He unlocked the bathroom door and walked outside into a deepening night.
DeBolt was right about the walk-in clinic. He gave them a name but didn’t have ID. He admitted to a few beers before he’d broken the damned window. He got questions and hard stares, but the spirit of Hippocrates carried the day, and they stitched him up and took his cash, and half an hour later he was back on the street with his arm properly bandaged.
His next stop was an all-night chain pharmacy where he purchased extra gauze and tape, along with a pullover hoodie to cover his filthy shirt. That done, he looked presentable, and he diverted to the Starbucks next door because he wanted to think and get out of the cold. And because a shot of caffeine never hurt. He found himself wondering loosely how that might interact with META. Would a double shot of espresso send his mind into hyperdrive?
He settled at a table with a simple cup of hot coffee. It felt warm between his hands, and the aroma was soothing. DeBolt tried to design a plan, tried to think forward. He always ended up in the same cul-de-sac. The META Project. There was a peculiar comfort in knowing he was not alone: Delta too had survived the surgery. If the kitchen hadn’t been so dark, DeBolt knew he would have seen the telltale scars on the man’s bald head. A vicious killer, no doubt with a military background, who had the same abilities he possessed.
Were there others? he wondered. Alpha and Charlie? Zulu, for God’s sake? Was there an army of men like Delta roaming the world? DeBolt saw countless divergences between Delta and himself. He was trained to rescue, Delta to kill. There was but one overriding commonality: META. A project whose creators were seemingly being eliminated en masse, the only residue being its product — at least two highly altered individuals.
He considered the manner in which Delta had communicated with him, some direct, inter-META link that DeBolt knew nothing about. He might be able to figure it out, but did he want to? And what else didn’t he know? Did his requests for information compromise his position? Could he be tracked like a cell phone, his position triangulated? He looked around the coffeehouse, then out into the darkness beyond. How much more did Delta know? Where was he now? The uncertainty was demoralizing, dark, and confining. Like a box closing in from all sides.
There was only one place to get answers. If any of META’s designers remained alive, DeBolt had to find them. He tried to consolidate his thoughts into one desperate request. After considerable deliberation, he settled on: Need information on META. Are there any surviving creators?
He waited for a reply.
Nothing came.
The first threads of despair began to envelop him. DeBolt was accustomed to physical challenges. He knew how to recover a lost line in the sea. How to stay warm in subzero temperatures. How to bring back a human heartbeat. But this — the interminable waiting, relying on the whims of some unseen computer before taking action. It was counter to everything he had ever done. Everything he had ever been. He needed META more than ever, and he hated it for that reason.
He finished his coffee, and still nothing came. DeBolt went back to the counter for a refill, this time adding a pastry. He should have been hungry, yet his appetite was nonexistent, quelled by the trauma and fatigue of the last days. He was wiping a blob of sugar from his lip when, quite literally out of thin air, an answer struck into view:
META CHIEF PROGRAMMER, DR. ATIF PATEL
CURRENT LOCATION: VIENNA, AUSTRIA
41
Lund was on an airplane, but she wasn’t heading west. She’d bought a ticket on the last southbound shuttle to Washington, D.C., and first thing tomorrow morning she would visit the Coast Guard’s national headquarters, the St. Elizabeths campus on the southeast side of town.
As she sat in a middle seat deep in coach, Lund finished off a much-needed beer and mentally mapped out how she could best help DeBolt. There seemed only one good lead — the suspect Jim Kalata had uncovered while investigating William Simmons’ climbing accident. Douglas Wilson of Missoula, Montana. Was he one of the men who’d abducted her and DeBolt that morning? Possibly. Kalata thought Wilson might have traveled from Vienna to Alaska, intent on killing a man who’d been asking too many questions about DeBolt. Lund thought her partner might have that much right.
But she needed more. Fortunately, there was no better place to get it than Coast Guard headquarters. The Coast Guard was attached to the Department of Homeland Security, the best source of information in the world when it came to suspicious characters and air travel. Yet it wouldn’t be easy. Lund was not traveling on official orders, nor had she opened any investigation relating to Trey DeBolt. She figured she could handle all that with a few phone calls, and perhaps some half-truths. But she would have to tread carefully. Only hours ago she’d been abducted by a shadowed entity of the United States military, then held in a government building. The very fact that they’d released her only reinforced the legal ambiguities that seemed to swirl around the META Project.
A flight attendant picked up her empty can. “Can I get you another?”
Lund almost said yes, but shook her head. “I could use a cigarette when we land though. Do you know if there’s a smoking lounge in the airport?”
“Sorry, I’m not sure about Reagan National. Outside on the curb is usually best.”
Lund had the feeling the woman would just as soon have told her to light up in the traffic lane, but she smiled her flight attendant’s smile all the same and walked off. As she did so, Lund’s gaze was caught by the screen of her seatmate’s iPad. The airplane apparently had Wi-Fi, and CNN was running on his screen. Lund saw a nighttime backdrop of rolling blue and red lights, and a headline crawled across the bottom: SHOOTING IN WATERTOWN, MA. FIVE FATALITIES CONFRIMED.
“Getting as bad as D.C.,” said the iPad’s owner, who’d clearly caught her looking. He appeared to be a businessman, well dressed, although Lund had watched him put his jacket in the overhead bin, and his tie was now tugged loose. The man’s tone was friendly, if a bit weary. Weighed down by either a long day at work or more senseless big-city violence — she couldn’t say which.
“Yeah, it’s a shame,” she managed. “Tell me, I’m not familiar with Massachusetts — is Watertown near Boston?”
“Yeah, I’ve been there once or twice — maybe twenty minutes from downtown.”
Twenty minutes, she thought. Roughly the length of the car ride she’d taken today. She looked again at the news feed, and saw a man and a woman in matching dark jackets that were emblazoned with big yellow letters: FBI.
Lund had a very bad feeling. Right then, she decided to skip the cigarette when she arrived and go straight to headquarters.
DeBolt found the Buick right where he’d left it, in a parking garage near Logan airport. He drove south, checking the mirror continuously, and took off-ramps to try to distinguish if anyone was following him. It was probably pointless — he was a complete amateur. Delta, on the other hand, was not. Is this how it’s going to be? he wondered. Running scared for the rest of my life? His rhetorical thought actually found an answer — a resounding no. Either Delta would find him, or DeBolt would somehow bring his association with the META to an end. And the only way to do that: reach the last man alive who could explain it.
Dr. Atif Patel.
The name meant nothing to him. He repeated it aloud, hoping for some association. DeBolt drew a blank. He went to his connection to find more, but there was little available. He learned that Patel was not much older than he was. A graduate of Caltech, he was now a professor at Cal Berkeley and attached to a number of research projects there, all relating to computer software and systems architecture. He was a geek’s geek, which DeBolt found encouraging — perhaps Patel was the Oz behind the machine that was META.