Stone Junction (35 page)

Volta started laughing. Daniel increased the pressure but then he began laughing too and eased off slightly. The instant the pressure relaxed, Volta shot his arms straight up as he pushed backward, neatly slipping the hold and knocking Daniel off balance. Before Daniel could react, Volta produced a deck of cards and tossed them fluttering at Daniel’s face, who instinctively raised his arms to protect his eyes.

‘Dharma combat!’ Volta shouted joyously. ‘Real magic!’ He tickled Daniel along his exposed ribs.

Daniel brought his elbows down to pin Volta’s hands, simultaneously shifting into position for a Tao Do Chaung shin-kick. Volta escaped him and tossed a fine gray gritty powder in Daniel’s face that instantly blinded him and set his sinuses ablaze. Pawing at his face, Daniel staggered helplessly while Volta followed close behind, almost yelling, ‘It’s really all in the imagination? Come on, is that for
real?
’ He timed his words between Daniel’s vicious sneezes, but found little pleasure in Daniel’s discomfort. He put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder and guided him to the sink.

‘You win, Daniel.’ He pushed Daniel’s head down tenderly and turned on the cold water so Daniel could rinse his eyes.

Daniel burbled, ‘Jealous.’

‘Wrong,’ Volta said softly, but with such conviction that Daniel shut up and gave himself to the soothing water.

Volta patted him on the back. ‘I don’t want you pouting about this. I applaud your abilities, but I won’t be taunted or demeaned. We have important work to do together. Obviously, and to your credit, you’ve surpassed my abilities at vanishing, have done in a week what took me years. I readily admit you may well have a genius for it. However, I am responsible for sharing the secret, and I wouldn’t have assumed that responsibility if I hadn’t thought you would grant me some rights in the matter, some control, some respect.’

He quit patting Daniel’s back, and leaned down to whisper in his wet ear, ‘I can feel your hunger, Daniel. I can feel how you want to lose yourself. I felt it too. Expanding, contracting – it makes no difference. Vanishing is not the way out. There is
no way out
, Daniel, no final, astonishing escape. That’s the cold, magical fact.’

Daniel nodded almost imperceptibly.

‘Good,’ Volta said. He paused a moment, his hand still on Daniel’s shoulder. ‘And don’t ask me any more questions today. Practice your right to remain silent. If the theft fails, you may need it.’

Over the
huevos rancheros
, Volta briefed Daniel as usual on the previous night’s radio transmissions regarding the Diamond.

‘Last night’s only news was that we can expect some real news this morning. We know the Diamond is in New Mexico, probably the White Sands Proving Grounds – or that’s my guess.’

‘No progress,’ Daniel translated.

‘If I’m reading correctly between the lines, it means someone’s gotten in close. Probably Jean or Ellison Deeds. I don’t think you’ve met Ellison, but he’s as accomplished as Jean in his own right. Patience is crucial, Daniel. You’ve been with us long enough to know how highly we value quality information. Lacking guns and numbers, intelligence is our most important weapon. And as I’m sure you appreciate, the closer one gets to the source, the more reliable the information. If you don’t appreciate it, you should – your life may depend on it.’

‘I didn’t say no progress was unsatisfactory,’ Daniel said primly, a tone at odds with his damp hair and red eyes, which gave him the look of a half-drowned gargoyle at the end of a bad drug binge.

Volta nodded, pleased that Daniel, if a little testy, seemed willing to regard their recent clash as a mode of clarification. ‘We’re just at one of those plateaus,’ Volta said. ‘After all, we’ve learned about where it is, though not exactly – White Sands is a large installation. But the exact location and the security arrangements will likely come as a single breakthrough, so it could all coalesce very quickly.’

‘You said White Sands was a military testing ground for bombs and other weapons, right?’

‘Correct.’

‘You think they’re going to nuke it?’

‘Who knows? A national government is bad enough, but this administration is the largest collection of scoundrels and morons in recent memory, perhaps ever. I wouldn’t even guess what they might do. However, I’m not convinced they could destroy it, even with a nuclear device.’

‘You still think it’s the diamond you saw in your vision.’

‘I hope so,’ Volta said, noting Daniel had replaced bald questions with tentative assertions.

‘Well,
you
want to see it for your own purposes. It would seem you’re being greedy too.’

Volta smiled. ‘Of course I’m being greedy, but my greed is pure: I want to see it, not possess it. I think it’s not real greed if you don’t think anyone should have it, including yourself.’

‘You should run for president,’ Daniel said.

‘I’m already a president of sorts, and serving the Star seems to have exhausted my ambition as well as my strength.’

‘That still leaves you your wisdom and charm,’ Daniel smiled thinly, lifting a salsa-drenched forkful of the
huevos rancheros
in salute.

‘Plus, I can cook,’ Volta said.

And precisely at that moment a solo harmonica began the opening strains of ‘Amazing Grace.’

Daniel slowly lowered the fork to his plate. ‘How did you do that?’

‘I didn’t. Coincidence did. It’s a signal that an EU transmission – Essential and Urgent – will follow in fifteen minutes. Why don’t you let the dishes wait and come down to the barn with me. You haven’t seen the communications center yet, and this is probably the information we’ve been waiting on.’

As a monotone voice recited numbers and letters in clusters of three – ‘A-O-seven – Niner-Double L – Zone-four’ – Volta wrote them down. Daniel noticed Volta was taping the message, or at least had the
record
button pushed down on a tape deck jacked into the radio. ‘B-eight-N – G-O-Niner – I-two-Zero …’ The code fascinated Daniel. It sounded like Bingo on mescaline.

As the voice settled into a drone, Daniel glanced around the barn, nearly half of which was a communications center – phones, CBs, shortwave radios, tape decks, two computer stations, a row of locked filing cabinets, and a long worktable. A huge bank of solar-charged nickel-cadmium batteries lined the far wall.

The transmission abruptly ended and Volta sent a brief response, also in code. When he clicked off the shortwave, the tape deck stopped.

‘That must be a secret channel,’ Daniel said, avoiding a direct question.

‘No,’ Volta said, ‘we use legal frequencies: 21.000 to 26.450 Megahertz in the daytime, 7.000 to 7.300 at night. The CIA has computerized scanners that monitor unauthorized frequencies. If it picks up an illegal signal, it can easily triangulate the point of origin.’

‘But if it’s on a legal frequency, anyone can listen.’

Volta shrugged. ‘Let them. All they’ll hear is the code, and code is fairly common on the air – smugglers, amateur cryptographers, paramilitary groups. We use what’s known as a shift-cipher code, which means it shifts from one code set to another – we use nine – at intervals that can also be changed. It’s extremely difficult to crack it by frequency-of-occurrence methods. We use one set of nine for a year, and to our knowledge we’ve never been cracked or compromised. And besides, the band we use has over a thousand frequencies available. So first someone would have to find it, monitor it continuously, and then break the code. And they still might not understand the message. Here, let me show you.’

Daniel watched as Volta transcribed: OBJAY THIRTY K CARROT C CRUSH ZROW GLO DFORM U HIRNOW XTR CBR 1BLT T GO CECIL.

‘I don’t get it all, but I think I caught the important part.’

Volta read it aloud, explaining the shorthand: ‘The object is a thirty-thousand-carat diamond – “C Crush” being crushed carbon – a zero being round or, in our case, a sphere. This one glows. However, DFORM is our standard phrase for “the defense is formidable,” so I should go there and confer – “you here and now.” XTR is again standard, meaning further information – usually nothing more than where to meet – is available through the CBR station, which it might please you to know is the
City of Baton Rouge
. And that’s basically it.’

‘What about the “1BLT to go Cecil.”’

‘That’s Smiling Jack’s signature. In the unlikely case the code gets broken, a signature phrase makes it far more difficult for the codebreaker to transmit disinformation back to us. Everybody has a signature phrase; the names are nulls, dummies. So a transmission with a name but no signature phrase indicates the code has been compromised in some way. Even so, it probably would have been judicious to switch to a new set for this project. We’ve been using this set almost eleven months. I just hate to make the change at a critical juncture, since it takes a while to get fluent in the new set.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ Daniel said. ‘You just got it confirmed that it is a large spherical diamond that glows – exactly like your vision. Right on the money. You should be pleased, or grateful, or at least vaguely happy.’

‘I am,’ Volta said. ‘I’m also worried.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when I’m not having visions confirmed, I have to make decisions, the right ones I hope. And when you have to be hopeful, you should be worried.’

‘What do you have to decide right now that couldn’t wait on a few minutes of satisfaction?’

‘Whether to leave you here to practice by yourself or take you to New Mexico for the meeting.’

‘Take me. I can practice anywhere.’

‘At this point, only one other person knows you’ll be involved – that’s Smiling Jack. If you attend the meeting, six more will know.’

‘But they’re trustworthy, right?’

‘Daniel, it’s not a question of the knowledge being safe with them, but of them being safe with the knowledge.’ Volta paused, then added more forcefully, ‘You
do
understand the Feds are going to want it back?’

‘I haven’t been dwelling on it.’

‘You stay,’ Volta decided. ‘I’ll be taking the truck, so you’ll be without a vehicle. Unless, of course, you can imagine one. Now, if you’d do me the favor of cleaning up the kitchen, I’ll send some routing messages and gather my gear.’

Daniel was rinsing out the sink when Volta called him into the living room. He was standing near the door, looking at himself in the oak-framed mirror under the cuckoo clock. A Bulgarian anarchist had given Volta the clock for helping him during an illegal stay in the U.S. It kept excellent time, but the cuckoo appeared randomly.

Daniel thought Volta was referring to the cuckoo clock when he said, ‘I should have warned you about this earlier.’ But he took the mirror down, tapped the exposed nailhead as if it were a telegraph key, then pulled outward and up, lifting a veneered panel out of the wall. The panel was about half the size of the mirror that had concealed it. There was a narrow vault behind the panel.

Daniel had never seen a safe so skinny, six inches wide and two feet high. Nor did it appear to have a lock. ‘What’s the point of a safe without a lock,’ he said.

‘The lock’s inside.’

‘Well, that’s certainly a provocative approach to security.’

Volta opened the safe door and removed a small black cubical box with a short aerial mounted on one side.

Volta held it up for Daniel’s inspection. ‘The lock. A radio-controlled nerve-gas canister. You noticed my tapping the nail. I was sending a coded radio sequence to deactivate it; otherwise it fires automatically when the door is opened. Solar trigger. Fires at the faintest hint of light. The gas isn’t lethal, but it’s instantly incapacitating and makes your recent bout with the flu seem like a Tahitian cruise in comparison.’

‘
Another
of Aunt Charmaine’s concoctions from the concrete bunker?’ Daniel said with distaste.

Ah ha
, Volta thought,
Charmaine’s really got a hook in Daniel
. He wasn’t surprised. Charmaine could make you feel like she knew you better than you would ever know yourself, a feeling that simultaneously attracted and repelled. Nodding as much to himself as to Daniel’s question, Volta said, ‘Yes, Charmaine. But I trust you appreciate that Charmaine’s genius for synergistic associations extends beyond mere potions.’

‘But probably also includes that powder you threw in my face this morning.’

‘No, I’ll take credit for that. It’s the inner bark of a species of Peruvian pepperbush that is dried to parchment, then finely ground.’

‘Where did that and the cards come from anyway? I saw you roll up your sleeves.’

‘I’m a magician, Daniel, remember? When a magician rolls up his sleeves, it should arouse your suspicions, not lull them.’

‘I’ll watch that,’ Daniel said.

‘Do.’ Volta removed three flat black plastic boxes from a stack inside the safe.

Daniel said lightheartedly, ‘You don’t trust me alone with the family jewels?’

‘Actually, two boxes are the family crystals – we use them to modify our CBs. The other is a taped transmission to Ellison from a group in Canada.’

‘What sort of transmission?’

‘Confidential.’

‘To me, but not Ellison.’

‘You weren’t included in the confidence.’

‘I see.’

Volta closed the safe door and turned to Daniel. ‘I honor confidences. Sometimes it seems silly, given the information. Sometimes it’s literally torture – not physically, or not yet anyway, but heart and soul. But we can’t live without secrets and the trust that bears them. You’ve asked that your ability to vanish be held in confidence. It will be. Our Canadian friends requested their information be kept confidential. It will be. How could you possibly expect me to keep your confidence if I betray theirs?’

‘I didn’t, not really. Ever since I’ve been vanishing, I seem to want to know everything that’s going on, and act against what’s expected. In a weird way it’s made me sort of playfully impulsive.’

‘I thought that might be what was going on,’ Volta said. ‘But you’re fortunate. Your reactions – curiosity, perversity, and goofiness – are much sweeter than mine, which were fits of morbidity and crushing doubt.’