“You’re in New York?”
“At the Hangar, yes. Toys and I flew out. Joe, it’s so awful about Aunt Sallie, D.J., and Sam.”
We talked about our fallen friends for a while. Sharing fears, offering mutual comfort. The survival tactics of frail and compassionate human beings. Then Junie shifted gears and said she’d seen me on the news.
“Does that mean they’re going to arrest you?” she cried.
“They can try.”
“No,” she said sharply. “Don’t do that. Don’t give me that kind of macho bullshit answer, Joe.”
I winced because she was right. Junie is way more mature than I’ll ever be. Bravado may be good for trash talk and psyching one’s self up, but it’s often bullshit and it’s evasive and she deserved better from me.
“Sorry,” I said. “Really. Look, Junie, this scares the piss out of me, too. No joke. But we are the DMS. I’m going back in in a second to talk to Church and Bug about what we can do, and you have to know that we’re going to have options on how to spin this.”
“Can it be spun?” she asked. “I mean, they mentioned your name and they mentioned the Department of Military Sciences. What’s that expression you like so much? You can’t unring a bell?”
I leaned against the cold concrete wall next to the ER entrance. An ambulance was parked, engine off but the red and blue lights still turning, slapping me with color as if in silent reminder that the whole country was an active crime scene. Thanks, O subtle genies of the universe, I get the metaphor.
“Yeah,” I said to Junie. “And no, you can’t. Don’t know what’s going to happen to us yet. Church is not exactly BFFs with the president these days. Even before all this today we’ve kind of been expecting something from the White House. Like our charter being run through the shredder.”
“Do you think he’ll actually do that?”
I leaned my shoulder against the cold cinder block wall. “I don’t know, babe. Things have been going south for us these last couple of years. Hell, for almost as long as I’ve been with the DMS. First Hugo Vox turned out to be a bona fide supervillain, then MindReader gets hacked and hacked again. And on and on.”
“Right, but now you have MindReader Q1, or is that closing the barn door…?”
“It might be.”
We were quiet for a moment.
“Joe,” she said after a while, “I miss you.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve missed you so much lately.”
“I know. Me too.”
“No,” she said, “I mean I think we need to talk.”
“Now? About what?”
“Not now,” she said, “and not on the phone.”
I tensed the way you do when you know a punch is coming but you don’t know from which angle or how hard.
“Junie…,” I began, but let it fade.
“We’ve been apart so much these last couple of years,” she said. “I feel like we’re becoming strangers to each other.”
“You know who I am, Junie. I know who you are. Just because we’re both busy doesn’t change that.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No, damn it,” I said.
“Don’t yell, Joe,” begged Junie. “Please. I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“What you’re doing is scaring me. I love you.”
“And I love you,” she said. “This isn’t about love.”
“Then what is it about?”
Her pause was long enough to make my jaw hurt from clenching. “I’m tired, Joe.”
“Tired of what? Us?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry. Let’s talk some other time.”
“Hey, wait, you can’t leave me hanging like this.”
“It’s okay, Joe. It’ll keep.”
“No, tell me—”
“I love you, Joe,” she said, and then the line went dead.
I went inside. The hallway was empty, and so was I.
I nearly called her back. But didn’t. My need told me to do the former, but my instincts — faulty as they sometimes were — stayed my hand. Instead I stood there, leaning against the wall, wanting to bash my head against it. I’d have done it if there was even the slightest chance that it would force the world to make sense.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
Valen drove at five miles over the road speed, only used the fast lane for passing, and made sure he used his blinkers to lane-change. The car Gadyuka provided was a two-year-old Nissan Ultima, one of the most common cars on American roads. Silver color; the second-most popular hue after white. There were no bumper stickers on it and absolutely nothing to make it stand out. He would never have driven anything that looked sporty, and certainly nothing red, because red cars are pulled over by highway patrol more than any other cars, even when driving at the speed limit.
The credit cards he had belonged to one of the deeply positioned American spies, a third-generation sleeper. The cards were clean and the accounts they drew on were years old and sensibly maintained. He had a driver’s license with his face, but the name attached to the account. As he drove, he listened to news radio and tried not to cry.
He turned off of George Washington Memorial Parkway onto the exit for I-495, heading toward Maryland. Heading west. He had more than two thousand miles to drive. Planes and trains weren’t safe anymore. Not since he’d let the government agent see his face.
Joe Ledger. The psychopath who worked for the Department of Military Sciences. It had definitely been him, of that Valen had no doubt. He watched the footage on Fox News over and over and over again of the same man and the same dog fighting people on the steps of the Capitol Building.
He hadn’t told Gadyuka about the encounter while recovering the machine. All he said was that he recovered the damaged machine without incident. A lie.
Why had he lied? Why hadn’t he told her about Tasing the man? Why hadn’t he told her when he’d realized who that man was? Why?
Valen drove.
He kept looking in the rearview mirror. It would be many miles before he realized who he was expecting to see behind him. And it was no comfort at all to see no one.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
“Bug,” I said as calmly as I could, “tell me I am not well and truly screwed.”
I was in a borrowed doctor’s office with Church, using a wall-mounted Scroll for the teleconference. A Scroll is Doc Holliday’s tweak of the flexible computer screen. It looks like a big map on thick paper, but the material is actually a blend of several polymers with flexible circuits built in. Once unrolled it can be attached to any flat surface. The skin acts as a high-resolution screen that made it look like Bug was in the same room with us.
Bug — born Jerome Leroy Williams — is smallish, medium brown, with colored contacts and a perpetual smile. Except now that smile looked fragile. He wore a Wakanda Forever long-sleeved T-shirt and was surrounded by computer monitors and pop-culture action figures of Black Panther, Shuri, Luke Cage, Ant-Man, The Wasp, Falcon, Doctor Strange, and Agent Dana Scully. At least they were the ones I could identify.