Cutting Edge

46

With the bulk of his journey behind him, DeBolt decided a train was the least-risk option for the remainder. Rail to Vienna would take twelve hours, even on high-speed ICE trains, but now that he was established in the E.U., it seemed the most likely way to travel without further testing the passport of Ronald Anderson.

He exchanged dollars for euros at a station currency kiosk. He had enjoyed the business class transatlantic flight, but with limited cash going forward, DeBolt opted for an economy seat on the train. The first leg to Cologne was relatively short, a two-hour blur on a high-speed route. He spent an hour at the station in Cologne where he exchanged the remainder of his dollars for euros, and took an espresso and a sweet roll at a track-side teashop. He also continued to test META’s network.

Since arriving in Europe he’d had no trouble getting a connection using his internal wiring. As far as he knew, the only way tell if things were working was to make a request. He found himself wishing he had a status bar above his screen to display the current signal strength. If I ever meet the designer, he thought, maybe I’ll mention it.

Even with a connection, DeBolt was unsure what META could do on this side of the Atlantic. Were there differences, limitations? Slower response times? He began with the facial-recognition application, and was mildly disappointed by the results — roughly half of his inputs came back with positive IDs, many of these proving to be Americans. He guessed that certain European countries, and probably much of the rest of the world, didn’t register driver’s license or passport photos in whatever database he was accessing. Or perhaps META was restricted from breaching the servers of particular countries.

He tried for identities on a number of people who he thought might be recent immigrants from the Middle East and Africa — DeBolt knew Europe was awash in refugees, and train stations were ground zero. Not a single one registered. The reason seemed apparent. Without a known image on file for comparison, it didn’t matter how good your correlation software was. DeBolt also noted that many responses seemed to take longer, perhaps because his information had to funnel through fiber-optic cables miles under the Atlantic Ocean.

He noticed a security camera near the teashop entrance, and wondered if he might be able to get a feed, much as he’d done at the embezzler’s house outside Calais. Camera networks, from what he remembered, were everywhere in Europe, and the idea of accessing them seemed unthinkable. He experimented with a few commands, but nothing seemed to work. As he did, DeBolt watched a constant stream of people come and go through the doorway, and he imagined what it would be like to track them through the indifferent eyes of so many black-and-white feeds. Everyone going about their business, not realizing they were being watched, or perhaps not caring. If he could gain that power? It would be intoxicating and voyeuristic, like being night watchman to the world.

He was considering whether to explore the concept further, outside the station, when reality intervened. So engrossed was DeBolt in this new idea, he nearly missed his train. He scrambled aboard with two minutes to spare, took a seat by the window, and marveled at META: there had to be hundreds of possibilities he hadn’t even considered yet.

DeBolt settled in for an afternoon spent traversing the Rhine Valley and Bavaria. He set aside the what-ifs and committed to more practical research, even if he undertook it in a way that few people on earth could imagine — he closed his eyes and envisioned what he wanted.

He learned nothing more about Dr. Atif Patel, deepening his suspicions that the man had specifically blocked searches. More alarmingly, he learned that Shannon Lund’s reservation on a United Airlines flight from Dulles to Kodiak had been canceled. DeBolt searched from every angle he could think of — airline reservations, TSA records, mobile phone tracking, credit card usage — but found nothing on Lund’s current whereabouts. Had she taken some obscure route home, perhaps on a military transport? Or was she still on the East Coast digging for information? Either way, he decided she was safe. Safe because she was nowhere near him.

He slept intermittently, fitfully, until 5:42 that evening when, under a driving November rain, the train drew smoothly and punctually into Vienna’s Wien Westbahnhof.

Late that same afternoon, another jet landed at Vienna International Airport. The A330 taxied home, was umbilicaled to its jetway, and passengers began to disembark. Among them was a large bald man who, weary after forty-eight hours of travel, was relieved to reach an end point.

Delta did not consider Austria home, but he’d come to like the place. He liked the food, the beer, and most of all the fact that because so many languages were spoken here — and inversely, so many not spoken — people didn’t find it peculiar when he failed to respond to their questions or reply to conversational openers. He simply answered with a shrug, and nobody seemed to mind.

He slipped uneventfully through immigration using a new identity, the pretext of Douglas Wilson having exceeded its shelf life. He’d kept that one longer than he should have, a mistake that had necessitated his second trip to Alaska. Lesson learned. For years the Marine Corps had dispatched him across the world to do its own brand of violence, but those travels had typically been undertaken on military transports, or occasionally commercial flights, under his real name. He’d dabbled in clandestine work, but it was not his forte. Delta was a killer, no more and no less, an asset built for sand dunes and ditches and jungles, for urban assault in third-world hovels. Give him a door to breach, an MP4, maybe a few grenades, and he could sanitize a room with what bordered on artistry.

He was getting better at these new missions, the secrets and duplicity. And he would continue to do so. Delta had only begun to explore what his new abilities allowed. The more he learned, the more lethal he would become. There was already no soldier on earth like him. Not the prima donna squad he’d eliminated in Boston. Certainly not Bravo. A Coastie, he thought derisively. A man whose only training involved saving lives. Still, Bravo had been enabled with META, so he couldn’t be underestimated. He wasn’t a threat, but if he learned how to leverage his powers he could prove very elusive.

Delta initiated communications as soon as he reached the line of taxis outside. His instructions were waiting:

He knew it well enough, a place they had met before. He went to the first cab in line and slid into the backseat. The driver turned and said, “Wohin gehst du?”

Delta took out one of his cards, along with the pen he always carried, and wrote an address on the back. The driver, a thickset Bavarian with a day’s growth of stubble, made an upside-down U with his mouth and nodded to imply that he understood.

As they struck away from the curb, it occurred to Delta that communicating with the cards carried a degree of operational risk. He was leaving a written record of his destination with the driver. Of course, the man knew where they were going anyway, and could relay it after the fact to the police or any adversary. Still, it was yet another complication brought on by his condition. A small problem, but a problem all the same. The card also confirmed his inability to speak, and the fact that he was a United States Marine who’d been injured in combat. All true. He was proud of his service, but in light of his new trajectory in life, he supposed it was unwise to offer information unnecessarily. Any of it might be traceable, perhaps in ways he didn’t even understand. Fingerprints or DNA on the card itself. There were some clever people in this world. Very clever indeed. He was on his way to meet one of them right now.