True Path

by Graham Storrs

  O‘Dell was still chuckling over Sandra’s surprise exit. He waved a dismissive hand at Polanski and walked away. “See you in Hell, buddy,” he called over his shoulder.

  Polanski watched him go without a word. After a while, he turned back to his headquarters, still shimmering and folding in on itself. “How long will it keep doing that?” he asked.

  It was a question clearly meant for Jay. “Not long now. It’s not a big backwash. Sandra probably didn’t mean for it to kill anyone, just distract you while she got out.”

  Polanski turned to Jay for the first time since he’d emerged into the street. “You and me got to talk,” he said. “Can Peter let you go without you trying to escape?”

  “What makes you think I couldn’t just break free any time I like?”

  Polanski almost broke into a smile. “Gets your goat that your lady friend’s tougher than you, huh?”

  Jay realized that Polanski was almost right. Sandra had floored two guys like some kind of Amish ninja. What irked him was that Polanski didn’t credit him with the same skills.

  “OK, call off your gorilla and we’ll talk. I did come here to see you. Thing is, I need your help.”

  -oOo-

  Polanski left instructions with his lieutenants about how to prioritize the reconstruction. First thing was to get someone called Matthew on the job of getting the “time machine” back up and running. Then he and Polanski left to find a café. They walked a long way. The boy, Peter, and two other armed men followed close behind as they passed through the big main gates of the Shanty and into a far more salubrious suburb—one that didn’t smell of excrement. A few blocks into the rows of brick houses and concrete roads, they found a small café that smelled of roasted coffee beans and had large Italian sausages festooned behind the counter. Polanski took Jay inside while his men loitered by the door.

  Although Polanski was outside his own turf, the proprietor greeted the rebel leader like a national celebrity, which, Jay supposed, he probably was. The man brought them coffee and plates of food and cakes, all unasked for. He beamed happily at Polanski all the while, chattering away about the food, his family, the weather, with Polanski nodding and smiling and asking by name after various relatives. It was quite a performance and while it went on nobody else in the place got any attention whatsoever. Eventually, Polanski called a halt by saying, “Joseph, my old friend, I need to talk business to this gentleman here.”

  “Of course! Of course! And here am I jibber-jabbering about my Mary. Hey …” He leaned close to Jay, with a hand on his shoulder, and spoke into his ear in a lowered voice. “This man here is going to save us all. He’s going to bring back the old days, like it used to be. So you treat him with respect, OK? OK?” Jay gave back a weak smile and nodded. “OK,” said Joseph, his point made, and left them alone.

  “Who are you and what’s your relationship to Duvalle?” Polanski asked—the first words he’d spoken to Jay since they left the Shanty.

  Jay had already decided that the whole truth was his only possible play. So he told him who he was, who he worked for, and how he’d become tangled up with Duvalle.

  Polanski listened in silence. “And the girl?”

  “Cara?”

  “Sandra,” Polanski said.

  “That’s … a long story.”

  “I’ve got time, and Joseph is going to keep filling up our coffee cups whether we want him to or not. So let’s hear it.”

  “No, we don’t really have time at all. Duvalle is holding my daughter hostage to make me come here and kill you.”

  Polanski took the news with remarkable calm. “The Reverend Jeremiah Duvalle? Head of the Measurers of the Temple?” Jay nodded. “So why haven’t you done it yet? You’re armed. You’ve had plenty of opportunity.”

  “Because I’m a cop, not a murderer. Besides, I don’t have any reason to want you dead—except that you brought all this down on—” he almost said, “my family,” but that wasn’t quite true. So he said, “the people I love,” instead, which also wasn’t quite true. “I just want to get Sandra and Cara out of this mess and get them home. The only people who want you dead are your Government, the FBI, and Duvalle. Oh, and that guy in the cowboy hat we met in the street. He doesn’t seem to like you much, either.”

  Polanski nodded. “It’s a long list.”

  “Maybe you ought to stop kidnapping people and plotting mass murder.”

  Polanski seemed to consider making such a career move for a moment, and then said, “What do you know about building lob sites?”

  “Nothing, I’m happy to say. I’ve devoted my working life to putting people with such dangerous knowledge in prison.”

  “Do you want to put Sandra in prison, then? I thought you just said you loved her.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  They both fell silent for a moment until Polanski said, “Here’s the thing, Chief Inspector …”

  “Please, call me Jay. I find such formality coming from people holding me prisoner just a bit creepy, you know?”

  “OK, Jay. The thing is, I’m going to create a timesplash.”

  Jay’s heart sank. There was no way Polanski could let him go now. “When?” The chances of getting back to Duvalle within the twenty-four hour period looked vanishingly small.

  “When? Tomorrow, I hope, if Sandra didn’t destroy my equipment completely. I’ve got a guy who can screw the pieces together but he doesn’t have the skills to set up a rig to do what I want. I need Sandra for that.”

  “She won’t help you.”

  “She has to.”

  “She won’t. She’s not the kind. It wouldn’t matter what you threatened her with.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  Polanski continued to study him with his dark, steady eyes and Jay tried to keep the thought from his mind that there might just be one threat that would do it.

  “What about the girl?” Polanski asked.

  “Sandra?”

  “Cara.”

  A switch inside Jay’s head flipped to overload. Just as a dog that has been driven back and back until it is cringing in a corner sometimes flips from flight to fight, so Jay’s mood changed in an instant from desperate hope to furious anger. His lips pulled back into a snarl and his eyes narrowed. “You so much as touch that child and I will make it my life’s work to hunt you down and destroy you.”

  Polanski blinked in surprise but did not look the least bit frightened. Which made Jay even more angry. “So,” Polanski said, still watching Jay’s eyes. “You think Sandra might do it to save the girl?”

  With an eruption of rage, Jay shoved the table. It hit Polanski in the stomach and knocked him back. His chair toppled and he flailed as he fell to the ground. The table, with Jay still pushing against it, toppled after him, hitting Polanski in the stomach once again as it landed knocking the breath out of him.

  Jay yanked his revolver free of his belt and knelt down beside the gasping rebel leader. He pushed the stubby barrel into his face. “You and I are leaving here, now,” he said, still snarling. “Get on your feet.”

  He grabbed Polanski’s shirt to heave him up. There was a quick footstep to one side and Jay looked up just in time to see the proprietor, Joseph, swinging a gigantic salami down onto his head.

  Chapter 19: Revolutionaries

  Sandra walked and walked. The day became cloudy and cold and she was glad of the exercise. She walked with her eyes cast down and spoke to no-one. When she left the Shanty and moved into the more fragrant suburbs, she did not entirely break clear of the poverty that she had seen since she first reached the Americas.

  Paint peeled on doors and window frames, the gray wood beneath revealing decades of neglect. Despite the cold, children played in bare feet, or if they had them, battered old boots. There were few vehicles around of any kind except bicycles. Horse-drawn carts were not uncommon, making deliveries alongside battered electric trucks.

  She had noticed that few wo
men went anywhere on their own. After the third incident of a young lout shouting out to her as she passed, she tried to walk close to small groups, pretending to be walking with them. Early on in her travels, she stole a shopping bag from a shop and used it to hide her gun. She also picked up a headscarf the same way, and supplied herself with enough cash for a few meals and maybe a room for the night by mugging a very surprised cleric who had offered her money for sex in a quiet alley.

  There seemed to be no way to find Duvalle except to ask the people she passed, but every time she did so, she got the same polite but confused response: “What does he do? What’s his full name? What does he look like? If you could just give me a bit more to go on …”

  She did learn that there was a public database of contact details available through the compad system—but nobody she spoke to had a compad. “Advanced electronics” as one woman described the compad, were expensive, imported devices that ordinary people couldn’t afford, and, besides, the Church frowned on their use by anybody who didn’t need them for their job.

  An old woman—gray hair, overweight, missing teeth, walking with a stick—tried to keep Sandra talking, telling her tales of the old days when she was young, “before all this One Church stuff started up.” It shocked Sandra that the woman was only sixty. No age to be so decrepit, yet old enough to know that in pre-Adjustment America things could have been very different for her.

  “My name’s Ruth,” she said and pulled Sandra close as she whispered that her name used to be Charlene. “But we all had to change our names back in the Fifties when they brought in the baptism laws. Damn fool laws if you ask me. I was perfectly well baptized the first time. So was everybody else I knew. Didn’t make no sense then and it don’t make no sense now. Used to be a Baptist back then, before all the churches joined into one. Why’d they go and do that? That’s what I want to know.”

  Sandra tried to sound sympathetic as she extricated herself from the conversation.

  “I suppose you’ve got a fella to meet,” the woman complained, shaking her head wearily. “All the trouble in the world is down to men, girl. Women used to be free back then. Now we’re no better’n slaves, but the fellas is doing just fine. Made themselves a real cozy little world now they have. And young things like you, you don’t even fight it. Born to it, I guess, and don’t know no better. But some of us still remember how it used to be.”

  On impulse, Sandra asked her if maybe Polanski might make things right again. The old woman looked at her sharply with her rheumy eyes. “I don’t know nothing about Polanski. What are you doing, coming around here spying? Everybody spying on everybody else. What kind of a world is that? You should be ashamed.” Painfully, she limped away, looking back at Sandra with fear in her eyes.

  As the afternoon wore on, Sandra began to feel desperate. She found herself walking down a busy street lined with shops and offices, and considered which one she might go into, brandish her gun, demand that somebody look up Duvalle on their compad for her.

  Then she saw the offices of The New Church Times, est. 2051, and claiming to offer “All the news that’s right to print.” She might have missed it altogether except it had headlines, hand-written on paper, clipped to boards outside the entrance, and one of those said, “Duvalle Slams Defense Cuts.”

  She went inside. A dimly lit reception area with a wooden counter greeted her. Behind the counter an empty chair seemed to reproach her for her haste. A glass-paneled door beside the counter led to a much larger, brighter room in which men in shirtsleeves occupied desks cluttered with paper.

  “He went out for something,” said a man’s voice. In the shadowy corner of the reception area, a smartly-dressed man watched her.

  “The receptionist?”

  “Why don’t you sit down here and wait with me?” There was a self-confident arrogance about the man that Sandra liked.

  Danger, Will Robinson! she told herself. Not only were men like that the bane of her life, out here anybody who dressed that well was either Government, or Church—or maybe something just as bad. “How long will he be?”

  “Search me. What’s the rush? You got some breaking news that just can’t wait?”

  She gave him a tight smile and turned away. She didn’t want to hang around with this nosy official poking and probing, but she had wasted so much time already and needed a lead on Duvalle right now. She considered bursting into the back office and just asking someone, but who knew what kind of reception she’d get? She’d certainly get more attention than she wanted.

  “I came to ask about someone they’ve just done a story on,” she said. It was a risk, but then everything she did was a risk. “Duvalle. Do you know him?”

  He stood up. He was tall and broad and smelled of cologne—surely some kind of deadly sin around those parts. “I know of him,” he said. He sounded cautious, as if just talking about Duvalle could bring down trouble on them.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I’m a stranger here. I saw the headline outside and wondered, so I thought I’d ask. I know a Duvalle family back in London. They’d be thrilled if they had a famous relative out here.” Lame, she thought. Now he knows I’m lying to him.

  He certainly looked more suspicious than ever. He leaned on the counter, too close to her, and said, “The Reverend Jeremiah Duvalle is one of our leading churchmen. A very influential man.”

  “Does he live here in Washington?”

  The stranger broke into a lewd grin. “Let me give you some advice,” he said, and Sandra could have hit him for the patronizing tone alone. “You’re a beautiful woman. Quite possibly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I can understand why a rich and powerful man like Duvalle would single you out for … special attention. And I dare say he led you on and maybe you did some things you now regret.” Sandra opened her mouth to set him right but he raised a hand. “I know you must have felt angry and foolish when he dumped you—although, if you ask me, he was the fool in this instance. You’re probably feeling plenty ashamed of yourself too. So you’re down here thinking you’ll spill the beans on Reverend High-and-Mighty Duvalle and show him he messed with the wrong little lady this time. Well, honey, Duvalle would never let a story like that get into print and he is well known for being a man who knows how to bear a grudge when it comes to people trying to hurt his public image.”

  “And you made all that up on the strength of me asking one little question? That’s quite a talent. You should write for the newspapers.”

  He looked amused, but sad too. “The only other explanation I can think of is that you want Duvalle’s address so that you can go to his home and shoot him with that gun you’re carrying in your bag.”

  “Who are you? A cop?”

  He ignored the question but went on studying her. “Why don’t you come for a little stroll? We can talk more freely in the street.”

  “Seems to me you’ve been talking pretty freely since I met you.”

  “I’m wrong about you, aren’t I? You’re not a fallen woman at all. You’re … something else.” He offered her his arm, as if they were old friends. “Let my buy you a coffee. If you do, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about Duvalle.”

  “And what do you get out of it?”

  “I get to be seen around town with the most beautiful woman in Washington on my arm.”

  She looked him in the eye but that told her nothing at all. The cocksure smile and the charming manner warned her to run a mile. But she didn’t.

  She took his arm and let him lead her out into the street.

  -oOo-

  He took her to a smart little restaurant and ordered for her. By then, she knew not to protest. He said his name was John. She said hers was Susan. He asked her questions about herself and she lied or evaded until he grew tired of it.

  With a sigh and a small smile he finally said, “OK. I admit defeat. There’s no way I’ll ever find out anything about you unless I tied you up and whipped it out of you.” There was something in his man
ner that suggested he might just like to give that a go. “So why don’t you ask me what you want to know and I’ll see if I can do a better job of telling the truth?”

  She was glad that the game-playing was over. Every minute was precious. “I need to get to Duvalle. He’s got something of mine and I want it back.”

  “I can give you his address and you can go storming in there, guns blazing, or you could explain to me what he took and I’ll give you my professional opinion on how to go about retrieving it without getting yourself killed.” He handed her a small rectangle of paper. She had never seen a business card before except in old vids. The card had his name, John Vargas, and beneath it said “Attorney at Law”.

  “You’re an ambulance chaser?”

  “I prefer the term ‘shyster’.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Sandra that, in such a repressive regime, there would still be courts, but of course there would be. Even so, she couldn’t believe they would be anything but a sham, or that the court officials would be anything but corrupt. “I don’t think legal representation is what I need right now,” she said. What she needed was surveillance equipment, lock picks, maps, a moonless night, and spare clips for her gun. After that, she’d need a helicopter and suppressing fire from a special forces unit. “Thanks for the offer. Maybe you could just give me Duvalle’s address and directions how to get there?”

  He pulled a small notepad and pen from his jacket, and wrote down an address. “It’s his home and also the headquarters of his church. If he’s anywhere, that’ll be it. You want to tell me what this is about?”

  “Not really.”

  He leaned back in his chair and pushed his hands into his trouser pockets. “A woman of mystery,” he said.

  “What kind of lawyer are you?”

  “The kind who’d like to take you to dinner. I’ll pick you up at your hotel. It’ll be fun. You can tell me all about how many of Duvalle’s bodyguards it took to throw you out.”

  “His place is heavily guarded then?”