Rift (27 page)

Crystal doesn't have an immediate answer, so I press on.

“This doesn't seem like a well-funded outfit to me. It seems like something thrown together by a couple of kids who are in way over their heads.”

“You think kids could come up with a half-dozen MP-5's and enough C4 to level a building?”

“I'm just saying that I expected more. I think something about what you've told me doesn't add up. I think you've been misleading me.”

Crystal looks away.

“Well? Am I right?”

“Maybe,” she says. “But if I'm going to tell you, I don't want to do it here. Let's go back to the room and talk.”

         

Crystal pulls a T-shirt and shorts over her bikini and then closes the drapes, cloaking the hotel room in shadows. I rummage through the Dillard's bag until I find a white linen shirt of my own. We each sit on one of the queen-size beds and face each other.

“You're right, we've sort of misled you,” Crystal says. “I guess it was really me.
I
misled you.”

My heart accelerates to just over one thousand beats per minute.

“About what?”

“About who we are. When I told you we were a nationwide organization, that we had contacts in Congress and the FBI; when I told you all that stuff about airlines and Big Oil being involved—that was all bullshit.”

“What? You lied to me? Why? Why would you do that?”

“We needed your help.
I
needed your help. And I didn't think you would cooperate if you knew the real situation.”

“The real situation? What the hell does that mean?”

Crystal looks away. First at the dormant television, then at the closed motel room door.

“The man who created this whole mess—NeuroStor, the volunteer program, the idea to use an electronic storage company as a front to build the transmission machine—his name is Stanley King. He's one of the officers who was waiting when you came out of the transmission portal in Phoenix.”

I remember this fellow. A big man in his sixties. The imposing one who questioned me as I struggled to suppress my excitement upon making the trip in one piece.

“And he has nothing to do with Aryans or white supremacy or anything like that,” Crystal continues. “Lee's best friend was the victim of a hate crime a few years ago. It affected him a lot and he wanted to, you know, fight back. All he really ended up doing was learning way too much for his own good about the white supremacist movement.” A guilty look settles over her face. “It was the rest of us . . . we decided to use what he knew as our cover story.”

Crystal's eyes break contact with mine as she says this last piece, angling toward the floor, as if anything down there would surely be less threatening than looking at me.

“Wow,” I say to her. “I guess at this point the average person would begin to wonder if anything you've
ever
told me was true.”

“I expected you to say that, and the only answer I have for you is that the intention behind what we're doing is true, just not the details.”

“But how am I supposed to trust someone so selective with the facts?”

“I'm sorry, Cameron. You would never have given us any credit if you knew the intimate nature of our battle.”

“‘The intimate nature of your battle'? What are you talking about?”

“Well, I didn't want to . . . I mean, you don't have to know every—”

“Jesus Christ, Crystal! Can't you be honest with me now? After everything that's happened, as hard as I've tried to—”

“Okay, okay. I was Stanley's administrative assistant. His secretary. Here in Plano. I'm not from Arizona.”

“And?”

“And we sort of got into a relationship, and—”

“And you were fucking him? Is that what you're trying to tell me? The man is forty years older than you, Crystal! Jesus Christ!”

“What the hell does his age have to do with anything?”

She's right. His age has everything to do with nothing. I suppose I should at least attempt to contain my jealousy for the time being. It's not like Crystal is a virgin. Just because I'm smitten with her, just because this anger has somehow intensified my electric desire for her, that doesn't mean I'm the only man who has ever felt this way. Certainly she must have slept with several men, perhaps a score of them, I mean,
look
at her. She must have to beat men away with a stick when she goes out on weekends, and I have the nerve to be jealous of her because some rich old man impressed her with his baritone voice, his command of power, his—

“It didn't last long, Cameron. I realized pretty quickly that I was being shallow. And you're right, the age thing was always going to be a problem.”

“So what happened? You dumped him, and he fired you?”

“No,” Crystal says with a distant look in her eyes. For a moment she doesn't answer, but just when I'm about to say something, she continues. “Stanley was a bigger man than that. When I told him I didn't think it was going to work, he gave me the option to leave or stay. I decided to leave.”

“Did you know what was really going on? About the transmission machine and what he planned to do with it?”

“Eventually I did.”

“Is that what made you leave?”

“Yes and no. Stanley admitted to me early on that the whole NeuroStor thing was just a means to an end—the storage technology was important, but certainly not the crown jewel. He couldn't really keep the transmission machine from me because of the administrative work I did for him. He told me all along that he planned to market the machine as a transportation device, something he claimed would eventually change the way all Americans traveled. But later . . .”

I wait for Crystal, but here she has decided to stall.

“Later what?”

“Later, I met the guy who ran the R and D offices in Wyoming. No one at NeuroStor knew about this facility because it wasn't on the books. The R and D guy was much younger. You could say he was Stanley's right-hand man, because without Rodrigo there never would—”

My mouth opens, noticeably, and Crystal waits for me to say something. Instead I fill the room with silence.

“—have been a machine,” she decides to finish.

Batista.

Thunderous silence, still.

BATISTA!

“Cameron?”

I get up from the bed and walk over to the window. The parking lot is sunny. A ten-year-old boy glides across the asphalt in Rollerblades.

“Crystal, pardon me for saying this, but is there
anyone
in this soap opera—this real-life fantasy—that you
haven't
slept with?”

Her eyes shrink, dark and wounded.

“What do you mean by that?”

“What I mean, Crystal, is that you and Lee have sucked me into this . . . this lover's spat, and yes, maybe it's more than that because of what's at stake, because of this machine that someone created, that someone somehow built in spite of the physics laws it seems to ignore. Yes, maybe there are bigger consequences at stake, but in the end you got yourself caught in a love triangle, with King and that slimy, greasy motherfucker, and the only way you saw fit to extricate yourself from said situation was to find
another
boyfriend, another man perfectly willing to stick his dick in you, a muscle-bound soldier of fortune with just enough knowledge of guerrilla warfare to help you break into the offices from which you've been banished, enabling you to put a stop to
something,
God only knows what the
real
purpose of the machine is—”

“Cameron—”

“—to make you look like a hero—”

“Cameron!”

“What?”

“Clay is my brother.”

“What?”

“Why would . . . why did you think we were—”

“I heard you while I was asleep.”

“What did you hear?”

“I thought I heard you . . . well, I thought you were having sex. With him.”

“Jesus, Cameron. Of course you didn't hear that.”

I just stare at her.

“You also said you heard an explosion. You were obviously dreaming.”

I walk back to the bed and sit down again, still with nothing to say.

“I'm sorry if you think I'm a slut. I don't see how dating both of those guys makes me different from any other girl out there. But—”

“But
Batista
? Come on, Crystal! He's—”

“You don't know anything about him, Cameron, so shut the hell up about that, all right?”

“Believe me, I know plenty about—”

“You don't have to help us, Cameron. I will understand perfectly if you don't want anything to do with me, considering how I've misled you. But the rest of us . . . we still have to go through with this. We can't just sit back and let them test this machine on innocent people—people like you, for instance—and then sell it to a foreign government that will just end up using it against us at some point.”

“What? They want to sell it to a foreign government?”

“Israel has sent over representatives. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I even heard that a former KGB agent turned Russian mob boss got wind of the machine and threatened Stanley, who of course isn't afraid of anyone. But it did convince him to move the timetable forward, and that's why we have to act now. I think he wants to sell soon, even before all the problems are completely worked out.”

“I don't understand where the money is coming from. You sure he doesn't have a buyer already, someone pumping money to him? Because a project like this would take an extraordinary amount of investment capital.”

“Stanley made a fortune off the Internet. I think he was in on the Yahoo IPO a few years back and owned a bunch of Oracle stock. And because he needed liquidity to form NeuroStor, he cashed in just about everything well before the NASDAQ nosedive.”

“Still, if that netted him, say, a half-billion dollars, would it be enough for this?”

“Regardless of where he gets his money,” Crystal says, “we can't let him sell the machine. If it gets into the wrong hands a lot of innocent people will die, Cameron.”

“Crystal, I have to admit that doesn't matter a whole lot to me. I don't care a whole lot about battles in faraway countries. Even though I'm supposed to now because of the constant battle against foreign terrorism, I don't. I don't care. And right now I can't really find the desire to care about any of the rest of this considering how you used me.”

“Look, Cameron. I'd be angry, too. I hate it when people lie to me. But I needed your help. Badly. And I was afraid you wouldn't want anything to do with me when you learned the real truth.”

“But this isn't about you. It's about King and Batista. I don't understand why you thought it would be better to lie to me than to admit you slept with them. Because from what you told me, that's the limit of your involvement in their plans.”

“I was embarrassed, Cameron,” Crystal says. Her eyes gleam as she tries not to cry. “Look at how you reacted when you found out. Imagine if I had tried to tell you that before we got to know each other. I'd have lost you right away.”

Knowing full well that her tears could be artificial, that she could be manipulating me again, my anger softens anyway. What a predictable fool I am.

“You don't know that.”

“I do! I do know that! You have such a good heart, such strong moral convictions, and I'm just a pretty face who got into this shit because a couple of guys wanted to fuck me.”

Of course, here I sit, condemning her lies, when all I want is to fuck her, too.

“Crystal, don't cry.”

“This is just so overwhelming. I'm not as stupidly confident as Clay. I don't think we can pull this off. Especially when the most important evidence we have—you—doesn't trust us anymore.”

“I don't know if we can pull it off either, but you know I have to try.”

Crystal looks up at me.

“You do?”

“Look, it pisses me off that you lied to me. But in the end I'm still better off than if you hadn't helped me. By now, without your help, Misty and I might both be dead. And even if I don't make it out of this intact—who knows what's going to come of this ‘transmission sickness'—I can't just stand by and let Misty suffer at the hands of Batista. Because if I don't do something to help, he could kill her.”

Crystal absorbs this information, knowing as she probably did that I would be forced to come to this conclusion whether I wanted to or not.

“But I'm not going to do it the way Clay explained. I don't want to be pulled into the mix after you guys have already done the hard part.”

“What do you propose, then?”

For a moment I hesitate, unsure what to say, even though somehow my mind has already made a decision—that this is my battle, not theirs. Certainly we both agree that NeuroStor must be stopped, but no longer do I care why Crystal thinks so or what she and her friends have planned. I stepped into that transmission portal four days ago to make a difference in this world, to do something with my life, and now, finally, I have found a platform upon which to do so.

“I'm going in alone.”

“Alone? Cameron, that's suicide!”

“If we catch them by surprise, I don't think it matters how many go in.”

“I'm telling you it won't work,” Crystal says.

“And I'm telling you I won't do it any other way.”

“But this is my battle, too, Cameron. I was getting ready for it a long time before you stepped into the picture.”

“Yeah, but now I
am
in the picture. And I'm the only one here who is likely to die no matter what we do.”

“I understand that, but—”

“I don't think so, Crystal. I just said that I'm likely to
die
. One minute I'm going to be a living, sentient organism, and the next I'm going to be gone. Dead. The whole world will just go on, just like it always has, but I won't be part of it anymore. Because of this fucking machine! I don't know if you understand that at all.”