“Oh well.” She sounded almost friendly for a moment. “Not your problem. Just dodge the mortars for a few weeks and you’re out of here.”
“And you?”
“And me what?”
“Why don’t you leave?”
She jabbed a nicotine-stained finger toward him abruptly enough to make him flinch. “Bingo. Just the question I ask the bitch in the mirror every morning.”
“And?”
“And you’ll be the first to know if I ever get a straight answer out of her.”
Arkady must have fallen asleep after that. When he woke the city was gone and they were flying over empty desert.
Waves of sand ran away to the horizon under towering dust-brown thunderheads that the pilot seemed to be flying into at every moment. The sun shone feebly through the enveloping haze, though Osnat’s sunburned face testified to its destroying power.
Arkady shifted uncomfortably. He’d hoped that flying would relieve the constant ache of full gravity. But, flying or earthbound, he was still sucked onto this spinning rock like a bug in a wind tunnel, every joint popping and aching until it was hard to believe his ancestors had survived long enough to make it off the planet.
Night was falling, and suddenly he identified something that had been pricking at the edge of his mind for several minutes.
“There are lights down there!”
“What?” Osnat had dozed off too, judging by the soft, bleary-eyed face she turned toward him. “Sure. No big deal. Someone’s got a generator.”
“But…aren’t we still over the Line?”
She glanced at her bulky wristwatch. “Yep.”
“People live down there?”
She cocked her head, turning her good eye on him. “What, you thought all that prime real estate was empty just because of a piddly few birth defects?”
“Who are they?”
“They’re called Ghareebeh. Arabic for stranger.”
“So they’re Arabs?”
“Some of them. Some of them are the children of Jewish settlers who refused to leave. Some of them are just poor schmucks born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But how do they live?”
“Let’s just say they don’t drink the water if they can afford not to. Like I told you, those were the wild frontier days of genetic weaponry.” Her voice took on a more sarcastic edge than usual. “Now we’re more environmentally responsible.”
“Osnat?”
“What?”
“Can you answer a question?”
“Ask it and I’ll let you know.”
“Who’s Absalom?”
“It’s a code name.” She sounded as flatly objective as if she were summarizing the results of a peer-reviewed scientific study. “Most people on this side of the Line think the man behind the code name was Gavi Shehadeh.”
“A Palestinian.”
She wrapped her arms across her chest and huddled into the corner of her seat. “Half-Palestinian. His mother was Jewish. I don’t know the whole story. Just that he was some kind of war hero back in the days when the soldiers on the Line were real soldiers, not Enderbots. And then he went into AI work. Or maybe he was already doing it before the war started, I don’t know. Anyway, he was working on EMET when the Mossad tapped him for counterintelligence work. Just compsec at first, but he didn’t stay stuck there for long. Didi Halevy moved him into counterintelligence. And then…he climbed. And not just by riding Didi’s coattails. No one ever accused Gavi of not being good at his job.”
“And what did he do to make Moshe hate him so much?”
“He turned traitor.”
“So he’s in…prison?”
“No.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “Maybe he had a horse—that’s what we call it when someone has a friend in high places to protect him. Or maybe it was just too embarrassing for the people who promoted him and trusted him. All I know is he’s still alive.”
Arkady digested the staggering implications of that statement. “You mean you still execute people?”
“Of course not. We’re not the Americans, for God’s sake. But you can always arrange a nice clean traffic accident.”
They set down on a gritty landing strip hacked out of the same straggling scrub oak and juniper that Arkady could have found on almost any of the terraformed planets he’d worked on in the last decade. The pilot flew in low and fast and lifted off again before they’d even cleared the rotor wash.
Osnat hustled Arkady across the tarmac to a small half-track whose paint had been scoured so clean by wind and sand that Arkady couldn’t read its markings.
“I’ll have to ask you to get in the back,” she said. “Sorry.”
The back of the half-track was unlit and smelled strongly of biodiesel and some unclean animal that he gradually identified as human. He climbed in and found a blanket to sit on.
“Just keep your mask on,” Osnat told him, “and remember this is for your own safety too. There are a lot of people around here who’d kill you on sight if they knew what you were. And they don’t all work for the UN.” Then she rolled the steel door down with a clatter, leaving Arkady in darkness.
The truck stopped so many times that Arkady lost count. The first few stops were at traffic intersections, he thought. Another two were at checkpoints. But though he heard the border police checking the truck over, they never opened up the back or asked him for his papers.
Other stops had no obvious purpose. The truck would simply pull over to the side of the road, gravel crackling under the wheels, and wait. Sometimes Osnat and the drivers got out, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they waited for a minute, and sometimes they waited for what felt like hours. Once, very late into the night, he heard Osnat’s voice:
“Look at that! Back a day and I already have a mosquito bite. How can you get a mosquito bite in the middle of a fucking desert in the middle of a fucking ice age?”
One of the men said something in Hebrew too riddled with slang for Arkady to make sense of.
“Not unless you pay better than the army does,” Osnat said succinctly, and everybody laughed again.
Eventually Arkady dropped off to sleep, only jolting awake when the engine shuddered to a halt again. He heard voices, footsteps. Then the steel door rattled up to reveal Osnat flanked by two powerfully built young men, both gripping snub-nosed carbines in their broad farmer’s hands.
“Out,” Osnat said.
They hurried him across a dark parking lot toward a low shed that was the only building Arkady could see anywhere this side of the undulating desert horizon. Despite the visible weapons, Arkady had the feeling that discipline had relaxed here. What was the point of theatrics, after all, when he didn’t stand a chance of crossing the waterless waste that surrounded them?
The shed turned out to be the top end of a flight of stairs that plunged down three stories without a single door opening off it in any direction. The stairs bottomed out in front of a steel fire door. The fire door opened on a cramped room with nothing in it but a ratty couch and a dilapidated workstation. Sitting on the couch, sipping Turkish coffee with his sandaled feet up on a crate of RPG rounds, sat Moshe.
He raised his glass to Arkady. “Good news. The first round of the auction kicks off the day after tomorrow at the King David Hotel.”
“Auction?” Arkady asked, confused. “What auction?”
“Oh right. You slept through all that. Turns out—excuse me.” Moshe rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a frayed and crumpled handkerchief, and blew his nose with loud abandon. “Turns out Israel’s not interested in your genetic weapon after all. My betters have decided to put you back on the market and see if they can make back the money we blew getting you here.”