Rift (24 page)

nine

I
nitial thoughts are incoherent. An overwhelming feeling of artifice, of falseness, comes over me, as if my eyes can't be trusted. As if what I'm seeing is a well-designed movie special effect, or maybe extremely high resolution camcorder footage broadcast onto the wall. It must be an optical illusion of some kind. It
must
be.

These thoughts are evaluated and rejected by my mind in fractions of a second. I know what I'm seeing. I know who this person is. I know him like no one in the world, but I don't know what to say to him. Or how to address him. By his name? By
my
name?

His thoughts must be similar to my own. He doesn't seem surprised, but I know he is a person who can easily mask emotions.

“Hello,” I say. I want to offer my hand, but he has not ventured much farther than the office doorway. Several feet still separate us.

“Hello,” he returns.

Neither of us knows what to say next.

“You two are gonna have to work close together,” Clay says. “I suggest you get on speaking terms. In the meantime, let's go out into the warehouse and look at what we've got so far.”

Clay starts toward the rear door, and Crystal immediately follows him. Cameron and I both stay put.

“Have they told you what happened to me?”

“Pretty much,” he says. “You must have had a terrible time. It certainly shows.”

“How do you mean?”

“You're very pale. Your eyes are red. You look tired.”

“I was sick in the car. We came a long way.”

Where do we go from here? What do we say? The only thing that comes to mind is to catch up, to brief each other on everything that has happened since the transmission, since we separated.

“How is Misty? Is she okay?”

“Misty's fine. And for the moment has no idea what's going on.”

This is a relief.

“And you know about Tom?”

“I'm still kind of in shock. I can't picture him dead. This is all so unreal.”

“So what do you know about everything?” I ask him. “What do you know about me?”

“I know Tom picked you up from the transmission station in Phoenix. You guys went to a strip club that night, where you met Crystal, and then you played golf the next morning. That's where NeuroStor first tried to apprehend you.”

“What else?”

“I don't know a whole lot more except these guys want to use us to help bring down NeuroStor. What have they told you?”

“Nothing more than that. And they really haven't told me anything about you at all. I don't understand how NeuroStor returned you. I talked to Misty while I was in Arizona. What the hell could they have told you guys to reconcile that?”

“You'd be surprised how believable the story was,” Cameron tells me. “I woke up in a transmission portal two days ago, but to me, of course, no time had passed. I didn't even know I was still in Houston. But when I went to put my clothes on, they weren't the same as what I had been wearing before. The door opened after I dressed, and that's when I saw the same NeuroStor employees who were there before. I was disoriented. Upset. When I asked what the hell had happened, Batista and some other guy whisked me into a room and closed the door.”

“What did he say?”

“That there must have been some kind of problem with the transmission. As far as they knew, I came through fine in Phoenix, but at some point had stumbled back into the terminal asking to be sent back to Houston. According to Batista, I couldn't remember anything after I arrived. He rattled off a bunch of unclear technical talk that was supposed to be an explanation. Then he apologized profusely and offered more money for my promise not to go public.”

“What a motherfucker. What a moneygrubbing prick.”

“There was no point in fighting with him. I signed the release. He didn't have to give me anything. And to be honest, I was just happy to be alive.”

Of course, Cameron didn't know, as we all do now, that he never left at all. He didn't know everything I was going through, or that I even existed.

“What was it like?” he asks. “The transmission, I mean.”

“Just like we expected. Like I fell asleep and woke up in Arizona.”

“What does it feel like now?”

“Hard to describe,” I say. “You know how it feels when you take a nap in the afternoon, how—”

“When you wake up, you feel like you're not yourself. Like you're just . . . off.”

“Right. Sort of like that with nausea and dizziness thrown in. And I had seizures.”

“They told me that. I really don't know what to say. Somehow I think I should apologize, but it was . . . I guess it was
your
decision, too. Of course, if I had known something like this was going to happen, I would never have—”

“You don't have to apologize,” I say. “I know how you feel.”

“But in a way, I did this to you. You're the victim. It's like I . . .”

“Like you what?”

“I don't know what it's like. It just makes me feel badly, because what—”

“What am I going to do now? Now that I don't have a wife or a job or a place to live?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

“Don't worry about it. Please. Don't feel sorry for me.”

For a little while we are silent. We search for a new subject, and now something else occurs to me.

“Since Misty doesn't know what's going on,” I ask him, “how did you get here? Crystal told me the house was being watched.”

“We came to Dallas to accept the settlement from NeuroStor and to stay at her mother's for a few days. I went to play golf this morning, and the guy they paired me with turned out to be one of Clay's hired soldiers.”

“Hired soldiers?”

“For the assault on the NeuroStor building. You know about that, right?”

“Crystal told me they were going inside to get someone from NeuroStor on tape.”

“Kind of reckless if you ask me. I thought a less aggressive approach, like going on a news program to tell our story, would be more prudent. It would accomplish the same thing, anyway.”

I nod my head. Not much of a shock that we think alike.

“So this guy at the golf course, what did he tell you? How did he convince you to come with him?”

“He just told me the story. Most of what I just told you is what I found out on the course. I was even par until he started talking about this, and then I made three double-bogeys in a row. Finished with a ninety.”

Cameron smiles at this.

“What?”

“I thought you'd be disappointed,” he says. “I mean, we haven't shot ninety in probably ten years.”

This man obviously doesn't know what it's like to be presented face-to-face with his own death.

“Look,” he adds, “I know that sounds stupid. But you've got to understand, this shocked the hell out of me. I didn't want to believe it at first. I
couldn't
believe it. But when they told me you were sick, how Tom had died trying to get you away from those goons, I had to at least come here and see if it was real. And if it was real, I was willing to do whatever I could to help you.”

Clay pokes his head through the warehouse door and looks at us sharply.

“What are you two waiting for? A wrapped invitation?”

A wrapped invitation. What a yahoo.

“Get in here and take a look at what we've got,” he tells us.

Cameron and I follow Clay into the warehouse. The collection of equipment is nothing like what I expected.

“Is this everything?”

“What'd you expect?” Clay says. “We don't have an army.”

Indeed. There are two wooden worktables, one on each side of the door, and I count a total of six large weapons—machine guns of some kind. Beside each of these sits a holstered handgun, extra ammo clips, a harness, and a brown utility belt. A white van stands beyond the worktables.

“Each of us will be outfitted with two weapons—an MP-5 machine gun and a .45 Sig Sauer. The MP-5 will be your primary weapon. The Sig will be concealed. We also obtained several pounds of C4 plastic explosive.”

Six people. He expects us to go into the NeuroStor main building with six people? I look at Crystal, surely she must also recognize this as futility, but I don't catch her eyes.

“The last item you'll carry is a hidden video system. A camera is fitted into each helmet and will be wired to a broadcast-quality digital video recorder. An FM transmitter will send the video signal to a receiver in the van. We'll all be live, and our man in the van will select the best angle for broadcast. He'll beam the signal to the NBC satellite. The affiliates could preempt us, of course, and many of them surely will. But we'll likely have at least a few minutes of nationwide coverage, and of course all stations will tape the entire broadcast.”

“How are we supposed to get inside the building?”

“First of all, you two aren't part of the assault. You don't have any combat training, and if you get killed before the broadcast, then there isn't much of a point, is there?”

“I suppose not.”

“Anyway, to answer your question: We have someone inside. There will be a fire. We'll be disguised as firefighters and go in through an emergency exit. You two will be with us at first, but then you'll hide in a designated room while the rest of us take the building. After everything is secure, we'll bring you to the action and begin taping.”

“So basically we're staging a fire drill?” I ask him.

“It sounds crude, but the employees will be running scared, and I don't think their security will expect a full-on attack in broad daylight.”

“Who are we going to capture on tape?” I ask. “Won't everyone be running out of the building?”

“Our target is the boardroom,” he says. “We want to talk to the men who really run this fucking thing. All these men have their own offices, of course, but our information says Batista is meeting with them on the morning in question. We'll use their ‘sophisticated' security system to turn that room into a jail cell.”

Crystal walks closer to Clay and leans against his shoulder.

“You really came through for us, Clay. We couldn't have organized this without you.”

“What are the explosives for?” I ask.

“After our broadcast,” Clay says, “we might need to destroy the building.”

“Why?”

“If something goes wrong—if the broadcast isn't successful, or if part of our team is disabled and we aren't able to arrange the video at all—we'll cripple them in another way: by destroying computers and hardcopy files. C4 is a devastating explosive. Strategically placed, we have more than enough to level their building.”

He grabs the duffel bag and shoves it toward us. Cameron and I both shrink away.

“It ain't gonna bite you,” he says. “Watch this.”

He tosses the bag into the air above us and grins as Cameron and I fall backwards trying to get away. The duffel bag drops onto the concrete floor with a harmless thud.

“This stuff is stable. You can even set it on fire and it won't explode. But an electric charge, that's a different story. All I have to say is you better be far away when it detonates.”

He points to another, smaller duffel bag.

“Those are blasting caps and simple wind-down timers. Maximum time: five minutes. That's not any time at all, especially if we detonate on the top floor. The NeuroStor building is nine stories high.

“If something very bad happens, something that prevents you from leaving the building, there are hand devices that you press and release for instant detonation. We'll practice that later.”

I shudder at the thought of hand-detonating a lump of plastic explosive. Whoever did so would be nothing more than carbon goo scattered among the ruins. And how likely is it that “something very bad” will happen? Would Clay answer honestly if I asked?

But I guess it doesn't matter. This is never going to work.

         

The car is quiet on the way back to the motel room. Clay doesn't come with us—he lives in Irving and promises to meet us later today for a midafternoon lunch—so it's just Crystal, Cameron, and myself.

I want to talk to the guy, but what is there to say? I can't ask him what his interests are or what he does for a living or who his favorite sports team is. And what's strange is that, instead of wondering what differences there might be between us, all I can think about are the many embarrassing things about myself that I've never told anyone. Autoerotic idiosyncrasies. The huge crush I had for the cheerleading captain back in high school. My failed first effort at sex after the senior prom. How I've always secretly hated pizza but refused to tell anyone because they might think I was weird. Everyone likes pizza, don't they? And if Crystal wasn't around, I would ask him if he's thinking the same things. Our responses to the world, after all, are nothing more than the accumulation of all experienced stimuli. Cameron and I share everything. Everything, that is, save one notable exception: the past three days. Three days that have been the most important of my life.