My heart jumps. He’s out of the hearing about Jamie. I take the phone. “Hello?”
“Phoebe,” he says.
Just from his tone of voice, I know something has gone terribly wrong.
Eleven
Fifteen minutes later, I lay on my back on Mila’s floor, tears of anger leaking from the corners of my eyes. Cat-Phoebe has decided that she likes me, and her chin rests on my hip bone. I can feel the purring through my jeans, and it may be the only thing keeping me sane. My body is rigid with tension. Mila sits cross-legged nearby, sipping some tea.
“Something is happening to us,” I say adamantly. My stomach clenches in helpless rage. “Someone is… doing something to us. This can’t be accidental. For the hospital to block Jamie’s transfer of guardianship… these charges against us… the FBI…”
Mila straightens and tilts her head as she gazes at me. “Something is happening to us,” she repeats thoughtfully. She tilts her head again the other way as if she’s thinking intently.
“Don’t you think?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says calmly. She leans back against the base of the sofa and closes her eyes. I can’t read her expression.
“So what can we do?” I sit up and stare at Mila accusingly, as if she’s supposed to have the answer. Cat-Phoebe objects to my sudden movement with a mew. I say, “We’re about to be back in jail, and I can’t help Jamie, and—” I don’t think I can go on without bursting into tears, so I stop.
An idea strikes. I scramble up to my feet. “Let’s call Dr. Abadi.”
The phone call goes straight to voice mail. The brusque, tense recording says, “This is Dr. Abadi. I’m unavailable due to a family emergency. Messages will be returned in a day or two.”
I groan, but I leave a message anyway. I don’t know what else to do. “Dr. Abadi, it’s Phoebe Bernhart. I’m sorry to bother you. I hope you’re okay. Look, something has to be done to continue our work on HAD. We’re being framed, and they wouldn’t bother to do that if we weren’t on the right track. By the time you get this message, I’ll be back in jail, so it’s up to you to do something. Please do something. Please tell everyone. Tell the CDC and the World Health Organization and everyone you can think of. I know it sounds crazy, but if you tell everyone, maybe someone will believe you and look into it. Something has to be done. It’s up to you now.”
I hang up. “Crap. I hope she’s okay. Maybe someone in her family has HAD, too.” I groan. “What now?”
Mila lets out a long breath. “In two hours?” She shakes her head and rubs her face tiredly. “That’s only enough time for us to make arrangements for our pets and pay up our rent and bills… you know, get ready to go back.”
I contemplate the fact that I’m expected to waltz over to the nearest police department and give myself up. Put all my things back into a plastic baggie. Step into a green jumpsuit again. Put out my hands for the cuffs. Voluntarily resign myself to futility and helplessness.
I stand up and pace the small living room.
There has to be another way. I refuse to accept that this is where it ends for me, that it’s in other people’s hands now to find the cause of HAD and to get treatment to Jamie before he dies from the grand mal seizures. While I’m helpless. Unable to help him. Unable to do a damn thing.
My stomach clenches again, so hard I nearly double over, and I brace myself on the back of a chair.
Jamie is my responsibility. I brought him out here into “the world.” It’s my job to protect him from it.
This is everything my father ever warned me about. This never would have happened back home, where we would have had the resources of the entire community to rely on. When hundreds of people are on your side, you don’t have to be afraid of the world. You stay out of it, and it leaves you alone.
And just like that, I know what we have to do.
My breath is taken away by how much there is to do and how quickly we have to do it.
“Mila, do you have a carrier for cat-Phoebe? We’ll take her to Mrs. Jones. She can take care of both Tobi and the cat. We’re going to have to cut off your ankle bracelet. Do you know how to do that? Because otherwise, we’ll have to find a computer somewhere to look it up. And you have to disable the app that they’re using to track me with my Navi. And then Jamie’s. Jamie’s, too, or they’ll follow us through him.”
Mila looks up at me, her eyes wide. But, to her credit, she doesn’t ask me what I’m talking about it. She’s smart. She understands everything in an instant.
Changes in expression flicker across her face. She’s considering this. Whether she’s going to do it.
I sink to my knees in front of her. I plead with her silently. But I don’t need to say anything. She understands what’s at stake. She understands that I have no other options.
“I don’t know how to remove the bracelet, no.” She brings up her ankle and looks at it, feels it. “It’s plastic. It’s so flimsy, it feels like I could cut it off with kitchen shears. But I don’t know much about it. You’re right, we should look it up.”
She straightens up and thinks for a moment. “There’s a computer at a library down the street, but we should buy me another laptop. I’ll need it. I’ll be useless to you without it.”
I nod vigorously. I should have thought of that.
“Disguises,” Mila says. Now she’s talking as fast as I am. She suddenly seems energized, even frantic, but then, so do I. I’m shivering with anxiety. “We don’t pack any of our own clothes. The moment we take off the bracelet, they’ll be looking for us, so we have to be in clothes they won’t recognize. And we’ll need wigs—several wigs. I don’t know where a wig store is, but there’s a big Goodwill down the street that I shop at all the time. What are your sizes?” She rushes to a kitchen drawer to get a pencil and a pad of paper and writes them down as I tell her.
I start making a list of things to do on my Navi display.
Disguises and wigs
Get Mila a laptop
Jamie’s meds
Jamie
Cat-Phoebe to Mrs. Jones
“First, we do everything that doesn’t look suspicious,” I say. “Taking cat-Phoebe to Mrs. Jones would seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We do that first. Going to Goodwill won’t raise any red flags. You might as well pack your toiletries, since you’re here, and I’ll grab mine when we take cat-Phoebe to Mrs. Jones.” I’m nearly hyperventilating, I realize. “Oh my God, we have so little time to do all of this.”
“Was five thirty the absolute deadline?” Mila asks.
I check the time. It’s three thirty now. I try to recall how Mr. Pataky said it. “I don’t think so. He initially said something like, ‘you don’t have more than a few hours.’ Then he said three hours. I think he said that to be on the safe side. We might still have three hours left, or even four hours. I don’t know.”
“Let’s call the courthouse and ask,” Mila says.
“What? Really? Ask?”
“Why not?” Mila shrugs. She picks up her land-line phone on the kitchen counter and dials. I go back to composing my list while I pace.
Money (is there untraceable money anymore?)
Fake IDs?
A private manual-drive car—not Mila’s
How to get off ankle bracelet?
I’m feeling overwhelmed and intimidated when Mila comes back.
“I told them that I found out about the warrant and asked how much time I have to make arrangements for my elderly mother and my pets. They said they would hold off until seven thirty. They were perfectly pleasant about it.”
I exhale and nod. I look at the time. It’s three forty. “Almost four hours. Okay, then this might be doable. What happens at seven thirty?”
Mila shrugs. “I guess they send cops to pick us up.”
I nod. “I’ve been making a list of things to do. Mila… I can’t tell you how embarrassed I am to have to ask this… but you know I don’t have any money. And we’re going to need some. We m
ight need a lot.”
Mila nods as if she’s already thought of this. “I’ll have to empty my accounts, because they’ll freeze them as soon as we go AWOL. But we’ll have to do that as one of the last things, because it’ll get their attention.”
“Is there any such thing as untraceable cash anymore?”
“I don’t know. But I do know who to ask. I need that laptop computer first.”
Time rushes by with alarming speed. Mila packs up her few things in five minutes, but then it takes another fifteen minutes to put cat-Phoebe into the carrier. There are a few things in life you cannot rush, and getting a cat who has all of her claws into a small box is one of them. So now it’s four o’clock.
“Laptop first,” Mila says urgently.
We head to a DigiBox, and Mila buys the cheaper of the two laptops they still offer. I’m surprised, but she explains that her task will require little computing power. She also gets solar chargers and battery packs, since my family doesn’t have electricity. She asks whether the national wi-fi covers my community, and I assure her that it does—I’ve noticed it on my few return trips since I got my Navi. She pays with her credit card, and we head back to the car. “Aren’t they going to be able to trace this laptop back to us?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Not really. I just have to be careful where and how I connect to networks, and I have to keep changing my MAC address. But just to be sure, I’ll also install a special-purpose rootkit to remove any tracking software and automatically route all traffic through anonymizing routers.”
I just shake my head and keep walking.
Once in the car, Mila opens the laptop and connects it to the car’s charging port. “I’m connecting to another server in Thailand I still have access to from an old contract job. From there, I’ll reach out to find someone who can get us anonymous cash cards.”
By now, it’s 4:25.
I drive to the Goodwill and go in for an armload of clothes in both our sizes, paying no attention to styles or colors. This takes twenty-five minutes.
Mila reports that she has a contact for the cash cards, and she dives right back into her work. “I have to be ready to shut down your Navi and Jamie’s.”
It’s a good thing nationwide wi-fi was put in years ago. Otherwise, we’d be seriously handicapped while we tried to do all this.
I continue driving. Because Friday-afternoon rush-hour traffic has kicked in, it takes thirty-five minutes for me to get cat-Phoebe to Mrs. Jones and then another fifteen minutes to extricate myself from Mrs. Jones, who is eager for company and determined to sit me down for a cup of coffee and some pastries. I tell her that Jamie is in the hospital with HAD and I’m spending all my time there right now. I spend eight minutes grabbing my toiletries and sundries from my apartment, and now it’s 5:48.
Our next stop is the nearest Diva Dimension, which takes twenty minutes to get to with this traffic. I’m practically hysterical with stress by the time we get there. Then, while Mila continues to work on her computer as fast as she can, I go in for an armload of wigs, skull caps, hair pins, and makeup. It’s 6:25 when I come out.
I have intense anxiety. My chest aches and I’m dizzy from constantly hyperventilating. But there’s nothing to be done about it.
We’re starving, and brains don’t work well without fuel, so we stop at a drive-through for soy burgers. While we sit in the car in the parking lot and eat our burgers and fries, she looks up how to remove an ankle bracelet. Thankfully, that only takes about four minutes.
“Any sharp blade will do it,” she says. “But the alarm goes off within ten seconds. And they recapture ninety-nine percent of offenders within forty-eight hours. We’ll have to move fast. Plus, tampering with it will add another felony charge. Of course, all of that will also apply to me disabling the tracking on your Navi.”
I think my stomach would be doing flips if it weren’t already weighed down by the fast food. Instead, it gurgles.
“On the up side, they sometimes spend as long as four hours trying to reach the ‘offender’ before they declare them AWOL. Oh, and if the cops can’t find us, federal marshals will be sent after us to get us back. But not private bounty hunters, from what I can tell. We didn’t use a bail bondsman, and those are the guys who hire the bounty hunters to get their money back.”
I rub my face and let out a long, slow breath. This is getting too real. And now I’m acutely aware of the fact that I asked Mila to do this for me. For my family. And we’re putting everything at risk.
“Mila.”
She looks at me.
I don’t want to say this, but I have to say it. “You don’t have to do this. I have to go get Jamie out. I have to risk it, because he’s going to die if I don’t. But you don’t have to go with me.”
The truth is that I can’t possibly do this without her, but still. Now that I’m fully aware of the consequences, I can’t ask her to do this for me.
She faces forward again. I gaze at her profile, thinking—irrationally—that she’s beautiful from every angle. Her curly blonde hair slips forward, covering her face, and she smoothes it back.
“They won’t let me program anymore if I’m convicted of cyberterrorism,” she says thoughtfully. “So I have to prove that we’re being framed. And I can’t do that from a jail cell.”
I shouldn’t be surprised at how pragmatic she is, at how mechanically she sees the world. I should know this about her by now. For a moment, I wonder if all her thoughts are in binary. Just 1s and 0s in there. Nothing human.
But then she takes my hand and turns to gaze at me, and my heart skips a beat. Her voice low, she says, “And I don’t want Jamie to die.”
Tears well up in my eyes. I am so damn grateful right now. I squeeze her hand and murmur thanks, and she squeezes back.
I catch sight of the time in my display. “It’s 6:40,” I say, my voice strangled.
She takes a deep breath and thinks for a minute. “I think it’s about time for us to go AWOL. We’ve done everything we can do legally and without drawing unnecessary attention. So getting all my money out is the next thing to do, and that’s when they’ll take an interest. That will be our cue to take off the bracelet and get disguised.”
We both sit and study one another’s faces for a moment. I think both of us are looking for some sign in the other that we’re going to back down. This is our last chance.
Whatever we’re looking for, we don’t find it. And while Mila continues to work on her new laptop, I drive us to the nearest branch of Mila’s bank—Dash Bank. I grin at the apt name, and I thank God that Dash Bank has late-night hours on Fridays.
She hurries in and comes back five minutes later with four money cards. “They would only let me take out ten thousand dollars. Let’s go now. I’ve made arrangements to meet my contact at the Super Seven off 278.”
It takes an alarming eighteen minutes just to get there. She gets out before I’ve even come to a complete stop, and she hurries back, panting, exactly three minutes later.
“Done. These money cards are anonymized.”
It’s 7:28.
“Now is the time to go AWOL,” Mila says breathlessly. “I will shut down your Navi first, since it will take longer. I will take off my ankle bracelet after that.”
About ten minutes later, Mila mutters something in frustration. “I forgot that you depend on this device to correct your vision. Give me a few more minutes.”
I chew my nails and try to stop hyperventilating.
It takes a few more minutes, and then my Navi is gone. Everything in my display vanishes. I can still see, though.
I hadn’t been using my Navi for much since I got out of jail this morning before the bail hearing, but I still want it back. Like, right now.
Actually, I had been using it consistently for one purpose. “Now we need to buy a watch,” I say.
Mila and I look at each other and laugh, though there’s hysteria in it.
Out of necessity, I set aside my mourning f
or my lost Navi, and I start driving to a used-car dealer. Mila keeps working on the money cards in the meantime. While we’re on the freeway, though, she takes a knife out of her backpack, slices through the ankle bracelet, and tosses it out the window.
I shake my head.
I cannot believe what has happened to my life. A couple of weeks ago, I was a run-of-the-mill nurse with of an attitude problem who talked to her Collective 24/7 and was addicted to coffee. Now I’m a suspected terrorist on the run.
We stop on the way to put on wigs and makeup and new clothes. I’m impressed by how different Mila looks as a brunette with too-dark lipstick and dark sunglasses. She’s still drop-dead gorgeous, but in a different way. For my part, I’m now a curvy redhead with too much blush.
I take us to the shoddiest car dealer I can find that’s close by—the kind that has faded, sagging paper pennants and a hand-lettered sign that says, “Bad credt, no credt, drive away 2day.”
I park a block away, and Mila goes in for the kill. As I watch the poor guy who owns the place gesticulate wildly out in the parking lot, I’m dying to know how Mila’s coming across. I can imagine how she looks—this too-calm, too-beautiful chica with too much makeup who wants to buy a car right now and doesn’t care what car it is and will overpay him by five thousand dollars from an untraceable money card if he will give her the car right-now-please and then kindly forget she ever existed.
I’m pretty sure she makes an impression. I don’t think his operation is legal to begin with, though, so I’m also pretty sure he’s not going to tell anybody about us. And her disguise is good.
We drive both cars about six blocks, and then I leave Mila’s in a big parking lot. Mila slides over into the passenger seat of the new car, and I take over driving. It’s a silver Honda. Can’t get much more nondescript than that. And it doesn’t have plates, and it’s a manual-drive car, so there’s no ID associated with it.
It’s killing me that all this has taken so long—and that I don’t know how long it’s been, now that my clock is gone. I’m in a serious hurry to get to Jamie. If they suspect that I’m going to try to break him out, then they’ll put security in place.
Absence of Mind Page 20
