“But that was years ago.”
“See, that’s the mistake I’ve been making. This shit didn’t start a couple of weeks ago—it was set up while I was still in the army. They just didn’t activate it until they needed me.”
“‘They’? You think the army’s behind all this?”
I actually went cold in all the rippling heat. Some ductless gland that had evolved in order to deal with agencies that had three initials. “No. Huh-uh.” I pointed toward the car.
While we walked I asked about her aunt, who was dying of cancer. She made up a sob story that would melt the ice-cold heart of whoever was listening to parking-lot conversations.
As we approached the car I asked her to pop the trunk. “I want to take a look at the rifle,” I whispered.
“They’ll be watching.”
“Probably.” The trunk sprang open and I reached past the rifle box to a tackle box that I knew was full of tools. I selected a pair of pliers and slipped them into my front pocket while I was lifting the clumsy rifle box and struggling to open it.
I set the rifle on top of the box, still hidden to outside eyes. While running my left hand over the stock, I used my right to gently press the magazine release button. I slipped the top round off and then slid the magazine partway back, and returned the rifle to the box. But one round was in my shirt pocket now, and the magazine was loose, not pushed in. Kit looked mystified; she knew I had done something fishy but hadn’t followed it.
I scribbled a note, GUN WON’T WORK, though I was still a step away from that.
When we were up to speed on the highway I took out the cartridge and used the pliers to wiggle the bullet and separate it from the brass casing. While Kit chattered about music I emptied the powder out of the cartridge and rolled the window down and let the breeze blow the grey powder away. Then I reassembled the bullet, tapping it home firmly with the pliers, and put it back in my pocket.
It was an old saboteur’s trick. With the cartridge back in place, the emptied top round in the magazine, the rifle was a passive booby trap. If someone pulled the trigger, the hammer would fall on the empty cartridge’s primer, which would make a small explosion—just enough force to drive the bullet partway up the barrel and be stuck. When the next bullet was fired, full power, it would strike the first one, and the gun would blow up in the shooter’s face.
I could fire the weapon safely, because I knew to eject the first round before pulling the trigger. For anyone else it would be a nasty and perhaps fatal surprise.
I scrolled the map down and left and enlarged it. She looked over and held her finger over a small town, Carlinville, not tapping it. I nodded and we studied it for a second, and then turned off the map, and resumed talking about Steven Spielberg.
Interstate 55 had the cruise lane, so we took less than half an hour to get down to the Carlinville exit. Meanwhile I fiddled with her iPak and found out that Carlinville once had more houses ordered from the Sears catalog than anyplace else in the country, and was once the home of the woman H. G. Wells called “the most intelligent woman in America.” I passed that morsel on to Kit, and she said, “We just have to stop there and pay our respects.”
We passed by a small park in the middle of town; she looked at me and I nodded. Parked a block away and walked back, picking up a couple of ice cream cones on the way. We could watch the car from the park, in case somebody tried to put a dead body or an H-bomb in the trunk.
There was a bench in the shade of a tree next to a playground area. The kids were raising all kinds of hell. I spoke quietly.
“None of this makes any difference if they have a microphone up my ass.”
“I would have felt it.” She smiled. “Here’s my logic: I think they do have a device in or on your body, which they can track for location. But not listening.”
“Which ‘they’ are we talking about?”
“Does it make any difference now? Them versus us. But I don’t think it’s a listening device or a video bug, if we’re talking about Agent Blackstone and his gang. If they’d been listening to us, they’d know you’re innocent.”
I nodded. “Unless they think we think we’re being listened to all the time. Saying things to avert suspicion.”
“Yeah, but how far down that rabbit hole do you want to go? Blackstone being manipulated to feed us lines?”
I took his card out of my shirt pocket. Nothing fancy: plain picture, not a holo; James “Pepper” Blackstone, Analyst, Domestic Terrorism, Department of Homeland Security.
I held it up to my mouth. “Hello? Jimmy boy?”
“He probably likes to be called ‘Pepper.’”
I studied the card. “You know, you’re right. This has to stop somewhere. Blackstone didn’t know where the gun had come from. They didn’t have time to set up some damned phony scene in a gun shop in Des Moines.”
“Okay.”
“So that means someone who wasn’t working for them set me up. Nobody who buys a weapon in a gun shop doesn’t know he’s on Candid Camera. They got somebody who looks kind of like me.”
“What about the driver’s license?”
“That is a problem. The feds can’t get past that because they lack one crucial piece of evidence that I have: I do know I wasn’t there. Nobody did some voodoo crap and made me drive to Des Moines and buy a fucking gun!
“It’s simple. Someone hacked the god-damned system. If someone can program it, someone else can program around it. The ID dot on your license really boils down to a string of ones and zeros. Somebody got ahold of my string and put it in the system.”
“How?”
I had to laugh. “I don’t know! I’m not a fucking criminal!”
She put a finger on my arm. A woman on the other side of the play area was staring at me with a cross expression. No doubt a prissy G-man in drag.
I lowered my voice again. “Let’s just assume as a starting point that Blackstone is what he says he is. Tonight when we stop, we’ll write him a long e-mail with chapter and verse, everything that’s happened. ‘Here it is, take it or leave it.’ Even if they think I’m lying, at least it’ll go into my dossier. In case.”
“In case you die, you mean.”
“Well, yeah.” I started to frame something sarcastic to say but it evaporated on my lips. In that dappled noisy playground she was trembling, and looked like she was about to burst into tears.
“Sometimes I forget,” she said. “People trying to kill you is not a new thing.”
“Yeah. Me, too. I forget.”
But not really. Not ever.
2.
James “Pepper” Blackstone, M.S.
Analyst
Domestic Terrorism Working Group
Department of Homeland Security
800 East Monroe Street
Springfield, IL 62701-1099
Dear Agent Blackstone:
This is just to put down on paper some of the things we said, and perhaps forgot to say, when we spoke with you at your office May 18th, this afternoon.
For the record, I, Christian “Jack” Daley, have no active connection with the U.S. (or any other) government, except for monthly disability checks from the Veterans Administration, and occasional medical examinations there. I have never been employed by the government in any way other than the straightforward, if unwilling, relationship I had with the Selective Service Commission and the U.S. Army: I was drafted and then chose to “volunteer for the draft,” as the official language has it: I was told that I could get a better assignment that way, and still serve only two years, after training.
Whether my eventual assignment as a sniper was actually “better” than whatever would have happened to me, if it had been left up to chance, is not relevant anymore. I served out my time as a sniper in Operation Desert Freeze, and was wounded and given the usual handful of medals, and came home.
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I was subsequently diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and have gone to the Iowa City VA Hospital off and on for medication and talk therapy.
(I don’t dispute the diagnosis, but would like to repeat my opinion here, that anyone who has had the experience of being a soldier, killing people, and being wounded, and does not suffer a “stress disorder” from the experience, would have to be ipso facto mentally ill.)
I think the record will confirm that PTSD has not greatly affected my behavior since I separated from the Army.
You surely have access to my military records, but I would be surprised if you found anything there of interest beyond the simple fact of my sniper training. I was moderately skilled as a marksman but had no enthusiasm for killing strangers.
It’s a mystery to me why anyone would select me for this cryptic and surely criminal enterprise. I was not that great a sniper—I did get the sniper cluster on my rifleman’s badge, but that really means that I managed to hit some of the enemy and didn’t shoot anyone on our own side. My politics lean toward the left, but I’m far from being anyone’s candidate for an instrument of violence against the government. I mainly want to be left alone.
Of course, politics didn’t really come up with whoever gave me that rifle. They threatened my lover’s life, and my own, if I didn’t kill a “bad man” for good pay. They haven’t yet said why he was so bad.
You were confident that Homeland Security, with the help of the FBI and police, can put a quick end to this matter. I would like to share your confidence, but Kit and I are both very scared, and have to act with exaggerated caution.
If you have any message for me and Kit, please leave it on my home phone recorder. We will be travelling.
C. Jack Daley
I printed out a copy on the library’s printer and Kit proofread it. “Looks okay.”
“Good.” I folded the paper up and put it in my back pocket. “Go get the car. When I see you pull up in front, I’ll click on SEND and come get in the car, and we’re off for the highway.”
She breathed out heavily. “Whatever you say, boss.” She wasn’t 100 percent with me on this, but couldn’t come up with a better plan. I wanted Homeland Security to feel we were cooperating, but we couldn’t know whether the bad guys might intercept a message, or might even be hiding there, safe in some corner of the bureaucratic web.
Even if they, the menacing “they,” were hooked up with the government, they didn’t necessarily know that we’d gone to see Blackstone. But it would be prudent to assume that they did know, as soon as the agent filed a report. They might have known as soon as his secretary typed in my name—or maybe even as soon as we rolled into the parking lot. Where some scanner evidently noted that we had a gun in the trunk. That might ring a few alarm bells even if I were just a forgetful hunter.
Her bronze car rolled up and I pushed SEND. Anybody who really wanted to know could find out that I was in the public library in Litchfield, Illinois, at 12:39 on May eighteenth. Just passing through, though. Leaving behind some cybernetic spoor.
She had the radio playing loud. Taped on the dash over it, where we both could see it, our complex route to Baton Rouge, which we’d researched and printed out in the library. It was “blue highways” all the way, a slow crawl but one that ought to avoid stoplight cameras and toll booths. Getting off the grid by burrowing under it.
We were plainly in no hurry. No real destination. Baton Rouge was big enough to hide in, and dodgy enough that we wouldn’t have any trouble finding odd jobs that wouldn’t require ID.
But we weren’t really going there. It was a feint.
Without saying a word about it, we drove straight into St. Louis and left the car in a low-rent long-term parking lot outside the airport. Took the airport shuttle to the East Terminal and transferred to one of the hotel shuttles headed into downtown St. Louis. Ninety minutes after we ditched the car, we were in the Greyhound station with tickets south, bought from a machine with cash, no IDs.
We had about $9,000 in cash, split evenly. We were taking different busses—hers direct to New Orleans and mine via Joplin. We would meet in two days in the line waiting for breakfast at Brennan’s—and then go someplace more reasonable for a meal and planning session.
If they managed to follow us through that maze, it was hopeless. Maybe learn Chinese and go join their space program. No way Homeland Security, or the nameless “they,” could follow us to the moon.
Of course they might already be there, hiding behind some fucking crater.
I hoped the clue we left in the Litchfield library was subtle enough not to look planted. I’d noticed that the connection between the computer and printer was wireless, so any cloak-and-dagger types who’d followed us there could pick it up from the parking lot. We talked about going to California while Kit typed up unrelated directions to Baton Rouge.
Of course they would eventually find the car in the long-term parking lot outside of the airport, the gun still in the trunk. Whether they were the government or some more sinister “they,” we knew the car was bugged. We would probably be caught on camera outside the airport if they were the government, but even so, we might lose them between the airport and the bus station. When did a self-respecting spy or terrorist ever go Greyhound?
Before her bus left, she downloaded her e-mail and mine. Blackstone had sent a pro forma “thank you for cooperating with Homeland Security” message, and there was a note from my father asking why I wasn’t picking up the phone.
And Hollywood raised its ugly head. A note from Ronald Duquest’s office reminded me that the next chapter was due yesterday. Golly, slipped my mind.
I would normally e-mail the manuscript to myself, as I always do at the end of the writing day. Kit was taking the iPak with her, of course. I could write the next chapter out by hand and type it in later, but there was a Woolworth’s down the street. So I went in and bought a kids’ laptop for $99, bright red with big rubbery keys. An economy-sized twelve-pack of batteries, enough to get me to New Orleans.
The first thing I wrote on it was an e-mail to Dad, copied to Mother, explaining that I’d been accepted to a special writers’ retreat at a Trappist monastery. Total silence for a month, no street mail or e-mail, complete isolation from the modern world. By the time I’d written out a description of it, I wanted to sign up. Just write for a month, no guns or spies. Not sure about “plain food cooked by nuns.” Kit was confident I could find the one nun who was a gourmet cook, and maybe a closet nymphomaniac, besides.
Anybody who was really interested would be able to figure out that the message came from St. Louis, but in a couple of minutes I’d be headed south in anonymity. I clicked on SEND and kissed Kit and got on the bus. Waved to her as it pulled out, and then opened up the file with Duquest’s story line and my minim opus.
CHAPTER TEN
Hunter slept for ten hours, woke up famished, and microwaved the heart and kidneys. They were not tender but juicy and tangy. He drank a pint of whiskey and a gallon of water and slept again.
When he awoke, he hacked the remaining leg into two pieces, and put the foot half into a big pan with onions and a handful of wild rosemary. He stabbed it a dozen times and pushed garlic cloves deep into the muscle. He opened a can of camper’s bacon and draped it all over the leg and put it in a slow oven.
He sat on the trailer stairs for exactly one hour, listening intently. Two cars and a motorcycle went by, and as he was rising to go back in, he heard the whir and labored breathing of a bicyclist slowly climbing the slight grade.
It would not be smart to hunt so close to home. But just for practice he slipped quietly through the underbrush and crouched down behind a dense thicket of bramble. He nibbled on some berries and watched.
He would be a beautiful catch, young and plump. He must be local, since he couldn’t have pedaled very far on the old Schwinn, fat patched tires and f
aded blue paint held together with skeins of rust.
Hunter’s stomach made a noise and the boy heard it. He stopped and looked around wildly, and Hunter tensed to attack. But then he turned the bike around and fled downhill.
Some ancient instinct urged him to bound after the quarry and bring it down, and something like saliva squirted into his mouth in anticipation. His long muscles tensed to spring, but the brain interfered and he relaxed.
There would be another day.
He would be cautious, as usual. He sat unmoving long after the sound of the bike receded into nothing. The clock in his brain ticked off an hour, and then another hour.
No villagers with torches and pitchforks. No steady-eyed deputy adjusting his Stetson and saying, “Maybe the boy did hear somethin’, Sheriff.” No rumble of tanks and scream of jets converging on the invader from another world.
But he was not an invader, he thought; he belonged here as surely as a shark belongs in the sea.
A rabbit advanced slowly, almost invisible against the dun mat of humus, and sniffed Hunter’s bare foot. He snatched it and crushed out its life before it could even squeak, and nibbled at its twitching body as he watched the sun set.
Not a bad planet at all.
3.
When I turned eighteen, my mother took me down to New Orleans to celebrate my birthday with Aunt Helen. Eighteen was the legal drinking age in New Orleans, and I was ready. Aunt Helen lived there, and knew all the watering holes, and the three of us had walked up and down Bourbon Street and Decatur and St. Charles, comparing the quality of mint juleps in various places. I probably lost track after three or four.
Brennan’s is the place where I learned about treating a hangover with booze, their traditional champagne breakfast. It was a strange medicinal compound of champagne and Pernod, with orange juice on the side, and it worked so well we kept drinking champagne for a while, even after the hangovers were buried.