On the second day after, Matt Caidin regained consciousness. He knew he was in a hospital room, but he didn’t know where, and none of the staff would speak to him about anything other than medical matters.
On the third day after, Owen Lomax came to visit him. The big man moved stiffly, and used a cane. “They tell me you’ll be okay,” he said.
Matt brushed such irrelevance aside. Nothing would ever be okay. “What about Caparelli?”
Lomax sat down on a chrome-and-plastic visitor’s chair, shook his head. “But he’s the reason the rest of us made it.”
“Arlo?”
“Recuperating. I don’t think he’ll ever leave the office again.”
Matt saw there was something more Lomax seemed hesitant to say. “Whose office would that be? CROSSWIND, or DHS?”
“Mine. I’m acting director of CROSSWIND, now. It’s out of the NSA, and I’m out of Homeland. We’re on our own.”
Someone got what he wanted, Matt thought. Just not the way he wanted it.
Lomax finally got to what had really brought him here. “I want you to stay with the project.”
Matt had already considered that, knew he didn’t have a choice. How could he turn his back on the new reality he had glimpsed? How could anyone? “So do I.”
Lomax looked pleased. “Good. According to Hirst and Kushner, you’re something more than the other perceivers. You were able to manifest, project mass, take action … I’m still catching up, but … the people who know this stuff, they’re impressed. So, I guess I’m impressed, too.”
Matt didn’t care.
Lomax shifted in the flimsy chair, winced as he put a hand on his side. “First thing to get our heads around: We can’t risk assuming Borodin was just a lone madman out for revenge. What if it was a sanctioned test of our defenses? What if there’re more coming?”
“I’m not the guy to ask,” Matt said. “I didn’t open the door to Borodin. Laura did. She’s the one who tracked him and…” Matt stopped, surprised at how much this conversation hurt.
“You opened it, too.”
“Not on my own. Anything I did, I did through her. Always through her.”
Lomax didn’t argue. He explained the theory Arlo was developing: how it appeared that over time the EM fields of consciousness in two individuals could begin to resonate in sync with each other. It explained how, after years of building and reinforcing that link, perceivers could lock onto their targets almost instantly from half a world away. It might even explain how the link established between Matt and Laura had been so strong that Laura’s wraith hadn’t vanished after six days, no longer dependent on its own diminishing energy, but able to draw it from Matt. Arlo was still looking for a reason why that link between them had become so strong in so short a time, when all other factors suggested it could only have been strengthened over years of contact. But that was a problem for another day.
“Maybe you can do it through her again?” Lomax asked.
Matt shook his head, decisive. “I’ve been in this room three days. Three sunsets. That’s when she could come to me. And she hasn’t. And that’s all there is to it.” The terrible finality of those words struck Matt anew, and he looked away so Lomax wouldn’t see how devastated he actually felt.
“Caidin, do you know where you are?”
“A hospital. Somewhere. No one will tell me.”
“This is CROSSWIND. In DC. We have a medical wing. You’ve been in a Faraday cage for the past three days. To protect you from VEKTOR.”
Matt pulled his covers off, sat up. Outraged. Heartsick. “You knew that I was Laura’s only link to life, and you deliberately cut me off from her? Even if she had wanted to come to me she…” He broke off. “I need to get out of here.”
“Done.”
* * *
Thirty minutes before sunset, Matt was in a wheelchair, in the Projection Room. Waiting for a miracle.
The facility’s shielding could be dropped here, to permit CROSSWIND perceivers to project their awareness to other locations. Even more important to Matt now, if anything else … someone else … was out there, then the lines of communication worked both ways.
Lomax was waiting with him. Though Matt didn’t encourage him, they talked of Laura, and how nothing made sense but had felt so right.
Lomax told him there was a name for that. Matt was relieved when he didn’t go on to state the obvious.
His eyes were on the clock, watching as it marked the time until sunset.
Ten minutes more.
Lomax began talking to him about the conference, and the evacuation. About how more than one hundred people had been killed, but that the president had managed to escape. Though Matt didn’t ask, Lomax also summarized the Ebola cover story. Apparently it was holding up.
He spoke about other work-related details. The Russian woman with the missing hand Matt had sat with at the Greenbrier was Major Sofia Kalnikova, a special forces soldier assigned to VEKTOR. Matt wasn’t surprised. Lomax said she had disappeared from the site, no body found, no record of being evacuated. He added that the physician who had treated her at the DHS medical facility had been found murdered in his Logan Circle apartment. Cause of death was the same as for the physician Kalnikova had murdered in Colorado. Lomax was certain it wasn’t a coincidence.
Then he changed gears, asked Matt about what it was like, to be in that other realm, a projected presence, and because his interest now seemed genuine Matt did his best to tell him what he’d experienced, what he’d thought, what he’d done.
It was difficult to find the right words, but he tried to describe the sensation he’d felt of being pulled back into his body when Laura had fought Borodin’s son, and of coming to consciousness with Borodin strangling him. And how he had tried to see which of … of …
“Which of what?” Lomax asked.
Matt blinked. “There were two of them,” he said, replaying the events as he had witnessed them. “Laura and the berserker, fighting. Merging into…” He felt his heart start to race. “What was there at the end … I think it was only one of them.”
“Laura, right? Because she attacked Borodin and killed him to save you.”
Matt shook his head, somehow knowing that wasn’t the only explanation. “Borodin’s son hated his father. He could have killed him just the same as Laura.”
Matt looked at the clock.
The sun had set.
“Then which one was it?” Lomax asked. “Which one made last contact? Which one’s drawing strength from you now? Laura Hart? Or the berserker?”
“I don’t know.”
On the wall behind Lomax, a subtle distortion gained substance—a gray shadow … growing.…
He was about to find out.