[Alex Vane 03.0] The Mockingbird Drive

by AC Fuller

  Hector chuckled. "No way you're taking Baby Blue for four hundred, and it doesn't just start. Baby purrs."

  He slid into the driver seat and turned the key. I breathed a sigh of relief when it started right up. And he was right. The thing sounded pretty good.

  "The papers are clean?" Quinn asked.

  "Yeah, grandma gave it to me a few years ago. I pimped it out myself."

  "And you're moving out of state?" Quinn asked.

  Hector shot her a confused look. "Why?"

  Quinn walked around the car, running an index finger along the edge like a snobby maid checking for dust. And, of course, her finger came up covered with grime. "You said in the ad you're moving out of state."

  "Man, my cousin wrote the ad."

  "So you're not moving out of state."

  "Look, you want the car or not? I got shit to do."

  Quinn frowned at me. "Let's go." I was stunned. I knew she didn't want to get back in the ZipCar, but she didn't seem to be bluffing. "He's a liar," she said, loudly enough for Hector to hear.

  I looked at Hector apologetically and moved toward Quinn like a dad in a grocery store, shuffling away from the jar of jelly his kid just knocked onto the floor. Hector raised his shoulders as if to say, "So?"

  Quinn was walking her little square. "We're not gonna do better than this," I whispered to her.

  "I can't. He lied."

  I looked over at Hector, who was staring at us with an amused smile, then led Quinn a couple yards away as Hector pulled a cellphone out of his back pocket. "Quinn, what the hell are you doing?"

  "He lied about leaving town. That was one of the reasons I chose this car."

  "Why does that matter?"

  "If they come looking for us, and they will come looking for us, I wanted the owner of the car to be gone, unreachable. Or at least a little more unreachable."

  If we were going to swap cars, this was the one. There was no way I was going to go through this process again, but I needed to get Quinn on board. I decided not to address her paranoia right there, standing on the street with Hector glaring at us.

  Instead, I tried a practical approach. "Quinn, if we don't get this car, we have to go back, sit in the ZipCar, open up your laptop, and find someone else on Craigslist who happens to want to make a deal on a Wednesday evening. It could take hours. We might have to get a hotel, sleep in the car or the street, wait till tomorrow, steal a car. Something." I paused for effect. "This is the car. If it's alright with you, I will go chat with Hector, get the best price I can, and in ten minutes we'll be driving out of Vegas."

  Finally, Quinn folded her arms, gave me her ambivalent-yes grunt, then walked back toward the ZipCar.

  With Quinn out of the picture, it didn't take much to talk Hector down. I started at $400, where Quinn had left off, figuring we'd end up at $800 or $900. To me, speed was more important than a couple hundred bucks. But Hector was a terrible negotiator. Every time he tried to highlight a feature of the car—the rims, the strangely incongruous beaded seat cover in the back, or the spoiler, which it turned out used to light up—I just said, "I get it, but those features don't add value for us."

  After five minutes, we settled on $650. I paid him in cash, and twenty minutes after we'd arrived at the Sunset Vista Apartments, I was back at the ZipCar, holding a registration slip, a set of worn keys, and a sales slip handwritten on notebook paper.

  Quinn was sitting on the hood of the ZipCar and she didn't look up even when I gave the top of the car a double-tap, the sort you give a taxi after you've gotten your luggage out of the trunk. "Let's go," I said. "We'll leave this thing here. How far is Duck Valley?"

  "Five or six hundred miles," she said, sliding off the hood.

  Earlier, when she'd said it was "not far," I'd assumed that meant twenty minutes, an hour, tops. "What?" I managed.

  "Nevada-Idaho border," she said casually, pulling the hard drive and her duffle bag out of the ZipCar.

  I was trying to convince myself I wasn't making a big mistake.

  Chapter 10

  The ZipCar abandoned, we were rolling north on 93 in the godforsaken Thunderbird. Our bags were in the back seat, stacked protectively around the backpack holding the drive. I was driving and Quinn was staring at the splits in the velour upholstery, closing the glove compartment every time it fell open, which was every time we hit a pothole or one of those rumble strips on the shoulder of the highway.

  Since meeting her, I'd been too busy to be annoyed with Quinn. But as I watched the power lines thin out, giving way to strange and beautiful rock formations along the highway, I was no longer wondering if I'd made a mistake. I was wondering how big a mistake I'd made.

  Within five minutes of meeting her, I'd known that Quinn was eccentric and probably paranoid. But in the sixty minutes that followed, she'd burned down her house, refused to call the police, and claimed that the CIA was behind the mass shooting that killed James and five others.

  And that was before she'd convinced me to drive through Nevada in an antique Thunderbird.

  The ZipCar had the new-car smell of freedom. The open road, possibility, and some sort of chemicals that are terrible and lovely at the same time. I'd never been in a Thunderbird, but I'd always pictured something sleek but solid. American-made speed and toughness. This thing looked like a fat guy sat on a beat-up Toyota Camry, flattening and widening it but leaving the uninteresting lines and uninspired styling. It smelled of stale cigarettes with a hint of curry. Like someone had spilled a couple orders of chicken tikka masala in the trunk eight years back and it had slowly become part of the car. The only nice things I could say about it was that the air conditioning worked, and it suited Quinn well.

  About an hour outside of Vegas, we passed a road sign that seemed to rise up out of the dust: TWIN FALLS: 400 MILES.

  Twin Falls is the first real city you hit after leaving Nevada from the north, and it was just an hour or two east of the Duck Valley Reservation. At an average speed of seventy miles an hour, we had at least seven hours of driving ahead. The traffic had thinned, and we were cruising down a dark stretch of highway, jagged mountains on both sides. It was just past dusk, and the sky had faded from blue to gray to brown.

  I turned to Quinn, knowing that she'd probably be wrong, but wanting to hear her story, just in case she wasn't. "So, what do you think happened?"

  She said nothing, so I tried again. "I mean Baxter, the shooting, the sticker on the drive. All the stuff you were talking about before. Start from the beginning."

  "This whole thing must be kinda screwed up for you, huh?"

  Not what I expected. "What do you mean?"

  "Just, you know. I've been planning for something like this for years. Decades, possibly. Why do you think I had my bug-out bag ready, full of cash, couple passports, clean t-shirt, underwear, and pistol."

  "You have a gun in there?"

  "Sure, and I'm guessing your life doesn't usually involve driving a car like this. With someone like me. Or having people trying to kill you."

  "How do you know they were trying to kill us?"

  "Are you…they killed six people yesterday, then followed you, showed up at my house with a gun, and chased us through that tourist hellscape. What do you think they were trying to do, sell us Amway?"

  "Okay, first off, I have no reason to believe they killed those people. No, let me finish!" Quinn was trying to interrupt. "And they didn't exactly seem like they were trying to shoot at us on Fremont Street. That guy had a cellphone in his hand, not a gun."

  "These days you can kill a lot more people with a cellphone," she muttered.

  "They were running after us like…like a jog, almost. Like they weren't even trying to overtake us. It was weird."

  "So your theory—being as you're the sane one here—is that two armed people followed you from the airport and then decided to run after us for a mile because, what, we were like a pace car for their morning jog? I guess the guns were for extra weight, build some muscle ton
e. Yessir, okay, that makes perfect goddamn sense, I sure am sorry I tried to make that sound crazy."

  "Look, if I thought that, I wouldn't be in this car with my cellphone turned off," I said, and it sounded a little too much like I was implying that having my phone off was the worst part of the whole ordeal. Quinn shot me a withering look, which I only caught out of the corner of my eye. I said, "I just don't understand it yet."

  "Me, I don't plan on dying of overthinking. The CIA's been after me for years, and today they finally made their move. I don't need to pin down every little detail to know that."

  "Okay, you keep bringing up the CIA, so let's start there. Why did you say the drive used to belong to the CIA, and why do you assume Kenny and Holly are—"

  "Who?"

  "When I met them at the airport, they said their names were Kenny and Holly. Claimed to be with Global News Link. I don't believe that, obviously, but they did seem corporate."

  "Ah yes, your highly-trained instincts in spotting intelligence operatives."

  "Hey, if there's one thing I've met a lot of in my life, it's corporate types. They had that feeling, like at any minute they might break into a PowerPoint presentation."

  She laughed slightly, which made me feel good, like the ice was starting to melt. "Whereas, I've been tracked by the CIA for years," she said wearily, "so I'm just going to assume that without further information, these are the same bastards who've been ruining my life all along."

  "See, that's what I don't get." I paused, trying to put it as delicately as I could. "I'm just not sure the CIA devotes that many resources to tracking and stalking…you know, people like you."

  "Well, they do."

  "How do you know, though?"

  "Pattern recognition, dammit! When you get a rash every time you eat fish, you figure out you're allergic to fish by recognizing the pattern. And when you get rejected for car loans or credit cards all the time, you figure out that the secret number three unelected agencies have assigned you is low, right?"

  "It's called a credit score."

  "I know what it's called! So, when your credit score drops lower and lower the more you dig into the CIA, when weird coincidences rob you of your job and your friends, when the more you figure out what they're really up to, the worse your life just coincidentally gets, that's what you'd call a recognizable pattern! They don't like people finding out their secrets, and they make sure that anyone who does is miserable and poor. An 'outsider' nobody will listen to."

  She paused for a moment, and I was about to try to bring her back to the subject, but she was just getting started.

  "Think. Just…think. This is an organization that is designed to find out secrets and to keep secrets, right? That's what they do. It's what they're for. So, think about what they let you know, what they don't keep secret. They will tell you—Cheerfully! Happily! With a big smile!—that they killed a guy in the whorehouse they were running to test mind-control drugs. They'll tell you that they were founded on information straight from Adolf Hitler! They don't think it's important to keep secret that they funded terrorist training camps with the money they got from selling heroin to veterans. That's all public record. So how—I seriously mean how—do you think that's all there is to know? Do you think that tracking people who try to expose their secrets is somehow beyond them? Like, oh sure, we'll assassinate people left and right, overthrow elected governments, yeah, but monitoring our critics? Goodness me, no! We'd never do that!"

  I knew a couple of the references she made, but not most of them. "Adolf Hitler?"

  "Reinhard Gehlen," she said tiredly. "You can look it up."

  "Okay, so if I can grant, for now, that you're right about the CIA, will you answer some direct questions with short, on-topic responses?"

  "I'll try."

  I still wasn't buying that the CIA was after her, but I needed some straight answers. "Baxter. Who was he?"

  "Kinda like me. Bit of a loner. Traded old computer hardware with him from time to time."

  "Why do you think he didn't do the shooting at The Gazette despite what every news agency on earth is reporting?"

  "Isn't the fact that 'every news agency on earth' is reporting it enough to know it's not true?"

  "No, it's not. And you promised me straight answers."

  She sighed. "Okay, look. I'm not going to pretend Baxter was a saint. He had some anger issues, but he wouldn't have done anything like that shooting. The people he was mad at are the same people I'm mad at. Baxter cared about the little guy. The guys getting screwed by your Apples and Googles and CIAs."

  "Enough with the editorializing," I said.

  "Fine, but he was not out to get some poor receptionist at a struggling newspaper. Not a crooked old editor who couldn't ever get his life right. And certainly not James Stacy, who he respected the hell out of."

  "And he knew James and Innerva?"

  "Sure, he gave them the drive."

  "How do you know Baxter gave James the drive?"

  "Same way I know about the sticker. He told me."

  She had my attention now. "Baxter did?"

  "About a week ago, Baxter emailed me a photo of a box of goodies he'd gotten in trade. The drive was in the box. He asked me what I thought the sticker meant because he'd gotten two drives. One with the sticker and one without. He was confused because they seemed identical in design, and in age. You know, most likely from the same place. But one had the sticker, one didn't."

  I was pissed at her for burying the lede, for making me listen to a ten-minute rant about credit scores before getting to the important stuff. "And I assume you researched it?"

  "Directive 6/35 was issued by CIA director George Tenet in 2003. It was pretty routine. It called for the destruction of certain computers, hard drives, and related materials deemed of no historical value."

  I decided to believe this part of her story for now, though what remained of my journalistic instincts wanted to confirm her story with a second source. "You said that last part like you were quoting something."

  "I was quoting. CIA Directive 6/35. And no, you can't just Google that. I got it off the Dark Web."

  "Assuming that's true, why did Baxter give the drive to James and Innerva?"

  "Once I told him what the sticker meant, the first thing he wanted to do was to find out what was on it. But he also knew that he wanted no part of a CIA drive. James and Innerva specialize in hacked and stolen information. They're truth crusaders. Plus, they have some technical skills. Not with hardware so much, but enough to get by. Anyway, he figured if he gave it to them, he'd still get to find out what was on it, but so would a lot more people. If it was something interesting, he'd pass the risk along to James."

  "Did he own guns?"

  She looked at me skeptically. "Yeah, why?"

  "News reported that the shooting took place with two guns, both of which were purchased by and licensed to Baxter. And that he was found dead by his own hand at the scene."

  "Framed."

  I didn't know what to say. Of course, it was possible she was right. But it didn't seem likely. "By the way," I said, "since we may have to do a lot of communicating over the next few days, here's a tip. If you want to bring me on board with one of your arguments more quickly, start with facts, like the CIA sticker and destruction directives, rather than credit scores and Hitler conspiracy theories."

  I glanced at her and thought she cracked a smile, but all she said was, "I'm telling you, Google the Hitler thing. Public record."

  She said it with a sigh, like she was talked out. And I was happy to have some time to think about what she was saying.

  The sun was long gone and the road was straight and black ahead. I could still see the faintest glow of orangish-black behind the mountains, but the area had a feeling of desolation. My mind flashed on what we would do if the car broke down, but it worked for now, and we were only another four or five hours from the Duck Valley Reservation.

  Quinn had said the word 'framed' as tho
ugh she was sure of it, as though she already knew the details. Of course, she couldn't know the details, but she thought she did, and I was curious.

  As a journalist, your job is to know things, then to write them. Problem is, in order to know things you have to rely on sources, and sources can be deceiving. Some are trying to play you—to get you to print something that serves their interest rather than the interest of truth. Many think they know more than they actually do. They're sure they have the complete story even though they're only looking at a tiny corner of it. Like the blind men and the elephant. One touching the rough skin, one the hard tusk, one the rope-like tail, all certain they have the complete version because their experience seems real.

  For example, when I was still in high school, I interned at a tiny paper on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where I grew up. I wasn't there to write anything, though. I was there to get coffee, research things for the real journalists, and so on. But one night a reporter called in sick before a big Town Hall meeting and the editor sent me out to take notes, get quotes from at least five residents, and bring it back so she could punch it into a story.

  The first guy I interviewed for the piece was a local contractor and he was happy to give me a quote for the story, but it's what he told me afterwards that I remember. He said, "You know what you should really be covering? The use of school funds. You know they paid twelve thousand for the new sprinkler system at the soccer fields, eighty-thousand for new bleachers. Could have done both for half the price by hiring local contractors, but the superintendent wanted some big, out-of-state firm to get the work. Those guys are criminals."

  Now, in my little seventeen-year-old brain, this sounded like a big scoop. Corruption within the school board. Wasted funds. Great headline material. And the guy seemed sure of himself, too. He had the figures off the top of his head, after all. I dutifully recorded what he said and told him I'd look into it.

  But he was the blind man, just holding the tail. And, like the blind man, he wasn't wrong, exactly. He was partially right, which is how most of us are, most of the time. He was correct about how much everything had cost, but it turned out the money had come from a state infrastructure bill designed to help make Washington State greener, and green materials cost more. The new sprinkler system would use half the water of the old one. The new bleachers were made of some special kind of alloy that would last sixty years, as opposed to the twenty-year lifespan of aluminum.