He wished desperately that he could talk to Joan. She had asked him if he’d had any unusual sensations, and promised to explain everything soon. Joan had known. She understood what had been done to him. Perhaps she’d even been part of it. After considerable reflection, he realized this was where he had to begin. The best way to find out what had been done to him? Find out where Joan had worked. Find the hospital where it had begun, the place that floated through his mind like a fractured dream.
There was little to go on. He remembered everything before the accident, before the rescue mission that had killed his crew and put him on the brink. Call sign — Neptune 11. But that was where his past ended. Since that day he had known only Joan Chandler and a cottage on the shores of Maine. Now five men were hunting him. DeBolt feared those men, but — in a response he’d never before had — he hated them even more. Then something else came to mind. Words he’d seen scrawled on his medical file: META Project, Option Bravo. What did they mean?
He was desperate for answers.
But how? How do I find them?
A soft uphill gust brought the murmur of the Cadillac’s engine — the clock was running. No longer a stopwatch, but an alarm. It was time to go. Time to learn what he had become.
14
Lund was at her desk talking on the phone, an unrequited stack of papers pushed to one side. It wasn’t much of a conversation.
“Permian Air Ambulance,” she repeated.
“Don’t know. Don’t know that one,” said the woman, who sounded distinctly Asian. She assured Lund for a second time that she ran a dry-cleaning service in Fresno, not an air ambulance company.
“All right, thanks anyway,” said Lund.
“We run half-off special Wednesdays,” said the woman. “You come in, bring your—”
Lund clicked off. She double-checked the number, and saw she’d dialed it correctly. She had found the phone number for Permian Air Ambulance in the air station flight logs. It was right there on the flight plan: the operator of the jet and contact information. On the night in question, N381TT, a Learjet 35, had collected Trey DeBolt and airlifted him to Anchorage International.
Only it hadn’t.
She was trapped in a classic backpedal. Her first calls had been to the Air Force hospital at Elmendorf and the Anchorage VA hospital, but neither had any record of a patient named Trey DeBolt. She tried all spelling variants of the name, and even asked record-keepers at both facilities go through the admission logs for the date in question, plus or minus one day. Still nothing. So Lund had tracked down information on the med-evac flight, hoping the company that ran it could shed light on where DeBolt had ended up. Now that appeared to be a dead end. Fresno, for God’s sake. It could have been a mistake, a pilot inputting a phone number that was off by one digit. Or … it could have been an intentional error.
She went to her computer and performed a search on Permian Air Ambulance. Lund found no such company. She decided to go back one more step — an inquiry she knew would at least get honest results. It took two calls to find the right number, and on the third ring Matt Doran, EMT, picked up.
“Hi, Matt, it’s Shannon Lund.”
“Hey, Shannon.” Doran sounded sleepy.
“Did I get you at a bad time?”
“No, I’m good. Just got off a twenty-four — hour shift, but it was a quiet night. You make any headway on that climbing accident?”
“Yeah, it’s coming along. But I was calling about something else. You mentioned that you helped transport Trey DeBolt to a med-evac jet a few weeks back.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Well, do you remember anything else? Did the crew actually say they were going to Anchorage?”
“I never saw the pilots. There was a doctor and a nurse in back, but they were pretty busy prepping Trey for the flight.”
“A doctor … like an MD? Isn’t that unusual on a med-evac?”
“Yeah, I guess it is. I only talked to the nurse, and that was how she referred to him—‘the doctor.’ She did mention Anchorage, come to think of it — said they were going to perform surgery there, something about relieving the pressure on his brain.”
“Do you remember their names?”
“I don’t think I ever heard his. Her first name was Joan or Jean, something like that.”
“What did they look like?”
“The nurse was maybe mid-forties, average build, a little round at the edges. Brown hair cut short — kind of frumpy, I guess you could say.”
Me in fifteen years, Lund thought. “What about the doctor?”
“Had to be sixty, hair going silver, frameless glasses. I don’t remember much else. He seemed real busy, focused on Trey.”
She pumped him for a few more minutes, but got nothing notable. After hanging up, Lund sat back in her chair. She wondered who had searched DeBolt’s apartment and why. Wondered where besides Anchorage he had been taken in a private jet. When Doran had asked her about the climbing accident, she realized she’d been neglecting that case. Not that there was a case — the death of William Simmons was cut-and-dry compared to the klaxons going off around Trey DeBolt’s disappearance.
She pulled open her desk drawer and retrieved a bottle of pills, a ten-week regimen of iron supplements the doctor had insisted she take. She took it most days, but the bottle was more full than it should have been. She decided to go outside for a cigarette.
At the second-floor landing she waited for the elevator. On the wall next to her was a full-length mirror, and above it a sign that read: WEAR THE UNIFORM PROUDLY. Every building on station had a mirror like it, credit to an old commander, twice replaced, who apparently thought his troops weren’t looking snappy enough. There was a dress code, of course, for civilian employees of the service. Lund had been issued a copy when she’d first arrived, and while she reckoned it had probably changed over the years, nothing in her closet was going to raise anyone’s hackles. In truth, her wardrobe was so consistent it was practically a uniform in its own right: plain pants, loose-fitting shirt, therapeutic shoes. There were a few colors among the earth tones, none particularly bright, and not a single dress that she could remember. As she stood looking in the mirror, she realized her pageboy was overdue for a trim.
Lund sighed. She’d become a shadow of what she might be. Worse yet, she didn’t much care. Is that wrong? she asked herself. Before an answer came, the elevator rumbled to a stop and the door opened, interrupting her little sulk.
Lund turned away, opted for the stairs, and soon was outside walking into a chill fall breeze.
He had an incredible new gift.
People were trying to kill him.
Which seemed rather redundant, since he was officially dead.
That was the sorry state of PO2 Trey DeBolt’s life as he drove north toward Calais. It was a small township nestled between Canada and the Bay of Fundy. He had never been there before, but he’d heard of the bay, which was famous for its extreme tidal surges. DeBolt held the Caddy to the speed limit, but tensed all the same when a state trooper passed in the opposite direction — it was, after all, a stolen car. The trooper kept going.
He felt a compulsion to experiment with his abilities, and he wasn’t surprised to learn that there were indeed limitations. In certain rural stretches he drew blanks, but now, nearing Calais, all the world’s information was once again there for the asking. Some of it was downright disturbing. He passed a tanker truck carrying a load of hazardous material. Within a minute DeBolt knew that the placarded warning diamond signified the eighteen-wheeler was full of ammonium nitrate — with a reactivity hazard rating of three, a load that was extremely combustible under shock. The truck was destined for a fertilizer manufacturer in Presque Isle.