“It’s tsam lic, ” I said. “That means like ‘blood lightning.’ A samlet’s like a fishling or some-”

“You’re a junkie and like, true to form, you’ve gone-”

“It has nothing to do with the drugs.”

“Sure. You’re just like any other OD’ing psycho.”

“Uh-huh.” The needle crossed over to the sweet side of a hundred. There was a Chevy up ahead of me going just as fast. Evidently the police had given up on the area. Billboards passed me like pages flipping in a magazine: Orlando: It’s All about Options. Spartacus Jones, Opening December 19. Legoland Orlando. I felt a thrilling lack of self-preservatory neuromodulators. When you’re sure that death’s around the next curve, suddenly you can deal with anything. What was too bad, though, was that I figured they had a LoJack and any number of other trackers on me, so I’d need to change cars pretty soon and kiss the ’Cuda good-bye. And for that matter, I could practically feel an itch on my scalp where the Warren Communications ROGS, the RapidEye Operational Geostationary Satellite, was tracking me from a hundred and forty miles overhead. And was Grgur actually chasing me? I couldn’t see any fast cars behind me on the GPS. Weird. Maybe he’d decided the cars they had would be too slow and hadn’t even taken one out. Just get downtown, I thought. They have everything. I clicked up a state police page that I’d marked, that showed where the manned checkpoints were and where they weren’t. It looked like if I just kept on 27 and got off at Revolutionary Road, I’d get downtown without dealing with any PoPos. No prob “Jed, I’m serious,” Marena said, “you’re not thinking clearly.”

“Look, yes,” I said, “I know crazy people think they’re not crazy, but actually I know I’m crazy about a lot of things, it’s just that this particular thing-I mean-oh, fuck. I mean, it really, really checks out. That’s like, suppose I said, ‘two times forty is eighty’ and you said that can’t be true because I’m crazy, that’s just-I mean, it’s that level of certainty.” The road went over an orchard that used to be a swamp and had tried to turn into an industrial “park” before the recession, and now was reverting to swamp. I passed six cars and a semi. There wasn’t much traffic. Even though the Park District had been closed for months, a video billboard advertising the Rainforest Cafe and the Tree of Life was still running a loop of giant rocketing centipedes. Zoom, zoom, zoom.

“Jed, everything-”

“Mister DeLanda?” Grgur’s accented voice interrupted. “We are go to ask you once and we are not go to ask you again. Stop the vehicle and wait of us. We know where you go. Understood?”

“Sorry,” I said. Either he’s bluffing or I’m toast, I thought. Maybe I should just aim this crate into the next overpass upright. I’d be out in a blaze of gory-uh, glory-and everything would still go on according to plan. But like Donald Pleasence in Telefon, I wanted to watch every little thing myself. Dimwit.

“If you do not stop, we are go to shut down your systems. Do you understand?”

“Put Marena back on and we’ll chat,” I said. I was passing a thirty-two-wheel car carrier with Aerostar vans packed into it like ticks in a wound. EXIT 29, a sign read. GAS FOOD LODGING.

“Mister DeLanda?” Grgur asked. “Listen. Get right now away from other vehicles. Understood?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Say again?” He can’t be really serious, I thought. The variable constellation of molded-acrylic-slab fluorescent signage rose into view against the dark orange sky, Taco Bell, Quiznos, Gulf, Texacoco, Burger King, Jamba Juice, Chicken Itza, McDonald’s, Arby’s, a regular Amalthea’s Horn of affordable dainties.

“We shutting down your systems,” Grgur said again.

“Not understood,” I said. Bullshit, I thought, hopefully. Still, I got into the right lane and slowed a little. If they were watching me I didn’t want them to think I was taking the threat seriously, but then if he was telling the truth I didn’t want to Pain shot through my nose and into my jaw and there was just grayness in my eyes and everything started happening in a confusing way, and I couldn’t see a thing, just this wall of fog.

— but it wasn’t fog, it was semisolid, and I couldn’t get my arms around it to reach the wheel. Instinctively I stepped on the brake-I brake with my left foot-and the brake was engaging, but I could feel that the car wasn’t quite stopping and at about this time I figured out that the gray stuff was the driver’s-side airbag. There was a rumbling in the belly underneath me and a string of metallic pops as we slid over the line of flexible reflector posts. I could feel my testicles retracting. Cowards. One whiff of trouble and they go skittering back to the inguinal canal. The airbag was already deflating but the car was tipping alarmingly to the right, even though I thought it was totally flat around here, like one inch above sea level, but it was still just tipping and tipping and then there was all this scraping like it was driving over shrubbery and then it was just STOP, an instant absolute stop, and my right hand crunched against the lip of the dash screen and my forehead CHUNKED through the limpening vinyl into the lip of the dashboard with a blue flash of detaching retinas.

“Your ballroom days are over,” Jim sang. “Your airbag has engaged and you have sustained impact,” the ’Cuda gloated in its Maleficent purr, for some reason neglecting to cut off the music. “Exit this vehicle and seek emergency help immediately.” An alarm preeped. PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, it preeped.

“Mr. DeLanda, are you injured?” Grgur’s rasp asked. I didn’t answer. The most worrisome thing, I thought, with that sort of pedantic clarity that sometimes kicks in during a high-stress event, was that they hit me with the bag instead of just overriding the gearshift and putting the car into neutral, which would have brought the car to a gradual stop. Maybe they hadn’t been able to spend enough time with the car to develop that capability. Or maybe whatever software they were using to run the car had just screwed up. But that didn’t seem like them. By them I mean Executive Solutions. They were one of the ten biggest military-services vendors out there and certainly one of the two or three classiest, and they were usually very strong on detail. Except if it was just Grgur, maybe he’s not so smart as the rest of them-well, you don’t have to figure it all out right “Mr. DeLanda?”

“Fuck you, I’m in great shape,” I almost said. Resist that impulse, I thought. If, I mean when, you get away, it’s better if they think you’re still dead in the car. Except if they’d wanted to kill me they could have, right? So maybe the deal is that they’re nearby already and they wanted to mess me up enough so that I wouldn’t be able to get away. So they crashed the thing delicately enough not to kill me but to keep me here. Well, if that was true they’d grab me pretty soon and I wouldn’t be able to do much about it. And if the Executive Solutions goons got hold of me-hell. Even if I, say, killed a few people right now to get the cops to put me in the state prison, Boyle-I mean, Laurence Boyle, whom among ourselves we called Lance Boil, and who was one of Lindsay Warren’s younger let’s-say cardinal nephews-would find a way to get people in and give me a going-over. And it wouldn’t take long. Lately there’s been a media disinformation campaign about torture, trying to convince the public that it doesn’t work and how you’re liable to get false information, but the fact is that torture works just fine. Even if you’ve read only one or two manuals on the subject, these days, with just a recorder, some conductant, and a modified stun gun, you can basically get anything out of anyone in a couple of hours. Although I do still have that dirt on Lindsay Warren, I thought. Or actually it wasn’t dirt on him, it was dirt that he and the other eighty Church elders had been hiding for more than a hundred and fifty years, scans of old letters by somebody named Sampson Avard, who was a founding elder of the Church of Latter-day Saints. No Way had dug it up months ago, before the downloading-I guessed from one of his antimissionary comrades in Ixcan, one of the CPR communities, which by the way is not the same place as the ruins of Ix-but he’d sent it to me on paper, to a FedEx store in Tampa that I used once in a purple moon, so I’d only just gotten and scanned in the folder a week ago. Just offhand it looked like dynamite stuff, really incriminating revelations, but it might take a while to use that sort of thing to threaten him. And I hadn’t set up an automatic post. So it wasn’t something I could do while I was being interrogated. If anything, they’d just get me to give it up. Hell, hell.