The Second Sphere (The Three Spheres Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “It’s a bit of a stretch, sir,” I said. Quincy glanced at me.

  “You’re the one who first introduced us to this case, are you not, Mr. Cox?” he asked.

  “I was.”

  Quincy smiled. He was a master of understatement. He could make anyone feel guilty with a mere flash of his eyes or a nod.

  “So you all sincerely believe that you were doing the right thing by following this investigation into the plot against the Lunar Capitol?”

  “Of course, sir,” Bryant said.

  “Good. I just want to make sure that we’re all on the same page about this. We’ve got enough pressure on us as it is, especially with this potential new contract with the TSG. There are some who want any excuse to take our piece of the pie away and put it elsewhere.”

  “I understand that sir, but we can’t--”

  “I get it, Bryant. I get it. You believe that you were doing the right thing. We do need to speak with a unified voice. The problem is that it’s not good enough to simply tell the TSG or the governors or whomever it is that I’m speaking with that we believed we were doing the right thing.”

  “Sir, but that doesn’t mean--”

  “I’ll say it again, Bryant. It doesn’t matter what you believe or what reality is. You may very well be right. But politically, none of that matters. What matters is showing that we can get work done and that we have a specific reason, not of our making, preferably, for having erred. There are plenty of other smaller shops out there, Agnew Company, The Trane Group; all of those folks are interested in taking what we have. And they’re putting their money in the right places to do it. So we’ve got to show that no one can do what we can do.”

  Shari brought in the coffee just as Quincy stopped speaking. I thought about doing a dose right there.

  “So, we can be confident that this is the Green Revolution?” Quincy asked.

  “I just don’t know who else it would be,” Bryant said. “They’re the only ones with the level of sophistication it would take to carry out something like this.”

  Sure, there were other groups out there, Mafioso types who liked to flex their muscles occasionally, let a bought politician know that he or she had crossed a line with them. But 99 times out of 100, these were Green Revolution cases.

  “Well, what’s your game plan?” Quincy asked as he patted his coiffed hair.

  “Lance knows he has our full support and that anything we can do to help the team in New Washington and the JSF accomplish what they want to, we’ll do. I’m having our analysts comb through everything from the past months to see if there’s any evidence that might be useful,” Bryant said.

  Quincy’s stare fell to Rosie. “My dear, what are your thoughts on this matter? You’ve been rather quiet this morning.”

  Rosie opened her hazy eyes wide and shrugged. “I agree with everything they’ve said.”

  Quincy smirked, eyed Bryant, then me. He searched for something. “Am I getting the sense that you’re not taking this auditor very seriously?” He asked.

  “We take it very seriously, sir,” Bryant said.

  “Because let me make something perfectly clear; what’s most important to me, right now, is ensuring that our contract is renewed with the TSG for lunar intelligence and military services. I don’t give a damn about anything else.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What I’m telling you, Bryant, all of you really, and let me make myself perfectly clear, is that I won’t hesitate to let any of you go if we don’t find a way to make this right. All of these hundreds of years of service that you’ve given to our company will go out the door. All of you. That means no pension transition, and no positive reference for any future employer.”

  “Sir, I’ll be speaking with my informant this evening, trying to work my way up the chain.”

  Quincy looked at me and smiled, slightly. He nodded, then put up a smooth, un-calloused hand. “I’m giving you forty-eight hours to come up with something significant, something that can deflect attention away from this mistake that was made by you and your team.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If I don’t have something by then, I’ll be forced to bring in people who can get something for me. Do I make myself clear?” he asked.

  Bryant clicked his teeth together and stood.

  “Yes, sir,” Bryant said, though I knew he wasn’t clear at all. His hands fidgeted. But, ever the good worker, he pushed his rage down and didn’t let his anger overwhelm him.

  Rosie and I stood, but Quincy remained seated.

  “I’ll be in touch with you at some point later this afternoon when the auditor arrives,” Quincy said. “Thank you for your time. That’ll be all.”

  Without another word, his eyes guided us to the door.

  We pounded by Shari and caught the elevator. No one said a thing as the doors closed. We needed to commiserate and we wanted privacy. When we got back to our office, Bryant followed us.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. Sweat beaded at his brow, and his eyes bore the threat of losing his job. Rosie and I took our seats.

  “I don’t know what to say, Bryant,” I said. “But--”

  “Your mole had better find something,” he said as he shook fists at me.

  “I told you, I’m on it.”

  “Our jobs?” Bryant asked. “Our pensions?” His face burned a deep shade of red.

  “Hey, if Quincy’s worried about renewing our contract with TSG, then--”

  “There are worse things that could happen,” Rosie offered. Her mind was on another plane. Love had run off with all of her senses. I hated to think this, but she sounded like a throwaway, devoid of all things human.

  “Worse than losing our jobs?” Bryant asked, his voice low and throaty. “Tell me, Rosie, what would you do if you didn’t have this money coming in? Go back to the military?”

  “I don’t like it either,” I said. “But you know that Quincy gets what Quincy wants. You know that. You need to be focused on making sure that we get the best out of our analysts.” I touched my chest. “I’ll worry about my mole. Okay?” I said.

  “Doesn’t seem to matter to Quincy whether you take responsibility for it or not,” Bryant grumbled.

  This pressure to deflect attention from the Laslow Corporation and the threat to make us the fall-people for this fuck up, something wasn’t quite right with it; something that my mind just couldn’t grasp.

  Chapter 9

  There were five years separating me from the end of my career. In the grand scheme of things, it was a short amount of time. But in this pressure cooker of a life, amidst the never-ending threats and the need to produce results, five years seemed like a long time.

  I left the cramped office and walked down the narrow hall toward the bathroom, fondling the drive in my pocket. I pushed the door, feeling a lust and in need of a bit of privacy. A man on the way out shot me impish eyes, but didn’t say anything. I lumbered to the sink, put my hand on the cold, hard, white surface, and bent over. The water started to run. I reached down, gathered some in my hand, and splashed it on my face.

  I felt the stillness of my surroundings, went into one of the stalls, and locked it. The drive appeared in my hand, and I let a dose go before I heard the door to the bathroom open again. Feet shuffled across the floor and the door to a stall creaked open. The door locked, then I heard the swoosh of a zipper and pants dropping to the floor. An explosion, then a splash soon followed.

  I leaned back against the wall as the colors began to pop and my mind began to run. I saw the present far in the distance, at the end of a long dark corridor, just as the past swallowed me in one gulp.

  Earth.

  Being away made it seem like a magical place, a world of infinite possibilities. Maybe I put too much pressure on the idea of home. Whether that was the case or not, I couldn’t believe that being on earth was worse than what I felt for the last fifty years of life on the moon, encumbered by the limits placed on my movement.

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; I couldn’t think about my future as retirement so much as a transition. Because in reality, retirement was impossible. This never-ending life required work until I chose not to renew my transfer or some unforeseeable event extinguished humanity. My pension would give me a year or two to get back on my feet and find myself a new vocation. So the threat by Quincy Laslow to take away my hard-earned retirement fund made my palms sweat.

  I’d been in the intelligence business for a few centuries, and that was long enough. There were other adventures out there, or at least I hoped there were. I often imagined myself doing something completely different, like, say, working behind the counter of a store. I imagined the leisurely talks with smiling, happy customers, and going home at five o’clock to sit on my balcony with a cold drink and watch the sky as night descended on the earth. My imagination didn’t provide many details. For instance, I didn’t know what I wanted to sell, didn’t think about doing the books, or ordering merchandise. I just knew that I longed for some kind of normalcy. The game we played with the Green Revolution had worn me out. I needed a fresh start.

  I didn’t care where I lived. There were no countries to choose from. Just being on terra firma mattered. No more separation from the things that mattered most to me, no more need to rely on an artificial nature at the Source for hope. I thought about the simple things that I wanted when I got back to earth, rays of sunshine on my face, a long stroll on a hot summer evening, to see my daughter and grandson in the flesh. I desired all of those things more than I could say, and certainly not in that order.

  I remember what it was like before we had Three Spheres. There was a romantic notion about space exploration. Words like destiny and honor were tossed around as though God wanted us to rule the universe. The longer I lived, the less I believed that any higher being wanted our reign to stretch beyond earth.

  I was a country boy, from a town with a dying coalmine and people struck with horrific lung diseases. It was a hard life; a poor life. And it made me want to escape, to explore places that I, as of yet, didn’t know, to free myself from the burden of what would have certainly been a life in the mines. That’s why I enlisted in the army after high school; to see the world, maybe do some good, to get away from the constraints that my birth placed on me. The military introduced me to potential. The training instilled discipline as a tool to create a better life. There was honor in it, certainly, but for many of us, it was also about the hope of a different outcome than the previous generation.

  When the China attacks happened, everything changed. It wasn’t just Los Angeles and Boston that bore the scars. My life in the army suddenly went from discussions about managing conflict, and regular training, to constant physical threats in the span of one month.

  The mountains of China were about as close to hell as I’d ever experienced. It was a barren landscape inhabited by people whom we didn’t understand. As much as we wanted everyone to believe what we believed, to coerce them into peaceful capitalism, we were confronted with the truth that a complex world couldn’t be ruled by simple notions of right and wrong. We never seemed to learn our lessons. After a few tours, I needed to get out. As soon as I could, I left the military to go back to school and get some books in my head. I needed to understand where I’d been and where I wanted to go.

  In the halls of higher education, I discovered that, despite finding my days in China terrifying, I’d become something of an adrenalin junkie. It would never be enough to sit at a desk and write memos. Sure, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but, equally important, I needed a rush. At the first recruitment fair I attended during my senior year, I went straight to the Central Intelligence Agency table.

  My first years working for the Company, I spent the majority of my time back in hell. I could only guess how much we chased our collective tail, how far we actually were from winning that war. We were still clueless, in over our heads in a culture that we didn't understand, fighting a war without realistic plans. But I wasn’t a decision-maker at the time, merely a pawn placed at the whim of those above me.

  When I got a break after those few years of being abroad and headed home, I felt like I had chosen the wrong path, that if I had to spend another moment being an ignorant handler’s plaything, I would go insane. I thought about giving up on the intelligence field altogether, maybe go back to get a PhD, use my brain and experience to help change the theories behind the way the world ran. But I felt a deep conflict. I still needed that rush.

  A colleague of mine at the Company suggested I check out Laslow.

  The Laslow Corporation got into the intelligence field after decades of defense contracting. Ed Laslow was big into chemical and biological weapons in the ‘80s and a regular thorn in the side of human rights organizations throughout the world because his products were the leading cause of death among civilian populations in conflict zones.

  But he was also a master of Research and Development, the creator of a company pushing the fields of robotics and biological exploration into new and previously unknown territory. He seemed to know the next big thing before anyone else. When the War on China was born, Laslow flipped his political connections into a nice piece of U.S. government pie in the more legitimate intelligence field, eventually becoming the leading contractor with the government.

  There was something sexy about the intelligence wing of the Laslow Corporation. Maybe it was the headlines they made. Maybe it was the connections they had throughout the world that hadn’t been tainted by the stink of U.S. government ineptitude. All I knew was that I wanted in. I sent in my resume and waited.

  Chapter 10

  I slowly came out of my dream-state and realized that I was on a toilet, slumped against the wall. The bathroom stank. Several stalls down, someone still struggled with a bowel movement.

  Thoughts of whimsical Quincy Laslow danced through my head. His threats were asinine. The very idea of putting contracts over and above hardworking employees was completely foreign to me. Then again, who the hell was I to judge? I’d done plenty of moronic things in my life. And I didn’t have the pressure of running a multi-trillion-dollar corporation.

  Ogling the past only brought up thoughts of my dead wife, which then led me to another dose of Love. The dance of people entering the bathroom continued beyond the door to my stall. More shuffling feet; another stall door opened.

  In 2008, I let a woman run away with my heart. It wasn’t the first time, but it was certainly the last. Her name was Sofia Lucht, and she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, the most loving and caring person I’ve ever known. We married at her parents' home in suburban Maryland a year after we met. Soon, we had a daughter, Lila, and she was everything that I’d imagined a child to be, full of joy and unconditional love.

  I put in for some domestic time and started working out of Langley, my desire for a rush restrained by new commitments. I lived the life of a family man and enjoyed every second of being around my wife and daughter. The workdays were shorter, filled with meetings in boardrooms and communications with men in the field, but with immeasurably less stress. I got to sleep in my own bed, and Sofia and I talked about having a second child.

  About a year after Lila was born, after forgetting I’d applied, I got a call from a recruiter at Laslow. The recruiter told me that management liked what they saw on paper and wanted to get me in for an interview and a battery of tests. It felt like a tremendous opportunity, one with higher pay and the potential for actually accomplishing something. Psychologically hardened, no test could match the intensity of real field action for me. They hired me immediately. It was a match made in heaven, professionally.

  Not so for my family life.

  I was gone a lot, to say the least, which put something of a strain on the relationship with my family. Being abroad for months tested my wife, and left my daughter wondering whether her father was real. But what could I do? I’d never quit my addiction and I loved the work.

  And the work got noticed.

  Laslow repla
ced the CIA as the source of reliable information for intelligent decision-making. It was well known in most circles that when the President needed to make a choice between two unpleasant, but strategically important options, he read Laslow briefs first.

  So it surprised no one on the inside that we were the ones who struck the final blow, assassinating Bai Boutou, outside of Beijing. He was hidden in a compound about the size of four football fields, counting the days until his kidneys failed. One of the things I’ll always remember about that life on earth was that I was there when we got him, all thin and unrepentant as he was. Striking that final blow, the one that brought about peace after fifteen years of war, helped mythologize the Laslow Corporation and brought a few centuries worth of guaranteed government contracts.

  When the transfer era arrived, thirty years after the war ended, my marriage descended into bitterness. For Sofia, the idea of attaching herself to corporations for life extension was horrifying. She was disturbed that I, a person she thought to be good at heart and well intentioned, could believe that man-made immortality was in any way moral. We fought endlessly about our future, as I tried to convince her that we needed to spend eternity together.

  I knew what I wanted and thought I understood all the consequences. I was in the first ten thousand to get the procedure done, mostly because I wanted to work, and Laslow knew how valuable I was. It all seemed to make perfect sense.

  When I came home with that first Transfer in 2043, we were in our sixties. I’d chosen a transfer that was as close to the way I’d been when I was 25. Dark hair and skin, deep set brown eyes. Maybe that scared Sofia when she saw me walk through that door. But I knew that I wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror for eternity only to see a stranger.

  Over the next nearly thirty-odd years, as she aged, Sofia’s heart broke. I continued to try to convince her that there was no reason for her to die, that our love was so strong that we could make it forever. But her convictions were firm. She couldn’t understand why I chose unnatural, endless life over my moral center. To me, it wasn’t a choice. It was only instinct, the will to survive.