They had champagne and steaks when they arrived. More champagne was on its way for brunch, with crepes and strawberries. A Realtor would meet them in the lobby in an hour for an afternoon of house-hunting. He wanted her to be happy.
“Kerry?”
She moved under the sheets and he called her name again, a bit louder.
“Hi,” she answered into the pillow.
“Brunch is coming, with mimosas.”
“Didn’t we just eat?”
“Ages ago. Want to get up now?”
“Okay. Did you tell them you weren’t going into work?”
“They know.”
“Mark?”
“Uh-huh?”
“You were acting kind of weird last night.”
“I know.”
“Will you act normal today?”
“I will.”
“Are we really going to buy a house today?”
“If you see one you like.”
She propped herself up and showed her face, which was brightly illuminated by her smile. “Well, my day’s starting pretty nice. Come over here and I’ll start yours off nice too.”
Will drove all night and now was cruising on flat land through Ohio, going for broke, driving fast into the dawn and hoping he’d skip through unscathed, avoiding speed traps and unmarked staties. He knew he couldn’t make it all the way without sleeping. He’d have to pick his spots, Motel 6 kinds of places near the highway, where he’d pay cash and pick up four hours here, six there-no more than that. He wanted to be in Vegas by Friday night and ruin this motherfucker’s weekend.
He couldn’t recall the last time he’d pulled an all-nighter, especially an alcohol-free one, and it didn’t feel good. He had cravings for booze, for sleep, and for something to squelch his anger and indignation. His hands were cramped from gripping the wheel too hard, his right ankle sore because the old Taurus didn’t have cruise control. His eyes were red and dry. His bladder ached from the last large coffee. The only thing giving him any solace was the red Lipinski rosebud, succulent and healthy, stuck into a plastic water bottle in the cup holder.
In the middle of the night, Malcolm Frazier left his Operations Center and took a walk to clear his head. The last piece of news was unbelievable, he thought. Un-fucking-believable. This abomination happened on his watch. If he survived this-if they survived this-he’d be testifying at closed Pentagon hearings till he was a hundred.
They’d gone into crisis mode the moment Shackleton switched his cell phone off and the beacon was lost. A team converged on the Venetian but he was gone, his Corvette still in the valet lot, the bill unsettled.
What followed was a very dark hour until they were able to turn things around. He had been with a woman, an attractive brunette whom the concierge recognized as an escort he’d seen around the hotel. They accessed Shackleton’s mobile phone records and found dozens of calls to a Kerry Hightower, who fit the woman’s description.
Hightower’s phone was pinging towers along I-15 westbound until the signal went dead fifteen miles west of Barstow. It looked like L.A. was a likely destination. They fed the description of her car and its tag number to the CHP and local sheriff departments but wouldn’t know until an after-action investigation that her Toyota had been in the shop and she was driving a loaner.
Rebecca Rosenberg was eating her third postmidnight candy bar when she suddenly blasted through Shackleton’s encryption and almost choked on a gob of caramel. She peeled out of her lab, ran clumsily down the hall to the Operations Center, and burst into the scrum of watchers, her white-girl version of a sixties Afro bouncing on her shoulders.
“He’s been passing DOD’s to a company!” she gasped.
Frazier was at his terminal. He swiveled toward her and looked like he wanted to throw up. This was as bad as it got. “The fuck you say. You sure?”
“Hundred percent.”
“What kind of company?”
It got worse. “Life insurance.”
The corridors of the Primary Research Lab were empty, which magnified the echo-chamber effect. To relieve tension, Malcolm Frazier coughed to play with the acoustic bounciness. Shouting or yodeling wouldn’t have been dignified even if no one was listening. During the day, as Chief of NTS-51 Operational Security, he roamed the underground with a cocky swagger that intimidated the rank and file. He liked being feared and had no regrets that his watchers were universally hated. That meant they were doing their jobs. Without fear, how was order to be maintained? The temptation to exploit the asset was simply too great for the geeks. He had contempt for them, and always felt a rush of superiority when he saw them in the strip ’n’ scan, fat and puffy or thin and weak, never fit and well-muscled like his lot. Shackleton, he recalled, was one of the thin and weak ones, snappable like a plank of balsa wood.
He gravitated to the special elevator and called it up with an access key. The descent was so smooth it was almost imperceptible, and when he emerged he was the only soul on the Vault level. His motion would trigger a monitor and one of his men would be watching, but he was permitted to be there, he knew the entry codes, and he was one of the few authorized to pass through the heavy steel doors.
The power of the Vault was visceral. Frazier felt his back straighten as if an iron rod had been rammed through his spine. His chest swelled and his senses heightened, his depth perception-even in the subdued cool-blue light-so acute he was almost seeing in 3-D. Some men felt tiny in the vastness of the place, but the Vault made him feel large and powerful. Tonight, in the midst of the most serious security breech in the history of Area 51, he needed to be there.
He stepped into the chilled dehumidified atmosphere. Five feet, ten, twenty, a hundred. He wasn’t planning to walk its full length; he didn’t have the time. He went far enough to fully experience the magnitude of its domed ceiling and stadium dimensions. He let the fingertips of his right hand brush one of the bindings. Strictly speaking, contact was not allowed, but he wasn’t exactly pulling it off the shelf-it was just an affirmation.
The leather was smooth and cool, the color of mottled buckskin. Tooled onto the spine was the year: 1863. There were rows of 1863s. The Civil War. And Lord knew what else was going on in the rest of the world. He wasn’t a historian.
At one side of the Vault a narrow stairway led to a catwalk where one could take in the full panorama. He went there and climbed to the top. There were thousands of gunmetal-gray bookcases stretching into the distance, nearly 700,000 thick leather books, over 240 billion inscribed names. The only way to get your mind around these numbers, he was convinced, was to stand there and take it in with your own eyes. All the information had long been stored on disks, and if you were one of the geeks, you were impressed with all the terabits of data or some such bullshit, but there was no substitute for actually being in the Library. He grabbed the railing, leaned into it and breathed slow, deep breaths.
Nelson Elder was having a pretty good morning. He was at his favorite table in the company cafeteria tucking into an egg-white omelet and the morning paper. He was energized from a good run, a good steam shower, and renewed confidence in the future. Of all the things in his life that affected his mood, the single biggest factor was the Desert Life stock quote. In the last month the stock was up 7.2 percent, rising a full 1.5 percent the day before on an analyst upgrade. It was too early for this craziness with Peter Benedict to affect his bottom line, but he could predict with mathematical certainty that denying coverage to life insurance applicants with an impending date of death, and risk-adjusting the premiums for those with an intermediate death horizon, would turn his company into a cash machine.
To top that off, Bert Myers’s walk on the wild side with his Connecticut hedge fund was turning the corner, with double-digit yields in July. Elder translated his bullishness into a new, more aggressive tone with investors and research analysts, and the Street was taking notice. The sentiment on Desert Life was shifting.