Zig Zag

  By the time the really strong winds picked up, it was after six o'clock; you could hear the gales howling, even from the control room.

  "That storm might cause problems," Blanes said uneasily.

  "That's the least of my worries." It started with a storm, it can end with a storm. Elisa tried to think of it as a good sign.

  Jacqueline approached her. She'd pulled her thick hair back into a rubber band, and the ends were drooping down like a plant in need of water.

  "What will you do... when you get the images? We all need to see them."

  Elisa had no trouble picking up her stress on the word "all." But, of course, Jacqueline was right. If I see Zig Zag, they should, too. Otherwise, they'll never believe me.

  "I'll record them and make copies. I'll need some media."

  "So sorry," Carter quipped. "I completely forgot to pick up any CDs at the supermarket in Yemen."

  "There must be a CD around somewhere," Elisa said.

  Carter lit a cigarette and affected a smooth, radio announcer's voice. "They'd thought of everything... except the CDs." He chuckled huskily.

  "Maybe there's one in Silberg's lab," Blanes said.

  "I'll go see," Victor offered. He walked out of the room, avoiding the tangle of coaxial cables coiled up on the floor like dead snakes.

  "It's all going to be OK," Elisa said.

  It was a lie, of course, but they all knew that. She thought they might just think of it as a defective truth.

  CARTER pulled the metal door shut.

  Like a tombstone seen from inside the grave.

  She was all alone now. All she could hear was the moaning wind. It was like being in a hermetic diving bell several fathoms under the sea. An immense, boundless fear gnawed away at her. She looked at the blinking control lights, the flashing computers, and tried to concentrate on her calculations.

  She knew the exact time that had to be explored. The clocks on the computers had stopped on the night of October 1, 2005, at exactly 4:10:12. In round numbers, that worked out to three hundred million seconds ago. She stopped a moment to reflect on how much her life had changed over those three hundred million seconds.

  Elisa was sure that she'd calculated the exact energy required to open two or three strings from just before that time. The camera behind her was filming, and she'd send its footage to the accelerator to make it collide with the calculated energy. Then she'd recapture the new beam using the open time strings and upload it onto the computer for viewing. And then, we'll just have to see, she thought.

  We'll just have to see.

  She checked over equations again and again, scanning the columns of numbers and Greek letters, trying to ensure there were no errors. Now go correct that damn error! What had Blanes said in class that day? Physics equations are the key to our happiness, our fears, our lives, and our deaths. She was convinced she had the right solution.

  The yellow lines indicated that the accelerator had reached the configuration levels it needed. In the growing darkness of the control room, those lines seemed to bisect Elisa's sweat-drenched face and her half-naked body, her tank top now tied just beneath her breasts. Unfathomably, it was getting hotter. Carter said it was due to the low-pressure system and the storm. The wind in the palm trees sounded like a swarm of locusts. It hadn't started raining yet, but she could hear the sea roar.

  The numbers all added up: 100 percent. She heard a familiar buzzing. The initial process had finished. The accelerator was now preparing to receive the image and send it into gyration at something approaching the speed of light.

  Feverishly, she began to key in the data for the amount of energy calculated.

  This just might work. This just might identify Zig Zag.

  But what would she do if it did? What would she do if she found out Zig Zag was a split that had come from David, or Carter, or Jacqueline ... or herself? Hadn't Blanes been right when he said that getting it right would be as bad as getting it wrong? What were they going to do?

  She pushed those nagging doubts aside and focused on the screen.

  31

  BLANES removed the batteries from the transmitter.

  "Take the batteries out of everything you've got on you: cell phones, PDAs, all of it. Carter, have you checked the flashlights and the kitchen sockets?"

  "I unplugged all the appliances. And this is the only flashlight that still has batteries in it."

  Carter darted back and forth with flashlight in his right hand, his left one extended like a beggar, his palm full of round, flat coinlike batteries. He approached Victor, who held up his wrist and smiled.

  "Mine's a windup."

  "What? Come on..." Carter looked him up and down in the flashlight beam. "Here we are in 2015 and you don't even have a computer watch?"

  "I have one, I just don't use it. This works fine. It's an Omega classic. Used to be my grandfather's. I like mechanical watches."

  "You're full of surprises, Father."

  "Victor, did you check the labs?" Blanes asked.

  "There were two laptops in Silberg's. I took the batteries out."

  "Good. I told Elisa to disconnect the accelerator and unplug the computers she's not using," Blanes said, cupping his hands for the batteries Jacqueline was handing him. "We should stash all this someplace."

  "Leave it on the console." Carter had gone to the back of the room, leaving them in darkness.

  "David..." It was Jacqueline's quivering voice. She'd sat down on the floor. "Do you think he'll make his next move ... soon?"

  "Well, the nights are riskier because the lights are on. But we really don't know when he'll attack, Jacqueline."

  Carter came back and found a spot on the floor, too. The four of them took up less than half the space in the screening room. They were all crowded together by the screen, as though sharing a small tent. Blanes sat in a chair backed up against the screen, Carter and Jacqueline were on the floor, and Victor sat in another chair opposite Blanes. It was pitch black, except for the yellow beam of Carter's flashlight, and hot as a sauna.

  At one point, Carter sat his flashlight down and took two black objects from his pants pocket. Victor thought they looked like pieces of a faucet.

  "I suppose I'm allowed to use this," he said, screwing the pieces together.

  "Won't do you any good," Blanes warned, "but as long as there are no batteries, go ahead."

  Carter set the gun in his lap. Victor realized that the ex-soldier was staring at his pistol with a degree of passion he'd never shown the others. Suddenly, he picked up the flashlight and tossed it. It was so unexpected that rather than trying to catch it, Victor tried to move out of the way, and it hit him on the arm. He heard Carter laugh as he bent to pick it up. Idiot, Victor thought.

  "That means it's your turn, Father. Thanks to your windup watch, you win the prize: first shift on guard duty. Call me at three if I fall asleep. I'll be on second shift the rest of the night."

  "Elisa will have news before then," Blanes said. They sat in silence for a long time, their shadows like the mouths of a tunnel projected onto the wall in the flashlight's gleam. Victor was sure what he was hearing was the rain. There were no windows in the screening room (despite its drawbacks, it was the only place where they could all stretch out comfortably), but he could hear what sounded like interference, the crackling of a TV that wasn't tuned in. And the wind, howling over the background noise. And closer, within the gloom of those four walls, the sounds of labored breathing. Sobbing. Victor realized Jacqueline had buried her head in her hands.

  "He can't attack now, Jacqueline, not this time...," Blanes soothed, trying to convey confidence. "We're on an island. There's nothing for miles around: the only energy he's got are the batteries in that flashlight, and Elisa's computer. It won't be tonight."

  The paleontologist looked up. Victor no longer thought she was a beautiful woman. She was a wounded, quivering wreck.

  "I'm next," she said in an almost inaudible voice. Victor heard her, though. "I
know it..."

  No one tried to console her. Blanes sighed and leaned back against the screen.

  "How does he do it?" Carter asked, stretching. He placed his hands on the wall, behind his neck, and his elbows out to the side. Chest hairs peeked out from his T-shirt. "How does he kill us?"

  "As soon as we're sucked into his time string, we're his," Blanes explained. "In such a short space of time, as I explained, if we're inside a time string, we aren't 'whole,' we're not 'solid.' So our bodies and everything around us are unstable. We're like a jigsaw puzzle of atoms. All Zig Zag has to do is take the pieces out one by one, or move them around, or destroy them. He can do that at will, the same way he makes use of the energy in the lights. Clothes and everything else outside the time string and its current just disappear. There's nothing to protect us; there are no weapons we can use to fight back. Inside the time string, we're as naked and defenseless as newborn babes."

  Carter sat stock-still, as though he'd stopped breathing.

  "How long does it last?" He took a cigarette from his pants pocket. "The pain. How long do you think it lasts?"

  "No one's come back to tell us." Blanes shrugged. "The only version we have is Ric's. He said it felt like he was in there for hours, but his split didn't have anything even approaching the force of Zig Zag."

  "Craig and Nadja survived for months," Jacqueline whispered, hugging her legs to her like she was cold. "That's what the autopsies tell us ... Months or years, suffering intense pain."

  "But we don't know what happens to the consciousness, Jacqueline," Blanes added quickly. "Their perception of time might be entirely different. Subjective and objective time. Remember, there are differences. It could all be incredibly fast from a consciousness perspective—"

  "No," Jacqueline replied. "I don't think so."

  Carter hunted in his pockets for something, maybe a lighter or a box of matches. He still had the unlit cigarette between his lips. But then he gave up, took it from his mouth, and stared down at it as he spoke.

  "I've seen a lot of torture in my time. Been on both sides of it, too. In 1993, I worked in Rwanda training Hutu paramilitary groups in Murehe. When the war kicked off, they accused me of being a traitor and I was tortured. One of the chiefs told me they'd be nice and slow about it: start with my feet and work their way up to my head. First, they ripped off my toenails with sharpened sticks." He smiled. "I've never felt anything as painful in my whole fucking life. I cried, I pissed in my pants it hurt so bad, but the worst thing was knowing that they'd just begun. Those were just my feet, two dried-out crusty things on the very bottom of my body ... I thought I'd never make it. Thought I'd lose my mind before they got to my waist. But after two days, another group I'd trained took the village, killed the men holding me, and let me go. That was when I realized that there's a limit to what a human being can tolerate. At the military academy where I did my training, they used to say, "If the pain is enduring, you can bear it. If it's unbearable, it will kill you and it won't last." He let out one of his weary, sarcastic chortles. "Knowing that was supposed to help us through tough times. But this..."

  "Would you shut up, please?" Jacqueline desperately covered her ears and buried her head once more.

  Carter glanced over at her for a second, but then kept talking in a quiet, gravelly voice, aiming his unlit cigarette at them as if it were a piece of bent chalk.

  "I know exactly what I'm going to do when your colleague comes back with that image. I'm going to slaughter the bastard like a sick dog, whoever it is. Here and now. And if it's me..." He stopped, as if considering a startling possibility. "If it's me, you'll have the pleasure of watching me blow my brains out."

  THE tiny UH1Z cockpit lurched like an old bus on a dirt road. Imprisoned by the modern, ergonomic seat, complete with tightly crisscrossed seat belt, Harrison's head was the only part of his body moving, but it jerked and jiggled in every direction his vertebra would allow. Sitting opposite him, their knees touching, was Previn, the woman soldier, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Harrison noticed that beneath her helmet, her pretty blue eyes were dilated. The others didn't look much better. Only Jurgens, in the back, sat unflappable.

  But Jurgens was the other face of death, so he wasn't a fair standard.

  Outside, it was as if the wrath of hell had been unleashed. Or maybe it was heaven; who could tell? The four angels flew recklessly against an almost horizontal rain pounding straight into the front windscreens. A hundred and fifty feet below them, a colossal monster rose up with the force of a thousand tons of water arched into a wave. Luckily, they couldn't make out the sea's maelstrom in the dark. But when he looked out the side window long enough, Harrison could see millions of foam torches atop miles of choppy velvet, like a capriciously decorated Roman palace during the carnival orgies.

  He wondered if Previn blamed him somehow. He very much doubted she could reproach him for that idiot Borsello's death. At Eagle, they'd applauded the news.

  The order came at noon, five minutes after Borsello had been shot between the eyes. It came from somewhere up north. It was always the same: the north gave the orders and the south obeyed. Like the head and body: everything went top to bottom, Harrison thought. The brain gave the orders, the hand carried them out.

  The "head" had deemed Borsello's death admissible. Harrison had done the right thing, Borsello had been inept, the situation was imperative, and Sergeant Frank Mercier would stand in for him. Mercier was a young guy, and he was sitting beside Previn, across from Harrison. He was scared, too. His fear was legible in the bobbing of his Adam's apple. But they were good soldiers. They'd been trained in SERE: survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. They knew everything there was to know about their weapons and equipment; they'd received supplementary training in securing and isolating regions. And they could do more than defend themselves: they had XM39 assault rifles with high-explosive bullets and Ruger MP15 automatic rifles. They were all strong as bulls, with glassy eyes and shiny skin. They looked more like machines than human beings. Previn was the only woman, but she wasn't out of sync with the group. He was happy to have them by his side and didn't want them to think badly of him. With Jurgens and those soldiers, he had nothing to fear.

  Except the storm.

  After the last jolt, he decided to react.

  He looked at the pilots. They were like giant ants, with those black, egg-shaped helmets shining around the edges in the instrument panel's glow. There was no way he could take off his seat belt and get up there, of course. But he bent the arm of the mike attached to his helmet, pulling it down toward his mouth, and pushed a button.

  "Is this the storm?" he asked.

  "This is just the Beginning, sir," one of the pilots responded. "These winds haven't even reached sixty-five miles an hour yet."

  "It's not a hurricane, though," said the other pilot into his right ear.

  "Or if it is, it hasn't been named."

  "Will the chopper make it through this?"

  "I guess so" came into his left ear, spoken with remarkable indifference.

  Harrison knew that the angel was a tough, sophisticated piece of military machinery designed to withstand all kinds of atmospheric conditions. The blades even self-adjusted depending on the force of the winds. Right then, for example, they weren't rotating in the typical crisscross pattern, but instead looked like two diamonds. Still, the very idea of an accident made him anxious—not because he feared death, but because he couldn't stand the thought of not attaining his goal.

  "When do you think we'll get there?" He felt sweat coursing down his neck and back, beneath his helmet and life jacket.

  "If all goes well, we should be in sight of the island in an hour."

  He left the frequency open. The voices buzzed in his ear like a lunatic's hallucinations. Angel One to Angel Two, over...

  THEY'D fallen asleep, or at least that's what it looked like.

  He didn't want to shine the flashlight at them to check for fear of waking them, though
that seemed unlikely. It was obvious everyone was absolutely exhausted. And looking at them one by one, he was sure they were fast asleep. Jacqueline was neither peaceful nor silent. Her breasts quivered under her shirt with each breath, and she was making a sort of guttural moaning sound. Carter looked like he was awake, but his lips were pursed into a small, round, black hole resembling the barrel of a gun. Blanes snored.

  It was ten to twelve and Elisa hadn't come back yet.

  Almost time.

  His heart pounded. He wondered if the others could hear it beating, if it would wake them. But he couldn't stop it.

  In slow motion, he placed the big flashlight on the ground, took the small one, and turned it on. Baptism by fire, so to speak.

  He turned the big flashlight off. Waited. Nothing happened. They were still out.

  The glow from the little flashlight was tiny, like the dying embers of a campfire, but it would be enough to keep them from getting scared if anyone woke up unexpectedly.

  He left the flashlight on the floor, by the other one, and took off his shoes, making sure to keep an eye on Carter. That man was terrifying. He was one of those violent types who lived in a parallel universe as out of place in Victor's life of aeroponic plants, math, and theology as a donkey at Princeton. He knew the ex-soldier wouldn't think twice about hurting him to protect himself.

  Still, neither Carter nor the Devil himself was going to stop him from doing what he wanted.