A Song Called Youth (84 page)

She pretended to fall for it. She nodded and closed her eyes as the truck started moving. She was a good girl.

Hearing the electric motors droning, vibration coming through the floor; thinking that it was his fault they were here, undergoing these absurd contortions, he should have stayed out of it for his family’s sake or left them, the Company probably wouldn’t have . . . yes, they would have. They’d have picked up Janet in case she knew where he was. Maybe to use her and Cindy as hostages to get him back. To shut him up.

But somehow this was his fault. Dragging his family through this, making them feel like wetbacks lying on the floor of a truck. Maybe in the trunk of a car next, for God’s sake.

And this absurdity was made worse by its probable futility. They’d probably be busted; any second cops or CIA Domestic would stop the car, dourly smug faces would look through the front windows at them.

He felt the van descending a ramp of some kind, turning; he and Lopez nudged by inertia against one another, Cindy whimpering, Janet clutching her tighter, trying to smile at Stoner.

Maybe they’ll simply execute the lot of us. Cindy too.

The van was leveling out, probably in the underground parking lot.

The van stopped. Men’s voices. Stoner wondered if it would have helped if he’d brought a gun.

“If I knew where, I wouldn’t be out looking for them,” the kid driver said to someone.

Don’t come close enough to look in the back.

The van was moving again. Stoner realized that Cindy was squeaking with pain because he was holding her so tight. He loosened his grip, whispered, “Sorry, sweetie.”

Lopez hissed, “
Silencio!”

The van hummed along for ten minutes, and Stoner realized,
We must be out!
and as he thought it, the light shifted its quality, became streetlight, harsh blue-white. They were on the streets.

Ten minutes more and then the kid driver said, “Checkpoint. Lay still no matter what.”

The van grumbled and stopped. Clipped voice of a young by-the-booker who sounded like he’d just finished his stretch in the service. “You got a pass to—what the hell is that? In the back. Get out of the . . . ” Then a rattling hiss. A bubbling
uh-uhnk
sound from the guy who’d stopped them. The van was moving again before Stoner realized . . . 

It was Janet who said it aloud. “Oh, God, no,” Janet said. “He . . . ”

“You must be quiet!” Lopez said.

“Oh, shut up, Lopez,” Stoner snapped. “Doesn’t matter now.”

There’d be a patrol car after them in minutes. The van wasn’t fast, maybe wasn’t even street-legal, was designed for trundling around the walkways of the mall. It stopped.

“Change vehicles fucking
fast!”
the kid driver yelled, banging the side door open.

They were up and moving. Glimpses of an industrial park, Cyclopean red light atop a tower, and then they were in a bigger van, thirty years old, its sides painted with surfer myth imagery, a bulging window blurrily shaped like an arrow on the side above a god-sized curl that never breaks. In the back, they sat on the metal floor.

Sirens.

“Oh, shit,” the kid driver said, putting the van in gear. A lurch and a growl, the van burning rubber. “Oh—he’s not on our road . . . I don’t think . . . just a mile to our airstrip.”

Stoner was certain that any second they’d come up against the roadblock or a Police Assault Van forcing them over, maybe taking out the rear tires with a neatly placed 20-mm shell.

But then a long, long curve as they turned off the industrial park road, down a utility road. Gravel crunched under the tires till they reached the tarmac of the airstrip. Stoner sat up, peered past Lopez, saw the Lear and thought,
No, really?

Really. Thirteen minutes and they were aboard, the little jet taxiing down the runway, Janet, laughing with relief as a steward—no kidding,
a steward—
saw to it they were strapped in, and they were in the air.

Stoner and his family were the only passengers except for Lopez and the kid driver (what happens to the guy they left in the van? The cops would find him), the kid throwing the oversize guard’s cap in the corner, then beginning work on his acne, squeezing pimples methodically as they talked to Lopez.

“You heard they got Charlie Chesterton? Not sure how. But he snuffed hisself, probably so they couldn’t brain drain him.”

Stoner glanced at his daughter and changed the subject, “Where we going?”

“South,” Lopez said. “The Caribbean.”

The kid adding, “Little island you got to call home for a while. It’s comfortable, almost like a resort. It’ll be okay.”

Will it be prison? Stoner wondered.

He still had a bargaining chip. He knew about the mole in the European NR. They might subject him to the extractor, of course. But he had a feeling that wasn’t their style. So he had something to bargain with. Maybe he’d have to bargain with them for his family’s freedom.

Maybe he’d have to give them the SA agent who’d penetrated Steinfeld’s base on Malta.

Cloudy Peak Farm, Upstate New York.

“Satelex from Colonel Watson,” Johnston said, coming into the room. “He’s on his way here.” He showed the printout to Crandall, who was in his office, sitting at a WorkCenter; he’d been scowling over some statistics on the monitor. The scowl deepened as he scanned the satelex. Hayes was at the door as usual, watching and listening but not seeming to. It wasn’t like he was
spying.
But it kept him amused, kept him from mentally roving up to those disconcerting membranes that cut him off from certain channels of free association. He listened because he wanted to feel like a part of the place. He believed in Crandall, admired him.

“Watson’s coming here?” Crandall said. “I didn’t order him to come here.”

It was Sunday afternoon. They’d just come from chapel, where Crandall had preached on the security channel, for Initiates only. Fresh from church, Ben and Rolff were in their dress uniforms, standing beside Crandall’s chair.

Johnston was in a real-cloth Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suit, blue serge and subtly cut. He had the sturdy, brown-haired, blue-eyed, enlightened-young-cowpoke looks that Crandall liked to surround himself with. Early twenties, very serious. Johnston stood by in case Crandall wanted to send a reply.

Crandall seemed to consider it, then shook his head. “Wouldn’t get to him, anyway. Well, he’d better have a hell of a good excuse. He’s supposed to be gettin’ squared away to clean the chimney, sweep those little greasers out of their nest.”

Meaning the NR, Hayes guessed.

Hayes found himself watching Rolff. He looked a little pale. He was staring at the satelex print. Rolff looked up and looked directly at Hayes, almost like he wanted to say something to him. Then he dropped his eyes and cleared his, throat. “Sir . . . ”

Crandall muttered, without looking up from the computer screen, “Yes?” He’d gone back to picking through statistics.

“Permission to use the bathroom.”

“Sure, Johnston’s here, he can stay till you’re back.”

“There’s something else, sir,” Johnston said with a little hesitation. “I don’t know if I should report on it till I’m sure . . . but I’ve got a good feeling about it.”

“What’s that?” Crandall asked, glancing up at Johnston.

Rolff was moving toward the door, but slowly, as if he wanted to hear what Johnston was going to say.

Johnston said, “The Secur-search data base has put a red star next to an island in the Caribbean. Place called Merino. Dinky place, sir. Military installation there we thought belonged to Costa Rica. Set up to look like it’s part of Costa Rica. Camouflaged that way, I think. But there are a number of irregularities. Civilian jets from Mexico City landing there with unusual frequency, and we’ve identified the owner of one of the jets, sir.
Witcher.
” Edge of excitement in his voice. “We think we might have a major NR stronghold. Maybe Western HQ.”

“Lordy. Who all knows about this?”

“Just me and you, sir. In accordance with your directive.”

“Good. I’m feelin’ funny about security again. If it leaks that we know where they are, they’ll run and hide again.”

Rolff wasn’t listening to them, Hayes realized. He was standing in the doorway, staring. At Hayes. Just looking at him, a little to his right. One hand resting on his gun butt. The other, his left, remained in his pocket. The hand in his pocket made a movement. Hayes saw it through the cloth, and then lights flashed. The ceiling lights. Flashing on and off, over and over, in a pattern and—oh, God, but Hayes had a roller-coaster feeling inside. The room got all tunnel-dark, except for a corona of light around Crandall and Johnston, and they were moving in slow motion, looking up at Hayes, Johnston reaching into his coat, Crandall throwing his arms in front of his face. Why were they reacting that way?

And then Hayes saw that there was a gun pointed at Crandall (the lights flashed—oh, no) and the gun was in Hayes’s hand, his own gun.
I’m pointing a gun at Rick. What am I doing?

Slow motion went to fast motion as he squeezed the trigger again and again, not even having to sight in, his hand doing it for him. He heard shouting, and then Crandall’s head exploded, and the gun was tracking up to Johnston.

Johnston had his gun out now, and Ben had his leveled. Something kicked into Hayes, right through the middle of him. He saw Johnston falling, knew that he’d shot him, felt another kick in the side of the head where Rolff had shot him.

He heard a long squealing sound, like metal wheels braking, the sound accompanying a white light, a white light that bore down on him like a train’s headlight, and when it hit him it made everything into white light.

And then silence.

“The lights flashed,” Ben said, “like a signal. And the new guy shot Rick. That Hayes guy.” Ben was crying, big guy like that blubbering.

Klaus, standing behind Watson, snorted and shook his head.

Watson turned to Rolff. “What was Johnston there about?”

“About your satelex,” Rolff said. “And about something he’d found. I didn’t catch what. I was . . . Hayes seemed to be acting funny so I was pretty focused on him . . . ” Rolff glanced at Ben. “I didn’t move fast enough . . . ”

You’re a bad actor, Rolff,
Watson thought. But fortunately Ben was too upset to notice.

Rolff went on, “I didn’t catch it. You get it, Ben? What was it Johnston wanted?”

“Something about a satellite picture,” Ben said, his voice breaking, nose running. They were in the dark-wood living room, sitting on the black leather couch, Ben with his head in his hands.

Crandall was only three hours dead. Watson felt . . . what? Mostly a kind of dreamy detachment.
Crandall was dead!
Unreal. And Watson was tired, jet-lagged, but the adrenaline of the trip—never quite sure if the New-Soviets were going to let you through—still had him jacked up. “I don’t know,” Ben said after a moment. “I didn’t pay attention because I was noticing how Rolff was looking at Hayes and . . . ” He shrugged. Then he looked at Rolff. It made Watson uncomfortable to look at Ben; such a big man, a muscle rippler, with his face tear-streaked like a five-year-old who’d scraped his knee. “You shouldn’t have shot Hayes in the head, Rolff,” Ben said. “That was stupid. We can’t extract now.”

Not that extraction would show much. But then, perhaps Rolff had done well: an experienced extracting tech might realize that Hayes had had his brain rearranged by an extractor before. Conclusions could be drawn from that. Yes, Rolff had good instincts.

“And you,” Ben was saying, looking at Watson. “Hayes was sent over by your people.”

A shame Johnston had been there. That had confused Hayes’s cerebral reprogramming. He’d been programmed to shoot Crandall and the man standing with Crandall, which should have been Ben. But Johnston had been there with Ben . . . so Ben was alive and might be suspicious.

To kill him, though, pretend he’d been killed at the same time as the others. That would alert Sackville-West. “This came in just ten minutes ago,” Watson said. And in saying it committed himself to letting Ben live. He handed Ben a satelex. It read:

Arrest Special BG Hayes instantly. Repeat: Arrest and hold now for extraction team. The following is text of Hayes’s letter to newspaper
International Herald Tribune
 . . . “I have decided to terminate the life of Rick Crandall, a pious hypocrite whose distortions of God’s Teachings are an embarrassment to all real Christians. St. Peter has come to me in a dream and asked me to do this, and I want the world to know why I’m doing it. By the time you get this, I will be a part of history. I will have killed the Antichrist.”

“So that was it!” Ben said. “He was crazy!” A little relieved, for some reason. “But why couldn’t this have come just a little earlier . . . It isn’t fair . . . ”

Watson nodded with a believable look of sympathy, thinking: The ground had been prepared; false background on Hayes, which Sackville-West would be allowed to unearth, made it look as if Hayes had converted to “Christ’s Army” fanatics, the Christian equivalent of Muslim militant fundamentalists, dead set against Crandall. “He’d decided that Crandall was the Antichrist.”

Ben put his face in his hands. Rolff and Klaus looked at each other; Klaus rolled his eyes. Rolff smiled.

“Rick was important to you, wasn’t he, Ben,” Watson said.

Ben nodded into his hands.

“He was important to all of us,” Watson said. “He was the heart and soul of the Second Alliance and its Church. We can’t let him die. Our people, our movement . . . all of us, we need him too badly.”

Ben, red-eyed, looked up at him. “You can’t revive him. His head . . . ”

“We can revive . . . what he symbolized. And we can revive Crandall as a symbol. Not as a martyr. Not yet. In time. But for now, we need Crandall himself. Or . . . an image of him. We’ll computer-animate him. A generated image of him will go out on the channels, will continue giving orders, lectures, insights. Just as he would. We’ll be . . . arranging it.”