“Can I help you boys?” an elderly woman asked. She was sitting in a rocking chair at the far end, knitting in the yellow glow of a polyphoto globe hanging from the rafters.
“I’m looking for first aid products,” Adam said.
“Some bandages and aspirin on the third shelf in from the door,” she told him. “Few other odds and ends. Mind you check the expiry dates, now. They’ve been around awhile.”
“Thanks.” Adam pulled Oscar along. “You heard Johansson’s answer last night.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, along with half of this world who’re listening in to the Highway One chase on their radios. Thank you for that. It went down particularly well with Rosamund, I thought. She certainly gave her guns a big polish afterward. You know it’s only going to be a matter of time before one of your street thugs decides the Guardians’ cause is best served by slitting our throats.”
“They’re not street thugs, I trained them.”
“The way Grayva trained us?”
Adam grunted dismissively, and rummaged through the section boldly labeled MEDICAL PROVISIONS. The shopkeeper hadn’t been joking about the lack of variety. “Don’t worry about my team, they’re well structured and disciplined.”
“Whatever you say, Adam.”
“So how do you explain Dudley’s claim that you deliberately ordered him to carry on through the Watchtower so he’d be left behind?” Adam was quite surprised by the involuntary spasm of anger on Oscar’s face when Dudley’s name was mentioned.
“That little shit!”
Both of them gave a guilty glance in the direction of the old woman.
“Sorry, Dudley just manages to rile me every time.”
“So?” Adam invited.
“It must have been the Starflyer agent. Whoever it was hacked into the Second Chance’s communications systems.”
“I figured that, too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you yanking my plank?”
“I know it’s not you.” Adam grinned at Oscar’s astonishment, the thick skin on his cheeks crinkling stiffly.
“You do?”
“Let’s say that after our long association I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Oscar rolled his eyes. “If this is the tradecraft you trained your kids in, we’re in deeper shit than I thought. But thanks, anyway.”
“Don’t mention it. Your innocence reduces my problem by one.”
“Yeah.” Oscar scratched at the back of his head. “And then there were three.”
“Two of whom were on the Second Chance; and Myo has been persecuting the Guardians since their inception.”
“It can’t be Wilson and Anna.”
“Is that emotion or logic talking to me?”
“Emotion, I guess. Hell! I’ve been part of their lives for years now, we virtually live in each other’s pockets. They’re friends. Real friends. If it is one of them, then they have truly run rings around me.”
“I told you before, you manage to cover up your earlier activities with a perfect shell of respectability. To be honest, I never quite expected you to have so much success in your current life.”
“Thanks a whole bunch. But my crime was in the past. The Starflyer agent is active now.”
“All right. Is their any indication, anything that might tell you one of them might not be genuine?”
“I don’t know.” Oscar picked up a tube of dental biogenic cream intended to treat abscesses, not looking at it.
“What?” Adam persisted. “Come on. We’re still fighting to stop this war, and more, stop it from happening again.”
“Someone tampered with the official logs stored in Pentagon II after I found the evidence that the Starflyer agent was on board the Second Chance. That little cover-up blocked us from using it to expose the Starflyer. Only Wilson and I knew about it.”
“Are you sure?”
Oscar closed his eyes. “No,” he said in a pained sigh. “A lot of people knew we had a private meeting, which is very unusual, especially as there was no official record of the topic. And then we invited Myo for an equally secret conference. But I swear that office is sealed up tighter than Sheldon’s harem.”
“You’re looking for a get-out clause. It sounds like a locked room to me.”
“It can’t be Wilson.” Oscar sounded deeply troubled.
“What about his wife?”
“Anna? No way. Nobody’s worked harder to defeat both the Prime invasions. She was the liaison between the tactical staff and Fleet Command; if she was the agent that would be the moment to ensure we were totally screwed.”
“Except the Starflyer wanted the Commonwealth intact to strike back at MorningLightMountain. According to Bradley it sees us as a couple of old prizefighters battering the crap out of each other until we’re both dead.”
“Christ Almighty. I don’t know.”
“Then give me your take on Myo.”
“Definite candidate.” For once Oscar sounded confident. “And what is up with her anyway? How sick is she?”
“She claims her body is reacting to her decision to let me go free. Think of it as neurotoxic shock, and you won’t be far wrong.”
“Jesus. She is one weird woman. That damn Hive!”
“It’s an illness which mitigates in her favor. If she’s having that reaction, then her genuine personality is intact.”
Oscar dropped the tube back on the rack. “Come on. Like she couldn’t fake the shakes.”
“The diagnostic array confirms it. She’s seriously ill, Oscar. I’m not quite sure…” He looked at the meager display of medicines, and shook his head sadly.
“Or she’s taken a compound to produce that effect.”
“I believe you mentioned paranoia?”
“Face it,” Oscar said, “you haven’t got a clue which one of them it could be.”
“Not yet. I fear I must rouse Paula to work this out for me. This is her field of excellence. Her only field, come to that. We need her…if it isn’t her.” He quickly picked a few packets off the shelf, mild sedatives and some biogenics designed to counter viral infections. They might help. Probably not.
“In the state she’s in?” Oscar said as they walked over to the shopkeeper. “Not a chance. She’s barely rational.”
“I’m aware of that. If it’s genuine.”
“What are you going to do?” Oscar asked with brittle humor. “Fall on your sword? If it is a genuine illness, it’s the only way to cure her.”
“Would that be so dishonorable?”
“Hey, come on, don’t joke about this.”
“After the Guardians win, where will I go? What will I do? There’s no one left to shelter me. No one that I’d accept help from, anyway.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“No, I’m not.” But he didn’t like the fact that he’d actually thought of it. True desperation.
“Good! We’ll work it out; you and me, the old team. Damnit, there’s only three possibles. How difficult can it be?”
Adam gave that a lot of thought as the interminable afternoon rolled ever onward. They’d left the sparse road behind at Wolfstail, heading directly south from the town’s T-junction along a stony farm track that vanished a couple of kilometers later beneath the advancing Anguilla grass. Once they reached its outlying fringes, it quickly grew taller and thicker, reinforcing Adam’s earlier comparison to a sea. A heavily modified variety of terrestrial Bermuda grass, the Anguilla’s individual stalks were as thick as wheat; they clustered so densely the entire mass supported itself, swaying in giant slow waves as the winds gusted over the surface. No other plant could gain any kind of niche amid its indomitable all-pervasive root mat. It had been tailored by the revitalization project office to thrive on the area’s prevalent heat and moisture, and succeeded to a degree its creators never expected.
Feathery tips reached up to the Volvo’s windows. Kieran, who was driving again, had to use the truck’s radar to see the shape of the land below the tide of grass. There had been a road here, decades ago, back when Wolfstail had been built around a crossroads, linking the Dessault Mountains to the inhabited northern lands. It was completely smothered under the Anguilla grass now, its disintegrating surface long since sealed over by the root mat. The Guardians still used the route. McMixons and McKratzes mostly; riding or driving down out of the mountains to trade with Far Away’s normal population, and transporting back the illicit weapons technology Adam and his predecessors had smuggled through the gateway in First Foot Fall Plaza. They’d placed tuned trisilicon markers along the hidden road, stiff meter-high poles invisible within the grass but shining like beacons if they were illuminated by the correctly coded radar pulse. Their unmistakable gleaming points marching across the display screen, and an accurate inertial navigation system allowed the Volvos to race on at close to a hundred kilometers an hour, a speed impossible through the grasslands without the certainty of a solid surface beneath the root map. Adam likened it to running along a precipice. God help them if they wavered from the exact line laid out by the inertial guidance. He would have been happier if control of the trucks had been switched over to the drive arrays, but their programs would have taken into account the dreadful local conditions, and crawled their way forward. Besides, the Guardians took a perverse delight in showing how ballsy they were; each of them claiming to have driven the route many times previously. Adam didn’t believe a word of it.