The Traveler fr-1

by John Twelve Hawks

Gabriel turned right onto Coldwater Canyon Drive and headed up the hill toward Mulholland. A few seconds later, three motorcycle riders wearing black helmets shot past the van and chased after him.

  “Looks like some other people were waiting for him.” Hollis started the engine and slammed his foot on the accelerator. Fishtailing on its worn tires, the delivery van headed up the canyon. A few minutes later, they were turning onto Mulholland Drive, the two-lane road that followed the ridge of the Hollywood hills. If you looked to the left you could see a brown haze covering a valley filled with homes, light-blue swimming pools, and office buildings.

  Maya traded places with Vicki and sat by the passenger window with her shotgun. The four motorcycles were already well ahead of them and they lost sight of the pack for a few seconds when the van went into a curve. The road straightened out again. Maya watched one of the riders pull out a weapon that looked like a flare gun. He approached Gabriel, fired the weapon at the motorcycle, and missed. The bullet hit the thin asphalt near the edge of the road and the pavement exploded.

  “What the hell was that?” Hollis shouted.

  “He’s shooting a Hatton round,” Maya said. “The slug is a mixture of wax and metal powder. They’re trying to take out the back tire.”

  Immediately the Tabula rider fell behind while his two companions continued the chase. A pickup truck came from the opposite direction. The terrified driver honked his horn and waved his hands, trying to warn Hollis about what he had just seen.

  “Don’t kill him!” shouted Vicki as they approached the first rider.

  Staying near the edge of the road, the Tabula loaded another shell into his flare gun. Maya stuck the barrel of her shotgun out of the open window and fired, blowing away the motorcycle’s front tire. The bike jerked to the right, slammed into a concrete retaining wall, and the rider was thrown sideways.

  Maya pumped a new round into the shotgun’s firing chamber. “Keep going!” she shouted. “We don’t want to lose them!”

  The delivery van was shuddering like it couldn’t go any faster, but Hollis pressed the gas pedal to the floor. They heard a booming sound, and when they came around the next curve, they saw that a second rider had fallen back to load a new shell into his flare gun. He snapped the barrel shut and turned onto the road before they could reach him.

  “Faster!” Maya shouted.

  Hollis gripped the steering wheel as they skidded into another turn. “I can’t. One of these tires is going to break apart.”

  “Faster!”

  The second rider was holding the flare gun in his right hand while he gripped the handlebar with his left. He hit a pothole and almost lost control of his bike. When the rider slowed down, the van caught up with him. Hollis cut around to the left. Maya shot out the bike’s back tire and the rider was flung over the handlebars. The van kept moving and hit another turn. A large green sedan came toward them, honking its horn and swerving. Turn back, the driver gestured, turn back.

  They passed the turn to Laurel Canyon, honking and swerving around other cars as they ran through a red light. Maya heard a third booming sound, but she couldn’t see Gabriel and the third rider. Then they came out of a curve and looked down the narrow road. Gabriel’s back tire had been hit, but the bike continued moving. Smoke rose up from the shredded tire and there was a raspy sound of steel grinding on asphalt.

  “Here we go!” shouted Hollis. He steered the van into the middle of the road and came up on the left of the rider.

  Maya leaned out the window, the butt of her shotgun pressed against the van’s door, and squeezed the trigger. Shotgun pellets hit the motorcycle’s fuel tank and it exploded like a gasoline bomb. The Tabula was thrown into a ditch.

  Five hundred yards up the road, Gabriel turned into a driveway. He stopped his motorcycle, jumped off, and began running. Hollis turned into the driveway and Maya leaped out of the van. She was too far from Gabriel. He was going to get away. But she sprinted after him and shouted the first thing that passed through her mind. “My father knew your father!”

  Gabriel stopped on the edge of the hillside. In a few steps, he would be falling down a steep slope of chaparral.

  “He was a Harlequin!” Maya shouted. “His name was Thorn!”

  And those words-her father’s name-reached Gabriel. He looked startled and desperate to know. Ignoring the shotgun in Maya’s hands, he took one step toward her.

  “Who am I?”

  24

  Nathan Boone looked down at Michael as the private jet headed east over the squares and rectangles of Iowa farmland. Before they left Long Beach Airport, the young man appeared to be sleeping. Now his face was slack and unresponsive. Perhaps the drugs were too strong, Boone thought. There could be permanent brain damage.

  He swiveled around in the leather seat and faced the physician sitting behind him. Dr. Potterfield was just another mercenary, but he kept acting like he had special privileges. Boone enjoyed ordering him around.

  “Check the patient’s vital signs.”

  “I did that fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Do it again.”

  Dr. Potterfield knelt beside the stretcher, touched Michael’s carotid artery, and took his pulse. He listened to Michael’s heart and lungs, pulled back his eyelid and studied the iris. “I wouldn’t recommend keeping him under for another day. His pulse is strong, but his breathing is getting shallow.”

  Boone glanced at his watch. “What about four more hours? It’ll take us that long to land in New York and get him to the research center.”

  “Four hours won’t change anything.”

  “I expect you to be there when he wakes up,” Boone said. “And if there’s any problem, I’m sure you’ll be glad to take full responsibility.”

  Potterfield’s hands trembled slightly as he took a digital thermometer out of his black bag and slipped the sensor into Michael’s ear. “There won’t be any long-term problems, but don’t expect him to climb a mountain right away. This is just like recovering from general anesthesia. The patient is going to be confused and weak.”

  Boone swiveled back to the small table in the middle of the plane. He was annoyed that he had to leave Los Angeles. One of his employees, a young man named Dennis Prichett, had interviewed the injured motorcycle riders who chased after Gabriel Corrigan. It was clear that Maya had acquired allies and captured the young man. The team in Los Angeles needed direction, but Boone’s instructions were clear. The Crossover Project had highest priority. The moment he obtained control of either of the brothers, Boone was supposed to personally escort him back to New York.

  He had spent most of the flight using his computer to search for Maya. All these efforts were channeled through the Brethren’s Internet monitoring center located in an underground site in central London.

  Privacy had become a convenient fiction. Kennard Nash once lectured on that subject to a group of Evergreen Foundation employees. The new electronic monitoring had changed society; it was as if everyone had been moved into a traditional Japanese house with interior walls constructed of bamboo and paper. Although you could hear people sneezing, talking, and making love, the social assumption was that you shouldn’t pay attention to it. You had to pretend the walls were solid and soundproof. People felt the same way when they walked past a surveillance camera or used a cell phone. These days the authorities were using special X-ray machines at Heathrow Airport that could see through passengers’ clothes. It was disturbing to realize that different organizations were watching you, listening to your conversations, and tracking your purchases-so most people pretended that it wasn’t true.

  Government officials who supported the Brethren had provided access codes to crucial databases. The largest source was the Total Information Awareness system, established by the American government after the passage of the United States Patriot Act. The TIA database was designed to process and analyze every computer-connected transaction in the country. Whenever a person used a credit card, checked out a library book
, transferred money overseas, or went on a trip, the information was entered into the centralized database. A few libertarians objected to this intrusion, so the government transferred control of the program to the intelligence community and changed its name to the Terrorism Information Awareness system. Once the word “Total” was replaced by the word “Terrorism,” all the criticism stopped.

  Other countries were passing new security laws and setting up their own versions of TIA. In addition, a variety of privately owned companies were collecting and selling personal information. If the Tabula employees at the computer center in London couldn’t obtain the access codes, they had software programs called Peephole, Hacksaw, and Sledgehammer that allowed them to break through firewalls and enter every database in the world.

  Boone felt that the most promising weapons in the battle against the Brethren’s enemies were the new computational immunology programs. The CI programs had originally been developed to monitor the Royal Mail’s computer system in England. The Brethren’s programs were even more powerful. They treated the entire Internet as if it were an enormous human body. The programs acted like electronic lymphocytes that targeted dangerous ideas and information.

  During the last few years, CI programs had been released onto the Internet by the Brethren’s computer team. The self-contained programs wandered unnoticed through thousands of computer systems. Sometimes they lingered like a lymphocyte in a person’s home computer, waiting for an infectious idea to appear. If they found something suspicious, the program would return to the host computer in London for further instructions.

  The Brethren scientists were also experimenting with a new interactive program that could actually punish the Brethren’s enemies, like a cluster of white blood cells dealing with an infection. The CI program identified people who mentioned the Travelers or the Harlequins in their Internet communications. Once that was done, the program automatically placed a data-destroying virus in the owner’s computer. A small proportion of the most dangerous computer viruses on the Internet had been created by the Brethren or their government allies. It was easy to place the blame on a seventeen-year-old computer hacker living in Poland.

  Maya had been tracked down using both computational immunology and a conventional data scan. Three days earlier, the Harlequin had entered an automobile parts warehouse and killed some mercenaries. When Maya fled the area, she’d either had to walk, get a ride from someone, buy a car, or find public transportation. The computer center in London had sorted through Los Angeles police reports involving a young woman in the target area. When that wasn’t successful, they entered taxi company computer systems to discover what passengers hired cabs during the four-hour period after the murders. These pickup and drop-off addresses were matched against information obtained by the CI programs. The central computer had the names and addresses of thousands of people who might help the Travelers or the Harlequins.

  Five years ago, the Brethren’s psychological evaluation team had plugged into the computers of the shopping clubs run by American grocery stores. Whenever a person bought something and used their discount card, the purchases were entered into a general database. During the initial study, the Brethren’s psychologists attempted to match a person’s food and alcohol consumption with their political affiliation. Boone had seen some of the statistical correlations and they were fascinating. Women living in northern California who bought more than three kinds of mustard were usually political liberals. Men who bought expensive bottled beer in East Texas were usually conservative. With a home address and data from a minimum of two hundred grocery-store purchases, the psychological evaluation team could accurately predict a person’s attitude toward a mandatory citizen ID card.

  Boone found it interesting to see what kind of people resisted social discipline and order. Opposition sometimes came from antitechnology tree huggers who ate organic food and shunned the factory food manufactured by the Vast Machine. But equally troublesome groups were organized by the high-technology freaks that ate candy bars for dinner and searched the Internet for rumors about the Travelers.

  By the time Boone’s plane flew over Pennsylvania, the monitoring center had sent a message to Boone’s computer. Drop-off address corresponds to residence of Thomas Walks the Ground-nephew of a terminated Native American Traveler. Computational immunology picked up negative remarks concerning the Brethren placed by this individual on a Crow tribe Web site.

  The jet plane banked steeply as they approached a regional airport near the Evergreen Foundation’s research center. Boone switched off his computer and glanced over at Michael. The Brethren had found this young man and saved him from the Harlequins, but he might refuse to cooperate. It annoyed Boone that people still refused to recognize the truth. There was no need to worry about religion or philosophy; the truth was determined by whoever was in power.

  * * *

  THE CORPORATE JET landed at the Westchester County Airport and taxied to a private hangar. A few minutes later, Boone climbed down the steps of the plane. The sky was gray with clouds and there was a cold autumn feeling in the air.

  Lawrence Takawa was waiting beside the ambulance that would transport Michael to the Evergreen Foundation Research Center. He gave orders to a team of paramedics, and then walked over to Boone.

  “Welcome back,” Takawa said. “How’s Michael?”

  “He’ll be all right. Is everything ready at the center?”

  “We were prepared two days ago, but we’ve had to make some last-minute adjustments. General Nash contacted the psychological evaluation team and they’ve given us a new strategy for dealing with Michael.”

  There was a slight tension in Lawrence Takawa’s voice and Boone glanced at the young man. Every time he saw Nash’s assistant, Lawrence was carrying something-a clipboard, a folder, a piece of paper-an object that proclaimed his authority.

  “Do you have a problem with that?” Boone asked.

  “The new strategy does seem rather aggressive,” Lawrence said. “I don’t know if that’s necessary.”

  Boone turned on his heel and looked back at the jet. Dr. Potterfield supervised a team of paramedics as they eased the stretcher onto the tarmac. “Everything has changed now that the Harlequins have taken control of Gabriel. We have to make sure that Michael is working for our side.”

  Lawrence glanced at his clipboard. “I’ve read the preliminary reports about the two brothers. It sounds like they have a close relationship.”

  “Love is just another means of manipulation,” Boone said. “We can use that emotion like we use hatred and fear.”

  Michael’s stretcher was placed on a steel gurney and pushed across the tarmac to the ambulance. Still looking worried, Dr. Potterfield remained with his patient.

  “Do you understand our objective, Mr. Takawa?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Boone made a quick motion with his right hand that seemed to take in the plane and the ambulance and all the employees working for the Brethren. “This is our army,” he said. “And Michael Corrigan has become our new weapon.”

  25

  Vicki Fraser watched Hollis and Gabriel grab the motorcycle and lift it into the back of the van. “You drive,” Hollis said as he tossed the keys to Vicki. He and Gabriel crouched beside the motorcycle while Maya remained in the front passenger seat with the shotgun on her lap.

  They turned west and got lost on the narrow residential streets that cut through the Hollywood hills. Gabriel kept asking Maya questions about his family’s background; he seemed desperate to find out everything as quickly as possible.

  Vicki knew only a few facts about the Travelers and the Harlequins, and she listened carefully to the conversation. The ability to cross over into other realms seemed to be genetic, inherited from a parent or a relative, but occasionally new Travelers appeared without a family connection. Harlequins keep elaborate lineages of past Travelers and this was how Thorn had known about Gabriel’s father.

  Hollis lived a few blocks a
way from his storefront capoeira school. The single-family homes in the area had front yards and flower beds, but gang graffiti was spray-painted with dripping lines on the walls and billboards. When they turned off Florence Avenue, Hollis told Maya to move to the back of the van. Sitting up front, he instructed Vicki to slow down whenever they saw groups of young men wearing extra-large clothes and blue bandannas. Each time they stopped beside these gang members, Hollis would shake hands with the young men and use their street names.

  “Some people might come around and ask about me,” he told them. “Tell ’em they’re in the wrong neighborhood.”

  The driveway of Hollis’s two-bedroom house was blocked by a chain-link gate woven with plastic strips. Once they drove the van down the driveway and closed the gate, the vehicle was concealed from the street. Hollis unlocked the back door and they went into the house. Each room was clean and uncluttered, and Vicki didn’t see any signs of a girlfriend. The curtains were made out of bedsheets, oranges were stored in a clean automobile hubcap, and one bedroom had been filled with barbells and turned into a gym.

  Vicki sat down at the kitchen table with Gabriel and Maya. Hollis took an assault rifle out of a broom closet, snapped in an ammunition clip, and placed the weapon on the counter. “We’ll be safe here,” he said. “If someone attacks the house, I’ll keep them busy. You jump over the wall to my neighbor’s backyard.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I don’t want anyone to risk their life for me.”

  “I’m getting paid for this,” Hollis said. “Maya is the one who’s doing it for free.”

  Everyone watched as Hollis filled up a kettle and boiled water for tea. He opened the refrigerator and took out bread, cheese, strawberries, and two ripe mangos. “Is everybody hungry?” he asked. “I think I’ve got enough food.”

  Vicki decided to make a fruit salad while Hollis made grilled-cheese sandwiches. She liked standing at the counter and slicing up the strawberries. It was uncomfortable to sit next to Maya. The Harlequin looked exhausted, but she couldn’t seem to relax. Vicki thought that it would be painful to go through life always being ready to kill, always expecting to be attacked. She remembered the letter that Isaac T. Jones had written to his congregation about Hell. There was a real Hell, of course. The Prophet had seen it with his own eyes. But my brothers and sisters, your main concern should be the Hell you create within your own hearts.