Grand Junction (49 page)

On/off. Digital. Like the black night and the ultraviolet sky.

“You, Pluto,” says Yuri. “I advise you to stay very calm, place your hands on your head, and get down on your knees like your friend just did. You, Link, stay seated on the hood of your quad; please don’t move. You are not part of this situation.”

And Campbell adds to the man who raises his hands slowly to the back of his neck: “You will be the first one.”

Campbell knows the entire language of fear. The man instinctively bows his head, squares his shoulders, clenches his fingers until the knuckles turn white.

Chrysler allows a few seconds for the nail to be hammered into the coffin, then says:

“You will be the first one to answer some questions.”

He places the barrel of his Winchester lightly on the back of the man’s neck.

“My patience tends to run out pretty fast. When I’ve asked a question for the second time, that’s generally the limit. And when my patience has reached its limit, my finger presses on the first metal object within its reach. So I’m going to ask you some questions, and you would do well to answer them the first time, because if you don’t I guarantee that one of my twelve cartridges will prevent you from being buried with your head, which will have disappeared like a watermelon in a wood chipper. Do you understand me,
hombre?”

The man turns toward Campbell slightly, just enough to say, nodding his head, “Yes, I understand.”

And Yuri feels his heart lurch violently as he recognizes the man.

Campbell begins the interrogation, but Yuri is no longer listening; he can’t hear anymore; he has shifted to another channel of reality. The channel of consequences and causes. The channel of potential catastrophes.

Until now, the situation was serious. It has now become a true disaster.

Yuri stares into Pluto’s eyes and sees fear in them. He answers with an expression of pure disdain. Then he coldly informs Chrysler that the situation is much worse than they imagined.

Chrysler glances at him frostily. “By ‘situation,’ I assume you mean this man.”

Yuri takes a deep breath. It is up to him, now, to announce the imminent arrival of the cataclysm.

“Yes. It’s him. The man in the Buick.”

Now the ultraviolet night has fallen on everything, isolating this small piece of the Territory from the rest of humanity.

The fire of the stars shines for each of them, and for each it has reserved its own particular combustion.

“Bravo, Pluto. You really know how to behave. This is the man with the red Buick, a piece of shit from Little Congo, the guy who’s been following us for weeks. Thanks to you and your delusions of personal grandeur, he has found us. You’re nothing but a worthless bastard; you let yourself be manipulated like a little girl. But I’ll deal with you later.”

The language of fear. That language that writes itself in the body. Yuri reads the alphabet in Pluto’s face, and in his smallest movements—reflexes, expressions. Down to the pallid color of his face, shiny with cold sweat.

Campbell turns back to the man at whom his weapon is pointing.

“You must see, Mr. Vegas Orlando, that now we’re going to have to resume our little interview from a slightly different angle.”

And he strikes the man a violent blow to the side of the head with the butt of his gun. Yuri can see the blood trickling in fine bluish lines through his binoculars.

The night is very, very black. The night is interrogatory black. It is a dungeon of a night. An ultrablack night.

A lake, underbrush, a dusty road, the sky and the stars. Four men, one boy. Two men armed; two men on their knees. The boy is just an observer of the whole thing.

The night is interrogatory black, Gestapo black, NKVD black, CIA black. It is the pirated recording, the clandestine listening station, the secret file. It is Chrysler Campbell and James Vegas Orlando. And Madam Winchester SX3, who has just placed a cold kiss on the neck of the man on his knees.

It is the night that speaks:

“Very well; we’ll start over from the beginning. Start with your first contact with Pluto Saint-Clair—and don’t try to feed me any bullshit about meeting in Vortex Townships. I’ve filled whole cemeteries with jokers like you.”

The silence of the night, a few instants too long.

“I would prefer not to have to ask you again. I think you’ve understood me.”

“I’ve been using him as a spy.”

“Yes, like you spied on all of us in Carbon City. Why Pluto?”

“You—we couldn’t pin you down, and we wanted to move faster. One night, I was able to follow Pluto here and I saw the trade they were running—the boy on the quad bike and the two teenagers from New Arizona. I saw guitars.”

Campbell looks at Link de Nova, sitting on his Suzuki in front of two long black-and-tawny electric guitars lying side by side on the still rain-wet earth, like offerings.

“I understand. So you followed Pluto and you saw the trade. But your words have given you away; you said ‘we.’ You’ve said it more than once, so it isn’t just a slip of the tongue. Who is ‘we’?”

A few seconds of silence, but this time the man starts speaking again just before Campbell can remind him—with the butt of his gun—of the rules of the game.

“I hired some guys to flesh out the investigation, but they didn’t turn up anything on you, so we concentrated our research on Pluto Saint-Clair.”

Yuri and Campbell exchange a glance full of the Territory’s secrets. The men on Row 299. Vegas Orlando’s little soldiers. He doesn’t seem to know that they’re dead, that Yuri wiped them out.

In fact, he doesn’t seem to know a lot of things. But there is at least one thing he does know.

The most important thing.

“Okay. Very interesting. You’re rising in our estimation, Mr. Orlando. Now I’m going to ask you a crucial question, and it will not tolerate the slightest bending of the rules I’ve laid out for you. Understood?”

“Understood perfectly.”

“Excellent. Who are you working for?”

The seconds are stars whose fire shines in the night.

This time, the standard delay is exceeded by a great deal.

“I’m going to be nice and ask the question a second time without killing you first. Now, who are you working for?”

“I … I don’t know what you’re talking about; I swear.”

“Too bad.”

The ultraviolet night has fallen on this part of the Territory, and the ultra-black night is Campbell’s friend. It is very simple, very fast, very clean.

The butt of the gun hits the man’s other cheek, hard. He gives a groan of pain and falls heavily on his side, then gets shakily back up on his knees, prodded by the pressure of the Winchester’s barrel. Again, thin geysers of bluish blood spurt in Yuri’s binoculars.

“Don’t mistake me for a fool, Mr. Orlando. I know you by name; I know you wouldn’t have the means to conduct a wide-scale search in the Territory, or even in Junkville. Someone has to be helping you. And I want to know the name of your … associate.”

A moment of silence, shot through with vibrations that could contain an eternity.

“I … if … if I tell you, will you let me live?”

The man gasps like an animal being tracked by a nocturnal predator. He’s right, thinks Yuri; it would be better if he knew how to run very fast, with Campbell at his heels.

The night is ultrablack. The time to make a deal with death has come. The moment of truth—the moment of betrayal.

“How can I know you’re telling the truth, for starters?”

“I … I’ll give you all the details … listen, I’ll tell you everything, and I’ll get out of the Territory within forty-eight hours. Anyway, my life won’t be worth a drop of gasoline once I tell you his name.”

“Your life is already pretty far down on the list. You’d better decide.”

And Campbell gently presses the barrel of his gun into the man’s neck. It is as if he has heaved a sigh of impatience mingled with resignation. Yes, the night is surely interrogatory black.

“They say the exception proves the rule. For the third and very last time, who are you working for? You have three seconds before I pulverize your head. One … two …”

“I … I work for a man from Little Congo.”

“Good; you know how to count to three. Who is this man? Another pimp? What is his name?”

“He isn’t a pimp. He’s a surgeon, an autotransformist, a refugee from Neon Park.”

Yuri remembers the deluxe mobile home at the top of the butte, near which the red Buick had been parked on that day. A former resident of Neon Park; a bionician. Undoubtedly one of the very last in the Territory. A man who would know how to profit from his knowledge. It makes sense.

“A surgeon?”

“Yes, a specialist in body tuning. He worked on the strip in Monolith Hills as a whore before he moved to Neon Park. He’s androgynous.”

Yuri knows the man has decided that if he is to betray, then he might as well betray everything, do anything to save his own skin, give as much information as he can.

“His name?” asks Campbell again.

“He’s very discreet. He can repair some biosystems—not as well as the boy here, but he implanted a nanogenerator in me that has worked for a month now.”

“And you told yourself you could get something even better. I understand.”

Suddenly, Yuri knows that the same flash of understanding is coursing through his and Campbell’s consciousnesses. The ultraviolet night is their Grand Junction.

“A moment. Pay attention now. Did you plan a meeting between your associate and Pluto, and the one we’ll call ‘the boy’?”

A very brief moment of black night, of silent interrogatory night.

“Yes. Day after tomorrow. I asked Pluto to arrange another contact as soon as possible, for a friend in need, I told him. He told me we had to do it before you got back, so we set the date.”

Campbell looks at Pluto Saint-Clair. The cold light in his eyes almost matches that of the starfire.

“What else did he say about us?”

“Nothing much, except that you were the boy’s bodyguards.”

“And your ‘associate’; what does he know about us?”

“Almost nothing. That’s why we were looking all over the Territory for information about you, and why my ‘associate,’ as you call him, wanted to get a meeting by saying it was urgent.”

“But it wasn’t urgent?”

“Listen, I don’t know exactly what he was planning. He always keeps the details of his plans secret.”

“Plans? What plans?”

“He wanted to be immunized, but afterward he had planned a surprise attack. He asked me to scope out the site.”

“A surprise attack? I’d very much like to hear more about this, and fast. I love stories about situation rooms.”

“I think—but he didn’t tell me to the letter, okay?—I think he wanted to have himself immunized, and then immediately afterward kidnap Pluto Saint-Clair and the boy.”

A betrayal for a betrayal, thinks Yuri, watching Pluto’s face whiten as if his entire body has been emptied of blood. Yes, old man, that’s how it is. You were in the process of getting yourself fucked over royally.

Campbell simply shoots a frozen glance at the man from Midnight Oil, the man who was their informant, and who informed others about them.

“He wanted to kidnap Pluto and the boy, I understand very well. What did he want, to make the boy work for him and use Pluto as an adviser?”

“I don’t know. But he was thinking farther along than that.”

“Farther than what? And, let me remind you, you still haven’t told me his name.”

“Farther than the boy. He thinks the boy is acting under the influence of another man.”

“Another man?”

“Yeah. A professor. A man from Texas. The one you went to find on BlackSky Ridge. He wanted to make this professor work for him in exchange for his hostages’ lives. He told me one night that he was going to send him Pluto Saint-Clair’s head to show him he wasn’t kidding around.”

Yuri almost laughs at the sight of their erstwhile informant’s crumpled face. He grins at him, but his eyes are full of the same ice as Chrysler Campbell’s.

“His name. Now. Immediately. I think I’m light-years beyond my natural limits.”

The response bursts forth without an instant of hesitation. “Silverskin. He’s called Jade Silverskin. Let me live; I won’t say anything to anyone, and I’ll leave the Territory. …”

The man has conducted his betrayal well. He delivered the crucial information at the end, but he proved his goodwill by telling a coherent, simple story, all the details of which fit together perfectly.

Chrysler Campbell is silent. The ultrablack night is on his side. His brain analyzes all the data, all the parameters. He draws diagrams, he compiles programs, he calculates. Seconds of silence go by like photons in the ultrablack night.

The man on his knees does not speak. Chrysler Campbell does not speak. Yuri does not speak. Neither Pluto nor Link de Nova has said a word.

The ultrablack night is the night of hunters, the night of birds of prey. Campbell calculates. He
computes
. He establishes correspondences, consequences, inferences, incidences; he creates a grammar of the night, there, at the very moment Yuri is watching him, his gun pointed at the neck of the man on his knees on the damp ground.

Campbell is silent. The man is silent. Between them stretches the silence of the ultrablack night, the alpha-and-omega night, the night when all the lights are revealing themselves. Campbell is silent. The man is silent. The black interrogatory night has stopped its chorus, silencing all the voices.

All except one.

Campbell is silent. The man is silent. Yuri is silent. Pluto is silent. Link is silent.

The one who speaks, suddenly, raising the voice of the interrogatory night one more time, is Madam Winchester.

She causes the head of James Vegas Orlando to explode, like a large, ripe fruit, just as Campbell said it would. A violent scarlet efflorescence takes the place of the man’s skull. His body falls forward in a single motion, crumpling onto a carpet of catchfly and red
Cornus
spotted with snowflakes and grains of sand.

“You won’t say anything, but you won’t leave the Territory, either,” says Campbell simply, in a macabre version of a funeral oration.