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  What did I owe Kay? She had been my friend’s girl, and he had told her to come to me if she was ever in trouble. She had come. She had been in trouble, and now she was dead. It would be too hard getting drunk, I decided. Instead, I would give her the one thing I could: justice.

  Does that sound funny? This was a cruel world, and justice was one of the last things anyone received. Kay had been on the Reservation, but she had been one of the people inflicting tests, not taking them. Then one night she had opened my door to freedom. Therefore, whether it was my conscience or a sense of old-fashioned payback, I was going to find out who killed Kay, and then I was going to do something about it.

  -7-

  Like some dingy Science Fiction future, the California coast was a dirty smudge of smog to our left.

  Blake and I were on the Alamo, and San Francisco was far behind us to the north. The ocean was a vast expanse of long, rolling swells. They were hypnotic to watch, lulling and peaceful. Billowy clouds hid the sun, although the fiery orb put in an appearance now and again as it journeyed from one cloud-island to another. The wind was brisk and it felt good on my face. I enjoyed the salty tang and knew an intense feeling of freedom. The only problem was my hair. It didn’t lift in the wind as it used to. It was a small thing, but I was self-conscious about it. Like the rest of me, it was denser than before the incident.

  Blake and I had spotted two ships several hours apart but most of the voyage we had the ocean to ourselves. It was strange how troubles faded while out at sea. I was going to find out who killed Kay…soon. While watching the swells, my thoughts slipped into limbo.

  The boat lurched. I blinked several times. The boat lurched again the other way. I looked up at Blake. He stood at the controls, grinning down at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  Friends had called me a brooder before. There were times I stopped and stared into nowhere. Then a person would nudge me and ask if I was okay. Despite Blake being a techie writer, he had an extrovert’s way. He liked to talk, even if it was about nothing.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Blake said, as he swung his arm to indicate the ocean. “Could you imagine if we were astronauts and this was a new planet? That would mean this would be the first human vessel to sail across an untouched ocean?”

  The thought made me grin, which no doubt encouraged Blake.

  “It’s a shame we don’t use the Hubble Telescope with more foresight,” he said. “Who cares how the universe began? Use the Hubble to search for nearby planets is what I say.”

  “How would that help us?”

  “What would happen if astronomers found an Earth-type planet within ten light-years of us?” he asked. “That would be a game-changer. The knowledge would start working on everyone’s imagination just as knowledge of spices in the Far East spurred on the early European explorers. People would look at the night sky and realize a new world, an inhabitable planet, was on our doorstep.” Blake’s eyes shone. “Think of it. The knowledge might defuse a few wars and shake up some religious terrorists. It might even shake up some religions. Scientists and inventors would seriously begin thinking of ways to reach that planet. It would be a goal, just like China’s riches once lured Christopher Columbus into discovering America.”

  I considered what Blake said as we rumbled through the ocean. My hazy, limbo-like thoughts evaporated along with my good feelings. Tantalizing goals had lured Kay, and she had shipwrecked her life on a Long Beach street.

  Two hours later, a helicopter appeared as a dot in the sky. It was near six o’clock in the evening, with plenty of light still.

  Blake pointed it out to me. I grunted, acknowledging that I saw it.

  Ten minutes later, Blake said, “It’s still there.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The chopper is still out there.”

  I turned away from the rolling swells. The sun was behind a cloud, but there were fewer clouds than previously and plenty of blue sky. I was wearing my extra-dark sunglasses, so I could see. But looking up in the daytime sky made me squint too much. If the sun had been freely shining, I wouldn’t even have bothered trying.

  “Is the helicopter bigger than before?” I asked.

  Blake was silent long enough that I glanced at him. He stared intently at the chopper.

  “Maybe,” he finally said.

  Five minutes later, I looked again. The helicopter was still there and it had grown larger. To my mind, it had also dropped lower in the sky.

  “Is it black?” I asked.

  “Black helicopters went out with the Nineties,” Blake said.

  He meant the old conspiracy theory about black U.N. helicopters monitoring American patriots. There were people who still subscribed to the idea, but not as many these days.

  Blake shook his head. “I don’t think it’s black.”

  “Which means nothing in itself,” I said.

  “Are you paranoid about it?”

  The Chief had warned me away from Long Beach. He’d said Jagiello had aimed a workable laser weapon at my head.

  “It’s not paranoid if people really are after me.”

  “Okay,” Blake said. “But there’s not much we can do about it.”

  That was where he was wrong. I had been on the run for years, although I’d settled down in San Francisco these last seven months. I had been involved in some crazy things before that, and I’d had to shoot or fight my way out of several traps. The Green Berets had taught me to use the right weapons, just as a mechanic or an electrician used the right tools to do his job. I had relatively easy access to money. With it, I’d purchased a few high-grade weapons for a day of extreme emergency.

  What that meant was that I had a FIM-92 Stinger deep in the ship’s hold. The Stinger was a handheld, shoulder-fired SAM, surface-to-air missile. Together with the missile, the launcher weighed thirty-three and half pounds. It was simple to use. One aimed at the target, activated the tracking system and pulled the trigger. An ejection motor blew it outward and then the missile moved, maxing out at Mach 2.2.

  Now Stingers weren’t the easiest black market weapon to buy. The reason there were any available at all was that long ago, in the late Eighties, the CIA had supplied almost two thousand Stingers to the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan. Back then, the Afghans had fought the Soviet Russians who had invaded their country. The Stingers inflicted unacceptable aircraft losses to the Russians. In 1989, they withdrew and Uncle Sam tried to buy back the unused Stingers, spending fifty-five million dollars to purchase three hundred missiles. Too many ended up in Croatia, Iran, Qatar and North Korea. Then America went to war in Afghanistan. U.S. and Coalition forces downplayed or denied it, saying unguided RPGs hit various air assets. The truth was otherwise. Our own Stingers took down several of our helicopters and I know of at least one fixed wing aircraft.

  The Stinger down in my hold was old, but still very servicable. If needed, I wouldn’t hesitate to use it on the helicopter pacing us. That didn’t mean I wanted too, just that I had an option.

  The Alamo plowed through the swells as we watched the helicopter. Blake finally dug out a pair of binoculars and trained it on the intruder.

  “Coast Guard,” he said with relief.

  “Or painted with Coast Guard colors,” I said.

  Blake lowered the binoculars. He had a funny frown on his face. “Don’t tell me you think it belongs to the Shop.”

  It would be the easiest thing in the world to send a helicopter out to sea and sink my ship. “Wait here,” I said.

  “Gavin!” he shouted.

  I descended into the boat and went down to the hold. There, I unpacked my Stinger. It was a last resort, but I wasn’t going to wait until they started firing on us before I prepared. Because of my increased density, I sank instead of floated like most people. The reasonable question then was why I lived on a boat. Freedom was the answer. With the cabin cruiser, I could go anywhere in the world. Airports these days were the least
free place on the planet, and I had vowed never to travel by air again. I wasn’t sure what airport scanners would show security. I could have gone to Long Beach by car…but I liked traveling by water.

  I soon peered out from under cover near the lounge’s door. There was no sense letting them see my missile, not until I fired it.

  The chopper kept inching closer, making me more nervous by the second.

  Blake joined me. The binoculars rested on his chest, with a leather strap around his neck.

  “And if they aren’t the Shop?” he asked quietly.

  “Have you seen anything suspicious?”

  He hesitated before saying, “There’s a man wearing goggles and a flak vest sitting behind a machine gun.”

  “Right,” I said. I could hear the whomp-whomp of its blades, although it was a distant sound. All I needed to do to fix this was step out into the open, aim, acquire and fire. If I was right, I would have preempted the Chief and probably killed Jagiello and his team. If I was wrong, I’d have killed several innocent Coast Guardsmen.

  I kept hesitating and Blake kept glancing at me. Finally, I said, “I don’t want to murder innocent men.”

  “Good.”

  “But I want to die even less.” I took a deep breath, telling myself I couldn’t afford to take chances, not with the Shop. “They’re coming too close. We can’t risk it.”

  “Give it just a few more minutes,” Blake pleaded.

  “You want to give them enough time to launch a missile at us?”

  He lifted the binoculars at the approaching helicopter. As he did, the chopper veered away and began to climb.

  “The gunner is waving at us,” he said.

  I chewed my lower lip, and I realized I was itching to fire the Stinger. The Chief’s warning—the man didn’t threaten lightly. It was stupid to have gone out to sea.

  “He’s leaving,” Blake said, as he watched them go.

  I lowered the Stinger, unnerved that I’d almost taken down a Coast Guard chopper.

  “What do you think they are looking for?” I asked.

  “My guess would be submersibles or people spotting for submersibles,” Blake said matter-of-factly.

  “Submarines?” I asked, setting down the Stinger. “Who puts submarines along the California coast? The Chinese?”

  Blake plopped onto a deck chair as he dug a Corona from his cooler. He twisted off the cap and sailed it with his thumb and index finger into a hanging garbage bag. He guzzled like a desert traveler, smacking his lips as he pulled the bottle away.

  “That was too close,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “I’m glad you didn’t destroy it.”

  “What about submarines?” I asked. “Who uses them on our West Coast?”

  Blake took a swig this time. Then he began to talk. “They make them in Venezuela and Panama out of fiberglass. Because of the fiberglass the submersibles have an almost nonexistent radar signature.” He grinned. “The vessel isn’t completely submersible, just the bulk of it. The conning tower remains above water, supplying the five-man crew with air. They construct it for a one-way trip to the United States. The crew is usually made up of Colombian farmers. Their families are taken hostage for their good behavior. If the farmers fail, the hostages are shot and the fact is advertised.”

  “Brutal,” I said.

  “Very,” Blake agreed. “The farmers are given minimal training and sent into a foreign environment. Can you imagine what it’s like for them? With the small conning tower hardly above water, the men inch their way up the coast at about five or six knots. The craft is loaded with cocaine or other drugs. They move so slowly they don’t leave a wake, and with the tiny conning tower, it’s nearly impossible to spot unless you’re right on top of them. Once the farmers reach their destination, they radio and small boats come out and load up. The farmers are finally taken to an airport, they fly home, are paid and they are soon reunited with their families. The one-way submersible is ditched.”

  “Doesn’t seem too cost-effective for the drug cartel,” I said.

  “You’re wrong,” Blake said. “That’s exactly what it is. Bulk shipments by boat are far cheaper than transport by plane. Believe it or not, a higher percentage of the submersibles make it through than the planes.” Blake frowned. “We’re in a losing drug war, if you want to call it that. As long as we Americans so fiercely desire drugs, there will be people more than willing to supply us with them.”

  “It’s all about desire,” I said, thinking of Kay.

  The sun decided to poke out from behind a cloud just then. The brightness hurt my eyes. So, I headed inside to stow the Stinger and then lay down.

  ***

  I woke before dawn, lifted anchor and pushed the throttles so the stern lowered noticeably as the propellers dug hard. The Alamo sped toward the endless spread of lights that was the LA Basin.

  Greater LA was suburban sprawl gone insane, from San Fernando in the north, to Huntington Beach in the south to San Bernardino in the east. Freeways ran like arteries, pumping cars, trucks and semis in every direction. 7-11s ruled. Gas stations were the shrines and snarled freeway hours the holy times as fellow travelers crawled along at a snail’s pace. Since the mid-Eighties, the demographics had remorselessly shifted. Every year, more of Greater LA turned into Little Mexico, mutating the culture as white flight increased.

  First checking the GPS display, I changed direction, heading east. The sun rose as the concrete sprawl spread from one end of the coastal horizon to the other.

  Blake staggered topside and plopped into a deck chair. He made strange contortions with his face, rubbing it and offering grunting sounds. Soon, he popped a bottle of orange juice, sipping it delicately as if testing for arsenic.

  After another mile churned past, he spoke up. “I used the Internet last night.” I had a wireless hookup. “I searched Polarity Magnetics,” he said. “And followed the links to—”

  “Spare me the details how,” I said. “What did you find?”

  He sipped more orange juice and rubbed his eyes harder than seemed wise. “It’s still too early to talk about this,” he complained. He yawned, finished the juice and pitched the plastic bottle into the trash bag. Turning to me, he said, “Polarity Magnetics is a subsidiary of a major military contractor, one that supplies combat jet parts.”

  “Boeing?” I asked.

  “No. The third company that seldom gets air time,” Blake said. “They’ve been moving into new technologies.”

  “Combat hardware?” I asked.

  “Space.”

  “I thought there were treaties against the militarization of space.”

  “Let me clue you in,” Blake said. “There have been treaties trying to halt war and slow down the spread of advanced weaponry since…since the Crusades, at least.”

  Blake was something of a history buff. No, he was a reader with wide tastes, historical facts among them.

  “Back in 1139,” he said, “the Pope issued an edict prohibiting crossbows. No one was supposed to fire them against fellow Christians, and most certainly one wasn’t supposed to use them against Christian knights. Naturally, there was no law against using them against Muslims and pagans.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Crossbows were that age’s high-tech weapon,” Blake said, talking over me. “Any peasant could wind up a crossbow and put a dart in it, aim and fire at a noble knight. The arrow or bolt punched through the expensive armor and killed the warrior. That was bad because training a knight took a lifetime, and that armor, horse and sword, the cost was prohibitive. Peasants with cheap crossbows changed the rules no matter what the laws said. Now do you think a piece of paper has stopped the great powers or enterprising companies from militarizing space?”

  “What else did you discover?”

  Blake pulled a granola bar out of his pocket, ripped it open with his teeth and began to speak with a mouthful of chewy crumbs.

  “I remembered a
name you once told me, another of the accelerated, a Doctor Cheng. Her name showed up last night. Tina Cheng is the acting president of Polarity Magnetics, Long Beach Department. She has a nice picture on the web site and a pretty smile.”

  I’d known that Doctor Cheng worked for Polarity Magnetics, since Kay had told me. I hadn’t known she ran the division in Long Beach. Kay and Tina Cheng had never gotten along well in Geneva. If Cheng ran Polarity, it meant Kay had stolen from her and tried to force Doctor Cheng’s hand. I grimaced. Tina Cheng would not have liked that at all. She would have been furious, if she was anything like the woman she used to be before the accident.

  “Good work,” I said.

  “It was just a matter of a few clicks.”

  “Probably more than a few,” I said.

  Blake shrugged.

  Tina Cheng…I tried to remember what I knew about her, and I wondered how the acceleration had changed her.

  -8-

  We docked in the Long Beach Marina without incident. I gave Blake cash and he paid with a credit card, renting two Fords. Mine stank of cigarettes. Blake had printed copies of several Long Beach locations, particularly Center Street, the movie theater Kay had walked out of, the right police station and the local morgue.

  I sent Blake to the police. The less I had to do with them the better. It wasn’t out of any inherent dislike of the police. They were the thin blue line, these days more than ever. My problem was that they were trained observers. They noticed my strangeness more than others did, and then they began probing. My evasiveness made them suspicious—it had happened to me enough that it had become a pattern. Soon, they stopped answering my questions. Blake, on the other hand, was good at getting cops to talk. I wanted to learn the known facts of the case.

  I’d been thinking about Kay, about the last time we talked. She had said something that I only really recalled now. It had been as she’d rubbed her wrist aboard the Alamo.