His groin throbbed again. “I’m readier than ready,” he said. And he was.
She giggled. He never cared whether her joy was real. Probably wasn’t, but so what? She got wet and she got him hard and what more did either of them need?
“You want the light on or off?” She flicked the switch up and down, creating a strobe behind her.
“Leave it on,” he said. “I want to see you.”
She laughed again, and it sounded real. Happy to be admired. Or whatever. She came running toward him.
And then the lights went out.
All of them.
In the bathroom. The light on the clock. The glow of his iPad over on the desk. Out.
Bang.
The iPod went silent, too. All at once. The U2 mix he had on was gone. Just like that.
Bang.
There was a solid thump on the side of the bed and Lily’s laugh turned to a sharp cry of pain as her shins hit the frame. She cursed and pitched forward into the bed. Marty could hear her but he could not see her.
Not at all.
For a single freaky moment he thought that it was him, that he’d gone blind. That the stress of sex with a woman two or three decades younger than him had pushed his ticker past the red line. He thought, Oh Christ, I’m going to die in a Houston hotel with a Korean hooker. Connie will be pissed.
But it wasn’t him. He understood that a half second later.
Outside, the sky was filled with stars and the lights of Houston were still on. A splash of jewels.
“What’s going on?” asked Lily, and the little-girl quality was gone, replaced by a voice that was colder, harsher, and in no way playful.
“I told you to leave the lights on,” he snapped.
“I did. Maybe there’s a power outage in the hotel.”
As she said it the world seemed willing to prove her wrong.
Outside the lights began changing. First it was the buildings closest to the Marriott. They went dark. Bang. All at once, as if someone had found a single switch that could shut off every light.
Then the buildings across the street from them went out. And the buildings on the next block. The next. The next.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
All dark.
Marty and Lily froze, staring through the glass at the city.
No, staring at the blackness that had been the city. Now it was nothing. Only the upper floors were edged with thin blue lines of starlight. And Marty had an irrational thought.
At least the stars didn’t go out.
It was almost the last thought he had.
He heard the sound then. Not an engine whine. No, he might have understood what was about to happen.
This was a whistling sound. Almost a shriek.
Getting closer.
Getting louder.
Something moving so fast through the dark air that the wind screamed along its sides.
Marty knew what it was. He knew.
The moment that his brain identified what it was… that was his last thought. He even said it aloud.
“They’re falling,” he said in a whisper that was filled with awe. “They’re all falling.”
A moment later a Boeing 737 struck the top floor of the Marriott.
Between the hotel and the airport, the rest of the planes stacked up for landing fell.
Like dead birds.
Like stricken crows. Black and falling through blackness.
Until the darkness recoiled from the fires.
But by then Marty was long gone.
PART TWO
FATHERS AND SONS
What do we know… of the world and the universe about us?
Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few,
and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow.
We see things only as we are constructed to see them,
and can gain no idea of their absolute nature.
With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the
boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings
with wider, stronger, or different range of senses
might not only see very differently the things we see,
but might see and study whole worlds of matter,
energy, and life which lie close at hand
yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
His name was Harry Bolt and he was not a great spy.
He was probably not a very good spy. Or even a moderately good one. He knew that. Everyone who knew him knew that. His boss did, too.
And his father definitely did.
Harry thought about this as he crouched in the dark and tried hard not to get caught, not to get seen, and not to get killed. All very important things on his to-do list. Right at the top of his priorities this evening. Harry was a disappointment to many but he was still his own favorite person. Getting arrested, interrogated, disappeared, or shot would seriously interfere with his motto of “Die Old and Rich and in Bed with a Porn Star.” He wanted to get that translated into Latin and tattooed somewhere on his body.
The night was dark and the rest of his team were taking their sweet time doing their part of this job. This very, very illegal job. Being a third-tier field agent for the CIA did not come with many protections. He was alone now because the two other members of his team, Roy Olvera and Jim Florida, were nowhere to be found. Olvera was supposed to have prepped this lock so all Harry had to do was cut a wire and manually push back the metal service door to enter the underground chamber. But, no Olvera and no prep work. God only knew where Florida was. He’d gone off to upload a neutral video loop to the security cameras, but he was taking his sweet time about it. Or he was lost again. Florida got lost a lot.
That was the problem. Neither of those other two clowns took this job seriously because it was a bullshit assignment. All three of them knew it. Shit jobs like this were only ever given to field operators who had screwed up as badly or as often as the Three Stooges. That’s what the other staffers at the Agency’s Hungarian station called his team. Nice. He wished that it hadn’t been so thoroughly earned, though. Screwups were their specialty, and Harry had to admit it.
He wondered if his father had ever screwed up any part of any mission in his entire life. No. Probably not. Demigods don’t make mistakes. In truth, Harry’s father was a great spy. Maybe the great spy. Absolutely everyone knew that. Dad was Harcourt Bolton, Senior, and Harry knew that nothing he ever did was going to let him live up to that kind of a legacy.
Harry Bolt loved his father. He really did.
Conditionally.
He also hated his father. Conditionally.
Like everything in Harry Bolt’s life, his relationship with his dad was complicated. It was always complicated. Even more complicated than Harry’s love life, which was so weird you couldn’t sell it as a reality show. No one would believe the string of beautiful, artistic, accomplished, and absolutely bug-fuck nuts women who came and went in his life. Harry couldn’t believe most of it and he’d been there, done that, and had all the scars and souvenirs.