In the morning they gathered in Dowd’s room for a planning session.
“I’ve got ID for myself and a commercial permit for transporting radio gear,” Dowd said, “so I’m good for the border. You all have identification you haven’t used yet, so use it today. Beth can ride with me. But it’s too dangerous to cross in a stolen vehicle, even with new plates and a paint job. So we ditch the car and you guys buy yourselves bus tickets, San Diego to Tijuana. We’ll meet up at the depot on Avenida Revolución. Leo, you still have that pistol you shot a guy with?”
Leo gave Eugene Dowd a cold stare. Beth must have told him the story. “Yes.”
“Give it to me.”
Leo didn’t move, though his eyes darted to the green duffel bag he had carried all the way from Buffalo.
“Come on,” Dowd said. “What are you gonna do, cross the border with a gun in your luggage? That’s just stupid. Give me the pistol and we’ll ditch it along with the car.”
“What if I need to protect myself?”
Beth, standing next to Dowd with a proprietary hand on his arm, said, “You should listen to Eugene. He knows about these things.”
Leo scowled but retrieved the gun from his bag and handed it to Dowd, who checked the safety before tucking it into the waistband of his jeans.
“One other thing,” Dowd said. “I know your daddy gave you my Kansas address, and he told me I should watch out for you if you showed up. That’s fine. That’s part of the deal. But he didn’t say anything about her,” Cassie, “or him,” (Thomas). “And I’m not real happy about looking after children on this junket, especially when we have a few thousand miles of the Trans-American Highway ahead of us.”
“They don’t need you to look after them,” Leo said. “They’re with me.”
“Well,” Dowd said, “leaving them behind isn’t safe either, considering they’re wanted criminals. I suppose we could shoot them.” He smiled to show this was meant as a joke. “But once we’re in Mexico you might fix them up with a little hacienda and a cash stake for the duration. Safer for all of us.”
“No!” Thomas said before Leo could answer.
“Didn’t ask your opinion,” Dowd said.
“They’re with me,” Leo repeated, “at least until I can talk to my father.”
“Yeah, well…” Dowd shrugged. “The next mail drop’s in Mazatlán. I guess they can tag along that far. But then this business gets serious. Everyone clear on that?”
They were all clear.
At the San Ysidro crossing a bored customs agent strolled down the aisle of the Greyhound bus asking desultory questions and examining papers. Cassie sat with Thomas, and for the purpose of the crossing they were brother and sister en route to visit their uncle in Rosarito Beach. The guard gave their documents a cursory look—the Common Passport Accord had made this a formality—and moved on. Neither Cassie and Thomas nor Leo a few rows back, appeared to arouse his suspicion.
The bus idled a little longer in a cloud of diesel fumes, then grunted into motion. Cassie listened to nearby passengers chatting in in Spanish as they passed under the Port of Entry gates and crossed the brown Tijuana River. “You going to Rosarito?” a woman asked her as the bus pulled into the station on Avenida Revolución. “I heard you say.”
Cassie stood to shuffle out, taking Thomas by the hand. “Rosarito, yes.”
“Very nice! Feliz navidad!”
Rosarito, no, she thought. No, we’re not bound for Rosarito Beach. We’re bound for Antofagasta, Chile. We’re bound for the Atacama desert. We’re bound for the end of the world.
20
JOPLIN, MISSOURI
“WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO INTERCEPT THEM in Sinaloa,” Werner Beck said. “Failing that, we’ll meet them in Antofagasta.”
He had explained about Chile, about the facility the hypercolony had supposedly constructed in the Atacama desert, the beams of high-intensity light. He hadn’t seen it himself, but he had talked to an eyewitness, and there was plenty of corroborating evidence: from shipping manifests, from suppliers of industrial parts and rare earths, from inexplicable lacunae in the routes by which commercial aircraft passed from Chile to Bolivia and Brazil. Beck had made a study of it.
The facility in the desert, he insisted, was the hypercolony’s reproductive mechanism. Strike there and you strike at the heart of the beast. Or at least, Nerissa thought, its balls.
Ethan seemed convinced. Nerissa wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that she might at last be able to put her arms around Thomas and Cassie and shelter them from Beck’s militant fantasies.
While Ethan was showering she sat in the kitchen with Beck and raised a question that had been troubling her. It was about what the sim Winston Bayliss had said, that there was a parasite at work in the hypercolony, that the hypercolony was divided against itself. Could that be true? If not, why had Bayliss been attacked in Ethan’s farm house by a different party of sims?
“It’s possible,” Beck said. “There are certain signs.”
“Such as?”
“All the cultures from Ethan’s ice cores are identical and compatible. But we’ve cultured fresher strains, and the two samples sometimes compete for resources in vitro until one is eliminated. But I’d hesitate to draw any conclusions from that.”
“Still, what Bayliss said—”
“Nothing a sim says is trustworthy, Mrs. Iverson. And all warfare is based on deception.”
“You’re quoting Sun Tzu.”
“I suppose I am. Of course, what emanates from the hypercolony isn’t even a conscious lie.”
Nerissa’s busy mind turned up a different quote, from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson: But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons. “So it is possible there could be some kind of internal conflict going on.”
“Sure, but it’s impossible to know.”
Ethan came into the room fully dressed and with his suitcase in hand. “Packed and ready.”
They waited while Beck built a fire in the living-room fireplace and systematically burned the contents of his files, including Dr. Wyndham’s ghastly photographs. Nothing must be left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy.
Beck drove one hundred and fifty miles to the international airport in Kansas City, where he paid for long-term parking in a lot where the car wouldn’t be disturbed for at least three weeks. At the terminal he booked seats on the next available flight to Mazatlán. Not long after dark, a gleaming six-prop aircraft lofted them into
the night sky. Nerissa, sleepless in a window seat, watched prairie towns pass beneath the plane like luminous maps of a world she could no longer inhabit and which her traveling companions had sworn to dismantle. Several times she caught Beck looking at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read—suspicion? Curiosity? As if he wondered what secret motive she might be concealing.
But her motives weren’t secret, not secret at all. Let Beck conduct his war against a hostile abstraction; let Ethan join him, if that was what Ethan wanted to do. She would follow a certain distance down that road. But she was fighting a different war, for a different cause. And maybe Beck understood that truth about her. And maybe that was why she was so frightened of him.
21
MAZATLÁN