Without warning, the rental car seemed to explode. It lifted into the air and slammed down. Ian lost control and the car spun around 180 degrees.
They were facing the building again and a column of smoke roiled into the air where it had once stood. Half the cars in the parking lot were on fire, including the ones surrounding the empty space that had just held her rental car.
Somehow, Ian put the car in motion a second time. He turned it around and accelerated toward the guard tower. A man stood in the middle of road with a gun in hand. Ian accelerated, but Julia grabbed his arm.
“It’s Kilroy!”
Ian screeched to a stop just in time and Joe Kilroy climbed in. His face was pink, lightly burned, and his beard singed.
“Where’s Gandhi?” Ian asked.
“Dead! The Almighty?”
“Also dead.” Ian peeled past the guard station and beyond the gates. The car made a clanking sound as Ian accelerated down the road, but it kept running.
“What? He can’t be dead. He must have got away from that explosion.”
“He’s dead,” Julia said. Her voice sounded cold and distant in her ears. “He was already dead before the building blew up. Bullet hit him in the chest.”
“Well, I guess I always knew that he couldn’t be immortal,” Kilroy said in a disappointed voice. “But a guy like the Almighty doesn’t expect to die.”
“Nobody ever does,” Ian said over his shoulder as he gunned the throttle and turned sharply onto the access road.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There was only one road that led to the facility and Ian thought there would be more trouble on the road ahead. Vehicles approached from the direction of Nephi with lights and sirens going. But the fire trucks and police cars just raced past, toward the fire that still burned behind them.
Minutes later they were on Interstate 15, headed north.
“I can’t believe they’re dead,” Kilroy said from the back seat. “Gandhi, he expected it, but the Almighty? He said he was immortal. I only knew those guys a few days, but we were there, for years, side by side.”
“I’m sorry,” Ian said.
“Someone is going to pay for this.”
“Just remember,” Julia said, “that you’re mortal too.”
“I wish I’d eaten their brains,” Kilroy said in a distant voice, clearly not hearing what she’d said. “Then they’d always be with me. A kind of immortality in its own way. And think of what those guys knew. The Almighty, especially, eating his brain would have meant truly knowing the mind of God.”
“Where are we, anyway?” Ian asked, to change the subject from eating brains.
“This will take us toward Provo,” Julia said. She’d rolled down her window. No doubt Ian and especially Kilroy smelled awful. “After that, Salt Lake. Maybe we should go south, instead. Bet there are tons of rural roads and small towns we can take to get out of here.”
Ian looked her over, and was surprised to see that she was holding up remarkably well. By now, he was used to being shot at and bombed by his own side, but Julia had probably never fired a gun before, let alone had people try to kill her. A lot of guys came out of their first battle and it started to sink in at once. Even if they’d held up well, the shakes would set in and they’d be useless for hours, or even days.
Ian felt terrible about what he’d put her through. The screwup in Namibia was in no way her fault. He’d jumped all over her when she’d come around the first time, at great risk. And now where was she? A fugitive from the U.S. government, on the run with two escapees from a government-run psychiatric ward. Emotion choked up in his throat, mixed with gratitude for her willingness to come back for him. He’d make it up to her. He’d get her out of this. He had to.
“You’re right, let’s turn around,” Ian said. “But first, we’ve got to do something about the way we look.”
________
Ian pulled over at a truck stop a couple of miles later, and drove around the back of the building. There were external restrooms and Ian and Kilroy went inside while Julia picked up a tourist tshirts, razor blades, a couple of candy bars, and a road map. She stopped at the ATM and took out the maximum. She passed the tshirts and razor blades to the two men in the bathroom.
In the bathroom herself, she washed her face and looked in the mirror. She half expected to see someone else looking back, a harder, aggressive version of herself. But except for a cut on her forehead–when had that happened?—she looked the same as always.
Julia’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She reached in, stared at the number. It was Terrance.
What did he know? Had they told him, in a passive voice that assigned no blame, that there had been an explosion at the psychiatric ward? So sorry, but your wife was one of the victims.
Or had they warned him beforehand that they were going to assassinate his wife? She is an enemy of the state and must be eliminated. You are a good employee, so we know you will understand.
Julia imagined Terrance shrugging when they told him the news. Unfortunate, but apparently necessary. Can you document that it was an accident? There’s this clause in her life insurance policy, you see…
No, that was unfair. Terrance had his problems, but he was no monster.
She’d have to call him later, get his help, once she figured out how to get out of this mess. In the meantime, she was afraid that someone was standing over his shoulder, or even tracking the call. She let it go to voice mail, then turned off the phone.
________
Ian and Kilroy came out clean-shaven and washed up a bit. Kilroy was unrecognizable except for the darting, animal-like way that he kept looking over his shoulder. You couldn’t wash away crazy.
Ian felt worlds better, just having the chance to strip off his shirt and wash up with soap and paper towels. He also felt a deep exhaustion starting to spread, the crash of a body drunk on adrenaline. But he needed to stay alert. He tapped his fingers and felt a surge of energy. He wondered how frequently he could use the implant before it either stopped working, he crashed, or it fried his brain. He glanced at Julia, and thought better of asking. He didn’t want to know. Not right now.
“You guys ready to get out of here?” he asked.
“This is small town Utah,” Julia said. “They’ll be busy with the fire for awhile, but then they’ll start looking for us. Plenty of people saw us, and our car looks terrible.”
“It will be easier if we don’t all travel together,” Kilroy said. “And I’m kind of a solitary guy, anyway.”
“The asylum must have been perfect for you, then,” Ian said.
“Not that solitary.” A smile. “But leave me here, and I’ll find my own way. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
“You mean that little patisserie in Paris?”
The smile broadened. “Ah, yes, that, too. But first I’ve got to find the Fer-de-Lance.”
“And what then? Revenge?”
“What do you do when you find a poisonous snake?” Kilroy asked. “You cut off its head.”
“What do you mean?” Julia asked. “What snake?”
“I’ll explain later,” Ian said. He held out his hand, which Kilroy took after a moment of hesitation. “Take it easy, brother. And thanks.”
Kilroy nodded. “You, too.” He made his way across the parking lot, toward a cluster of semis that idled by the diesel station. He struck up a conversation with a trucker fueling his rig.
“Let’s get a proper car,” Ian said to Julia.
Ian waited until they had the chance to trade up, which came about twenty minutes later when some guy left the keys in his Corolla while he ran inside to buy a soda or cigarettes; by the time he came out, Ian and Julia were on the freeway and heading south again. He didn’t think the police would move too quickly about the stolen Corolla with what was going on in Nephi at the moment, but just in case Ian stopped at the next rest stop and swapped license plates with another vehicle. They continued south.
The road s
tretched for mile after mile. Mountains loomed to their east, with a smaller, more distant range in the west. Huge, puffy clouds piled against the horizon. It was a big land, with a big sky and big horizons, like the South African Veld or Kaokoland in Namibia. He guessed they had two more hours until dark, time enough to put some distance between themselves and the asylum.
“So that was a missile from a jet?” Julia asked after they had traveled several minutes in silence. “Isn’t that going to make the news?”
“I’m sure they’ll blame it on a gas explosion or something. Nobody will know the difference.” He took a deep breath. Something had been bothering him since they left Nephi and he had to get it off his chest. “Look, Julia, I think I made a mistake.”
“You don’t mean you want to go back?”
“No, I mean I never should have involved you. People died, you’re a fugitive. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to help you figure out what happened to Kendall. And we’re going to find out who is screwing with the implant. And then we’re going to figure out what happened in Namibia.”
“Are you joking? We’re going to do that? You’re a not a field operative.”
Julia gave a manic laugh that made him think she was a lot closer to the edge than she’d seemed. “I know, it sounds absolutely nuts. And if you knew me, you’d know that it’s even crazier than it seems. I had a plan for everything. I feel like I just jumped out of a plane without a parachute.”
“I did that once, jumped out of a plane without a parachute,” Ian said. “Other guy caught up to me in the air. His main chute got tangled and I thought we were going to drop ten thousand feet into the sea.”
“And that’s the difference between your life and mine. It was a metaphor when I said it.”
He laughed. “It works both ways. You can do things that seem like magic to me.”
“It’s not magic, really. And half the time I feel like I’m fooling people, anyway, that they’re going to see through me and realize I’m just pretending to be in control.”
“Come on, I don’t believe that. You’re good and you know it. I can tell the way you hold yourself when you’re around all that medical stuff. It’s like a guy target shooting blindfolded.”
“No, really,” Julia said. “You know, everyone thinks I’m this brilliant researcher, but I’m not. I’m just organized, always have been. I got good grades because I figured out exactly what the teachers wanted and gave it to them. I found solutions to problems because I kept looking at the problem from different directions.”
“So what? So you’re great at what you do. What does it matter why?”
“But everyone thinks I’m naturally gifted.”
“Let me tell you something. Nobody is naturally gifted. Nobody who gets anywhere in life gets there by being born with it.” He shook his head. “Don’t discount it. Look at you. Who wouldn’t want to be you? You’re smart, accomplished, beautiful.”
He stopped with the feeling he’d gone too far, but the flush on her face didn’t look like embarrassment. At least, not just embarrassment.
He turned back to the road. A sign said that the junction with State Highway 50 that would take them through Salina was in four miles. Julia consulted the map and told him that it would take them east. Perfect. He took the exit.
“What now?” Julia asked.
“We’ll get off the main roads, go east for awhile, then turn south. After that, we need a game plan. How much cash you got?”
“A bit less than two hundred and fifty. After that, I have to find another ATM.”
“No more ATMs. They already know you’re alive from the first withdrawal. Next time you use it they’ll figure out which way we went.” He thought for a minute. “I’ve got a safety deposit box in Tucson with a couple of dummy credit cards and about four thousand in cash. Maybe five. I can’t remember.”
“You do? Why?”
“Kendall’s idea. He had a suspicious streak. The CIA has boxes for its agents in overseas locations that they can access in a pinch. Kendall thought it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple in the States that the company didn’t know about. So we’ll stop in Tucson and then head south, to Mexico. They’ll have a harder time tracking us south of the border.”
“Mexico? Are you sure?”
“Don’t worry about Mexico,” Ian said. “Now Afghanistan is no holiday to find yourself alone and looking for friends, trust me. But Mexico is breeze. Except the CIA will be looking for us with orders to kill. And this damn implant. Tell me what you know. Do they know where I am? Can they track me?”
“No, the implant is supposed to be undetectable, remember? It can’t do that if it’s giving off signals.”
He remembered the woman at the Namibian camp, who had found his implant, once she’d been sure something was there. It had taken a physical examination. But it was the transmission from a spooky flying overhead that had cued in Henri Dupont and set off a manhunt by the Blackwing contractors.
“It didn’t work like that in Namibia,” he said. Briefly, he told her about the sequence of events from when he and Kendall had taken instructions in the tent and set off on separate missions under implant control.
“So, I don’t know,” he finished. “Could be that the implant sends out return signals—like communicating with the probe over a short distance—if it gets certain commands. Even if it didn’t give out signals, could they send a radio pulse to fry my brain? Cause seizures or something?”
“I don’t know,” she said after a moment of hesitation. “Maybe.”
“Devil only knows what they’ve programmed into this thing. We’ve got to put as much distance between ourselves and the asylum as possible.”
“How will that help? All they have to do is fly overhead and beam down a signal.”
“But say they’re overflying with a spooky and shining a broadcast across the ground like a big searchlight. What can they control, a square mile at a time?” he asked. “If we’re ten miles from the asylum that makes what? A three hundred square mile circle they’ve got to cover. As soon as we’re twenty miles away, that becomes 1200 square miles. Every time we double our distance we increase the search area by four times.”
“Except that they can rule out half the state, which is desert without roads. And they can guess we’re not going north, toward Salt Lake City. So they sweep up and down the freeways and highways and the math starts to work in their favor.”
“All the more reason we’ve got to keep going,” he said.
“Either that, or find a hotel room with a few floors overhead. We’ll—I don’t know—wrap you in tinfoil or something. Listen to me,” she added, “I sound like a conspiracy nut.”
“We’re well past that now. We sent a nearly-naked, hairless guy into battle this afternoon with a lead blanket on his head.” He smiled at the memory, but it was tinged with sorrow and guilt for what had happened to their two crazy allies. “Anyway, no hotels. We’ll take turns driving and if we get too tired, we’ll find a quiet place to pull over and sleep a few hours in the car.”
The sky darkened as they continued south. Ian found himself fighting to stay awake, and tapped his fingers in succession when he found it too difficult to keep his eyes open.
They drove through a small town called Green River, where the scenery began to change as majestic red rock cliffs emerged from among snow capped mountains and sage-covered dunes. He pulled over at a greasy spoon on Main Street. They ate their burgers, then continued south and east.
In Moab, they pulled into a supermarket parking lot after Julia pointed out three separate police cruisers on the road. He could hear a helicopter flying over the town. For the next hour Ian hid in a bathroom stall in the supermarket with a roll of aluminum foil wrapped around his chest and shoulders. He felt beyond ridiculous, but the implant stayed quiet in his head, which made the precautions worth it.
Before getting back on the road, Ian swapped plates again, just to be safe. Chances were, the hel
icopters and the police were unrelated to each other, let alone connected to the incident in Nephi, but no sense taking chances.
They drove onto Highway 191 and passed Monticello, a small town in the southeast corner of Utah, and turned off the road where a sign advertised Devil’s Canyon campground in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Ian pulled into one of the unoccupied campsites and killed the engine.
He grabbed ten dollars from Julia, walked over to the local camp hosts, and put the money in a numbered envelope on the peg board by a parked RV. Always better to hide in plain sight, he’d learned. The only thing more likely to attract local police than a car pulled off the shoulder of a road was one hidden in the bushes.
By the time he got back, Julia had curled in the back seat, asleep. Ian watched her for a few moments by the moonlight that came through the window, then climbed in the front, inclined the seat and closed his eyes. Nothing like a few hundred airplane rides to teach you that putting your seat back 5 degrees meant sleep. The engine ticked quietly and he could hear insects buzzing through the open window. The arid, sage smell and the ache of his body from hours of driving reminded him of the trip across the Namibian countryside with Kendall.
But mostly, he kept seeing the Almighty fly backwards with Julia’s laptop sailing end over end and a look of surprise on his face. And that ridiculous geek tie, perforated with a 7.62 millimeter round at 860 meters per second.
Not the Almighty at all, just some kid, a computer genius, who’d got involved in the wrong project and paid for it first with his sanity, and then with his life. Did he have parents? Would they ever know their son was dead?
With Ian’s head filled with troubling thoughts like this, sleep would be a long time in coming. Or maybe it was more than that. How many times had he used the “alert” feature on his implant that day? Half a dozen? He tried to count each time he had juiced his brain for more energy. Some of the times, he realized now, were almost unintentional, like a reflex. Maybe not such a good idea—you got tired for a reason. And he didn’t like becoming dependent on the very thing that was putting his life in danger.
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