“Get me a gun,” he ordered.
Adjusting the SIG Sauer on his hip, he admired himself in the SUV’s window. He had never fired a SIG before taking Lou’s from his corpse tonight and turning it on one of the spies before it ran empty. The big spy had called him weak and untrained. The Director of the PBI intended to prove all that irrelevant.
He would not let some racist, sexist, red brute take away everything he had earned.
Larsen trotted over to him.
“Have you found it?” Rios-Parkinson asked.
“No, nothing,” Larsen replied. “But we are getting strange reports from the Hollywood PSF station.”
“What kind of reports?”
“Gunfire. We can’t reach anyone inside.”
“That’s the PSF station for this area. What would be…?” Rios-Parkinson paused. “They would take anyone arrested around here there for booking?”
“Yes,” said Larsen, confused.
“You usually secure the outer perimeter with two vehicles per location, correct?” asked Rios-Parkinson, although he knew the answer.
“Where was the other car when they killed those officers?” asked Larsen.
“Perhaps it was transporting an arrestee who has something they wanted,” said Rios-Parkinson. “Get my team together. Get everyone back to the Hollywood station! Now!”
The SUV convoy pulled up parallel to the station on Wilcox. The security team got out and set a perimeter around the vehicles. There were scores of civilians still running around in the shadows, fleeing as several dozen cruisers with lights flashing descended upon the scene.
Flames licked out of the building’s roof top. A pair of civilians were carrying a couch out the public entrance in the front.
Larsen came to the window of the SUV as Rios-Parkinson stared at the disaster.
“It appears from witnesses that a terrorist group burst in and attacked the station by surprise. Most of the officers were out in the field looking for the shooters. They must have taken out a dozen PSF, sir,” Larsen said, slipping back into military mode. Rios-Parkinson let it pass. That military mode might come in handy in the coming hours. He could deal with Larsen’s moral and character flaws later.
“What do the central server records say?”
“They arrested several people tonight. The one who fits best was male-identifying, cisgender, not a person of color, and flagged as Jewish. Age 14. John Brown, obviously a false name. It says he was disturbing the People’s order and disobeying the People’s will, which could mean anything.”
“The arresting officers?”
Larsen jerked his head toward the burning building. “I don’t think they made it.”
“And what was he carrying? What did they take into evidence?” “It says a backpack, $353 dollars, and ‘electronics.’”
“Electronics?”
“That’s all it said.”
“Did David Kaplan have a son?” “There’s a birth record of an Abraham Kaplan, but he never registered in a school, was never in the Young Progressives, never joined any of the voluntary committees on racism or gender justice or climate change like he was required to.”
“Let me guess. He was born around 2020.”
Larsen nodded. “That’s right.”
“Then they will have the hard drive,” Rios-Parkinson said, unable to fully conceal his fear.
“But we have the tracker,” Larsen said.
“Is the system working again?” Rios-Parkinson asked, hopefully.
“They say it will work, but you were very clear – do not start it outside your presence.” “Listen,” Rios-Parkinson said. “Get it transferred to your tablet and encrypted. You have to be the only ones who can track them. No one else can know. And we will follow them and we will get back the drive ourselves. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Larsen said, again slipping into old habits.
“And have our forces clear this building. Find out what you can from whoever they catch, then eliminate them. I want to demonstrate that the culprits have been caught and punished.”
Larsen nodded. He called over the PSF senior leaders and gave them their instructions. Their forces began to surround the building. Next, they would go in and retake it. And woe to whomever had not yet escaped with his lucre.
Larsen next directed the drivers of the SUVs to the gas pumps in back of the station to top off. Then he proceeded to contact the techs at headquarters about transferring the tracking program to his tablet, and to his tablet alone.
Early Friday morning on old Interstate 15, the traffic was sparse. There were a few cars roaring out to Las Vegas on spontaneous trips, the kind only those wielding Privilege Levels of 7 and up could plausibly explain at the frequent checkpoints. By Barstow, they had hit four of them, the bored PSF guards scanning their passes and then waving them through to keep heading out across the desert. The stars were subdued and obscured through this part of the journey, since the dozen coal plants that at least intermittently powered Southern California had been located out here in the middle of nowhere. They were out of sight, well off the freeway off in the desert, the better to avoid raising uncomfortable questions about why the government was essentially eliminating private vehicles from the non-elite citizenry in the name of climate sanity while it was also pouring many tons of carbon into the air every hour of every day.
They had switched seats after taking a rest break in the abandoned town of Victorville. Turnbull had pulled the Explorer off the road and behind an old, abandoned fast food place.
“See,” he said to Junior, pointing out the two untrimmed palm trees growing at a weird angle that created an “X.” “This was an In-N-Out. Now I’m going to go take a leak. See if that spigot still works. We need some water.”
They continued down the freeway, having filled several discarded plastic bottles they found lying about, with Abraham holding a flashlight from the front passenger seat while Amanda tried to dig the buckshot pellets out of Junior’s leg with the forceps from the medical kit.
“How about a pain pill?” Junior hissed through clenched teeth.
“Nope, need you fresh. Have a Motrin. And give me one. Damn rib hurts like a motherfucker,” said Turnbull. “So does my hip. Thanks, Amanda.”
Outside Barstow, they passed a broken down sign for Fort Irwin Road.
“Ugh,” said Turnbull. “If the old US Army had a rectum, Irwin would be it. It’s all gone now since the blues decided they didn’t need a real army.”
“Shit,” Junior said, wincing as Amanda bandaged his leg.
“You were always such a baby,” she replied.
“Will you be able to walk?” Turnbull asked.
“I think so, as long as it’s not too far.”
“Yeah, well I’m driving this to as close to Utah as we can get, off road if necessary.”
“What, we’re going back the same way we came?” asked Junior. “We don’t do that.”
“I know. Amanda’s boyfriend Rios-Parkinson may be a hack, but he probably has one or two real soldiers working for him, and they are going to tell him that there is no way we will ever go back out the way we came in.”
“Do they know we’re coming?”
“Nope. But once we cross the line, Meachum will pick us up and vector in some of his guys to check us out and they’ll bring us in. Now all we gotta do is get there.”
They got through the Vegas checkpoint without a problem shortly before 4:00 a.m. and drove through the heart of the city on the freeway. The Strip was so bright it cast shadows in the desert. The rest of the town was a black hole; the power went off overnight, and the masses were left to swelter while the elite partied in icy comfort.
About 20 miles out of town, they ran into stopped traffic that extended over a ridge to their front. The high flyers had all turned off in Las Vegas. This was mostly trucks and locals. And the line of vehicles was simply not moving.