Nerve Center

“She died within three months of the diagnosis. It was an ordeal, as you can imagine,” said Geraldo. “Losing a child that young—losing any child, of course, it’s traumatic.”

“Sure.”

“The etiology of the disease is not clear. There are many theories. But thyroid cancer in general has been linked to radiation.”

“So he blamed his work,” said Bastian.

“Oh, yes. He blamed himself and his work, and his superiors who had assigned him that work,” said Geraldo. She explained that the safety precautions, let alone security procedures, prevented any young child from getting near radioactive resources or reactors. So Madrone had apparently concluded—at least for a short time—that he had somehow poisoned his daughter.

“Patently impossible,” said Geraldo. “No way it could have happened. But in grief, we believe many things.”

“So what killed her?”

“The disease is so rare that it’s impossible to know. A random malfunction of genetics would be my guess, but it’s the sort of thing I can’t say. Only God knows.” Geraldo shook her head. “What’s important is that in his grief he became paranoid and suicidal. 1 use the terms advisedly; the ex-Mrs. Madrone says he saw a counselor.”

“That is not in his file.”

“Nor is the fact that his security clearance was removed for a time. It appears only that it lapsed as he was transferred. I’m still trying to reach his superior, a former Colonel Theo Glavin. I believe he’s now a civilian with the Department of Energy.” Geraldo spread her fingers for a moment, studying them before resuming. “Apparently this commanding officer was sympathetic, with his own child around the same age. He still sends Mrs. Madrone a Christmas card, though they were never really close. I only have this from the ex-wife, understand. Kevin was popular and had worked hard—you know how intelligent and likable he is—and everyone felt deeply sorry about his daughter’s death. Beyond that, he was a decorated war hero. So apparently people thought they were doing good by protecting him.”

Dog slid back in his chair. He too had felt sorry for people under his command; he too had often found a diplomatic way of getting things done without ruining a person’s career.

“I don’t like any of this,” said Geraldo. “Kevin never told me had a daughter, just that he was divorced. And as for the rest …” She shook her head and refolded her arms in front of her chest. “Technically, none of this would have disqualified him for the program. He did tremendously well on the tests, and as far as I can see has gone further faster than any ANTARES subject, including Captain James. He has an incredibly supple mind. Perhaps that is how he was able to hide this from us, since I would have thought the tests would have revealed it.”

“James was subjected to the same tests, wasn’t he?” Dog felt all of his reservations toward ANTARES resurfacing. He cursed himself now for not standing up more forcefully, for not refusing to go ahead with it, even if it meant resigning.

He should have followed his instincts.

“We’ve improved the tests as well as the procedures,” said Geraldo. “Or at least we thought we did. Knowing this—knowing how he reacted at a point of great stress in the past would have influenced me. I might have eliminated him from the program. But the fact that he was able to keep such a secret—that is extremely worrisome. I would not have chosen him for ANTARES.”

“All right,” said Dog. “Unfortunately, it may very well be irrelevant now.”

Aboard Hawkmother

Over Central America

19 February, 2240 local

MADRONE’S THOUGHTS TWISTED AROUND THE computer’s, tangles of wires that ran through everything he heard and saw. They pulsed red and black; at times he tried to follow them through the tangles, but got hopelessly lost.

The elation he’d felt at escaping the Mexican airport and refueling the Flighthawks had dissipated. Hungry and tired, he vacillated between wanting this all to end and not wanting to give up.

Bastian and the others would blame him for killing Dalton and Kulpin, not to mention whoever had died at the Mexican airport. They’d charge him with murder, treason, theft of government property—they’d invent charges to persecute him with.

They didn’t need charges, the bastards. They wanted to kill him, the way they had killed his daughter.

Worse. They would keep him alive, hound him every day. They might even be manipulating this now—Geraldo and Bastian and Stockard had set him up, hadn’t they’? Made him join the program, then concocted a series of petty tests, waiting for him to snap. They knew about his daughter. They were probably working with the people who had made him kill her.

The bastards had pla

It couldn’t just be Iraq. It had to be Los Alamos, something there. He’d killed one of the tactical artillery programs, made a few generals look bad by pointing out the obvious.

Madrone needed only a fraction of his attention, a small slice of his ability, to fly the planes. His mind hungered for more, ranging across the universe of possibilities in a feeding frenzy.

What would he do? He would crash the planes into the rain forest, be done with it all, end their plot against him.

He saw Christina lying on the hospital gurney, frowning at him. “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy.”

A cheap shining gurney. The bastards didn’t even have the decency to give her a real bed. She’d spent her final days in treatment, between sessions, dying, dying, dying in the mold-stinking hall as she waited.

By the time they reached the children’s wing, her eyes were closed, and she would never reopen them. Even the doctor admitted it, the bastard doctor who wouldn’t even give her morphine when she began to cry, the son of a bitch.

He wanted to kill them. He would kill them.

Lightning flashed and the plane lurched onto her right wing. Madrone had entered another storm, but it was the chaos of his mind that sent the aircraft reeling. There were so many conflicting emotions and impulses—suicide, revenge, hatred, love. They slammed against each other, physically pushing his head back in the seat, literally tearing at the neurons and other cells of his brain.

The ANTARES circuitry spat back wild arcs of energy into the system, befuddling the Boeing’s control system; the plane began to yaw, threatening to slide into a spin. The Flight-hawks, set by C3 in a basic trail pattern, faithfully mimicked their mother plane, rocking behind her at 25,000 feet.

Madrone knew he had to end this somehow. The pain threatened to overwhelm him. He felt the faint pings at the corner of his temples that meant he was slipping out of Theta-alpha.

If he went out now, he’d never get back in time to prevent himself from crashing.

Part of him wanted exactly that. Part of him wanted to just crash into the jungle below—he was over Colombia now—end it all in a flash of flames.

But other parts of him wanted to live. And those parts won out. He saw the rain forest enveloping him, heard the music Geraldo had played. And he felt the dark woman approaching, the shadow who had come unbidden from the recesses of his desire.

Come to me, she told him. Iwill show you the way.

Madrone’s rapid pulse eased. He felt his way into the cockpit of the big plane, stared for a moment at the holes the ejection seats had made, then took the controls firmly. The plane leveled off; he checked his systems, made a correction to deal with the fury of the storm.

He had less than an hour’s worth of fuel left in Hawkmother.

Landing at a major airport or military base was out of the question. But where?

The database in the navigational unit covered only the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He wanted something in Brazil, in the rain forest.