“Certainly not the measurements of any woman I’ve ever met.”
“I’m trying to be serious here.”
“Fine. The number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. I don’t know what comes to mind because I’ve heard the damn thing far too many times. Why in blazes didn’t that son of a bitch Lepin be more specific?”
“Because the walls have ears, I guess.” Gabe grabbed his bottle of water, found it to be empty, and pitched it in the direction of the room’s tiny trash can. “You never know how word’s going to get around.”
Mira was undeterred. “Luke, what do you think when I say one, three, five, four, one?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nope, nothing. Except for the keypad.”
Everyone looked at him.
“Explain,” Mira said.
“Remember when Dycar had to sneak into that room? The door was locked. Locked up tight. He had to steal the code to open the keypad.”
“Sure,” Ben said, grabbing Luke’s used-and-abused copy of This Mayflower Mars. “There’s the scene in which Dycar first comes to blows with the rebel officer … he has to enter a certain code to unlock the door … but I’m fairly positive that his was a four-digit number rather than five.”
“A code.” Mira’s forehead bunched up in what Ben thought was a look of classic consternation. “You know … it really could be a code, not one that opens up sealed doors on Mars, but … not word association but number association.”
“I don’t think that helps us,” Gabe admitted. “We’re still not any closer to deciphering it. And I don’t know anything about encryption. I’m a doctor, Jim, not a code breaker.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it. Geek humor.”
Ben stared at the open book but didn’t see the words. Number association? Maybe Mira was moving down the right highway but didn’t know it. Ben drove that road a little farther, just to see where it led. He had to assume that the numbers were easier to solve than they seemed, because Lepin hadn’t been expecting to pass whatever information they held to a random visitor; he’d figured out a way to communicate it on the spur of the moment, and thus he would’ve been forced to keep it simple. He probably used the first thing that came to mind. Say this was true, and Mira was right about the whole number-association thing. The easiest form of code was a simple substitution cipher. Take the letter A and turn it into a 1, while 2 becomes B and so on. He and Jonah had passed secret messages like that when they were boys, back in the Jurassic period.
“So what does that spell?” he asked aloud.
“Spelling is boring,” Luke opined. “I’m glad you do all the spelling, Ben, and I do all the talking.”
“Me, too. But play along with me for a second. If the number one is the letter A, and two is a B, then Lepin was trying to say—”
“That’s not a word,” Mira said. She performed a rapid count with her fingers. “A-C-E-D-A. That doesn’t spell anything. Aceda?”
Gabe sat up straight.
“It may not be a word in English,” Ben said, “but in español, it means—”
“Sour,” Gabe said, nodding as if he knew more than he was divulging. “It’s a verb that means to turn sour.”
Luke looked from one face to the next. “Mr. Lepin was trying to tell you to turn sour?”
Gabe got slowly to his feet. “Aceda’s a town, or it was a town, forty years ago. I saw it on a map. Now it’s nothing, an empty stretch of sand in the middle of the desert…”
“Maybe he was talking about some other form of the word,” Mira suggested.
“Probably. I’ve been out there. It was dark at the time, but if there’d been anything in the area, we would’ve run into it. The whole town’s been wiped off the Earth.”
“That may be,” Ben allowed, “but if this used-to-be town is anywhere near the place where you and Luke found the rifleman and that poor woman, then I submit that it’s no coincidence.”
“Yeah, actually it’s not far from there. Damn. But … there’s not a thing to see out there.”
“So it seemed at the time.”
Mira stood up. “Personally, I think looking around sounds a lot more productive than what we’ve managed to accomplish here with phone books and street maps.”
“We better call our dear friend Fontecilla,” Ben suggested.
Gabe was already shaking his head. “The last thing I need is to lead the cops on a potentially pointless six-hour drive across the desert. If we left right now, we wouldn’t even get there until sunrise. And then what? The police drive around and find me crying wolf again? No, thanks. I’m already on their semi-shit list. I take them all the way out there and they come up empty, they will deport me.”
Ben put down the battered paperback, the poor scoliosis victim with its tortured spine. “Then what, do tell, are you proposing we do about the two fine constables sitting in the motel parking lot, wishing they were at home instead of playing nanny to four American fools?”
“The Ninja Turtles?” Gabe pointed to the bathroom. “We give ’em the old bathroom window treatment.”
“Why did I know you were going to say that?”
“Didn’t this Dycar character of yours ever climb through any windows?”
“Careful, now. It’s dangerous to start thinking you’re a literary hero.”
Luke suddenly shot out of his chair. “That’s why we wear our Danger Caps!”
Gabe pretended to don a hat. “Good enough for me.”
“What if he’s out there waiting for us?” Ben asked. “Then what, Mr. Protagonist?”
“He won’t be. It’s a wasteland.”
“Humor me. What if he doesn’t give a damn that it’s a wasteland and he is there?”
“Guess we’ll play it by ear.” He headed for the bathroom. “If you guys are coming, you better pack your stuff. Fill up all the water bottles. Get some blankets. We can buy some food along the way. It’s going to be a long drive.”
Ben looked at Mira. “Tell me why we’re doing this again.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
“Sure we do.”
Mira grabbed her bag. “Try telling that to Tilanna.”
“What the devil’s she got to do with anything?”
“Hey, you started this, not me. I’m just not sure if I’m following in her footsteps or if she’s following in mine.” She zipped her bag. “Why don’t you guys skip ahead to the ending and let me know?”
Ben shook his head and glanced at Luke. “Damn the torpedoes, looks like we’re taking this composition on the road.”
Luke thrust his hand as high as it would go. “I call shotgun!”
* * *
As he drove toward the creeping dawn, Gabe glanced at himself in the rearview mirror.
Maybe he was a masochist. A punishment addict. Like one of those monks of yore who flailed themselves on the back until their skin peeled. He had no reason for trying, but still he looked himself in the eye and saw no one, the same damn no one he’d seen all his life.
Is that why you’re doing all of this? A superhero born of frustration?
Yeah. That sounded about right. The Face-Blind Avenger. All he lacked was the spandex.
“… but then Tilanna pulls him out of the way,” Luke was saying, “so the ax misses and Vanchette gets to still be alive!”
“All right, all right, slow down a bit. This old fountain pen might be worth more than just about anything I own, but it ain’t as fleet as your silver tongue, young master Luke.” In the backseat, Ben wrote with the aid of a penlight. “Of course, it doesn’t help when this highway is like the dented shores of Iwo Jima.”
“It’s the only road out here,” Gabe told him.
“Then I blame our lackluster shock absorbers. Next time, my friend, we’ll rent a Lincoln. No use chasing wild geese when you can’t do it in style.”
The Land Rover still sat in a police garage somewhere. It would rema
in there until the technicians were satisfied they’d extracted the last bit of ballistic information from its bullet-ridden steel. So Ben had suggested Calama’s El Loa airport, where they’d rented an SUV whose claim to minefield fame was its ability to convince its passengers it was blowing to pieces each time it rolled through a pothole.
Gabe was still staring himself down when he caught Mira’s eyes. Seated behind him, she met his gaze in the mirror. She didn’t look away.
Interesting.
Stars made sense to him. Women remained dark matter. “You doing okay back there?”
“Don’t I look okay?”
“Honestly? I can’t tell.”
“For now I’m fine. Ask me again after we get to Aceda.” She scooted forward in her seat. “If we find something out there—”
“We probably won’t.”
“But if we do, then we’re calling the police, right?”
“Your brother’s the brave one, not me. So yes, I’m driving straight to the observatory and dialing the first satellite that can give me phone service.”
“Good. And for what it’s worth, you’ve been plenty brave enough so far. Anyone else would have boarded the first plane for home.”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
She leaned back. “I suppose that makes you Dycar.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the book. He’s the reason Tilanna finds herself running pell-mell all over Mars, or at least I think that’s the case.”
“Indeed,” Ben interjected, “you are correct. The man can drive a plot, to be sure.”
“But isn’t Dycar dead?” Gabe asked. He’d caught only small chunks of the story as it was written around him.
“Minor detail,” Mira said.
“Yeah. Minor.” On impulse Gabe winked at her, then looked back at the road.
He felt her eyes on him as the kilometers disappeared beneath their tires, but he resisted the temptation to look again.
An hour later he pulled off the road and headed into the Atacama’s throat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mira stepped out of the car and into the nothing that was Aceda. The sun revealed a gray-yellow barren that reminded her of those places where daredevils tested their rocket cars.
“You’re right about this place turning sour,” Ben said, walking a wide circle around the vehicle. “It not only turned sour, it shriveled up and faded away.”
Luke played games with his shadow, a westward-leaning ghost at his feet.
Mira hurried to catch up with Gabe, who was stalking the grounds, casting his eyes about for clues. But there was nothing out here. Bob Seger was up to his old tricks again. “Are you sure this is the right place?” she asked him.
Gabe slapped the decrepit map in his palm. “We traveled exactly twenty-two kilometers off the road to Calama. If we went due east that way”—he pointed—“we’d run into Mentiras in just a few minutes. You’ll be able to see what’s left of the buildings when it gets a bit brighter. According to the map, this is where Aceda used to be.”
“So what happened to it?”
“Same thing that happened to a lot of towns in the American West. Boomtown shows up, resources go dry, people tear everything down or just move out, and Mother Nature lays claim to it.”
Mira put up the hood on her Cornhuskers sweatshirt. The morning chill, combined with the lofty elevation, made her wish she’d brought along a heavier jacket. So much for the misconception that all deserts were hot. “It’s hard to imagine that anyone was ever here at all. It’s just so…”
“Vacuous!” Ben called from where he roamed fifty feet away.
“Yeah, that.”
Luke made his arms into an airplane and raced his shadow across the flat ground.
Though Mira was thrilled by her brother’s newly discovered creative streak, she also knew that she was no closer to solving the puzzle of his ability to read Ben’s writing. Gabe had dramatically sidetracked her. Yet the most obvious question was why she’d permitted herself to be distracted. Asking her to chase down a murderer wasn’t high on the list of Ways to Endear Yourself to Mira Westbrook’s Heart, but nevertheless, here she was, working on mysteries with anorexic clues.
“I’ll go this way,” Gabe said. “Maybe if we fan out—”
“I gotcha.” She struck out at a right angle from him, knowing there was nothing to find but happy to play her part. When in Rome.
“I don’t see anything!” Luke yelled as his faux fighter plane banked into a sweeping left turn. “I. Don’t. See. Anything.”
Neither did Mira. So much for Lepin’s secret numbers. Aceda might have once contained the riddle of the man in the too-big coat, but now there was only a blank slate of ground, an unhelpful tabula rasa that ran on forever in all directions.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t so blank after all. She noticed a slight bulge on the desert floor, no more distinct than a pitcher’s mound.
She checked on the others. Gabe and Ben had headed in opposite directions, already almost a hundred yards apart. Luke engaged in a dogfight with the F-16 that was his swooping shadow.
Mira went to the little hill.
The ground here was the same color as the rest of the range, a kind of gray-orange that offered up no vegetation. In the story, Dycar had been obsessed with the Martian soil, almost to the point of investing it with imaginary life. He talked to it when he was alone, which was his state more often than not. Luke was the same way, anthropomorphizing the objects around him, respecting their kinship as if they were his fellow men.
If Mira was Tilanna, did that mean that Luke, rather than Gabe, was Dycar?
It made sense. Wasn’t Tilanna attached to Dycar on a spiritual level? And didn’t she also wrestle with the by-products of that attachment?
Could be. But if that was true, then where did that leave Gabriel Traylin? Ben might have portrayed the role of Vanchette, but there were no characters left for Gabe.
Or were there?
Mira took two steps and stood upon the mound.
The sun levitated higher into the sky. The far shadows receded. The land revealed by the morning light lay flat all the way to the brightening horizon. Her position seemed suddenly tenuous. What if their rented car decided not to start the next time they turned the key? Unless they happened to be found by police spotter planes, they wouldn’t survive. It was a world without trees to make a fire, without a water source, without anything.
There were no secrets here. Aceda had vanished.
She stepped off the hill and heard a hollow sound.
Looking down at her foot, she noticed nothing out of the ordinary. She tapped the ground with her heel. Was it just her imagination?
She knelt and brushed the dirt. But there was only more dirt.
Determined to wipe away a few layers, she applied both hands to the task, whisking the soil with her palms and splayed fingers. Half an inch down, something stung her.
“Ouch!” She examined her finger, fearing a spider bite. Were there spiders out here? Scorpions? She saw it was only a splinter. A quarter-inch barb had snagged her ring finger.
As she plucked the thing out, she realized that a splinter meant wood, and wood was something other than dust and sand.
She redoubled her efforts, and a few moments later she uncovered a section of … What was it? The lid of a buried treasure chest? A pine casket in a shallow grave?
“I found it,” she said to herself, amazed.
She shot off the ground and threw her arms into the air. “I found it!”
The others ran toward her. While they came, Mira just stood there being proud of herself. Maybe it was silly to be joyful about such a thing, considering the circumstances, but she couldn’t suppress the girlish glee at having found something buried in the ground. There was an excitement to it that almost made her forget the ineffable acts that the man in the too-big coat had committed.
Gabe arrived first. “What is it? Where?”
The
other two converged. Luke looked fine, but it was apparent that Ben wasn’t maintaining a healthy exercise routine. In her delight, Mira almost giggled at him.
She stepped back and pointed at the ground.
“What do we do now?” Luke asked.
Gabe dropped to his knees. “We dig.”
The four of them went at it with their hands, until they were covered in the dust that was the Atacama’s sloughed-off skin. Minutes later, they’d uncovered what Mira recognized as a cellar door.
“A fraidy hole!” Luke exclaimed.
Gabe wiped his face with his sleeve. “A what?”
“We have a lot of tornadoes back home,” Mira explained. “If you’re not fortunate enough to have a basement, then you have a cement-lined shelter in the backyard. The colloquial term is fraidy hole. The doors look like this.”
“I can assure you,” Ben said, “that there aren’t any tornadoes on this little patch of God’s earth. Though this could very well be some kind of root cellar.”
“Stand back,” Gabe said. “Let’s see what Lepin was talking about when he sent us out here.”
As the others looked on, Gabe found the handle, which was little more than an indentation in the wood. Just before he opened it, Luke said, “Stop!”
Gabe froze, bent over the door.
“This is Mars,” Luke said. “Hey, Ben, maybe when Tilanna and Vanchette get inside the rebel place, they can open a hidden room. A room like this!”
Ben put his hands on his hips and improvised. “And at last they stood, trembling, before the vault of the Kanyri leadership. Around them was only the yawning mouth of silence, a silence pure enough that Tilanna imagined she could hear the transit of her blood and, more importantly, the stirring of new life in her belly. What would she find when she eased that portal wide?”
Ben swung his eyes at Mira. “What will you find?”
Mira stared into his dark eyes. The silence he mentioned was indeed complete.
She looked at Gabe. “May I?”
He seemed uncertain. “You sure? We don’t know what’s down there.”
“That’s why I’m sure.”
Face Blind Page 23
