She went silent, knowing there was something he wanted to say.
'You're really sure about this Vegas thing?' he asked finally.
She shook her head. 'Why do you ask? No, as it happens. But we know the guy who killed himself here was one of the Children. It's a lead. It's the best we can do at the moment without some hard intelligence. Like I said, we need to cover every option.'
'I understand that.'
'But?' she asked, puzzled.
He tried to smile. It seemed to be his lot in life to bring people down sometimes. 'I don't know. The idea of Charley in Vegas sounds odd to me. You be careful. I like these conversations. I'd prefer them to continue.'
She looked flustered, in a way that Lieberman couldn't help but find amusing.
'Is that a CIA blush, my dear?'
Helen Wagner's face did go noticeably pink right then. 'Dammit, Michael. Time and place.'
'Okay. That's a deal,' he said, feeling a touch guilty for embarrassing her this way. 'Hey, you want to see something that proves how careful we all ought to be? How different this world is starting to behave right now?'
Lieberman's face disappeared. She heard him speaking off camera to Schulz.
'Yes?' she said to nobody.
The tanned, intelligent features came up on the screen again. 'I got to move this little camera thing from the monitor to the window so it's looking outside, not at my ugly face. Won't take a moment.'
She waited, watched the moving image on the screen, then closed her eyes. 'Do I really want to see this?'
'Sure! This isn't The X-Files. This is real.'
In the Gulfstream jet moving effortlessly toward Vegas, she took a good look out this distant window in a remote Mediterranean farmhouse. The sun was setting in a sky the likes of which she had never seen. It was gold, burnished gold, mixed with a bright, sparking, rolling overlay of green, like an electric curtain, a dancing light show in the heavens.
'Tell me I'm not going crazy, Michael.'
'Of course you're not. If you lived in Iceland you wouldn't think twice about seeing this. The Aurora Borealis. The Northern Lights. And as fine a show as I've ever seen. You'd almost think this was the opening night of something new.'
'Don't say that,' she whispered.
'Hey, there you go, off on an X-Files trip again. This is pure physics. The Aurora is nothing but the solar wind burning up in our atmosphere.'
'In the Mediterranean? It's rare even in southern Canada.'
'I told you we had an industrial-strength dose of this stuff right now. Wait your turn. I'd wager the puny contents of my solitary bank account you'll be seeing this across a lot of the northern hemisphere tonight, probably tomorrow night too. Though Vegas may be pushing it a little far south. Sorry to disappoint. And you know something?'
'What?'
'It's beautiful. In a kind of cold, cosmic way.'
'Beautiful?'
'Yeah. Like a sign. The times they are a-changing. Remember that one?'
'Not my generation, Michael.'
'Or mine really. "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command." Maybe the generation doesn't matter that much after all.'
'I have to go,' she said, seeing, somewhat to her relief, Levine and Barnside awake and in conversation at the front of the plane.
'Right,' he said. 'Just don't get scared by what you see in the sky. That's natural, whatever we think. It's what's inside us that's scary. Sure frightens the life out of me.'
She looked at this strange image on the monitor — the Mediterranean sky alive with gold and a dancing green curtain of arcs and bands and coronas of strangely coloured light — and said, 'I'll take your word on that.'
CHAPTER 37
Beneath the Green Sky
Bennett looked a broken man. He sat in a corner of the control room, nursing a tumbler full of Scotch, silent, hardly watching what was going on. Lieberman nodded at Schulz. 'Is the old guy still with us?'
'Up to a point. Bevan really chewed him out about security after we lost the dome. Can you believe that? Like it's his fault? Now that it's up to the Shuttle and whatever they can run up in Vegas, I guess he feels out of it.'
'Speaking of the devil, where the hell is he?'
'Out with what remains of the military guys,' Schulz replied. 'Looking for anyone who's still up there. After that we go quiet here until some word comes back from the Shuttle. The military go back to Palma in case they're needed for crowd-control duties. Nothing left to guard here, I guess. All they're thinking about is tomorrow, what happens if we get it wrong and the storm does hit. Understandable, I guess.'
'They come across anyone else up there on the mountain?'
Schulz sighed. 'A few. You look tired, Michael. To be frank, you look terrible. Why don't you get some sleep? When the Shuttle comes up with something, we'll wake you. Until then, we're pretty much out of this show.'
The latest activity report was done. It was available on the network for Helen or anyone else who had access to it, and the signs were as bad as Lieberman had feared.
'What happened to Mo?' he asked.
'I think she went upstairs too. Her kid was absolutely out of it, from what I saw. You could all do with some sleep. If — correction, when — Arcadia finds that thing, you're in the driver's seat.'
'I know.' Lieberman's head hurt. And only part of it was the wound.
'Take a break, man. Think of that as an order, and be assured I'll be shaking you awake before long.'
'Sir,' he said, making a fake salute.
'And Michael?'
'Yeah?'
'I hate to ask. You and Mo? Is there something going on there?'
He blinked. 'Are you serious? Under these circumstances?'
'No, I didn't mean it like that. I just thought there was something a little weird between you when you got back.'
'We got blown out of the sky and had to walk a million miles to find you people. Plus I confuse her, I guess. I'm a confusing sort of person.'
'Say that again. Is that why you two can't look each other in the eye?'
Some things you forget, Lieberman thought. Some things just hang around in the back of your memory, waiting for you to give them a little nudge. 'Is that right? Search me.'
He shuffled off out of the barn, back to the mansion, past the quiet bunches of soldiers who were waiting under this strange green light, then slowly climbing into the trucks taking them back to the city fifty miles away. His head was hurting. He was feeling tired, but alert too, something harrying away at the back of his consciousness.
The bar was empty. He surveyed the line-up of bottles, then picked up some mineral water, threw a few chunks of ice and lemon into the glass, poured himself a big one, and went upstairs. He walked into his room feeling dog-tired, the drink slopping over the edge and splashing onto the tile floor. And jerked upright, stopped by the bed. The big double doors to the balcony were open. Outside, lit by the strange sky, Mo Sinclair sat on a simple white chair, back to him, a glass of something in her hand. From this angle she looked so thin, unformed, like a teenager.