Sooner—or maybe later, it’s hard to tell—John and Paul catch up with Elvis and push the big old Gibson flatback into his hands and things get quiet. The lights go down a little, and he catches Marilyn’s eye as he sings Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Love Me Tender, but just as he’s about to give them Heartbreak Hotel to finish for the night the drone swarm signals and he cuts away—
—through a security camera with limited night vision, he watches as Garnett sets up a piece of equipment in the middle of the dusty street corner parking lot where the men have made their camp. It’s nothing like the mismatched guns and worn-out camo, this thing. It’s modern, or maybe postmodern if you factor in the Breakdown and the general halt in research and production around the world.
Garnett unfolds it from a heavy, insulated box lined with dense foam that supports every piece of the construct for transport. It’s a spindly thing, but sturdy enough, rising about man height on a tripod that reflects in the spectrum for titanium, mostly. Lightweight, but rigid. Then the colonel mounts some kind of a black-box unit on top, orienting it with tremendous care.
Elvis runs the silhouette of the device past a range of databases, but nothing matches up precisely enough to make him happy. He moves the drone swarm subtly, getting as many angles as he can. He’ll collate the images and refine them, and share them next time Indira’s got a satellite overhead. Even if she doesn’t recognize it, Indira will want to know.
It’s not until Garnett fans out a tiny, delicate dish of spider-web thin wires that Elvis realizes what he’s looking at. It’s some kind of highly directional transmitter. He checks the satellite database, but no, there’s nothing significant overhead at the moment. A high-altitude drone, maybe? He reorients half a dozen peripheral cameras around the city, but there’s nothing.
He shifts the drone swarm again, measuring the parallax, establishing the angle on Garnett’s transmitter dish. It’s aimed northeast, about thirty-six degrees from horizontal. And there’s still nothing to be seen.
Enough.
As Garnett plugs a portable drive into the unit, Elvis powers up a flatscreen advertisement across the street. The old sound membranes are unreliable with all the dust and blown sand, but the OLED matrix is as bright and clear as ever. Elvis makes a throat-clearing noise, and Garnett looks up. His eyes pop, and he scrabbles for his sidearm, but Elvis shakes his head.
“Ain’t gonna do neither of us no good,” he says.
Slowly, Garnett straightens. “Good trick. You about scared me stupid.”
The straight line is irresistible. “Short trip, I reckon,” Elvis says, and twitches a wry smile onto his image.
Garnett grins. “You might think that. And I guess if I’m right, you might have cause.”
“Right about what?”
Garnett folds his arms across his broad chest and peers at the image, twice lifesize, on the wall across the street. “Could be an animated avatar,” he says. “Could be there’s a man behind, somewhere, using that old face. But I think you’re something more.”
“Do tell,” says Elvis, but he’s got a bad feeling he knows where this is going. The feeling gets stronger as he watches Garnett pull a silvery bag from a pocket and enshroud the transmitter with it. “Faraday cage. You must think me all kinds of sneaky.”
“I surely do,” says Garnett. “That’s why I’m using this here ultra tight-beam, frequency-agile comms unit to talk to a stealthed aerostat way back over yonder. Now, I guess you can figure out the direction. You can probably even guess the range pretty close, knowing what I’ve got for power and seeing the angle of the transmitter dish. But not even you can suborn my communications if you can’t nail the frequency and the signal strength and a few other things I’m not inclined to discuss. So unless you’ve got something interesting to tell me, you might as well sit back and watch me send off a report that says I’m closing in on you, right now.”
“You think that?” says Elvis. “Closing in? That’s amusing, sir. Very amusing.”
“I don’t see you laughing.” Garnett slips his hands under the silvery bag, fingers moving.
Elvis has no really useful assets on hand. The drone swarm is already dying. Another couple hours and they’ll be nothing but decaying components, near indistinguishable from ordinary dead bugs. His heavy units are fixed, providing security for the Hotel structure itself. Of course he’s long ago infiltrated and suborned other security fixtures around the remnants of the city, but by good luck or worse, good planning, Garnett has set himself up out of range of all of them. It’s going to take at least another minute before one of the armed drones makes the distance. Time to stall.
“Those losers you got with you,” he says, pushing the membranes to raise the volume even though it makes his voice come out weird, tinny, kind of robotic. “They won’t get you in. You ain’t got nearly what it takes.”
“That’s okay,” says Garnett, not looking up. “They don’t have to. We just have to find your place, that’s all. Then I call in the professionals and these fine young men collect their promised and well-earned rewards before going back home to a hero’s welcome.” Garnett’s raising his voice too, and Elvis can see several of his men following the conversation with interest.
Change of tactic. “What’d he promise you? Money? I got money. Real money. Old style USA money if you want it. Gold and silver too.” Elvis shifts his image to look at the men with Garnett, throwing in a few superfast subliminal images as well—naked women, gleaming sports cars, gold coins. It can’t hurt.
One of the men—a youngster with a spray of pimples under the desert sunburn—moves uneasily, but Garnett cuts in first. “Family,” he says. “Back east, where you can’t get at them. These gentlemen do their jobs, and not only do they get the promised reward, but certain things happen in favor of their families. Important things. Things they can’t get in any other way. There’s no raccoon up that tree for you.” He frowns, and glances across at Elvis’s image. “What’s that godawful racket you’re making, boy?”
The old membranes are growling and whining now, distorting Elvis’s voice. “Old installation,” he says. “The maintenance staff ain’t what they used to be, you know?” The fact that the noise itself conveniently conceals the whine of a drone engine is another matter.
Garnett chuckles. “You can say that again.” He turns his attention back to the transmitter unit just as the AP drone pops over the top of the 7-11 building on the corner and puts two heavy rubber rounds through the delicate transmitter aerial, blasting it into uselessness.
As the men scatter and dive for their weapons, Elvis puts two more rounds into the transmitter unit itself, then sprays the campsite, the bullets bouncing and whining and kicking up dust. The drone is empty in less than a second, and he dispatches it back to base before Garnett’s men can return fire.
The colonel hasn’t moved a muscle, still there with his hands tucked under the Faraday bag though the transmitter has been smashed. “Good shooting,” he says, finally. “Non-lethal rounds. That’s an old police drone you’re using?”
“I got others,” Elvis says. “Not all of ’em play nice. Why don’t y’all just turn y’selves around and get out before I have to be downright unpleasant?”
Garnett sets himself down on a folding stool. He rummages about in his jacket, comes up with a worn, silver Zippo and a thin black cigar that he clenches in his teeth. He puffs out a cloud of smoke. “We could do that,” he says. Then he gestures at the wreckage of the transmitter. “But I’ve got backup units too. Maybe we could try talking instead. You never know. Could be we can come to some kind mutually beneficial arrangement?”