“They all had something in common,” Max said, as if he hadn’t heard Crossley. “They were all African American…”
“Don’t say another word!”
“…and they were all minors.”
There was a moment’s shocked silence and then a buzzer sounded on Crossley’s desk. “What is it?” he snapped.
“I’m…sorry to disturb you,” a male voice said. “I’m at the front desk. I have a Mr. Helmut Jager here to see you. He insists he has an appointment, though I can see no record…”
Crossley opened his mouth to respond, but Ellie wagged her finger at him.
“Err…” he flustered. “Keep him there until I confirm he can come up.”
“But Mr. Crossley, he…”
“I said, KEEP HIM THERE!” Crossley shouted.
The line went dead.
“You know, I could have security in here in moments. They’d wrench that laptop out of your hands and then throw it out the window at my command.”
Max smiled. Like the villain in an old western who pretends to run from the hero only to lead him into a ravine where his gang is waiting. “That wouldn’t do much good. I’ve set up an automated broadcast to go out in three hours with everything SaPIEnT knows about you, and that’s a lot.”
“So, that’s why you’re helping them? You’ll hang us out to dry so you can cover up the fact that you’re a disgusting pervert?” Ellie spat.
“I don’t believe you,” Crossley said, recovering a little of his confidence. “I don’t believe you’ve got more than just a few names, and I don’t believe you can broadcast anything.”
Max sighed. “I’ve got the police interview with Lucile—would you like me to read it aloud? She said she didn’t like some of the things you wanted to do. She called them unnatural. What did she mean by that?”
“Why, you son of a—”
“And I wouldn’t bet your future on Max being unable to do what he says,” Patrick added. “He’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
Max flushed at that.
“So, you’ve got to ask yourself,” Ellie said, leaning back in her chair. “Do ya feel lucky, punk?”
Crossley almost lost it then, she could tell. For a moment, she thought she’d gone too far and tipped him over the edge into irrationality, but the sort of pragmatism he’d needed to get to the top of his profession acted like a life preserver. “What do you want?” he said, deflating.
“You will let us go,” Max said, then looked at Ellie.
“With a pass that will get us through any checkpoints and a vehicle with a full tank of gas.”
“Then what?”
“Then I will log in and stop the bot,” Max said.
The buzzer on Crossley’s desk went off again, and his piggy eyes swiveled from it to Max and the others. “How do I know you won’t release those…lies anyway?”
“Why would we do that?” Ellie asked. “All we want to do is go on our way.”
Again, the buzzer went off.
He jabbed down on the button. “Send him up in five minutes,” he said, then, “Follow me,” and quite suddenly he leaped up and opened the door, leading them past his surprised secretary and out into the maze of cubicles that sprawled between the private offices.
He ignored all greetings and they eventually found their way to a fire door in the far corner. “Go this way. Down the steps. Here are my car keys.” He handed them to Ellie and then pulled out a plastic card from his pocket. “This is my pass. It’ll get you through any checkpoints.”
“What will you tell Jager?” Ellie said as the door swung open and warm air wafted in.
“The truth. You escaped. I suggest you hurry.”
They filed past him onto the metal landing.
“And I suggest you never come back to this city.”
The door slammed closed behind them. For a moment, Ellie looked up at the flaking paint, feeling like a child who had been excluded from adult company, but Patrick pulled on her sleeve and she followed him carefully down the metal stairs, moving as quickly as she dared.
“Where in tarnation is his car?” Hank muttered as they reached the bottom.
“Over there,” Patrick said, pointing at a new sign on the wall: City Manager.
“A Prius?” Ellie said. “There’s a surprise.”
“Do you want to drive, or shall I?”
Ellie scowled. “This is no time to pretend to be a modern man, Patrick. Feel free to go full on Cro-Magnon on me.”
As they drove out of the parking lot, Ellie glanced up at Crossley’s office. She thought she glimpsed a dark figure looking down at them.
“Where to?” Patrick asked, as they made their way back onto the main street running past the capitol.
Ellie reached in his pack and pulled out the paper printout. “Best head west—there could be water to the north and I don’t want to get trapped with Fritz on our tail.”
Patrick swung the car around and they headed back the way they’d come in the minivan a couple of hours earlier.
“Well done, Max,” Hank was saying in the back seat. “So that’s what you were doin’ on your computer.” This second remark was clearly aimed at Ellie, but she wasn’t biting.
“Yes, nice one, Max. But I’ve got a hundred questions, beginning with where did you get all that dirt on Crossley?”
“Oh, that was easy. I was looking through the data dump I’d grabbed before we left the boat and I noticed some of the information there didn’t seem to have any connection with science. I didn’t think much about it, but when we were in his office, I thought I’d search for his name, just for something to do. It was all there in a report by SaPIEnT.”
“That’s this secret organization out of Denver?”
“Not really secret. They’re a biotech organization.”
“And they keep tabs on influential people,” Hank said. “But that stuff about Crossley—it was true?”
Max pulled out the laptop.
“No, I don’t need to read it,” he said.
Max nodded. “Yes, it was all in the report. It looked as though it was part of a larger report—just the executive summary. Bullet points.”
Ellie grunted. “A list of things to say during negotiations. Smart. But how were you going to broadcast it?”
“I wasn’t. I lied.”
“Well I’ll be…” Hank said, slapping the boy on the shoulder. “That was a helluva bluff, son. I wouldn’t want to be playin’ poker against you.”
Max shrugged. “I don’t like lying, but I think that agent is after me and I don’t want him to catch us.”
“He’s lookin’ for Buzz, that’s plain enough,” Hank said.
“He was looking for Buzz. But now he’s looking for me. If he wasn’t, why wouldn’t he have left us alone when he realized Buzz isn’t with us?”
Patrick said from the front, “Yes, that’s what puzzled me. It’s one thing to come after us on the open road, quite another to blackmail the city manager into trapping us. It could be that he thinks we know where Buzz is…”
“Which we do,” Ellie said.
“Or it could be that he wants to know how we’ve been hacking into their system and what we’ve learned. Or maybe there’s something in that data dump that you haven’t found yet. You haven’t looked through it all, have you?”
Max shook his head. “No. But whatever; it’s me he wants. Don’t let him get me, will you?”
And suddenly the frightened boy had returned. The mask had slipped and he allowed Hank to put his arm around his shoulders and pull him close. “We won’t, son. I promise.”
Chapter 17
Ragtown
Eve woke Bobby up far too early for his liking, eager to know what had happened the night before. She drew a bucket of fresh water and then went back for a pitcher of hot, and he sat in the bath as she mixed them together and poured it over him.
To his delight, he found a razor and shaving cream in the closet above the sink. He watched h
imself in the mirror as, like a moth emerging from its cocoon, he transformed himself with a few strokes of the blade. All he needed now was a haircut, but he made it as tidy as possible with his hands and emerged from the bathroom feeling like a new man. He found Eve lying on the bed wrapped in nothing but a towel and, over the following minutes, his transformation was completed.
Once they were dressed, they made their way to the field hospital. Linwood was awake and flirting with the nurse measuring his blood pressure and, after a short catch-up, they went looking for Randall.
He was in worse condition. Myron’s blow had cracked his skull and he hadn’t regained consciousness yet. “We’d better go tell Bonnie,” Bobby said. He’d wanted to be able to tell her that Randall would be alright when he related what had happened the previous night but, as usual, things weren’t going to be that simple. She at least had the right to sit beside her husband’s bed while he fought for his life.
“I’ll go,” Eve said as they left the antiseptic smell behind them. “You need to go report for duty, soldier boy!” She smiled, got up on tippy toes and kissed him. At that moment, Bobby would have given anything for a day spent in the hotel room with Eve, but he wouldn’t find that kind of peace until he’d found Maria.
As he strode over the sidewalk, looking for someone he could ask directions of, he thought about how quickly his emotions about Eve had cleared. It seemed that the threat of a desiccated death had the effect of focusing the mind on what really mattered. The journey they’d taken to find each other was irrelevant. If there was one thing he’d learned during the nightmare of the past three weeks, it was that here and now were all that mattered. The distant past had been washed away in the deluge. He loved Eve, that much was now obvious. And, once he’d found Maria, he would be complete.
“You rescued your friend, then?”
Bobby emerged from the deep ways of his thoughts to see the soldier who’d given him the pass striding toward him. He took the man’s hand and shook it. “Yes, we got him.”
“I’ve been in to see Linwood. I’ve met plenty like him over the years. Abandoned by an ungrateful country.” He shook his head. “But we’ll look after him now. Everything’s changed, and I guess our country will find a use for us again. The name’s Duarte, Warren Duarte. Sergeant, retired. Well, formerly retired. Come on, son, let’s get you enrolled.”
He began leading Bobby toward a nondescript office building opposite the field hospital.
“Warren, I came here to find my daughter.”
“You know she’s here, do you?”
Bobby paused for a moment. “Honestly, I can’t be sure. But she was heading this way.”
“With her mother? Is that the story?”
Bobby stopped and Duarte came to a halt beside him. “No, with a woman pretending to be her mother. I left her with people I trusted to go find help, but that was weeks ago and I’ve followed her from Ventura to here.”
Duarte nodded. “I get you. But we need folks like you. We’ve got enough knuckleheads already. Look, son, you think your daughter’s here, but you don’t know where exactly. Is that right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re gonna find it a whole lot easier to track her down if you’re on the inside, if you catch my meaning. My advice: sign up, keep your nose clean, and then go talk to the admin team. I’ll put in a good word. Go tonight, once your first shift is done.”
Behind what had been the reception desk of a chiropractic office sat an ancient soldier in military blazer with medals hanging from his chest.
“Hey Bert,” Duarte said. “Bobby here’s an engineer. I’m just taking him through to see Earl.”
“Gotcha, Warren,” the old man said, snapping a salute.
“Are we in the clear?”
Bert looked left and right and gave a stiff nod. “We’re in the clear, for now.”
“Warren keeps an eye out for the suits,” Warren said as he guided Bobby along a corridor and toward the rear of the office. “It’s never good news when Summers or one of her stooges turns up. I don’t reckon any of us knew what we were getting into when we signed up to provide security to Ragtown.”
“Why is it called that?” Bobby asked, reluctant to get sucked into local politics.
“That was the name of the original settlement here. Back when they were planning the dam, in the teeth of the Great Depression, men gathered right here where we’re standin’ and waited for the work to start. The government built a city for them eventually, but to begin with they were living in tents, if you could call them that. Got the name then. Hey, Earl! I got a new recruit.”
The workshop door was open and a man with a wiry white beard looked up from a bench. He wore a dirty blue boiler suit and, as he stood, he slid his spectacles from the top of his bald head onto his nose and peered at Bobby.
“You have? And what makes you think he’s qualified? We got standards here, ya know. When I said I wanted extra help, I told you no grunts.”
Professional pride overrode his reluctance to get involved at all, and Bobby stepped forward, hand held out. “My name’s Bobby Rodriguez. I’ve worked in telecoms and electrical engineering. Are you having trouble with that solenoid?”
The old man took his hand and eyed him suspiciously. “Yeah. I figure it must be something to do with the valve itself. Not much can go wrong with solenoids, as a rule.”
Bobby nodded. “True. Generally not worth the trouble.”
“Maybe, but this one comes from the water tank in the accommodation block and I don’t reckon I’ll be able to order a new one anytime soon.”
Bobby scratched his chin. “You know, that looks like a standard part. You could probably take one from a washing machine in a pinch.”
The old man looked up and rubbed at one of his eyes. “Say, you might be right. Spent so long tryin’ to fix the thing because I didn’t figure I’d be able to replace it. Never occurred to me to steal one.”
“Well,” Warren said, “I’ll leave you two geeks to talk shop while I get on with kicking butt out on the parade ground.”
Earl ignored the departing sergeant. “Name’s Earl Sims. We don’t do ranks here, but I was once a corporal. Never got any higher. Not exactly the kind to play by the rules.”
Bobby took his hand. “Sounds good to me.”
“Now, you’ll find overalls out back and I’ll give you somethin’ to take to the silly old fool at the front desk so he can organize your ID. If he remembers, of course. Soon as that comes through, why don’t you head off and requisition someone’s solenoid?”
Bobby spent the afternoon hanging around with Earl, waiting for his ID to turn up. The old man kept him entertained, and he discovered that the engineering team consisted of around a dozen men and women, most of them as useless as a chocolate coffee pot, as far as Sims was concerned. From time to time, one would return from a job—generally to report that they couldn’t complete the work for one reason or another, at which point, Sims would either give them instructions or tell them to find another member of the team.
He listened sympathetically when Bobby told him about his hunt for Maria. “Jeez, I can imagine how you feel. I got two daughters and three grandkids. Or, at least, I hope they’re still okay. They live in Kansas and it scares me half to death to think of that wave rollin’ in and…” He wiped his eyes. “Sorry. I’ll tell you what. As soon as that ID comes in, you head over to the admin block and find out what they know. We’ll call this your induction day.”
The clerk adjusted his glasses and scanned down the spreadsheet. Bobby ground his teeth, fighting back the temptation to point out that Excel had a search function. If he was any judge, this guy wasn’t the sort who’d take that sort of advice well. Eve sat next to him, her hand on his arm as if restraining him.
“So, I’m looking for Fitzgerald, not Rodriguez?”
“Yes. As I explained, I believe the woman who has my daughter has taken a fake identity.”
“And this isn’t the c
hild’s mother?”
Bobby choked back a sigh. “No. I don’t know how she came to have her. That’s one of the things I want to find out.”
“Fitzgerald…Fitzgerald,” the clerk repeated as he ran his finger down the screen. If he took much longer, Bobby was going to have to at least tell him about the sort function.
Finally, the finger stopped. “Ah. K. Fitzgerald. Kathi. Is that her?”
“Yes!” Bobby leaned forward, trying to peer around the laptop screen.
“And what did you say your daughter’s name was?”
Bobby bit the inside of his cheek, sucking down blood. “Maria!” he managed through clenched teeth.
The clerk opened his mouth, but Eve got there first. “But she was recorded as Ellen.”
“Ah. Yes.” The clerk looked doubtfully at her. “This all seems…irregular.”
“Ellen’s her mother’s name.”
“And that’s you?” He looked at Eve.
“No. She lives in Florida.”
The clerk was clearly floundering now. “But the child lives…”
“With me, godammit!” Bobby snapped, banging the desk with his fist. Eve grabbed his arm, but it was too late. The clerk got up and called over to someone standing near the back of the office.
“Mr. Saunders,” Eve said, glancing at his name badge. She stepped around the side of the desk and looked imploringly up at the man. “Please understand. My friend is very worried about his daughter. Could you please forgive his…passion?”
The man shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. I have no intention of revealing someone’s personal details to a person like this,” he said, gesturing at Bobby, “without clearing it with my superior. And I wouldn’t hold out much hope if I were you.”
Eve sighed, seeming to deflate. “I’m so sorry to have caused you trouble. Come on, Bobby. We’ll come back when you can keep your temper.”
Survivors: Deluge Book 3: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story) Page 14