Another head shot for each mall guard, just to make sure. Which causes blood and green goo to leak all over my shoes.
Then I get in their truck and drive. Full tank, reliable vehicle, and by this time I’m so high on adrenaline I start to feel pretty good about myself, all things considered. Back of me I can see more headlights, but I’m way ahead of ’em. I blow past the depot where Bastián and I worked, and by the time the sky gets light I’m halfway to San Pedro de Atacama and if anybody’s following they’re well out of sight.
In San Pedro I traded the Ford to a guy no-questions-asked for his little piece-of-shit ten-year-old Hudson, which for some reason there are a lot of in the Atacama, somebody must’ve opened a dealership once… a plain dumb car, which I managed to drive all the way to Antofagasta before its tranny seized up. Laid low for a while, did day labor at the puerto until I could afford a plane ride back to the USA. Back home I spent a year or so trying to chase all this shit out of my head with Jack and Coke, hold the Coke, until I shot off my drunken mouth to that writer. After which Werner Beck showed up and more or less explained things to me.
And that’s my story.
“But that doesn’t explain anything,” Leo protested.
“What do you need explained?”
“The light in the desert? The spider things?”
“You should ask your daddy about all that, Leo. Assuming you ever see him again.”
“Also, what’s in the back of your van that’s so important?”
“Your daddy should’ve mentioned that, too.” Dowd grinned, displaying a row of crooked teeth. “You could call it a secret weapon. Or part of one.”
“And you keep talking about getting on the road. Road to where?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
Leo shook his head. “This is crazy.”
Dowd’s grin expanded. “Amen, brother,” he said. “No argument from me.”
18
ETHAN’S FIRST CONCERN WAS FOR Nerissa, who was hugely disappointed to discover that Cassie and Thomas and Leo hadn’t shown up at Werner Beck’s safe house.
Ethan was disappointed too, of course. But Ris seemed to lose all the fierce energy she had been drawing on for days. She looked suddenly years older, and the tone she took with Beck was querulous and irritable. “So where are they—do you have any idea where they are?”
Beck escorted them to a plain pine table in the kitchen of this small, plain house. “Sit down,” he said.
“And Leo! He’s your son, for Christ’s sake! Are you telling me you can’t find him?”
“We made plans for this contingency.”
“What plans? What do you mean?”
“If Leo’s doing what I told him to do, we should be able to catch up with him. And if Cassie and—what’s the boy’s name?”
Nerissa shot him a poisonous look. “Thomas.”
“If Cassie and Thomas are with him, that will be your opportunity to take them out of harm’s way. But obviously, Mrs. Iverson, I don’t know with any certainty where any of them are right now. I can’t snap my fingers and make them appear in front of you. You need to exercise some patience.”
“Do you care to explain any of that?”
“I’m as concerned about Leo as you are about your niece and nephew, and I’ll do everything I can to guarantee their safety. The situation is complex, and I’d be happy to talk about it, but in the meantime maybe you’d like to have a shower and a change of clothes? No offense, but you look like you could use it. I’ll put together a hot meal for all of us as soon as you’re refreshed. How about that?”
It was testimony to her fatigue that she sighed and nodded. Beck told her how to find the bathroom.
“I understand why you brought her here,” he said when she left the room. “But it’s frankly a little awkward.”
Ethan didn’t want to get into that discussion, at least not yet. “How many houses do you own, Werner?”
“Enough. They’re only tools. You could say, weapons of war.”
“The sims came for you, didn’t they?”
“I got out of my place in Illinois minutes ahead of them. I’d been there too long in any case—I knew it was probably compromised. I was packed and ready to go when they came to the door. They didn’t see me leave.”
Ethan had heard speculation about Beck and his money—especially his money—for years before Beck confided in him. It was rumored that Beck had patented some useful invention. Or that he had inherited a fortune back in the 1990s. Or that he had criminal connections. Or all three.
That he possessed both deep pockets and useful connections was undeniable. It was Beck who had organized and paid for the annual gatherings of Society members; it was Beck who had funded key research projects when educational institutions backed out; and after the murders of 2007 it had been Beck who helped out the survivors and their families, with cash and when necessary with goods otherwise unobtainable: new names, social security numbers, passports.
Not to mention his apparently inexhaustible supply of safe houses, properties he owned but kept unoccupied so that he could relocate himself or others on a moment’s notice. More than one Society member had called Beck paranoid, and maybe they were right. But it was, Ethan thought, at least a well-funded paranoia.
“The thing is,” Beck said, “you more or less walked into a war zone.
“The war came to us. And you supplied the address, Werner.”
“Because we need to stay in touch. But I didn’t expect you to turn up on the doorstep.”
“It seemed like logical thing to do, given that Cassie and Thomas are traveling with Leo.”
“I understand. But the situation is more complicated than you realize. I’ve been working with people who aren’t part of the Society. The Society was never more than one aspect of this war, Ethan. You can think of the Society as a kind of intelligence service, gathering information about the enemy. That’s good and useful work. But wars have to be fought. And they have to be fought by soldiers, not scholars.”
Ethan sat back in his chair as Beck got up to make coffee. The coffee machine on the faux-marble counter looked as if Beck had bought it yesterday. And maybe he had. The house itself still smelled untenanted, redolent of stale air and the chemical exhalations of undisturbed carpets and furniture. Ethan had a momentary vision of Beck as the kind of furtive animal that nests in abandoned buildings. But he looked martially efficient as he filled the machine’s reservoir and dropped a filter into its basket. He was fifty years old, Ethan guessed, maybe older, but he could have been a weatherworn drill sergeant, still able to hike as far as any recruit and count off twice as many pushups. “You always were unhappy with the Society,” Ethan said. In fact Beck’s private letters had so often dripped with contempt for his colleagues that Ethan occasionally wondered why Beck bothered with them at all.
“Well, I don’t really blame the Society. So much of what we believed was essentially speculative. Before you turned up those ice-core inclusions all we really had was some anomalous data, a history of academic persecution, and a mother lode of surmise. The Society connected the dots, and what emerged was this frankly ludicrous idea, that the radio-propagative layer was also an organism. From elsewhere. From outer space. Even before ’07, nobody wanted to say that out loud. A few of the old lions took it seriously—Fermi, Dyson, Hoyle—but even those guys never contemplated doing anything about it.”
“What could they do?”
“As I said, I don’t blame them. You learn to fly under the radar. Fine. But there’s something to be said for facing facts. And since 2007 we’ve been forced to face a few.” Coffee began to seep through the filter and drip into the pot, a metronomic sound. “Or anyway, I have. You want anything harder than cream in your coffee? You look like you could use it.”