[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (18 page)

“I think it’s best you both head back to the hotel.” he said, “I will leave it up to you how long you remain in Washington.”

Then to Madeline alone, “Madeline, I had not previously been aware of your relationship with the captain. Please allow me to offer my sincerest condolences. He was a very good officer, and, I believe, an equally good man.”

She nodded at this, struggling not let her emotions get the better of her, not in front of this austere officer, not now they might be able to relax for a little while. So they all stood and shook hands, but as they turned to leave, the admiral suddenly said, “Err, Neal, the sad loss of my longtime colleague, and dare I say it, friend, Dr. West, has left a gap on the White House Science Team.”

Neal turned to look at him as he continued, “I hope you do not mind that I have recommended your name to the president as a replacement?”

Neal’s mouth opened, dumbfounded at the statement. He shook his head, unable to find words.

“I am assuming,” the admiral said into the silence, “that you are planning to complete that thesis of yours ASAP? It would not do to have a lowly masters of science advising the president.”

“No, Admiral, I imagine it wouldn’t.”

“Well, take a few days to think about it. The White House chief of staff will begin interviews in about two months, once candidate background checks have taken place. That should give you plenty of time to wrap up your thesis before you get the call. How long have you been working on it, now?”

“Oh, about … eight years … give or take.” he laughed.

“Yes, well,” the admiral frowned, “you should be about done then.”

* * *

“What do you think, Admiral?” asked General Pickler as they spoke on the phone, not fifteen minutes after Neal and Madeline had left.

“I think that they’re good people who’ve just been part of a clusterfuck, Michael … and I think they are afraid.” said Admiral Hamilton.

“Of what?” General Pickler had watched the entire interview from a camera mounted behind a mirror in the corner of the slightly deceitful office they had met in. For unbeknownst to Neal and Madeline, they had not met in the admiral’s office at all, but in one of many interview spaces in the building, this one designed to put people at ease by being set up as the office of the interviewer.

After Neal and Madeline had left, the admiral had picked up his brass desk nameplate and the two photos of his family and walked back to his own, notably less wired office. As he had done so, the ‘secretary’ stationed outside had disabled the cameras and microphones in the room and removed the admiral’s name from the door.

“I don’t know what has them scared, probably just seeing a boyfriend and a respected colleague die while in a very foreign country. Either way, we weren’t going to get anything more out of them today, so I figured it best to send them home.”

The general was silent for a while he pondered this, then he said, “And recommending this Danielson to the advisor’s job? Are we sure that is wise?”

“Dr. West brought something unique to that team, a combination of extreme intelligence, rare creativity, and the balls to combine the two. She will be near impossible to replace, but if we can find it, we need someone who doesn’t store his head up the scientific community’s ass to make sure the president stays informed. Something tells me Neal is ready to be that guy.”

“He’s certainly got the smarts, I can’t deny that.” The general had been part of the review team for the probe and had seen the amount that Neal had brought to that effort, as well as being the only person who had correctly predicted the meteors’ landing spots.

The general continued, “And I concur that he seems much more mature than when he was bumbling his way through my operations meetings. And anyway, I’ve got no one I’d rather have in there right now, so I’ll guess support your nomination … for now.”

“Thanks, Michael, I owe you one. You’ll let me know if I can get you anything else on this.” said the admiral, wrapping up the conversation.

“I know I’ll let you know when you can repay me for supporting your boy.” said the general smarmily, “Bar that, I think this whole project is better forgotten for a year or two. You don’t think Neal and Madeline will push for another expedition to retrieve one of the meteors?”

“Something tells me neither of them plans on raising that topic again for a while. And I’ll certainly dissuade them with some vigor if they try.”

The admiral and general said their good-byes, closing the call, both satisfied with the conversation for now. The admiral had to meet his son for dinner. Apparently a new girl was in the boy’s life, and the admiral always liked picking on his son about his unfortunate choices in women.

* * *

Having reviewed their entire discussion, and having hacked into and watched the meeting from the same remote view as the general, the AI transmitted to the eight that there was currently no need to further increase the mission’s exposure by killing the remaining scientists. It would continue to monitor the actions of both Neal Danielson and Madeline Cavanagh, but for now the immediate threat appeared to have passed.

Neal pushed opened the door to his apartment in Arizona and immediately reeled at the smell. It had been nearly three months since he had left for Florida.

Seeing a pizza box on the floor, he felt a wash of shame. That was bad, even for him. His mind went to whether he had emptied his fridge. He hadn’t. But he had remembered to unplug his air conditioner to save electricity during the Arizona winter, such was the confoundable rationale of his sometime excuse for a brain.

Covering his mouth and nose with his grey T-shirt, he stepped over the mound of junk mail around his door and walked to the window, leaving the door open behind him. After wrangling the window open, cracking the flaky old paint that held it in place to do so, he grabbed his tall trash can from one side and pulled its bag out, itself another thing he had forgotten to empty. It was doing its bit for the aroma as well, no doubt.

The pizza box was damp through on the bottom and Neal feared it would collapse under its own weight, visions of a collapsing star coming to mind, and the relatively comparable destruction this box’s unleashed contents would do to his floor. But he was spared that. It wasn’t until he opened the door to the fridge that he was hit with a wall of pungency akin to, well, he didn’t really know how to classify it: road kill, maybe? The puff of gas from a month-old corpse spontaneously combusting? No, that wasn’t quite it. It was like an athlete’s reused jock strap … dipped in excrement … and then baked.

He gagged, barely controlling himself, then set to making his home smell a little less like a French cheese shop.

He had seen Madeline onto her flight to Florida with a long and heartfelt hug before walking to his own gate for his flight back to Arizona. Neither of them had had the heart to talk more about what they were facing before they had settled their lives a bit, so they had agreed not to speak about it again until they were next together, which would be at James’ funeral in two days.

No information had been provided to him about Laurie’s funeral, though he assumed that, like James’, it would sadly have to be closed casket, unable as they had been to identify any of the remains retrieved from the Indian Ocean.

He had not even started to think about the offer the admiral had made. He doubted that the White House would select him, even if he had the time to finish his thesis before the interviews started. Either way, he had bigger things to face than going job hunting.

He retrieved his old laptop from under a slew of junk on the coffee table and sat down on his unmade bed, the PC powering up as it settled on his lap, like a docile pet.

“OK, what do we have here?” he said to himself as Outlook came slowly to life on his screen.

“4,256 new e-mails, I’ll get right on those, now how about calls. Two. Great, love to everyone too. Mom, three weeks ago. Shit, need to call her back. And … Madeline …”

He flinched involuntarily at the sight of her name, then clicked playback.

“Neal,” came Madeline’s voice through the PC speaker, “just to let you know I got back fine. Listen … I wanted to say thanks … I haven’t said that yet. You know what for. You’ve been, just, you know, great.” Neal bit his lower lip, uncomfortably.

Part of him had been unable to stop blaming himself for it all, like it was his curiosity that had gotten Laurie and James killed, but when he had tried to say that to Madeline as they parted she had, in a more forceful tone than he had ever heard from her, told him never to say it again. She had met his guilt with such stolid fervor that he had stepped back, but she had placed her hands on his shoulders and said, firmly still but with real affection as well, that he was not to blame for what had happened, and that both James and Laurie would be as furious as her to hear him say it.

Seemingly knowing where his mind was going, the voicemail continued, “I know you blame yourself for what happened, but, like I said before, we all went into this with eyes open. James was a big boy, and he wouldn’t thank you for one second for implying that he needed you to protect him.” Neal smiled at this, James would, indeed, have kicked his ass for presuming that this scientist should have saved the mighty naval secret agent.

“That said, you have been a rock these last few days, and … well … I just can’t imagine what I would have done without you.” Neal could hear her tears through the line, and now that she wasn’t here to see them, his own trickled down his cheek as he felt her pain throb inside him.

He would not call her back, despite a pang in his heart to comfort her, she had already said more than she should. No, once he had booked his onward ticket to meet her in Florida, he would check in at the Array, maybe even head down there. He had to wrap-up things there, and maybe see if he could stop himself from being fired from the thesis program. He was sure that having access to the facilities like the Array would be more than a little useful as they tried to figure out exactly what had happened in the Indian Ocean, and what it all meant.

* * *

The colonel was surprised when his aide, Lieutenant Diorio, told him that Danielson had called the office. He had asked to be notified if Neal tried to contact the facility. Diorio had assumed it was because the scientist had apparently run off without notice, leaving his place on the roster empty.

But the colonel was not concerned with such things. He had rarely thought of the civilian team at the Array as much more than a nuisance. In fact, in his years running the complex facility he had only ever once had cause to fully admit the importance of its civilian arm at all, and that was when he had started working with Neal.

There was no doubt in Barrett’s mind that someone like Neal would have been chewed up and spit out by any military force that would have had him in the first place. He was simply too lackadaisical to survive the kind of routine or discipline the colonel had come to find so reassuring.

But it was the very untamable nature of Neal’s mind that had made him see the rarity of the atmospheric incident and to keep pushing for further analysis, an incident that had been viewed as nothing more than a liability to everyone else.

But now things had shifted again, and the call from General Pickler had thrown the colonel once more. He had not known this Captain Hawkson, or the crew of the
King’s Transom
, but Dr. West had been a frequent visitor to the Array. The colonel was not one to dwell on losses, probably because he had suffered so many himself, but the deaths of too many friends over the years had left him with a profound respect for those left behind, and so he would go and visit Neal Danielson and see if there was anything he could do.

He would also follow the two specific orders of General Pickler: firstly he would see that there was no more talk of further expeditions for a while, and secondly he would … encourage the young scientist to pursue the job the admiral had put him up for. Certain people wanted another strong voice in that job, and they had decided that voice should be Neal’s.

Standing, he went to the door, took his colonel’s cap from the hook on its back, and walked out of his office.

* * *

Neal had given up on his junk-strewn hotmail inbox after getting through about 1% of the crap that filled it, and put his computer aside. He needed a black suit, white shirt, and a tie. He knew he owned at least one of each of these items, but now he had to find them amongst a sea of clothes which any self-respecting hobo would spurn in disgust.

Walking over to the taller of his two easy chairs, he started wading through the randomly piled clothes, of varying cleanliness and age. He was near the front door, and the pile of mail around it was proving even more annoying than its electronic equivalent in his inbox. He decided to find the three things he actually needed to attend to so that he could mail in his responses: rent, internet service and electricity bills.

As he kicked his feet across the pile looking for the telltale envelopes, two other pieces of mail jumped out at him. In amongst the credit card offers, coupon books and magazine subscription offers were two plain manila envelopes. The unusual thing about each was that the address on each was handwritten.

Like most of America, he hadn’t received a personal letter since he was a child.

Picking them up, he returned to his spot on the edge of the bed and looked at the writing. It was phenomenally neat, but not familiar to Neal at all. There was no return address on them either, and they were on identical card stock. The only difference was that one had mailed two weeks before the other. He opened the most recent first.

‘Neal,

You do not know me, but I know of you. I cannot explain who I am yet, or why I am sending you this note, but I can say with certainty that showing this note to anyone you do not trust absolutely would mean certain and instantaneous death for both you and them.’

Neal stared at the handwriting, as neat and regular as the envelope had been, and whispered, ‘what the f..?’ He read on.