“Having you on our side might help prevent it.”
Bane shook his head. “The words sound good, but that’s all they are. You can’t control technology with such words any more than you can control the Soviets with them. Davey Phelps is an example of how far we can go to get nowhere. Vortex is finished and Chilgers is dead, but there’ll be others, probably are already. I think maybe the best thing to do is to see it out on a deserted island somewhere.”
Bane struggled up from his chair. The President rose to join him.
“I’ll be in touch when you return, Mr. Bane.”
Bane nodded and left the room.
“Car’s over there, Josh,” Harry Bannister said when Bane returned to the freezing air in the White House parking lot. The Bat had insisted on making the trip to Washington with him, if for no other reason than to act as his driver. He even found an agency which provided special vehicles for the handicapped. Now he wheeled himself alongside Bane toward the station wagon he had rented. “We heading back to New York?”
“Yeah.”
“Worried about the kid?”
“Not at all. The King moved into his hospital room. He’s not about to lose him twice.”
“For sure.” The Bat cocked his head back toward the White House. “How’d it go inside?”
“Well, I don’t think they’re about to let me quit again.”
“Can’t say I blame them. The President make you an offer?”
Bane nodded. “Which I promptly turned down. I told him I was finished.”
They had reached the car. Harry eased himself into the specially designed driver’s seat while Bane stowed the wheelchair in the wagon’s tailgate section and then slid gingerly into the passenger side.
“And are you finished?” the Bat wondered.
Bane just looked at him.
And suddenly Harry knew. “You’re playing hard to get, you bastard. That’s what this meeting was all about, for you to set the ground rules so you can have things on your own terms. And when you get back from taking the kid on vacation, what then, Winter Man? A return to the Game maybe?”
“Why, Harry,” Bane said with a wink, “you know me better than that.”
“Yeah? Well if you go back in just remember to take the Bat with you, you son of a bitch.”
Thick, wet snow flakes had begun to fall from the sky when Harry started the engine.
“Shit, will you look at that,” he moaned, as the windshield wipers swiped at them, squeaking against the glass. The Bat gunned the heater and blew into his hands.
Winter had returned.
A Biography of Jon Land
Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-nine novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. He began writing technothrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.
Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel, The Doomsday Spiral, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain US security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman’s tact.
In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent, The Last Prophecy, was released in 2004.
RT Book Reviews honored Land with a special prize for pioneering genre fiction, and his short story “Killing Time” was shortlisted for the 2010 Dagger Award for best short fiction and included in 2010’s The Best American Mystery Stories. He is also the author of the Caitlin Strong series, starring the eponymous Texas Ranger, a female character in a genre that Land has said has too few. The second book in the Caitlin Strong series, Strong Justice (2010), was named a Top Thriller of the Year by Library Journal and runner-up for Best Novel of the Year by the New England Book Festival. His first nonfiction book, Betrayal, written with Robert Fitzpatrick, tells the behind-the-scenes story of a deputy FBI chief attempting to bring down Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, and was published to acclaim in 2011. The Blaine McCracken novel Pandora’s Temple won the 2013 International Book Award for Best Thriller/Adventure, and was nominated for a 2013 Thriller Award for Best E-Book Original Novel.
Land currently lives in Providence, not far from his alma mater.
Author’s Note
The Safe Interceptor, Project Placebo, and Bunker 17 are products of my imagination. The Philadelphia Experiment, though, has been arguably documented in the superb investigative study by William Moore and Charles Berlitz, which provided the impetus for this novel.[1]
Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, meanwhile, remains a baffling and controversial concept. My special thanks to scientist Emery Pineo for making sense of it for me and theorizing on ways it might be employed to create the ultimate weapon. Thanks also go to Scott Siegel, scientist John Signore, and Dr. Morty Korn, whose brilliant career as a cardiologist is rivaled only by his expertise as a critic of my early drafts.
The principles and effects of the Vortex fields lie not only within the realm of credibility, but also within the reach of contemporary technology. Sometimes fiction seeks to imitate truth. Sometimes they are very much the same thing.
1
Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore,