The Rift (16 page)

“No one really cares what you want or don’t want,” Hannah said. She pulled open a drawer. She reached in and took out an object, which she placed on the desk, in clear view of Moms, whose legs quickly became uncrossed and hands became fists.

“Where did you get that?” Moms demanded.

It was a picture album, the kind you buy at Walgreens or K-Mart or more likely remaindered at the Dollar Store. Which is exactly where Moms’s mother had gotten it with her employee discount as a young teenager. It was obviously cheap, covered in fake imitation leather. Gold letters on the front read
OUR WEDDING
.

It was anything but a wedding album.

“Dr. Golden tracked it down,” Hannah said.

Moms absorbed the implications of that, which raised more questions than one sentence should. She tried to prioritize the questions in her mind, but Hannah didn’t give her the time.

“Yes, Dr. Golden was researching your background. Digging deeper than the ones who vetted your security clearance. After all, there is a large difference between being trustworthy with secrets and being trustworthy. Don’t you think.”

It was not a question, but a reminder.

Hannah continued. “Dr. Golden found it in an old storage unit one of your brothers had forgotten about with the rest of the stuff from your now-abandoned childhood home. Covered in dust and neglect. Which raises an interesting point: Do your brothers love you? Did they love you when you took care of them when your mother was incapable of action most of the time due to her intoxication?” She didn’t consult any notes. “You have not spoken to any of your siblings for over six years.”

“We don’t have siblings or family in the Nightstalkers,” Moms said. “I don’t believe you have them in the Cellar either.”

Hannah ignored that. “Who loves you, Moms?” She reached out and placed a hand on the album. “Your mother cut pictures from catalogues and pasted them in here while she was a teenager. A wish list for her life.”

Moms remembered the images her mother would stick on the old beat-up refrigerator, using magnets from the local feed lot to hold them in place. The album was the predecessor to the fridge.

It wasn’t a step up.

“A wish list,” Hannah continued, “that was ironically canceled by the wedding in front of the judge with no flowers or rings or anything in this book. A wedding you were present for, although certainly you can’t be expected to remember it. It’s why you see weddings, indeed all intimate relationships, as the end, not the beginning.”

“Is that shrink-speak? I thought I got that later with Dr. Golden?”

Hannah ignored her. “Then the pictures change. From the perfect wedding to places. Beautiful places all around the world from old
National Geographic
magazines.” Hannah flipped it open. “You had this up until eight years ago; then you gave it to your brother.”

“That’s private,” Moms said. There was an edge to her voice and she was leaning forward in the chair.

“Of course,” Hannah said. She looked up from the album and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “And, of course, you understand that’s almost the definition of irony saying that here, three hundred feet below the NSA? I can order you to go out and kill someone but you’re upset about a book that’s been gathering dust for years?”

“It’s personal.”

“And your life isn’t?” Hannah didn’t wait for an answer. “You used to check off these places, if you happened to have traveled to or through them and write notes to your mother about them. Postcards from the edge, literally, given some of your missions and assignments. Of course, you rarely traveled to the nice, exotic locales your mother dreamed of. Mostly hellholes, but there were some decent stops en route and on the way back.”

“She loved me,” Moms said, trying to stop Hannah.

“Not enough to stop drinking,” Hannah said. “Not enough to be a mother.”

Moms pointed at the book. “She gave me hope. She gave me purpose.”

“Rearing your brothers? Then traveling around the world killing people? It’s amazing what we get used to. For you, your life is sort of normal. Yet for a normal person your life is so far off the grid, they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.”

Moms wasn’t giving in so easily. “She at least showed me a world beyond what we had growing up. A world she knew she’d never see but I could. Even if it means killing people,” she added bitterly.

“A world beyond that gray, flat Kansas horizon?” Hannah flipped the album shut. “Of more interest, and more importance, is who loved
her
? That’s where
your
allotment comes from.”

Moms sat back, some of the anger draining from her. “You know.”

“That’s what makes Mrs. Sanchez’s job so difficult and so important,” Hannah said. “Money leaves a trail. Many a Predator strike has resulted from following a money trail and Mrs. Sanchez is very good at that. She’s been responsible for quite a few strikes.

“The allotment is from a man who loved your mother. Before you were born. He wanted to marry her but instead she married your father. Not planned for in the album of her future life. It is a testament to your mother’s beliefs that you are here at all. But part of that was marrying that man. The man who put her in a very small world and kept her there.

“So the man who really loved your mother left. He went into the military. He couldn’t bear to stay in that town and see your mother still working at the Dollar Store, when she was able to make it to the job. It pained him to see her at all, so he left, and he eventually died in the service of our country. And he left the money to your mother so maybe she could see some of these places, but when he died, she was long since gone also, so it went to you.”

Hannah fell silent.

“Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Hannah swept the album off her desk and into the drawer and slid it shut.

“That’s mine.”

Hannah ignored her. She put her hands flat on the desk, and her dark eyes met Mom
’
s. “Who loved you? Loving someone, like you did your brothers and your mother and like you do your team, just gets you by. Most people go through life throwing love around to those they find worthy of it, but the real power is in who loves us. Because those who love us, they own a piece of us. They find us worthy.”

Moms was confused. “What do you mean?”

“Love is like electricity,” Hannah said. “When we feel it for someone, it’s grounded in
our
hopes and dreams. When someone loves us, it’s wild and free. Unleashed. It’s power without a ground. It can hurt us or help us. We have to decide which. The problem for you is that you didn’t have a you.”

“I imagine there’s a point to all this,” Moms said.

“I—” Hannah began, but then her desk phone trilled.

Hannah picked it up. She listened and Moms watched her face, searching for any tell.

There was none.

“Bring her to me once she’s been cleared,” Hannah said. “Where is the terminus of the Loop message?”

She listened and then issued a last order before hanging up. “Help the last relayer decrypt and send, then secure the Loop.”

Hannah hung the phone up. “It appears things are not as we would like. Neeley was not able to Sanction Burns.”

Moms stood. “My team—”

Hannah held up a hand. “I believe a message is being forwarded to one of your team members as we speak.”

“Where’s the demon core?” Ivar asked Doc as he slid shut the second drawer.

Doc looked up from the cabinet he’d been rifling through. “Ah, the dragon’s tail. The very first Rift.”

“The records are incomplete,” Ivar said.

“Of course they are,” Doc said. “Everyone who worked on it disappeared.”

Ivar shook his head. “No. I mean even the paperwork before they opened the Rift is wrong. Like they were hiding something.”

“They were Nazis and—” Doc paused, searching for the right word—“you know, there was never a word for those who followed the emperor of Japan into that war. Who perpetuated crimes as bad as the Nazis. Nanking. The Bataan Death March. Unit 731.”

“Japanese,” Ivar said.

“Yes, but we make such a distinction between Nazis and Germans sometimes. Was every German a Nazi? Was every Japanese responsible for those crimes?”

“The records,” Ivar said, thumping the drawer. “There’s very little on what this group, Odessa, was doing. The theoretical physicists.”

“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Odessa. Does the name ring a bell?”

Ivar shrugged. “Not particularly.”

“Ask Eagle about it sometime,” Doc said.

Ivar tapped the drawer, getting back on track. “There’s some mention of the demon core.”

“From Los Alamos,” Doc said. “Majestic-12 appropriated the plutonium core from Los Alamos that killed Daghlian and Slotin. They nicknamed it the
demon core
because of those accidents.”

Every physicist knew of Daghlian and Slotin. Cautionary tales told early in their studies. “What was that thing about the dragon’s tail?” Ivar asked.

“Enrico Fermi told Slotin that playing with that core was like tickling the dragon’s tail and that the dragon was going to consume him. More like it farted when Slotin’s screwdriver slipped, but it was a radioactive fart and it killed him.”

“Where’s the demon core now?” Ivar asked. He looked about the Archives. “In some big lead box?”

“They never found it after the first Rift,” Doc said. “It was assumed that the Odessa group used it to open the Rift and it got sucked through with them.”

Ivar frowned. “But how come everyone who has opened a Rift since then hasn’t needed a plutonium core? Just algorithms?”

“Good question, isn’t it?” Doc said.

“But plutonium has a half-life of a little over twenty-four thousand years,” Ivar said. “Wherever it is, that core is still putting out a lot of radioactivity and potential power.”

“Let’s hope it’s frying whoever is on the other side of the Rifts,” Doc said, and then pointedly went back to looking at the file he’d just pulled out.

Wallace Cranston was standing at the craps table in the Bellagio losing his stash, his savings, and his shirt. He was thinking about going to the ATM to get the money he swore he wouldn’t get.

His wife’s money.

Even though doing that would most likely change that status to ex-wife. But he could feel it in his bones that his losing streak was just about up and he was going to hit it good.

Of course, he didn’t even know what day it was, never mind what time it was, but he was on vacation and breathing the lovely oxygenated air they pumped in, and he was on the fourth, or fifth, or sixth day of a fantastic bender, and he felt anything was possible.

He noticed the cleavage on the waitress as she handed him another rum and Coke, and he thought,
Maybe even that’s possible
, even though she had the dead eyes of one of Stephen King’s bad people from
The Stand
. Which reminded him he’d been to Boulder, Colorado, where the supposed good people had made their “stand,” and the locals there had been a bunch of liberal, stuck-up pricks, so he’d rather be here with the bad.

“It’s Vegas, baby,” he whispered to himself, then took a slug of his drink and started to weave his way toward the ATM. He bounced into it, then used one hand to claim it as an anchor as he pulled his wallet out. He fumbled through it for the cash card he’d swiped before leaving home, hoping his wife hadn’t canceled it already.

Then the phone that never went on vacation started to vibrate in his shirt pocket and chime with “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which was more than appropriate here in Vegas. Cranston had a theory that people went to Vegas to die and to L.A. to suffer. He glanced back at the waitress with the dead eyes and thought,
You’d like me better if you knew who I was
.

Then again, maybe not.

He pulled the phone out and with surprisingly steady hands accepted the incoming text message. He saw the five letter groupings and knew he’d have to go back to his room to decrypt and forward.

He looked at the ATM and sighed. His wife would never know how close it came. Saved by the bell. By the ringtone. He started to giggle as he walked toward the elevator.