She was the enemy. Better not to forget that. Play his part, play it to the hilt, and keep an eye on her throughout.
Just get to Wyoming, get to John Smith, and end this.
For all the children.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Three days of green and brown and the road humming beneath their tires, of billboards against endless sky, of seemingly identical gas stations and fading radio stations. I-90 west, a long gray ribbon unfurling through the rolling hills of Wisconsin, the flatlands of Minnesota, the sun-bleached scrub of South Dakota. The cities decreased in size as they rode, from the Milwaukee skyline dotted with church towers and brewery signs to the barely-there hint of Sioux Falls and the low-slung strip malls of Rapid City.
They could have made the whole thing in a mad run but needed to kill time anyway and so drove eight-hour days and had dinner at chain restaurants. The silence hadn’t lasted. By the first evening, they were back to their calculatedly casual routine. They avoided politics, kept things light. Told stories of growing up, of friends and drunken misadventures and favorite books, tales neither intimate nor distant.
Last night they’d stopped at a roadside motel in the Black Hills. Ate delivery pizza and flipped channels on the tri-d, skipping the news networks without acknowledging it. Outside the world was black, just gone, and the sky awash with stars. He’d fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing in the other bed.
This morning they’d risen early and crossed into Wyoming. He’d visited the state only once, a camping trip with Natalie in the Grand Tetons a dozen years before. It had been late summer then, the mountains carpeted in green. He remembered making love in the morning while coffee boiled on the campfire and birds sang in the trees.
Here, though, on the eastern edge of the state, the landscape was low and blasted, thorny underbrush and dry rock. It didn’t look like a place where people could live. The towns were tiny things clutching the highway.
Until they came to Gillette. It had once been a quiet place, twenty thousand people, mostly working in the energy industry. Then Erik Epstein had revealed that the massive portion of the state he’d quietly been buying would be combined into one vast new “commune,” a place he’d named New Canaan Holdfast, a home for people like him. Twist Territory, people had called it, and laughed at the idea of anyone trying to live there. Laughed, that was, until the full weight of his $300 billion came into play, and in a matter of months the world changed completely.
Gillette was the end point of a road into New Canaan. Along with two even smaller towns—Shoshoni on the west and Rawlins off I-80 to the south—it was one of the only ways to enter the Holdfast. Epstein had constructed broad highways, four lanes in each direction, that ran into the center of a wasteland, a rough-edged slash through some of the least desirable land of the United States. He’d bought the land for dollars an acre, bought it through holding companies and at auction, bought it around existing villages of twenty people, bought sprawling cattle ranches and mineral rights for ranges of oil and natural gas that lay too deep or were too sparse to have been tapped. The result was a patchwork of stony desert, largely contiguous land that had been barely touched in all of human history.
And with that move, the previously inconsequential towns of Gillette, Shoshoni, and Rawlins became nationally recognized as the gateways into New Canaan. Massive truck stops had sprung up, and housing for the thousands of construction workers who built the initial stages of the Holdfast. Restaurants and movie theaters and shopping malls swiftly followed. Finally came tourist hotels and trinket shops and storefront museums and all the rest.
As a kid, Cooper had loved science-fiction movies, especially the ones from the seventies, all gaudy colors and neon and people in jumpsuits. There was something so kitschily appealing about them, the world transformed into a metropolis two hundred stories high. But now, as they waited in a sea of trucks twenty minutes past Gillette, it occurred to him that the future hadn’t turned out like that at all. The barren landscape and blinding sun looked more like the past. A cowboy western.
“How long does it take to clear the checkpoint?”
“From here?” Shannon was at the wheel; she craned her neck sideways to see around the 18-wheeler in front of them. “Probably fifteen minutes.”
“Efficient.”
“Has to be. The entrance is basically a massive delivery depot.”
“Yeah, I know.” Like any DAR agent, he’d had numerous briefings on the Holdfast. While culturally it resembled Israel shortly after the Second World War, NCH faced a unique set of circumstances. Because it was American soil, it had to abide by US law. But $300 billion made for all manner of exceptions. Epstein’s lawyers and lobbyists had cobbled together a hundred loopholes, resulting in the Holdfast being declared a separate county, with its own municipal code. And because the entire NCH was privately held corporate land, access could be controlled. “All the inbound trucks drop off their loads here, and then they’re distributed via an internal shipping network. Makes for a lot of jobs.”
“Jobs the Holdfast has plenty of. Unemployment is zero. And not only research—trucking, construction, mining, infrastructure, the works.”
“Sure. Got to have something for the normals to do.”
She laughed. “Not just normals. Plenty of gifted move here to be part of something, but a tier-five calculator or a tier-three musician aren’t exactly leading the charge in biomedical research.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“I’ve had my apartment for three years. I don’t know that I’d say I live here.”
“I know how that is.”
Ten minutes later he got his first look at the border. The four lanes of the highway doubled, then doubled again, and then again. The semis edged to the right, filling the bulk of the lanes, with passenger vehicles heading left. Each lane ran to a checkpoint not unlike a tollbooth. Guards in dun uniforms bearing the blue rising-star emblem of the Holdfast moved like ants, hundreds of them, talking to drivers, running mirrors under cars, walking German shepherds. The canopy over each checkpoint looked simple enough, but Cooper knew that it was packed with the most advanced newtech scanning devices in existence. The joke was that to see next year’s DAR gear, you just went to Wyoming and walked into a bar. That was the true protection of the Holdfast, the trump card more important than the desolate landscape or Epstein’s billions. The best minds in their fields, gifteds who individually jumped technology forward decades, here worked together, and the results flowed outward to the country as a whole.
You don’t need an army to conquer America, Cooper thought. You just need to produce entertainment centers people can’t live without.
Shannon pulled up beneath the canopy, the sudden shadow falling cool into the car. She rolled down the window, and a young guy with a neat moustache said, “Welcome to New Canaan Holdfast may I see your documentation please,” without pausing to breathe. They each dug for their passports—they’d discussed it on the way, the importance of not seeming too ready, too eager—and passed them over. The guard nodded and handed them to a woman behind him, who ran each against a scanner. Cooper knew it would be checking not only the validity of the passport, but also recent credit history, driving and criminal records, God knew what else.
Time to see if Schneider screwed us. The IDs and credit cards had worked fine on the way out, but that meant nothing at all. This was the first real test. Cooper forced nonchalant interest, looking around like a tourist.