Caitlyn wished Theo hadn’t been so direct. The letter from her father had been very specific. He wanted her to travel in secrecy.
“I won’t run away on you, I will tell you that.” When the time came, she’d ask them to let her go.
“She can read,” Theo said. “Did you know that?”
“Theo!” The boy had a natural ability to exasperate her. Caitlyn’s voice was softer as she addressed Billy. “I can’t tell you what’s ahead. I don’t know, and I have to protect whoever will help get us Outside.”
“You really think you can get us Outside?” Billy asked. “No one makes it past the divide.”
A twenty-five-foot-tall electric fence surrounded the entire perimeter of Appalachia, its top laced with coils of barbwire. There was a quarter mile of cleared land on each side to reach it, mined with motion sensors and heat detectors, monitored by security cameras. All of the technology had been tested and proved for decades along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Have you seen the divide?” Theo asked Billy. “I’ve only heard about it.”
“Once, when we were kids. The church took us there and explained that the fence was meant to keep Outsiders from getting in. One of the boys got a whipping for saying Outsiders never try to get in. We were all forced to take turns with the whip.”
“We can’t get too close.” Theo shook his head violently. “We might end up floaters. I heard the Clan always gets people who try to make it past them. They trap them, and sometimes they barbecue ’em and hang them from trees.”
“We’re not going into the Valley of the Clan,” Billy said. “Right?”
Both looked at Caitlyn for a response.
“You don’t have to come with us,” Caitlyn said to Billy. “I’ll understand if you want to turn around now.”
“Are you kidding?” Theo blurted. “They think he burned the livery. That’s five factory years. He let you throw his vidpod into the trees. When they find it, that’s another two factory years. He nearly killed a bounty hunter. Ten more years. If he turns back now, he’ll be in a factory until he dies of old age!”
Billy’s eyebrows furrowed deeply. “I got nowhere to go. Except with the two of you, so that’s where I’m going.”
“It’s worse than that.” Caitlyn tapped the unregistered vidpod. Although it could not be tracked by Bar Elohim, it still accepted the universal broadcast messages. One had been sent across Appalachia a few hours earlier. “There’s already a fugitive alert.”
She showed them. Billy’s photo filled the small screen. He looked earnest and slightly dazed. A reward was offered to anyone who sighted him. Yet another reason they needed to be off the road before curfew lifted.
“A man named Mitch Evans was in the livery,” Caitlyn said. “He died in the fire. Billy’s wanted for murder.”
TWENTY-THREE
Pierce opened the door of his temporary housing. He held a cup of coffee in his hand. Bad coffee. He missed Outside. This country was so controlled, his cell phone couldn’t access Outside, nor could he get an Internet connection. It was an information vacuum here. With bad coffee.
The sheriff stood in the hallway. Clean, pressed uniform. Straight posture. Nothing on Carney’s face betrayed any indication of what he was thinking. Nor did it show the least signs of exhaustion.
Impressive, Pierce thought. The guy had to be in his fifties. The night before, he’d been knocked out and dragged from a fire. Then he spent an hour at the blaze helping firefighters and another half hour supervising the removal of a charred body from the feed room. Plus another hour reviewing surveillance tapes of the scene. The only thing about Carney that hinted at the previous night’s events was the smell of smoke, probably from his hair. Pierce had been there too; showering and shampooing three times hadn’t done much to get rid of the smell.
“I’ve sent an alert out to every town,” Carney said. “Right after dawn, each sheriff will be sending people down all the roads. There’s a vidpod warrant out on my deputy. A mandatory alert, which every person in Appalachia will see. The reward offered is big enough that he won’t be able to move anywhere.”
“Where’s Lee?” Pierce asked. Pierce gestured for Carney to step inside, but the sheriff stayed where he was in the hallway, hands relaxed at his side.
“Stopped by my office this morning and told me he was done. He gathered his men and dogs and left town an hour ago.”
“From what I heard, Mason Lee never quits. Told me himself, more than five times a day.” Pierce’s coffee was getting cold, but he drank it anyway, then hid his grimace at the taste. Starbucks had been a monopoly as long as anyone could remember. Appalachia wouldn’t even let them inside the divide.
“He said his broken arm made it impossible to be part of this.”
“Suddenly the pain is too much? Everyone talked about how he had it set without anesthetics.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the pain. Maybe it was how it got broken.” Carney lifted an eyebrow, clearly waiting for how Pierce would respond.
Pierce expected that the waitress at the diner had watched his encounter with Lee from a hidden viewpoint. The noise of the crashing table had only scared her from sight, he imagined.
“A man like him needs to be careful,” Pierce answered.
“So does a man like you,” Carney said. “A man like him is apt to appear out of nowhere and strike like a snake. Don’t like it much that I owe him my life. Nor that I might have to protect yours.”
“I’ll be fine on my own, Sheriff.”
“You won’t be on your own.” Carney pulled his vidpod out of his shirt pocket and gestured to indicate that it was recording. “You and I will be working together more closely until you leave Appalachia.”
Under the scrutiny of Bar Elohim, Pierce understood.
“Make sure to be at my office as soon as you’re ready,” Carney continued. “I’ll expect you there.”
Carney gently set the vidpod on the floor, stepped inside Pierce’s apartment, and shut the door with a loud click. He walked past the couch where the fugitive had died earlier, moved into the bathroom, turned on the shower, walked back to the doorway of the bath, and waited for Pierce to come closer.
“I’m your baby-sitter.” Carney spoke in a low voice. “I don’t expect you to like it, but that’s the way it is. The sooner I can get you out of Appalachia, the better it will be for the both of us.”
“Fine with me.” Pierce held his coffee mug tighter. “What have you got on your deputy and the horses? What about that kid with the girl? Any ID? You guys have face recognition software, right? Database of everyone in Appalachia?”
“Not so fast. I’d like to know about the canister. Mason had it when he came into the livery with the girl. Showed up clear on the surveillance footage.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” Pierce said. “I’m not your resource. You’re mine. Go ahead and confirm it with Bar Elohim.”
“It does work that way.” Carney’s hands and arms weren’t relaxed any more. His hairline shifted as his face tightened. Slightly. A man had to be watching close to see it. Pierce filed the poker tell away. “We might as well make that clear. I’m not afraid of Bar Elohim. There’s more to all of this than meets the eye, and I want to know what’s happening. You don’t like it, I’ll book you on murder charges, and you’ll be in the jail cell waiting for me to return from collecting the deputy. You might think you have the juice to get released, and you do. But how many days do think it will take for the international politics to work themselves out?”
“Who’d I kill?” Pierce wasn’t sure whether to be amused or irritated by the older man’s plan.
“No one. I just lay charges.”
“Not much evidence for a murder charge.”
“None,” Carney said. “But it’ll still take time to clear your name after an accusation from the sheriff. Then, too bad, it will appear like I made a big mistake. Nothing I won’t survive. And about the time the murder charge gets cleared, I’ll put in a couple of heresy indictme
nts, and Appalachian politics will force Bar Elohim to take my side until that’s sorted out. You’d spend a week in jail. Maybe two. Understand?”
Pierce nodded. He would have made the same threats himself. “I understand you won’t be treated like hired help. Fair enough.”
“The canister.”
“You want the deputy,” Pierce said. “I want the girl. I’ll help you with what you need. But the canister is off the table. And really, you don’t want to know.”
Carney’s hairline dropped fractionally. Pierce took this as a good sign, and he started with a basic question. “Who was the boy with her? His face showed up on the footage clearly too.”
“Had him on an electronic warrant. He’s a factory runaway. Best guess is she found him somewhere in the woods.”
“And your deputy?” Pierce said. “I’d like to know how she convinced him to help.”
“Me too,” Carney answered. “All I can tell you right now is where he threw his vidpod. About a mile away. Don’t expect to find his body with it, but had to send someone to look.”
“And the horses from the livery?”
“All except one are accounted for. GPS shows it’s stationary, a few miles outside of Cumberland Gap. Want to walk there? Or do you know how to ride a horse?”
“I saw an official vehicle parked by the courthouse. Each town has one, right? We could be there in a few minutes. Mason Lee told me the procedure. You get the engine computer unlocked via satellite.”
“Just so you know, if we take the car, it also unlocks the live video and audio monitors inside.”
Pierce gulped the last of his coffee. “Horse sounds good.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Factory 22 was set against a postcard-perfect background of forested hills, one mile downstream from Cumberland Gap. Appalachia’s economic system had evolved to a perfect symbiosis; each town supported a factory, and each factory provided the town with necessary employment opportunities.
The exterior of 22 was structurally identical to all other factories in Appalachia: a low, one-story brick structure with solar panels, prison-style fencing, and guards at the gate. A lane ran from the gate through a manicured lawn and tasteful landscaping.
Mason Lee was alone, without shotgun, when he approached the guard at the gate, a soft-bellied man in his midforties, whiskers roughly shaven.
“I have authorization.” Lee anticipated the guard’s question and pulled out his vidpod. “Let’s make this fast.”
It seemed that the guard became deliberately slow as he unclipped his own vidpod. Mason resisted the impulse to whack the man on the side of the head with his cast.
“Ready,” the guard finally said.
Lee beamed his authorization via infrared. The guard peered at his screen, and Mason could hear the words from a vidcast from Bar Elohim.
“Give this man unescorted access anywhere he wants in 22.”
Unescorted access.
This, coming from the image of the face of Bar Elohim, caused the guard’s eyebrows to rise, and to Mason’s satisfaction, the insolence disappeared. The guard nearly tripped over himself to open the gates.
Mason Lee was inside.
“Tell me about the dead fugitive,” Carney said. “Jordan Brown.”
The sun was clearing the mountaintops to the east, and they were only halfway through the five miles to where GPS showed the livery horse was waiting.
“What does it matter?” Pierce said from his saddle. “The man’s dead. Well on his way to being buried, I assume.”
“I know who he is,” Carney continued as if Pierce hadn’t dismissed him. “Face recognition software and mandatory registration. I pulled up the information within twenty minutes of snapping his image in the apartment with my vidpod. He arrived at the collective, one of our labor communities, ten or twelve years before that. We can’t be sure, because it was before mandatory registration. No record of her birth certificate, so that doesn’t help me pinpoint it any better. My guess? He fled here from Outside just after she was born. So tell me why Outside suddenly wants him for a crime committed almost twenty years ago?”
Carney was making simple deductions. Jordan hadn’t committed any crimes inside Appalachia, so he must have done it Outside. That would have been before the completion of the perimeter fence, an extensive construction project that divided Appalachia from Outside sixteen years earlier. Unlikely that Jordan would have slipped into Appalachia after that. Even less likely that he’d found a way inside within the last five years, after mandatory face registration had been imposed. A registered population meant a controlled population. Jordan wouldn’t have been able to work or find housing without allowing his facial features to be indexed; had he tried, he would have shown up on law-enforcement lists that cross-referenced warrants from Outside.
Jordan clearly slipped in while the fence was being built and found a way to establish himself as a collective worker before face registration.
The girl was from Outside too. Her age dictated it, unless Jordan had adopted her once he was inside. But in Carney’s experience, fugitives didn’t saddle themselves down. The only explanation was that he’d fled with her.
There was something else. Jordan was dead. Pierce still wanted the girl, but they both knew she hadn’t committed any crime.
What did this mean? What was it about the canister that Pierce refused to discuss? Carney wanted to know but reasoned he needed to come at it sideways.
“What was Jordan Brown’s crime?” Carney asked again. “And why the interest now? After all those years he’d been gone from Outside, how did you find him?”
“We’d both be better off if I didn’t answer that.”
“The more I know, the better my chances of helping you find the girl before Mason Lee.” Carney wasn’t going to push much harder than that. This monitored conversation, after all, could be reviewed at any time, now or in the future, by Bar Elohim.
They rode in silence for about a hundred yards. Jordan had died. Instead of the agent leaving Appalachia at that point, he was still here, enduring a horseback ride. What could the girl have that was so valuable? Carney considered the silver canister, but he couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer.
“I’ll tell you what I can,” Pierce finally offered. “We learned about Jordan because of a surgeon. Dr. Vadis. He comes into Appalachia on a rotating basis.”
Carney nodded for Pierce to continue. He didn’t need an explanation of visiting surgeons. Appalachia was too small for specialized medical care. Instead, Outsiders came in on visas.
Carney squinted. “If a visiting surgeon passed on information to you, that tells me something troubling.”
“Not even close.” Pierce shook his head. “We’d like them to help us, but they refuse to break patient confidentiality.”
“I don’t understand, then.”
“Dr. Vadis is a second-generation surgeon. His father, Dr. Vadis Senior, spent nearly a decade as a visiting surgeon before him. Our man showed up expecting to see Dr. Vadis Senior.”
“You know this because…” Carney waited. Pierce seemed to be struggling with reining his mare but began talking again after she settled.
“Jordan Brown handed a large envelope with x-rays to Dr. Vadis’s nurse. He told the nurse that Dr. Vadis would understand, assuming the senior Dr. Vadis, who had taken the x-rays, was the visiting doctor. The son knew nothing about the x-rays, and when he stepped outside his office to ask Jordan about the them, Jordan took them and left without identifying himself.”
“X-rays of Jordan?”
“They were the girl’s films,” Pierce answered.
“Come back after initial surgery how many years earlier?”
“Twelve or thirteen. There’s no record of the x-rays or a surgery in the doctor’s office.”
“So something on the x-rays was significant enough that Jordan expected a surgeon to remember them well over a decade later. Had the surgeon operated on the girl?”
“You a
sked how we found Jordan. I’m answering. Vadis, the son, made copies of the x-rays before coming out to ask Jordan questions. When Jordan left so abruptly, that raised more questions. The doctor took the copies back Outside with him and started asking around. Which eventually led our agency to the films.”
“You won’t tell me what was on the them?”
“It took about a month to track Jordan down because he’d lied about his name at the doctor’s office. We found him at a collective. Or rather, we knew he lived at a collective. When I got there to arrest him, he wasn’t there, but his registered vidpod was.”
“Interesting.”
“The short version is that he’d been doing that for years, disappearing for two or three days at a time, unreported by the collective.”
“You mean,” Carney said, “protected by the collective. Where’d he go?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Each time he went, he was taking a big risk. Five years in the factory if caught without his vidpod, right?”
“The collective knew this and told you.”
Pierce nodded. “Serious trading was done to get this information. We got full disclosure; the collective suffered no penalties.”
This was big, Carney thought, if Bar Elohim authorized that kind of immunity. “Why didn’t you arrest him when he returned to the collective?”
“First thing I did after the initial interview with the head of the collective was go to the cabin to get the girl, but she was gone. Someone had warned her while I was interviewing. Jordan never returned to the collective. I can only presume he was reached before he headed back home and he had arranged to meet the girl. That’s when Mason was brought in to track them down.”
“I’ve got two questions,” Carney said. “Why would the collective protect him all those years by letting him go places unregistered and by warning him about you? What was on the x-ray?”
“You’ll only get the answer to the first question,” Pierce said. “The collective protected him because he wasn’t just a laborer. Jordan had been providing everyone in the collective with medical care for years.”
Broken Angel Page 11
