Tsao kneaded his cheeks again. He could hear the stream of nine slow turns trilling like musical chimes over its rocky bed. The sound did not relax him tonight.

“I’ll be waiting,” he said, and hung up the phone.

4

Various Locales
April 15, 2024

The Terminal, New York City

Carmody dove headfirst from the overhang like a falcon, plunging hundreds of feet straight down into the ravine. Its stone walls were sheer and vertical, the narrow Black Sea inlet below winding between them in slow, snaking curves. Then the lock branching off into the cliff wall, a tunnel cutting deep into the mountain slope.

He hovered above the inlet. He could not see its western bank. He could not see the tunnel entrance. That side of the channel was washed out and distorted, like a smeared watercolor painting. It disoriented him.

After a moment Carmody shot back upward, soaring high toward the top of the cliff, then higher, until he was above the distorted area and gliding over the escarpment. The sirocco was hot and dusty but not yet strong, and he could scan the rugged landscape for miles around. He saw the two ancient towers guarding the inlet’s mouth. He saw the railway line coiling around from the far side of the mountain. But the west bank of the inlet remained an unnatural blur stretching as far as he could see to the left and right, and for a hundred feet up from the mountain’s base.

He’d had enough. For now, anyway.

Carmody snapped off his V/R headset and was at a desk in an air-conditioned office. He was sweaty, out of sorts and a little nauseous, his brain and body adjusting to real physical space.

He grabbed a bottle of water on the desk and drank. Then he crushed it in his big hand, dropping it into the trash under his borrowed desk.

He had a meeting with Carol Morse in ten minutes.

Morse’s office was on the eighth and uppermost floor of the Terminal, a converted nineteenth-century warehouse that stood like a brick-and-mortar fortress in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen.

She was at her desk facing the door when Carmody entered. A slender, blonde woman in her midforties, she wore a charcoal blazer, white blouse and platinum necklace with a small blue sapphire pendant. From his side of the desk, Carmody couldn’t tell if she had matched a skirt or slacks with the blazer. Whichever, he knew she would look snazzy, put-together and situationally appropriate. Morse was never anything less than fully poised.

“Mike,” she said. “Please, come in.”