by Blake Banner
I kept turning that question over and over in my head for the five hours it took us to get to St. Louis. Just before we got there, at ten minutes after one, I pulled into a restaurant in the town of New Baden. It was called A Fine Swine, which seemed to be a promising name. It also had a parking lot at the back where our vehicle would be out of sight. We left the car tucked in beside some dumpsters and went inside.
There was a lot of melamine pretending to be rustic wood, a TV playing sports on the wall, and a smell of good, fresh meat being barbequed. There were half a dozen tables occupied, so there were plenty to choose from. We sat away from the windows, ordered some championship pulled pork and a couple of beers from a friendly waitress, and when she’d gone away I leaned back in my chair and studied Cyndi’s face. She didn’t look quite so pale, and she’d had about four hours sleep in the car on the way there. I figured she was ready to do some talking. She looked away from me, toward the glare of the window we’d avoided.
“Cyndi, we are going to have to address this. We have a problem, and the longer we put it off, the more at risk you put yourself, and the rest of us.”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Lacklan.”
“I want you to quit feeling sorry for yourself and take responsibility for what’s happening to you.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “That is harsh. That is damned unfeeling. You know what? I have just about had enough of you…”
I shrugged. “That suits me fine. I’m here doing you a favor, remember? You’ve had enough of me? That’s fine. It means I get to go home and read all about it in the papers. What are you going to do?”
“You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?”
“Yes, I know that. What are you going to do?”
“What’s it to you?” I didn’t answer so she carried on. “I’ll rent a car and carry on to Albuquerque, make the meeting. I can do that without you.”
“Sure you can. You going to use your credit card and ID?”
She stared at me. I could see the tears starting in her eyes. The waitress brought our beers, saw Cyndi’s face and hurried away.
I went on, “Because both of those will enable Omega to locate you. These people have access to all the federal databases and the technology available to the Bureau and the intelligence services. These people operate out of the Pentagon, Cyndi, and you of all people know what that means.
“So when you ask me, what is it to me? Well, the people you are going to meet in Albuquerque, that you are so casually sentencing to death, along with yourself, are friends and associates of mine. Now you say you’ve had about as much of me as you can stomach, and you are going to go it alone. Tell me, exactly, how you are going to get out of New Baden and either back to D.C. or on to Albuquerque? Because the choices you make might cost my friends their lives.”
She closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath. “If you knew just how much I hate you right now…”
I waited till she’d opened them again. “Are we done?”
She nodded, but there was still real hostility in her expression.
“I’m going to see if I can make you understand this. Those men who broke in last night, were hunting for you—not me—you. Do you understand that?”
“Stop patronizing me. Of course I understand it!”
“Now let’s assume for a moment that I had been an obedient, mannerly officer like Major Charles Hawthorn. You would have had your room, and I would have had mine, according to your wishes, and you would have slept in your bed. And right now you would be dead. As it was, because we did it my way, I faced the risk, I killed the men who were hunting for you, and I got you out of there alive.”
She had the good grace to avert her eyes.
I pressed on. “Now, remind me how much you are paying me for my services.”
She didn’t say anything.
I leaned closer. “I didn’t hear you.”
“You made your point.”
“No, not yet. My point is this: I don’t give a damn whether you hate me or not. You go it alone and you die. I don’t. I go home and nobody knows I was here. You die. My point is also that the longer you piss around feeling sorry for yourself and hating me, the more you put all of our lives at risk. Now, you tell me you want to go it alone, as though that is supposed to upset me or worry me. Cyndi, what you need to be worrying about is what the hell you are going to do if I get pissed off with your attitude, get in my car and go home.”
She went ashen. “You wouldn’t do that…”
The waitress brought our food, told us to enjoy it and scuttled away.
“What’s to stop me? The fee?”
“I offered to pay you. You refused.”
“Now maybe you understand why. This way I am not beholden to a spoiled brat who hates me because she doesn’t like the way I saved her life. So moving on. What is to stop me walking out right now? Your charming and engaging personality?”
“Please, Lacklan, stop.”
“Your looks? Let me tell you, I have a beautiful home, with a beautiful woman waiting for me. And right now I am wondering what the hell I am doing here. I am laying it on the line for you, Cyndi. You get a grip, you work with me and cooperate with me, right now, or I am going to get in my car and leave you here on your own.”
“Please don’t do that, Lacklan.”
I ate in silence for five minutes, allowing her to think. She picked at her food, but seemed on the brink of bursting into tears. I knew I had been brutal, and I hadn’t enjoyed it. But time was too short and I’d had no other option. Finally I pulled off half my beer, set down the glass and said, “Omega always uses their own men. They are trained professionals. But the men who came last night were just thugs. They had no training, their weapons were cheap, and the guy I spoke to told me they were muscle for a smalltime Irish gang outside of Baltimore. So, I know you don’t know who they were, or why they came, but I need you to start thinking about it. Somewhere in your head is the answer, Cyndi. One person in your circle of family, friends or associates, connects somehow with those men last night.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe that.”
I felt a rush of anger in my belly, but suppressed it. “No, Cyndi, you can. You can believe it. You just don’t want to. You are an intelligent woman. It’s time for you to start thinking. I shouldn’t have to be asking you these questions. You should be asking them yourself. How did those four thugs know where you were last night?”
“I promise I will think about it.”
We finished our meal. I paid cash and we left. We drove through St. Louis and then followed the I-44 south and west for the next five hours or so, until we came, at about six in the evening, as the sun was setting and the air was turning cold, to Tulsa. And twenty miles south of Tulsa, just outside the town of Bristow, we came to the Carolyn inn. It looked clean and pleasant, and best of all it had a large parking lot with secluded space at the back. I was exhausted and every part of me ached. I ached in parts of me I didn’t even know I had.
I pulled in, left the car at the back of the lot, told Cyndi to wait, and went and checked us in. There was a pretty, young receptionist on duty and I told her I had been driving for over ten hours and I needed to sleep, so could she please give me a room at the back, away from the traffic. She was sweet and obliging, and gave me a double room with two single beds, at the back left hand corner.
I dragged Cyndi, her case, my bag and my body into the room and then collapsed on the bed. She closed the door, pulled the drapes and sat in one of the chairs. I checked my watch. It was seven PM. I glanced at her. She was watching me with an expression that was difficult to read.
I said, “I am going to sleep for one hour. Don’t go out. Don’t open the door to anybody. Do not phone anybody. Don’t even switch on your cell. If you want to read, I have a dystopian thriller in my bag. OK?”
She nodded, then smiled, and I slipped into obsidian sleep.
SI
X
There was a voice talking in the darkness. I couldn’t make out what it was saying, because it was speaking in hushed tones, almost whispering. I knew the voice. It was a woman’s voice. For a moment I wondered if it was Marni, but then realized that that would have been a dream; and I was coming out of a dream, not into one. It was Cyndi’s voice. I opened my eyes. On my left the drapes were drawn closed. There was a diffuse light coming through them from the streetlamps outside. I looked at my watch. It was eight.
I turned my head, searching the room for Cyndi. She was still sitting in the armchair on my right, watching me from the shadows. She smiled. “Hello.”
I said, “Who were you talking to?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Seriously? Have a look around. I’m sitting here in the dark on my own. It must have been a dream.”
I sat up. “I guess so. You must be hungry.”
“I suppose I am. I need to get past the shock of last night. I seem to have lost my appetite.”
We were quiet for a bit. I stood, planning to go to the shower and wake myself up.
She spoke suddenly. “Lacklan, can we please go out?”
I frowned. “Go out?”
“To dinner. Please? I can change my hair, wear jeans and a sweatshirt. I can not use makeup. I can make myself totally different. I guarantee nobody will recognize me.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“No. It is a good idea. Please, I ended up agreeing with you on everything. Now listen to me on this one.”
I sighed and managed a small smile. “OK, I’m listening.”
“I have just been through the most terrifying experience of my life. My nerves are in pieces. If I am going to get through the next couple of days in one piece, and deal with a meeting with Professor Gibbons and Marni Gilbert…” She trailed off, shook her head. “Lacklan, if I have understood one thing in the last two days, it is that the importance of this meeting is incalculable. I cannot get there in this state. And if I have to spend the next night without sleep, in a state of terror and anxiety, I am just not going to make it.”
“How will going out to dinner help?”
She held out her hands, almost as though she were pleading with me. “I am not a soldier! I am not trained in the way you are. This is like a crazy fantasy, or a nightmare to me. To you, in some weird way, it is second nature. But to me it’s madness! I need to ground myself. I need to go back, even for just a couple of hours, to the normal world, that I know.”
I sighed and sat back down. I didn’t want to fight with her again. I had driven her hard and put her under a lot of strain. I needed to ease up and start building some rapport with her.
“Where? How far from the motel?”
She held up both hands. “Listen, if you really think it would be dangerous, I will accept that. But I am telling the benefits will outweigh the risks. I know this town. The place is a mile down the road, a twenty minute walk. It is a cute Mexican place, and I could really use a couple of margaritas. You’ll love it. The food is great and it will help me to get things back in perspective. It will help me work through the shock.”
I thought about it. There was some sense to what she said. She had experienced a very violent shock and there was a risk of her cracking under the strain. It did seem we had temporarily thrown Omega off the scent, and the bottom line was, we were no more at risk in an obscure restaurant than we were at the motel. Plus, there was another point that weighed heavily in the balance. When people are highly stressed, their frontal cortex tends to shut down and they stop thinking. If she relaxed a bit with a few drinks she might start thinking again, and I really needed her to start thinking. I needed to know why Omega had sent those thugs instead of one of their own teams.
I smiled at her. “Jeans, sneakers, sweatshirt, hair down and no make up. We’ll be like a couple of college kids going on a first date.”
She laughed. It was a nice thing to see and hear. “Mr. Walker! Are you flirting with me?”
“Give me five minutes in the shower and I might just start.”
I stood under the stream of hot water for ten minutes, shaved, and by the time I stepped out of the bathroom, dressed in fresh clothes, she had become a different woman. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she had revealed the woman who hid behind the trappings of office, the woman who protected herself with the Greco-Roman columns of the Capitol and the façade of temporal power. In boot cut jeans, a Snoopy sweatshirt and her hair tied back, not in a ponytail, but in an auburn explosion of curles, she looked human. More than approachable, she looked attractive.
I smiled at her and she grinned. I said, “You have freckles.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“With makeup, you look like a beautiful senator, without it you look like a beautiful woman. You shouldn’t hide your freckles.”
“Will you stop that!”
I opened the door and we stepped out into the limpid wash of streetlight. Her cashmere coat looked conspicuous, so she borrowed my black leather jacket, which looked huge on her, and wore a heavy sweater.
She took my arm. “I don’t know if you are more dangerous as a grouchy soldier or a charming date.”
We walked because I figured nobody would expect us to. If Omega had any inkling of where we were, they would be looking for two people hidden in a motel, or driving a car. The last thing they’d expect would be two people on a date. We were half a mile outside town, so the first ten minutes we strolled under the kind of stars you just don’t see in D.C., and she spent most of the time with her head thrown back staring at the vastness of the night sky and the staggering number of ice cold sparkles of light.
“Every one of them,” she said, “is a picture of the past. The light we see there left its home thousands, even millions of years ago.” Then a small frown creased her brow. “Do you think we will eventually make our home out there?” I didn’t answer and she looked down, watching her own feet on the sidewalk. “People like Elon Musk, visionaries, see us colonizing Mars, and from Mars spreading out to the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. That is exciting and inspiring, but it’s a shame they have no visions for our world.” Now she looked at me and there was something infinitely sad in her eyes. “This poor old planet has been a good mother to us, we have thrived and prospered here—too much! And yet our visions for her are all dark.”
We were entering the town, passing a magnificent, Georgian building that claimed to be the Spirit Bank, and she suddenly gripped my arm tight and gave a little hop, grinning up at me. It made me laugh. This was not the firebrand senator I had seen so often on TV. This was an excited teenager in jeans and a leather jacket three sizes too big for her.
“Hey! You know where we are?”
“Bristow? The Spirit Bank?”
She stopped dead and pointed at the road. “You are on hallowed ground, my friend. This here is the legendary Route 66.” In a flash her expression had changed again. She took hold of my arm and gazed down once more at her feet, taking one step after another. Unexpectedly she said, “Humanity’s last cry of ‘Freedom!’ before the darkness began to close in.”
“The sixties?”
She nodded. We were quiet then for the rest of the way, until we came to a small, two-story red brick building with a parking lot on one side. For some reason, in that limpid light from the streetlamps, with the vast sky overhead, it reminded me of an illustration from an early 1960s science fiction comic. And inside, the 1960s theme continued. It was like Carlos Castaneda meets Happy Days, with Formica tables and burgundy vinyl seats, Mexican blankets and walls painted in yellow and lime-green chalk. It was warm, and almost full, and the smell of cooking meat and chili made me realize I was hungry. We found a table at the back, out of sight of the window, sat where I had a view of the entrance, and ordered two beers, a fajita salad to share, and beef and chicken tamales.
When the waitress had gone, Cyndi gave me a peculiar smile. “Thanks for doing this, Lacklan. I appreciate it
. You’re a beast, but you’re a good man.”
I gave her a peculiar smile back. “Hey, the country needs you, but it needs you sane.”
She snorted. “That ship sailed!” The waitress came with our beers. Cyndi took a swig from the bottle, then became serious. “Tell me about Omega.” She hesitated, frowned. “Not just facts and figures, your thoughts and feelings.”
I leaned back in my chair and studied the dark brown glass of the bottle in my hand. I took a swig and gave my head a small shake. “That’s not easy.”
“Why not?”
I sucked air through my teeth. “Because what they are trying to do makes sense.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “What? I don’t follow you, Lacklan. You telling me you’re with them?”
I gave a small laugh. “I hope for their sake that I’m not. Nobody on Earth has caused them more damage than I have. No.” I thought a little more, wondering, not for the first time, exactly what it was about Omega that I hated so much. “What they are trying to do makes sense in as much as, we have passed the point of no return.” I looked into her face. “We have nearly eight billion people on this planet. The planet can sustain nine. But to house, clothe and feed this many people we need mass production and mass distribution, and whatever Elon Musk may say, that requires the massive burning of fossil fuels…” I smiled and shrugged. “And that reduces our capacity to produce food. So as far as that goes, they are right. Somebody has to address this problem, and there is no painless way out. It’s the Malthusian nightmare meets Frankenstein’s monster on steroids. We need to reduce the population of the planet to pre-Industrial Revolution levels.”
Her frown had deepened. “So you do agree with them…”
I raised an eyebrow. “I agree with their statement of the problem. I don’t agree with their solution.”
“What is their solution?”
The waitress brought our salad and Cyndi stabbed into with her fork. I took another pull on my beer and tried to set it down precisely on the ring it had left on the table.
