Device Free Weekend, page 22
And yet, to find the image of Ryan Cloverhill that looked most like the selfie he carried around in his mind, he’d have to scroll back to Bardsley—the last version of himself he truly recognized.
Prior iterations seemed unfinished, subsequent releases subtly compromised. It was as if each passing year since Stillwater had replaced something old with something new, until eventually, there was no way to clearly identify which parts were original. If, one day, something in the engine room sprang a leak and blew the whole vessel apart, how would you even begin to start putting it all back together again?
Would it even be possible?
“Negative,” he said into the handset. “Civic data trends from the past five Labor Day weekends puts minimum traffic density for the area between 3:15 and 4:30 a.m. How long to inspect?”
“Fourteen hours,” Einhorn told him. “Seven buildings. Two hours per structure. That’s what tomorrow was for, and it was already tight.”
He was a good man, Einhorn. But he was no Jud Bernal. “I’m aware of the challenges, Terrance. Would you feel more comfortable with Turner in command?”
A pause.
Then: “We can get by with a spot check. Ready for preliminary detonation by oh-three-oh-five.”
“That’s top-notch adapting and overcoming,” Ryan said. “Now, listen carefully, this is impor—”
But he never got a chance to finish the thought.
A sudden blow rocked him like a brick to the head, knocking him off the bed. Suddenly, he was numb in one hand and deaf in one ear. It was as if he’d lit a firecracker and pressed it against his face until it exploded.
The handset had clattered up against the closed cabin door. Disoriented, Ryan grabbed the phone and immediately felt the heat of its misshapen casing, saw the shattered screen, but he couldn’t make sense of it. He smelled the scorched components and knew instantly what had happened, though he couldn’t understand why. Within the vast spectrum of natural conditions to be found on planet Earth, the Pineapple Drive was essentially malfunction-proof. What had just occurred should not have been possible.
He dragged himself back up to the bed, still shaking the cobwebs out of his head. Now he felt pain: a skewer in his ear, a hot sting around a numb spot on his cheek, painful tingling in his fingertips.
He reached out and grabbed the tablet from its dock. In the moment before the screen woke up, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the glass. It was like glimpsing a stranger. Then the screen popped to life where he’d left it, on the open video chat window, and now he was looking at himself through the onboard camera—essentially a high-definition version of the same reflection.
There was a line of blood trailing from his right ear. A scorch mark already ringed with blisters on his cheekbone. His eyes looked hollow and bloodshot, hair matted with grease. Even to himself, he looked like a man who’d been beaten.
He swiped his own image away and called up the network dashboard.
Before he could say “event log,” the screen shattered and went black. The tablet flopped out of his hands and tumbled to the floor.
“What are you doing?” he shouted, as if the devices could explain themselves. “You can’t be serious!”
He reached back onto the bed and pulled over his go-bag: spare tablet, spare phone, the chunky development laptop he’d used to slam out the update he’d pushed to Sham Rock.
Bang went the spare phone.
Bang went the spare tablet.
Kabang went the high-spec laptop, spitting out keys like teeth.
Each time it happened, it couldn’t have happened. With each mini-blast, the gasps and jabbering and general commotion escalated from the cheap seats on the other side of the cabin door, only adding to the clamor in his head. It wasn’t the first time today he wished he’d left all their gags in. Ryan hurled a hot pulped handset at the door, shouting at the whole world to shut the hell up, for Christ’s sake, and just let him think. Because this wasn’t possible.
Yet it was happening. And it could only be happening one way:
Somewhere, somehow, somebody was hitting each device with a Pineapple command the moment it came online. It was as if his overstressed brain couldn’t comprehend the riddle itself, let alone begin to solve it, until the answer suddenly dawned on him, obvious and fully intact. Because there was only one answer possible.
Kai stripped off the headset and finally closed her eyes. She waited for that little voice that sounded a lot like her mother to tell her what to do next.
It was a jolt, returning to the oppressive physics of the real world after the assistive capabilities of the interface. Everything felt so much… heavier. She thought of a LinkStream interview she’d once seen with an American astronaut. He’d just returned to Earth after nearly a year in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station. The man had come back physically taller, only to begin the slow process of shrinking back down to size. He couldn’t walk right for a period of time. Everything hurt. His extremities had swollen from the redistribution of his own bodily fluids. Gravity, he’d said, gets you down.
Gravity and bomb blasts.
She needed a doctor. Even through her jittering eyelids, the light from the bedroom spiked her eyes, intensified the pounding behind them.
What light, KK?
Power’s out. Remember?
Her eyes sprang open. The bedroom was still dark, compounding her confusion.
Then the light came again: a brilliant white beam glancing across the rain-speckled windowpanes. As it did, her swollen brain finally caught up to her ears. A new sound resolved itself, emerging from the steady thrum of rain on the roof:
Helicopter rotors.
Somehow, Kai.
As the central communications hub for this operation, she was the only person on the team—the only person on the planet—he’d entrusted with the command syntax a person would need to accomplish what she’d just accomplished. In the event he didn’t make it through to the end of this thing, he’d needed to leave somebody he trusted in charge of handling a few small but crucial cleanup routines, beginning with the tablet inside the house.
But how?
How had she managed it? He’d taken out her devices. He’d watched every last one of them go off-line, including Jud’s spare in the Sikorsky. Clearly, she’d survived the tunnel. But how?
It didn’t matter. However she’d done it, Kai had left him dead in the water.
Except for one last life ring:
He dove back into the go-bag, realizing he still had the pile of devices he’d liberated from the gang upon their arrival at the Rock.
Ryan started pulling standard-issue, Dick-and-Jane smartphones from the bottom of the bag, one after another, powering them on one at a time, then tossing them aside. Each one was locked with a passcode… until he got to Stephen’s.
Naturally. He mused at the stock, factory-default screen saver. Zero photos saved in the camera roll. Just a crammed-full music library. The model itself was about nine years out-of-date. In short: The phone was Stephen Rollins through and through. A man who had, inexplicably, devoted his entire working career to a widely discredited device that hadn’t evolved significantly since the 1950s.
He’d installed the Link app, though. It was hard not to find that sort of touching.
But the outdated piece-of-shit internal antenna was picking up only one bar’s worth of signal out here. Roaming.
Ryan pulled up the dialer anyway and punched in a number from memory. Nobody answered. Part of him almost felt glad. He was calling from an unfamiliar number, Chicago area code… There was something vaguely refreshing about somebody following the rules for a change.
But only vaguely. He tried again, then again, letting each call ring all the way through to voice mail until finally, after six more crackling, static-chopped rings, Einhorn finally broke protocol and answered: “Wrong number, asshole. Stop calling it.”
“It’s me,” Ryan said. “Change of plans.”
Long pause. “Mr. Clov… Oh.”
“Listen carefully.”
“I, uh… Is this… Sir, do you mean to be calling me in the clear right now?”
“Exceptional circumstances,” Ryan told him. “I’m coming back in. You now have three hours. Be ready.”
“Hang on. You’re breaking up.”
“Be ready. Three hours,” Ryan shouted into the phone. “And if you see Kai Keahi before you see me, shoot her.”
He ended the call without waiting for a response. He grabbed his coat, shoving Stephen’s phone into a pocket. Then he fished around until he found the pocket containing the last thing he needed: his zippered hard-shell pen case.
It hadn’t been anywhere near three hours yet, and he could already hear Mags in his head: If you chain-smoke these, expect your heart to explode somewhere around dose three. Be advised.
Terms and conditions accepted.
He jabbed the second pen into his leg.
Then he zipped up the case, zipped up the bag, struggled into the coat, and zipped that up too. Then he grabbed the Walther and opened the cabin door to captive pandemonium.
Everybody was standing, shifting around, struggling to maintain their balance with the rocking of the boat, clucking like chickens as they banged against one another. What was that sound? What’s happening? Please tell us what you want. Please think of our families.
And these were the people who believed themselves qualified to take control of the Linkverse?
Fat chance. He fired three rounds up the open stairwell, into the rain.
Instantly, the clucking changed to yelps and screams. Everything down below got extremely loud for a few seconds. Then extremely quiet.
When he saw that he finally had their attention, he said, “Good news, folks. You caught a break. If you’ll return to your seats and prepare for departure, I’ll be getting us underway.”
A surge of adrenaline drove Kai up from the bed and hobbling to the window. Her first thought was nonsensical: Jud?
The sound of the rotors was fading already. She chased it, a lurching hobble through the darkened cottage, out the front door, to the edge of the porch. In the dim light of the storm, through the curtain of rain, she saw the search-and-rescue beam tracking along a truly amazing sight: a long, wide track of plowed earth leading from the edge of the front porch into the timber.
Above the column of light, she recognized the aircraft’s silhouette and tail stripe from her mission prep. It was a Coast Guard MH-65 Dolphin. It had scanned the darkened cottage with its powerful spotlight and was now moving across the island, following the track all the way to the big house on the other side.
Help had arrived.
Medical attention had arrived.
Authorities had arrived.
Apprehension, custody, and eventual incarceration had arrived.
Kai tried to think. Her mind felt addled, fuzzy, as if she’d left her core processor back inside the interface. How could she explain this? The trapped houseguests, the collapsed tunnel, her unrestricted presence here… It was her job to know how to spin things. But nobody could possibly spin this.
Anything you could do, you’ve already done, she heard her mother say. You can’t go back and do any of it over again. Time to rest now, KK. You need help.
You couldn’t exactly argue with that voice.
But you could tune it out, if you tried hard enough. Kai had practiced that a lot recently.
Except this time, she must have tuned herself out in the process. Because the next thing she knew, she was somehow standing in the screen-enclosed porch at the back of the house, go-bag at her feet, holding a wet suit in her hands.
She couldn’t remember leaving the front porch. Had no recollection of finding her way back through the darkened cottage. All at once she simply looked up, and… there she was. As if the real world were just another big interface, and she’d stumbled onto a cheat code by accident.
Not a good sign, KK.
Mags and Luna kept a pair of stand-up paddleboards back here. Fourteen-footers for day touring in big water. There were wet suits still hanging on drying racks in the corner.
They’d left it all behind. Kai could hardly blame them. Their job was complete; why travel heavy? When Mags and Luna got where they were going, they’d be able to afford new wet suits. They’d be able to afford to never wear the same wet suit twice for the rest of their lives.
Grinding her teeth through the pain, Kai stripped down and struggled into one of their discarded hand-me-downs. Luna’s, she presumed—the two of them were similar enough in height and build to make it work.
You can’t even stand up straight.
Yeah, well, she didn’t have to stand. She could kneel on the board. She could lie down on her stomach and hang on. She could do anything she needed to do.
Except breathe without crying. Or pick up a sick cat with that arm of yours. Come on, keiki. You really think you’re lugging that thing all the way down the bluff in a rainstorm?
Why the hell not? Pain was just the body’s way of trying to hold you back in life. Screw pain. Besides, that was what carry straps were for: carrying things. She still had one good arm. She could drag the damn board behind her by the straps if she had to. She could crawl all the way to the dock off the spit if that’s what it took. Once she was on the water, she’d be weightless again.
And then what? Seven miles through hard chop. On that thing. Sure.
I can do it.
With a concussion so bad you lost time just now.
Maybe next time I’ll wake up onshore.
Maybe next time you wake up, you’ll be drowning.
Then I’ll drown. Kai means “sea.” It doesn’t mean “prison cell.”
Don’t tell me what your name means. I’m the one who gave it to you. And this is the last thing you’ll do with it?
Kai understood that she was only arguing with herself, no matter how much the voice sounded like her mom. It was pointless. Just a way to stall. Beyond the porch screens, the rain was already letting up.
Or maybe it was raining harder. Who cared? All that mattered was that time was running out. They’d be here soon. And then she’d spend the rest of her life wishing she’d drowned herself when she’d had the chance.
“No dick-dragging,” she said, working her arms into the sleeves. She zipped herself in.
This time, the voice didn’t have an answer.
CHAPTER 37
IT WAS TO have been a long, lazy, device free weekend: a chance for the seven of them to unplug, catch up, and enjoy one another’s company for the first time in too many years.
Five of them lifted off the Rock in the rain that Saturday evening, hardly more than twenty-four hours after they’d first touched down.
The big orange helicopter waiting on Ryan Cloverhill’s rooftop tennis court—the helipad being currently occupied, and the rain-soaked ground deemed too soft for landing—had capacity for up to twelve passengers. The flight crew consisted of three men and two women—two pilots, a mechanic, one paramedic, and one orange-suited rescue swimmer who hadn’t needed to get wet. Even counting them, Stephen couldn’t fail to notice how much capacity they had to spare.
At least on paper. “Sorry about the elbow room,” Petty Officer Williams called out over the howl of the rotors. “Gets a little cramped in here with this many.”
She slid the bay door closed behind her, pounded the back of the copilot’s chair, and duckwalked over to help Stephen with his harness, water streaming from her rain gear. She’d replaced the bandage on his wrist with a clear vinyl air splint that went past his fingertips. The sight of his own hand inside the splint made Stephen think of Sylvester in his display case. He imagined the placard: This was once a real human hand. Through the fateful foolishness of its owner, it caused the sequence of events that led to the death of Perry Wayne Therkle, aged 51 years.
He stared at it as Williams finished strapping him in. She gave his harness a tug, then seemed finally to hear her own words: Gets a little cramped in here with this many.
“Sorry,” she said. “Dumb thing to say.”
Stephen didn’t hold it against her. She was right, after all: It wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the helicopter that brought them here. There was no leather upholstery, no sweeping views. Definitely no quiet. He didn’t see a cocktail holder anywhere.
What he saw were functional hard surfaces and lots of important-looking equipment tied down with canvas straps. Nobody squabbled over the bare-bones jump seats. This time, Will Shrader had to be sedated just to climb aboard. Not because he’d gone phobic about flying again, but because it was the only way they could get him to leave Perry behind, unrecovered, alone on the island without them. But based on the radio chatter Stephen had picked up, it appeared to be Coast Guard protocol to avoid remaining stationary longer than absolutely necessary on or within any structure that may or may not be wired to explode.
“Where will you take us?” Emma called.
“UWMC,” the copilot called back. Ensign somebody.
“University of Washington Medical Center,” Petty Officer Williams clarified. “We’ll get you there safe. Sit back and save your strength, folks. Long night ahead.”
The chopper lifted, creating the sensation of suspended gravity all around them.
In the past hour, Sham Rock had become the most popular law enforcement destination in the Salish Sea. Through the far bay window, Stephen caught the pulsing bleed of red and blue from the waterline somewhere below them, flashing against the bluffs, refracted by the rain. He couldn’t pick up everything he overheard, but he’d gathered that a bomb disposal unit out of Port Angeles had finally arrived at the spit. Robots had found the cottage empty so far.
As they ascended, Lainie said, “It’s in his brain.” It was the first Stephen had heard her speak in an hour; over the rotor noise, and the drumbeat of rain on the hull, he barely heard her at all.
