Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (19 page)

He started counting but the man made him before he got to ten. Davy stayed where he was and let Hunt walk to him.

“I thought it would be here or the sushi place,” Hunt said.

“Is that why you had them in your wallet? So I’d have a point of contact?”

“No. I realized you probably saw them when I was writing up my post-mission report.”

“I’m not seeing the limp.”

“No. The ankle is maybe ninety-five percent back.”

“Ah. Not going to apologize. You were going to Tase my wife.”

Hunt nodded. “And I pointed a gun at your mother-in-law.”

“An unloaded gun.”

“You didn’t know that. I’m lucky you didn’t kill me. But you don’t do that, do you?”

“Tell that to Lawrence Simons.”

Hunt shook his head. “I’ve read the autopsy. I saw the report on the device they took out of you, too. Did you know they got the one out of Hyacinth Pope intact?”

Davy blinked. “No. No, I didn’t.” He thought about Agent Martingale of the FBI. “I don’t think the FBI knew that, either.”

“Right. The NSA classified that. Anyway, I don’t think you were trying for Simons’s death.”

“Forget about that,” said Davy. “I’ve made my peace. What did the NSA find out from the implant? Did that lead anyplace interesting?”

“Sort of.” Hunt looked down and scuffed the toe of his shoe on the sidewalk. “The implant started out as a Cyberonics vagal nerve stimulator for the treatment of refractory partial epilepsy, but someone retrofitted a larger case, a larger battery, and added physiological sensors. The programming was changed to allow higher voltage levels based on feedback from the sensors. Debilitating.”

Davy couldn’t help shuddering. “If by debilitating you mean convulsions, vomiting, shitting yourself and, what was that last one? Oh, yeah,
not
breathing.” He paused to take a couple of deep breaths. “You’re not telling me anything new. Could you trace the purchases from Cyberonics or the vendors on any of the sensors?”

Hunt shook his head. “Dead ends. Companies that never existed or, in the case of the sensors, cash purchases. The only thing that led someplace was the code.”

“Code?”

“The overwritten firmware. When the NSA decompiled the machine language, they found a set of unique assembly language-library subroutines. They could only find one other piece of hardware that used that library.”

Davy raised his eyebrows.

“It was a DoD contractor. I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to say which one.”

“So they’re
still
a DoD contractor.”

Hunt didn’t say anything.

Davy let it go for the moment. That was twenty years in the past. “How about our friends at the nursing home?”

“We got four of them. All of them are U.S. citizens. Two of them have residences in LA county, but two of them came in from out of the country.”

Davy raised his eyebrows. “Costa Rica?”

“How’d you know?”

“Some of the employees of Bochstettler and Associates ended up there. Same kind of business, different name—Stroller and Associates. There’s a link between them and the Daarkon Group.”

Hunt took out his phone and began typing on the keyboard. “Stroller like baby stroller?”

“Yeah. CEO is William Stroller. I first found Daarkon Group by following him there. There’s a Facebook photo with James B. Gilead and William Stroller at a Daarkon Christmas party.”

Hunt nodded at the mention of Gilead’s name. “Gilead surfaced two months ago for his daughter’s wedding but then vanished again. Except for that, he hasn’t been seen in almost two years.”

Davy nodded. “Yeah. Not since I visited their offices in LA and they went to ground.”

Hunt said, “What did you do to them?”

Davy wasn’t going to tell the CIA about gravimeters and jumping. “Just looking but they made me. It spooked them.”

“What were your intentions?”

To never be a target again. To make sure Millie and Cent aren’t targets.
“Know thy enemy. I certainly did no more than show up, but the wicked flee where no man pursueth.”

Hunt blinked. “Well, it’s hard to pursue when you didn’t see them go.”

Davy said, “So, where’s the Retreat?”

“Ah, you’ve heard of it? We have no idea. There was a mention of the Retreat in an e-mail between Gilead and his wife in the weeks before the wedding. The only other mention was in a phone conversation between a lower-level Daarkon exec, Todd Hostetler, and Kirsten McAdams, one of Gilead’s known personal assistants. Ms. McAdams shut him down as soon as he said the name. Like ice. Hostetler apologized profusely.”

“Anything else?”

Hunt shook his head. “
Nothing
. No
where
, no
what
, no
who
. Communications going in or out from there have to be blinded, possibly double blinded. All previous cell phones associated with the top-tier executives have either been canceled or are moribund. Not only no calls, but none of them have connected into any cell network in the last fifteen months.”

“Well, it makes me feel better knowing
you
can’t find them either, but why are you trying?”

“Well, initially we were wondering if you got them.”

Davy didn’t bother responding to that.

Hunt looked off to the side. “There has always been some concern when people are so highly connected and you don’t know who’s pulling
their
strings.”

“It should damn well be a matter of national security. Far more justifiably than your pursuit of
me
.”

Hunt turned to watch the street traffic. Without turning back to Davy, he said, “Well,
I
agree with you. But the job has a certain amount of, well, following orders, you know?”

Davy showed his teeth but it wasn’t a smile. “Yes, but
whose
orders? If you knew
all
the hands tugging that string, that would be one thing, but there’s still the chance one of those hands belongs to a person like Lawrence Simons. Like James B. Gilead.”

Hunt turned away from the traffic. “Then why are you
here
?”

“I’ll work with you but I won’t work for you. I gave you Stroller and Associates. You told me about the guys who came for Samantha. This stuff I can do. But if one of your bosses gets anxious again and tries for some kind of snatch … well, afterward he won’t think it was a poor decision—he’ll think it was a disastrous decision. A career-ending decision.”

Davy pointed at Hunt. “But the way things work they’ll make sure you take the blame.”

“As you say,” Hunt said. “That’s the way things work.”

Davy nodded, stepped around the corner of the building into deep shadow, and jumped.

SIXTEEN

Cent: Good enough for Yuri

“I just think you should stick to under two hundred kilometers.”

I hate it when they argue with me while I’m wearing the prebreathe mask. This time it was Cory
and
Dad.

“Why?”

“Radiation,” said Cory.

I took a deep breath, lifted the mask away from my mouth and said, “Are you kidding?” I put the mask back on and purged it before inhaling again. Took it off. “I’m staying equatorial and below the inner Van Allen belt. No real difference!” I put the mask back on.

Dad said, “If you stick to under two hundred klicks, the orbit will take less time—therefore less radiation.”

I lifted the mask again. “Two hundred three miles, three hundred twenty-seven kilometers. If it was good enough for Yuri, it’s good enough for me.” Mask on, deep breaths. “And the difference in orbital period is less than five minutes!”

Dad wasn’t giving up. “He didn’t have a circular orbit. His perigee was only one hundred five miles—one hundred sixty-nine kilometers!”

I just shook my head.

Dad glared. “I hate arguing with you when you’re wearing that mask!”

He couldn’t see my mouth but he could tell I was smiling.

We “launched” from the lab. There was no real point in having the “ground crew” in Texas, especially since the prepaid cell phone wouldn’t get a signal there. When I jumped to ten kilometers, it
was
over the pit because that was the site I had. Ditto for twenty kilometers and then 104.

The phone rang in my headset and I hit the answer button.

“Status?” asked Cory.

“At one hundred four klicks altitude. Adding velocity now.” I flipped the visor down to protect my eyes.

It was a weird thing.

When I was learning to add velocity while jumping, my first clue, my first feedback, was the sound of air rushing by. Not much air rushing by at
these
altitudes. See the problem?

Now all of my feedback was visual, the motion of the earth below or the stars above or the readings of the space-enabled GPS. I faced southeast and tried to imagine the earth spinning below me.

It stayed still.

I was station keeping, jumping back to that spot 104 kilometers above the pit, to zero my vertical velocity, but with each jump, trying to add horizontal speed to the east.

It wasn’t working. I’d drop again, but I wasn’t moving sideways that I could tell.

Well, maybe if …

I watched the readout on the GPS instead, looking at the heading and imagining it reading 120 degrees, one kilometer per second.

Suddenly the earth was sliding slowly under me, moving west and a bit north. I was still dropping, though, since one kilometer per second wasn’t anywhere near orbital velocity for this altitude.

“Status?” This time it was Dad’s voice and I could tell that Cory had put the cell phone on speaker.

“One kilometer per second, altitude ninety-nine kilometers. Heading one hundred twenty-eight degrees. Central Texas.”

I jumped again, back to altitude, trying to double the horizontal velocity. I peered at the GPS. Had it changed? It still said 1.0 kilometers per second, but the earth seemed to be really spinning below. I looked at the display again. Not 1.0, but 10.0—
ten
kilometers per second.

Whoa, Bessie.

I barely kept myself from flinching back to my bedroom. Wouldn’t
that
have surprised Grandmother.

This wouldn’t take me in a circular orbit. This was fast enough to take me all the way out past the geosynchronous satellites, 35,800 kilometers away, before swinging back in a highly elliptical orbit. If the vector was in the right direction, it might even be enough velocity to get me gravitationally captured by the moon.

“Ten kps, One hundred five degrees bearing, one hundred forty-eight kilometers altitude.”

Cory said, “What was your speed? I don’t think I heard that right.”

“Ten kps.”

“Do you think that reading is right?”

“Pretty sure. Longitude is changing far more rapidly than it was before and my altitude is jumping. And the earth’s spin, well, let’s just say it’s zippin’ along.”

“Cent, from LEO, it only takes ten point nine kps to escape Earth’s gravity!”

“Don’t worry. Just using it to reach my target altitude. I’ll trim it
way
back.”

When the altitude read three hundred kilometers, I started trimming the horizontal speed back, paying more attention to my vertical speed.

“Status?” Dad’s voice was a bit strident.

“Crossing Cuba. Eight kps. Altitude three hundred seven kilometers. Heading one hundred twenty degrees.”

I kept increasing or decreasing the horizontal component until my vertical speed was barely changing, a very slight rise, less than a tenth of a kilometer every few minutes.

“What’s happening there, Cent?”

“Altitude three hundred forty kilometers. Bearing one hundred twelve degrees. Velocity seven point seven two kps.”

I bit down on the bite valve to take a sip of water and it squirted hard, jetting into the back of my throat and airway. I began coughing furiously and beads of water splashed off the inside of my faceplate and began floating around my face.

“Cent what’s wrong?” Cory said, his voice rising slightly.

Dad said, “Return, Cent, abort! Christ, her life support must be failing!”

I got my throat clear and took a wheezing breath, then another, finally saying, “S’okay. Got some water down the wrong pipe.”

Dad said, “Jesus!”

I heard Cory exhale before saying, “Microgravity can be tricky. Liquids don’t always behave like you expect.”

Tell me about it
. Though I didn’t think it was microgravity that was the problem.

When we’d tested the suit the day before, the water feed had behaved like any earthbound hydration pack—bite down to open the valve and suck to get the water into the mouth.

I cautiously bit down on the bite valve again, barely squeezing, and water sprayed hard into my mouth. I released the valve and swallowed the water.

“We’ve got a bit of an overpressure problem in the water compartment, Cory.”

“What? Oh!” I heard him smack his forehead with the palm of his hand. “The compartment is at a full atmosphere and the helmet is now a third of that! It must be squirting like a fire hose. It’s not leaking through the bite valve, is it? It wasn’t designed to hold a pressure differential—just open so you can suck water through the tube.
Last
thing you want is a helmet full of water.”

I glanced at the drops that were floating in front of my eyes. They were drifting past my cheeks, heading for the air return to the rebreather. The first filter cartridge the water would hit in the rebreather chamber was the activated charcoal, but next one after that was silica gel and it would probably soak up the drops.

Unless—

I realized that, really, the first thing the water would encounter on entering the chamber was one of the circulation fans.

I hoped it wouldn’t short out.

“The bite valve seems to be holding,” I said. “Maybe we can put an overpressure valve on the water compartment, to vent the excess when I’m, uh, exoatmospheric?”

“Sure. I’ve even got a spare that’s set to five psi. It’ll take less than a half hour to drill, tap, and install it. You want to come back and take care of that now?” From the tone of his voice, I knew which one
he
preferred.