“Oh, well,” says Andreas.
“Oh, well, what?”
But it’s too late. He twists his body, flicks the half-smoked cigarette back toward the bar, and throws himself in front of the bus.
“No,” is all I’ve got time for, one cold sorrowful syllable. He’s timed it, calculated the vectors, bus and man intersecting as they move through space at their varying speeds. Bam!
The bus screeches to a halt and time stops, freeze-frame: the girl in the ball gown with her face hidden in the crook of the goth kid’s arm—me with my mouth open, gun out, pointed uselessly at the side of the bus—the bus at a deranged angle, back end on the sidewalk, front end jutting into the road. Then Detective Andreas slowly peels off and slips down onto the street, and the bar crowd is streaming out and surrounding me and chattering and hollering. The joyrider and his friend climb down the steps of the bus and stand a few paces back from Andreas’s broken body, staring openmouthed.
And then Detective Culverson is at my side, a firm hand on my wrist, gently lowering my gun hand to my side. McGully works his way through the crowd, pushing and shouting, “Cop!” waving his badge around, a Coors in the other hand, cigar in his mouth. He takes a knee in the middle of Phenix Street and lays a finger on Andreas’s throat. Culverson and I stand there in the center of the awestruck crowd, cold puffs of air drifting from our mouths, but Andreas’s head is all the way around, his neck is snapped. He’s dead.
“Well, Palace, what do you think?” says McGully, heaving up to his feet, looking over. “Suicide, or murder?”
PART THREE
Wishful Thinking
1.
“Good Lord Almighty, Henry Palace, what happened to you?”
This seems like an awfully harsh assessment from a former sweetheart I haven’t seen for six years, until I remember what I look like: my face, my eye. I bring my hand up, adjust the thick stiff packet of gauze, smooth my mustache, feel the bristle of stubble along my jaw.
“I’ve had a rough couple of days,” I say.
“Sorry to hear that.”
It’s six-thirty in the morning, and Andreas is dead, and Zell is dead, and Toussaint is dead, and here I am standing in Cambridge, on a footbridge over the Charles River, making small talk with Alison Koechner. And it’s weirdly pleasant out here, it must be over fifty degrees, as if crossing the Massachusetts state line has tripped me over into a southern latitude. All of it, the gentle spring breeze, the morning sun glinting off the bridge, the soothing ripple of the river in spring, it would all be pleasurable in another world, another time. But I close my eyes and what I see is death: Andreas flattened against the grill of a bus; J. T. Toussaint thrown back against the wall, a hole blown open in his chest; Peter Zell in the bathroom.
“It’s great to see you, Alison.”
“Okay,” she says.
“I mean it.”
“Let’s not get into all that.”
The wild tangle of orchid-red hair that I remember has been cut to an adult length and corralled into a bun with a system of small efficient clips. She wears gray pants and a gray blazer and a small gold pin on her lapeclass="underline" she really does, she looks terrific.
“So,” says Alison, and draws from an inside pocket of her blazer a slim letter-size white envelope. “This friend of yours? Mr. Skeve?”
“He’s not my friend,” I say immediately, raising one finger. “He’s Nico’s husband.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Nico, as in your sister Nico?”
“Asteroid,” I say, no need to expound. Impulse marriage. Shotgun wedding. Biggest imaginable shotgun. Alison nods, just says, “Wow.” She knew Nico when Nico was twelve years old, already not the kind of a person you imagined settling down. A sneak smoker, a snatcher of beers from the cooler in Grandfather’s garage, a succession of bad haircuts and disciplinary problems.
“Okay then. So, your brother-in-law, Skeve? He’s a terrorist.”
I laugh. “No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.”
“The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”
I sigh, lean one hip against the rusted green steel of the bridge’s guard rail. A shell slides by, cutting through the surface of the river, the crew grunting as they shoot past. I like these kids, getting up at six in the morning to row crew, keeping in shape, sticking with their program. These kids, I like.
“What would you say,” Alison asks, “if I told you that the United States government, long ago anticipating this kind of disaster, had prepared an escape plan? Had constructed, in secret, a habitable environment, beyond reach of the asteroid’s destructive effects, where humanity’s best and brightest could be relocated and made safe to repopulate the species?”
I bring my palm up to my face, rub it against my cheek, which is only now beginning to emerge, from its numbness, into active pain.
“I’d say that’s insane. It’s Hollywood nonsense.”
“And you would be right. But there are those who are not as perspicacious.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” I’m remembering Derek Skeve lying on the thin mattress in his cell, his spoiled kid’s clowning grin. I wish I could tell you, Henry, but it’s a secret.
Alison opens the white envelope, unfolds three pieces of crisp white paper, and hands them to me, and my impulse is to say, you know what? Forget the whole thing. I have a murder to solve. But I don’t. Not today.
Three single-spaced typed pages, no watermark, no agency seal, pocked here and there with thick black lines of redaction. In 2008 there was a tabletop exercise convened by the Directorate of Strategic Planning of the United States Air Force, drawing on the resources and personnel of sixteen discrete agencies of the United States government, including the DHS, the DTRA, and NASA. The exercise imagined an event “above global-catastrophe threshold” in a “short-warning” scenario—in other words, exactly what has now come to pass—and considered every possible response: nuclear counterstrike, slow push-pull, kinetic options. The conclusion was that realistic response options would be limited to civil defense.
I’m yawning, flipping forward. I’m still on the first page. “Alison?”
She rolls her eyes slightly, the small gentle sarcasm so familiar that it squeezes my heart in my chest, and takes back the papers. “There was a dissent, Palace. An astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore named Dr. Mary Catchman insisted that the government act preemptively and build habitable environments on the moon. When Maia turned up, certain individuals convinced themselves that the DOD had embraced that dissent, and that these safe havens exist.”
“Bases?”
“Yes.”
“On the Moon?”
“Yes.”
I squint into the gray sun, seeing Andreas plastered against the bus, slowly sliding down. IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY. Secret government escape bases. People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.
“So, Derek was tooling around the Guard station on his ATV looking for, what, blueprints? Escape pods? A giant slingshot?”
“Or something.”
“Doesn’t make him a terrorist.”
“I know, but that’s the designation. The way the military-justice system works right now, once he’s got that tag, there’s nothing that can be done.”
“Well, I’m no fan of this guy, but Nico loves him. There’s nothing—?”
“There’s nothing. Nothing.” Alison sends a long look out across the river, at the rowers, the ducks, the clouds easing along in parallel with the water line. She is not the first girl I ever kissed, but she remains the one I’ve kissed the most, in all my life thus far. “I’m sorry. It’s not my department.”