. One minute, we’re staring at a load of static on screen, the next we’re watching a feed scrolling at a thousand miles an hour. We see people, famous people, ordinary people, places I know and places I don’t, historical events, wars – Vietnam, World Wars One and Two, stuff that goes back further, even; way, way back. It also starts to show events that I can remember, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, the planes slamming into the Towers …’
He opens his eyes.
‘And then the screens go black and I look left and Duke is standing in the glow of the emergency lighting, staring at the screens, still wearing the helmet. His eyes are open and moving, like the movie we just saw is still running, but it isn’t, there’s nothing to see, until, boom, suddenly the screens burst back into life again and so does the hologram they project onto the plinth when they need to show a target from multiple angles.
‘There are images of the Wailing Wall, the gold cupola of the Dome of the Rock; churches, portraits of saints; and then …’
I lean forward.
‘Then there’s this guy waving at a crowd, and it’s waving back, and I suddenly realize it’s Thompson – Senator Thompson – only this is Jerusalem, and he’s President.’
I hold up a hand. ‘Wait a minute.’
Offutt stops and looks at me.
‘You’re talking about something that hasn’t happened.’
‘So?’
‘You mean …’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. To the Grid, time is entirely fluid. Just as it is to a psychic. Totally meaningless. The holosphere is a perfect record of past, present and future events. The job of the Grid’s processors is to bring the false positives down to a minimum so we know which future events are real.’
A bead of sweat trickles down my back. I ask him to continue.
‘The picture switches again, and the viewpoint is somewhere above the Old City, in a building of some description, and we’re face to face with this guy. He’s talking, deeply, as if the fate of the world is at stake, and there’s this flash, a burst of pure, intense white heat, the screens all disappear in a shower of sparks and Duke collapses.’
I scroll through photos on my iPhone until I reach the cabin sketch of the Engineer. I show Offutt the image. ‘This him?’
Offutt peers at it, looks at me. ‘Yes. Who is he?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Should I?’
‘You told me your cell targeted the jihadist WMD threat.’
‘So?’
‘He’s a bomb-maker with nuclear expertise. Goes under the nom de guerre “Engineer”. Jihadists have been chattering about him for months. They’re all telling each other he’s going to ride at the head of the four horsemen and wipe away the unbelievers on a day that’s going to make the Twin Towers look like a pre-game.’
I pause.
‘And you weren’t ever tasked with looking for him?’
I emerge with Offutt into a freezing wet day.
Hetta and Schweizer are waiting at the helipad. As we round the corner of a hangar, the wind picks up, throwing spray at us from the waves pounding the rocks off Hains Point. A hundred meters away a V-22 is warming up, one of the more recent additions to the presidential fleet: a ‘tiltrotor’ – half plane, half helicopter – able to take off and land vertically, thanks to two massive props on the end of its wings.
By the time I climb aboard, Hetta and Schweizer are already strapped in.
Hetta points to Offutt, cups her hands around her mouth and shouts at me over the engine noise. ‘What’s he doing here?’
‘He’s coming with us,’ I yell back. ‘I need him to tell the President what he just told me.’ It’s too noisy for a discussion. I mouth and semaphore the rest: Tell you when we get there.
Offutt straps in beside Schweizer. I strap in next to Hetta. We don headsets. There’s a surge of power from the engines. The Osprey lifts into the air and in seconds is in full forward flight. I see the river recede and the Monument and the White House. I settle back into my seat as soon as we’ve crossed the Beltway.
Gapes fled with five thousand pieces of imagery on a flash drive. He managed to avoid detection by the Grid and made his way to the cabin – a place, due to its isolation, he knew nobody would ever find him.
From thereon in, he’d lost his tech bridge to the holosphere; but he didn’t need it. He was a viewer – the best, everybody said – so he went back to basics. With pen, paper and an ability to access the signal line at will, he began to download his own data, sketching out everything he saw, filling in gaps, until he not only assembled a mosaic that spoke cryptically to what the Grid is, but delivered a warning: that without my intervention, apparently, the President is going to die in a conflagration in Jerusalem.
I stare out the window as we leave the suburbs behind, and think again about the muzzle flash in the blacked-out window of the office building beyond the labor union. The freeze-frame of the moment Gapes was shot by Jimenez. He knew he was going to die. And he knew it was the only way we’d listen really carefully to his message.
The day after the Grid meltdown, they took Gapes and Offutt for tests at a medical center within the Bluffdale complex. They were interviewed by a succession of suited types, but clearly military/intel, about what they thought they had seen. Was it real? Could the system have been hacked? At one point, Offutt heard one of the interviewers ask another whether it could have been ‘reachback’. Reachback? He had no idea what that meant.
Duke remained calm throughout. Calmer than Offutt had ever seen him. At first, he thought they must have upped his drugs, but, looking back, he realized it was because he’d made up his mind. That afternoon they went back to the bunker to resume calibration. Some tests were made with a new helmet and, for twenty minutes, Duke was left alone – long enough, they figured later, for him to download what he needed on a drive. That evening, while taking the air outside the ward where they were running more tests on them, he gave his orderlies the slip, and vanished into thin air.
Ahead, through the rain, the rolling hills of Pennsylvania await us.
What am I going to tell Thompson and Reuben? Gapes asked whether I believe the President to be a good man. I do, but there’s something that he isn’t telling me; and it isn’t just about Abnarth – it’s about two of the sub-panels in the sanctum that haven’t yet revealed themselves to us – Church and Pitnatsat.
The implication of Thompson’s sub-panel, 2B, is that he knows something about Church that he isn’t sharing. If so, what does ‘Church’ refer to? A straightforward reference to St John’s Church itself seems unlikely. Besides, I saw the way Thompson reacted when I asked him about it. He was lying. And ‘15ski’, beneath the surface layer dedicated to the Engineer, has me completely beat.
The engine note changes. I hear the whine of hydraulics above us, as the Osprey’s wings tilt toward the vertical and it begins its descent into Camp David. I look out the window. We’re still a hundred meters up. And then I feel the shudder. We all do. Hetta grabs a hold of my arm. I glance at Schweizer and Offutt.
Offutt, who must have made as many trips in vertical lift aircraft as I have, looks panicky. We all turn toward the source of the vibration, which is coming from the starboard engine. There’s a crackle in my headset. It’s hard to take in what the pilot is saying, because a cacophony of horns and alarms suddenly bursts from the cockpit, but the words I catch are ‘gearbox’, ‘failure’ and ‘catastrophic’.
‘What’s happening?’ Hetta yells.
I snatch another glance out the window.
We’re above a hillside covered in boulders and trees.
You get an engine failure on a helicopter, you contain it by decoupling the rotor and using the body mass to spin the blades as you fall, and flare off seconds before you hit the ground.
With a V-22, you lose an engine, it’s still possible to fly thanks to a driveshaft that transfers power from the remaining good engine.
But when you get a gearbox failure the power transfer option isn’t available.
I look back again toward the source of the vibration, which is getting worse. Then I look at Offutt. He pulls the straps tight across his shoulders and closes his eyes. Schweizer leans over and spews his guts across the floor.
We make a lurch to the right and I hear a voice in my head – not the pilot’s this time, but someone else’s – telling me to undo my seat belt, Hetta’s too, and I reach over and twist the catch; first hers, then mine. A second after I do this, the engine makes a noise like a rattling toolbox. At the next lurch, more violent than the one that preceded it, the Osprey noses down and rolls. I grab Hetta and we fall from our seats, bouncing off the floor as we tumble across the cabin, until we hit the starboard wall just behind the forward bulkhead. The noise is unbelievable. Chunks of metal colliding within the gearbox as it rips itself apart. Schweizer screaming.
The voice urges me to reach beneath me and I grab something, a handle, which, with all my strength, I pull.
The door opens and I free-fall into the freezing air, dragging Hetta with me.
I see the stricken V-22 rolling to the right, upside down, and the ground spinning beneath me. I close my eyes, screw them tight shut, but still see the huge orange fireball and feel its searing heat.
The blast rips Hetta from my grasp.
I feel myself lifted by the explosion.
Then, happily, nothing.