Swarm

going to be arrested for something suitably epic. The legend of LoTek lives on!”

Danielle rolled her eyes.

“But did it work?” Lisa demanded. “Did we stop them?”

In the silence that followed I heard what sounded like dozens of sirens coming towards us from all directions.

“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “We’ll find out if the lights come back on.”

Chapter 87

Our entrance into Dubai’s gleaming new glass-and-steel police station was a full-on perp walk: all four of us in handcuffs, escorted by a crowd of scowling police, while cameras rolled. Our faces were as grim and tense as those of the arresting officers – until we saw the television showing CNN.

We froze to watch, but there was really no need. Even before we saw the story graphic America Attacked!, and heard the robotically pretty anchorwoman report “dozens of attacks that have left hundreds dead” with mechanical gravitas, the mere fact that CNN was still broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters proved that only a handful of swarm attacks had gotten through.

I moaned with physical relief. We all turned to look at each other, grinning so widely you could have counted our molars, and then Lisa whooped, and burst into jubilant laughter, and the rest of us couldn’t help but join in. We cackled like madmen with relief and triumph. The surrounding crowd of police and media stared dumbfounded; they could never have seen such a delighted lot of arrestees. Much later I realized they thought we had been celebrating the hundreds dead, rather than the tens of thousands saved.

It wasn’t until after we had been processed, fingerprinted, and imprisoned in small but comfortable solitary- confinement cells that I thought of Jesse, and how much he would have loved that moment, how amused he would have been to be arrested and jailed for the crime of saving the world.

At that my joy began to wither into ashes. It still didn’t seem possible that the world no longer had Jesse in it. It still felt like at any moment my cell door might slide open and he would be there, cracking jokes and plotting our escape, with his usual all is right with the world, I’m Jesse Ruby and you’re not grin stitched across his face.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep but couldn’t, I was too wired, my heart was still hammering in my chest, the day had been too crazy. My memories of it were already fragmenting into particularly surreal images. The atrium of the Burj al-Arab. The shattered ruins of the Rolls-Royce. The cloud of emergency vehicles outside the factory. When I thought of Jesse sprinting across the roof I groaned involuntarily.

I supposed I would spend the rest of my life in jail, both for things I had done and things that I hadn’t. Just then such a fate seemed not entirely unfair, and not entirely undesirable. I felt empty of all ambition. Camus had written in The Stranger that a man needed the memory of only one day outside prison to be able to live a whole lifetime inside. I thought I knew what he meant. I thought of what Lisa had taught me about enjoying every instant, treating every moment as a gift, even the awful ones, especially the awful ones.

Jesse had never needed to learn that lesson. He had always known it in his bones.

I took long deep breaths, concentrated on the sensation of my lungs filling and emptying, my muscles slowly relaxing, my heart beating slower in my chest, the tears slipping languidly down my cheeks. Slowly the jangle of noise and sharp edges that was my mind began to smooth and grow quiet, and somewhere in its darkness I found sleep.

Chapter 88

I spent the first day of my life in jail waiting for something to happen. I assumed I would at some point be taken away for further processing, for interrogation, for something; but aside from meals delivered through the slot in my door, the outside world made no contact at all.

It took me all of five minutes to explore everything that my new existence had to offer. My cell was tiny, eight feet by six, furnished with a metal bunk, chair, sink, and toilet, all gleaming in the single bright light guarded by steel mesh. The door too was solid steel. A single small window, barred by an iron cross set in foot-deep concrete, revealed three horizontal stripes, golden sand and blue sky separated by a featureless concrete wall. My new jail clothes were ill-fitting and uncomfortably starchy, but I didn’t care. The meals were rice with tasteless sauces. I forced myself to eat, and waited for an interruption that did not come.

I spent the second day of my life in jail trying to prepare for the years to follow. The haunting atonal Islamic call to prayer woke me at dawn. By noon I had accepted that nobody wanted to talk to me. Maybe they were trying to soften me up with a period of solitary confinement. Maybe they had just forgotten about me, distracted by all the bigger fish – Sophie, Lisa, LoTek, Danielle – who had jumped into their net. It didn’t really matter. I managed to while away a good long time just trying to itemize all the charges that might be brought against me by the various nations in which I was wanted. I supposed I would have to grow adept at such mental games, if I was going to spend several decades trapped inside four claustrophobic walls.

Even such a life was precious beyond all reckoning, I told myself. I could have died so often over the last few weeks. I could have singlehandedly condemned the world’s greatest nation to anarchy. After that, treating every remaining moment as a gift, even they were all spent imprisoned for trying to destroy civilization rather than lauded for saving it, seemed like the easiest thing in the world. They could imprison me in a nutshell for fifty years and I would still count myself a king of infinite space.

I did push-ups and sit-ups, telling myself I was commencing a gruelling physical regimen that whatever else happened, I had to stay in shape, a strong mind required a strong body. I lay on the cot and meditated, took deep breaths. I thought about the past. I forced myself not to think about Jesse, or about the future. I had no future. The future didn’t exist. There was only the everlasting present.

On the third morning of my life in jail I woke completely resigned to a life of eternal imprisonment. About an hour later I was released.

Chapter 89

Two Arabic men in dark suits who seemed to scare the daylights out of all the ordinary guards took me to a room where the clothes in which I had been arrested lay in a neat pile, freshly washed and folded. The rest of my possessions, the Android phone and fake passport, were nowhere to be seen.

They wouldn’t tell me what was happening. I got the impression they didn’t know. As I changed, my mind whirled with terrible fates. The death penalty. Extradition to Russia. The last thing I expected was to be marched out of the jail’s front door and simply abandoned there, atop marble steps leading down to a busy street. A street Sophie and Lisa waited in front of a big black limousine.

“What are you,” I said, “what, what… ” My voice trailed off. My stupefaction was beyond words.

“Full pardons for all,” Sophie explained calmly as I descended. “From everyone, for everything. You are no longer wanted by the FBI, or the government of Dubai, or any other authority.”

My mouth worked for a moment before I managed to speak: “I don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but why not?”

“Because the Americans have armtwisted everyone into letting us go.”

“Because they found out what we did?”

“They’re still picking through exactly what happened,” she said, “but they’ve wised up enough to realize that going forward they really have no choice but to have me on their side, and pardons were the first part of the price I named. Call it realpolitik.”

I wasn’t sure I liked her regal self-satisfaction. “What were the other parts?”