30
It was a plan that already felt as if it were coming apart at the seams. At least for Alison. Every surprise, at least in her mind, had been followed by a gut-wrenching consequence.
She sat motionlessly in her chair, staring at the phone on her desk. The small red light was still blinking. And it would continue to blink until she went through all the messages. Which she wouldn’t.
She lowered her face into her hands just as the phone rang again. Without looking, she lowered a finger and pressed the large button with a message icon on it, sending it to voicemail along with the others.
The retraction had finally been published. In a crushing blow, her reputation was permanently tarnished. And the calls flooding in now were little more than scandalous probes from scientific publications veiled as inquiries. Cynics hungry for condemnation.
As the echo of the last ring faded away, she heard a knock on the open door of her office. When she looked up, she saw John Clay watching her from the doorway, keeping himself up steadily now with only a cane.
“Are you okay?” he asked in a low voice.
“No. Not really.”
Clay stepped in and quietly crossed the room until he was beside her, where he dropped a hand gently around her shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
Alison closed her eyes. “It’s like I’ve got a giant knot in my stomach — that feels like nothing I’ve done even matters anymore.”
“It does,” Clay said. “People just aren’t ready.”
“What if they just don’t want to be ready?”
Clay frowned and reached out to pull a second chair closer. He then sat down and faced Alison somberly. “I know how you feel.”
She glared at him sarcastically. “No, you don’t. You’re perfect.”
He laughed at her joke. “I’m far from perfect, Ali.”
“Uh huh.”
Clay watched her, with a smile. “I don’t like broccoli.”
“What?”
“I don’t like broccoli,” he repeated. “I hate it.”
She folded her arms and tilted her head. “Oh, please.”
“I hate beets too. And I’m not a huge fan of heights.”
Alison’s eyes widened. “You’re afraid of heights?!”
Clay nodded.
“You… afraid of heights!”
He shrugged. “I said I wasn’t a fan.”
“Now that, I don’t believe. I’ve seen you—”
“It doesn’t mean I liked it,” he grinned.
“But, you didn’t…”
“Panic? No, I didn’t. I had to talk myself through it. My point is, I’m not perfect, Ali. Not by a long shot. None of us are. And the frustration you’re feeling is the same frustration I felt when I was a SEAL. Like a feeling of purpose wrapped inside a blanket of thanklessness. No one outside of a very small department ever knew what we did. And to make it worse, those times that the public did find out, the government lied about it or twisted the story until it was almost unrecognizable. In the beginning, I considered it a necessary evil, required to protect our great country. But after enough years, I began to realize that’s not true. That instead we are nothing more than a political pawn. Fighting over things that really only matter to some very powerful people.” He paused before continuing. “A lot of men have died for this country. Good men. Men of integrity and loyalty. And men that didn’t deserve to die for a lie.”
Clay stared into Alison’s reddened eyes. “But this is different. People may not know about it, yet, but it doesn’t change the fact that the entire world has just evolved into more than it was. How long it takes the planet to know and accept it is another story. And as much as we might not want to admit it, that part is not really up to us. The painful truth is that real change always takes longer than we expect. But you are making a difference in the world. A huge difference. I know it, our team knows it, and most importantly, you know it. So who cares what the rest of the world thinks?”
Alison’s face softened as she listened to his words. He was right. As painful as it was, some things were simply not under their control. “That may be true, but God, when do our own sacrifices end?”
Clay took her hand and kissed it. “The greater the struggle, the greater the life.”
She looked down at her hand, still inside his. She took a deep breath. Her eyes followed his muscular arms up and over his shoulders, then back into his eyes. She ended at his dark, wavy hair.
“What do you worry about, John?”
His lip curled at the question. It was an easy one. “I worry about you,” he said.
“About me? Why?”
Clay squeezed her hand. “My greatest fear is for us not to be able to grow old together.”
She melted. Alison leaned forward and placed her head gently against his chest. She’d never felt safer with anyone else in her life.
Still resting against him, Alison had a thought and suddenly smiled. “You know… Steve would say you guys are already old.”
When they emerged from her office, they found Lee Kenwood climbing the wide set of stairs.
He stopped and looked up at them. “We’re ready.”
Alison, still holding Clay’s hand, looked down at the room below them. The desks and tables sitting solemnly, near the glass wall of the giant saltwater tank. Their area seemed eerily quiet as if waiting for them.
Inside the tank, Sally and Dirk watched Alison on the second level. Her face was still and eyes filled with sorrow. They had never seen her quite like this: struggling to let go… to move on.
They felt her pain and both dolphins floated side by side in the water, wondering if they’d ever be back. Judging from Alison’s appearance, they wouldn’t.
Sally drifted forward, nosing up to the glass, and watched Alison as she descended the stairs. After crossing the carpeted floor, Alison flattened her hand against the tank. She left it there for a long time before Sally spoke.
We ready Alison. We go now. Beautiful.
On the other side, Alison listened to the translation and merely nodded her head. She then let her hand fall from the glass and turned around to face Clay and Lee. Her eyes scanned the room before stopping on IMIS. The giant computer loomed large against the far wall, made up of racks filled with servers from top to bottom. Their fans created a gentle hum, with hundreds of green lights blinking on and off. A reminder that it was forever churning through its data, searching for ever more complex relationships between the languages.
The rest of the room was surprisingly nondescript: blank white walls and dark, two-tone carpet. The simplicity of not just the room but their entire research center seemed odd now. Almost surreal.
With that, she blinked and followed the men out through a door on the other side of the tank and up a set of stairs. While they climbed, Dirk and Sally darted up and through the deep concrete channel extending out to the shallow beach and the open ocean beyond.
At the shore, a long dock extended much farther over the water. It served as a lingering reminder of the old cannery that had once occupied the site. Most of the dock had been repaired and now held a large Teknicraft aluminum-hulled catamaran, tied securely to the dock’s cleats from both bow and stern.
Alison mused at the sight of their latest boat. They’d been going through boats faster than… well, almost as fast as Dirk went through fish.
They reached the dock to find DeeAnn and Dulce already waiting. Their friend was wearing her dark gray translation vest.
“You okay?” DeeAnn asked.
“Yeah. It’s just sobering, that’s all.”
“I completely understand. It just hasn’t been the same since Juan.”