An Absence of Light

Chapter 78

The sixty-five-foot Sphinx rocked gently in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The pontoon plane had gone, and Kalatis and Jael sat on the deck with binoculars, their feet on the railing gazing at a specific coordinate to the northwest. The area they were watching was fifteen miles off the coast and might as well have been fifteen hundred miles off the coast It was the middle of nowhere and didn’t exist at all until someone drew the navigational coordinates on a map to define it. For three hundred and sixty degrees there was nothing but emptiness and darkness and one direction could have been any direction; it was all empty, without boundary or meaning or relationship.

Kalatis checked his watch and then looked again in that one single direction that the navigational maps had told him was the right direction. He lifted his binoculars. The space around them was silent except for the whispered swash of the Gulf Stream nibbling at the hull of the Sphinx.

Suddenly there was a bright flash directly in line with Kalatis’s gaze.

“Christ!” he said. “There it is. Close. Shit, closer than I was expecting. I didn’t even hear the plane.”

He took down his binoculars and watched the fireball the size of an orange against the star-speckled darkness.

“How much far away is that?” Jael asked, lifting her binoculars to see it more clearly.

“I don’t know,” Kalatis said, raising his binoculars again. “A mile. Maybe a mile.”

The fireball died out quickly, leaving its afterimage in the stars.

“That’s Pace,” Kalatis said. “The first thirteen million is in the van.”