“I see, sir.” Trevor rose. “Then, if we’ve no further business to discuss—”
“Trevor, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for this mission, for letting the Dornaani bury your father in space, for everything that our work has cost you. But if I had to do it all over again, I don’t know what I would—what I could—afford to do differently. Not with all that’s at stake.”
Trevor nodded. “I understand. I’ll wait to hear from you.” He turned and walked briskly out the door.
Downing leaned his head forward into his hands and expelled a long sigh. He closed his eyes, drank in the darkness…
After several moments, he heard the glass door to the inner office open. He did not look up, even when asked a question:
“I perceive that this meeting was—difficult?”
“Not really,” Richard lied.
“The operation you have designated Case Timber Pony has received final approval, has it not?”
“It has. When should we start tracking the system delivery assets?”
“I am already doing so. I have also passed word that our relocation is to commence in two days. Do you believe that is sufficient?”
“Yes,” sighed Downing. “The sooner we can get out of DC, the better, I think.”
“I expected you to say otherwise. The approaching holidays are customarily spent with family members and close friends, are they not?”
“Yes, they are. That’s why I want to leave.”
Opal discovered that she had arrived on the street. Which was fortunate, because she hadn’t been able to think since leaving Downing’s office and hustling into the elevator. Instead, she had been myopically preoccupied with the irrational fear that Downing would appear, chasing her, demanding that she return the hardcopy folder she had scooped up while he was in the bathroom prior to the meeting. It was labeled “Riordan, Caine/code-name ‘Odysseus’: Bio data,” and it might hold the secrets of the one hundred hours Caine had lost on the Moon just before being coldslept, fourteen years ago.
Walking—still without really thinking about what she was doing—she produced the folder from her backpack, grazed a finger along its outer edge. The cover turned back slightly. By mistake, of course. Not that she was snooping. Well, not for herself, anyway. This was for Caine, so he could finally have some answers about what happened on the Moon, about why Nolan and Downing had cryocelled him and impressed him into IRIS. Her own burning curiosity was not propelling her actions, of course. She had never stolen anything in her life—not even from the snotty rich girls that always pegged her as a tomboy army brat in each of the myriad of grade schools she attended while her family followed Dad on his endless restationings.
She realized she had inadvertently started glancing at the contents, had a quick impression of old photographs and news clippings. She shut the manila folder swiftly, heart racing. She had faced death on a battlefield frequently, and yet nothing had ever induced this particular species of terror—because this one was laced with guilt, as well. Which was foolish. Because after all, she hadn’t stolen Caine’s file; she had only borrowed it. And she hadn’t done so to satisfy her own curiosity. She had done it to help him. Only to help him.
She looked around her, discovered that she had somehow navigated herself to the correct street corner, and raised a hand. A driverless cab smoothly swerved across two lanes of traffic and came to a stop beside her.
The taxi was requesting the address and she was giving it, but that was happening someplace else, as if it was in a side closet of her mind. Because as soon as she had stepped inside the vehicle, was beyond Downing’s reach, she knew the truth of what she was doing. You’re a liar, Opal. This isn’t about Caine. This is about you, worrying that there’s something in those one hundred hours that could come between the two of you. Maybe he hooked up with some old girlfriend, there, or maybe—
She felt suddenly nauseated. At herself. So now you’re jealous of ghosts that might not even exist, Opal? How pathetic is that?
The question remained unanswered. She was too busy getting the encircling rubber band off the manila folder so she could devour its hated and feared contents.
Letters he sent to friends. High school records. A picture with a girl—but only a skinny, coltish girl—before a prom. It was a funny picture, too; he was kind of gangly as a kid. Pictures of his house on the Chesapeake Bay. Another, much earlier one with several teeth missing from his warm and easy smile, his silver-maned father with an arm around his shoulder, and some kind of sports field behind them. She studied his faintly freckled face and tousled hair. It was impossible to reconcile that boyish image with the mental portrait she had of the man whom fate had turned into an operative code-named Odysseus.
There were printouts of the first articles he published as a kid in the local paper, then later in Time, then reviews of his books, letters to publishers and editors that lauded him, castigated him, and finally eulogized him.
She came to the end of the folder. And had discovered absolutely nothing useful. Somewhere far away, the taxi announced that their arrival was imminent.
She looked down at the ravaged pieces of Caine’s life, scattered in her lap. What have I done? Or, more importantly, why did I need to do this? Because I’m afraid I’ll never see him again? Or that I will—only to find he has someone to go back to, a life in which I can have no part?
She closed the folder slowly. And now I can’t undo what I’ve done. Even if Downing never notices this file is missing, even if I return it first, I still stole it. Stole it to quiet my fears—but at the expense of what little privacy Caine has left. She looked up without seeing the dusk-darkening streets, tried to will away the two tears—one from each eye—that struggled free of her lower eyelids and streaked swiftly down each cheek. Damn me. Damn me.
This time, when the taxi’s robot voice announced her arrival, she heard it. “Now at Bethesda Hospital, Maternity Annex. Eleven dollars, please.”
Chapter Seventeen
Sitting beside Darzhee Kut, Yaargraukh peered out the rear of the extended cockpit canopy. The waves scudding beneath them were now occasionally distressed by small rocks, diminutive islands. “We are approaching the landing zone.”
Darzhee Kut clasped to his seat more tightly. This was a part of his calling that he had never envisioned. “How soon until we arrive?”
“Ten minutes,” said the Arat Kur at the controls. “Assuming—”
The pilot abruptly stopped speaking and pulled the spaceplane into a steep left-handed dive. The plume of a rocket—the thick white exhaust clumped and bloated like a kilometer-long length of intestines—shot up and past them, not more than ten meters away from Darzhee’s recoiling antenna.
“Counterfire!” Yaargraukh snarled into his commo clip.
Their two Hkh’Rkh escort craft banked, seeking the active sensors the humans had used in acquiring a lock on the spaceplane. An eyeblink later, a dense cluster of down-shooting, white-hot lines streaked dirtside, a ripple of supersonic cracklings trailing a second behind them: rail-launched kinetic-kill cluster warheads, heading planetside at six or seven times the speed of sound.