Nighthawk

48

Emma followed her guard as he walked across the beach, cut through the grass and traveled up into the clearing where the Nighthawk sat. On the far side, Urco stood among the containment units.

Two of the eight units had been removed. They now rested on the stony ground, each of them connected to a fuel cell.

“Check these over, please,” Urco said.

“What am I looking for?” she asked.

“I want to be sure everything is functioning properly and that they’re safe to move.”

It was a simple task. She crouched beside the units and did a quick diagnostic review, all the time wondering why he’d bothered to say please.

“The magnetic bottles are stable,” she said. “The cryogenic systems are operating within accepted parameters. The fuel cells are generating clean power.”

“Good,” Urco said.

She stood. “I assume you want me to remove the other units?”

“In time,” he said. “For now, we should discuss your role in things.”

“My role?”

He only smiled and said, “Walk with me.”

With little choice in the matter, she nodded. “Lead on.”

They left the guard behind, entering a path cut through the foliage that twisted toward higher ground. Machetes had done the work; freshly cut stalks and fallen blades of the long grass lay across the ground. They’d been trampled down by a fair amount of foot traffic already.

“Are we entering some kind of maze?” she asked.

“We’re already deep inside one,” he insisted. “Working together is the only way out.”

“We were working together,” she replied, “right up until the point where your men attacked us, killed Kurt and took the rest of us hostage.”

“Not hostages,” he said, “captives. Captured thieves, actually.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a thief,” he said. “A well-dressed, Stanford-educated thief. Your entire organization has larceny in its heart and, by extension, the nation you serve. But you’ve been caught — red-handed, as they say — in the middle of the greatest robbery the world has ever known.”

“You’re the one who took the—”

“No,” he said, turning on her and cutting her off. “I only relieved you of the stolen goods. It was you and your government that engaged in this theft. You chose to fly this craft up into the heavens and gather the mixed-state matter from the magnetic field. You chose to bring it home to your hidden bunkers at Vandenberg, where you and your people would hoard it for your own purposes.”

“We only did that because—”

He wouldn’t let her speak. “There are five separate treaties governing activities in outer space,” he snapped. “The United States is a signatory on each and every one. Three of them were drafted by American statesmen. Collectively, they forbid every activity you’ve so recently engaged in, from the militarization of space to the national appropriation of any part of space or any celestial body, such as the Moon.”

As he railed at her, she recalled the ethical arguments internally discussed at the NSA prior to the mission. Arguments put forward and then so easily swatted aside. “We claimed nothing,” she said. “We merely retrieved free-floating particles.”

“Are you really going to play the lawyer with me?”

She fell silent and he turned and led her out of the grass and onto a plateau. From here, they looked over the lake seventy feet below. In the distance, the waterfall fell, with its hushed and ceaseless voice.

He turned back her way and bore down. “Like everything else in space, these free-floating particles are reserved as part of the common heritage of all mankind. They belong to everyone on Earth and to no one person or government in particular.”

The furor in his voice surprised her. Why, she thought, should he care about such things? How would he even know about them? Or about the wording of some obscure treaties?

“Who are you?” she asked.

“You still don’t recognize me?” he said, sounding almost disappointed. “Fortunately for me, I suppose. I feared you might spot me when we dined together beneath the cliffs of La Jalca.”

He reached to the side of his face as if to scratch at his ear but instead of scratching began to pull at his beard, slowly removing the portion on the right side of his face. His skin was burned beneath it, not terribly disfigured but scarred and hairless.

“The other side of my beard is real,” he replied, “but I can grow nothing over here.”

An indentation in his jawline told her the bone had been broken and never healed correctly; a portion of it might have been removed.

“It was the crash and the fire,” he explained.

Suddenly, the pieces came together for her. This man was involved in hacking the Nighthawk’s control system. He knew about the NSA mission and the antimatter. He was well versed in the international treaties regulating the use of space. And he knew her.

“Beric?” she said.

“So you do remember.”

She barely recognized him even now. Years had passed. Age and scars had changed his face. His eyes held no kindness, only bitterness and twisted anger. “I don’t understand? How? Why? Your plane exploded. They told us it was a terror group. They told us we were all in danger.”

“I was in danger,” he insisted, as he raised his voice. “And the terror group was based in Washington, D.C. Ironically enough, you now work for them.”

“The NSA?” she said. “Why would they want to harm you? Surely you can’t believe what you’re saying.”

“I have proof,” his voice accusatory as he moved closer to her. “And what’s more, they had a motive. If you recall, I was involved in the initial studies that determined the possibility of antimatter getting trapped in the magnetic field. I was the one who suggested it might be a more stable form of mixed-state matter—if it remained cold enough. The head of the program came to me shortly after I submitted my findings. He said they’d been discussing a plan, not just to search for the antimatter but to actually harvest it. I objected strenuously. They insisted the purpose was peaceful, but when the funding is coming from the military and the National Security Agency, that stretches credibility just a bit.”

Her head was spinning, but she took in every word.

“We shall use this for propulsion to push rockets to Mars in eight weeks,” he said in a false voice. “To the outer planets in less than a year. Even to deep space. But it wasn’t long before someone mentioned the possibility of a weapon.”

His voice growing louder, he shook his head in disgust. “I threatened to go to the press. To put the information out on the Internet. To tell the whole world, no matter what they did to me. I knew what you’re probably discovering right now: it is a mistake, a Pandora’s Box we’ve brought into our homes and managed to hold shut only by the thinnest of margins.”

She saw it now. It was a mistake. A disaster in the making. She wished she’d never been a part of it.

“I was threatened with deportation, should I speak a word — thirty years in solitary confinement. I agreed to keep quiet, but they watched me constantly. It seems my word wasn’t enough. On that short flight to New Orleans they made their move. My plane exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. It left me like this. I ended up clinging to an abandoned oil rig, my face a cake of blood. I found a life raft the next day and waited for the tide. I made it to shore under cover of darkness. And I chose to remain hidden. I knew if they found me, I would be dead.”

She stared at the scarred complexion, wondering how he’d survived and who had stitched him back together so badly. A doctor with a gun to his head, perhaps. Or maybe he’d done it himself. His affect was hideous; he sounded paranoid. She wondered if he’d blown up his own plane to fake his death. Was he so deranged that the difference between good and evil was lost on him? “So you came here and began plotting revenge?”

“At first, I only wanted to survive and disappear,” he insisted. “I created Urco. As I learned more and more about the destruction of man by man, it became clear to me.”

He hesitated; taking a step back, he changed the subject. “Why did you leave NASA and join the clandestine world of the NSA?”

“Because of what happened to you,” she whispered. “After your death, and the endless news of terrorism and war in other parts of the world, I realized that most of the planet was filled with evil. And that evil must be fought at every turn.”

“You were a pacifist,” he said.

“So were you.”

He nodded slowly and reapplied his beard. “It seems we’ve both realized the truth. Pacifism in a violent world is another term for suicide. Only the evil and violence I see resides in government buildings and ivory towers.”

“There’s a difference between governments and terrorists.”

“Only in the scale of their atrocities,” he insisted. “Learning that was the key to everything. Despite my desire to simply leave it all behind, I soon learned that the Nighthawk project had been transferred to the NSA and that the unthinkable was going to be attempted. I began to obsess over ways to expose it without exposing myself. Ways to prevent what you might do. Eight long years has led to this.”

“And what exactly is this?” she asked. “How is it better? The whole world put at risk so you could take the mixed-state matter away from us and give it to the Russians? That’s your solution? Hand the most powerful substance ever known to a nation that invades its neighbors, crushes any form of freedom or human rights and poisons its detractors with radioactive isotopes?”

As he stepped toward Emma he said, “You’re so focused on winning. You fail to see the forest for the trees. You fail to understand my position even as I shout it at you. All governments are evil. All power corrupts. Of course I’m not working for the Russians. Or for the Chinese. Or for the Americans.” His voice grew tighter and louder. “They, and you, are all working for me.”

The statement rang of such megalomania, she could hardly believe it had come from his mouth. “What are you talking about?”

She tried to step back but was frozen by the depth of hate in the eyes that bore deeply into hers. “I needed allies,” he said smugly. “I made them a deal. I would hack into the NSA’s system and divert the Nighthawk into their clutches if they would provide the means to collect it.”

“You’re the Falconer,” she said.

“I see you’ve heard the name.”

It made perfect sense now. She realized they’d played right into his hands. “You designed the automated computer system that operated the X-37 and we used it virtually unchanged in the Nighthawk. No wonder you were able to hack into it and redirect the aircraft. No wonder we never found a mole. You were operating remotely the whole time and we weren’t looking for a dead man.”

“Your mistake,” he said arrogantly. “One of many.”

“How’d you do it? How did you get past the encryption?”

He stepped so close to Emma, she could feel his hot breath. “NASA left a huge back door open to your project,” he said. “It was so easy to hack, I thought it might be a trap. I received data from every division like clockwork. I probably had more information about the program than any single person actually working on it. And when you decided to bring it back a week early because of the storm, I was literally the first to know.”

Their betrayal was complete. “But why? To what end?” She hesitated. “What’s the point of all this?”

He stared back at her, his eyes never blinking. She saw him now. The same man but changed, deranged by some mad desire. “Balance,” he said. “I gave the Russians a choice, I gave the Chinese a choice and now offer you the same one.”

“Which is?”

“To fight me,” he taunted. “Or to work for me. And, by extension, to work for the common heritage of mankind.”

She wasn’t sure where this was going, but it was not something to refuse out of hand. It might give her a chance to seek help. “I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

“It’s very simple,” he said, his voice teeming with vengeance. “I intend to undo what you and your nation have done. Obviously, I can’t give the mixed-state matter equally to all the world’s citizens or even to each nation or a large group of them. Few have the technological capability to handle it. One part to the Russians, one part to the Chinese, one part to your government and the rest to another group of my choosing.”

She could hardly believe what she was hearing. Was he serious? Her mind drifted back to the Beric she had known and some of his causes. Not only was he a pacifist like her but also an antinationalist, of sorts. He’d written an article he’d titled Duty of the Commons that argued ownership of anything by a nation-state was the cause of wars and strife. It tied in with what he was suggesting now. “You want us to share this?”

“Far better that than one country hoarding all of it,” he said.

“Who are you to make such a decision?”

Urco stepped back and smiled. “The only one who can,” he said smugly, “since I now control the entire stock.”

She struggled to process the situation. It was all too new. He was unstable, delusional and perhaps even certifiably insane, but he was also brilliant, devious and determined. And, at the moment, in an unquestionable position of control.

“Cooperating with you would be considered treason,” she explained.

“Better to live in prison than to die in a cataclysm.”

She looked away. She didn’t want this. Didn’t want to help him in any way. But no matter from what angle she approached it at, the answer was always the same: What choice did she have?

His plan sounded like madness, but even that was preferable to Armageddon. “How will I take our portion back to America? Will you let us fly it to Cajamarca?”

“No,” he said. “You will explain what is occurring to your friends and then you’ll drive in a vehicle that I possess.”

“How can I drive when the bridge is out?”

“There’s another route,” he said. “A shorter route that goes to the south and then through the pass. It avoids the highest of the mountains. It has its own steep cliffs, yes… but I trust you’ll drive with the requisite caution.”

She glanced to the north as the sound of a helicopter approaching became audible.

“That will be the Chinese agents,” he said. “I require your answer.”

She looked him in the eye once more. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do as you ask. I have no other choice.”