Red Knight Falling (17 page)

THIRTY

Chicago to Los Angeles was four and a half hours of turbulence, the plane shaking like a rag doll in a giant’s fist as we crossed the storm-swept Rockies. The mountains drifted by like a broken wasteland in the darkness, shrouded in wisps of gray-and-black cloud. I didn’t sleep so much as fade away, my conscious mind swallowed by the rumble of the trembling cabin and the drone of the engines. I stared out the window with my body on autopilot, waiting for the call to action.

We beat the sun, landing at LAX twenty minutes before dawn. The sky beyond the San Gabriel Mountains glowed like a violet pearl. We refueled at a Starbucks kiosk, a double espresso helping my brain to shrug off another flight, another sleepless night, another change of time zones.

We were close. If al-Farsi hadn’t led us astray, we were two steps away from getting the tablet back. Then we just had to figure out how to launch it back into orbit. No room for mistakes now. We rented a black Lincoln Navigator, the heavy SUV big enough for the five of us and our luggage, and made our way across the city through sluggish morning traffic.

The California Science Center sat on a sprawling, green campus, braced by a natural-history museum on one side and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on the other. A lush rose garden was in full bloom, bursting with pink, scarlet, and yellow: even in the fall, everything thrived under the clean California sunshine.

I stepped out of the Navigator and took a deep breath of warm air, quickly stripping off my tie and trading it for the one I’d just bought on the way over: cherry red, a splash of color just like al-Farsi’s note called for. I also slipped on a second accessory: Agent Lawrence’s camera glasses. Without al-Farsi’s listening device, they’d gone from a dangerous liability to a useful tool.

“Here’s how we’ll play it,” Jessie said. “Harmony and Cody, you’re with me. Kevin and April, I want you analyzing the photos from Harmony’s glasses the second she snaps ’em. There’s no telling what’s waiting for us in there, and I want to know exactly who we’re dealing with.”

“No problem,” Kevin said. “I did a little tinkering on the plane. Kept me from freaking out over the turbulence. Harmony, every photo you take will automatically pass through to the laptop and to April’s phone. Video, too. Just get a clear shot and we’ll do the rest.”

“I’ll have my contact in Information Services on standby,” April said. “We’ll get priority access to their biometric database.”

“Sounds good,” Jessie said. “All right, let’s go to the museum. Hopefully it’s an educational trip.”

We climbed to the second floor, crossing a vast glass-walled concourse. Cody had his phone out, taking pictures and beaming like a kid at the circus. He circled what looked like a giant reflector bulb tilted on its side, its flat head about ten feet across and scarred with black streaks.

“Harmony,” he said, “this is the Gemini 11 capsule. I mean, it’s
the
Gemini 11 capsule.”

As on edge as I was, half expecting al-Farsi’s “help” to be a trick or an ambush, I couldn’t help but smile at his enthusiasm. I wished I could share it. On another day, I could see myself coming back here with Cody, taking our time and touring the exhibits, learning why this was so special to him. Sharing ourselves.

But it wasn’t another day, and while he was taking photos, I was shooting some of my own. My gaze slowly swept across the atrium, pausing to focus on the other tourists as I clicked the pen in my pocket and sent the raw footage back to April and Kevin.

“We’re receiving clearly,” April said over my earpiece. “Good photos, but no hits so far.”

The museum had just opened, and the crowds were thin. Still, I didn’t see anyone who looked out of place, or like they were there for anything but the exhibits. We strolled along, keeping it casual, my footsteps easy but my senses on high alert. We paused under an elongated rocket festooned with bumps and bulges, one half bare steel, and the other painted wintergreen mint.

“This is the Apollo-Soyuz command module,” Cody told me. “Joint mission with the USSR in 1975.”

The elderly man at Cody’s side, looking up at the suspended ship with his hands clasped behind his back, smiled and spoke in a reedy voice tinged with a German accent. “You have a good eye for history, young man.”

I guessed he was in his late eighties or early nineties, tall and gaunt with sparse white hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His smile crinkled the corners of his eyes as he looked my way, glancing from my face to my cherry-red tie, then back again.

“You seem familiar, Fräulein,” he said. “Have we met before? In . . . Chicago, perhaps?”

I snapped his photograph.

“We’re looking for a particular satellite,” Jessie told him, “but I don’t think it’s on display here.”

The old man nodded. “I believe I know the one you want. Shaped like a chess knight, and as red as this young lady’s necktie.”

“You’re familiar with it,” I said.

“Familiar?” He chuckled. “You could say that. I
built
it.”

Cody and I shared a glance. Not the response I’d been expecting, but it made a certain amount of sense: if anyone would want to get the curse tablet back in orbit, it would be the man who put it there in the first place. I started to question him, but he shook his head and pursed his lips.

“Not here. Too many unknown ears. If you would follow me, please?”

He led us along the atrium, past signs for the Samuel Oschin Pavilion. He was spry for his age, with a long-legged gait.

“Admittance to this particular exhibit is on a reservation-only basis,” he said, “and I’ve purchased all the tickets for the ten fifteen viewing. We won’t be disturbed.”

Our path ended in an airplane hangar behind the museum. Calling it a mere hangar was an understatement. You could have fit another two museums under its sloped, white-insulated roof. Instead, a single exhibit waited for us, raised up on a bright-yellow crane arm: the space shuttle
Endeavour
, its mighty hull still bearing the pits and scars of its final mission.

“My name is Huburtus Becke,” the old man told us as we stood in the
Endeavour
’s long shadow. “As for you, I’ll tell you what I believe to be true, and you can tell me how close I come, hmm? I believe that you are working for our government in an irregular capacity. I believe that you know the purpose of the Red Knight, and I believe that you are attempting to restore the curse tablet to its proper place in the heavens. Am I correct?”

“Three for three,” Jessie said.

“Then that makes us allies. To that end, I must apologize for some earlier confusion regarding my
other
allies.”

Behind us, the door into the hangar rattled and swung open. I recognized our new arrivals in a heartbeat, which is exactly how long it took to sweep the Glock from my shoulder holster and drop into a shooter’s stance.

Bette and her two fellow “college students,” the last survivors from the gunfight in Orlando, did the same.

“Drop it,” Jessie snapped, aiming her pistol. “Lose the steel, right now.”

“You first,” Bette said.

“Ladies, please,” Huburtus said, holding up his open hands. “There’s no reason to fight. We’re all in pursuit of the same goal, and there is
very
little time to lose.”

“Who are you?” I asked Bette. “Hired guns, like Xerxes?”

She rolled her eyes. “Please. We’re not working
for
Mr. Becke, we’re working
with
him. And if it hadn’t been for those Xerxes assholes crashing the party, we’d have recovered the Red Knight and gotten it back in orbit
days
ago. Who are you people with? Company? NSA?”

“You first,” I said.

“I’m going to extend a little trust here,” Bette said, “and lower my weapon. I’d be pleased if you’d consider doing likewise.”

She pointed her pistol’s muzzle to the sky, slowly lowering her grip, and I did the same.

“I’m reaching into my pocket,” she said, hands dipping toward her cargo pants. “Nice and easy, all right?”

Her hand came back up with a laminated ID folder, embossed with a golden sphinx over a wire-frame outline of the earth.

“Master Sergeant Bette Novak,” she said. “National Air and Space Intelligence Center.”

My turn. I holstered my gun, dipping my fingers into my breast pocket and trading the pistol for my badge. I held it up for her to take a closer look.

“Special Agent Harmony Black, FBI,” I said. “Master sergeant, huh? If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little young to be an E-7.”

“Yes, well, appearances deceive. But that’s what my identification says I am, doesn’t it?” Her sapphire eyes bored into mine, raptor sharp. “Just like yours says you’re an FBI agent.”

Message received, loud and clear: we knew Bette and her men were serving a higher master, just like she knew we were. And she’d play along with our story if we played along with hers. Fair enough. Jessie and the two men at Bette’s side holstered their guns, and everybody kept their hands in full view. Nobody offered to shake.

“You people are good,” Bette said. “We didn’t make you at the lodge, but when that Xerxes convoy turned into a pile of burning scrap and the Red Knight showed up minus its payload, we knew we weren’t the only operators in town.”

“Then Roman Steranko was spotted in Orlando,” the man on her left said. “Frankly, we thought you were working for him.”

“We lost four good soldiers in Orlando. Steranko has to answer for that.” Bette looked from me, to Cody, to Jessie. “Where’s the other one? Did he go down in the fight?”

“Say hi for me?” Kevin said in my ear.

“He’s fine,” I said. “He’s technical-support staff—he normally doesn’t do fieldwork.”

Bette nodded, wearing a lopsided smile as she looked me over.

“Ooh. So he’s probably watching through the pinhole camera in those glasses you’re wearing.” She wriggled her fingers in a wave. “Hey, there.”

“Turn on your video feed,” Kevin said in my ear.

“Not doing that,” I muttered. Then I took off the glasses. “I thought these were pretty well made.”

“Oh, they are.” Bette nodded. She tapped the rims of her sleek purple-framed glasses. “It’s just that I own a pair of my own. So can we pretend to be friends for a while, at least until we’ve resolved the crisis at hand?”

I glanced to Jessie. She hooked her thumbs in her belt loops and shrugged.

“Sure,” she said. “Let’s call it a team-up.”

I just wished I knew whom, exactly, we were teaming up with. My thoughts kept drifting to Linder’s briefing and his warning about hostile sharks sharing our waters. I knew one thing for certain: we’d be documenting anything and everything about Bette and her people in the hopes that Vigilant’s analysts could crack their cover—and she’d be doing the exact same thing to us.

“Oh, there’s one last thing I need to get straight,” Bette said. She held her empty hands out before her, one palm turned upward, the other downward, as if framing the empty space between.

The skin on the back of my neck prickled, and goose bumps rose up on my arms. The air crackled with static electricity, moving in a slow, roiling wave. Then sparks spat from Bette’s fingertips. Little flashes of electric light danced in the space between her palms, swirling, bouncing off her skin, and firing in arcs as they sketched a picture in three dimensions. I watched, rapt, as the sparks finished their work.

Now an electric rose blossom hovered in the air between Bette’s hands, its glittering petals born of golden lightning. She clapped her hands sharply, shattering the spell.

“I pegged you as some kind of magician,” Bette told me, then nodded at Jessie. “And I’m still not sure what
your
deal is, but I’m looking forward to finding out. Just thought you should be aware that we’re all on the same page here.”

Huburtus cleared his throat. “With that established, let us proceed. Time is running out, and I have witnessed the face of our enemy.”

“That thing from outer space,” Jessie said. “We’ve seen the pictures.”

“Almost correct, young lady. Almost.” He held up a finger. “It’s not
from
outer space. We merely sent it there.”

THIRTY-ONE

Huburtus looked from me, to Jessie, to Cody. “Are any of you familiar with an Office of Strategic Services program called Operation Paperclip?”

“Sure,” Cody said. “Saw a documentary about it. Right after World War II, the United States recruited over a thousand German scientists, like Wernher von Braun. Braun was practically the father of our entire space program.”

“German scientists,” Jessie said, her voice flat. “You mean Nazi scientists.”

Cody winced. “It . . . was not our shining hour. A lot of good came out of it in the long run, but, yeah.
Technically,
no card-carrying Nazis were eligible, but in practice, a whole lot of people got new names and backstories to go with their free ticket to the United States.”

“Herr Braun was a
Sturmbannführer
in the SS.” Huburtus opened his hands with a sigh. “As, to my great shame, was I. But with Germany crumbling, it was inevitable that our talents would be enlisted in the service of a new master: either the Americans or the USSR. Our benefactors in Operation Paperclip decided that whitewashing our past was a fair trade for what we could accomplish—and for the knowledge they could keep out of Soviet hands.”

“You worked with von Braun?” Cody asked.

“Indeed. He was a good friend. Eventually we were installed at Redstone Arsenal, creating a new generation of rockets based on the German V-2. There was another program there as well. Master Sergeant?”

Bette stepped forward, fixing me with a hard look.

“I don’t know who you really work for,” she said, “but right now, all I care about is results. It’s clear you’re tapped into lines of communication an FBI agent has no business knowing about, or you wouldn’t have been after the Red Knight in the first place. That’s the
only
reason I’m briefing you on this. Are you familiar with Operation Panpipe?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Paperclip’s been declassified. Panpipe hasn’t, and never will be. With Hitler out of the picture and the Russian Bear looming in the east, we had two objectives: acquire as many former Nazi assets as we could, and deny them to the Reds. Paperclip gave us the means to close two widening gaps in the Cold War: first, our rocket program. Second, our occult technology. Stalin was going all in—remote viewing, psychic warfare—and we’d seen enough to know it wasn’t all hocus-pocus.”

Huburtus nodded. “Many of my contemporaries were quite keen on unlocking such mysteries. I had personally attended rituals at Wewelsburg Castle. I . . . shan’t describe them.”

“Panpipe was an offshoot of Paperclip,” Bette said. “We scooped up some of Himmler’s crew, Thule Society mystics, anyone who looked capable of advancing our knowledge. They were treated exactly like the Paperclip scientists, given bogus credentials and installed at Redstone right alongside von Braun’s rocketeers. There was a surprising amount of overlap between the two groups.”

Huburtus turned and began to walk, slowly, stoop-shouldered in the shadow of the
Endeavour
. We followed, passing beneath the shuttle’s massive wing.

“And it was there,” he said, “that we made a dreadful mistake. One of our fellow expatriates was a man named Marius Diehl. He had spearheaded a program of occult experimentation in the motherland, under Himmler’s direct authorization. He was placed in residency at the Buchenwald concentration camp to acquire the . . . raw materials for his projects.”

“Huburtus,” I said softly. “What did he do?”

Huburtus stopped walking. He turned, looking back at me.

“Terrible things.”

“If our side didn’t recruit him, the Reds would have,” Bette said. “The situation required hard decisions. Continue the briefing, Professor.”

Huburtus touched a trembling finger to his brow. “Your predecessors could have put a
bullet
in his
head
, Sergeant.”

Bette stared him down. “I’m not here to make apologies for past mistakes, I’m here to fix the present situation. Continue the briefing, Professor, please.”

He looked my way. “You are familiar with
hexenwerk
, yes? The witch’s art? You and your partner here, you have the look about you.”

I nodded.

“Our research plumbed beyond the boundaries of this dimension,” he said, “but we were not alone, nor were we the first. There are kings in the outer dark, young lady. The King of Wolves, the King of Worms, the Kings of Lament and Rust. And others.”

Jessie’s shoulders tensed. One of those names, we were intimately familiar with. The King of Wolves was more than an entry in Vigilant Lock’s database of hostile entities: Jessie’s father had worshipped the thing. The rituals she’d been forced to participate in as a child had left her changed forever. We didn’t know exactly what the king
was
, only that it was as powerful as it was evil, and its blood ran through her veins.

I reached over and touched the back of Jessie’s arm, trying to be reassuring. She gave a tiny shake of her head and pulled away from me.

“Marius’s particular fascination was with the King of Silence,” Huburtus said. “He’d traced its name through history, followed every lead, until he finally believed he could conjure it and bind it to his will. He was convinced it would grant him unimaginable power.”

“I’m guessing it didn’t work out like that,” Cody said.

Huburtus gazed up at the shuttle’s wing, lost in his thoughts for a moment.

“Unbeknown to our American paymasters,” he said, “there was a civil war brewing at Redstone Arsenal. A good number of us supported Marius’s project, more than a few hoping they were witnessing the dawn of a Fourth Reich. The rest of us had no intention of allowing this madness to proceed. The night Marius set forth to conjure the King of Silence, we did what needed to be done.”

“You killed him?” I said.

“Would that I had been so lucky. No. We improvised weapons from the arsenal cafeteria and attacked Marius and his loyalists. They held us off just long enough for him to complete the ritual. I saw . . . I saw a tear. A crack in the world, with a howling void beyond it, blacker than space. No stars in that void, only hunger. Wernher was there, fighting at my side. He called it the Shadow In Between.”

“In between what?” Cody asked.

Huburtus gave him a humorless smile. “In between
everything
. And what forced its way through that crack was . . . madness incarnate. Silent death in a thousand forms, shifting and mutating and growing by the second. Marius realized, too late, that he couldn’t control it. He hadn’t conjured some petty demon, some wish-granting genie: he’d conjured a
god
. He fled, leaving his last disciples to die in its hundred mouths.”

“So what happened?” Jessie said. “You banished it?”

Huburtus shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut.

“We didn’t know how. The best we could do was contain it. I’d been recruited primarily for my scientific skills, but like many of the others, I had enough practical experience of the occult to work a binding rite. We trapped the King of Silence: first in a circle of salt, then in a cylinder of titanium steel inlaid with the strongest spells we could find. Still, we knew it wouldn’t be enough. The creature was too dangerous, too hungry, and the consequences if it escaped? Hmm. No. Unthinkable.”

Jessie stepped closer, leaning in and tilting her head at him.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You shot it into space.”

Huburtus shrugged. “One works with the tools that one has. By the early ’50s we’d routinely made suborbital launches: we got our first photographs of Earth from the nose of a V-2 back in 1946, and the new breed of Redstone rockets were much more powerful. Wernher engineered a delivery system, and we fired the king’s prison into the starry void. We hoped that would be enough, but . . . we were men of science. We banked on facts, not hope.”

“Hence the Red Knight,” I said.

“Indeed. The first orbital satellite in human history, launched secretly from Redstone Arsenal in the summer of 1954, with a singular purpose: to create a shield around our fragile planet in case the King of Silence ever sundered its prison and attempted to return. And as you’ve seen from the photographs, I’m afraid that’s exactly what it’s done.”

Cody held up a hand. “Wait a second. I understand why you couldn’t reveal the
reason
for the Red Knight’s existence, but why would you keep the entire launch a secret? I mean, Sputnik wasn’t until 1957—we beat the Russians into space by
three years
and nobody knows about it?”

Bette chuckled. “That was a strategic decision. The Cold War was in full swing, and President Eisenhower knew maintaining technological superiority was vital to our survival. That included a robust space program, considering how many other sciences—like missile technology—stood to benefit. At that time, however, public support was tepid, and the Senate was more interested in pouring money into conventional military assets.”

I followed her train of thought, and my jaw dropped.

“Are you telling us,” I said, “that we threw the fight in the first round? We
deliberately
let Sputnik launch first?”

Bette folded her arms and smiled. “The newspapers that morning were a splash of cold water in the face of every loyal American. The Reds had claimed all of outer space as their dominion, and Communist technology was flying over Small Town, USA. Less than one year later, NASA and ARPA were created with full funding and wild public support. We were able to take the lead in the space race fairly quickly—but it helped that we had a head start.”

Huburtus looked up to the
Endeavour
. He spread his arms wide, as if he could wrap the ship up in his arms and pull it close.

“And here we stand,” he said, his voice a soft rasp. “In the winged shadow of our legacy. I wish Wernher had lived long enough to see her fly.”

“So what happened to Marius Diehl?” Jessie asked.

“He gave his handlers the slip,” Bette said. “Severed ties with his past, changed his last name to Daly, ended up in Topeka with a new wife and a job teaching high school algebra. Died of a heart attack in 1963. His son made a fortune investing in steel and tech start-ups. And
his
son, well, he took back the family name.”

She showed me her phone, turning it lengthwise and bringing a video clip up on the screen. On an auditorium stage, towering screens displayed a spinning stylized
D
as applause washed out over the room. The man on stage, bouncing, energetic as a kid on a sugar bender, gave the audience a pearly white smile. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and rolled-up shirtsleeves, business casual quirky down to his lime-green sneakers.

“Who could have imagined, twenty years ago, that their children would hold all the world’s knowledge in the palm of their hand?” He brandished a sleek phone, holding it up for the cameras. “My grandfather did. Who could have imagined that the computers that powered the first flight to the moon could one day be contained in a device the size of a pocket calculator? My father did. But it’s not enough to dream. To invent, to innovate, one must dream with
purpose
.”

Showgirls with glittering rhinestone headdresses swept onto the stage from both sides, rolling out display carts. Gloved fingers trailed over a showcase of phones, tablet PCs, and laptops, all cased in pristine white plastic and emblazoned with the monogram
D
.

“This year, our new line of consumer electronics and home appliances will take you places you’ve never been. They’ll be faster. Smarter. Better. To help you work with purpose, play with purpose, and most important of all:
dream
with purpose.”

I didn’t need to see anything else. I knew the man onstage. Pretty much anybody who owned a television or had picked up a magazine in the last few years did. Or, at the very least, there was a good chance they owned one of his products.

“Bobby Diehl,” I said.

Bette nodded.

“Of Diehl Innovations. Which makes . . . everything.”

“Affirmative,” she said. “In public, a billionaire philanthropist with a flair for self-promotion. In private, our intelligence indicates he’s been obsessed with his grandfather’s legacy since childhood. He thinks Gramps got a raw deal, and he’s looking to set things right. He’s been tracking the Red Knight, same as us, and he hired Roman Steranko to retrieve the tablet.”

“He thinks he can succeed where Marius failed,” Huburtus said. He shook his head, staring at the floor. “He’s a fool. A fool who may well doom us all.”

“The King of Silence leaves distinct radioactive emissions,” Bette said, “which we’ve been tracking on spy sat. It’s coming back. If we don’t get that tablet back into orbit before it does, well . . . either the king gets loose on Earth, or Diehl manages to bring it under his control. Neither one is an optimal outcome for humanity.”

“We were briefed,” I said. “We know the creature returns, once a year, every autumn. Our people expected it might touch down within the week.”

She gave me a humorless smile. “A week? If we had a week, I’d be jumping for joy. No, the timetable’s a little tighter than that. As far as we can tell, the King of Silence is trapped in a long orbit—imagine it slingshotting from here to some distant star and back again, propelled by its own momentum. Picture the Red Knight as a repelling magnet. The king nears Earth, the Red Knight pushes it away, and it swings around again. This time, without the satellite in orbit, it’ll be free to crash straight into the planet.”

“How much time do we have?” I asked her.

“At its projected velocity?” She checked the time on her phone. “The world ends in fourteen hours.”