With that Maggie walked off and the crowd was asked to take their seats. Frank checked his pocket and, finding nothing, went to his assigned seat — front row, good sightlines, and right next to Mrs. Stevens.
“Well?” Mrs. Stevens said as Frank sat down.
“Garbo.” She’s still on our side.
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, thank God. Anything else?”
Frank looked over to Beria, who had taken a front-row seat behind the North Korean negotiators. “Left jacket pocket.”
Immediately, Beria’s eyes grew wide and his hands began to tremble, as if he’d seen the scariest fucking thing imaginable. Which, knowing Maggie, he probably had.
“It’s over, Comrade,” Maggie said, stepping forward. “You’re really gonna want to give me that.”
Beria began sobbing uncontrollably — but he still held his pistol in his right hand, and a small device in the other. “No!” he wailed. “We are so close! A new dawn for all the Empowered!”
Danny walked over to Maggie’s side, sharing a small half-grin with her before turning to address Beria. “It’s over, Comrade. Let it go.”
“Never!”
Beria roared in agonized rage and lifted his gun, firing a shot toward Maggie. At the same time, he fumbled with the device in his hand…
… until a shot burst cleanly through his wrist, causing him to drop the detonator…
… which quickly flew away from him and landed several meters away.
Move. Now, came several voices in Frank’s head.
Rushing forward, Frank hit Beria with a left cross that sent the Russian sprawling.
And then all was silent.
Frank turned to check on Maggie, only to see her kneeling on the ground, holding a prone Danny in her arms.
“Oh, shit.” Frank rushed over and slid down next to them. “Move, let me see.”
Maggie relented and Frank went to work. Shot entered through left lung, between fifth and sixth ribs. Short range, likely reached his heart as well. Breathing shallow, pulse erratic. Emergency surgery needed stat. If a disembodied voice could sound grim, this was very grim indeed.
“Get off him!” Frank shouted, pushing Maggie back. “I need a knife! Now! Cal, get over here!”
One of the Russians offered him a rather wicked-looking field knife, which he used to cut away Danny’s uniform as Cal slid down next to him. “Oh, no. Oh, Danny, no.”
“Give him as much as you can,” Frank said.
Cal placed his hands on Danny’s shoulders for several long moments as Frank began to make a ventral incision over Danny’s heart.
“Frank.”
Frank looked over at Cal — who hadn’t aged.
“I can’t get him, Frank. I think he’s gone.”
Agreed. Breathing and pulse have ceased.
Frank shoved Cal aside and prepared to pound the hell out of Danny’s chest to try to revive him.
Then the world went dark.
Frank.
In the blackness, Frank could hear Danny’s voice. “Don’t go,” he pleaded. It was all he could say.
I’m already gone. Just shut up and listen.
“What?”
They’re not aliens or anything like that. The things beyond the vortex. They’re people. People who have passed on. They latch on to the living, giving them abilities.
“Why?”
To get out. The A-bomb. It ripped a hole between the living and the dead. It made them want to come back. All of this, all of our Enhancements — all designed to keep us fighting each other. To build up to another bomb to release more of them.
Frank tried to look around in the darkness for Danny, but saw nothing. “What happened?”
I think they did something back at Mountain Home to keep them from communicating. They were trying to push us. They nearly succeeded with Beria. They wanted him to detonate the H-bomb with Variants at ground zero to open up another vortex.
Frank thought back to the voices, how insistent they were. “So what now?”
Tell them to keep a lid on the vortex. Tell the Russians too. We have to keep them out. You’ll all still have your abilities, but we need to be careful now. Tell them, Frank.
“I will. I’ll tell them.”
Frank. I’m sorry. I tried to protect us.
“You did good, Dan. You really did.” Frank wanted to cry, but somehow knew he had to keep Danny talking. “Stay with me, pal.”
Tell the others. Be careful with their abilities. Tell them I tried. Tell—
Danny’s voice was suddenly cut off. Frank screamed into the darkness, but could hear nothing.
24
Hoyt Vandenberg received the sealed teletype from his aide and waited for him to close the door before opening it, as usual. The teletype itself was anything but.
The Air Force chief of staff read through it, smiling all the while, until he got to the end, which hit him like a truck and sent him staring off out his Pentagon window at the late night sky for a good ten minutes.
Danny Wallace had been the key to MAJESTIC-12, something Roscoe Hillenkoetter had recognized way back in 1945. Vandenberg and Hillenkoetter had convinced the powers that be — first the late James Forrestal, and then Harry Truman himself — that the Variants were indeed real, and that their abilities might be harnessed. And Wallace himself was their ace in the hole, with his ability to sense and track other Variants at great distances. Wallace put America ahead in a unique and frightening arms race.
And honestly, he was a good kid. He was a patriot, yes, but he genuinely cared about the Variants placed under his command. Compared to them, he was supposed to be the weak link — the tracker who really ought to just get out of the way once the quarry was found. He never did. He’d stuck by his people right until the very end.
Finally, Vandenberg picked up the phone and dialed a special number. It picked up on the third ring.
“Yes?”
“Mr. President, reporting in on MAJESTIC, sir.”
There was a short pause; Vandenberg imagined Eisenhower was shooing a bunch of people out of the White House residence. “All right, Hoyt. Go ahead.”
“Our people have captured Lavrentiy Beria in Panmunjom and kept him from detonating an H-bomb nearby,” Vandenberg said simply.
This time, the pause was a little longer. To be fair, it was a lot to take in. “Jesus Christ. Whose bomb?”
“Our person on the inside said Beria diverted it from the Soviet Union’s weapons program while he was still running it. This was not, repeat, not an official Soviet mission. It was all Beria.”
“And where’s that rogue bomb now?” the President demanded.
“Took some doing, but it’s been defused and disarmed. The nuclear material has been destroyed,” Vandenberg said. “Also, sir, I have to inform you. We lost Subject-1.”
There was a loud exhale on the other end of the line. “That puts a huge dent in the program, Hoyt.”
“Yes, it does, sir. He was a good man.”
“What about that thing in Idaho?”
Vandenberg reached over and pulled out another teletype he’d received an hour before. “No clear signals have been recorded. We believe the jamming worked.”
“You believe,” Eisenhower repeated, an edge in his voice. “You’re not sure?”