But near-zero isn’t zero.
“Turn around very slowly and show me your hands,” the security guard said.
Something in the voice tickled the back of Keene’s memory, but he tried to ignore it and stay focused on the mission. He turned, keeping his eyes fixed on the explosives and his hand covering the grenade. Maybe he could fool the guard, act like a regular Joe.
He started to set a smile on his face and looked up to make eye contact with the stranger. When he did, he saw the impossible: Terris McKendry, very much alive, aiming a pistol at his chest.
Keene blinked. McKendry’s face looked like an astonished child’s as his jaw fell open. “What the hell?”
Stupefied, Keene almost dropped the grenade. The motion startled McKendry, who jerked the pistol.
Involuntarily, Keene ducked. “You’re dead,” he muttered.
McKendry looked at his friend as if that were the stupidest thing he had ever heard, but he clamped his lips shut. Keene knew that the same words had been about to come from the other man’s mouth.
“I watched you die,” the bigger man said. “Blown overboard. They never found your body. The sharks got it.”
“I saw the bullets hit. I saw you thrown off the bicycle.”
For a moment the two men held their weapons, facing each other. Keene kept his hand on the grenade; McKendry’s pistol was still targeted at his partner. Finally Joshua laughed out loud, the braying chuckle that had always annoyed his friend.
“What are you doing here?” McKendry lowered his weapon a fraction of an inch.
Keene tucked the grenade in his jumpsuit pocket. “What areyou doing here, Terris? Helping out those bastards at Oilstar?” He raised his hands to indicate the totality of theValhalla platform. “Don’t you know what Frik did?”
“Why are you doing the dirty work of those Green Impact scum, Josh? Selene Trujold has the blood of dozens on her hands. Probably more. You saw yourself what she did to the crew on the tanker.”
“Yes,” Keene said, uneasy. “But I also saw what an Oilstar assassination squad did to her and all the other members of her team; slaughtered most of them and sent the rest off to rot in some Venezuelan jail.”
McKendry turned gray. “You were there?”
“I was off in Pedernales getting supplies. When I came back, I found the camp destroyed. Selene died in my arms.” He gritted his teeth. “Damn it, Terris! I loved her.”
“She would have killed you eventually. Maybe I saved your ass.”
“Maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She was a killer, Joshua. A mad dog, willing to murder innocent people to make her point. I had to shoot her.” McKendry sounded as if he were working as hard to convince himself as he was to convince Keene.
“You’re full of shit, Terris,” Keene said. “She wasn’t shot, she was stabbed.”
“What do you mean she was stabbed?”
“I mean she was stabbed. With this.” He pulled the knife from his waist and held it pommel-out to his partner. The etched initials J.R. caught the light.
“Where did you get that?”
Keene couldn’t figure out his partner’s reaction. “I picked it up from the pool of Selene’s blood that she dropped it in. Terris, what is your problem?”
The big man’s pallor had improved. He shook his head and stood up straight, as if a large weight had been removed from his shoulders.
Keene knew better than to push the subject. He sheathed the knife and said, “Did you ever stop to wonder about the real reason Frik wanted this artifact?” He grabbed Selene’s fragment out of his pocket and held it up. At times, he had wanted to wipe the surfaces clean, to remove the discolorations, but instead he had let the bloodstains dry on it. Selene’s blood.
McKendry stared at the object. Keene dangled it like a carrot in front of his friend’s eyes. “Yes, I got it, Terris. I also found out why Frik really wants it.”
He rapidly summarized what he had learned: Paul Trujold’s discovery of the artifact’s true power, and the real purpose behind Frikkie’s Daredevil scheme—knowledge that had cost Selene’s father his life.
Keene watched McKendry absorb the information, run it through his logic filters. He knew McKendry’s process, knew his partner would come to the same conclusions he himself had reached.
Finally, in a lowered voice, McKendry said, “If it were anybody else telling me this, I wouldn’t even listen.”
“But it is me, Terris. Damn it, it’s the truth.”
McKendry gestured with the pistol, not in a threatening manner, just as the most obvious means to point. “I think you’d better disassemble those explosives. You won’t be needing them now.”
Keene hesitated, feeling his heart turn to lead in his chest. “I promised Selene,” he said. “With her dying breath she asked me to shut down Oilstar, to get even with them. I can’t ignore that.”
“And I gave my word to protect this platform. It may not be worth what I thought it was, but I won’t let you destroy theValhalla .” He paused. “There’s got to be some other way.”
The two men held their ground, each waiting for the other to speak or offer a suggestion. After a minute, Keene said, “Crap. Maybe I don’t have to blow up theValhalla to be true to my promise.”
A short time later, the two men stood side by side at the edge of the heliport deck, high above the water. McKendry’s on-duty security men had encountered them and waved at their chief. They had not bothered to question the identity of the man wearing Virata’s work overalls. McKendry growled under his breath; Keene snickered at their incompetence.
The smaller man held the odd artifact that had been excavated from deep beneath the sea. He stared at it for the last time.
“I sure wish I understood what this is,” he said. “But I know it’s not worth all the grief it’s caused.” He held it high, dangling it more than a hundred feet over the waters of the Gulf of Paria, and thought of his promise to Selene. Frik Van Alman would be more upset about not regaining the artifact than he would ever have been about losing the oil rig.
He smiled at the thought of his revenge, muttered something under his breath, and let go.
As the artifact droped from his fingers, it reflected the lights of the rig oddly, as if the perspective were wrong. The optical illusion made it appear to hang in the air.
McKendry’s big hand reached out in a flash and grabbed the object before it could fall to the water.
“No. That wouldn’t finish it, Joshua.” Keene glared at his friend, feeling betrayed, but McKendry continued. “Frik would find it. Somehow.”
“That’s ridiculous. He couldn’t know—”
“Anything is possible. He could have a camera on us right at this moment.”
Keene didn’t answer. McKendry grinned. “I’ve reduced you to silence. That’s a change. Listen to me, would you? Getting rid of this would not make Frik stop what he’s doing. You said yourself this thing could make internal combustion engines a distant memory. That would destroy Oilstar, destroy Frikkie.”
“What if he comes after it before then?”
“He won’t,” McKendry said.
“Why not?”
“Because he trusts us to be good soldiers and do as we were told. On New Year’s Eve, you and I will go to Las Vegas and make Frik answer for himself. We’ll see to it that this discovery gets put to good use for the whole world, not just for one greedy son of a bitch.”
Keene sighed and stared out at the water and the nearby coast of Trinidad. The sky was lightening, shifting from indigo to blues and grays and pinks as the first rays of the sun refracted through the gathering clouds. Red sky at morning, he thought. A storm was on the way.
“You always did hate loose ends,” he said, turning to face his friend.