I folded the paper carefully into fourths and placed it into the breast pocket of my trench coat, right beside the four-inch antique solid-titanium surveyor’s compass transit key, stepped with fifty-six analog cryptographic notches along its lower edge:
KEY IDENTIFIER: MERCER-CLARA-010
CLASSIFICATION: STRATEGIC SOVEREIGN ESCROW // TITLE 50 CONTINUITY
TITLE: CONDUIT TEN // THE CAPITAL COMMAND SPUR
For the remaining sixty minutes of the flight, the aircraft hummed peacefully toward the west.
In First Class, champagne corks popped.
Flight attendants brought complimentary flutes to seat 2B.
Laughter and clinking glass drifted back through the curtain.
Beside me, Mason held my hand.
He didn’t eat his gummy bears.
He didn’t put on his headphones.
He sat with his small jaw set into that identical, stubborn, unyielding line his great-grandfather had worn when surveying the pre-Cambrian crystalline schist of North America eighty years ago.
At fourteen-twenty-two Central Time, the landing gear dropped with a heavy, hydraulic shudder: THUMP-WHIRRR.
