It had been Beck’s idea to send Ethan to San Pedro de Atacama.
According to Beck the plan was simple: get a mobile radio source and signal generator within effective range of the Atacama facility, shut it down by interfering with its internal and external communications, and destroy the facility while its inhabitants were incapacitated. Beck claimed to have laboratory evidence that this scheme would work. His faith in it was messianic and, Nerissa suspected, gravely misplaced.
But Ethan considered the idea plausible, and at Beck’s suggestion he had agreed to travel to San Pedro de Atacama to scout out a place where a truck full of radio gear, a similar cargo of incendiary material, and Beck’s supposed fifty-man army could assemble for the attack.
He had been gone for two days now. Because it would have been suicidal to report by telephone, there was no way of knowing whether or not he had been successful. And because he had been away, he hadn’t seen the most recent evidence that Beck’s scheme was jury-rigged if not downright delusional.
The signal-generating device, which Beck had designed himself, had arrived in the back of Eugene Dowd’s van, but the amplification and broadcast gear Beck had ordered from Valparaiso hadn’t been delivered—hadn’t even been shipped, according to the freight service; the vendor had declared bankruptcy. Beck sulked for an afternoon, then told Nerissa he could make do with off-the-shelf equipment from another supplier… which would nevertheless have to be discreetly purchased and delivered, delaying the attack by at least a few days more.
And there was the question of his army. Fifty men, Beck had claimed. More like a platoon than an army. Fifty men good and true, recruited from three continents, to be housed in five safe houses scattered across Antofagasta. But at last report none of the alleged volunteers had succeeded in leaving their native countries. For replacements Beck had managed to recruit a dozen men from the pool of unemployed stevedores at the dockside union hall. These men believed they were being hired to transport liquor to an unlicensed ware house in San Pedro de Atacama, and while they would be useful for lifting and carrying duties, not even Beck envisioned them as combatants.
It didn’t matter, he insisted. As long as the radio gear and the incendiaries were delivered to the desert, a handful of men—even three or four—could successfully conduct the attack. If all went well.
That was the plan on which Ethan had wagered his life.
Downstairs, Nerissa found Beth Vance sitting by herself in the common room near the kitchen. Beth was still coming to terms with the news that her father was alive.
A single unarmed sim had approached John Vance on the day Cassie and Thomas fled Buffalo. They had seen a body being removed from the apartment building where Beth lived with her father, but that had been the remains of the sim, which John had elected to shoot rather than engage in conversation. John had since gone into hiding, Nerissa didn’t know where, but someone in Buffalo would be able to put him back in touch with Beth when they got home.
Beth looked up at Nerissa with an expression that was hard to decipher. “Were you with my father when he killed the sim?”
“We can talk about that tomorrow.”
“I’d rather talk about it now.”
“Okay,” Nerissa said. “If you like. The answer is no, I wasn’t there. I’d left for home by then.”
“But you spent the night?”
“Yes.”
“I knew about that. He told me he was seeing someone. He just didn’t say who.” She darted another glance at Nerissa, looked away. “It wasn’t the first time. He doesn’t usually see Society women, though. Most women he doesn’t see more than once. Actually, that’s why I was at Leo’s place. He didn’t care where I spent the weekend, as long as I was out of the house.”
“Maybe so. And maybe it was a mistake, my seeing him. But I’m sure he’s worried about you.”
“Not worried enough to come looking for me. Not the way you came after Cassie and Thomas.”
“That’s not a fair comparison. He doesn’t know anything about Werner Beck or Leo. Your father never paid attention to Correspondence Society business.”
Which, ironically, was one reason Nerissa had accepted John’s invitation to spend the night. Like John, she had been connected to the Society by marriage; like John, she harbored an abiding anger at the way the Society had disfigured their lives.
“Well, that’s true,” Beth said. “He doesn’t even like me going to survivor meetings. Probably we wouldn’t have had anything to do with the Society, except he needed the pension. It wasn’t much but it made a difference. Do you like my father?”
“We’re friends, but I don’t think it was going anywhere.”
“Not your type, huh?”
“Maybe we just weren’t the people we thought we were.”
“He can be a real shit. I’m not going back to him.”
“What?”
“Don’t look so shocked. I know him better than you do. I’ll go back to the States, but I’m not living with him again.”
“But why?”
“He never, you know, touched me or anything. But he likes to look. And he likes to say things.”
After a few wordless seconds Nerissa said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. People aren’t always what you think they are. But I guess you know that.”
Nerissa slept fitfully by the door of the bedroom, startled awake by every sound the house made in its negotiations with the cooling night. And when she did at last fall into a deeper sleep, she slept shamefully late. She needed to talk to Beck about arranging her flight to the United States—she was determined not to spend another night here; she would take the kids to a hotel if that was necessary—but by the time she was dressed and downstairs Beck and Leo had already left on some errand. They would be back—Cassie relayed this datum—before dinner.
Noon came. Beyond the windows, the air itself looked pale and hot. Beth brooded in the shady common room with an equally sullen Eugene Dowd. Cassie sat in the kitchen, watching Nerissa heat precooked empanadas from the store across the street.
Cassie wanted to talk about what the sim Winston Bayliss had said back at Ethan’s farm house: the idea that the hypercolony might have been infected by some competing entity. Was that possible? Maybe, Nerissa said. Beck had claimed there was some evidence for it. But the hypercolony, like the devil, was a proverbial liar. Nothing it said could be trusted.
“Still, if it’s true, it could help us.”
“I doubt it, Cassie. It would only make the sims less predictable.” And more dangerous, the way a wounded and cornered animal is dangerous. She thought again of Ethan, on this the third day of his sojourn in the desert.
Beck and Leo came back in the still heat of late afternoon. Beck walked through the door with his shoulders squared and his head at a cocky angle, obviously pleased with himself. “We secured a small truckload of incendiary material,” he told Dowd. “We can move as soon as the radio gear is in place.”
Nerissa was mildly surprised. No other part of Beck’s plan had fallen into place so easily. But maybe it wasn’t terribly difficult to buy black-market explosives in a town that catered to the needs of a vast mineral-extraction industry.
Leo’s expression was the opposite of his father’s, a grim disdain. “Show them what else you bought,” he said tonelessly.
Beck gave his son a hostile stare, then opened the bag he was carrying in his right hand.
Inside the bag was an unmarked white plastic box. He put the box on the kitchen table and pried it open. Embedded in a sculpted foam protector was a graduated glass syringe and a dozen needles in sterile paper sleeves.
“Let me explain,” Beck said.
25
SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA