Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  “Hell, I wanna watch ’em,” the male kidnapper said. “I like their attitude! I’ll even play ’em some music.” A radio snapped on, playing a lively Cajun two-step.

  “Get your hands off that thing!” Willis commanded.

  “Shut up! I can drive while I watch.”

  “I’m gonna gas both of ’em.”

  “What are you, crazy? Don’t do that. Hey!”

  The ambulance veered wildly. There was a loud splattering of mud and the overloaded vehicle yawed and half spun. Oscar was flung from Greta’s side, and thrown bruisingly against the bulkhead. The vehicle ground to a halt.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Willis said.

  “Don’t get in a twist,” the man grumbled. “We’ll make it on time.”

  “Not if you just broke the axle, you horny moron.”

  “Stop bitching, lemme think. I’ll check.” A door squealed open.

  “I broke my arm!” Oscar yelled. “I’m bleeding to death back here!”

  “Would you stop being so goddamn clever?” Willis shouted. “Jesus Christ, you’re a pain! Why can’t you make this easy? It doesn’t have to be this hard! Just shut up and go to sleep.” There was an evil hiss of gas.

  __________

  Oscar woke in darkness to a violent racket of tearing metal. He was lying on his back and there was something very heavy on his chest. He was hot and dizzy and his mouth tasted like powdered aluminum.

  There was a vicious screech and a sullen pop. A diamond-sharp wedge of sunlight poured in upon him. He found that he was lying at the bottom of a monster coffin, with Greta sprawling on his chest. He squirmed, and shoved her legs aside with an effort that brought lancing pain behind his eyeballs.

  After a few clear breaths, Oscar grasped his situation. The two of them were still lying inside the ambulance. But the vehicle had tumbled onto its side. He was now lying flat on one narrow wall. Greta was dangling above him, still handcuffed to the stretcher stanchions, which were now part of the roof.

  There was more banging and scraping. Suddenly one of the back doors broke open, and fell flat against the earth.

  A crew-cut young man in overalls looked in, a crowbar in one hand. “Hey,” he said. “You’re alive!”

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “Hey, nobody! I mean, uhm…Dewey.”

  Oscar sat up. “What’s going on, Dewey?”

  “I dunno, but you’re some lucky guy to be alive in there. What’s with this lady? Is she okay?”

  Greta was dangling limply by her wrists with her head flung back and her eyes showing rims of white. “Help us,” Oscar said, and coughed. “Help us, Dewey. I can really make it worth your while.”

  “Sure,” Dewey said. “I mean, whatever you say. C’mon out of there!”

  Oscar crawled out of the back of the ambulance. Dewey caught his arm and helped him to his feet. Oscar felt a spasm of nauseated dizziness, but then his pumping heart jumped on a gout of adrenaline. The world became painfully clear.

  The shattered ambulance was lying on a dirt road next to a swampy, sluggish river. It was early morning, chill and foggy.

  The air stank of burned upholstery. The ambulance had taken a direct hit from some kind of explosive—maybe a mortar round. The concussion had blasted it entirely from the road, and it had tumbled onto its side in red Texas mud. The engine was a blackened mess of shredded metal and molten plastic. The cab had been sheared in half, revealing the thick, dented armor of the interior prison vault.

  “What happened?” Oscar blurted.

  Dewey shrugged, bright-eyed and cheery. “Hey, mister—you tell me! Somebody sure shot the hell out of somebody’s ass last night. I reckon that’s all I can say.” Dewey was very young, maybe seventeen. He had a single-shot hunting rifle strapped across his back. An ancient, rusty pickup truck sat nearby, with Texas plates. It had a smashed motorcycle in the back.

  “Is that your truck?” Oscar said.

  “Yup!”

  “Do you have a tool chest in there? Anything that can cut through handcuffs?”

  “I got me a power saw. I got bolt cutters. I got a towing chain. Hey, back at the farm, my dad’s got welding equipment!”

  “You’re a good man to know, Dewey. I wonder if I might borrow your tools for a moment, and saw my friend loose.”

  Dewey looked at him with puzzled concern. “You sure you’re okay, mister? Your ear’s bleeding pretty bad.”

  Oscar coughed. “A little water. Water would be good.” Oscar touched his cheek, felt a viscous mass of clotted blood, and gazed down at the riverbank. It would feel lovely to wash his head in cold water. This was a brilliant idea. It was totally necessary, it was his new top priority.

  He stumbled through thick brown reeds, sinking ankle-deep in cold mud. He found a clear patch in the algae-scummed water and bathed his head with his cupped hands. Blood cascaded from his hair. He had a large, gashed bruise above his right ear, which announced itself with a searing pang and a series of sickening throbs. He risked a few mouthfuls of the river water, crouching there doubled over, until the shock passed. Then he stood up.

  Twenty meters away, he spotted another wreck, bobbing slowly in the river. Oscar took it for a half-submerged tanker truck at first, and then realized, to his profound astonishment, that it was a midget submarine. The black craft had been peppered from stern to bow with thumb-sized machine-gun holes. It was beached in the mud in a spreading rainbow scum of oil.

  Oscar clambered back up the riverbank, spattered with mud to his kneecaps. On his way to the ambulance he noted that the cab’s windshield had exploded, and that many of the fragments were liberally splashed with dried blood. There was no sign of anyone at all. The rain-damp dirt road was furiously torn with motorcycle tracks.

  The muffled sound of Dewey’s power saw echoed from inside the smashed ambulance. Oscar trudged to the back and looked inside. Dewey had given up on his attempt to saw through the handcuffs, and was sawing through the slotted metal stanchion of the stretcher frame. He bent the metal frame and slipped the cuffs through.

  Oscar helped him carry Greta into daylight. Her hands were blue with constriction and her wrists were badly skinned, but her breathing was still strong.

  She had been gassed unconscious—twice—and had lived through a car wreck and a firefight. Then she’d been abandoned in a locked and armored vault. Greta needed a hospital. Some nice safe hospital. A hospital would be an excellent idea for both of them.

  “Dewey, how far is it to Buna from here?”

  “Buna? About thirty miles as the crow flies,” Dewey allowed.

  “I’ll give you three hundred dollars if you’ll take us to Buna right now.”

  Dewey thought about the offer. It didn’t take him long. “Y’all hop on in,” he said.

  __________

  Oscar’s phone couldn’t find a proper relay station this far from Buna. They stopped at a grocery in the tiny hamlet of Calvary, Texas, where he bought some first-aid supplies and tried a local pay phone. He couldn’t get through to the lab. He couldn’t even reach the hotel in Buna. He was able to restore Greta to consciousness with a cautious application of temple rubbing and canned soda, but she was headachy and nauseous. She had to lie still and groan, and the only place available for lying down was the back of Dewey’s truck, next to the salvaged wreck of a motorcycle.

  Oscar waited in anguished silence as the miles rolled by. He had never much liked the lurking somnolence of the East Texas landscape. Pines, marsh, creeks, more pines, more marsh, another creek; nothing had ever happened here, nothing would ever be allowed to happen here. But something important had finally happened. Now its piney hick tedium crackled with silent menace.

  Four miles from Buna they encountered a lunatic in a rusted rental car. He raced past them at high speed. The car then screeched to a halt, did a U-turn, and rapidly pulled up behind them, honking furiously.

  Dewey, who had been chewing steadily on a rocklike stalk of sugarcane, paused to spit yellow
flinders through his wind vent. “You know this guy?” he said.

  “Does that gun work?” Oscar countered.

  “Heck, yeah, my rifle works, but I ain’t shooting anybody for no three hundred dollars.”

  Their pursuer stuck his head out the window of his car and waved. It was Kevin Hamilton.

  “Pull over,” Oscar said at once, “he’s one of mine.”

  Oscar left the truck. He checked briefly on Greta, who was doubled over in the truckbed, racked with car sickness. He then joined Kevin, who had thrown his door open and was beckoning wildly.

  “Don’t go into Buna!” Kevin yelled as he drew near. “It’s hit the fan.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Kevin. Can you help me with Greta? Let’s get her into the backseat of the car. She’s all shaken up.”

  “Right,” Kevin said. He gazed at the truck. Dewey had just decamped from the driver’s seat, carrying his rifle under his arm. Kevin reached below his own seat and pulled out an enormous chromed revolver.

  “Cool it!” Oscar told him. “The kid’s on the payroll.” He stared at the handgun in alarm. He had never suspected Kevin of possessing such a thing. Handguns were extremely illegal, and a source of endless trouble.

  Kevin hid his gun without another word, then limped out of the car. They helped Greta out of the truck, across the dirt, and into the backseat of Kevin’s ratty, ill-smelling rental car. Dewey stood beside his truck, chomping sugarcane and waiting patiently.

  “What’s with the handgun, Kevin? We’ve got problems enough without that.”

  “I’m on the lam,” Kevin told him. “There’s a counter-coup at the lab—they’re trying to put us all away. I’m not staying there to get busted, thank you. I had a lifetime’s worth of encounters with the properly constituted authorities.”

  “All right, forget the handgun. Do you have any money?”

  “As a matter of fact, yeah. Lots. I kinda took the liberty of cleaning out the hotel till this morning.”

  “Good. Can you give this kid three hundred dollars? I promised it to him.”

  “Okeydoke.” Kevin reached behind the driver’s seat and produced a well-stuffed Yankee carpetbag. He looked at Greta, who was stirring on the backseat in a futile search for comfort. “Where are your shoes, Dr. Penninger?”

  “They’re in the truck,” she groaned. She was very pale.

  “Let me take care of this,” Kevin said. “You two just aren’t your usual suave selves.” Kevin limped back to the pickup truck, had a few cordial words with Dewey, and presented him with a horse-choking wad of flimsy American currency. Kevin then returned with Greta’s shoes, started the car, and drove away from Buna. They left Dewey standing on the weed-strewn roadside, thumbing through his cash with an unbelieving grin.

  As he drove, Kevin examined a cheap Chinese navigation screen, which was stuck to the cracked dashboard with a black suction cup. Then he ceremoniously rolled down his driver’s window and carefully flung both of Greta’s shoes out of the car and onto the side of the road. “I guess it’s time for me to explain how I found you,” Kevin said. “I bugged your shoes, Dr. Penninger.”

  Oscar digested this information, then looked at his own feet. “Did you bug my shoes too?”

  “Well, yeah, but just short-range trackers. Not the full-audio bugs like hers.”

  “You put listening devices into my shoes?” Greta croaked.

  “Yeah. Nothing to it. And I wasn’t the only guy on the job, either. Your shoes had six other bugs planted inside the heels and seams. Very nice devices too—I figured them to be planted by players a lot heavier than I am. I could have removed them all, but I figured…hey, this many? There must be some kind of gentlemen’s agreement going on here. I’ll do better if I just stand in line.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do that to me,” Greta said. “We’re supposed to be on the same side.”

  “You talking to me?” Kevin said, eyes narrowing. “I’m his bodyguard. Nobody ever said I was your bodyguard. You ever pay me a salary? Did you ever talk to me, even? You don’t even live in my universe.”

  “Relax, Kevin,” Oscar said. He flipped down a windshield visor, examined the cracked mirror, and brushed cautiously at a huge crust of blood in his hair. “It was good of you to show so much enterprise under these difficult circumstances. It’s been a rough day for the forces of reason. However, our options are multiplying now. Thanks to you, we’re regaining the tactical initiative.”

  Kevin sighed. “It’s incredible that you can still spout that crap, even with your head knocked in. You know what? We’re in terrible shape, but I feel good, out on the road like this. It’s homey. You know? I’ve spent so much of my life dodging cops in beat-up cars. The old fugitive game…I guess it’s got its drawbacks, but it sure beats having them know your home address.”

  “Tell me what’s been going on at the lab,” Oscar said.

  “Well, it didn’t take me long to figure out you’d been kidnapped, what with my hotel security videos, and the fact that your phones didn’t answer, and the bugs in the doctor’s shoes. So I get up from my laptop screen, and I check my real-life windows. Sheriff’s department on the prowl outside, three AM. Not healthy…Time for Scenario B, discreet planned withdrawal.”

  “So you robbed the hotel and ran away?” Greta said, raising her head.

  “He was accumulating capital while enhancing his freedom of action,” Oscar pointed out.

  “That was my best move under the circumstances,” Kevin said mournfully. “Because what I just saw—that was a leadership decapitation. It’s a classic cointelpro thing. A tribe that’s making big trouble—they’ve gotta have a charismatic leader. If you’re a sensible, modern cop, you don’t want to butcher a crowd in the streets—that’s old-fashioned, it looks bad. So you just target the big cheese. You knock that lead guy out, smear him somehow…Child abuse is a pretty good rap, satanic rituals maybe…Any kind of ugly-paint that’ll stick a little while and really stink…and in a pinch, you just steal him. So then, when all the second-rankers are wondering where King Bee went, that’s when you round ’em up. After that, even if Mr. Wonderful comes back, their big momentum’s over. They just give up and scatter.”

  “They wouldn’t do that to us, though,” Greta said. “We’re not a mob, we’re scientists.”

  Kevin laughed. “The word’s out already about you two! You’re a major scandal. You eloped together last night, and oh, by the way, while you were doing that, you somehow cleaned out the lab’s treasury. Terrible embarrassment for all your friends. While your krewes and your Strike Committee are scratching their heads, the Collaboratory cops are gonna round everybody up. Because there’s no denying that story they planted. Because you’re not around to deny it.”

  “Well, I’m denying it now!” Greta said, wrenching herself up with her cuffed hands. “I’ll go back there and take them all on face-to-face.”

  “Softly, softly,” Oscar said. “When the timing’s right.”

  “So, there I was, in a bad corner,” Kevin said. “I was thinking—who has the gall and the muscle to kidnap two famous people like that? And then spread all this killer disinformation about them…”

  “Huey,” Oscar said.

  “Who else? So now, it’s little me versus Green Huey, right? And who’s gonna help me against Huey? The lab’s cops? They’re all Huey’s people from way back. Buna city cops? Forget it, they’re way too dumb. Texas Rangers maybe? The Rangers are very scary people, but they wouldn’t believe me, I’m not Texan. So then I thought of Senator Bambakias—he’s an okay guy, I guess, and at least he’s a real sworn-in Senator now, but he’s somewhat insane at the moment. So, I’m ready to cash in my chips and head for sunny Mexico. But then, just before I go, I think—what the hell, what have I got to lose? I’ll call the President.”

  “The President of the United States?” Greta said.

  “Yeah, him. So that’s what I did.”

  Oscar considered this fact. “When was this de
cision made?”

  “I called the White House this morning at four AM.”

  Oscar nodded. “Hmmm. I see.”

  “Don’t tell me that you actually talked to the President,” Greta said.

  “Of course I didn’t talk to the President! The President’s not awake at four AM! I can tell you who’s up at four AM, at the White House national security desk. It’s this brand-new, young, military aide from Colorado. He’s a fresh new transition-team guy. It’s his very first day on the job. He’s working the graveyard shift. He’s kinda twitchy. Nothing important has ever happened to him before. He’s not real streetwise. And he’s not that hard a guy to reach, either—especially if you call him on twenty or thirty phones, all at once.”

  “And what did you tell the President’s new national security aide?” Oscar prompted gently.

  Kevin examined his navigation console and took a left turn into the deeper woods. “Well, I told him that the Governor of Louisiana had just kidnapped the Director of a federal laboratory. I kinda had to spice up my story to hold his interest—Huey’s gang was holding her hostage, there were French secret agents involved, you know, that sort of thing. I chucked in some juicy details. Luckily, this guy was very up to speed on the Louisiana air base problem. Real aware of the Louisiana military radar hole, and all that. See, this guy’s a lieutenant colonel, and he happens to come from Colorado Springs, where they have this very massive Air Force Academy. Seems there is, like, extremely irritated Air Force sentiment in Colorado. They hate Huey’s guts for making the Air Force look like weak sisters.”

  “So this colonel believed your story?” Oscar said.

  “Hell, I dunno. But he told me he was gonna check his satellite surveillance records, and if they backed up my story, he was gonna wake up the President.”

  “Amazing,” Greta said, impressed despite herself. “They’d have never woken up the old guy for a thing like that.”

  Oscar said nothing. He was trying to imagine the likely consequences if the President’s national security team pressed their panic buttons at four AM, on the very first day on the job. What weird entities might leap from the crannies of the American military-entertainment complex? There were so many possibilities: America’s aging imperial repertoire of Delta forces, SWATs, SEALs, high-orbital, antiterrorist, rapid-deployment, pep-pill-gobbling, macho super-goons…Not that these strange people would ever be used, in modern political reality. The military killer elite were creatures of a long-vanished era, strictly ceremonial entities. They would jog around the subterranean secret bases doing their leg lifts and push-ups, reading bad historical technothriller novels, watching their lives and careers slowly rust away…