Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

The limo turned on to Great Russell, the museum looming before them on the left, a small side street to their right shooting down between heavily windowed eighteenth-century buildings. Just past the gates of the museum entrance, the road was blocked by police cars, a security van, and a couple of motorcycles. Uniformed bobbies manned a temporary barricade to keep back junior members of the press and the hundred or so curious onlookers. Senior reporters and photographers were on the museum grounds, solidly flanking the steps up to the building.

The scene was familiar. Although he’d been to the museum many times during his schooling, Khalid had the feeling that he’d somehow seen this night before. The barricade, the streets, and even the buildings were like the vague outline of a dream.

The desert, a training camp just recently abandoned but thoroughly destroyed, streets, buildings, this place.

Even as the realization struck him, the partition between the passenger and driver compartments began sliding down. The limo had stopped in a line of other luxury automobiles waiting to enter the museum grounds. The West Indian who’d driven him from his hotel to the Savoy had been replaced by a Turk, or maybe an Afghani. Khalid had just enough time to notice this when the man raised an automatic pistol into view.

Khalid lurched to the side, a silenced shot punching a neat hole in the leather upholstery, the compartment filling with the sharp smell of gunpowder. He grabbed for the door handle and threw himself out of the car. The second round tore the seam at his suit coat’s shoulder, missing his body.

He hit the wet pavement hard, rolling once against the curb, then scrambling to his feet and lurching behind a heavy flower planter. Already he felt the eyes of cameras turning toward him. He had never felt more naked in his life, but he could not move. The driver’s window was open and he could see the man looking for him. The planter offered minimal protection.

Khalid thought about running behind the car and ducking down the side street, hoping that he wouldn’t be detected. Then he remembered the nine-millimeter shell casing that Bigelow had found at the abandoned training camp. Khalid knew enough about guns to recognize that the driver had used a.22-caliber automatic. There were others hunting him.

A bloom of light appeared in a window across the street, two floors up in what appeared to be a residential apartment. It turned into a streak that raced across the space between building and car in a fraction of a second. Khalid was in motion again, running as the shoulder-fired missile struck the Daimler squarely in the hood and exploded.

Burning fuel, molten metal, and deadly shrapnel filled the air as the limo disintegrated. Khalid was lifted from his feet and tossed through the air. He smashed against the wrought-iron gate that fronted the museum, the breath sucked from his lungs by the concussion. The driver/assassin behind the wheel of the Daimler had been vaporized.

Even as he fought to recover his breath, even as his ears rang, Khalid heard automatic gunfire, like the ratcheting of some great machine. He looked behind him and saw a whole army rushing toward him, their guns spitting tongues of flame.

Like a blunt-nosed arrow, the shining Boeing 737 sped through twenty-seven thousand feet, its turbofans purring sedately under half their intended strain. The aircraft had been designed as a medium-sized commercial long-haul air carrier, built to ferry more than one hundred people. But this aircraft carried only one passenger in the kind of decadent comfort that hadn’t been seen since the time of the British Raj.

Max Johnston lay sprawled in one of the leather chairs in the cabin’s main salon. Behind him was a galley capable of five-star meals, a conference room with an African stinkwood table, and a private bedroom with an antique Shaker four-poster bolted to the cabin floor. The dresser in the bedroom was Regency in style and predated the aircraft by more than a century, and the silver backing of the mirror above it was so flecked with age that its reflection was like an old photograph. The carpeting throughout the aircraft was a rich maroon pile accenting the tasteful wallpapers and oriental throws that somewhat hid the airliner’s functional outline.

Ostensibly, the aircraft was owned by Petromax Oil and was available to every upper-level executive of the company. However, it was understood that the Boeing was Max Johnston’s private plane, and in the two years since the corporation had purchased it, only Johnston himself had ever used it.

The Scotch in his slack hand was so diluted with melted ice that it looked like urine, and when he took a quick gulping swallow, it tasted as vile. His suit coat lay balled up in the seat next to him, so wrinkled that it would probably be replaced by his valet when he returned to Washington. His shirt was soiled with spilled liquor, and his uncoordinated struggle to pull off his tie had left it knotted tightly inches below his throat. His skin was pale and waxen, dark smudges under his eyes highlighting the pouches that had developed in just the past few sleepless nights. He looked like a hanging victim after being lowered from the gallows.

Johnston heaved himself from the chair and poured his drink into the dip sink of the concealed wet bar. Ignoring the ice bucket, he recharged his glass with a twenty-four-year-old single malt and knocked it back like iced tea. It was his fourth drink in just the two hours since the plane took off from London’s Gatwick Airport. Although he was feeling drunk, his legs unsteady so that he had to brace himself against a television console, his feelings of self-loathing and disgust had not gone away. In fact, they were stronger, clutching deeper into his flesh, taking hold of his very soul.

He collapsed back into his chair, his chin sinking against his chest in a pose of utter defeat and despair. Tonight was the eve of his greatest coup. In several bold moves he was about to launch Petromax Oil into the lofty realm of a supercorporation, in league with the likes of General Motors, Exxon, or IBM, a company whose name and power would be known throughout the world. Taking risks far and above those of normal business practices, Johnston had quite literally traded his soul to scrabble those last steps to the very pinnacle of success. When he’d left London, he’d felt like one of the merchant princes of the Renaissance, making deals that not only affected his own purse strings but the fate of entire nations as well.

But now, just a few hours after sealing his pacts, he was drunk and despondent. The depression had come as soon as the aircraft labored out of England, but he knew he’d heard the voice nagging him even as a limousine was whisking him to the airport. The voice.

His father’s voice.

The ghostly hand of his father touched his shoulder, and Max Johnston jumped, spilling his drink on the Egyptian silk-on-silk rug that lay under his seat. The imagined gesture, as so often before, brought back a crush of emotions. But like all the other times he’d felt his father’s spectral presence, thoughts and feelings were quickly burned away, distilled into one crystal bitter memory. No matter what Johnston did, no matter how much he accomplished, he realized that his success would never erase what happened to him when he was sixteen years old and the scathing remarks that followed.

The teenage Johnston had helped a friend cheat on an exam by giving away his answers. Of course, they were caught, and both boys were suspended from school. That night, waiting in the study of the mansion that had become their home after Keith Johnston, a hardscrabble wildcatter, had struck it rich, young Max had been afraid. Keith Johnston had made his fortune by hard work, determination, and a large dose of luck, pulling in two fields within six months and launching Petromax Oil, a company named for his only child. Max imagined disappointment from the man he saw as a god, and the shame he felt was unbearable. His dad was an hour late coming home that night, and Max waited as if he were a soldier facing death, ready to accept whatever fate had in store.