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CHAPTER SIX

BLACKWELDER SOLUTIONS

From the outside, Blackwelder Solutions looked absolutely ordinary. It was housed in a low, nondescript building that squatted on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. In fact, as Barron stepped out of the taxi, he almost got back inside, thinking that he must be in the wrong place. The building was not only small, but the exterior was coppery mirrored glass from floor to ceiling, all the way around.

Isobel Crisostomo had said Barron would need to be “read on” in order to be briefed on the job he was being offered, which indicated the place was involved in some kind of intelligence-related activity. No such place would have glass walls all the way around; anyone with any resources at all could listen in on conversations inside by using a laser to read the vibrations of the glass.

But three things stopped Barron from leaving again. First, the small granite sign beside the sidewalk on the artificially-green lawn confirmed that he was, indeed, at the place specified on Isobel’s business card. Second, although the building’s acreage seemed wide open, there was subtle security in place. There had been a guard station limiting access to the campus, and Barron could see sensors placed along the chain-link fence that delineated the perimeter. They were camouflaged so as to be practically invisible from outside the fence and scarcely easier to spot from his vantage. And third, simple math. The parking area he could see was fairly small, but even it seemed too much for such a small building. And that didn’t count the entrance he could see to underground parking levels. This place had way too much parking space for the occupancy of the small building he could see before him.

He dismissed the cab and entered the building. He stood in a small lobby, enjoying the cool, dry air after the heat outside. There were a couple of chairs and a security desk of brushed stainless steel. It was all very generic and harmless at first glance.

But the details presented a different story. The supports for the entrance door were too thick, probably concealing a metal detector, maybe more. To either side, he could see a narrow corridor between the glass outer wall and a featureless inner wall of cinderblock. Office noises played quietly through speakers in the ceiling. A steel security door blocked access behind the guard. Variations in the ceiling tiles meant what, drop-down panels with some kind of active defense system?

“Mister Barron?” asked the security guard. When Barron nodded, the guard continued, “Ms. Crisostomo is on her way out to meet you.”

Barron signed the visitor’s log, but didn’t bother to sit. Moments later, the steel door opened with a loud click and Isobel emerged. She walked up and shook his hand firmly, business-like, so different from the seductress he’d met in the bar or the woman of mystery he’d spoken with in the diner.

“Glad you could make it,” she said as she turned and indicated for him to follow her through the door. “How was your flight?”

“Crowded, with bad food,” Barron said as they entered a small office suite inside. The furniture was all business bland: black painted metal, blond wood, and Ultrasuede that smelled of chemical sealants. “The usual.”

“You don’t like flying?”

“Love flying,” Barron said. “Hate airlines.”

She smiled and led him into a small conference room. “Michael Barron, this is Lionel Van Treece.”

“Glad you could make it,” said the thin man sitting at the head of the conference table, though his face didn’t match the sentiment. Van Treece was in his 60’s at least, with blue eyes and a thick head of white hair. There was nothing happy about the man, though a scar at the corner of his mouth turned it up into the semblance of a sardonic smile. He didn’t stand, but offered his hand to shake Barron saw in the way the man turned his whole torso, in the way his arm failed to extend fully and in the old scar tissue peeking out from under his cuff that this was a man who had been through the wringer at some time in his life. Some men ended up paying more dues than others, and Van Treece looked to have paid more than almost anyone.

“Sit,” Van Treece said after they’d shaken hands. “Chris tells me you’d make a good addition to our team.”

“I’m not convinced she’s right,” Barron said.

“Then why are you here?” Van Treece asked.

“Something like—what do doctors call it–informed consent,” Barron said. “Don’t agree to something unless you understand it. I don’t like turning down something until I know for sure what it is.”

Van Treece leaned back and looked even less pleased than before. “That’s strike one.”

Barron looked to Isobel and back to Van Treece. “You’re looking for someone who will buy into this sight unseen?”

Van Treece leaned forward again. “No. I just don’t like—what do people call it, Chris—bullshit. Don’t play dumb by pretending not to remember what something’s called, just so you can talk down to me without it seeming offensive. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“You served with Derrick Robinson in the Army.”

Not a question. “Yes, I did.”

“Went with him to Bulwark after you got out.”

“Yes.”

“Good man. We need more like him,” Van Treece said. “Why’d you quit?”

Images flashed through Barron’s mind: fire, explosions, scaled metal wings beating against the sky. Karen’s face, Karen’s blood. A voice speaking impossibilities in his head. They didn’t last long. Barron had long practice at turning his mind away from things he didn’t want to remember. “Zero Day,” Barron said simply. “My wife died. My boss died. I fell apart.”

Van Treece’s face underwent a slight shift. Everyone understood Zero Day, that day when everyone awoke as if from a dream to find the world blown to pieces and still burning, with no memory of how things had gotten that way, except for a vague memory of six names to whom the world owed thanks. It was the universal bond, that moment that everyone had shared, and for which no one had a story. No one except Barron.

Van Treece nodded. “I understand. But why haven’t you ever come back?”

“I realized after that I had come out of that day with nothing except a daughter who was almost a total stranger,” Barron said. “That was the price I paid for my career, and I paid it willingly. I thought I was doing good for the world. But after that day, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what had been bought with the price I paid. Seemed pointless to go back until I figured that one out.”

“And you still haven’t.”

Barron shook his head.

Van Treece stared at Barron for a few moments, then pushed back from the table and stood up stiffly. “Come meet the team,” he said.

Barron looked from Isobel to Van Treece. “Is the interview over? I still don’t know what the job is.”

“Strike two,” Van Treece said as he headed for the door. “Stop telling me things I already know.”

CHAPTER FIVE

MILK, SUGAR, AND CRIME SCENE VIDEO

As traps went, this one wasn’t bad. At least it had coffee.

Barron sat in the booth in the diner and figured the angles. He had made at least four men watching the diner outside, two more inside. He hadn’t gone around back to check, but you had to figure at least two more back there and a sniper on overwatch. He hadn’t spotted one on a cursory glance and hadn’t wanted to look too obviously. It was hard to tell at a glance how good each man was, tactically, but whoever had placed them was good.

The day had started out so well. Granted, he was tired and a little hung over, but his mood was light and the pressure in his head—that particular formula that had pushed itself on him for almost three years now, demanding to be spoken, the one he had steadfastly refused to say—was nearly gone. It would come back, he knew, and drinking would not relieve the pressure for long. He knew from bitter experience that it was no long term solution.

Still, he had been reasonably satisfied for most of the morning, until his phone rang. “Barron,” he answered.

“Mike?” asked a female voice. “It’s Isobel.”

Barron was confused. Was this a wrong number? Although his name was Michael, no one called him “Mike.” He preferred it if they didn’t use his given name at all, but working in a civilian office, you had to get used to it. The woman’s name wasn’t ringing a bell, but the voice sounded familiar. “Excuse me?”

“Isobel Crisostomo? From last night?”

Barron managed not to groan out loud. Of course, he recognized the first name now. But how had she reached him here? He didn’t remember telling her where he worked, and he didn’t think he’d had that much to drink. And she hadn’t stirred when he got up early and crept out of the motel room. “Yes. Good morning,” he acknowledged. “What can I do for you?”

“Did you enjoy last night as much as I did?” the voice cooed.

“Yes?”

Silence on the line. Maybe she was waiting for him to respond in more detail, but he had work to do and didn’t want to let this drag out.

“Is that all you wanted?” he ventured into the silence.

“No,” Isobel’s voice said, speaking faster now, and with a more professional tone. “I thought you might come meet me for coffee.”

“I don’t think so, Ms. Crisostomo,” Barron said. “I don’t know how much you remember from last night, but I’m sure I told you that I was not looking for anything ongoing in a relationship. And I do have a lot of work to do today.”

“Oh, you were very clear,” Isobel’s voice said. “But this is just coffee. I mean, I know it’s not as exciting as stopping a bank robbery, but I thought you might spare a few minutes.”

Barron went cold. He hadn’t been sure whether or not he had let slip where he worked, but he was as sure as could be that he had not told her about the robbery. He hadn’t talked to anyone about it in the three weeks since it had happened. Not even Grace. “What are you talking about?”

She didn’t give any further answer. She only spoke the name of the diner before hanging up.

And now here he sat, waiting for the shoe to drop. He saw her emerge from the ladies room, and he was immediately sure it was her, even though he didn’t entirely recognize her. Her ash-blonde hair was pinned back instead of falling loosely to her shoulders, and she was dressed in business-like slacks rather than the party outfit he’d taken off of her in the motel room. The only incongruous thing about the outfit was the very large purse she carried; not very businesslike. He knew it was her because of the way she met his eyes and held them all the way to his booth, pausing only to ask the waitress for coffee on the way.”

“I’m glad you could make it,” she said. She plunked her heavy purse into the seat opposite him, then slid in after it.

“Well, after all the things you let me do to you last night, I figured the least I could do was buy you coffee,” Barron said. “But that stuff you were saying about a bank robbery?”

“Let’s not insult each other with a denial dance,” Isobel said. “We’re both too professional for that.”

“Okay,” Barron allowed. “So what is it you want from me?”

“To ask you a question,” Isobel said. “What exactly do you do, Mister Barron?”

“I work with data,” Barron said.

“That must be awfully dull,” Isobel said, as the waitress set a cup of coffee in front of her. She waved away the waitress’s inquiry about ordering food. As she added sugar to her coffee, she looked at Barron and said, “I mean, I’ve read your jacket. Security consultant, special forces operator, combat veteran…”

“That was a long time ago.”

“But stopping that bank robbery wasn’t,” she said. She added creamer and stirred.

“I’m still not sure…” Barron began.

“How we know about it?” Isobel finished. “Or are you wondering if there’s still a way you can deny it. Let me show you something.”

She fished a laptop computer out of her huge purse and flipped it open on the table. A few moments later, she turned it to face him. There was a video clip playing in a window on the screen, obviously a feed from the bank’s security cameras. Barron watched himself disarm the boy with the AK. He winced as he saw himself hit the boy in the throat. The kid had been so obviously unprepared for this job.

“I thought the police said the security videos had been hacked,” Barron said, not saying that he had erased them himself.

“We have a guy who works with us,” Isobel said. “He’s pretty good at this stuff.”

Barron didn’t answer. He hadn’t had time to be completely thorough, but the randomizing seed he’d hastily spoken over the disk drives should have made them unrecoverable. “Pretty good” was an understatement of Biblical proportions.

Isobel spun the laptop around and clicked through to another file. “This one’s my favorite,” she said as she turned the laptop again.

Barron watched as a section of vault wall unraveled and the grey-haired leader fell backwards into the hallway. He watched himself shoot the man in the face, turn and walk away as the wall remade itself.

“And you think this really happened?”

Isobel shut the laptop and smiled. “We both know there are people in the world who can do these kinds of things. Not many, at least not that we know of, but you can’t say that what you saw on the video is impossible.”

“Perhaps not,” Barron admitted. “But I don’t think you’re here to arrest me.”

“Of course not.”

“So what exactly do you want from me, Ms. Crisostomo?”

Isobel sipped at her coffee. “To offer you a job. I’m setting up a small elite task force. I obviously can’t tell you the details until you’re read on, but believe me when I say it’s an important job. We should wrap it up in a month, max.”

“Not interested,” Barron said. “Even if I could take a month off my current job without losing it, which I can’t, I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

“This is important, Barron,” Isobel said. “You would be stopping some bad guys and doing a good thing for the world.”

“The world?” Barron asked skeptically. “That seems a little ambitious for a small task force.”

Isobel shrugged and put her laptop back into her oversized shoulder bag. “Well, I’m not going to beg, and threatening you probably won’t do any good. But we both know that a man like you, with an ability like yours, is wasted in that office. So take some time to think about what you really want out of life.”

She climbed out of the booth and looked down at him. “Give me a call when you decide.”

“Shouldn’t you give me your number?” Barron asked.

“My card is in your wallet. I gave it to you the first time we had this conversation, ten minutes ago.” Isobel smiled. “You’re not the only one who‘s different, Mister Barron.”

Barron watched her turn and walk away, followed a moment later by the men she’d placed at the counter.

CHAPTER FOUR

IN THE CASCADE

The busiest part of the month is also the loneliest. Ironic, since work usually distracts him from his loneliness.

But on the week when they close the monthly book, Barron usually stays late to check his team’s numbers, correct their mistakes. The office is deserted, shut down to half-lighting, just him and rows and rows of silent cubicles. Silent, but not empty. They teem with stuff: doodads and souvenirs, stuffed animals and birthday cards, children’s drawings and dozens of dozens of family photographs. Proof of life.

Sometimes when he’s waiting for a report to finish compiling, he walks alone between the silent rows, looking at the frozen fragments of other people’s lives. Christmases, birthdays, vacations, baseball games. Parents hugging children, couples posing in their fanciest outfits over romantic dinners or draped drunkenly over each other at a bar. He can identify the emotions in the photos even if he can’t really remember how they feel anymore.

And every now and then, on a night like tonight, he feels that hole in himself more keenly than ever and tries once more to fill it.

There’s a hotel bar not far away, adjacent to an office park, full of secretaries and salesmen taking advantage of cheap booze after work. The air is thick with cigarette smoke. In any smaller amount, it would be an irritant, but at this concentration, in a place like this, with the liquor flowing and the music pounding, it’s like a chemical marker for sex.

Barron walks between the tables and booths, and even though the people here are real rather than photographs, he feels no more connection to them than to the photos in the cubicles. Strangers living lives he can’t comprehend. Usually when he does this, he ends up just sitting and watching them, like a TV show without a discernible plot, the dialogue drowned out by the soundtrack. He’s looking for something very specific, and he rarely finds it.

Tonight is different.

He has read dozens of books and articles on the psychology of attraction and pick-up methods, knows dozens of ways to manipulate a conversation to where he wants it to go, but there is one thing he cannot get around. The woman must find him attractive on some level before the conversation even begins. He has a multitude of ways of closing the deal, but he cannot manufacture something that isn’t there to start with.

He tries to make eye contact with each single woman as he walks along the bar. With most, the contact is fleeting, but one gives him a little smile that he returns. Mid- to late- 20’s, pretty, ash-blonde, slim. He finds an open spot at the bar where he can order a drink, looks back at the woman, and yes, she gives him a second look and another smile.

They exchange a few more looks as he waits for his beer, and it is as if she is demonstrating the classic signs of attraction in an instructional video. Holding momentary eye contact and looking away. Looking up at him from under her eyelashes. Toying with the rim of her glass. Turning her body slightly toward him in an open posture. She’s almost too perfect.

But he can’t approach right away. Even though he knows all the right things to say, it can be hard to get the words out because of the noise in his head. Ever since the day that changed everything, the day no one else remembers, his life has been a constant struggle to function past the noise of his expanded perceptions.

Because although common wisdom says that everything in the universe consists of just two things—matter and energy—the truth is that there is a third factor: information. A proton is a proton is a proton. The only real difference between gold and lead is the number of protons in the nucleus. You want the alchemical secret of turning lead to gold? Build a tiny vacuum cleaner that can suck three protons out of every lead nucleus.

There’s more, of course, much more. The entire universe is built on numbers: mass, velocity, wavelength, the speed of light, the gravitational constant. Barron perceives the numbers in everything; the universe sings to him, because music itself is a mathematical progression and Barron’s senses aren’t equal to the task of perceiving these things in their pure state. He hears constant atonal music, and every surface crawls. He sees something like static and something like symbols, but he has to concentrate to bring order out of the chaos, and he can’t do it for long. Sometimes the flow of information becomes so overwhelming, it’s like his mind is being sandblasted.

Alcohol helps, usually. Helps him relax and surrender to the flow, helps him pick the pieces he wants out of the information that bombards him. The scouring sandblast becomes a gentle shower, a comforting cascade.

He drinks half his beer and feels the bombardment retreat before making his approach. She smiles at him as he draws near, and it feels as if the battle is half-won, but he can’t relax. He knows dozens of conversational gambits from the pick-up artist books and knows hundreds of statistics about human behavior, but that math only ever works in the aggregate. If he could approach 250 women at once, he would be almost guaranteed to score one, but human attraction doesn’t work that way. One on one, he can play the odds, but there’s never a sure thing.

He doesn’t worry about an opening line, because he already has her attention. He just introduces himself and asks how she’s doing. Her name is Isobel, and anything else she tells him about herself is lost in the cascade. There’s a script that he has aggregated from a dozen pick-up books, structured like a flowchart or conversational tree from a video game. He can almost see the next lines dropping into place as she responds to his questions and comments, and meanwhile, he’s reading her data. The diameter of her pupils, the temperature of her skin, the rate of her pulse and respiration..

There’s arousal there, but something else holding it in check. Something she’s holding back, keeping secret. Husband or boyfriend, maybe, or maybe lying about her job. He doesn’t really care, because he’s not interested in becoming a part of her life, or in her becoming a part of his. He wants what she is increasingly signaling to him that she wants, and nothing more.

He goes in for the kiss, and when she draws back, her eyes narrow. “You know, there’s something about you I can’t quite put my finger on,” she says. “I can’t figure you out.”

“There’s nothing to figure out,” he says. “What you see is what you get.”

Which is quite possibly the biggest lie he has ever told in his life, but it’s not as if he can tell her the truth. All that ever did was lose him his daughter and his job, and it has never, ever, gotten him laid.

Of course, he could help things along. Because the language of God is more than just simple data. There are the formulae, not just the equations that govern physics and chemistry, but the deeper equations, numbers and symbols and concepts that cannot be expressed in any human language, that can regulate and govern anything and everything. Some might call it magic, but for Barron, there is no distinction between magic and science. There is only the hidden truth which only he knows, now that God is gone. He holds his tongue, though, because if she doesn’t choose to go with him freely, what’s the point?

And soon, she suggests they leave, and he suggests a motel, and it’s so easy, you’d think she were seducing him. Her body under the business casual dress is a surprise, firm and strong, more like a professional athlete than a secretary. He plays her like a theremin, almost able to see the numbers flickering across her skin as her nerves respond to his touch. He calibrates his touch to her responses and hears her skin sing with pleasure.

She lies back on the bed and her legs sigh open, and he can taste by her galvanic skin response when she’s faking an orgasm, and later, when she’s not.

And then he’s inside her, and the gentle shower of the cascade becomes a driving rain and then a wave breaking over him, the hum of the universe drowned out in the power chord of their shared pleasure.

And all too briefly, there is a moment of quiet.

CHAPTER THREE

GROUNDHOG DAY

Jake Morel couldn’t figure out precisely when it had all gone to shit. The shooting had only started a minute or two ago, but he had the sneaking suspicion it had really started when he allowed his son’s idiot friend along on the job. What the hell kind of a name was Stang, anyway?

But now if the asshole around the corner was to be believed, both Matt and Stang were dead, and Morel didn’t even have time to grieve his son because they were cornered in the vault and Lee was bleeding all over the money and the cops were surely on the way by now. They should have been done and gone already, but instead Morel was listening to this nutjob talk about being a superhero. With the power of math, yet. Jesus wept.

Soames stood on the other side of the doorway, rubbing at the sore spot on his chest where he’d taken a couple of rounds. Morel snapped his fingers to get his attention, then mimed the two of them going out simultaneously while Lee provided covering fire from behind the steel cart they’d turned on its side. Soames nodded and gripped his shotgun; Lee nodded as well, though he was looking decidedly pale. Morel held up five fingers and barked a harsh laugh. “What the hell kind of superpower is math?”

Morel tucked in his thumb to make four. He’d get the asshole talking and hit him while he was distracted. Three. Soames leaned forward, ready to go. T...

A shot rang out from the hallway, ricochets zinged off the wall, and Soames clapped a hand to his throat.

“Well, there’s geometry, for starters,” said the voice.

Soames coughed, and blood spurted from between his fingers. He wheezed and stumbled back against the wall. Lee looked panicked. Morel was mad. “What kind of asshole shoots a guy in the throat?”

“I was aiming for his head,” said the voice. “You try double-bouncing a head shot around a corner based on a shadow on the floor. Not as easy as it sounds. But if geometry’s too fancy for you, what about simple addition and subtraction? For instance, every bullet I add…”

Morel flinched as a flurry of shots clanged against the steel cart Lee huddled behind. The racket was incredible, though ultimately pointless. It would take armor-piercing rounds to get through metal that thick. Then just as suddenly, the shots stopped. Soames was still wheezing, though the sounds were getting weak.

“Subtracts from your defense,” the voice finished, followed by one more shot.

Lee grunted and pitched forward. Morel couldn’t believe his eyes. Something had apparently burst through the cart, the metal bent aside in little flaps like the petals of a tiny steel flower.

Lee sat back up, turned around and goggled at the hole in the cart. He tilted his head to look through the hole. “My God, Jake, he shot right through the…”

Another shot took part of Lee’s face off.

Morel suddenly found it hard to breathe. Light glinted off tiny striations in those metal petals where the bullet had burst through the cart. Whoever this guy was, he had shot through the cart by shooting it in exactly the same spot over and over. And then shot through the hole he’d made, like it was nothing! Who was this guy?

“Okay, you win!” Morel said, a little ashamed at the way his voice cracked. “You don’t have to show off any more. I give up.”

“I haven’t even started to show off yet,” the voice said, “and surrender is not an option.”

“But you said…”

“I lied,” the voice interrupted. “I have a daughter, works at this bank. She doesn’t like me much. Never calls me, can barely stand to be in the same room with me. Right before you came in, she told me she wishes she had someone else for a father. It hurts, to know your child hates you like that. But even then, nobody puts a gun to my little girl’s head and lives. You understand?”

Morel leaned forward. “Are you crazy? You can’t just…”

“I can do whatever I want,” the voice said. “Hey look! It’s Groundhog Day!”

Morel saw something move out of the corner of his eye. He had leaned forward far enough that the flourescents in the ceiling were casting his shadow onto the floor. He flinched back just as the shot sounded, zing-zing! and something tore into the wall mere inches from his face, flinging debris into his eye. He stumbled back into the corner, trying not to rub his eye too hard and scratch the cornea.

“Missed me, you son of a bitch!” Morel screamed. He cast frantic glances at Lee, at Soames, neither of whom were moving. He squatted down on his haunches, leaning back against the wall to avoid another lucky bounce shot. “You lose! Sooner or later the cops will come and take me into custody and you can’t do a damn thing about it. You can’t bounce me without a shadow, and if you try to come in here after me, I’ll kill you, I swear to God!”

“God is gone,” the voice said. “Banished. And I haven’t lost anything.”

“Well, you can’t kill me from out there!” Morel said, hating how desperate he sounded. “And you sure as hell can’t math your way in here!”

“I didn’t say my power was math,” the voice said. “I said, I speak the language of God, by which the universe was made, and by which it can be unmade. You want to see showing off?”

The voice stopped speaking and started muttering. Morel couldn’t make anything intelligible out of it over the ringing in his ears, although to be truthful, the few syllables he did hear clearly, he couldn’t understand. His mind seemed to slide right off them, like greased glass.

And then suddenly, there was no wall behind him. He pitched over backward, landed on his back in the hallway looking up at an expanding hole in the wall, as if the steel of the vault were simply unraveling. He looked up and saw a grim-faced man standing over him. Morel’s pistol was still in his hand, but everything was moving so slowly. Looking into the barrel of the grim-faced man’s pistol, Morel knew he wouldn’t get his own brought to bear in time. The world disappeared in the light of the big bang.