“Marion?” I asked him then. “What has she done?”
“She’s found a car and gas to get her out to Lexington. Rob Roy is opening the shell at noon for another convoy of refugees. The car is parked in a private garage. I have the keys.”
“You mean—” I stopped to stare at him. “I can leave the county?”
“Mrs. Kirk plans for you to crawl into the trunk when she picks up the car. You tough it out in the trunk till she’s past the checkpoint. She’ll pull off the road to let you breathe again. You’ll be home free!”
I let him drive another block while I thought about it.
“I can’t do it,” I told him then. “I thank you. It’s noble of Marion. But I don’t want the risk!”
“We’ve considered it.”
“Coon will have his guards watching the checkpoint. If they find me, Marion and the kids could be trapped here forever. And think of yourself—”
“Clay—” He paused to shake is head. “There’s a lot more to think about.”
He pulled off the street, parked on the strip beside an empty public playground, and turned soberly to face me.
“You’ve just seen a hint of the tension between the Colonel and the council, but you don’t know how desperate we are.”
“Desperate? I saw Coon back down when you threatened to drop the barrier.”
“But suppose we had to do that?” Anxiety furrowed his weathered face. “Bad news for the likes of Stuart and Coon, but suicide for us. The end of the Haven. Treason trials for the lot of us.”
“With all that at stake,” I said, “how can you risk more trouble for me?”
“Not just for you.” He frowned at the abandoned slides and swings on the playground beside us. “We’ve been eating at the Bristol House. I’ve gotten to know Mrs. Kirk and her children.” He gave me an odd little tight-lipped smile and went on in a slow half-whisper, almost as if to himself.
“Angela, an angel really. Your little nephew begged me to help you. I made them a promise.”
“Then I think you’ll understand why I can’t hurt them.” “You’ll be hurting them more if you make them leave you here at Ben Coon’s mercy. Think it over, Clay.”
I sat a moment, trying to think.
“A lot has happened to me,” I said. “A lot of bad luck, or maybe something worse than luck. I’ve wondered if I’m not another victim of whoever killed my brother. But I am innocent, in spite of all the charges. If we get an honest government, I should have a chance in court.”
He sat for half a minute staring at me bleakly.
“You’re a fool, Barstow,” he muttered at last. “Maybe an idealistic fool, but still a monumental fool. As I had to tell Marion, you’re a dead man if you stay here.”
“Could be,” I said. “I hope you’re wrong. It’s a chance I want to take.”
He dropped me on the gravel drive at the Katz House. My room key long lost, I walked in the front door and waited in the hall between Saxon and Katz and Katz Guns and Ammo till Julia Sue Katz came to the counter in a cloud of lemon scent, her hair rolled in curlers.
“Mr. Barstow!” Her black-penciled eyebrows arched in astonishment. “I thought—” She caught herself, gulped, and blinked at me. “I thought—”
“I’ve been in jail,” I told her. “I’m out on bond.”
“You are?” Her eyes narrowed. “So I guess you want your old room back?”
“I certainly do. The rent was paid through the whole semester.”
“I guess it was.” She nodded reluctantly. “But—” Confused, she was turning pink. “You’d better see Mr. Katz.”
“I’ll be glad to see him.”
She rapped on the Katz & Saxon door and slipped inside. Sam Katz followed her back. A short thick round man in baggy pants and a tight black polo shirt, he wore old-fashioned black-rimmed glasses that gave him the look of an anxious owl.
A bundle of nervous habits when I got to know him, he was forever fiddling with the pens in his shirt pocket, fiddling with the mini-infotel on his wrist, fiddling with any object in his reach. He kept making grotesque one-sided grimaces that seemed unconscious, kept taking the glasses off to lick them with a moist pink tongue and polish them with a white silk handkerchief before he jabbed them back.
“Mr. Barstow!” He bustled to meet me. “A relief to see you free, my boy.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on inside.”
His desk was flanked by a computer on one side and an infotel on the other, with a collection of antique handguns locked in a tall glass case across the room. He waved me toward a chair and stood shaking his head in apparent regret.
“I wish I could have seen you sooner, Clay. I might have been able to do more.” He saw the question on my face. “I’ve been concerned about you because I knew your brother.”
He smiled faintly at my shock.
“His widow told me about the kinship. She came to me for help to find you. Nothing I could do. Sit down.” He gestured again at the chair. “Let’s discuss your situation.”
I stood blinking at him, recalling Kirk’s laptop comments. A worthless windbag, to be taken with a double pinch of salt? Maybe a shyster? Maybe too apprehensive to reveal his secret self. Uncertain what to make of him, I felt desperate enough to take the chair.
He sat very deliberately and opened a silver humidor.
“Smoke?” He offered a fragrant cigar. “Cuba’s finest. The gift of a grateful foreign client.”
“Thanks, but I don’t smoke.”
Ruefully, he replaced the cigar.
“Julia Sue disapproves, but sometimes she does let me enjoy one with a client.” He closed the humidor and leaned more seriously across the desk, gray eyes searching me though the black-rimmed lenses. “Clay, was your brother an agent of the FBI?”
I tried to keep a poker face.
“If he was,” I answered cautiously, “he never told me.”
“No matter.” He shrugged disarmingly. “Just a rumor. Crazy guesswork. All we get since this damn wall went up.” His shrewd eyes narrowed. “You came here to look for the makers of the letter bomb?”
I had to nod. “My brother was an investigative journalist. I was hoping to carry on his work.”
“A dangerous undertaking.” I saw a momentary twist of his lips. “Do you have a lawyer?”
“Not now,” I said. “Not since Luke Huron was run out of the county.”
“Regrettable.” He made a wry face. “An ugly shadow over Pepperlake’s new utopia. And on your own situation, Clay. But I’m anxious to help you in any way I can.”
“I have no money.”
“Nobody does.” He shrugged. “Not till the council decides what to do about a currency.”
Still I hesitated, uneasily wondering how he had earned my brother’s comments. His face grew graver.
“You’re in a hard spot.”
“I know.”
“It’s more than just the murder raps.” His voice fell confidentially. “Julia Sue knows a nurse who works at Mercy Hospital, where they have old man McAdam. She was in the room when the Colonel came to see the old man, and she says he had words with his sister.”
“Beth?”
“Words about you and that shot through the window.”
That took my breath.
“Beth didn’t want to believe you were the gunman. Stuart raised his voice at her. Called you a conniving Yankee cocksucker. Accused her of turning soft on you. Finally stalked out and tried to slam the door.
“Stuart hates you, Clay. If you wonder why, the nurse says he’s jealous. Beth has never married, so the nurse says, because he’s run off every man she ever liked. He’ll get rid of you, Clay, any way he can. You need all the help you can get.”
“From you?”
He hesitated, blinking through the lenses. “I don’t know—”
In spite of all my uncertainties, I had to beg for his help.
“If you ask.” Grinning genially, he came around the desk to shake my hand a
nd escort me to the door. Warmer now, Julia Sue took me down the hall to my room.
“There’s been nobody in it,” she assured me. “You’ll find your things just like you left them.”
Not quite true. My possessions were still there, but neatly rearranged, doubtless after a police search. I enjoyed a badly needed shower and found clean clothes to replace the yellow fatigues. Julia Sue knocked while I was shaving and came in with a paper bag.
“That damfool wall has made food hard to find, Mr. Barstow. I brought you a snack.”
The bag contained a thick ham sandwich and a ripe red apple. I devoured them and turned on the infotel. With the lines open for the moment, Ramona Del Rio was on the tube, broadcasting from the checkpoint on the Lexington road.
The refugees were creeping through it slowly. Cars whose owners had found gas, pickups stacked with household goods, now and then a yellow-painted school bus, a dragging line of people shuffling on foot, many lugging bundles or bags.
Inside the line of painted posts that marked the invisible barrier, police were peering into vehicles, sometimes searching them. Beyond it, on the federal side, uniformed immigration officials were demanding identification, searching everybody.
Once, as the camera swept the crawling line, I thought I saw Marion at the wheel of an old blue Ford sedan, Tim leaning out of the window. I wasn’t certain, but a cop was gesturing for them to stop and I felt glad I wasn’t suffocating in the trunk.
Del Rio’s cameraman drove south, panning the base of the shell. Outside it, under the guns of a camouflaged tank, his lens caught bulldozers clearing a broad strip, uprooting trees and leveling buildings. Men with drilling machines were planting a row of posts down the middle of it, stringing razor wire.
“Tex Horn on the World Wide Web for Washintel WebWatch One.” He was on the tube, the big white hat canted jauntily back, his mellow voice pealing. “The White House announced today that President Higgins is sending Rocky Gottler back to the outlaw county with a final attempt at a peaceful reconciliation.
“ ‘If the rebels want isolation,’ the president said, ‘we’ll give them isolation. We can seal them in, deny them everything they are used to importing, let them imprison themselves forever in their silicon cell.
“ ‘But we are not without concern for the misguided rebel leaders and the innocents they have trapped. Once again we offer amnesty. Our new perimeter around the rebel position will remain open for thirty-six hours to those who wish to leave. Their American citizenship will be restored, and they will be granted immunity from prosecution. Those who remain forfeit all rights and expose themselves to changes of treason—’ ”
His voice stopped. His image vanished. The tube was dark for a long two minutes until Ramona Del Rio returned.
“Our Washintel feed has been interrupted. The rebels have evidently closed their shield again, but now—”
The tube went dark, and she was flushed and breathless when her image came back.
“Now our field camera has picked up something else. Something I don’t understand. Just another moment—”
The tube darkened again, but her voice went on.
“The cameraman reports a curious flicker in the sky, something so brief that I missed it on the feed. He reports a momentary distortion of everything in the distance—everything outside the rebel barrier.
“And now the tank! The fencing machines! The men running!” Her face on the tube, she fell silent, red lips parted, wide eyes staring. In an instant she was gone. Her image was replaced by the tank, wrapped in a yellow fireball. The fencing machines stood motionless, smoking. The workers were running for safety. The camera followed them till they collided with something that checked them, sent them sprawling backward.
The picture vanished. The tube stayed dark and silent for a full five minutes, before I heard a blare of military music and saw a scene I remembered: the Kentucky Rifles marching down Main, passing the Freeman office, Stuart McAdam on his bay Thoroughbred leading the parade.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THROUGH A LONG and anxious afternoon I kept checking the infotel for news. Tex Horn and Del Rio did not return. I saw bits of a Kentucky Rifles recruitment film and a glimpse of Father Garron under a huge silver sword at his new Tennessee temple, yelling defiance at the baby-killing Satans of McAdam County. When I thought time enough had passed, I called the Bristol House and asked for Mrs. Kirk.
“Gone,” the manager said. “With her kids and a few other stranded guests. I saw them through the checkpoint.”
“So they’re safe!”
Relieved at that but also overtaken with a sudden ache of loneliness, I sat down at the desk to write letters of thanks and love and perhaps farewell to her and Angela and Tim.
“Take care of the kids,” I told her, “and stay away from McAdam County, no matter what happens to me.”
I sealed and stamped the letters, wondering if they would ever leave the county. I read my copy of Alden’s laptop notes again and walked the empty hall for an hour, searching my mind for clues to the Acorn riddle or hints that might help Katz with my defense.
Hope was hard to find. Mrs. Starker would swear that I had killed her daughter. Ben Coon had sworn that he saw me running from the burning clinic. I had been outside McAdam’s house when the bullet came through the window. My fingerprints were on the gun.
Julia Sue saw me in the hall and asked me to join her and Mr. Katz for dinner.
“Hard times.” Her voice had a bitter edge. “They’re trying to ration food, what little the hoarders left in the stores. We was lucky. The students upstairs all went home when trouble started. We got their ration numbers.”
Dinner, when she finally called me, was boiled cabbage and bean soup seasoned with shreds of ham. Katz got home late. He didn’t care for cabbage, but he seemed elated with his news.
“Old Higgins thought he had us bottled up, but Rob Roy just pushed the shield a thousand yards farther out. Blew up half a dozen armored vehicles and trapped the work crews stringing their damn razor wire.
“Men were hurt or killed when munitions and gas tanks exploded. We caught a hundred prisoners. A lot of ’em begging for a chance to join the Rifles. But that ain’t the big news.”
Grinning, he paused to scrape his bowl.
“Wait for later tonight. You know Rocky Gottler? Or maybe you don’t. They call him the power behind Senator Finn. He slipped in while they had the shield open for the refugee convoy. He claims to have another message from Higgins, and he’s meeting with the council tonight.”
“Maybe things will change.” Julia Sue brightened. “This craziness can’t go on.”
“It’s only begun.” Muttering into his empty bowl, Katz shook his head. “The world that was, it’s gone to total hell.” He stared at me through the black-rimmed lenses. “It’s the breakdown into terror your brother hoped to stop.”
His sudden vehemence startled me. Julia Sue had begun to clear the table, but she sat down to listen.
“Cass Pepperlake wrote about it in the Freeman. ” He spoke slowly, recollecting. “It couldn’t have happened a hundred years ago. So he says. He calls it one more curse of the information age. The electronic clamor, that’s what he calls it, leaves people no time to think. Public opinion is shaped by tiny sound bites. Actual information has gone to chaos.”
“My brother wrote something like that,” I said.
“I read the book.” Katz raised his voice as if to challenge me. “He studied all the signs of trouble coming and tried to warn the world, but he never pointed out the real cause, not the way he should.”
“So?” I asked. “What is the cause?”
“It ain’t what he heard from anybody here.” His face was twisted for a moment with his grotesque tic. “It ain’t poverty. It ain’t the gangs. It ain’t bad schools. It ain’t loss of religion. It ain’t drugs. It’s the idiots that try to outlaw drugs.”
“Alden didn’t think much of the drug laws.”
�
��But he never attacked the fools that make them.” His face twitched again. “The self-righteous bigots who want to run over everybody else.”
He stopped till I asked what bigots he meant.
“The dumbfuck racist majority that poison themselves with the legal nicotine and legal alcohol that kills them a hundred ways, while they outlaw marijuana, even to study it for medical use.”
“Racist, you say?”
“Look in the prisons. A million and a half men and women, most of them Latin or black, locked up because they’ve chosen the wrong poison. Forced into crime and tempted into dealing because the crazy laws keep prices beyond the reach of honest men and make the profits enormous.
“Not just for the dealers.” He glared through his glasses. “The authorities connive with the drug lords in a hellish partnership. Look back at history. I’ve talked to old Colin McAdam. He had to admit that the Volstead Act failed because people under pressure will always find relief. He likes his juleps.
“It was national prohibition that created our criminal underworld. The damfool white majority have done it all over again, double plus. Done it to minorities with different drugs of choice. They’ve set up a monstrous machine. That’s their whole judicial system, the cops and the lawyers and judges, the prison wardens and prison guards and prison builders.
“They’re a generation of smarter crooks than you can find in any foreign cartel. Every year the drug czar reports great progress and begs for more money to make greater progress, while the traffic keeps on growing and the prison builders want more money to build bigger prisons to hold more victims. They’re symbionts, the drug lords and the lawmen. The laws keeps the prices up and the billions rolling in. Working together, the dealers and the narks are sucking the life-blood out of America.
“And it ain’t just America. Whole nations corrupted! Look at crime in Mexico. Crime in Colombia. Asia. Africa. But we’ve got The worst drug lords right here at home, squandering billions fighting a war they know they’ll never win, like old King Canute sweeping back the sea. Killing kids, rotting governments, poisoning the world.
The Silicon Dagger Page 22
