Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “Play along and say nothing!” she snapped.

  Vickery’s chest felt suddenly hollow, and after a moment he slowly raised his hands. Santiago was just sitting on his bicycle, his brown eyes darting back and forth. Vickery heard a car door slam, and then footsteps knocking on the concrete behind him.

  The muzzle of Castine’s gun was shaking, and she was whispering, “Fuck fuck fuck . . .”

  A man stepped into Vickery’s view on the left; he was wearing a long-sleeve white shirt and a dark tie, and he was holding a gun like Castine’s. He stepped back and aimed it at Vickery’s stomach.

  “What have we got, Castine?” he asked, then squinted closely at Vickery. “Damn, it’s . . . Woods, isn’t it?” he said wonderingly as another man appeared on Vickery’s right, also in a white shirt and tie and also now aiming a SIG-Sauer at him. “How the hell?”

  “That’s Woods?” said the second man. “Here? He sure looks like shit these days. Probably been living in the shrubbery, not that apartment.” He freed one hand from the grip of his pistol and unclipped a cell phone from his belt. He tapped the screen and said into it, “We’ve got Woods!—out by one of the nests along the 10. We’re right by the car.”

  “It’s my arrest, Mike,” said Castine unsteadily as the man reclipped the phone to his belt. “I’ll take him in.”

  “Stand down, Castine,” Mike told her. “Terry and I have got this. You and the kid get out of here right now.”

  “I’m taking it,” she insisted, and Mike turned his head to say something to her. The other man darted a quick glance at them.

  Four years ago Vickery had memorably been in a situation very like this one, and now the remembered actions took over.

  He spun on the ball of his left foot, crouching as his right leg shot out and his sneakered foot struck the gun and clenched hands of the man on his left, Terry. The gun was kicked upward and went off with an earsplitting pop, and Vickery was instantly following through with a lunge, grabbing the gun barrel and tumbling against the man; he hooked a leg behind Terry’s knee to pitch him over backward, and the man’s hands were still loosely gripping the gun in front of him when the back of his head struck the pavement with a solid knock.

  Vickery fell on top of him, and had just pried the gun out of Terry’s limp hands when a patch of concrete beside his head exploded in the same instant that another gunshot shook the air.

  He lost the remembered sequence and just froze, his ears ringing and the breath stopped in his throat, and then a foot in a polished wing-tip shoe kicked the gun away.

  “No!” came an anguished shout from Castine, and Vickery lifted his head to see Santiago pedaling his bicycle away very fast, and Mike leveling his gun in that direction. His finger was inside the trigger guard.

  And this time it was this woman, Castine, who now fired her gun twice, and as the echoes batted away between the freeway embankment and the thrift store wall, Mike took two quick steps back and then abruptly sat down on the pavement and fell over onto his right side. Vickery saw blood on the back of the man’s neck and his white shirt collar, and he looked away.

  Santiago kept pedaling his bicycle, and within seconds had disappeared around the corner of the bowling alley.

  For a long moment Vickery stared at Terry’s gun gleaming in the sunlight a few feet away on the pavement, and he knew he had no choice now but to take it; and even before he reached out and slid his fingers around the grip, his hand knew the feel and the weight of it.

  Then Castine had kicked him in the shoulder. “Get up, get up!” He rolled to his feet, and immediately she had caught his elbow and turned him around. A new Chevrolet Caprice, empty, was parked behind the Galvan food truck.

  “Out of here in your taco wagon,” she gasped. “GPS tracking on all their cars.”

  “Right.”

  The two of them hurried back to the gaudy vehicle, but while Castine clambered in on the passenger side, Vickery tossed Terry’s gun onto the driver’s seat, then stepped to the wide left-side face of the truck, squinting up at the top edge, where a long steel cylinder extended from just behind the driver’s side window to the vertical back rail.

  “Come on!” called Castine shrilly.

  Vickery jumped and caught hold of two handles that dangled from the rooftop cylinder, and he pulled down a wide brown canvas sheet that concealed the vivid painting and lettering on the side of the truck. He fitted the handles around hooks at the bottom edge, then hurried around and did the same thing on the other side.

  “Concealment,” he panted when he had climbed into the driver’s seat. He pushed the gun up under the dashboard, and when he withdrew his hand the gun stayed there. “Can’t have anybody noting a Galvan truck leaving here.” It bothered him to see that his hands were shaking.

  The engine started at the first twist of the ignition key, and a few seconds later the truck had rocked down the service road and around a curve and made a left turn onto Washington Avenue. Vickery’s cheek stung, and when he touched it he saw blood on his fingers. That shot that struck the pavement right next to my head, he thought. Lucky a cement fragment didn’t hit my eye.

  “You were supposed to cover Mike,” he said, “when I took Terry.”

  A tiny metronome was glued to the truck’s dashboard, and as the truck rocked over uneven pavement its pendulum occasionally clicked back and forth.

  Castine just exhaled and shook her head. “Is Terry dead too?”

  “I don’t know.” After a pause, he said, “You didn’t take the other guy’s gun?”

  “Of course not. You were crazy to take Terry’s. Think.”

  “I had to.” To keep moving, now, he thought.

  The breeze through the open window was sharp with diesel fumes. Midday sun glittered on close bumpers and back windows, and he steered into the right lane and idled along at thirty miles per hour, passing Mexican restaurants and Korean auto body shops and heavily bearded palm trees swaying over cracked sidewalks.

  Castine was flexing her right hand in front of her face. “What did I just do?” she said softly. “Why? Oh, God, I wish it was ten minutes ago!”

  Vickery took a quick glance at her. “Where’s your car?”

  “Oh—I don’t think I dare go near it now.”

  “You want me to drop you someplace?”

  For several seconds she didn’t speak. Finally, staring straight out through the windshield, she said, “I tracked you down at that church this morning, and then I sat for half an hour—I shouldn’t have, as it turns out, but I sat for half an hour in my car back there before I could make myself climb that hill—I was deciding whether I should break the law and probably commit treason, to save you. And then I, I did. And—killed Mike Abbott! And now they’ll probably—” Her voice had grown hoarse, and she just waved toward the traffic ahead.

  “Why did you save me?”

  “It was insane, I should not have.” She took a deep breath. “But when I helped them arrest you four years ago, in that Presidential motorcade on Wilshire, I didn’t know that they meant to simply execute you. You killed those two agents afterward in self-defense, didn’t you?”

  Vickery squinted against the memory that this recent action had forcefully roused. “Yes,” he said.

  She went on, “Just like I, God help me, killed Mike to save that . . . worthless boy. And whatever you are now, four years ago when you were standing post at that motorcade on Wilshire, you were a . . . clean, straight, dedicated Secret Service agent. You didn’t deserve what happened to you, just because you . . .”

  “Talked to a dead guy, on the radio of the Countermeasures Suburban, in that motorcade.”

  “Yes. That’s what you did. And they didn’t want, they don’t want, you to have heard whatever it was that the dead guy said.”

  Vickery exhaled one syllable of a laugh. “I don’t even remember what it said. A quote from a poem, I think, or maybe the Bible.”

  “And there was noise in the background,” she said dully. �
��Like pulsing, booming.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’d forgotten that. But yes, there was.”

  She shifted on the vinyl seat to look squarely at him. “Mr. Woods,” she began, in a voice that was shaky but resolute.

  “It’s Vickery now. Sebastian Vickery.”

  “I’d rather talk to Mr. Woods. I remember him. They were all sent out to kill you today, and I saved your life—twice! I stopped you from going back to your apartment, and I stopped them from taking you a couple of minutes ago. And now I’m in big trouble—they’ll at least be able to see I was there, my car . . .”

  Her voice had gone hoarse again, and she looked down at her clenched hands. After a while she sighed deeply and said, “There’s a, an attorney, who’ll help me. He’s my fiancé. He might, he’ll probably help you too. If I ask him to.”

  The traffic light ahead was green, but the food truck was behind a bus that had stopped at the curb. Vickery waited patiently for the bus to move forward. “I’m past the point of attorneys,” he said. “But you can use my phone.”

  She nodded, then shook her head. “No—damn it!—even from a prepaid throwaway I don’t dare call him. Terracotta, that’s my boss, he’ll be . . . looking at my fiancé’s phone records now, scrutinizing every call he gets, starting with ten minutes ago, and he’ll certainly track every call that originates in the LA area. A call from a burner phone would rouse his suspicions—and a call from your phone would lead him to you.”

  Vickery started to speak, but she waved him to silence.

  “My guy’s in Baltimore,” she went on, “he couldn’t do anything today anyway. And right now I can’t check into a hotel, or use a credit card anywhere, or even show up on the security cameras at 7-Elevens.” She inhaled sharply at a sudden thought, then swung the visor to the side and flipped it down, and sat up straighter. “Or at traffic intersections!”

  The bus moved forward, and Vickery lifted his foot from the brake. “What do you—”

  “You’ve lived off their radar for four years, here.” She was glaring at him now. “You know how to. I don’t. But they’re after you, and I know how they work.” She shivered visibly. “I need to hide, and get out of Los Angeles as quick as possible, and I need help to do it. Will you help me?”

  Vickery kept his face impassive as he steered north on Western, heading back to the commissary where the Galvan trucks parked. Castine had said that her people didn’t know about his connection with Galvan, and that seemed likely—he rented the apartment under a different identity, claiming a fictitious job, and Galvan didn’t fingerprint her employees, and the two men who had tried to arrest him a few minutes ago had clearly not been looking for him.

  “Will you help me?” she repeated.

  So she has to leave LA now, he thought. I don’t; and I might have to, or worse, if I get involved in her problems. And it would be hard to go dark in a new city. I’ve known the secret terrain of LA for decades—as a cop, as a field office Secret Service agent, and lately as a spectral-evasion driver. Can I really afford to take this woman under my wing, even briefly? My compromised, melting-wax wing?

  She did save my life. Does that sort of thing even still count with me?

  For another several seconds he just squinted at the cars and trucks in the lanes ahead.

  At last he sighed. “All right.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Transportation Utility Agency maintained a suite of offices in the Hsaio Tower on Lindbrook Drive in Westwood, three blocks from the UCLA campus, but the Operations Extension was a converted warehouse eighteen miles east in the Vernon district, on Bandini Boulevard just west of the 710 Freeway.

  The Extension stood less than two hundred yards from the freeway, and, separated only by a tall fence and a row of pepper trees, half that distance from the circular Bandini onramp. On the other side, facing a windowless white wall that bore the TUA logo in modest yard-tall sans-serif letters, four gray Chevrolet sedans sat in a parking lot that could accommodate eight. The whole property was surrounded by high chain-link fencing topped with coils of concertina wire.

  The interior of the onetime warehouse was still mostly open space, lit by the glow of sunlight on two rows of dusty skylights in the high, corrugated roof, but the expanses of wall were now paneled in a checkerboard of blue and white wedge-foam acoustic tiles, and a layer of textured blue vinyl covered the original cement floor. An old truck tire, which had proved to be too high to reach, still hung from the roof above the tall, broad doors on the east side; personnel used a pair of conventional doors opening onto the parking lot, and the old doors hadn’t been slid open in anyone’s memory. The renovation smells of paint and putty had long since given way to faint scents of coffee and microwaved Lean Cuisine chicken and fish dinners.

  The boxy 20th century fans and air-conditioners had all been replaced by a 20-ton Trane unit, and in the row of interior offices along the north wall of the warehouse, personnel generally wore sweaters or jackets even when the summer sun was baking the streets and onramp outside.

  But in one office three young men in shirtsleeves and loosened ties now sat around a radio under high-set fluorescent lights, each holding a script and a wireless keyboard in his lap, and sweat gleamed on their faces.

  “Amanda,” read one of them in a flat voice, immediately followed by the man next to him reading, “Woods,” and the third man reading, “where.”

  Continuing in sequence, they rapidly proceeded to read aloud from the scripts the words, “is”—“your”—“husband”—“now.”

  A faint but shrill voice vibrated out of the speaker. “A panda doesn’t need to be baptized,” it said, “I do. Where’s my mom?”

  One of the three seated men tapped rapidly at his keyboard, and the words that’s not her either appeared on a monitor beside the radio. The other two men rolled their eyes and nodded. One of them hit three keys, and the previous observation was now followed by duh.

  They repeated their one-word-at-a-time relayed question, and this time there was no reply at all, only the hiss of the vacant frequency.

  Standing in the doorway to the next office, a tall, gaunt man in a Princeton sweatshirt, with gray hair tumbling down to his shoulders, shook his head and stepped back, closing the door on the trio huddled around the radio. In this office were two men in business suits, one seated in front of a metal desk and holding a cell phone, the other standing and looking out the window at the warehouse floor, and they both turned to him.

  “No luck,” he told them, “they’re still getting everybody but. His wife has apparently withdrawn back into the ether.”

  The seated man said into his phone, “I gotta go.”

  “Jeez, Terracotta,” said the man by the window, “let them take a break. Abbott and Vendler have found him.”

  “And they’ve broken off communication,” said Terracotta. “Until we get confirmation from them, the scanners can keep trying to raise his wife again.”

  “Deleted persons are all crazy anyway.”

  “She was right this morning,” said the man at the desk, tucking his phone into a pocket, “about his apartment in Culver City.” He tapped his pocket. “Westwood still hasn’t heard anything more from Abbott and Vendler, and listen, Castine’s car is there, within a block of where they are, though her phone’s still at the Westwood office.”

  “Why would she be there?” Terracotta stepped away from the closed door into the middle of the room; he frowned for a moment, then added, “I wish she were here, though. When she’s part of the triangle, ghosts nearly always reply.” He smiled faintly at the man standing by the window. “Sorry, Brett—‘deleted persons.’”

  “Words have connotations,” Brett muttered, and added, derisively, “Ghosts.”

  “Ollie,” said Terracotta, “where’s the backup?”

  Pulling out his phone again, Ollie tapped the screen. “Where are you guys?” he said; and a moment later he lowered the phone. “They’re only a block or two away from whe
re the cars are. They’ll—huh.” He raised the phone to his ear again and after a couple of seconds said, “Okay.” Then to Terracotta he said, “Westwood says LAPD is responding to a shots-fired on that block. I’ll—”

  The door behind Terracotta slammed open, and one of the trio from the next office leaned in and said, breathlessly, “We got Mike Abbott. On the fucking ghost band.”

  Ollie swatted his phone and bared his teeth impatiently, then barked into it, “Police responding to shots fired at your destination. We have at least one man down, there. Maximum caution.”

  Terracotta’s eyes were wide as he led Ollie and Brett back into the radio room, and he held up his hand for silence; then said, “Abbott,” and waved toward Ollie.

  “Uh, what,” said Ollie nervously. His face was pale under his close-cropped red hair, and his freckles stood out like drops of spattered coffee. The three men who had been manning the radio stood now against the outer wall.

  “Happened,” said Brett.

  “We had the goods, we had Woods,” came a sing-song voice from the radio speaker. “Get me back, Jack, this place . . . who is that man with the wings? That factory way out there in the desert, does it move? What number were you trying to reach, shithead? You think you’re so—”

  “Castine,” interrupted Terracotta.

  “Was,” said Ollie.

  “There?” finished Brett, on a rising note.

  “Castine,” said the tinny voice, “shot me. Get paramedics, dammit! I’m all fucked up—”

  The voice failed to answer further three-voice questions, subsiding instead into misremembered nursery rhymes; and then other voices replaced Abbott’s, all just babbling nonsense sentence fragments. After another full minute of uselessly trying to elicit anything coherent, Terracotta, Ollie and Brett returned to the other office and Terracotta closed the connecting door.

  Ollie slumped back into his chair. “I hate to hear Abbott like that. You think paramedics might . . .?”

  Neither of the other two answered; the fact of Abbott coming through on that band spoke for itself. Terracotta found an elastic loop on the desk and carefully pulled his long gray hair back in a ponytail. “I find I’m wondering what Terry Vendler’s situation is,” he observed.