Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(40)

“Hear that?” she said. “Like music? Like in church or something?”

I listened, but I didn’t hear a thing.



The sun came up as we were driving south. A long, flame-colored contrail cut across the sky, fading to a dappled spatter over the horizon. Fast food’s de rigeur on trips like this; we caught the early morning shift for muffins at McDonald’s, ate it on the move. I drove. She dozed. I was glad to see her get some rest. She’d left her coffee, so I helped myself to that and pushed on through the morning.

I got a text from Silverman: Clean getaway! We ROCK!!! Then, a moment later, You?

He was into this. He’d been scared, but now he had the rush and the excitement, knowing that he’d got away with it. I knew what that was like. He’d feel like James Bond, like he’d beaten all the odds—like he was practically immortal.

Still, he’d handled himself. He’d been frightened in the boat, but he’d done what was needed. And after, the way he’d used the camera—that was special. That was good. I texted back: Thanks, mate. You did well.

We should have celebrated. Angel’s first retrieval, and a tough one, too. Maybe exhaustion cut the thrill of it. But neither of us felt like partying.

In a town called Napoleon, east of Defiance, west of Liberty Center, we sat in the parking lot at Pizza Time, a little red-white-and-blue building, and ate pizza, and waited for the Registry’s dispatch rider. He came on time: a sixty-year-old biker with a full white beard, an outlaw Santa Claus.

He brought papers to be signed. I started working through them, leaning on the car roof to write.

“Hell of a rigmarole,” he said. “I couriered for Chase Bank, twenty years. Was never this much hassle.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s only money.”

I powered up the flask and we each took a photo of the readings, time-and date-stamped, and we each of us, separately, e-mailed them to Central Records, as we were meant to do.

Then he put the flask into his pannier, padded it around, and locked it down. A little pod of energy. A capsule that could light a town.

“Know how many of these I done? Three, this month. Month before—oh, five, maybe. Used to be more like one a year, y’know?”

“All Registry?”

“Who else?”

“No one ever asked you for a favor? Wanted a cut of it? Offered you money, or—?”

He climbed back on his bike.

“If they did,” he said, “I sure didn’t listen.”

I watched him as he drove away.

“You’re getting kind of paranoid here, Chris,” Angel told me. “You can’t go round suspecting everyone.”

“I don’t, but—”

“You practically accused him there.”

“I did not! I just said—”

“Wasn’t the words,” she said. “It was the tone.”

“Well. I can’t help . . . yeah, OK.” To break the mood, I said, “Let’s find somewhere. Take a day off. Celebrate, OK?”

“You mean pizza’s not enough?”

“Let’s hit somewhere a bit more upscale, first. Shall we? Then, we do the town.”

Silverman sent me a text, forwarded from Eddie-boy.

Disappointed, guys, but may b we can talk again. What say?

“Tell him to go to hell,” said Angel.

“Actually, I want to talk to him.”

“You’re the only one who does.”

“You heard him. Says he’s got a god. I think I’d like to know about that.”

“I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you.”

She slept most of the way south. At one point, she stirred, and I thought she said something, but when I listened, she was singing, softly at first—that weird, disjointed stuff she liked to listen to—Berg, Messiaen, whatever.

She was singing and her hands moved and her body started shaking and she got so agitated that I leaned across and woke her, and she started up, staring round as if she’d no idea where she was. She sucked in air like she’d been drowning.

“What’ve you done?” she said.

Her hands were raised. She pulled at the seat belt.

“You were having a bad dream,” I said. “I woke you.”

I heard her breathing, heavily, and then she sank back in her seat.

“It wasn’t a bad dream,” she said. “Or I don’t think it was . . .”



There is a wind farm on the plains of Indiana. It runs for miles and miles, long avenues of tall gray towers, each topped with a huge, three-vaned propeller; some turning slowly, others frozen into strange, suggestive attitudes: elegantly beckoning, or fending off, quizzical or curious . . . There is something beautiful and slightly eerie about it all, its size, its silence, and that weird trick of the mind by which these simple shapes resemble giant human effigies—the way a stick man or a smiley-face are instantly identified as human—as one of us.

They stand there like some primal memory, an army of long-vanished giants, reborn into the modern world.

The Registry has factions that would sweep aside such installations, blow away the wind farms and the dams for HEP, the coal reactors and the nuclear sites, declare them all irrelevant and obsolete. New Heaven, new Earth: let the gods regain their hold, and run their fingers through the deep veins of the world, while the Registry, as ever, strains to keep them on the leash. In service, and not in control.