Daniel stopped. Then, realizing it couldn’t have been meant for him, he looked in the bunker. One of the guards was watching TV. The other two were bent over a board. Daniel stepped through the wall for a better look. Two guards, one thin and rangy, the other built like a stump, were playing chess. Stumpy, playing white, didn’t have a prayer.
‘Fuck it,’ Stumpy hissed, ‘my ass is grass. I tell ya, it’s that damn pill they’re making us take – fucks the shit out of my concentration.’
‘I took one, too,’ Rangy said. ‘All it is is atropine, and if you think
‘Hey man, no way any dude’s gonna rain gas on us. I’ve been in the fucking Corps since ’Nam, and I’m telling you this is jacked-up, jerk-off duty. We don’t even know what the fuck we’re guarding. Whole duty, all we’ve seen is a little box go by once. Fucker’s probably empty.’
‘Right,’ the thin one said disparagingly, ‘that’s why the place is crawling with federal spooks. That’s why Keyes, the Region Supe, has been here himself for three weeks. It’s probably plutonium.’
‘That’s wonderful fucking news,’ Stumpy muttered. ‘Lay a little radiation on the Agent Orange I got in ’Nam and throw in this anti-nerve gas atropo-fucking-feen or whatever the hell it is and my balls will probably drop off.’
‘Don’t sweat it. From what I hear, Keyes knows his shit.’
‘Keyes is an asshole; asshole’s ’sposed to know shit.’
‘Hey,’ the guard watching TV hissed at the other two, ‘this is a silent watch, remember.’
‘Eat my dick, Orvis,’ Stumpy said, but he quit talking.
Daniel felt something missing in the silence. It took him a moment to realize there was no sound from the TV, and less than that to see it was a monitoring screen displaying a static view of the vault. Neither cameras nor the atropine were expected. The mission was canceled.
Daniel doubted that the atropine was any defense against Aunt Charmaine’s Medusa brew, but if he was wrong he was dead or in prison. And the camera cut at least five minutes on the getaway. He turned and started walking toward the tunnel mouth when he suddenly started laughing so hard he nearly lost his concentration and lurched back into visibility. Prison? How could they keep him in prison? How could they shoot him if he was invisible? If it fell apart he could always shoot a flare to warn Eddie off and use his invisibility to give him a big edge on pursuit. Volta was right, though – better to leave and try again. But he should look around for other security surprises. And see the Diamond. He turned and continued down the tunnel.
He reached the vault without incident. He spotted the camera quickly, but was so anxious to step into the vault that he almost missed the photoelectronic eyes. That’s what he assumed they were until he examined them more closely. Perhaps they were lasers. No difference – either way it was some sort of grid. He quickly noted their positions. He’d been vanished twelve minutes already. He could feel the edges of his concentration beginning to erode.
He examined the vault door impatiently and then stepped through into a room of unimaginable light. Bars of gold stacked along each wall bathed in the steady, dense, incorruptibly clear light from the spiral flame, slender as a thread, burning through the Diamond’s center. Daniel felt his concentration begin to dissolve, its force subsumed by the greater coherence of light. He grabbed the suction cup at his waist, desperately thrusting it upward as he leapt back into flesh. The suction held. Visible, he swayed above the Diamond, arms and legs reflexively outstretched to stabilize himself, like a man about to plummet down a well transfixed in midair. Dazed, he looked down into the the Diamond’s center. The spiral flame had vanished but the light’s unflickering clarity remained, neither terrifying nor serene, particle nor wave.
Daniel wanted to hold the Diamond. It was perched on a columnar pedestal in the center of the vault, just out of reach. He would have to vanish again and reposition himself. He didn’t know if he could muster the concentration to vanish in its field or, if he could, whether he could sustain the focus necessary to reappear as he leapt and slap the suction cup back on the ceiling. But he didn’t care. He had to touch it.
He closed his eyes but it was hopeless. He could not gather himself out of the light. Couldn’t separate his center from the Diamond’s. He kept his eyes shut and tried to imagine the Diamond in his hands. He could see the Diamond clearly in his mind, but not in his hands, not touching. He opened his eyes and looked into the center of the Diamond, surrendering his concentration, his will and desire. When he vanished, the Diamond vanished also, though its light remained constant. Daniel picked it up gently, slipped it into the velvet pouch he’d brought, and walked quickly through the gold bars and the western vault wall and through the mountain. Even inside the velvet pouch, which had a thin lead sheet between the doubled material, the light was undiminished. He lifted it to his face and looked deeply into the light. At its center was the spiral flame again, the Diamond in the raven’s beak, the open window, the mirror shattering, Annalee screaming, ‘Run, Daniel!’ And then he was staggering on the moonlit plain, the pouch heavy in his hand, the light gone. He opened the pouch and looked inside. The Diamond was still glowing, but he couldn’t see the spiral flame. He lifted his hand and touched a face, a face he couldn’t imagine as his own.
Daniel started running toward the setting moon. Before he’d taken three strides there was a roar above him and what seemed to be a huge locust descended, blocking his way. Daniel’s first thought was to vanish again but then he realized it was Low-Riding Eddie and that the locust was Lucille. Daniel ducked his head against the prop wash and stumbled toward the chopper, the pouch clutched to his chest.
Low-Riding Eddie reached across the cockpit and helped yank him aboard, gunned the chopper into the air, backed off the throttle for a second as it stabilized, then whipped into a 180-degree turn. He kept it wide open as they flew fifty feet above the alkali flats below.
They’d covered five miles before Eddie glanced over at him and yelled, ‘Hey, you all right?’
‘Yeah,’ Daniel said weakly. Realizing Eddie probably couldn’t hear him over the engine’s howl, he nodded.
‘Fuckin’ near landed on ya, man – you come outa nowhere.’
Daniel shouted, ‘Lots of room. No problem.’
‘Get the goods?’
Daniel pointed at the pouch on his lap, then raised his thumb.
The Low Rider grinned his merry approval, his eyes sparkling like the silver studs on his leather jacket. ‘What kinda jump we got on the heat?’
Daniel was dreamily watching the flats slip by. He looked over at Eddie and shook his head.
