Channel Blue (35 page)

‘Yes?’

‘Were you at the White House earlier today?’

‘Yes,’ Amanda replied, careful not to betray a scintilla of the concern welling up inside her.

‘Would you please come with us? We have some questions about your visit.’

Amanda smiled warmly. ‘I would love to,’ she said. ‘That place was so incredible. I had the time of my life. And meeting the President! What an experience it was—’ She went on like this for several minutes, making sure that she maintained direct eye contact with both of the men. One minute into her mindless rant, she had both of them smiling despite themselves. Amanda had taught herself flirting while watching Channel Blue as a teenager and rarely had an opportunity to use it.

Finally, one of the men, very apologetically, interrupted her and said that they really needed to get going. Amanda made a big show out of being upset in an insubstantial, Earthle girl way – ‘Oh my goodness! I haven’t even changed my dress since I met the President!’ – and wouldn’t the men please please,
please
let her just go to the bathroom and change super,
super
fast? ‘It’ll take one second!’ One of the men vaguely nodded. She grabbed her purse and was in the bathroom locking the door before they realised what they’d agreed to. She slid the bathroom window open, climbed out and shimmied along a narrow ledge ten storeys above the traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue to the next window over. It was locked. She slipped off one of her heels, smashed it through the glass, slid open the window, pulled herself inside, and walked through the bathroom to a bedroom where Noah Overton lay sleeping off his night-long Earth-saving labours.

Amanda shook Noah awake. ‘Perry’s in trouble. We have to go.’ She spotted his wallet, phone and laptop on the bureau, collected them under her arm and pulled Noah, still blinking groggily, wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt, into the hallway.

Another man in a suit stood in the hallway. He saw Amanda, pulled a gun from a holster inside his jacket and shouted loudly for her to stay where she was. Amanda pretended not to hear him and walked towards the elevators, pulling Noah, who was now protesting loudly, with her. The man warned that he would shoot if they didn’t stop. Amanda pushed Noah face-first into the ground and pivoted quickly to face the man, who aimed the gun at Amanda’s right shoulder and fired. The bullet deflected off Amanda’s meteorite shield and ricocheted around the hallway before lodging in the ceiling.

Amanda took seven quick steps towards the stunned man and kicked the gun from his outstretched hand. She picked it up and held it on him while she backed up to the elevator, pulling Noah with her. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Noah whimpered.

Amanda pushed the down button. The man in the suit held his hands out to his sides. ‘Don’t do this,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Noah agreed. ‘Listen to him. Don’t do this.’

A chime sounded and the elevator doors opened. An elderly couple stood inside with a bellhop and a rolling suit rack. Amanda pushed Noah into the car and stepped in. The doors began to close and the man in the suit charged towards them. When it appeared he might make it into the car before the doors shut completely, Amanda flung the gun through the narrowing gap, smacking him in the forehead. The elevator’s occupants saw the man fall backwards onto the carpet before the doors closed completely.

Amanda smiled at the other passengers, who stared straight ahead in shock. She perused the rack of clothes, took a man’s suit off a hanger and held it up to Noah. ‘I think this is about your size,’ she said. When the doors opened, she pulled Noah through the busy lobby of the hotel and out the front entrance, where a line of cabs waited.

They climbed into the back of the first taxi in the queue.

‘Jefferson Memorial,’ Amanda told the driver. ‘And we’re going to miss our tour if we don’t get there in five minutes.’ She took a twenty out of Noah’s wallet and set it down on the armrest of the driver, who smiled and punched the gas pedal. The taxi squealed out of the driveway, thrusting Amanda and Noah against the back seat.

‘This is insane!’ Noah yelled. ‘We have to go back! You’re a crazy woman!’

Amanda calmly and quietly told Noah that if they had any hope of saving Perry and the world, they had to stay out of prison. Noah should try to relax and put on the suit she’d stolen for him. ‘You have your wallet, your phone and your computer. Did anything else have your name on it?’ Noah shook his head. ‘Then you’ll be fine.’

Noah sobbed softly while pulling on the pants. ‘This is really screwed up, man.’

The taxi stopped at a red light on Fourteenth Street and, just before the light turned green, Amanda flung her door open and jumped out, tugging at Noah, half in the stolen suit jacket, to follow her. They trotted down C Street and entered a department store, passed through it and emerged onto D Street. They crossed it, turned a corner and approached a building crowned with large blue letters that read: G
ALAXY
E
NTERTAINMENT
.

Amanda led Noah into the small café next door to the building. She took his laptop from him and, while he ordered two coffees, sat at a table next to the wall closest to Galaxy Entertainment. By the time Noah arrived at the table, two coffees in his shaking hands, she had hacked into Channel Blue’s feeds and was scrolling back through hours of footage. Within minutes she was able to follow unconscious Perry from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington to a C5 cargo plane flying to Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado. Amanda delved into her memory and reviewed everything she knew about US intelligence operations. ‘Drummond Nash,’ she said aloud.

‘What?’ Noah said.

‘A former spy chief. He basically runs his own CIA counter-terrorism unit out of some old ICBM caverns in Colorado. That’s where they took Perry.’ Before Noah could react, Amanda snapped the laptop shut, tossed the coffees into the trash and led him through an emergency exit into an alleyway. They quickly made their way back to Fourteenth Street and flagged down a cab for Dulles Airport.

At the departures terminal, Amanda bought a ticket to Telluride with a transfer in Denver. She saw Noah to the gate of his flight back to Los Angeles and wished him luck. ‘Thanks for all the help,’ she said.

‘Please don’t ever contact me again,’ Noah said.

‘I’m sorry it got a little hectic.’

‘I’m serious. You and Perry are insane. Leave me alone.’ Amanda smiled and waved goodbye as Noah boarded his plane.

It was late at night when Amanda arrived in Telluride. She rented a jeep with GPS and drove north for two hours before leaving the freeway. She couldn’t remember the exact coordinates of Drummond Nash’s hunting lodge, and she ran over dozens of miles of dirt track before arriving at a trailhead guarded by a locked metal gate and a sign that ‘prohibited trespassers beyond this point by order of the US Military’. She parked the jeep and caught an hour of sleep before sunlight peaked over the mountaintops.

When there was enough light to see fifty feet in front of her, she jumped the metal gate and hiked quickly up the trail, wishing that she’d stopped in town for some hiking boots and a jacket. When she came to the first barbed-wire fence, she stood motionless until she could discern the infrared lights of the alarm system. Fortunately, it was still dark enough for them to stand out. She crawled under the beams – and the wire – and continued up the mountain.

The patrol caught her about halfway to the top. She figured they must’ve been watching her with binoculars because they appeared in front of her without warning. The soldiers wore standard-issue camouflage with no identifying patches or emblems, and carried automatic rifles. Amanda made sure to act incredibly surprised, and it certainly helped sell her act that she was wearing a dirty white evening gown and high heels.

‘I just had a fight with my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘I needed to take a walk. I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. Where am I?’ She carried on in this vein long enough to slowly close the distance between herself and the two soldiers. When she had moved to within two feet, she kicked one in the knee and punched the other in the solar plexus. They both went down, though one had the presence of mind to pull up his rifle as he fell. She kicked it out of his hands before it went off. Using their handcuffs, she chained them around a tree and gagged them with their socks before moving on.

After another half-hour of steady uphill, she broke through to the summit. A wooden lodge commanded the highest point, surrounded by a vast lawn on which a helicopter idled. As Amanda ran across the open lawn, a group of men exited the lodge. She had nowhere to hide other than the helicopter. She reversed course, keeping the helicopter between herself and the men, ran up the gangway and slipped inside. The cockpit door was open so she dropped to her knees and crawled down the aisle, squeezing under the first row of seats ‘so the crew wouldn’t see me if they turned around,’ Amanda told Perry sitting next to him in the helicopter. ‘You could imagine how relieved I was when I heard your voice.’

Perry shook his head in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe you did all that.’

‘I got you into this. I had to get you out.’

‘Hey!’

Perry and Amanda looked up. The guard in front of them was awake and pointing his handgun at Amanda. ‘Who are you?’

‘It’s OK,’ Perry said. ‘She’s with me.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’ the guard said. ‘Where the hell did she come from?’

A sharp, percussive sound like a canoe paddle smacking the side of the helicopter jolted the cabin. The chopper lurched wildly like a bucking bronco having a seizure. The guard, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, flew across the aisle and smashed his head against the window. Perry and Amanda were flung against the seats in front of them, then spun end over end, violently shaken like rag dolls.

They reached out and managed to hold on to each other before blacking out.

* * *

Drummond Nash sat in his office, polishing his shotgun. He considered getting out for another walk before dinner, but he felt a little low energy, maybe a little ‘down in the dumpies’, as Mrs Nash called it.
It’s this damn work
, he thought.

He could never get over how much waste there was in national security, how much inefficiency. Perfectly good men died all the time unnecessarily. That unfortunately was the nature of the war he was fighting. He had to keep his eye on the big picture, the long view. Lord knows that’s what the other side was doing.

Drummond opened up the chamber of the gun and flicked away some grit with his rag. He’d have to do a proper cleaning one of these weeks, but not today. He returned it to its wall-mounted rack and looked at a blue monitor set into the wall, a radar screen he’d had the Air Force install as part of his security perimeter. The Marine One helicopter was no longer even a blip.

You’d never catch me riding in one of those things
, Drummond thought. As he always said,
There was a reason for fixed wings
. In a helicopter, if one of those metal spinning things comes loose, you’re Spam in a can. So many crashes. So many that you had to wonder why anyone would risk riding in one – especially the military variety, which seemed to drop out of the sky like bricks every day. And there were rarely any photos of the crash sites or investigations. Once you heard about a helicopter crash, you just accepted it, just as you accepted the inevitability of death itself.
Of course there was a helicopter crash
, you thought.
There are always helicopter crashes
.

You had to wonder why anyone would take the risk.

His intercom beeped. ‘Security One to Orion.’

‘Orion here,’ Drummond said.

‘We’re seeing smoke to the southeast. Looks like some kind of wreck. Should we send out search and rescue?’

‘Roger that.’

Drummond sat back in his chair.
You really have to wonder
, he thought.

CHANNEL 32

HEAVEN IS WHAT YOU WANT IT TO BE

Perry and Amanda opened their eyes. They sat in opposite chairs in an otherwise empty white room. A window looked out onto the night sky. They were both dressed in white.

Perry reached out and touched Amanda’s arm. ‘Are you OK?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘You?’

He nodded. ‘How can that be?’ He tried to remember his last frantic moments of consciousness aboard the upside-down helicopter plummeting towards the ground. Just before blacking out, he recalled wishing that Brent Laskey had been aboard.

‘Where are we? How long were we out?’ He glanced out the window. ‘It’s night. We were in the helicopter around noon, right?’

Amanda stood and walked to the window. ‘It’s not night,’ she said. Perry joined her. Outside, the dark dusty surface of the moon stretched out beneath the stars. ‘They must have had a fix on us,’ she said. ‘Froze the helicopter in a field before impact and pulled us off.’

Perry shook his head. He felt a sense of overwhelming relief that put a lump in his throat. ‘Jesus.’ He clasped Amanda’s hand in his. ‘I never thought I’d see you again.’ Tears rushed to his eyes, and he was surprised to see her eyes glisten as well.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘I never got a chance to tell you. Thank you for coming for me.’

‘Any time.’

Perry leaned over and kissed her. She enveloped him in her arms. A strange sound filled the air. At first it sounded to Perry like ice crackling. Then, with a sickening thud in his stomach, he realised what it was.

Applause
.

Light streamed through the opposite wall, which then bunched together like a large curtain and lifted up into the ceiling, revealing rows upon rows of seats filled with clapping spectators.

Though they had not moved, Perry and Amanda were now standing on a stage in front of a large audience of incredibly attractive men and women in blue tracksuits. A voice boomed: ‘Let’s give a big welcome to the stars of
Bunt to the Rescue
, Perry Bunt and Amanda Mundo!’ The crowd stood and applauded even louder. A spotlight followed Marty Firth, dressed in a blue dinner jacket, as he trotted across the stage to Perry and Amanda. Vermy, the white worm, jutted from Marty’s left ear, gleaming almost as brightly as Marty’s smile.