The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (6 page)

“You’re sure about that? You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes, I am. I’m sorry. Do you want to check back later?”

Johnny breaks the connection. He clenches his fists in his lap. He’s been screwed. Or maybe worse.

He manages to downshift his emotional gears and methodically reviews the course of his communication with New York. He’d decided he wanted to review the modified legal documents during the flight. Not wanting any surprises during tomorrow’s meeting, he phoned the law firm and requested that the documents be sent to his email as an attachment. They never showed up. He phoned back. They stalled. He just now phoned again and finally got the truth, probably by mistake.

He looks back at his peers, lost in their technical journals. Just the two of them. And nine empty seats of handcrafted leather.

He bolts up out of his seat and whirls to the flight attendant, who sits by the cabin door. “I want off. Right now.”

“But sir …”

“Tell ’em up front I’m getting off. Right now. Do it.”

The woman looks stricken and grabs the intercom phone. The two scientists in the rear look up toward the commotion but keep their distance. Dr. John Anslow’s emotional issues were
well known.

Johnny cranks the cabin door open as the attendant jabbers with the crew in the cockpit. Daylight and fresh air stream in. Johnny sits on edge of the cabin floor, pushes off, and leaps to the tarmac. He briskly walks away without looking back.

***

The sniper perches on a branch sprouting from a lanky fir tree and plants her weapon across a second branch at chest height. It gives her a clean line of sight across the expressway below to the end of the runway, about 250 yards distant. A thick line of alders shields her position from the passing traffic.

She adjusts her gear, an M24 bolt-action rifle joined to a 10-power telescopic sight. She uses a laser range finder to calculate the distance. A fairly simple shot, especially with a light breeze. Her watch reads slightly after four
P.M
., and she understands that the departure time for this noncommercial flight is somewhat variable. She moves the scope up off the runway and downfield to the designated aviation center. The plane sits motionless on the tarmac. She comes up off the rifle, reaches into her fanny pack, and retrieves a can of high-energy drink. It’s still slightly cold and goes down nicely. She deserves it. Tree work is never easy.

She checks her watch again. 4:20
P.M
. There’s been some kind of delay. She once again trains her scope on the aviation center. Good. The plane is moving. It’s on the taxiway and rolling toward her end of runway at the southeast end of the airport. She readies her gear for a shot at the tire under the right wing.

***

Johnny stands alone in the parking lot of the aviation center, which now appears closed for the day.

Even in high-end private aviation, business isn’t what it once was. He watches the jet in the distance as it turns onto the main runway and rotates for takeoff.

The plane will never reach New York. It seems so very clear to him. The key players possessing the key knowledge to the key science: All on the same flight. All suddenly gone. And if the plane crashes, who’s left who knows? Only the old man and Arjun Khan and Crampton, the director at the Institute. That’s why the corporate paperwork was never modified on Johnny’s behalf. There was no need. There would be no company.

But what if he’s wrong? What if the deal goes ahead just as the old man outlined? What
then? He’ll look like a grandstanding fool, a slave to the great tidal forces that tear at the core of his soul.

He stands in a puddle of agony and doubt. Just like so many times before. Then he hears the plane’s engines rise to a howl.

The aircraft’s right tire spins madly as the jet surges past V1, the velocity of no return. All the while, pressurized nitrogen blows out of the rubber sidewall where the sniper’s bullet has already entered. A wave forms in the tread, a violent ripple that feeds off the friction of its contact with the runway. The temperature soars. The tire explodes. Fragments fly up and back into the right engine.

The pilots feel the blast and the lurch as the engine fails. Too late. The jet surges ahead at over 160 miles per hour, far too fast to stop. It pulls violently to the right from the drag of the failed wheel. It leaves the runway and sleds across the dry grass toward a curve in an expressway filled with traffic.

An articulated bus rounds the curve, two buses joined into one by a flexible centerpiece. It carries maintenance people from the Chip Mill, those who man the mops, the scrubbers, the buffers, the leaf blowers. It’s just after quitting time. The bus is packed.

Inside, a chorus of screams goes up from those with window seats facing the airport. Passengers crammed into the aisle bend to see what’s causing the commotion. They’re dead before they can even get a glimpse.

The plane collides with the bus just to the front of center. Its speed upon impact is over 100 miles per hour. Twenty-six thousand pounds of aviation fuel instantly ignite, with horrific consequence.

Johnny has an unobstructed view of the fireball from his vantage point in the parking lot. It rises over a half mile from where he stands. The distance throws the dirty orange boil into abstraction. It permits him to focus on a more immediate catastrophe. They want him dead. If not now, as soon as possible.

Maybe Lane can help. Just like always. He reaches for his handheld, and stops. Maybe Lane can’t help. Maybe it’s bigger than the both of them.

He turns away from catastrophe and trots toward his car. He needs to act quickly, preemptively; before they figure out he’s still alive. The germ of a plan presents itself to him. If he can pull it off, he’ll expose the entire operation and gain sanctuary. If he fails, he’s as good as dead.

Lane looks at his naked reflection in the smoke-tinted bedroom window thirty-two floors up in the Trade Ring. For someone well past forty, he’s holding his own. He glances back at the king-size bed, where a nude woman slumbers entwined in the silk sheets. She’s rich, kinky, and has a thing for cops.

He considers his expertly bandaged arm. Very nice work. Very spendy work. It pretty much cleaned him out, just like he thought it would. His paramour had picked right up on the dressing, and had to hear the whole story in great detail. She particularly liked the young hooker and violent Bad Boys. The part Lane liked most was that the pain was now gone.

He quietly slips on his clothes and heads for the door. No need to wake her up. The truth is, he doesn’t really have anything to say to her anyway.

On his way out, he spots the note. It droops down from an antique vase that secures it to a marble tabletop. “For Your Arm.” A vertical arrow points up to an envelope leaning against the vessel’s elegant, glazed curve. Lane opens it. A neat row of hundred-dollar bills stares out at him. She knew. She knew he didn’t have insurance. She knew he couldn’t afford it. She knew by the scuffs on his shoes. She knew by the coarse weave of his shirts. She knew by the cheap watch, the bargain ties, the outmoded handheld.

He closes the envelope slowly and deliberately, and places it back where he found it. His sexuality might be negotiable. The rest of him is still private property.

As he leaves, he takes one last look at the urban vista out the big picture windows.

At the very least, he’ll miss the view.

An insistent drizzle falls from the bottom of an overcast sky as Lane walks down the transit mall through the long string of buses that collect workers off the sidewalks. The wet air beats down the blue diesel exhaust and mutes the low growls of the idling engines.

He stops and buys a coffee at a little shop on the corner and drinks it standing up at the counter. His visit from the Bird represents a serious complication for him. The Bird’s job offer cuts both ways. From now on, if he goes into the Middle East representing the city and the Bad Boys catch him, he’s dead on the spot.

A depressing development. He suddenly feels extremely weary. Time to go home. He
catches a streetcar and slumps into his seat as it rolls through downtown to his apartment, which faces the entrance to Multnomah Stadium.

Lane stares out his living room window at the dying day. The pavement and sidewalk glow with a wet sheen. He lights a cigarette, inhales, and blows out a blue cloud. His lights are off, so the smoke captures the exterior illumination and curls about itself in a rising plume. The only sound is the distant and grumpy murmur of the city grinding through its daily gears.

He looks up from the street to a backlit HDX billboard pitching vacation getaways. A small boat, a skiff, sits beached on the white sand of a tropical lagoon. Its shipped oars point skyward to the bluest of blues.

And then it comes.

Fuller Bay.

It’s the same boat, he’s sure of it, the same design. Only the colors are different. And the great span of years.

He closes his eyes and sees the skiff rocking in the water, tied to the piling, which is hopelessly encrusted with barnacles. It couldn’t have been much more than six feet in length. Squared at both ends, its outer hull is a robin’s egg blue, with the inside done in white. Bright orange life jackets peek out from under the backseat, still wet from the last outing. They emit little clouds of steam in the early summer sun. You had to wear the life jackets. No exceptions. If your mom caught you without them, you couldn’t use the boat for the rest of the trip, and she has an excellent view of the water, so you are almost always in plain sight.

She watches from the porch of their summer cabin built from aging logs, with a granite fireplace and old rugs of Native American origin hung as tapestries on the interior walls. It looks out over Fuller Bay, which is only a couple of hundred yards across, with a long sand spit that keeps out the big waters of Puget Sound. The skyline of downtown Seattle peeks over the far shore, like a distant urban dream.

Lane guides the skiff toward the graveled shore below the sloping lawn in front of the cabin. At twelve years old, he does all the rowing and navigating. At ten years old, Johnny simply rides and fidgets. But today, Johnny does something more. He tows a spent fish off the stern on a short line, an ocean perch that sends flashes of silver through the green wake. A prize of considerable import. The biggest fish they’ve ever landed.

Lane worries that Johnny will do something stupid and the fish will somehow float free. “You better not lose it, or I’ll lose you.”

Johnny ignores him and makes a kind of engine sound as the inert body of the fish spins lazily on its path through the water.

When they reach the shore, Lane moors the boat to the gnarled root of an upended tree
stump, the deposition of some ancient winter storm. Ants swarm over its bleached grain.

They cross the narrow beach and climb the stairs to the yard below the cabin. When they reach the top, Lane turns to make sure the boat is properly secured. And that’s when he sees it, in the open water of the sound, just outside the bay. A yacht. Its gleaming white hull, forty meters long, floats broadside to the sun.

“Johnny,” Lane says quietly as he tries to damp his excitement.

“Yeah?” Johnny replies as he stares at his fish dangling from the end of the leader.

“I said this was going to be our lucky day, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, that’s what you said, all right.”

“And you didn’t believe me, did you?”

“Not really,” Johnny answers without looking up.

“Like, you didn’t believe me when I said the thing about the yacht.”

“What thing?”

“That we might get one today.”

“Oh yeah, I remember.”

“Did you believe me?” Lane asks casually. He is savoring the buildup immensely, but now it’s time to let loose.

“No.”

“Well then, look where I’m lookin’, then tell me what you believe.”

Johnny turns his head toward the water, freezes for a moment, then his eyes open wide. “Oh my god!” he exclaims breathlessly, and he looks up to Lane. “What are we gonna do?”

“What do you think we’re gonna do?” Lane asks smugly.

“We’re gonna check it out?”

“Yeah, we’re gonna check it out.”

They scamper down the stairs to the boat, where they put the life jackets back on.

“You want to bad-mouth our lucky day anymore?” Lane asks. He buckles a sodden strap around his waist. “Well, do you?”

“Nope,” Johnny answers sheepishly as he pokes his arm into his jacket’s shoulder piece.

“Good.” Lane unties the mooring while Johnny climbs aboard and wiggles into his life jacket. Lane coils in the rope, pushes them off, and hops in. The boat pitches vigorously as he takes his place in the rowing seat. He grabs the oars and dips them into the water. Their grand expedition is officially under way. His back and belly strain as he rows at a lively pace away from shore. He can hear the water rush under the flat keel as the boat cuts a rippling wake through the calm water.

The shore recedes, and when his arms tire, he retracts the oars and turns toward the bow to check their course. Johnny kneels in the front seat, his head held erect to get the best view
possible. Lane dips the left oar in and pulls lightly to aim them at the inner shore of the sand spit, near the tip of its thrust between the waters of the bay and the open sound.

“How we gonna do it?” Johnny asks as Lane resumes rowing with vigorous strokes.

“We’re gonna put in on the spit and then walk around to the far side, so we see can see it.”

“What if they see us?” Johnny asks, a little worried.

“So what if they see us? It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

“Well, I guess so,” Johnny says, not entirely convinced.

As they close on the sand spit, they can make out more detail in its twisted, knotted mass of wood, all leached of color and burnished by wind and sand. It creeps down to a steep and narrow beach of virgin sand. By now they have lost sight of the yacht’s mighty superstructure, which is hidden behind the wall of driftwood. Lane pauses once more to check their bearing. In doing so, he looks at the mouth of the bay, a narrow passage of water less than a hundred yards wide that runs between the end of the sand spit on one side and a marsh full of cattails and reed grass on the other.