Nightstalkers (16 page)

Nada was sharpening his machete, Eagle was reading, Kirk was fiddling with his PRT, Doc was taking pills out of bottles and placing them in various slots on a fishing tackle box (which he had discovered was the perfect way to carry the max array of possible pills efficiently), and Mac was toying with a Claymore mine, modifying the contents.

“Really,” Mac said. “They have to print ‘front toward enemy’ on the front? How stupid are people?”

Nada didn’t even look up. “In Afghanistan, one of the Afghan army fellows pulled in his Claymore after an overnight patrol base, just rolling the cord around the body of the mine, and put it in his ruck without removing the fuse. The first time he did a rucksack flop, he blew himself in two and killed three others around him. People are pretty stupid.”

Eagle lowered his Kindle. “That doesn’t connect directly with Mac’s complaint about the printing. It’s more in line with the warnings they put on plastic laundry covers:
Don’t wrap this around your head: could be bad for you
. I think Darwinism has to get a chance to work. The more we protect stupid people from themselves, the more we ensure the long, slow descent of the human race into idiocracy.”

Roland was doing chin-ups on the bar next to his locker. It was either chin-ups or push-ups for Roland most of the time he was in the Den. If he wasn’t breaking down a weapon and cleaning it. Moms was in the CP, doing whatever it was Moms did in the CP when she was alone.

Everyone looked up as Nada’s cell began playing the tune Kirk had heard once before. Then Doc’s, Mac’s, Eagle’s, and Roland’s went off. Barely two seconds later, his PRT began playing “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

Moms came flying out of the CP. “We’ve got a pre-Rift alert from the Can.”

They were already moving toward the exit.

Downstairs, Doctor Winslow picked at the tiny bit of salad on his plate. It was all strange stuff that he hated, without even knowing what it was called. The farm had its detractions, but normal, hearty food had not been one of them. One had to eat solid food in order to do all those chores. This food was for people who thought pine nuts and cranberries made a salad.

He had a bit of a buzz going from three glasses of champagne he’d gotten down before meeting his wife on the main floor. A quiet celebration all his own. On top of the program initiating at the secret lab, there was the added satisfaction that UNC had won the alumni game handily, and it was fun to rub it in the faces of the Dukies, one of whom was a guest.

The table held fourteen, and he had been able to concoct his favorite mix. Three couples who might be considered his peers, but he secretly knew weren’t now, because they didn’t know about the laptop upstairs and the program it was running. There were also six grad students. He always invited over a fresh batch each time, because Lilith loved seeing their faces when they had to pick up their passes from the guard at the gate and then pull up in their beat-up little cars and see the huge double staircases and the chandeliers. It was petty, but it kept her happy, and when she was happy she didn’t care what he did in his closet. Winslow would never admit to her that he enjoyed seeing their faces, too. He also enjoyed that specified on the gate passes was that they expired at midnight, adding a fairy-tale edge to all of it. Poof and they would return back to their miserable little apartments.

Lilith had called him a sadist when she walked around the table. Mixing the haves with the have-nots. His point, which he knew was a waste of time to explain to her, was that a have-not would not make it to a have if they didn’t get to see what they had. There was some pronoun confusion there on his part, but Lilith
understood the base drive to cause turmoil. As Gore Vidal had once famously said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” Winslow had understood the sentiment the minute he heard it, and he always remembered it, not even needing his recorder app to remind him.

Still, the guests seemed happy and his buzz was growing and he was considering a fourth glass of champagne. He had much to celebrate although he could not speak of it. He’d never been much of a drinker, not like Lilith, who could put it away faster than you could pop the cork. Looking down the long table he could see the flush of her cheeks and the liquid glaze in her eye that meant she’d also had more than three while awaiting their first guests.

Winslow sighed. Her drinking could go one of three ways later in the evening, after the last guest departed. From the very low chance of an enthusiastic blow job, to the higher possibility of torrents of tears and recriminations on how he’d destroyed her career, her life, and her one chance of happiness, to the most likely—and optimal—result of her simply passing out on the bed, leaving him free to go back to his closet. He idly wondered—for the first time, perhaps because of his own inebriated state—what that one chance had been? He felt like she’d pretty much let her chances pass her by well before he met her.

Winslow poked at his sliver of purple lettuce and thought of her in a long gown in Sweden sitting at the table as he accepted his award and made a short (but smart) speech that was just about complete on the recorder on his phone. He knew she’d be happy then, because the Nobel, despite high-minded protests to the contrary, was a prize. And when one won a prize, it meant many others had lost. He must have smiled at the thought, because the physicist seated next to him asked:

“What are you so happy about?”

“Ah, a new experiment,” Winslow said. The four grad students who worked in his lab and his one physicist competitor from Duke all frowned, wondering what he could be talking about. Winslow abruptly grabbed his full glass of champagne and downed it. “To knowledge!”

Startled, the others at the table awkwardly followed suit.

Feeling emboldened, Winslow gestured for one of the wait people to load his glass once more.

The Snake lifted out of the Barn and Eagle wasted no time shifting the wings from vertical to horizontal. Eagle took them up to high altitude to fly a waiting racetrack, making sure the cabin was pressurized, because once they got a location for the Rift, the higher they were, the faster they could move. They all knew that on the other side of the world the Russian team was also airborne, but because of the recent theft of the hard drive, odds were the Rift was going to be on this side.

Moms was on the link with Ms. Jones, running through the things they always ran through on a Rift alert. Air Force refuelers were being scrambled at all points of the compass to top off the Snake if the distance to the target was greater than the craft’s range. For the moment, the number-one priority of the entire US military and the Support staff at Area 51 was to back up the Nightstalkers. At various military posts around the country and overseas, Quick Reaction Forces were being alerted, with no clue what they might be involved in.

Mac was kicking back in his seat and on the team net. “Hey, Doc. What’s the number, given that we got human error already involved courtesy of our stupid Courier?”

“I’d say it’s grave, perhaps at four.”

Kirk looked across at Mac and raised his eyebrows in question.

“Doc got a Rule of Seven,” Mac explained. “We could be in the middle of some heavy shit, bullets flying, Roland flaming things, and Doc will be trying to figure out how bad it could get. He says true disasters, like the
Titanic
, or a plane crashing—”

“Hey!” Eagle yelled from the cockpit. “None of that.”

“—require a minimum of seven things to go wrong, one of which is always human error. So far we ain’t never hit higher than a five, but that was pretty bad.”

“Forget the Rule of Seven and focus on the Rule of One.” Nada was writing in his Protocol, having figured out a way to save six seconds during loading. “It don’t take seven things to kill you. Once is bad enough.”

The waitstaff came out with dinner, pretending it came from the kitchen, which was a joke because Lilith couldn’t boil water without burning a hole in the pan, despite the Viking stove and whatever fridge, some big name, that she absolutely had to have. Lilith was on her feet, chattering, as if she might have to dash to the kitchen to correct something.

Winslow would have laughed, but instead he turned to the cute grad student, Mary, next to him and thought she might be someone who would dash in to tend to something, but not food. Mary was short, toned, and had wavy red hair that attracted lots of attention.

“When are your orals?” Winslow asked Mary.

She blinked.

“They can be right now,” the drunker professor to her other side said.

His wife glared from across the table. “Remember, you don’t have a prenup, dipshit.”

So they all started talking about prenups, which didn’t bother Winslow because he knew Lilith would gut him before she’d get a divorce.

“We don’t have a prenup, do we, darling?” Lilith said. That silenced the table.

His wife held up her glass and a waiter refilled it.

“I do love my Champers,” she said, calling the champagne by a name that generally set Winslow’s teeth on edge. She lifted the glass, some spilling over the edge of the Waterford crystal. “If I leave you, I get nothing, correct?” She looked around the table, stopping at the three pretty grad students, each for a moment. “Nothing.” She smiled coldly. “Which is why
I
will never leave.”

Everyone started asking for their dessert. The haves had seen this before, while the have-nots were appropriately embarrassed.

The professor raised his glass to Lilith, thinking,
I’ve got to get rid of her
. He glanced at Mary and thought she might make a nice third ex-wife. But his mind kept sliding back to the computer. He put the glass down and went all the way upstairs to take a leak, but really to look at the laptop. He realized he was staggering slightly and there was a slur in his speech, but he didn’t care. He paused in the closet and checked the computer. He was surprised to see the golden glow on the screen.

No data. Just the glow.

He knelt in front of the laptop, as if worshipping it, mesmerized by the glow.

He had no idea how long he had been like that when he suddenly shook his head, snapping out of the trance. His wife
probably thought he was off with one of the grad students. He hurriedly got to his feet and made his way downstairs, taking the closest staircase this time, making sure he had a firm grip on the handrail.

As soon as he recovered his seat, he indicated for his champagne glass to be topped off once more.

This was going to work!