August 13, 1984 – Various locations, United Kingdom

  They were a team of six.

  Pin clothes. Pin faces. Easy to forget.

  They spoke English well enough to pass for native speakers. Not always British—some passed as American, a few as Australian. In Engnd, that was easier to hide. Their pale skin didn’t stand out. Their teeth were no worse—and in some cases better—than what any Engl?nder might encounter in the pubs or shops of home. The hardest thing was remembering to drive on the wrong side of the road—the left side.

  They had studied the radar data for weeks—the eggheads, anyway. From every angle. Every probability and permutation. They extrapoted and interpoted, filtered and simuted, and the same answer kept coming up:

  The only possible terrestrial origin—and destination—of the mysterious flying object was somewhere in that tight cluster of isnds almost directly west of the Nethernds and Germany.

  Not enough data to pinpoint a town or street. But enough to give them a direction.

  It left them with a broad search area, and almost nothing to go on. No local radar feeds to tap. No obvious anomalous signals to track. And the moment they started asking if anyone had seen glowing figures or miraculous recoveries from cancer or trauma, they’d blow their cover.

  For now, they were three teams of two. None of them knew the locations of the others. Each assumed they had been sent to public libraries—rge ones, well-funded, and likely to subscribe to multiple newspapers. Not just the local dailies, but national broadsheets, sometimes even foreign papers. Most kept physical copies for a week or two, with older issues archived on microfiche. A five-year archive was the minimum.

  Each team had a pusible reason for requesting old editions: comparing historical weather forecasts to actual outcomes; analyzing the evolution of headline nguage; tracking media coverage of regional strikes. Innocent curiosities. Nothing that would raise eyebrows.

  What they would find at the end of their search—and what they would do with it—was an open question.

  Some believed they were looking for two different things.

  One was a healer.

  The other—a weapon.

  Either—or both—seemed to have access to high-speed transportation, nearly invisible to radar. That was the only solid evidence they had. The rest—reports of glowing shapes, strange sounds, phantom smells—were mostly discounted as hallucinations, trauma responses, or bad drug trips.

  Mostly. But not entirely.

  It was a tenuous thread to pull on.

  But it was all they had.

  No one could say how long it might take to turn up a lead. They all knew it would be slow. Painstaking. Unless, by some miracle, the glowing figure dropped into their ps.

  Five years ago—before the first whispers of a man some had called an angel—none of the six operatives would have cimed to believe in miracles.

  By the end of this mission, some of them would believe in angels.

  Others would believe in demons.

  August 13, 1984 – Gsgow, Scotnd

  Not for the first time, and probably not for the st, Edith shook her head at the cloudy, obscured sky.

  Now I know why people head north to avoid the summer heat.

  Not that London, or Surrey for that matter, was known for hot summers. Carol scoffed whenever the locals compined about the heat, taking the opportunity to remind anyone who would listen that Boston in August would change their minds about what passed for hot weather.

  At the moment, Edith and Delphine were wearing light sweaters as they left their ft on Lansdowne Crescent. They continued on their way until reaching the A82, with just enough time to stop at the café across from Websters Theater before catching their bus. The bus would drop them off only a short walk from the Department of Physics and Astronomy building—and Don Dreyer’s b.

  It really should have been Carol accompanying her and Aric. Carol was the expert on cosmology, after all. But Delphine had been nearly in tears at the thought of Aric being taken so far away. Carlos’ reaction to the prospect of losing Carol for a few months had been more subdued, but just as heartfelt. In the end, Carol spared them both and offered to stay in Surrey.

  “I’ve got a metric ton of data to go through,” Carol had said. “And I can give Delphine my notes on quantum entanglement and Einstein-Rosen bridges.”

  Her offer was met with a bear-like embrace from the Parisian, who let out a yip as her joy bubbled to the surface.

  Carol pried herself out of Delphine’s embrace. “Christ, girl, you’ve been eating your Wheaties. You’re as strong as an ox.”

  So for the past four weeks Aric had spent much of his days standing in a boratory directly above Professor Dreyer’s “wee small thing” of a ser interferometer That took up most of the basement one floor below, where the professor recorded the subtle distortions in spacetime that resulted from Aric’s drawing on his mysterious energy source.

  “My associates’ll be gnawin’ their ain arms aff wi’ envy,” was as close as Aric could interpret Don Dreyer’s words—his vowels moving in strange directions while his consonants melted together— as the rge man watched the results come in with a wide smile on his face.

  “OK,” was the safest response Aric had learned to give. He had, in fact, given it quite a few times during his short stay in Gsgow though he’d learned to keep his confusion from his face. His overcrowded nguage centers did nothing to help him penetrate Don’s thick highnd accent. Not just his, either. But Aric resisted the temptation to transte their words by reading their thoughts.

  The first time he had said anything while using his powers—his unnatural voice echoing off everything—the professor and his two research assistants had stood motionless in stunned silence for a good ten seconds. Now, they barely gave him a second gnce. Except for the woman named Siobhán. The looks she gave Aric had nothing to do with voices or echoes. Edith wasn’t bothered by it, but it would have been a real problem if she had been. Working so closely with a petite alluring woman who was clearly in love with Aric would have been torture for both of them.

  But Siobhán, who barely stood five feet two inches tall, never progressed beyond longing gnces and, most likely, wild fantasies. When Edith or Delphine were present, Siobhán was outwardly all business.

  “She’s a sweet kid,” Aric had said during the second week they were in Scotnd when Edith brought up the subject. He was used to being looked at in that way and knew how to distinguish between women who had no ulterior motives and those who did.

  “She’s not a kid,” Edith had replied. “She’s just a few years younger than you. Just like you’re a few years younger than me.”

  “You’re talking age. I’m talking about... actually, I’m not sure what I’m talking about. Except that maturity isn’t always about chronology. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “I most certainly do.”

  She’d matured a lot in the st seven years. But it was the st two that were most on her mind. That day in 1982, inside a dusty library, when she first glimpsed the man who would alter the trajectory of her life.

  Before then, she’d thought she knew what it was to love someone. Even back then, when she’d first felt it for him, she hadn’t a clue how the seed he’d pnted in her heart would blossom into the love she carried today.

  She’d had lovers before him. She’d even thought she loved one of them. Others had been more casual. Not sex partners. Companions. Men like Hank, or Carlos—chaste pceholders for the real thing. Someone to keep the loneliness at bay, at least for a little while.

  With Aric, it was different. She had been hesitant, almost scared. Was it because of his unnatural beauty? His immense power, the depth and breadth of which they still hadn’t fully mapped? Or was it because she sensed something fragile in him? Something that had been shattered—possibly by other women—and repeatedly put back together? His fear of being broken again?

  She’d seen the way women looked at him. She realized how many meaningless nights of sex he could have if he wanted them—and how empty they would feel afterward. She had dealt with some of those nights herself. The mornings that followed. The emptiness. Not many, but a few. His would be orders of magnitude worse.

  Or was it that he let her set the pace? Not like Hank, who always seemed in a rush to skip to the end without reading the pages in between. Some men had wanted something from her. Aric just wanted her—however much or little she was ready to share.

  They’d become friends first. And then she’d fallen in love with him. A year before she turned 27. A year before he reappeared, standing at her front door holding a small gift in his hand. She could close her eyes and recall every detail of that blessed image: His shy smile, the scent of cologne in the air, her heart pounding in her chest as joy surged through her entire being. And ter, the sight of his naked body, his slow approach to her like an Adonis from her wildest dreams.

  Can this really be happening? she’d wondered as he took her likewise nude form in his arms and kissed her sensuously on the mouth. Before his lips wandered downward, and then downward still—until she gasped, and cried out in ecstasy.

  Their connection hadn’t only become physical that day. That evening, they had also formed a bond she still struggled to describe with words. It was too ephemeral for nguage. It was a living creature made of pure thought, raw emotion—a merging of souls. Even Aric didn’t completely understand it.

  “I can feel you even when we’re apart,” he’d told her. “Like all I have to do is reach out to touch you—even if you’re a continent away.”

  She couldn’t say the same thing. She didn’t possess whatever extra sense he had that allowed him to do it—remotely sense people, pces, anything and anyone he met, any pce he’d visited. Some connection between him and them remained. Like a card catalog of the events of his life. The where and when. And the who. All filed away for future reference.

  She realized suddenly that it must also be some form of quantum entanglement—like his connection to some massive gactic entity they still hadn’t identified.

  The thought that she would forever have a connection to him made her heart leap with joy. She wasn’t silly enough to think that they would be together until death do us part. She hoped they would be. She could only guess at the torture of being broken up yet still connected.

  But that possibility was still far in the future. At least, she hoped it was. Right now, there was only today—and the hope of tomorrow.

  August 16, 1984 – Fife, Scotnd

  Four men sat in the ready room whiling away the time until four other men would arrive to relieve them. They pyed cards, drank tea—not too much, no point in tempting fate. 43 Squadron, The Fighting Cocks, was the Quick Reaction Alert for RAF Leuchars, and none of the men enjoyed high G turns with a full bdder.

  The room was retively quiet. They’d all heard each other’s stories so often they could repeat them word for word. There were times when Flying Officer Euan “Midge” Fraser thought that Flight Lieutenant Andrew “Saxon” Mallory’s stories were his own. Saxon had racked up almost twice the flying hours that Midge had, and twice the number of stories. Some of them were even true, he thought. English pilots were known to exaggerate everything. Just as Scottish WSO’s were known to be first css skeptics.

  Midge gnced across the small room at the other pair of men. As far as he knew Flight Lieutenant Nigel “Cnker” Dawson had no tendency to boast or brag. But everyone who’d ever been in his flight could—and would—tell stories about hearing the Welshman’s accent become so pronounced during a stressful training exercise that he was virtually unintelligible. Quite the opposite of his English WSO. Flight Lieutenant Rupert “Frodo” Halliwell’s voice could have been a recording it was so ft and emotionless.

  “You’re a bloody machine, Frodo,” Midge had said once as they walked back to the ready room—their long flight finally over.

  “Stiff upper lip and all that, old boy,” the man from Bath had replied just as evenly.

  Midge was about to stand up and get a refill when a well known tritone bst came from the wall speaker.

  “Kutex scramble. Unknown at angels five, track 130, speed 1200 knots.”

  The four men acted as one, sprinting for the hardened aircraft shelter just a short hallway away. Midge zipped up his immersion suit as he ran. Less than a minute ter, he was inside the shelter that housed two McDonnell Dougs F-4K Phantom FG.1s and the six technicians who supported them.

  No one spoke as they climbed into their seats. The men moved like clockwork—repeating actions they’d performed hundreds of times before. Two minutes after the first tone pyed over the wall speaker, they were on the QRA runway, picking up speed.

  Saxon pulled back on the stick and they began to climb—fast. Midge didn’t have time to gnce out the canopy. It was still too early to rely on their Ferranti AN/AWG-11 pulse-Doppler radar, but that moment was fast approaching. He needed to be ready. Fuel wasn’t a concern yet, but hydraulic pressure could go from fine to catastrophic in the blink of an eye, and he kept a sharp eye on the gauge.

  “Gear up. Clean and climbing,” Saxon said calmly.

  “Kutex 15, contact Tracker on two-six-three-decimal-one-five. Good hunting,” the tower called out.

  “Roger. Switching to Tracker, two-six-three-one-five.” Midge reached for the radio panel and flipped to the preset.

  “Tracker, Kutex One-Five airborne, angels one and climbing.”

  “Kutex 15, Tracker. Bandit at angels five, heading 130, speed 1200. Vector one-six-zero, intercept bearing zero-niner-zero, range twelve. You are weapons free for intercept only.”

  “Tracker, Kutex One-Five. Roger.”

  Two minutes after their wheels left the tarmac, they were at cruising altitude.

  “Tracker, Kutex One-Five, angels three-five, speed 1220 knots. Vector one-six-zero, intercept zero-niner-zero,” Midge reported.

  “Kutex One-Five, Tracker. Roger.”

  Whatever it was, it was doing something they couldn’t—holding Mach 2 in dense air. That didn’t bode well for what they’d find at the end of this chase—assuming they caught it at all. Their best shot was to climb above it and use a powered, gravity-assisted dive to close the gap. A cssic boom-and-zoom intercept. It worked well against other fighters flying at optimal altitudes—but not down at 5,000 feet. Down there, the margin for error was nil. If Saxon or Cnker pulled up too te, the best they could hope for was a cracked rudder. The worst was augering in—followed by the abrupt stop that ended their craft, and their lives. He didn’t need to remind Saxon of that.

  “Kutex One-Five, Tracker. Update. Bandit now at angels three decimal eight, heading 110, speed 1000. Vector one-four-five, intercept bearing one-zero-zero, range fifteen.”

  “Tracker, Kutex One-Five. Roger.”

  “Kutex One-Five, Kutex One-Six. If we push it, I think we can catch it.” Cnker’s voice was still crisp. Midge wondered how long that would st.

  Aric had taken the time to consult a map before beginning his trip to Surrey.

  Now—equipped with a Seiko scuba diver’s watch on his left wrist and an inexpensive diver’s compass on his right—he knew approximately when and where to divert course eastward to give Carlisle a wide berth. West Germany had been too densely packed to avoid overflying every poputed area, but Scotnd—and a good portion of Engnd—had vast regions of uninhabited green nd that he could thread through if he was careful. And if he looked at a map beforehand.

  He slowed down as he turned, already resetting the watch’s bezel to begin timing when he could return to his original heading—when something caught his eye.

  Wow. Would you look at that.

  A narrow, beautiful waterway snaked through verdant fields and rolling hills. The surface was deep blue and sparkled in the sunlight.

  Dr. Martell can wait a few minutes.

  Aric leaned forward and descended at a steep angle, the front of his energy spheroid reacting to the increased speed and air resistance. When ionization passed the midpoint, he slowed just as quickly. By the time he reached the edge of the water, he was doing barely 45 knots. He inched down closer. Then closer still as he dissipated the bubble.

  The wind whipped his hair and clothes as he reached down. When the cold water touched his fingertips, he ughed—pure, unfiltered joy. He moved his hand back and forth like a child holding it out the window of a moving car. He could only see to the next curve in the ke; everything past that was, for the moment, a mystery.

  Aric liked those kinds of mysteries.