Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  VERY HARD CHOICES

  Spider Robinson

  This book is copyright © 2008 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved. Permission to upload any portion of it to any part of the Internet, except for excerpts of 1,000 words maximum for review purposes only, is specifically withheld.

  This book is a work of fiction; any resemblance between people, places or things in it and real people, places or things is coincidental and unintended.

  Copyright © 2008 by Spider Robinson.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-5556-0

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5556-8

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, June 2008

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider.

  Very hard choices / by Spider Robinson.

  p. cm.

  "A Baen Books original"—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 1-4165-5556-0

  1. Widowers—Fiction. 2. Psychics—Fiction. 3.

  Police—British Columbia—Fiction. 4. British

  Columbia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.O3156V48 2008

  813'.54—dc22

  2008005951

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication:

  For Jim Baen, David Crosby,

  and John Barnstead:

  wise, kind and generous men.

  ADVISORY:

  This program contains scenes of violence, nudity, sexuality, adult themes, casual drug use, committed drug use, incorrect politics, coarse language, fine language, extensive use of fixed, nonmoving cameras, and numerous shots lasting longer than three seconds. Viewer discretion is definitely NOT advised: tell all your friends.

  Books by Spider Robinson:

  *TELEMPATH

  CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON

  *STARDANCE (with Jeanne Robinson)

  ANTINOMY

  THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

  TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH

  MINDKILLER

  MELANCHOLY ELEPHANTS

  *NIGHT OF POWER

  CALLAHAN'S SECRET

  CALLAHAN AND COMPANY (omnibus)

  TIME PRESSURE

  *CALLAHAN'S LADY

  COPYRIGHT VIOLATION

  TRUE MINDS

  *STARSEED (with Jeanne Robinson)

  KILL THE EDITOR

  *LADY SLINGS THE BOOZE

  THE CALLAHAN TOUCH

  *STARMIND (with Jeanne Robinson)

  OFF THE WALL AT CALLAHAN'S

  CALLAHAN'S LEGACY

  *DEATHKILLER (omnibus)

  *LIFEHOUSE

  THE CALLAHAN CHRONICALS (omnibus)

  *THE STAR DANCERS (with Jeanne Robinson)

  *USER FRIENDLY

  *BY ANY OTHER NAME

  THE FREE LUNCH

  CALLAHAN'S KEY

  GOD IS AN IRON and other stories

  CALLAHAN'S CON

  *VERY BAD DEATHS

  VARIABLE STAR (with Robert A. Heinlein)

  * Baen Books

  1.

  Saturday, June 23, 2007

  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

  This is how it was for him—not a reconstruction or guesswork. I have it on reliable authority.

  Charles Haden had expected the border to be a joke, but it was barely even a sitcom punchline. He needn't have wasted one of his few remaining genuine passports. (But then, if this trip paid off, that worry would join all his others.) Length of stay, Mr. Haden? One week. Purpose of trip? I'm retired now and I always heard Vancouver was the most beautiful city on earth. Big smile and a pass.

  No wonder his own government said terrorists streamed across this border at will into America: it was one of the few things his government claimed to believe nowadays that made sense. That not one terrorist had actually done so since the War of 1812 was a striking testament to the monumental stupidity of terrorists as a class. Drug dealers were smarter. Even poor Mexicans were beginning to figure out how cheap a ticket to Vancouver or Calgary was, and how much easier and more pleasant the northern border crossing. Any day now, al-Qaeda were going to wise up. It reminded Haden how important this operation was, how mortal the stakes—a reminder he did not need, as he had thought of little else for decades.

  The half hour drive up to Vancouver calmed his nerves. Driving is combat with rules, and Canadians had more of them and obeyed them all. By American standards the highest ranking male he encountered on that highway would have rated no higher than gamma or delta. He found himself thinking that he usually felt like a wolf loose among unsuspecting sheep, but here the sheep were drugged, hobbled and blindfolded. Just as well; he reminded himself it had been a long time since he'd done one of these insertions.

  Halfway there, the observation was underlined. A breakdown in the right lane forced two lanes to merge into one. And the strangest thing happened: the two lanes merged into one. Every single driver in the left lane slowed, deliberately allowed a car from the right lane to pull in front of him . . . and no more than one car at a time ever took advantage of his weakness. The two lines of traffic meshed like a zipper, as if their behavior were rational. Haden found it irritating.

  He saw large exit signs for a place with the implausible name of Tsawwassen. His GPS told him it was a very large ferry terminus servicing gigantic Vancouver Island, which was roughly the size of Maine and began thirty-odd miles offshore. That was the last feature of even that much interest on that highway for a long time. For most of the trip there was nothing at all visible in any direction. Endless fields of indistinguishable green growing crap, with and without smelly animals grazing on it. A zillion trees. Hills. A ton of distant mountains. Nothing at all. Postcards.

  A few miles—no, kilometers—later, they went through a rather long tunnel underneath something called the Fraser River, and he noticed there was not a single camera in the tunnel. Yet each car stayed in its lane as requested, even when the other lane was moving faster.

  Just short of the city he left the highway and deked west to the airport. He entered the long-term parking lot, idled around until he saw a woman park and walk away with a vast amount of luggage suggesting a lengthy trip, and swapped license plates with her. It took so little time the attendant let him leave without paying.

  Shortly he went over a structure that his GPS absurdly insisted was both the Oak Street Bridge and the Arthur Laing Bridge, which spanned the same damn Fraser River he'd already passed beneath earlier. It got Haden thinking about the unreliability of names, and being high above water it was a fine place to scale a driver's license and passport out the window. By the time he reached the city limits of Vancouver, he had completed an ID dump, both the supporting documents and the persona itself.

  Thomas McKinnon felt a little better once he was surrounded by tall piles of steel and stone and glass again. Other drivers started to act a bit more sensibly. The first chance he got he pulled over to the curb, opened his laptop, stole access and googled the lot where towed vehicles are stored by the Vancouver police. It was at 1410 Granville Street, which turned out to somehow be located underneath the Granville Street Bridge.

  Even in Canada, traffic-impound lots are reasonably well-secured. But even in the paranoid States they're secured in only one direction, because nobody but cops and tow-finks ever drive one the other way. McKinnon's timing was good. After a single reconaissance spin around the block, he was able to drive right in, remove both his stolen license plates and put them in his
travel bag, abandon the rest of the car, and walk right out without being seen. Everyone would assume someone else had screwed up the paperwork, and the car might stay there for weeks or even months. He only needed days. The identity that had rented it, far away in another country, no longer existed. He carried everything he was likely to need in a bag small enough to fit under an airline seat.

  Almost everything.

  He let his walking instincts take over, and within an hour he had located a place to buy a gun and a set of ID good enough to last a week. It was one block from police headquarters, but that did not alarm, amuse, or even interest him. He knew cities in which police headquarters would have been where to buy a gun. He loitered, watched a boatload of drugs being sold, had a few oblique conversations, and in under two hours he exchanged a fat sheaf of genuine U.S. currency for passable documents identifying him as "Thomas McKinnon," a Glock in reasonably good condition, a small-of-the-back holster, and four magazines. It was the "woman's model" Glock, with "only" 17 bullets instead of the 19 or 22 cops used, but he felt when you put 17 slugs in a man you've done enough for him. If he got himself into a fix that many rounds couldn't get him out of, two more wouldn't help.

  Once he was armed and papered, McKinnon went shopping for another car. He settled on a Toyota Camry just too old to have a GPS locator in it, had it open and started in seconds, and drove it around until he found a spot where he felt comfortable dumping its license plates down a sewer drain and replacing them with the ones he'd stolen from the airport. Fifteen minutes, start to finish.

  He was in a foreign nation, undocumented, with adequate ID that led absolutely nowhere, adequately armed and funded and wheeled. In one day. Not bad for a man his age, out of practice.

  Afternoon rush hour was beginning to get under way by then, but McKinnon didn't fight it because he believed he had lots of time. And he was indeed right back where he had started, a block from police headquarters, just as the day shift must be ending. But after half an hour it was clear there was a problem of some kind; no gathering of black-clad crows was apparent.

  He spotted a pedestrian who looked snotty, rolled down his window and asked if this was where the police officers came off shift. Sure enough, the man could not resist explaining to him how stupid he was.

  Shortly he had to agree: he should have realized that if a city's police headquarters is situated one block from an enormous open-air drug bazaar like something out of Dante or Dali, that city will almost inevitably pretend police headquarters is somewhere else. The nominal headquarters, including the lockers and parking lot for all four of Vancouver's patrol team districts, turned out to be located miles away. And underneath a bridge, just like the traffic-impound lot—only this time it was on Cambie Street . . . underneath the Cambie Street Bridge.

  (He wondered idly if all Canadian bridges were Möbius strips, the same at top and bottom. If he had driven beneath the one that was called both Oak Street Bridge and Arthur Laing Bridge, would he have found a second Oak Street, with a man named Arthur laying in it, perhaps?)

  He finally found the place—and wasted yet another hour before conceding that he had reached it just after shift-change. For some reason they changed shifts during rush hour here. He controlled his irritation and had the GPS direct him to the target's address of record. In a sense, he got lucky then. The reason his target had moved and the new address wasn't in the system anywhere yet was that the listed address, an apartment building, had been badly enough damaged by a recent fire to be condemned. So he did not have to waste several hours staking the place out, before admitting to himself there was nothing more he could do until morning. If police shift changed at 6:00 PM, the next change would come at 2:00 AM, and the one he wanted at 10:00 AM. He got himself a meal and a room, and was alone in bed well before prime time ended and the news came on.

  As usual these days, sleep came hard to him. It was the worst part of aging, worse than the aches. Each time he woke he used every relaxation technique he knew, but a little after four in the morning he knew he had slept all he was going to. Room service had not, so he showered, dressed in the clothes he'd worn the day before, and took the Camry out to look for an all-night restaurant. That took so long that a sense of stubborn professionalism made him decide to swing by the fake police headquarters first: four hours early was a good time to look it over.

  A very good time: somehow he had badly misjudged the time of shift change, and it was unmistakably in progress now, at—Jesus, at 7:00 AM.

  The same huge edifice also housed the headquarters of ICBC, the primary auto insurance company in the province of British Columbia, so naturally there was no possibility of a civilian vehicle parking or standing legally anywhere within blocks of the building. Accident victims who've just hobbled several blocks on their crutches or walkers are much easier to negotiate with. But fortunately for him, there was a combination of bad signage and diabolically placed one-way streets that made it almost impossible not to circle the building half a dozen times seeking escape from the loop. On his fourth go-round an infuriated McKinnon spotted his target emerging from the Stalinesque structure in his rearview mirror, in a crowd of other officers all carrying laptops under their arms like some nightmare of Steve Jobs's and walking north toward the parking lot.

  He pulled over just past it and pretended to consult an imaginary map until the target drove past him, in a private vehicle. He noted the make, model and plate number, and let two other cars go by before pulling out. Tailing a police officer by oneself can be tricky, but again he encountered no problems he could not cope with. Within half a mile or so—no, he reminded himself for the last time, within a kilometer or so—he let the traffic cause him to start closing the distance. When he saw a chance, he pulled into the right lane and made as if he intended to pass illegally on the right. Just as he entered the other driver's blind spot, he powered his window down, took something that looked just like a laundry marker from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, and used it to fire a GPS-snitch the size of an AAA battery at the rear bumper of the other car.

  He loved using that sort of James Bond junk, always had, but his luck so far had been so unreasonably good he almost expected this to fail. He couldn't help grinning when it worked just fine, stuck fast on contact and began reconfiguring itself. A second later he sensed he was moving into the target's peripheral vision, and elaborately mimed a man suddenly realizing he's about to illegally pass a police officer and reconsidering his plan. He slowed drastically, dropped behind, and took the first right he could. From that point on, he never again came within two blocks of his target's field of vision, or needed to.

  He was an old fart, no mistake about it, but he hadn't lost a step. Not yet, by God. And the prize he had sought for half a century as passionately and monomaniacally as Sidney Greenstreet had pursued the black bird was almost in his grasp at last, only weeks after he had finally begun to despair. Time enough for coffee and breakfast later. Life was good.

  He had no idea that his target had made him even before she had driven past his parked car that first time, back under the Cambie Street Bridge.

  2.

  Saturday, June 23, 2007

  Heron Island, British Columbia, Canada

  Horsefeathers the cat purred in ecstasy as Jesse's fingernails found the right spot behind his ears. I stopped short of the screen door with the tray of drinks in my hands and stood silently a few moments, for the pleasure of watching my son unobserved, out there on the sun deck.

  I got all too few chances. I'd had that deck built partly in hopes of getting him to come out to B.C. and spend some time sitting out there on it with me. Son on sun deck. Bright sun deck produces bright son. An effective magical pun.

  Gee, I found myself thinking, too bad I don't have a magic wife deck, too. That'd get him for sure.

  I swept that all away, and used all those precious seconds to study my only child, hungrily, as if trying to map him so well that I'd be able to recreate him with available atoms s
ome day, like a transporter beam. Almost thirty years younger than me . . . three inches taller, three inches broader, and twenty pounds heavier, not boney like me . . . fit and strong, not a semi-invalid like me . . . buzzcut and cleanshaven, straight-looking even to a normal contemporary, let alone to his "old-school" hippie dad . . . beyond doubt the most expensively and tastefully dressed young man on Heron Island, and possibly in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia as well. I found myself looking for any feature or other visible characteristic we shared—or for that matter, any trait of his mother's that manifested in him—and came up empty. I wanted to understand him, who he was, so well that one day I might risk telling him who I was and some of the things I had done. And I had high hopes that today might be the day we at least began that process, reopened the lines of communication, made a start. He was thirty, I was nearly sixty; if not now, when? God knew it had been long enough coming.

  The heart-stopping beauty of the place where I live was surely on my side. I'd managed to rid myself of more than one stubborn grudge sitting out there on that sunporch; raw nature is nothing but object lessons, really. Try explaining to a crow that you have reason to feel sour, or making a passing dragonfly see that it's all about you. Tell a hundred-foot-tall pine how far behind schedule you are. Even a City Mouse like Jesse had to be feeling it, or at least starting to by now: peace. Give it a chance, I thought.

  I smiled, slid the screen door open, and stepped out onto my magic sun deck with the tray of refreshments.

  "Christ, Dad, how can you stand it out here?" my son asked. Horsefeathers jumped down off his lap and went off to find his friend Fraidy, the half-mad feral cat who grudgingly permits me to feed her.

  I glanced around. "Too many bugs? Let's go in."

  "Not out here. I mean out here—in the middle of nowhere on a tiny island at the ass end of the universe. A week here and I'd go out of my mind."