Allen Zadoff - The Lost Mission

Afraid she will fall. Maybe even afraid of losing her.

“I told you before,” she says. “I liked you.”

“Past tense?”

“Uh, things have gotten a little complicated, wouldn’t you say, Daniel? Or whatever your real name is.”

My real name.

“Zach,” I say.

“What?”

“My real name. It’s Zach.”

“Why are you telling me now?”

I’ve never said my real name to anyone. Not for years.

So why now?

I look at Miranda on the edge of the roof. The wind whips her hair around her shoulders.

I try to focus on my mission. Two targets, only one of which is down.

But I cannot think about that now.

Without the chip inside me, my feelings race around, intense and out of control.

“Maybe there’s a case to be made,” I say.

“What kind of case?”

“A legal argument. You were held against your will at camp. You didn’t plan this bombing. You were forced to go along with it.”

“They’re still going to find me guilty.”

“But there are mitigating circumstances. You’ll avoid the death penalty.”

“So I spend the rest of my life in prison? No, thank you. They’re going to need someone to blame, Daniel. Someone to punish.”

“There’s still a chance for leniency,” I say. “A few years in prison, and then you can go home.”

“What home?” she says.

She’s right.

Her father and brother are dead. Camp Liberty will be dismantled.

Her hand slips into her jacket pocket and comes out holding something.

A cell phone just like her brother’s.

She looks at me across the expanse of rooftop. I step toward her, and she moves closer to the edge.

She holds up the cell phone between us like a warning.

“You know what this is?” she says.

“A backup detonator,” I say.

“That’s right.”

A gust of wind blows hard enough that I have to steady myself, redistributing my weight across both legs.

I look at the way she’s standing. Her body is tight, resistant. She is desperate, out of options.

My mission is to kill her. At least according to Mike.

As I think about it now, I realize I haven’t heard from Father or Mother in days. Mike showed up claiming to be some kind of messenger, but can I be sure why he really came?

For all I know, The Program has ceased to exist. Mike could be lying to me, sending me here for his own reasons.

Maybe he was embittered by Francisco’s turning against The Program. His first recruit became a traitor. Now he wants to cover his own tracks, so he invented a mission as payback.

If there is no mission, I’m out here alone without real purpose.

“Would you leave with me?” I ask Miranda.

“And go where?”

“Somewhere. Anywhere.”

“You want to take me into custody.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Maybe not, but the street below is filled with them. I agree to go, and you take me down and turn me over to them. Then you walk away.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“What, then?”

“I’m talking about us.”

She lowers the detonator.

“Us?” Her voice is quiet as she says it.

I say, “The first night on the mountain, you told me you wanted to know what was happening in the real world. Maybe you can live there for a while, see what it’s like. Maybe we both can.”

Her face softens for a moment, then her eyes cloud over and her face turns to stone.

“If I left with you, what would that make me?” Miranda says.

“It would make you free,” I say.

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “It would make me a traitor. Like my mother.”

My eyes are drawn to the motion in her hand. I look down and see her dialing a number on the cell phone.

“Don’t do this,” I say.

“There’s no way out, Daniel.”

I think about four days ago, standing in a circle of soldiers with their weapons pointed at me. The riddle that Father created for me.

“That’s not true,” I tell her. “There’s always a way.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she dials the final number on the cell and hits CALL.

I brace myself for the explosion—

A second passes, then two and three.

Nothing happens.

She looks at the cell, making sure the number is correct. She presses it again.

I’m looking at the giant antennas around us.

“We’re surrounded by high-frequency radio antennas,” I say. “They can block cell signals at this proximity.”

Her eyes dart around the roof.

“It’s done, Miranda.”

She peers over the edge of the roof toward the ground.

“It’s not done,” she says. “You said so yourself. There’s always a way. I can still get a signal. I just need to be closer to the ground.”

I suddenly understand her, the insanity of what she is contemplating.

“You don’t know if the vans were wired correctly. You don’t know if your cell phone signal can transmit through the walls of the subbasement.”

“But there’s a chance, isn’t there? If I were closer to the explosives. There’s a chance it would work.”

I hear sirens down below us, their sound carried up by the wind.

“The bomb squad may already be down there,” I say. “They may have dismantled everything.”

“Not everything,” she says. “I don’t think so. Truck bombs with fail-safes and trip wires? It’s going to take them a long time.”

“We don’t know that.”

I’m moving steadily toward her now, a step at a time.

“I think you’re wrong,” she says. “The bombs are still armed. They just need the right signal.”

“Don’t do it,” I say. “Come away with me.”

She smiles.

“You think you’re going to save me, Daniel, but you’re wrong.”

She looks out across the dark expanse of the city. The wind pulls at her clothing.

“I don’t need to be saved. I just need to finish what we started.”

“We?”

“My family. My legacy,” she says, and she steps off the building.

I rush to the edge, and I see her falling back into space.

Few people could do what she’s attempting. A fall like this would cause most people to flail, spinning out of control. They might pass out before they hit the ground or even have a heart attack.

But Miranda expertly adjusts her body in the air, spreading her arms and legs in the classic arch position of a skydiver. A falling object does not accelerate indefinitely. It reaches a terminal velocity and cannot fall any faster. By taking the arch position, she controls her descent, creating wind resistance and increasing the time it takes for her to reach terminal velocity.

There is no way that she will survive, but she’s not trying to survive.

She’s trying to complete her mission.

In the last seconds I see her pull her arms together above her head, the cell phone still clutched tightly in one hand, the other reaching to press the keys.

I turn away before she hits the ground.

A second later I feel the deep rumble of explosives detonating far below me.

The vibration travels up the steel of the building like a great shiver, and then the roof suddenly tilts to one side as a critical support lets loose in the structure far below. The angle steepens as another support gives way.

This is not a professional demolition, a neat series of explosions that will collapse one floor upon the next. It’s an enormous blast in one corner of the building that sends it leaning sickeningly to one side.

There’s no way for me to get out of the building in time.

The best I can do is to run in the direction of the building’s fall.

My mind is racing, calculating angle and distance as it changes moment to moment.