by Greg Bear
"I wouldn't much care if I actually did kill somebody, though. Guilt tank running on empty. Feels good—liberation plus. About this little trip—you're taking us someplace you've never been, without a map, just some coordinates. How?"
Nathaniel tapped the rearview mirror, which displayed a compass rose and NNE. "The compass, the speedometer, and the clock."
"In your head? Were you always that good?" Camp asked.
"No," Nathaniel said. "Runs down the blood sugar. Sometimes it hurts. There's energy bars in the glove box. Hand me one and help yourself."
The Hyundai did well enough on the next part of the journey, a rutted dirt road across a low plateau of scrub. At the end of the road, still within sight of the ocean—perhaps three miles down the gentle west-facing slope and surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire—they spotted a square concrete blockhouse and a smaller shack, separated by about a hundred feet.
No visible power lines stretched this far, and no evidence of any sort of receiver dish or telecom setup, either.
"The middle of nowhere," Camp said.
Nathaniel pulled the car up to a gate. A weather-beaten keypad-speaker combo and video camera mounted on a pole poked up from the dirt to the left.
Several old metal signs lay face down inside the fence perimeter.
The keypad was new and looked more than interesting. It provoked another variety of bee vision: brilliant warm colors for objects of particular significance, other areas cool and subdued or totally grayed—a way for his mind to leap-frog the old lines between conscious and subconscious reasoning.
It might take him months to harness this talent—or he'd never get the trick of it.
For now, Nathaniel suspected both he and Camp shared the same opinion. If this property had ever belonged to the Quiet Man, none of the Turing Seven had been informed. And likely the Quiet Man had kept it secret from Price as well.
The speaker crackled and the camera angled to take them in. Then the Quiet Man's voice—unmistakable—said, "Nathaniel! Come on in. Is that Camp sitting beside you?"
"Yes, sir," Camp said with a toothy grin.
"The gate's open. See you at the first stop—the tumbledown place. Glad you could both make it."
Chapter Thirty-Six
Lion City
For many years, Texas had been touchy about the death chamber in Huntsville. Texas still led the world in per capita executions, and also in DNA exonerations, but that did not stop the fatally grinding wheels of state justice. Lion City alone had sent fifteen of its former citizens to the Walls Unit in the ten years since the town's incorporation, so many that both the Bureau of Prisons and JPATS—the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation system, a decades old mash-up of the U.S. Marshals and Border Security—had refused to transport their prisoners, leaving it to the Department of Corrections to "haul their own garbage," as the local Fetch bloggers put it.
JPATS was having a tough enough job dealing with hundreds of thousands of Mexicans eager to get north, get work, get food; away from death squads, cartels, and paramilitary reprisals. In the drought, Mexico was coming apart like a piñata in a major league batting cage.
Add in the U.S. near-bankruptcy and the efforts by twenty Texas counties to go their own way and not pay taxes . . .
Tacitly supported by the Governor . . .
Border Security, the Department of Justice, and Texas state law enforcement had long since put up brick walls between their operations. No federal agency wanted to be tarred by Texas justice.
The Tunnel began a third of a mile from the Lion City Correctional Center, a spare, sandstone-faced building with tiny narrow windows adjacent to the historic county courthouse. The Tunnel had been expensive but it kept out reporters—though lately very few reporters had been covering the case of Little Jamey Trues.
Too dangerous.
This was where Talos Corporation got its justice served out to Axel Price's secret orders, and there was no reason to let the outside world know every little detail, including who was being sent where.
The dwindling national press—those journalists who still had a travel budget, who still worked for networks or newspapers or the five prime news sites and could afford to travel rather than just sit in front of a screen and suck back coffee and pontificate on what others saw and wrote—was as worn out and discouraged as the rest of the nation.
Screw the bastards.
He touched the temple piece on his spex and went off grid, then removed the glasses, folded them in a leather case, and stuffed the case into his shirt pocket.
Most federal agencies had been quietly but steadily releasing private companies from their sensitive law enforcement activities. Texas, however, had dug in. Working through Talos, the state DOC relied on Midland-based PerpTrans Inc. to transport its prisoners.
PerpTrans drivers were allowed to park their prisoner transport vans at home. Some used them to haul kids to birthday parties and carry college students back and forth to binges.
And that was one gap in Price's steel gauntlet.
The Tunnel scanned William's new chip and the truck's serial number and accepted the Econoline through its automated steel doors. The Vanilla Extract team had been told that people (and only people) monitored the security cameras that sprouted like shiny black mushrooms around the concrete entrance. No automated face recognition.
Even so, William wore his hat low over his face.
Jesus, it's working.
The correction center was not Lion City's highest tech enterprise—surprising, considering how much Talos had invested in securing the rest of the county.
"Hey, Mallom," came a twangy female voice over the van radio: the transfer dispatcher. William imagined her in her mid-forties, a heavy smoker with pruny skin and hennaed hair. "Hustle it, young man. Prisoner is at the gate."
"Down the chute," William said.
The DOC folks here were relying entirely on steely eyes and strong iron. Human judgment all the way.
The transfer station was an underground concrete cavern backed by a loading dock, the dock flanked by five parking spaces on each side, reserved for prison brass and visitors. This wide, cool box was dimly illuminated by a red bulb on the right and the greenish glow from an observation window about six feet wide and three feet high, made of inch-thick bulletproof plastic.
As William drove the PerpTrans van through the steel security gate, lights came on over the dock. A guard poked out from the access door and waved in the van.
William joggled the van around in the narrow space and backed it up to the loading dock. Two men emerged from an old Toyota Corolla in a visitor space—no longer the original DOC prisoner escorts, Sanchez and Markette, but Bureau replacements, Special Agents Glenn Curteze and Jonathan Kapp.
Someone had slipped a powder into a few beers at the PerpTrans BBQ toot.
The agents would soon join Little Jamey in the back of the van. No doubt by the end of the day, heads would roll at Texas DOC. That did not concern William. He was sweating profusely. The uniform's inseam pinched his crotch. The sleeves rode up and his socks showed.
Two more guards came through the door and stood on the dock. They looked glumly serious. The guards disliked this ritual, the darkest part of their duty. There would be no joking and little conversation, nothing to relieve the tension.
Dead Man walking.
William remotely unlocked the van's rear doors. The guards opened them and Kapp and Curteze climbed in first, then prepared the chains and locking cross-bars.
William acknowledged their presence through the viewport behind the driver. They passed him their papers—Curteze offered up a shit-eating smile—and he stuck them in his folder.
A female guard approached the driver side door and William slid open a conversation port.
"New directions," she said, and handed him another slip of paper. "You choose the third segment, the third leg. Off the beaten path, if possible. Tracking isn't fully operational. They promise to ha
ve it fixed in twenty or thirty minutes. You can stay here until they confirm, if you want."
William frowned. "We're supposed to be in Huntsville this evening. We could bill you and wait until tomorrow . . . That's what our contract stipulates if you cancel and it's not our fault."
"Not an option," the guard said.
"They should have flown this one," William said.
"Do you have a plane? Because we don't."
"I hear you," William said.
"Maybe Mr. Price should loan us a private jet," the guard said.
All of Price's jets were in the air, winging executives and politicians from around the world to the Talos corporate shindig. That could explain the jam-up in tracking—the roads around Lion City were already crowded with unfamiliar vehicles.
Another point in their favor.
William brushed his lip with a finger. "We'll get him where he belongs. Just hand him over."
The guard nodded and returned to the dock.
Kapp and Curteze prepared for the transfer. The door at the back of the loading dock opened and they lifted Little Jamey along in his orange prison jumper. The boy looked sleepy. The prison medicos had sedated him for the transfer. His heels floated and his chains clanked.
Kapp and Curteze took charge of the prisoner, ran his arm chip under their scanners, then signed multiple documents formally transferring custody.
The van's rear doors closed. William sealed them. Ominous clunks and chunks sounded. An obnoxious little horn beeped until he entered the code on the prisoner's transport slip. The horn stopped with a happy chirp. The van was now authorized to proceed up the Tunnel to its last security checkpoint before Huntsville.
William could hardly believe they had made it this far.
The indictment, trial, and conviction of Little Jamey had ignited a firestorm among law enforcement agencies around the nation. Most of them, anyway.
He didn't know how many courageous people in Washington and Texas—or inside the Texas DOC itself—had cooperated to make this rescue possible, at risk to career and personal freedom.
None were known to William, nor he to them.
And they in turn would learn nothing about their new partners, Bureau East and Spider/Argus, each with their own ulterior motives.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Pendleton Reserve, California
The shack supported a small cistern that collected rainwater and delivered it through plastic pipes to a small flower garden. The garden was a prickle patch of desiccated stems and the last dried buds from the summer before—all gray. The cistern had sprung a leak—a bullet hole.
The hole showed up intensely purple in Nathaniel's bee vision.
"Someone's been shooting here," he said.
"Kids or dumb hunters," Camp said, gesturing over his shoulder. "Up by the road, too—road signs and mailboxes."
Nathaniel paced before the path that led to the shack, head down. His whole body ached with the intensity of his thought. Finally he paused and flung his hands up in the air. "Goddamn it," he said. "There's no way in hell I can see what's happening. This place used to be important—but why? Nobody's taken care of it for a long time."
Camp assumed a farmer's slouch with hands deep in pockets. He shrugged. "The Quiet Man isn't here?" he asked doubtfully.
"I don't think so," Nathaniel said.
"We heard his voice. He recognized us."
"He's probably watching from someplace remote—maybe the main building in La Jolla." Though that seemed unlikely, as well.
"Then why guide us all the way out here? We should leave. Let's just chuck it."
"He must have a good reason."
"Lady or the tiger," Camp said, pointing to the shack, then to the blockhouse.
Nathaniel realized he was going to have to follow his instructions or abandon the scene completely and start over again—without guidance. That made his head hurt more.
"Stay here," he said.
"Give me the car keys," Camp suggested, snapping his fingers, and Nathaniel tossed him the ring. Then he started down the path to the shack—slow, cautious steps, eyes on the ground searching for disturbed earth, triggers, trip wires. The ground all around looked gray, uninteresting. Rain had washed away any evidence of foot traffic, but the grass near the trail had been trampled in a few spots. Four sad little eucalyptus trees leaned away from the shack, their largest branches broken off and littering the ground—also gray. Everything was gray except for the bullet holes.
He climbed the single step and paused on the porch, then looked back over his shoulder. Camp stood slouched as before, key ring dangling from one hand.
Nathaniel squinted and rubbed his temples.
The sun-warped wooden door made a click and opened. The whole front of the cabin seemed to explode with sudden color. Nathaniel averted his eyes until he could regain visual control. Some part of him was still capable of expressing fear, or at least caution—but from way down deep. Lizard brain stuff.
"All right," he said under his breath. "I get it."
He nudged the door with one foot. It opened stiffly. Watery daylight spilled into the interior, revealing nothing but a crumpled paper airplane on the dirty floorboards.
Someone had picked it up and scrunched in it in a fist, then tossed it down again.
Mind Design's logo was a paper airplane with its nose pointed skyward—merging with an illuminati pyramid and all-seeing eye.
Nathaniel picked up the airplane, shook it free of dust, and unfolded it. One wing's inner surface was covered with scribbles—penciled rows of numbers.
Seven groups of seven.
"Hell," he murmured, but more out of concern at the fascination that now flooded through him. He was being jerked around like a bloodhound pushed down a trail of funky rags—but this bloodhound was a number geek from way back, and the Quiet Man, or somebody, was perfectly happy to play with his oh-so-genius-class head.
The numbers presented little difficulty. In essence, the relation between the first three sets solved most efficiently to a half circle, or 180 degrees. The next two solved to any rectangle wider than it was tall, and the last two strings easily converted from ASCII to a word: DEADMAN.
Seven letters.
The Quiet Man had probably spent years of his youth playing video games. So had Nathaniel, of course, and most of the Turing Seven. He looked around the cabin. Nothing else of interest; heightened edge perception made sure of that, even in the shack's semidarkness.
His eyes burned as if they were on fire, so he shut them for a few seconds.
"You okay?" Camp called.
"Fine," Nathaniel said.
Nathaniel stepped back into the cloudy sunshine. The air was still cool, still moist. He had always liked southern California autumn weather, particularly near the coast. Fog might roll in from the ocean soon, as high or higher than this small plateau, about four hundred feet above sea level. It would leave everything moist and dripping through the night.
He waved for Camp to join him. "We're supposed to go to the blockhouse."
"He could have told us that right off," Camp suggested.
The breeze shifted and wafted a mild stench—stale but still foul—from behind the shack. Nathaniel's body stiffened. He had smelled death before—in Iraq and in Jordan and of course in Arabia Deserta.
Day-old death in dry, dusty air.
This was death many days old, in moist, cool air.
Nathaniel stepped gingerly through the yellow, dew-moist grass to the rear of the shack, again on alert for tripwires.
Three bodies had been laid out in a row in the grass. The bee vision outlines of shocking red and electric blue were totally unnecessary.
"What is it?" Camp called.
He was slunching through the grass to join Nathaniel.
"Watch your feet," Nathaniel said. "Three dead people. All men, I think."
Camp stood beside him. "Holy crap. Who are they?"
The bodies had lain out in the open for
at least a week and a half. The clothing was stained with bloat and bursting. Maggots still wriggled in a desultory fashion around a series of small thoracic holes gnawed by some animal through the clothing. Raccoons, maybe.
Raccoons might not like the taste of human flesh, but they knew how to farm a corpse: they chewed holes in a body and waited for maggots to cluster, then ate the tasty, high-protein morsels on a steady basis for several days, until the maggot food and thus the maggot supply chain gave out. Nathaniel had read about that in a crime novel years ago.
He recognized an MIT class ring on one brown, leathery finger. "That's Harvey Belton," he said.
Harvey "Bourbaki" Belton had been the eldest of the Turing Seven, a world expert in nested and recursively competitive algorithms. He had practically invented acciditional functions, finding a use for so-called accidental numbers—until then considered one of the most useless ideas in math. He could have won a Nobel, but went for the money instead.
They hadn't spoken in months.
"Three of us?" Camp asked in a plaintive voice. "Just dumped out here?"
Nathaniel stooped down and tried to guess the corpses' statures: 5-4, 6-1, 5-10 respectively. Their weight and build were more difficult to judge.
He had a bad feeling about one of them. The face, though crusted and shrunken, still looked familiar. Wispy grayish hair was slicked down by blood and dew. A sheen of something gray and cheesy coated the cheeks and nose—what was it called?
Adipocere.
He had read that in a crime novel, too.
Strange. Bee vision gone. The colors had dropped right back into normal. His subconscious was as stunned as the rest of his brain.
"We should check out the blockhouse," Nathaniel said, rising.
"What can we learn that we don't already know?" Camp asked. "Someone's killing us. I knew that already."
Nathaniel looked again at the middle of the three bodies. A ruck of checked wool poked through a gap in the muddy leather jacket. "I think that's Stan Parker," he said. "Fits his taste in shirts."