Yet there were also worrying voids in his search on Patel. No tax records, which he’d been able to gather on others, nor any address of record or phone number. He found no social media accounts or bank records. He couldn’t even find an image of the man — at least not the right Atif Patel — which in this digital age seemed remarkable. It was as if his background had been sanitized, scrubbed from the information world. As if he’d gone into electronic hiding. It made sense in a way — if Patel was indeed an architect of META, might he not exclude himself from its otherwise universal grasp? Then a disturbing corollary came to mind: Might Patel have gone into hiding in order to escape the likes of Delta?
DeBolt did uncover one glaring inconsistency. If information on Patel was limited, one fact proved widely available, even advertised — he was attending an academic gathering in Vienna this week, and scheduled to give two presentations, the second in two days’ time. After that DeBolt could find no indication of where Patel would be. Would he return to California? Attend another conference? Tour Europe? There was no way to tell, and this gave DeBolt a deadline — he had two days in which to reach Vienna.
The more DeBolt thought about it, the more he realized how challenging that might be. His only option was to take a commercial flight, but he had no identification. He also knew that paying cash for a one-way ticket was a surefire way to get the attention of authorities. Still, there had to be a way. He immediately discarded Boston’s Logan airport as an option. The threat there would be extreme. Delta too close. So he continued driving south, knowing in a loose way where I-95 would take him.
He drove deep into the night. The road became a blur, and the stream of oncoming headlights thinned into the early morning hours. He turned on the Buick’s radio, found an alternative rock channel, and cranked up the volume. He opened his window to be stunned by the inrushing air, New England autumn at seventy miles an hour.
DeBolt could barely keep his eyes open when he finally took an exit in New London, Connecticut. Less than a mile after turning off the interstate, he found himself at gates with a familiar emblem: the United States Coast Guard Academy. He’d never attended the school, but worked with many officers who had, men and women who seemed universally happy to be from the institution. Nearing two o’clock in the morning, he knew he would never get past security at the gate — probably not even if he still had his old identity card. So DeBolt navigated across the street instead, and pulled into a spot beside a Dumpster in the half-full parking lot of something called Connecticut College.
He locked the doors and turned off the engine, knowing the cold would seep in quickly. DeBolt did his best to ignore the screen in his head and let his mind roam. He thought about Joan Chandler. He thought about Shannon Lund, and hoped she was on her way back to Alaska. He thought about his crew from the helo crash, and wished he could remember something about the accident. Had he made a mistake that night, something that contributed to the death of his friends? Had those they’d been trying to rescue been lost as well?
And what if he could remember what happened on that doomed night? Would it replace the other mission so long entrenched in his memory? A vision came to DeBolt — not on META’s tiny screen, but on the more intimate and familiar canvas of his memory. He recalled what had become the signature event of his duty in Alaska. The mission he remembered above all others. Every AST had a story like it — the one rescue, for better or worse, that you could never shake. If it ended well, it was the tale you’d someday tell your grandchildren. If not, it was the one you took to your grave.
His had involved three survivors, a couple and their teenage daughter, who’d been set adrift when their sailboat pitchpoled — careening down the backside of a five-story wave on a following sea, the boat’s nose had dug into the trough, instigating a violent cartwheel. In a minor miracle, all three made it to a life raft, and from there they’d sent an SOS. An EPIRB signal gave an accurate position, but by the time the helo arrived all three were back in the water, the raft drifting away on a howling wind.
The storm that night had certainly been given a name, but DeBolt could never remember it. He only remembered dropping into the cold sea and finding three severely hypothermic individuals. One by one, he began lifting them to the safety of the helo. He remembered having to make the decision to leave the young girl in the water longest, despite the passionate protests of her parents. DeBolt had done it that way because in his opinion the parents were in worse shape — it was the only chance to save all three. His call. So at the end he was with the girl in waves that looked like buildings, in a wind that was gale force, and he had held on to her while they’d waited for the final lift. He held her close to be ready for the basket, but also to give her warmth. And God how she had held him back. His own strength was ebbing at that point, sapped by thirty frantic minutes in the Bering Sea.
And then — an ethereal moment like nothing DeBolt had ever experienced.
Tossed by ferocious winds, the helo had to abort its approach and reposition. In those desperate, vital minutes, as DeBolt himself became weaker and weaker, the tiny young girl whose body was pressed against his actually became stronger. She’d clung to him like a barnacle, her thin limbs and frozen fingers viselike in their grip. She had been in the water three times as long as he had, and didn’t have the luxury of a dry suit. None of that mattered to her. Never had DeBolt witnessed a power like that one young girl’s desperation to live. Even more surprising was what it instilled in him — an absolute resolve to make it happen.
Together, on that dark night over a year ago, they had both reached safety.
These were DeBolt’s fading thoughts as he fell fast asleep in the backseat of the Buick.
The will to live.
Absolute resolve.
42
He had no identity documents. No way to procure real ones. No clue how to acquire something counterfeit. He had plenty of cash, but no credit card. In his favor: DeBolt had all the information in the world.
The business of traveling across an ocean — so ordinary this day and age — was greatly complicated by his circumstances. Most problematic of alclass="underline" he was squarely in the sights of a killer, a man with the same cyber capabilities he possessed. No, he corrected, Delta is better than I am, because he knows how to use it.
How to get to Vienna? It was essentially an operational problem, yet unlike anything he’d encountered on a ship or a helo. DeBolt tried to be methodical, beginning before he even arrived at the airport. At a big box store he purchased an inexpensive leather attaché, a jacket that might have been business casual, and a notepad and pen to fill the attaché. He added an electric razor with a grooming attachment, and two pairs of off-the-shelf reading glasses, one with thick frames and the other thin, both with minimal refractive correction — his vision was just fine.
Arriving at New York’s JKF airport he left the Buick in long-term parking, the doors unlocked and the keys under the front seat. DeBolt didn’t know why he did it that way, but perhaps there was an intrinsic message … No going back.
At Terminal 4, the primary international gateway, he scouted the departure level for thirty minutes while his plan evolved. It was an ever-changing thing, with portions that remained a blank — like a half-finished sculpture in the hands of an amateur. He ignored the flight information boards, save for one quick study to verify that his options were bundled in a narrow time frame: flights to Europe from the East Coast departed almost exclusively in the late afternoon and early evening. While Vienna was his destination, he didn’t particularly care how he got there, and he presumed that any identity that could get him across the Atlantic would continue to work throughout the European Union.