“Mama!”
Cherry smiled and picked up the kid.
Calder couldn’t get over the baby smell—fleshy and sickly sweet and faintly uriney. Man. The one time he’d visited since the kid was born it had taken hours at the shooting range for the acrid gunpowder to burn away that smell. He held his breath, wondering how Avery could stand it.
“Go on back to the den, Calder. I’ll make you boys some coffee.”
Avery was sitting on a couch that was made up as a bed. He had on clean pajamas and Calder could swear his hair had been washed. Cherry must have done that, in honor of Calder’s visit. It made him feel guilty as hell.
He sat in a chair and Mark acted like they were two buds on some average, ordinary visit. For a while they chatted, Calder not having a whole lot of news because he’d been working, mostly, and Avery going on about Cherry and the kid—Jason, that was his name. “Jace.” The way Avery said it made Calder’s teeth hurt.
Jesus, it was as bad as Calder figured it would be. Avery was wasted away to nothing, his face like a skull, his remaining hair dry and dead-looking, as if it had passed on a couple of months ahead of Avery himself.
“You said on the phone you had some things to tell me,” Calder reminded Mark, to get the show on the road.
“Yeah.” Avery tried to sit up straighter and looked so damned pathetic that Calder stared out the window at the backyard. There was a play set back there. A play set.
“I taught you how to do your damned job.” Avery grinned—a rictus. “But that doesn’t mean I told you everything I knew.”
Calder wasn’t surprised. He knew exactly what was going down. Avery wanted to do a mind dump before he kicked it. And whatever had happened between them, Calder was his dumpee of choice.
“So what is it?”
“It’s waves, Farris. It’s all about waves.”
“Sound waves?”
There were a couple of top-secret projects going on in the DoD revolving around the lethal use of sound waves. Calder wasn’t supposed to know about it, but he did. Avery and he had always known these things.
Avery shook his head. “What if you could point a device at someone that would disrupt the particles of their bodies? Scramble their atoms? Neutralize their electrons? What if you could make a bomb that would do that to an entire city? And do it clean, not leave a couple of millenniums’ worth of radioaction behind?”
Calder was interested. “You have something solid?”
“Some good leads… The subatomic level, that’s the future. I’m talking about the fundamental nature of matter here.”
Calder slowly smiled, despite himself. It was like old times. They used to go on about this shit for hours.
For a moment, he remembered how much he owed Avery. Calder had always loved weapons, even as a kid—toy guns, soldiers, stone “grenades”… But Avery had taught him a deeper truth. Since early man picked up that first stick and conked a rival over the head with it, technology had always been about one thing: power. He who has the biggest toys rules. And power was everything.
“I’m serious,” Avery insisted. “The Next Big Thing is not going to be explosives. The future is going to be about undoing life from the ground level up, from the inside. And, Calder, matter is waves. You want to know who really has their hands in some nasty-assed science, you find someone who knows that.”
“What kind of leads do you have?”
“Some names. Some ideas. It’s all in the file.” Avery motioned his hand toward a thick envelope on the coffee table. Calder picked it up and looked inside—a big manila envelope, papers. Mark Avery’s legacy. It gave him a momentary stab of pain. He swallowed it.
“Thanks.”
“Hell.” Avery dismissed the word with a blink. He sank back, looking so tired suddenly, Calder thought he was going to red-line right there. “Everything’s kind of a mess. I didn’t really have the… energy to neaten it up for you.”
“No problem.”
The moment stretched out awkwardly. Mark coughed, doing it weakly, as though it hurt. Calder clenched his jaw.
“The thing is, the DoD—that whole institution—it’s gotten to be about sucking down tax money and producing jack-all. And the academics, hell, they’ve gotten themselves so tied up in knots they can’t see their way out of a cardboard box. The Big One, when it comes, is gonna be some undiscovered Einstein out there who isn’t a part of any of that. It’ll be someone from Podunk, New Jersey, and he’s gonna belong to you.” Mark turned his eyes on him. For once his eyes looked spooky. “He would have been mine, but I guess that’s unlikely now. You should thank me, you lucky bastard.”
“Yeah, right.” Calder tried for a jokey tone and missed. He just sounded pissed off.
Cherry brought them coffee. It gave them something to do. Calder could barely stand the taste. Between the smell of the kid that pervaded the house and the stench of Mark’s sickness, he had to gag it down. As they drank he sat with the envelope on his lap like a freaking job applicant. And Avery lay there, hardly able to hold the cup. Neither one of them could bear to look at each other.
As soon as he was done with the coffee, Calder thought, he could go.
Out the window, he saw something red flash by—the kid. Cherry came into view, chasing the baby, picking him up, swinging him in the air. Fucking Hallmark moment.
There was a muffled noise from Avery, and Calder looked at him. His eyes were on the backyard, too, his face so regretful it made Calder want to hit something. Avery glanced at him, guiltily. His face twitched.
“I…” He hesitated. Calder thought, Whatever it is, spare me, please God. Avery didn’t. “I almost didn’t give that to you, you know.” He met Calder’s eyes in a challenge, then looked back out at the kid. “I dedicated my whole life to weapons technology. Jace’s birth… sometimes I wonder if what we do… if it’s the right thing.”
Calder saw red as a hand reached up from his gut, squeezing. “What is that supposed to mean? We have the freedom we do in this country because we have the meanest, most kick-ass weapons, end of story. What the fuck’s the matter with you, Mark?”
Avery’s eyes were unapologetic. “I wonder if you’ll be as sure of that when you’re a father.”
Calder snorted. I’d have my balls chewed off by alligators before I’d let that happen. He kept it to himself.
“Calder, if you do find him…” Avery paused. Calder didn’t need to ask who the “him” was; it was the next Oppenheimer, the inventor of the new Big One. “When you do…”
“What?” Calder said impatiently.
Avery licked his cracked lips. “Ever heard that whole thing about what you’d do if you had the chance to go back and meet Hitler in 1925?”
“Stop talking this crap!” Calder’s tone said he meant it. It was a tone that would have made most men stick a horn up their butt and blow taps if he’d told them to.
Avery smiled sadly. “I guess when you’re dying you get some funny ideas.” He looked out at the backyard again where Cherry was swinging the baby around and around. “I don’t s’pose… if I asked you to keep an eye on them for me…”
“Jesus, Mark! Are you drugged or what?”
“Forget it.” Avery sounded resigned, like he’d known Calder would refuse and that it was stupid to ask him in the first place.
Well, it was stupid. Damned stupid. He must be stoned to have even thought such a thing. Then Calder recalled that Avery didn’t have any family. He’d been as much a loner as Calder himself until Cherry came along. God, he hated this.
“I’ll make sure they don’t starve, if that’s what you’re asking.” Calder spit it out like shards of glass. Fucking Cherry, she knew what she’d been doing when she married Avery. She’d get a pension. She and the kid would do just fine. And he’d bet anything she was remarried within a year anyway. But he had to say something.