Cutting Edge

41

Lund was on an airplane, but she wasn’t heading west. She’d bought a ticket on the last southbound shuttle to Washington, D.C., and first thing tomorrow morning she would visit the Coast Guard’s national headquarters, the St. Elizabeths campus on the southeast side of town.

As she sat in a middle seat deep in coach, Lund finished off a much-needed beer and mentally mapped out how she could best help DeBolt. There seemed only one good lead — the suspect Jim Kalata had uncovered while investigating William Simmons’ climbing accident. Douglas Wilson of Missoula, Montana. Was he one of the men who’d abducted her and DeBolt that morning? Possibly. Kalata thought Wilson might have traveled from Vienna to Alaska, intent on killing a man who’d been asking too many questions about DeBolt. Lund thought her partner might have that much right.

But she needed more. Fortunately, there was no better place to get it than Coast Guard headquarters. The Coast Guard was attached to the Department of Homeland Security, the best source of information in the world when it came to suspicious characters and air travel. Yet it wouldn’t be easy. Lund was not traveling on official orders, nor had she opened any investigation relating to Trey DeBolt. She figured she could handle all that with a few phone calls, and perhaps some half-truths. But she would have to tread carefully. Only hours ago she’d been abducted by a shadowed entity of the United States military, then held in a government building. The very fact that they’d released her only reinforced the legal ambiguities that seemed to swirl around the META Project.

A flight attendant picked up her empty can. “Can I get you another?”

Lund almost said yes, but shook her head. “I could use a cigarette when we land though. Do you know if there’s a smoking lounge in the airport?”

“Sorry, I’m not sure about Reagan National. Outside on the curb is usually best.”

Lund had the feeling the woman would just as soon have told her to light up in the traffic lane, but she smiled her flight attendant’s smile all the same and walked off. As she did so, Lund’s gaze was caught by the screen of her seatmate’s iPad. The airplane apparently had Wi-Fi, and CNN was running on his screen. Lund saw a nighttime backdrop of rolling blue and red lights, and a headline crawled across the bottom: SHOOTING IN WATERTOWN, MA. FIVE FATALITIES CONFRIMED.

“Getting as bad as D.C.,” said the iPad’s owner, who’d clearly caught her looking. He appeared to be a businessman, well dressed, although Lund had watched him put his jacket in the overhead bin, and his tie was now tugged loose. The man’s tone was friendly, if a bit weary. Weighed down by either a long day at work or more senseless big-city violence — she couldn’t say which.

“Yeah, it’s a shame,” she managed. “Tell me, I’m not familiar with Massachusetts — is Watertown near Boston?”

“Yeah, I’ve been there once or twice — maybe twenty minutes from downtown.”

Twenty minutes, she thought. Roughly the length of the car ride she’d taken today. She looked again at the news feed, and saw a man and a woman in matching dark jackets that were emblazoned with big yellow letters: FBI.

Lund had a very bad feeling. Right then, she decided to skip the cigarette when she arrived and go straight to headquarters.

DeBolt found the Buick right where he’d left it, in a parking garage near Logan airport. He drove south, checking the mirror continuously, and took off-ramps to try to distinguish if anyone was following him. It was probably pointless — he was a complete amateur. Delta, on the other hand, was not. Is this how it’s going to be? he wondered. Running scared for the rest of my life? His rhetorical thought actually found an answer — a resounding no. Either Delta would find him, or DeBolt would somehow bring his association with the META to an end. And the only way to do that: reach the last man alive who could explain it.

Dr. Atif Patel.

The name meant nothing to him. He repeated it aloud, hoping for some association. DeBolt drew a blank. He went to his connection to find more, but there was little available. He learned that Patel was not much older than he was. A graduate of Caltech, he was now a professor at Cal Berkeley and attached to a number of research projects there, all relating to computer software and systems architecture. He was a geek’s geek, which DeBolt found encouraging — perhaps Patel was the Oz behind the machine that was META.

Yet there were also worrying voids in his search on Patel. No tax records, which he’d been able to gather on others, nor any address of record or phone number. He found no social media accounts or bank records. He couldn’t even find an image of the man — at least not the right Atif Patel — which in this digital age seemed remarkable. It was as if his background had been sanitized, scrubbed from the information world. As if he’d gone into electronic hiding. It made sense in a way — if Patel was indeed an architect of META, might he not exclude himself from its otherwise universal grasp? Then a disturbing corollary came to mind: Might Patel have gone into hiding in order to escape the likes of Delta?

DeBolt did uncover one glaring inconsistency. If information on Patel was limited, one fact proved widely available, even advertised — he was attending an academic gathering in Vienna this week, and scheduled to give two presentations, the second in two days’ time. After that DeBolt could find no indication of where Patel would be. Would he return to California? Attend another conference? Tour Europe? There was no way to tell, and this gave DeBolt a deadline — he had two days in which to reach Vienna.

The more DeBolt thought about it, the more he realized how challenging that might be. His only option was to take a commercial flight, but he had no identification. He also knew that paying cash for a one-way ticket was a surefire way to get the attention of authorities. Still, there had to be a way. He immediately discarded Boston’s Logan airport as an option. The threat there would be extreme. Delta too close. So he continued driving south, knowing in a loose way where I-95 would take him.

He drove deep into the night. The road became a blur, and the stream of oncoming headlights thinned into the early morning hours. He turned on the Buick’s radio, found an alternative rock channel, and cranked up the volume. He opened his window to be stunned by the inrushing air, New England autumn at seventy miles an hour.

DeBolt could barely keep his eyes open when he finally took an exit in New London, Connecticut. Less than a mile after turning off the interstate, he found himself at gates with a familiar emblem: the United States Coast Guard Academy. He’d never attended the school, but worked with many officers who had, men and women who seemed universally happy to be from the institution. Nearing two o’clock in the morning, he knew he would never get past security at the gate — probably not even if he still had his old identity card. So DeBolt navigated across the street instead, and pulled into a spot beside a Dumpster in the half-full parking lot of something called Connecticut College.

He locked the doors and turned off the engine, knowing the cold would seep in quickly. DeBolt did his best to ignore the screen in his head and let his mind roam. He thought about Joan Chandler. He thought about Shannon Lund, and hoped she was on her way back to Alaska. He thought about his crew from the helo crash, and wished he could remember something about the accident. Had he made a mistake that night, something that contributed to the death of his friends? Had those they’d been trying to rescue been lost as well?

And what if he could remember what happened on that doomed night? Would it replace the other mission so long entrenched in his memory? A vision came to DeBolt — not on META’s tiny screen, but on the more intimate and familiar canvas of his memory. He recalled what had become the signature event of his duty in Alaska. The mission he remembered above all others. Every AST had a story like it — the one rescue, for better or worse, that you could never shake. If it ended well, it was the tale you’d someday tell your grandchildren. If not, it was the one you took to your grave.

His had involved three survivors, a couple and their teenage daughter, who’d been set adrift when their sailboat pitchpoled — careening down the backside of a five-story wave on a following sea, the boat’s nose had dug into the trough, instigating a violent cartwheel. In a minor miracle, all three made it to a life raft, and from there they’d sent an SOS. An EPIRB signal gave an accurate position, but by the time the helo arrived all three were back in the water, the raft drifting away on a howling wind.

The storm that night had certainly been given a name, but DeBolt could never remember it. He only remembered dropping into the cold sea and finding three severely hypothermic individuals. One by one, he began lifting them to the safety of the helo. He remembered having to make the decision to leave the young girl in the water longest, despite the passionate protests of her parents. DeBolt had done it that way because in his opinion the parents were in worse shape — it was the only chance to save all three. His call. So at the end he was with the girl in waves that looked like buildings, in a wind that was gale force, and he had held on to her while they’d waited for the final lift. He held her close to be ready for the basket, but also to give her warmth. And God how she had held him back. His own strength was ebbing at that point, sapped by thirty frantic minutes in the Bering Sea.

And then — an ethereal moment like nothing DeBolt had ever experienced.

Tossed by ferocious winds, the helo had to abort its approach and reposition. In those desperate, vital minutes, as DeBolt himself became weaker and weaker, the tiny young girl whose body was pressed against his actually became stronger. She’d clung to him like a barnacle, her thin limbs and frozen fingers viselike in their grip. She had been in the water three times as long as he had, and didn’t have the luxury of a dry suit. None of that mattered to her. Never had DeBolt witnessed a power like that one young girl’s desperation to live. Even more surprising was what it instilled in him — an absolute resolve to make it happen.

Together, on that dark night over a year ago, they had both reached safety.

These were DeBolt’s fading thoughts as he fell fast asleep in the backseat of the Buick.

The will to live.

Absolute resolve.