‘That’s wonderful fucking news,’ Stumpy muttered. ‘Lay a little radiation on the Agent Orange I got in ’Nam and throw in this anti-nerve gas atropo-fucking-feen or whatever the hell it is and my balls will probably drop off.’
‘Don’t sweat it. From what I hear, Keyes knows his shit.’
‘Keyes is an asshole; asshole’s ’sposed to know shit.’
‘Hey,’ the guard watching TV hissed at the other two, ‘this is a silent watch, remember.’
‘Eat my dick, Orvis,’ Stumpy said, but he quit talking.
Daniel felt something missing in the silence. It took him a moment to realize there was no sound from the TV, and less than that to see it was a monitoring screen displaying a static view of the vault. Neither cameras nor the atropine were expected. The mission was canceled.
Daniel doubted that the atropine was any defense against Aunt Charmaine’s Medusa brew, but if he was wrong he was dead or in prison. And the camera cut at least five minutes on the getaway. He turned and started walking toward the tunnel mouth when he suddenly started laughing so hard he nearly lost his concentration and lurched back into visibility. Prison? How could they keep him in prison? How could they shoot him if he was invisible? If it fell apart he could always shoot a flare to warn Eddie off and use his invisibility to give him a big edge on pursuit. Volta was right, though – better to leave and try again. But he should look around for other security surprises. And see the Diamond. He turned and continued down the tunnel.
He reached the vault without incident. He spotted the camera quickly, but was so anxious to step into the vault that he almost missed the photoelectronic eyes. That’s what he assumed they were until he examined them more closely. Perhaps they were lasers. No difference – either way it was some sort of grid. He quickly noted their positions. He’d been vanished twelve minutes already. He could feel the edges of his concentration beginning to erode.
He examined the vault door impatiently and then stepped through into a room of unimaginable light. Bars of gold stacked along each wall bathed in the steady, dense, incorruptibly clear light from the spiral flame, slender as a thread, burning through the Diamond’s center. Daniel felt his concentration begin to dissolve, its force subsumed by the greater coherence of light. He grabbed the suction cup at his waist, desperately thrusting it upward as he leapt back into flesh. The suction held. Visible, he swayed above the Diamond, arms and legs reflexively outstretched to stabilize himself, like a man about to plummet down a well transfixed in midair. Dazed, he looked down into the the Diamond’s center. The spiral flame had vanished but the light’s unflickering clarity remained, neither terrifying nor serene, particle nor wave.
Daniel wanted to hold the Diamond. It was perched on a columnar pedestal in the center of the vault, just out of reach. He would have to vanish again and reposition himself. He didn’t know if he could muster the concentration to vanish in its field or, if he could, whether he could sustain the focus necessary to reappear as he leapt and slap the suction cup back on the ceiling. But he didn’t care. He had to touch it.
He closed his eyes but it was hopeless. He could not gather himself out of the light. Couldn’t separate his center from the Diamond’s. He kept his eyes shut and tried to imagine the Diamond in his hands. He could see the Diamond clearly in his mind, but not in his hands, not touching. He opened his eyes and looked into the center of the Diamond, surrendering his concentration, his will and desire. When he vanished, the Diamond vanished also, though its light remained constant. Daniel picked it up gently, slipped it into the velvet pouch he’d brought, and walked quickly through the gold bars and the western vault wall and through the mountain. Even inside the velvet pouch, which had a thin lead sheet between the doubled material, the light was undiminished. He lifted it to his face and looked deeply into the light. At its center was the spiral flame again, the Diamond in the raven’s beak, the open window, the mirror shattering, Annalee screaming, ‘Run, Daniel!’ And then he was staggering on the moonlit plain, the pouch heavy in his hand, the light gone. He opened the pouch and looked inside. The Diamond was still glowing, but he couldn’t see the spiral flame. He lifted his hand and touched a face, a face he couldn’t imagine as his own.
Daniel started running toward the setting moon. Before he’d taken three strides there was a roar above him and what seemed to be a huge locust descended, blocking his way. Daniel’s first thought was to vanish again but then he realized it was Low-Riding Eddie and that the locust was Lucille. Daniel ducked his head against the prop wash and stumbled toward the chopper, the pouch clutched to his chest.
Low-Riding Eddie reached across the cockpit and helped yank him aboard, gunned the chopper into the air, backed off the throttle for a second as it stabilized, then whipped into a 180-degree turn. He kept it wide open as they flew fifty feet above the alkali flats below.
They’d covered five miles before Eddie glanced over at him and yelled, ‘Hey, you all right?’
‘Yeah,’ Daniel said weakly. Realizing Eddie probably couldn’t hear him over the engine’s howl, he nodded.
‘Fuckin’ near landed on ya, man – you come outa nowhere.’
Daniel shouted, ‘Lots of room. No problem.’
‘Get the goods?’
Daniel pointed at the pouch on his lap, then raised his thumb.
The Low Rider grinned his merry approval, his eyes sparkling like the silver studs on his leather jacket. ‘What kinda jump we got on the heat?’
Daniel was dreamily watching the flats slip by. He looked over at Eddie and shook his head.
Eddie assumed he hadn’t heard the question and yelled it again.
Daniel leaned closer and shouted, ‘No problems. I got by the alarms.’
‘Fuckin’ A-Okay!’ Eddie bellowed, pounding him on the shoulder.
Daniel leaned back smiling, his hands on the pouch. He could feel the Diamond’s warmth through the velvet. He remembered then that he hadn’t checked the inside of the vault for a camera. But he figured he would have noticed one, and recalled that the checkpoint monitoring screens had shown only the outside of the vault. ‘Clean,’ he murmured to himself, then turned his attention to the fading stars. A few minutes later Low-Riding Eddie set him down along a county road and was gone again, it seemed to Daniel, before his feet touched the ground.
The Chevy pickup with camper was where it was supposed to be, keys taped under the dash, a small toolbox on the front seat. The sight cleared Daniel’s head. There was work to do in the logical world. He opened the toolbox and found, on top, already snapped together, a ratchet, extension, and a half-inch socket.
The bolts on the front differential were loose. Lying on his side, he spun them off, then lifted the cover. The empty differential had been lined with mink. Daniel stared, then started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. Finally, choking, he had to crawl out from under the truck and get up on his hands and knees. It took a minute to catch his breath, and when he shimmied back under the truck with the pouch he tried to ignore the mink lining and concentrate on the task at hand. He took the Diamond from the pouch, marveling again at its light, noticing that the spiral flame wasn’t visible. Now he felt certain he could only see the spiral flame in his vanished state, and was tempted to check his theory. Instead he lifted the Diamond gently into the differential casing. It fit perfectly. He replaced the cover and cinched the bolts down tight. He returned the ratchet to the toolbox and picked up his harness-vest from where he’d left it on the floorboard.
The white flag was exactly where Volta had diagrammed it, forty yards down a shallow drainage gully to the right of the road. The buried disposal drum was directly below it. He lifted the sand-covered lid without difficulty. The drum was half full of a clear, odorless liquid. He set the harness-vest on the ground, then stripped down to his gloves, dropping each piece of apparel into the vat. Shivering in the chill dawn air, he picked up the harness-vest, gave the attached suction cup an impulsive kiss, held it over the dark maw of the drum. He was about to let go when he remembered that the unused plastique and nerve gas were still in the vest’s special pockets. The disposal plan assumed he would have used them. He was deeply unsure about how they’d react with the chemicals in the drum, another product of Aunt Charmaine’s bunker industry. He removed the gas and plastique from their pockets and dropped the harness-vest into the solution. He buried the gas and plastique farther down the gully, threw his gloves and the white flag into the drum, and then repositioned the lid, smoothing sand over it till it was well concealed. Bent over, bare ass pointed at the rising sun, he shuffled backward toward the road, erasing his tracks as best he could.