Grand Junction (36 page)

“But what does he know?”

“Haven’t you noticed that it’s been two or three years of rumors swirling around the Territory about people who are being immunized by who knows what, or who … and for months people have been talking about a mysterious ‘antimachine’ hidden somewhere in the south of the
Territory … and now this Professor has arrived in Junkville who was one of the Metastructure’s designers … do you still not see, Vegas?”

“He … he’s the one who … made it?”

“Obviously. Imagine, Vegas, the power and wealth of anyone who could control this anti-machine.”

“You mean, control the Professor?”

“That is exactly why I’ve given you this mission. First we need to locate him, as fast as possible. Then we need to monitor him day and night. We have to know the smallest detail of what he does. We have to spy on him until he tells us the location of his antimachine without knowing he’s doing it. Then we act.”

Vegas understands. He nods his head, mechanically, at the obviousness.

Everything happens very fast.

First he sees the man leave a luxury mobile home of anodized aluminum.

Then he sees him get behind the wheel of his car.

Then he sees the red Buick cautiously descend an access road from the top of the butte.

The Buick drives to the road that leads from Little Congo to Vortex Townships on one side and Windtalker Alley on the other. It turns east, toward Windmill Park.

He starts up his Kawasaki.

And everything comes apart; in an instant, everything erupts:

He puts the bike in motion, his eye fixed on the red Buick as it heads east of the city—he follows it at a safe distance of barely thirty meters—in the rearview mirror is the image of a topaz yellow Toyota pickup—he has already seen it this morning, in Vortex Townships; it has the distinctive mark of the necro Triads—and he has seen it again since then, parked for five or ten minutes not far from the butte, before the Buick drove away—so he is being followed—he follows the red Buick, but someone else is following it, too—or following him, rather—yes, that’s it, dammit—the man in the red Buick must be having him watched by men trained to follow his every movement—this fucking patsy is watching his back—not like him, alone with his Kawasaki—now he’d better act, fast, very fast, and well, very, very well.

He’d better do what Campbell would do.

He’d better act without the slightest conscience.

The trap: the good old plan of the route northeast of Deadlink. Then Row 299. Then Neon Park; he’ll lose them there, leave them believing that he lives around here, or at least spends a lot of time here.

The trap has been tested. Verified. Verified again. Campbell never leaves anything to that foolish god Luck.

The trap is part of the Territory, the purest emanation of it. It uses him but in return he will use it, because in the Territory traps are a form of life. The whole Territory is a machine. A trap.

The fundamental Law of the Territory can be summed up in a few words: Cheat or be cheated. It’s no worse than any other law.

He drives behind the Buick to the junction with Tin Machine, where he lets it continue east while he turns north, toward one of the still-usable bridges that spans the old highway. In the rearview mirror he can see the Toyota swerve toward Tin Machine in its turn.

Someone is definitely following him.

He will have to lose this pickup and its occupants.

He is in danger.

There are many rules in the territory. Chrysler taught them to him a long time ago. Some of these rules let you ensure your daily survival. The ordinary ones. Others, more rare, are there to guarantee your survival in case of extraordinary events, unusual ones, out of the norm, unforeseen.

Yuri knows the territory like the back of his hand, but he quickly realizes that the occupants of the pickup aren’t amateurs, either. Nothing to do with the red Buick. Of course, the Toyota isn’t as high-performance as Campbell’s huge vehicle, but it definitely outweighs Yuri’s little motorbike.

He rapidly sees that they aren’t trying to avoid being seen. They’re sticking to him from two hundred meters behind, and they aren’t doing a thing to stay invisible.
They’re fucking themselves
, he thinks, as he passes in front of the abandoned interchange at Deadlink with its masses of refugees in their collapsible shelters.

And if they’re fucking themselves, they probably have a plan, too
.

A plan he knows.

First rule: Always know, or guess, your adversary’s plans.

Second rule: Never let the adversary know, or guess, yours.

Third rule: Think deeply, act fast, disappear even faster.

Fourth rule: Strike first, strike hard, strike to the heart.

And finally the fifth rule, taken from the Special Forces manual: If your attack is going pretty well, it’s an ambush.

Hard cases, thinks Yuri. He has tried everything—leaving the row, taking just barely navigable roads, half-turning to the south, turning north again, regaining the road that leads west, reentering the row, and speeding east toward Neon Park.

They won’t let him go. They stick to their plan. Very well, thinks Yuri. Don’t forget the rules of survival in the Territory.

If your attack is going pretty well, it’s an ambush
.

For now their attack is going pretty well. Their plan is working perfectly.

Now it’s up to him to turn it into an ambush. To set a trap for them. To make a machine.

He knows their plan; it’s the one he and Chrysler use to lose their pursuers. He knows how to act to foil this plan. All he’s missing are the things most important for a successful operation.

Weapons.

In its side compartments, the Kawasaki has only medical materials and a military Taser with a voltage controller. It would be quite a procedure to carry out emergency modifications to it. A simple Taser and a few hypodermic syringes! The others are probably armed, not to mention the fact that their vehicle could inflict devastating damage on any motorbike—and any human body.

Chrysler told him once that the fifth rule signifies that a plan, even the best one, may quickly display its limitations. And that the surest way to counteract a plan is to let your adversary believe it is working.

He approaches Neon Park, still making fruitless attempts to leave Row 299, lose his pursuers, and return. It is only a decoy, part of his
counterplan. He has to make them believe he is at the end of his resources, that he no longer knows what to try, that he is vainly repeating the same maneuvers, that he has no chance to get away.

That he will end up running out of gas.

Rule number six: Jujitsu, Bushido, aikido. Use your adversary’s strength against him.

Rule number seven: Learn to see your own weaknesses as unforeseen opportunities for your adversary. Turn his shortcomings into assets. Transform his most obvious strengths into handicaps.

Rule number eight: Don’t do what is expected, especially by you. Know how to display a false repetition of routines, the better to break it at the opportune moment. Conceive of the effect of surprise not as a simple thunderbolt limited in time, but as a long-lasting barrage of fire.

Rule number nine: Imagine all the possibilities, but once a decision is made, never back down.

Rule number ten: Don’t forget any of the previous rules.

The trap worked.

Hard-asses, thinks Yuri, but nobody in the Territory can fight Chrysler Campbell and his teachings.

The Kawasaki is parked in the middle of Row 299, just past a bend at the edge of Neon Park, between two wooded hills. Here there is still vegetation—chaparral bushes, trees, bindweed brambles, masses of blackberry bushes, wild roses, erigeron, ambrosia, wild mustard and Canadian goldenrod mingled together, and tumbleweeds rolling through the dust and past holes filled with tall wild grasses. Plenty of places to hide from the Toyota’s occupants. The hardy, injurious plants of the Territory can fulfill that role to perfection.

Their plan works perfectly, too.
Pretty well, indeed
.

The Kawasaki has broken down, and its driver must have fled into the surrounding countryside nearby
.

So we get out of the pickup, our guns in plain view
.

Yuri can see a machine gun in the hands of a huge African American dressed in the yellow-and-black uniform typical of the Vortex Triads who has just extricated himself heavily from the passenger seat.

A blond dressed in red from head to toe has already emerged from the driver’s side, holding a big aluminum-colored snub-nosed revolver.

The plan worked really well. If we don’t trap him right away, all we have to do is wait for him to come back. He can’t leave his bike in the middle of the road forever
.

The men make a small tour of inspection around the small neighboring buttes, glancing briefly at the Kawasaki, holding a brief consultation that they continue as they head back toward their vehicle.

If your attack is going pretty well, it’s an ambush
.

If man is the most terrible of predators, it is precisely because he has a strong awaresness of the morality of his actions.

This “moral conscience” serves as a natural barrier against the most murderous instincts that can arise in any animal.

But man is not just an animal. His “moral” conscience is there less to prevent him from regressing to his most primitive levels than to keep him from reaching an often-unknowable stage
above
his strictly human condition.

The simple animal impulse is what allows men to kill.

But what is located a notch
above
moral conscience, what suddenly emerges once the natural barrier is breached, is much more terrifying.

Because it isn’t just about killing, even in the rage of legitimate defense or in the cold cruelty of the carnivore playing with its prey before devouring it.

It is about killing as invisibly, secretly,
technically
as possible.

It is about treating assassination as one of the Beaux Arts.

An exact science, Chrysler would surely call it.

Exact, the science.

Technical, the trap.

Very beautiful, the art.

Very simple, the blow.

Very simple, truly.

“… or maybe he went to some hideout in Neon Park,” the enormous black man is saying as he climbs back into his seat.

“You want to go all the way there? I don’t know the area too well; do you?”

“Not really, but if we drive fast we can probably still catch him on the road.”

“What should I do, smash his fucking motorbike on the way?” demanded the driver, putting the key in the ignition.

In your dreams, my friend
, says Yuri silently, sitting up from his hiding place underneath a pile of objects in the pickup’s backseat.

He is already in “automatic mode.”

Once you have begun to act, finish as quickly as possible. Once you have thought of what to do, do it without another thought.

The Taser flashes against the back of the big black man’s shaved head, voltage turned up to maximum. Distance: zero centimeters. The man emits a low groan and loses consciousness, his body twitching violently. He’ll have one hell of a concussion later, and probably much worse.

In the same fraction of a second, Yuri’s left hand presses the release of a hypodermic syringe he has pressed against the back of the driver’s neck, its projection force set as high as it will go. The tiny arrow of titanium and glass-composite shoots in one end of the blond man’s throat and out the other, punching a hole in the spinal cord and vertebral column before pulverizing his Adam’s apple. A little blood spatters the windshield in fine droplets.

There.

That’s the end of that.

Very simple. Very quick. Very lethal.

The two men slump slowly forward in the same strangely synchronous movement, as if manipulated by an invisible puppeteer.

Yuri gets out of the Toyota, maintaining a careful grip on the two objects that have just bestowed death with surgical precision, as if they were talismans dedicated to a deity he knows only too well. His hands are perfectly steady. His heart is still and calm, as if encased in a block of ice. His brain is an impeccable, translucent sphere absorbing all the universe’s radiation.

Never believe that killing someone makes death your friend
, Chrysler told him once.
That’s the most common mistake. Remember, death by definition doesn’t have any friends, any human allies, because it always finishes by carrying them off sooner or later
.

To kill someone
, he said,
is paradoxically to bring yourself as close to death as possible while also maintaining an infinite distance from it. It doesn’t become your
friend; on the contrary, it becomes more and more of a stranger to you. Like a lover, or a spouse, who moves farther away the closer you try to get to it
.

The sun is exploding in the turquoise sky, a golden furnace tinting everything within reach of its rays with silvery light, applying to every morsel of rock the geometric and brilliant perfection of a block of diamond, causing waves of heat to rise from the earth and giving every substance, vegetable or mineral, the very texture of the day, the very form of beauty.

Including the pickup.

The pickup containing the two men he just killed.

Automatic mode. Automatic mode. Act fast, disappear fast, turn your counterplan into a long-term ruse. Think deeply. Act fast.

He just killed two men.

Well, at least one of them, the African American giant, might have survived the direct electric shock to his head.

Think deeply, act fast, strike hard.

If the man isn’t dead, he’ll be able to give a description of Yuri—and whoever these guys are really working for, Yuri isn’t eager to be in his sights.

Notwithstanding the fact that he might already be there.

Given his constitution, the huge black guy has a small chance of surviving the Taser’s electric shock. It isn’t his lucky day.

Because he is in automatic mode—think deeply, act fast, strike hard—he is under the commandment of the Rules of the Territory.