arduous slowness. After many long hours of riding shotgun in the forward car, Kuhl had finally seen the compound through a break in the overhanging foliage, and then ordered their headlights dimmed and their vehicles pulled off the road.
Once under cover of the trees, he turned to his driver. “Que horas sao?”
The driver showed him the luminous dial of his wristwatch.
Kuhl studied it a moment without comment. Then he glanced over his seat rest and nodded to the man behind him.
“Vaya aqui, Antonio.”
Antonio returned the nod. He was dressed entirely in black and had a Barrett M82A1 sniper’s rifle across his lap. Accurate to a range exceeding a mile, it utilized the same self-loading, armor-piercing.50-caliber ammunition normally fired by heavy machine guns — bullets capable of pounding through an inch or more of solid steel armor. The weapon’s incredible firepower and semiautomatic action were its notable advantages over other sniper guns. On the negative side, it was weighty, long-barreled, and would kick back with a recoil matching its destructive performance. But Antonio’s targets would be shielded, and he would need to penetrate that shield at a considerable distance.
Slinging the Barrett over his shoulder, he opened his door and slipped from the jeep into the darkness.
Kuhl settled back and looked out the windshield. His team was right on schedule despite the wearisome inconveniences of their ride. There was nothing to do now except wait for Antonio to complete his work, and then for the others to arrive and give their signal. Perhaps he would even be able to glimpse them coming over the treetops.
They sat in absolute silence, hard, lean men in black combat outfits, their faces daubed from chin to forehead with camouflage paint. All but the sniper who’d gone on ahead carried French FAMAS assault rifles fitted with modular high-explosive munition launchers and day/ night target-tracking systems.
Still undergoing field trials by the French military, these adaptations of the standard FAMAS guns represented the state of the art in small arms, and were not slated for mass production or issuance to general infantry troops until 2003—two full years in the future.
Kuhl always made it a point to stay ahead of the game. It cost money, true, but unless one was willing to accept failure, the expense was more than acceptable. And he himself was paid handsomely enough that he didn’t mind spreading the wealth.
Impatient, he raised his night-vision goggles to his eyes, swung them from the compound’s checkpoint gate to the pair of men occupying its sentry booth, then studied the irregular outline of the buildings that lay beyond. He wanted nothing more than to get moving. While his team might be outside the observable range of the compound’s guards, he had seen enough in his mercenary career to know that only a fool or an amateur neglected to consider the unpredictable, and that each passing second brought an increased risk of discovery. It mattered little how well they formulated their plans, or how careful they were in bringing about their execution.
Secrecy, he thought. It was an essential requirement of his profession, and yet the very idea paradoxically seemed a joke. In an age when satellites could photograph a mole on your chin from somewhere up in space, there were no true blind spots, and nobody was ever out of sight for long. The best one could wish for was temporary concealment. If his men failed at that, if they were noticed too soon, all their elaborate precautions would be worthless.
Kuhl sat, watched, and waited. In his taut silence, he could almost feel that gigantic, damnable eye overhead, looking down, pressing down. Seeing what it wanted to see, peering through every shadow, its relentless gaze scouring the world….
Yes, Kuhl felt it up there, he did, and was only hoping it would once again blink as he went about the lucrative business of destruction.
“There’s smoke in the cabin. Elevated CA 19-9 and CA 125 levels. LH2 pressure’s dropping. Terra nos respuet. ”
Annie feels her book about to slip off her lap, catches it just in the nick of time. She blinks once or twice, completely out of sorts, guessing she’d sunk into a light sleep while reading on her sofa.
She had been reading, hadn’t she?
She readjusts the book and glances up at the man standing in front of her, the man whose voice startled her from her doze. In his midfifties, he has reddish-brown hair, a full mustache, and is wearing a white doctor’s frock. Phil Lieberman, she thinks. The oncologist who has taken over her husband’s case, not exactly the type to make house calls. She wonders what he’s doing in her living room, wonders whether one of the kids might have let him in the door… but then suddenly realizes that this isn’t her living room after all, isn’t even part of her home, and that the children are nowhere around her.
She straightens, blinks again, rubs her eyes.
The chair on which she is sitting is contoured plastic. The air has a recycled quality and carries commingled antiseptic and medicinal smells. The walls are an institutional noncolor.
It abruptly dawns on her that she is in the hospital.
In the hospital, in the third-floor waiting room that has become so numbingly familiar over these past few months, and where she must have dropped off like a stone with an open book on her lap. The hospital, of course. However strange it might ordinarily seem for her to have forgotten, these are far from ordinary days, and her brief disorientation is understandable in view of what’s been happening in her life. She has gone for weeks with precious little rest, rushing from her husband’s bedside to her training sessions at the Center and back again, trying not to neglect the kids amid her compounding pressures. It would not be the first time lately that the effort of keeping everything together has caught up to her without warning.
Looking at the doctor, she begins fidgeting nervously with the edges of the book — actually, she sees now, it is a magazine, a dog-eared copy of Newsweek with a featured piece about upcoming space shuttle launches connected with the ISS program — the magazine, then, that is spread across her thighs. The doctor’s expression is unrevealing, his voice without intonation, but there is a sobriety in his eyes that sends a cold, silent shiver running through her.
“Like the old Titan rockets,” he says. “Third stage fires, you’re up and out. ”
“What?” she says. “What was it you—”
“Mark’s latest tests, we need to discuss their results, ” he interrupts with the kind of patronizing abruptness medical professionals seem to take as their right, an exalted privilege bestowed on them the moment they recite the Hippocratic Oath. It is as though even the ones capable of showing some compassion — and Annie acknowledges that Lieberman has, by and large, been decent with her — must insist on reminding you they have other patients, other cases, more urgent demands than having to explain their findings.
“Laparoscopic exam revealed metastic tumors in the liver and gallbladder,” he says rapidly. “Statistically common once the disease has spread from the intestine to so many of its associated lymph nodes. Would have had a better chance with three lymphomas, but five is quite a bad crop. Very, very unfortunate. ”
Annie sits very still as she listens, but can feel herself crumbling from the inside out, truly crumbling, as if her soul is made of brittle, hundred-year-old plaster. She gives him a decimated look.
“He’ll be gone in five months,” she says, the absolute certainty behind those words filling her with horror and bewilderment. She feels weirdly detached from the sound of her own voice, almost as if she hasn’t really spoken at all, but is listening to a tape recording of herself, or maybe even some flawless impersonation issuing from a concealed intercom.
Dr. Lieberman regards her a moment in that serious yet matter-of-fact way of his. Then he shrugs his sleeve back from his wristwatch, glances down at it, and holds it out to her, turning his arm to display the dial.
“Yes, five months, three days, to be precise,” he says. “We’re on the fast track now. Time runs by until there’s none left. ”
Perplexed by his comment, Annie looks at the watch.
