Weng gazed out the window, looking at the Holloman runway. “It’s perfect.”
“Then drop your gear! Dinner’s gettin’ cold!”
Hal polished off a beer, setting it on his living room coffee table. He snatched up the remote next to it and clicked off the TV. Turning off a football game among two teams that would be fortunate to have games broadcast on local cable-access. Cleveland was beating the Jets in a field-goal fest with a total score higher than their Nielsen ratings—6 to 3.
Hal’s home was dead silent. He thrust the lever forward on his La-Z-Boy, dropping his feet to the carpet in a thud. Hal made the rounds of his nightly ritual — checking the coffee maker and stove — flipping switches on walls, draining the house of all light and life on his retreat to the back bedroom. Stopping off at the bathroom on the way.
Hal brushed his teeth in the mirror, staring at the scabbed wound on his arm then straight ahead into the mirror — into his own eyes. Trying to hide the suspicion that he was looking directly into the lens of a camera behind the mirror. I could rip the mirror off the wall and end it right now, he thought…And lose any chance of finding answers. Through the course of normal head-angling during the brushing of teeth, Hal’s eyes flicked to the corners of the ceiling — to the chrome of the faucet — to the mirrored medicine cabinet and to chrome towel racks — looking for places he would hide a micro-camera. Hal gargled, spat and opened the medicine cabinet, grabbing his dream blocking pills. He popped two, just like the good doctor ordered. He emptied the glass, turned his back on the mirror and faced the toilet, emptying his bladder. Trapped in the vise of his upper and lower incisors were the two shiny-white capsules. His tongue kicked them out and they flipped end over end like synchronized divers into his urine stream.
Hal wandered into his dark bedroom, shed his clothes down to his boxers and crawled under the covers. Lying on his back, his eyes traveled around the ceiling of his room, picking out a half-dozen hiding places for micro-cameras. He pondered the chronological events of the past several weeks. Leading up to his skepticism of the pills, his paranoia of what might be behind his bathroom mirror, and who may be staking-out his home right now.
Hal stared at his vertical blinds and the lazy rays slicing through from the streetlights. They splashed to pools of light on his desk and some stretched to the shag carpet beyond. If someone is watching me, I’m not making it hard with all the light I’m providing their cameras, he thought. Cameras… They’re not the only ones with cameras. His head lifted from the pillow looking straight ahead at his laptop on the desk. He got out of bed.
Hal eased into a small desk chair and fired up his laptop computer. His face and bare chest glowed in moonlight blue from the start-up screen. He opened a web browser, navigating to a sports website. Pretending to check the scores as a smaller window opened to the controls of his built-in webcam.
Baldo took a sip from a steaming mug of coffee, preparing for a long night. He watched Hal at his laptop on a monitor. The feed coming from a micro-cam in the corner of Hal’s ceiling.
Baldo heard footsteps on the cold concrete floor of the hangar behind him. McCreary arriving for the night shift.
“What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Baldo replied. “He’s on a football website. Checking scores from the weekend and standings. It’s one of the sites he visits when he can’t sleep.”
“Bring it up.”
Baldo typed at his computer, and moved the hacked feed from Hal’s browser to a larger screen on the bank. McCreary eyed it. Assessed it as innocuous — and boring. “Any word on his emails? Could you get in?”
“I’m in his AF email. All work related. He could be using a third party email on his phone. Almost impossible to hack if he has a strong password. Cracking it would be a waste of time. I mean, does Trest want me to hack his emails or surveil him? I can’t do both, sir.”
“I hear you. I’ll see what Trest says about outsourcing that. I’m gonna’ get some shut eye. Wake me up if he does anything worthwhile.”
“Roger that.”
McCreary found a dark corner of the padded floor near the VR OmniTrainer. He grabbed a thick sparring pad, using it for a pillow and closed his eyes.
Hal went back and forth from the sports website to the preferences window on the Motion Eye camera of his laptop. Hal clicked the preferences tab and boosted the gain on the iris, setting it for low-level light. He adjusted the laptop, nudging the corner while watching the display, until his bed filled the frame. He set the camera to record for a period of ten hours then quickly lowered the monitor illumination. Creating the illusion that it was powering down. Hal pushed back from his desk and returned to his bed for the night. The target of his own surveillance.
Hal’s foggy nightmare began with an attractive woman in a lab coat injecting him in the arm. He felt like he was falling backward, plummeting down an infinite tunnel of darkness. The woman and the rest of the world pulled away from him, vanishing far above in the distance. He landed in blackness and found himself running in place. At least he thought he was running. Everything was a soup of pitch around him. The only thing he could see was his legs pounding beneath him. His jog turned to a frenetic sprint, but he still felt like he wasn’t getting anywhere. So, this is what Hell is. Running through blackness — all the time — in an eternal void. A voice echoed commands that surrounded him. Coming from nowhere and everywhere. He heard one command after the other. At first they were groggy, like another language. Un-decipherable. Then the words and sentences took form…
“Avoid the light.”
“Stay out of water. Water kills.”
“No bright lights.”
“Step softly.”
“No talking.”
“Listen.”
“Obey.”
A surreal figure darted out in front of him while he was on a dead sprint. “Engage!”
He raised his rifle and fired. He heard no shot nor saw any muzzle blast. Only the sound of beeps spurted from his barrel as he sprayed the murky figure with bullets. Small holes riddled the man’s chest. He looked more cartoonish than a real human being. He fell to the ground and disappeared.
Another man appeared. Standing motionless before him… A Middle Eastern man in a designer suit.
“This, is your mission objective,” the mysterious voice echoed. “I repeat Mission Objective. Engage on my command.”
A dim light appeared on the right. Growing brighter as Hal’s feet thumped toward it.
“Avoid all light.”
Hal changed direction. Jogging to the left. Angling away from the light. Jouncing back to darkness. A surreal character leapt out of the dense void. Charging straight for Hal with a bayonet fixed to an AK-47.
“Engage!”
Hal raised his rifle around to block, whipping the stock around in the same fluid move. Catching the attacker square on the jaw with a rifle-haymaker. The attacker vanished into the black.
A tall, slender Asian man appeared, wearing a suit.