"Are they?"
"Yes. Because—"
But suddenly the boy stiffened. His eyes widened until Turk could see the small uncanny flecks of gold around the irises. "Whoa, hey—you all right?"
A terrified whisper: "Because I remember—"
The boy began to topple over. Turk caught him in his arms and called for help.
"Because I remember—"
"What, Isaac? What do you remember?"
"Too much," the boy said, and wept.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
By dawn Brian Gately was on a transport plane lofting out of Port Magellan's major airport, strapped into a bench seat with Weil on one side of him and Sigmund on the other. Elsewhere in the plane was a group of armed men—not quite soldiers, since they wore no insignia on their flak jackets. The interior of the plane was stripped-down and possessed all the homely comfort of an industrial warehouse. Brian could tell day was breaking by the red glow coming through the porthole-sized windows.
Weil had ordered him to the airport well before dawn. "In the event that we get involved in negotiations," he had said, "or in any other talking-type situation—a post-event interrogation, say—we'd like you to be the one who interacts with Lise Adams. We think you'd be better than someone she doesn't know. How do you feel about that?"
How did he feel about that? Shitty basically. But he could hardly say no. He might be in a position to protect her. He certainly didn't want her questioned by some hostile DGS functionary or one of these mercenaries. She was in the wrong place for the wrong reasons, but that didn't make her a criminal, and with luck Brian might be able to defend her from the threat of prison. Or worse. His memory of the photo of Tomas Ginn's body throbbed in his head like a fragile aneurysm.
What he told Weil was, "I'll help if I can."
"Thank you. We appreciate that. I know it's not what you signed up for."
Not what he had signed up for. That was becoming a joke. He had signed up with Genomic Security because he possessed a talent for administration and because one of his father's cousins, a DGS bureau chief in Kansas City, had opened the door for him. He had believed in the work of Genomic Security, at least to the degree to which it was professionally necessary to believe. The Department's mission statement had made sense to him, the idea of preserving the human biological heritage against black-market cloning, unlicensed human modification, and imported Martian biotech. Most nations had similar bureaus and they followed the broad guidelines set down by the United Nations under the Stuttgart Accords. All clean and above board.
And if there were bureaucratic nooks at the more carefully classified levels of DGS, hidden aeries in which less politically palatable attacks on the enemies of human genetic continuity were planned and carried out—was that so surprising? Those who were required to know, knew. Brian had never been required to know. Ignorance was his preferred mode of consciousness, at least when it came to the Executive Action Committee. Of course not everything could be done legally or visibly. As an adult, one understood this.
But he didn't like it. It was Brian's nature to prefer rules to anarchy. Law was the gardener of human behavior, and what lay beyond was brutal, red in tooth and claw. What lay beyond the garden was Sigmund and Weil and their uncommunicative smiles and their cadres of armed men. What lay beyond, fundamentally, was the battered body of Tomas Ginn.
The aircraft lurched as it rose to cross the coastal mountains that absorbed most of Equatoria's rainfall and made the inland a desert. "We'll be in Kubelick's Grave in an hour," Weil said. Brian had passed through Kubelick's Grave once before, part of an orientation tour he had taken when he was newly-arrived from the States. It was a nothing town, an adobe armpit that existed for the sole purpose of refueling land traffic bound for the oil sands of the Rub al-Khali or back through the Mahdi Pass to the coast. Weil said there was a community of robed eccentrics living in the desert foothills north and east of Kubelick's Grave: rogue Fourths, in fact, since aerial photographs taken in the past few hours showed Turk Findley's little bush plane nearby.
And now the site would be seized and secured, Brian thought, and would the seizure be violent? There was a large number of weapons on hand, he hoped, mainly for show. To make a plausible threat. Because Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent, gentled by the same tech that granted them longevity. No killing would be necessary surely. And if there was any killing involved, it wouldn't involve Lise. He would see to that. In his intentions, at least, he was brave.
* * * * *
It all happened quickly.
The airport at Kubelick's Grave was barely large enough to accommodate the transport. As soon as it had settled at the end of a cracked concrete runway, the rear cargo door dropped and the armed men trooped off in military order. A handful of lightly armored vehicles waited in the coppery morning sunlight. Brian joined Sigmund and Weil in one of those open-topped desert vehicles the locals called "roosters" for the way they bounced over the landscape like flightless birds. Sigmund took the driver's seat and they drove off at the back of the convoy. Not a comfortable ride. The heat and sun were oppressive even at this hour. All he saw of Kubelick's Grave was a garage and gas depot where rusty automobile parts lay scattered, the drive train of an ancient truck abandoned on the gravel like the spine of some Jurassic creature. Then they were off the main road, rattling over a hardpan trail parallel to the mountains.
An hour passed, broken only by the hoarse shouting of Sigmund as he attempted to converse with someone over a field radio. The talk, what Brian could hear of it, consisted of codewords and incomprehensible commands. Then the convoy came over the peak of a small rill and the Fourth compound was suddenly dead ahead. The military vehicles put on a burst of speed, big tires kicking up geysers of dust, but Weil pulled up short and killed the engine, leaving Brian's ears ringing in the relative silence.
Sigmund began yelling again, first into his radio and then at Weil: something about "too late" and an order to "abort."
"They abandoned the compound," Weil said to Brian. "Fresh tracks. Must have been a good two dozen vehicles."
"Can't you secure the site, at least?"
"Not until we can defuse whatever ordnance they left behind. What happens in these cases, they—"
He was interrupted by a burst of distant light.
Brian looked at the Fourth compound. A moment before it had been a cluster of small buildings around a central courtyard. Now it was an expanding cloud of dust and smoke.
"Shit," Weil had time to say. The concussion reached them a fraction of a second later, a noise that seemed to swell his lungs until his chest hurt. Brian closed his eyes. A second shockwave, like the beat of a hot wing, washed over him.
The compound was gone. Brian told himself that Lise wasn't inside: no one had been inside.
"… rig it…" Weil was saying.
"What?"
"They rig it to destroy their technical gear and keep us from taking samples. We got here late." Weil's complexion had turned pale with dust kicked up by the explosion. Sigmund's assault team had turned back, hastily.
"Is Lise—?"
"We have to assume she left with the others."
"Going where?"
"They won't all be traveling together. From the tracks it looks like a couple dozen vehicles headed in different directions. We'll run down a few of them. With luck we'll pick up Lise and the other major targets. With a little more warning we would have had drones in the air to keep watch. But we didn't have time and anyway every drone on the continent has been shipped to the far west, surveying the fucking oil allotments for earthquake damage."
Sigmund was still growling into his handset. Then he switched it off and said to Weil, "The plane's gone."
Turk Findley's bush plane, presumably. Gone. Escaped. Should he be pleased about that?
"The aircraft, at least, we can track," Weil said.
And Lise along with it.
Brian looked back at the ruins of the compound. Black smoke gushed from collapsed fou
ndations and small fires burned fitfully in the surrounding desert. Of the brick and adobe buildings that had once stood there, nothing remained.
* * * * *
They spent the night in what passed for public accommodations in Kubelick's Grave, a tile-roofed motel in which Brian shared a unit with Sigmund and Weil. Two beds and a cot—Brian got the cot.
Most of the afternoon and evening he spent listening to Sigmund make and take calls. The name of the Executive Action Committee was frequently invoked.
That night, unable to sleep in his cot, cold despite the banging antique electric heater, it occurred to Brian to wonder whether they had found out about Lise's last call to him.
Were his calls tapped for audio? Lise's callback code had been unfamiliar to him, probably a disposable loaded with anonymous minutes, so they wouldn't have been able to trace it. And there hadn't been anything really incriminating about the call. Apart from the fact that Brian had failed to report it. Which would suggest that his loyalties were divided. That he might not be a trustworthy DGS man.
He wanted to be angry with Lise. Hated her pointless personal involvement in this fucking mess, her obsessive need to sort out her father's disappearance and turn the story into some kind of memoir.
He wanted to be angry with her, and he was angry with himself when he didn't succeed.
* * * * *
Reports on the round-up of fugitive Fourths began to come in before dawn, Sigmund shouting into his phone while Brian hurriedly dressed.
Success had been mixed, he gathered.
"At least half the population of the compound is still at large," Weil said. "Our guys intercepted three vehicles carrying a total of fifteen people, none of them the major players. The good news—"
Brian braced himself.
"The good news is, a small plane registered to Turk Findley attempted to refuel at a little utility airport a couple of hundred miles west of here. The airport manager recognized the plane from a legal bulletin—Mr. Findley's former employer wants it impounded for back rent. He called the Provisional Government and somebody there was kind enough to refer the matter to us. Our guys arrived and detained the pilot and passengers. One male, three females, all refusing to identify themselves."
"And one of them is Lise?" Brian asked.
"Maybe. That's not confirmed. And there may be higher-value targets along with her."
"She's not a target. I wouldn't call her a target."
"She made herself a target when she ran."
But not high value, he thought, clinging to that. "Can I see her?"
"We can be there by noon if we get a move on," Weil said.
* * * * *
It occurred to Brian to wonder, as the town of Kubelick's Grave vanished behind them, who Kubelick might have been and why he was buried out here in the badlands; but nobody in the car had an answer to that question. Then the little cluster of buildings was behind them, Sigmund driving away from the mountains toward the razor-flat western horizon. The road ahead quivered in the morning heat like a figment of the imagination.
Sigmund couldn't make his phone work, though he kept banging it with one hand while he steered with the other. Even communication between the widely-spaced cars of the convoy—this vehicle plus three heavy trucks containing hired soldiers—was intermittent and unreliable. Weil couldn't explain it: "A half-dozen aerostats anchored between here and the west coast and not one of the fucking things doing what it's supposed to do. Lucky we got the news from the airfield when we did. Jesus!"
And it was not only the ruptured communication that seemed remarkable to Brian. He called attention to the steady flow of traffic in the opposite direction, not just oil-company traffic but a number of private vehicles, some so sand-pitted and sun-scarred that they looked barely functional. As if they were evacuating the inhabited outposts of the Rub al-Khali, and maybe they were—some new tremor, maybe.
Sixty miles farther on the convoy pulled onto the gravel verge and stopped. Sigmund and Weil went forward to talk to the leader of the paramilitary company. It looked more like an argument than a conversation, but Brian couldn't make out the words. He stood at the roadside watching the eastbound traffic. Eerie, he thought, how much this part of Equatoria looked like Utah: the same dusty blue horizon, the same torpid daytime heat. Had the Hypothetical designed this desert when they assembled the planet, and if so, why? But Brian doubted they paid that kind of attention to details—the Hypothetical, it seemed to him, were firm believers in the long result. Plant a seed (or seed a planet) and let nature do the rest. Until the harvest… whatever that meant or might one day mean.
Not much grew out here, just the peculiar woody tufts the locals called cactus grass, and even this looked dehydrated to Brians eye. But among the umber patches of cactus grass at his feet he spotted a place where something more colorful had taken root. He crouched to look, for lack of anything better to do. What had caught his attention was a red flower: he was no botanist, but the bloom looked out of place in this barren scrub. He put out his hand and touched it. The plant was cold, fleshy… and it seemed almost to cringe. The stem bent away from him; the flower, if it was a flower, lowered its head.
Was that normal?
He hated this fucking planet, its endless strangeness. It was a nightmare, he thought, masquerading as normalcy.
* * * * *
They came at last to the airfield off the highway, a couple of quonset-hut structures and two paved landing strips at contrary angles to one another, a bank of fuel pumps, a two-story adobe control tower with a radar bubble. Ordinarily the airstrips customers would have been oil company planes ferrying executives to and from the Rub al-Khali. Today there was just one plane visible on the tarmac: Turk Findley's aircraft, a sturdy little blue-and-white Skyrex baking in the sun.
The Genomic Security caravan parked in front of the nearest pavilion. Brian was a little shaky getting out of the car, his fears surfacing again. Fear for Lise, and under that a fear of Lise—of what she might say to him and what she might deduce, correctly or not, about his presence in the company of men such as Sigmund and Weil.
Maybe he could help her. He clung to that thought. She was in trouble, deep and perilous trouble, but she could still keep herself afloat if she said the right things, denied complicity, shifted the blame, and cooperated with the inquiry. If she was willing to do that, Brian might be able to keep her out of prison. She would have to go back home, of course, forget about Equatoria and her little journalistic hobby. Given the events of the last few days, though, she might not be so haughty at the prospect of a trip back to the States. She might even learn to appreciate what he had done, and was willing to do, on her behalf.
He hurried to keep up with Sigmund and Weil, who brushed past a cluster of airstrip employees and hurried down a makeshift corridor to the door of a tiny office guarded by an airport security guy in a dusty blue uniform. "The suspects are inside?" Sigmund asked.
"All four of 'em."
"Let's see them."
The guard opened the door, Sigmund went through first, Weil behind him, Brian in the rear. The two DGS men stopped short and Brian had to crane to see over their shoulders.
"Fuck!" Sigmund said.
Three women and one man sat at a stained conference table in the middle of the room. Each of them had been handcuffed to a chair.
The male was maybe sixty years old, judging by his looks. Probably older, since he was a Fourth. He was white-haired, he was skinny, he was dark-complexioned… what he was not was Turk Findley.
The three women were of similar age. None of them looked like Sulean Moi. And certainly none of them was Lise Adams.
"Decoys," Weil said, his voice turgid with disgust.
"Find out who they are and what they know," Sigmund told the armed men waiting in the corridor.
Weil pulled Brian out after him. "Are you all right?"
"Just… yes," Brian managed. "I mean, I'm fine."
He wasn't fine. He was picturing the
four prisoners with bullet-raddled skulls, washed up, perhaps, on some distant beach, or just buried in the desert, bodies shriveled under a layer of grit, paying the butcher's bill for their longevity.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
D'vali drove the car that took them north until nightfall, and in her less distracted moments Lise made a study of him.
He was—above all else—protective of the child, Isaac.
Lise and Turk had been hustled into a big utility vehicle, the kind with sprung-metal wheels that could cope with all kinds of terrain. The car had been built to accommodate six people comfortably but they had squeezed in seven: Lise and Turk, Diane, Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi—and Isaac.
Turk had advocated taking the Skyrex, but Dvali and Mrs. Rebka argued him out of it. An aircraft would be easier to trace and harder to hide than one land vehicle among many. They would use the plane as a diversion, Dr. Dvali said. Four of the compound's eldest Fourths, one of whom was a qualified pilot, volunteered to take it west. Probably they would be captured. But they knew what they were doing, Dr. Dvali had insisted. They weren't afraid to die, if it came to that. One of the ironies of the Martian treatment was that it quelled the fear of death even as it extended life. Turk asked if they had a cure for the fear of insolvency.
So they drove away, and a dozen or so land vehicles left the compound after them, scattering in multiple directions on the available roads or across the raw desert. The compound had been rigged with explosives to keep it from falling into the hands of the authorities and to destroy any evidence that might lead to their eventual capture. Lise and company had been too far down the road to see the actual explosion, but at one point she had spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. She asked Dr. Dvali whether anyone might have been hurt—if DGS agents had arrived before the timed detonation, wouldn't they have been killed?
"DGS knows what to expect in situations like this. If they found the compound deserted they would have known it was rigged to detonate."
Axis s-2 Page 19
