The Blue Light Project Read Online Free PDF

beaten Von Kemper in the qualifying sprints by five seconds, the rest of the pack another full twenty seconds behind them. A stunning, unexpected result. So now not only was the whole city watching, the whole world was watching as Eve was poised to start the pursuit. She would go first, followed five seconds later by Von Kemper, followed twenty seconds later by the rest of them in the order they’d finished the sprint. And in every watching mind—those rooting for and against Eve—it was a one-in-a-thousand shot she could hold them off. There were simply too many of them. And Von Kemper was too strong, too sure, too calm. So everyone
leaned forward, tense and waiting, as the starter raised his arm. As the pistol cracked in the cold air.
    Nick had once told her the circumstances surrounding his own viewing of this material on television. He was at the offices of the real estate development firm he was then working with, and someone came into his office to say the race was live on the television in the common room. Nick was game. He went down the hall. He remembered watching Eve’s breath making ghosts in the alpine air. But he remembered a particular feeling too. Not love at first sight, Nick said, as if he needed to assure her on that point. But a certainty that they were going to meet. And the deep irrationality of that thought so unsettled him, as it was just a superstition in the end, an ignorant hunch, that he excused himself to the men’s room before the race began, where he splashed cold water on his face and stared himself down in the mirror. Snap out of it, man. He returned just in time to see the race begin. In retrospect, he told Eve some months after they’d started dating, he also thought he might have had a touch of food poisoning.
    Now the archival footage rolled, Eve surging across the start line and heading down the trail. Von Kemper quickly in pursuit, her skis raising Valkyrian plumes of powder as she tried immediately to close the gap. In Double Vision, Eve watched and relived those straining first moments. And then the shock, as Eve seemed to stagger, to jolt in her boots, then tumble with agonizing slowness sideways and off the path. There was a glittering aura of snow crystals and camera flashes. The air humming instantly with alarm and reappraisal as the French announcer famously pronounced, in just those opening seconds: Eve Latour has fallen!
    Then the French announcer said it again. And as if to punctuate the epic seriousness of Eve’s failure—including the failure of judgment implied by being born to a French family that had immigrated to North America three generations previously—he rephrased and
focused the thought using the full version of her name, fully inflected with the mother tongue: Genevieve Latour! Genevieve Latour will not win the biathlon gold!
    He said this because Von Kemper was hard on her now, storming past Eve in a mist of snow and heading down the trail towards the first targets. But even so, it was early for him to reach his conclusion. Like all those watching, live and on television, he didn’t know what had really just happened. Eve hadn’t stumbled because she was clumsy. She’d stumbled because something had hit her, just above the ankle of her left boot. Something small, hard and traveling at extremely high speed. Like a bullet, exactly. An instant curtain of pain fell over her. But as she lay on her side, gripping her ankle, she saw in the faces of the nearby officials that they hadn’t heard a thing. Not a bullet from a gun, then. What? On the trail, right in the track left by one of her skis, lay a steel ball bearing. And all around the point of impact on her ankle raged a wildfire across frantic nerve endings.
    Slingshot, it would later turn out. A rather serious-looking hunting slingshot made of aluminum and surgical tubing wielded by a crazy Belgian on a balcony with clear sight lines. Now here was a random piece of bad luck. A man obsessed with the