But it was too late for that now. White light flooded the night, and a cool wind surrounded them. Two Dragonflies took up positions on either side of them. One was the common UAD model, but the other was a larger model that Val had never seen before. Side-by-side cockpit. A big fuselage that looked made for carrying freight or people. It was a personnel carrier.
If you can help, now is the time, thought Val, the rifle in front of her.
Braden didn’t respond.
26
Jessica parked the motorcycle behind the restaurant under the large awning that covered the loading ramp and the back entrance. The bike’s headlight caught a pair of stray cats scrambling away from the garbage cans that stood next to the brick wall.
On the way here, Jessica had told Merida everything over their helmet intercoms. Merida hadn’t seemed very surprised. At least, not the parts about the Samford Virus or the origin of SRP. She’d had a harder time swallowing the bit about the telepaths.
When Jessica killed the engine and lights, they were in almost complete darkness under the overhang. Merida got off the bike’s passenger pillion. The messenger bag hung over her neck. Jessica sat still. She kept her right foot on the foot peg and gripped the handlebars. Her heart pounded out slow, sickening thumps that radiated through her chest and stomach. Staring at the shadows under the awning, she wondered if she would ever stop seeing gutted pigs in the darkness.
“What’s wrong?” said Merida. She took off her helmet and shook her hair.
“Have we thought this through?” said Jessica.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Jessica, “there’s two unconscious government agents on the floor in my apartment. I probably killed one of them. And I just ran from the cops. And now that I know what this is all about, I’m not sure that I want to risk... I want the story, but I don’t know if I want to destroy SRP.”
“You think SRP is worth what they did to get it?” Merida said.
“No,” said Jessica. “Of course not. But it’s done now, right? Everyone involved is dead and buried. There’s no justice to be had, Merida.”
“So they get away with it?”
“They’ve already gotten away with it. Do you really want to risk fifty years of progress for women and equality because the people who brought it to us turned out to be evil dicks?”
“Evil, genocidal, child-maiming dicks. You’re not thinking straight, Jessica. The truth matters. You’re a journalist, for fuck’s sake.”
Jessica looked away. She wanted Merida to be right. She knew Merida was right, even if she didn’t feel it in her heart at this particular moment. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“You’re rattled. Beyond rattled. It’s okay, I get it,” said Merida. “Doesn’t matter anyway. If you’re right about what’s going on, there’s no sitting on this story until it goes away. They know you’ve got the computer, and they’ll never stop coming for you. Doesn’t matter if you try and give it back to them, they’ll still put a bullet in your head. You can swear up and down on a hundred copies of the Susan Wade Act that you’d never do anything to hurt SRP, and they still won’t take that chance. We’re in too deep for that.”
“If you’re trying to comfort me, you’re fucking up royally.”
“It’s just reality, baby.”
“And now you’re the one giving me a speech about facing reality?” Jessica snorted an incredulous laugh. “The whole world really is upside right now, isn’t it?”
“You think I’m wrong? You want to go to the cops? They’ve probably been told you’re a domestic terrorist with a nuclear bomb in that damn satchel bag.”
Jessica held her hands up in the air, her thumbs and forefingers forming the bottom corners of a TV screen. “Jessica Brantley, Domestic Terrorist, Plots to Bomb Downtown Atlanta in the Name of All-Mighty Poobah!”
“I’m glad you can joke about this.”
“Just trying to keep things in perspective.”
Merida unlocked the back door and led Jessica into the kitchen, which smelled of burned wood and seasonings. Jessica thought she could pick out garlic, cumin, and maybe coriander.
“Here,” she said, passing the messenger bag to Jessica.
Jessica took the bag and waited by the door while Merida stumbled in the darkness, her feet dragging across the floor in short steps. A few bumps and muttered curses later, Merida reached something on the other side of the room. With a click, she turned on a small light over one of the stoves.
“Better,” she said.
Jessica closed the door behind her and stepped into the middle of the kitchen. Stainless steel refrigerators, stoves, ovens, dishwashers, and sinks surrounded her. The floor felt slick under her feet.
Merida winked at her and walked to a door on the other side of a room, which opened into a storage closet. She disappeared for a few seconds and returned carrying a tool kit.
“This one doesn’t work right now,” she said, crouching in front of one of the ovens and putting the tool kit on the floor. “I’m not going to fix it until next month or so.”
After this, I doubt you’re going to fix it at all, Jessica thought. But she kept it to herself.
Merida opened the oven and took out the cooking grates, setting them on the floor next to the tools. Then she leaned through the oven’s large opening and began to work at screws in the bottom where the burners sat. Jessica thought of a cartoon character leaning into a lion’s mouth to inspect its teeth.
“They might come ransack my restaurant, but they’re not going to start taking appliances apart.” She paused and looked over her shoulder at Jessica, grinning. “See? There is a good reason to keep me around.”
Jessica felt herself smiling in spite of herself. She had stumbled upon probably the biggest conspiracy in history. Well, had been dragged into it by Havana—literally. But she couldn’t help grinning at the simple brilliance of Merida’s idea. She was right. Nobody would think to look in the guts of an oven for the computer.
“Hell, yeah,” said Jessica. “That, and other things. Like the view I’m enjoying right now.”
Merida snorted.
Still, hiding the computer for now didn’t solve her problem. She had no way to connect the computer to anything. Not a printer, not another device, not the internet. Whoever had compiled the information had been smart enough to protect it so that nobody could wipe it remotely, but they had also made it almost impossible for anybody to move the documents from the computer and make them public. She supposed she could take video of the computer’s screen.
“But what are we going to do now?” Merida said. “That’s your part of the plan.”
With a turn of her stomach, Jessica realized she had no idea. When your enemy was the government, where did you go for help?
Merida backed out of the oven.
“Why don’t you turn that off before we put it in here?” she said, indicating the computer in the bag. “I mean, maybe they have some way of detecting it if it’s turned on?”
“I doubt they do,” said Jessica, sliding the laptop out of the bag. “Still. Can’t be too careful.”
She opened the laptop screen, and with a whir and a flash of light from the screen, it came to life. The man with his two children looked out at her again. Their whole faces smiled, and their eyes were wide as if eager to take in every sight, every possible detail that they could. Behind them, a big yard with grass and pine trees looked impossibly green. Far in the background, a lake with greenish blue water shimmered in the light of the sun. There were no buildings, cars, or anything else artificial. Now that she really looked at the image, it struck Jessica that it had been a long time since she had seen any place like it.
“Hey,” said Merida. “You awake?”
“Sorry,” said Jessica. She held down the power button. The screen turned black and the computer’s fan fell silent. She closed the screen and handed the computer over to Merida, whose hands were stained with grease. But wh
en Merida tried to take it from her, Jessica held on to it for a moment.
“I hope this is a good idea,” she said.
“It’s the only one we’ve got right now,” said Merida.
She didn’t want to, but Jessica let go of the computer. With one hand, Merida lifted the bottom floor of the oven, and with the other, she slid the computer into the space below it.
It really is a good idea, thought Jessica, watching her begin to put screws back into their holes.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Merida. She set the bottom floor of the oven back in place with a metallic thunk. “We hunker down here. Maybe they don’t come looking for you here.”
“I’ll bet this is exactly where they come next,” Jessica said. “After they go to your apartment.”
Merida ignored this. “We hunker down here. Maybe have a little fun while we’re hunkering. And if they show up here looking for you, we tell them that we ran because Agent Date Rape Drug and Scary Bald Guy scared us. We thought someone else might come after us.”
“Why didn’t we just call the police?” said Jessica.
Merida kept screwing down the oven’s bottom, but she didn’t say anything for a moment.
“And I used that ‘date rape drug’ on him after you knocked him out with a bat,” said Jessica. She should kick herself for that, now that she thought of it.
“So we’re a couple of hysterical women?” Merida said. “And we forgot to bring our phones when we ran from the apartment terrified?” She glanced over her shoulder at Jessica. “It’s completely legit to embrace sexist stereotypes when it benefits us, right?”
Jessica gave her a frown. Merida turned back to her work.
“So we call the police from here?” said Merida. “We say we came here for safety, and we forgot out phones, so we used the restaurant phone to call?”
She tightened the last screw, backed out of the oven, and closed the door.
“Well, that’s going to be okay,” she said, putting the screwdriver back in its place. “Nobody will find it there.” She closed the toolkit and took it back to the closet. “And if they bury us in a hole somewhere,” she said, closing the closet door, “then somebody’ll fix that oven and get a big, smelly surprise when they turn it on.”
She and Jessica looked at each other. Jessica couldn’t believe Merida was being so calm about this whole thing, but at the same time, she couldn’t help loving her for it.
“But maybe we have a little fun before we call the police?” she said. She smiled and held up her hands. “You always did have a thing for grease monkeys, right?”
Jessica shook her head, putting on a smile. “The police can falsify evidence,” she said.
Merida frowned and walked over to a sink to wash her hands. “Maybe. But then, Atlanta PD isn’t DHR,” she said, running hot water over her hands and scrubbing off the grease. “This is still the South, for crying out loud. They’re backward as hell, but southerners still hate the government as much as they always did. I guess they were right about that part.” She dried her hands with a towel.
“You don’t know what the police will do,” Jessica said. “You already said the government might have told them I’m a terrorist or something. And even if they don’t find some reason to arrest me and throw me into a hole somewhere—”
“Arrest us, you mean.”
“—even if they don’t arrest us,” Jessica pressed, “or even if they don’t kill us, DHR and Homeland Security or the FBI will step in and take over.” She shook her head. Her heart pumped so hard that she felt it in her temples and behind her ears. “My only chance is to get ahead of them and put that information onto the net. I’ve got to find a way to get those documents off the computer. Once everybody knows...”
Merida reached out and took Jessica’s hand, pressing it against her face. Her skin felt damp and warm. She closed her eyes.
“The first time you kissed me,” she said, “I thought, This is the person I want to give everything to.” She rubbed her face against Jessica’s palm and brushed her lips with the tips of Jessica’s fingers. “I came back to you tonight because I thought, It doesn’t matter if I’m jealous and insecure. I want to be... I want to be vulnerable to you. I want you to love me, but you can’t love me if I don’t make myself vulnerable to you. You can’t be loved unless you put yourself into a position to be hurt. And you could hurt me so bad.”
We don’t have time for this, Jessica wanted to say. She stared at Merida. The woman who had leaped into danger with her without hesitation. The woman who had saved her from being raped by some government agent and then killed or taken to who-the-hell-knows-where.
Merida let go of Jessica’s hand and shook her head as if shooing away a gnat.
“Sorry,” she said. “Bad time.”
“Well, it’s—”
But Merida cut her off with a wave. “Do you know anybody who can help you get that stuff off the computer?” she said. “Could Carlo do it?”
“No, definitely not Carlo,” she said. Last week she’d had to help him convert a raw video file into hologram format. “There has to be—”
But behind them the back door flew open with a crash.
27
Braden? she thought. Can you help?
“They’re far away,” he said after a pause. “Maybe when they get closer.”
“Drop the rifle now!” shouted a voice from the smaller Dragonfly.
Two drones detached from the bottom of the craft. They buzzed in a circle around Val and Braden like planets orbiting a star.
Without turning her head, Val looked at the woods on either side of the creek. They were in the middle of the stream with at least twenty-five or thirty yards to the woods in each direction. There was no making it.
Each drone picked a target and settled into a hover, one in front of Val and the other in front of Braden. Their bottom compartments opened to reveal the dart guns.
This was it.
Val raised the rifle and fired a burst of rounds at the drone in front of her, sending it crashing into the water, and turned on Braden’s.
Then several things happened at once.
The pilot of the UAD-9 shouted something unintelligible through the loudspeaker. The larger Dragonfly, which had been hovering steadily the whole time with its weapons pointed toward Val and Braden, suddenly shuddered and reeled, turning away from Val and toward the woods—as if the pilot had lost control of the craft for just a moment. The second drone fired a dart, and Braden let out a surprised breath and staggered.
“Mom,” he said.
Val fired on the drone as it moved to try to evade her, but a bullet struck one of its whirring lift motors. As the drone went spinning away from her, the smaller Dragonfly fired a burst of rounds so close to her that water splashed her face.
“Put down the gun or I will shoot you!” shouted the pilot.
Braden stumbled into the creek.
“Mom,” he said again.
“Keep your face out of the water!” shouted Val.
“Okay,” said Braden. He lay his head on a rock using his hands as cushions.
“Last warning!”
UAD Dragonflies weren’t heavily armored. They were light and fast for police and urban anti-terrorist action. The rifle might pierce the canopy of the smaller Dragonfly before the gunner could shoot her. But the second craft would certainly mow her down before she could turn on it. And then they would have Braden without her. That thought made up her mind.
“Braden,” she said.
“Mom,” he said drowsily.
“Trust me, okay?” she said. “I will never hurt you.”
“Okay,” he said, fighting to open his eyes. “I know.” His eyelids drooped shut.
She turned and aimed the rifle at her son.
“If you want us,” she shouted. “You can have us dead.”
She glanced at Braden. Lying with his head on the rock and his hands folded
under him, he might have been dozing in his bed.
“Can you hear me?!” she screamed at the Dragonfly.
There was no response from the loudspeaker, and the noise of the lift engines that filled the night became like silence itself, filling everything so completely that it nearly disappeared. This wouldn’t work. Any second, drones would drop from the bigger Dragonfly and take her down with sedative darts, too, and a terrible thought occurred to her.
Oh, God. I have no idea what I’m about to do.
Her finger twitched on the trigger.
Oh, God.
A voice came from the loudspeaker, calmer now. “Ms. Hara, don’t do this. We can—”
What happened next startled Val so much that she tripped over a rock and tumbled into the creek. Gunfire erupted from the second, larger Dragonfly and struck the smaller craft, which burst into flames and went into a flat spin. As it flew toward the trees, Val tossed the rifle aside and threw herself at Braden. Clamping his mouth and nose with her hands, she dragged him under the water to shield him from the heat of the blast as the UAD struck the trees and exploded. Heat like a sunburn. A shockwave. Enough force that it shoved the two of them a few feet across the creekbed. Val hit her head against a rock, making her gasp and inhale the cold water, which tasted like dirt.
Choking, she lifted Braden out of the water. Braden slept on. The sedative they had put into him was powerful.
Please let him be okay. She coughed hard, spluttering water from her lungs.
The woods where the UAD-9 had crashed blazed with orange, red, and yellow. Dark billows of smoke rose from the crumpled heap of the craft and formed a huge column lighted by the flames. The noise and the flames would draw more attention soon, and Val didn’t think she could run any more. Especially not when she’d have to carry her son.
You were about to shoot him, she thought.
It was true. The thought had crossed her mind. Part of her would rather have him dead at her own hands than taken by the government to be locked up in a lab for experiments. But Braden was strong. He could get out of any facility they put him in.
The Way Out Page 15