by Amber Stuart
It was an old, rusted station wagon and it took Chal a few tries before the ignition finally caught. She pulled out backwards onto the dirt road and waved goodbye to Lucia. Lucia smiled and motioned for them to leave, shooing them away with both hands.
Chal shifted into first gear and let the car rattle forward, the smell of kerosene billowing from the air conditioner vents. A modern vehicle this was not. Rolling the window down, she turned off of the road onto the desert. They would be able to circle around the town and get back onto the highway farther up, hopefully missing the government men.
They had guns? Chal’s eyes were wide, her entire body now awake and raring with adrenaline. The car bumped up over the curb, the entire car frame creaking, and for a moment Chal thought the motor would stall and die. She caught the clutch and eased onto the gas. To her relief, the engine shook and then revved nicely, propelling them up and over the low dune and back out into the desert.
It was a bumpy ride, although Chal did her best to avoid the myriad rocks that appeared in her path. In the grey dusk it was hard to make out the terrain, and sometimes she dropped the car into gullies that she did not see before it was too late. Biting her lip, she concentrated hard on the ground in front of her.
They circled around the town, Alan looking through binoculars toward the center. The buildings from a distance blended into the dim landscape, their walls daubed with shades of brown and red.
“There’s no sign of the government cars,” Alan said.
“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad,” Chal said.
“At least they aren’t on top of us already,” Alan said.
“I’m going to start angling us toward the highway,” Chal said. “You think that’s okay?”
“Sure,” Alan said, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “Sure, I think that’s okay.”
They bumped their way across the cracked desert floor. The low chaparral crunched under the tires and Chal winced at every large rock that made the car shiver. The suspension was completely shot, and the rattling of the car was almost too loud for Chal to bear.
It was a blessing when they reached the highway and Chal eased the station wagon onto the road, speeding up. The car’s engine squealed as she increased the speed, shifting into fourth, then fifth gear. Fifteen miles. That was nothing. They would be there in no time, and then—
The police car was behind them and had its siren blaring before she saw it come out from behind a dense cluster of brush. The circular whirring of the LED siren flashed in the rearview mirror.
“Shit,” Chal said. Her foot jammed down on the pedal, and the car whined, reluctantly speeding up.
“What are you doing?” Alan asked.
“What should I do?” Chal said. “I’m trying to get away.”
“In this thing?” Alan laughed, and his laugh was so incongruous that Chal found herself relaxing her shoulders slightly.
“It’s not a government car,” Alan said, looking back. “They probably just caught you speeding.”
“They might still know,” Chal said. “What if--”
“We can’t outrun them in this car,” Alan repeated. He put his hand over hers. Chal breathed out.
“Ok.” Her heart was racing, but she let up on the pedal. In the rearview mirror the siren flashed red and blue. She brought the car over to the side of the road.
The policeman came over to the car.
“Identification, please,” the policeman said. Chal dug into the suitcase pocket and pulled out the passport Lucia had made for her. The name written on the front was Lillian Fraser. It looked normal.
The policeman peered at the passport, then back to Chal. The radio on his hip crackled to life.
Unit 217, come in, over.
The policeman handed Chal back her wallet and stepped away from the car, taking out his radio. Alan watched with intense focus as the man listened, then looked up at them. There was a strangeness in his eyes.
Alan opened the car door and was over on the other side before Chal could say a word. He had pulled the pistol out and had one finger over his lip, motioning the policeman to be quiet. The man’s hand hung in the air by his ear, the receiver still bellowing orders.
Chal gasped. She watched as the policeman raised his hands, his eyes wild with fear. He obviously hadn’t expected this to be a dangerous stop, and he was too young to know how to handle it. Alan unhooked the police radio from the man’s belt and set it down on the ground, kicking it away for good measure.
“You’re going to let us go,” Alan said. “Do you understand?”
The policeman nodded, perspiration beading on his forehead. Alan took his handcuffs and pulled the man’s arms behind his body.
“Please don’t hurt me,” the policeman said, his voice trembling.
Alan took the keys to the police car and threw them as far as he could out into the desert. Chal watched the keys sparkle in a wide arc and then skitter across the desert floor, disappearing into the rocks and dust a long way away.
Alan pointed in the opposite direction. “Start walking.”
“Please,” the policeman said, “please don’t hurt me.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Alan said gently. “Just keep walking that way. A thousand steps, and then you can come back.”
The policeman nodded, eyes bright with fear. He nearly tripped over a crack in the asphalt, but caught himself. He looked back over his shoulder once as he strode away, eager to be away from the dangerous criminals he had stopped.
“Don’t look back,” Alan said. “Just keep walking.”
The man was almost out of sight before Alan returned to the car.
“We probably don’t have much time before they come to find him,” he said.
“I’ll drive fast,” Chal said. Alan looked over at her, one eyebrow raised.
“Okay, okay,” she said, smiling. “Not too fast."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Although Chal was jumping at the sight of every man in a suit, they made it through the small airport without issue, except once at the scanning station. Chal tried to look calm as she stepped onto the sensitized pad, the sensor fan’s arms whirring around her. The standard face scanners were trained to identify emotions on the faces of passengers in order to better detect terrorists, but they were not linked to the national identification database, or at least they weren’t supposed to be. Chal held her breath as the scanner passed over her, but no alarms sounded.
It was only a few seconds before the metal arms whisked to a stop, but to Chal it felt like forever. Her senses were heightened, and she heard the air whisper between the fan blades. She looked back toward Alan, and saw him staring back at her dispassionately. She wanted to reach out to him, to never be separated from him again, not by anything.
Time seemed to slow as she watched the blades pass by and obscure him from her vision in an alternating pattern of real life and reflected image. The metal blades mirrored her figure back at her, a blurred and distorted reflection, in between her glimmers of his face. She tore her gaze away and quickly strode forward out of the scanner, forgetting her passport on the counter.
“Lillian? Mrs. Fraser!”
It was only when the airline worker caught up to her and touched her on the arm did Chal jump back with a start.
“Sorry to scare you, Mrs. Fraser. It’s just your passport. You left it.”
“What? Oh, thank you,” Chal said, taking her passport back from the airline worker.
“No problem,” the worker replied.
“No problem at all, Mrs. Fraser,” Alan echoed, once the airline worker was out of hearing. “Will that be all?”
“It had better be, Mr. Fraser,” Chal said. “I can’t take too much more of this.”
“Pity,” Alan said, looking at her with a fond expression. “I rather like your alias.”
“You like me as a Lillian?” Chal asked, teasing.
“As a Mrs.,” Alan
said.
Chal’s eyes widened slightly. Alan simply grinned.
They waited impatiently in the airport terminal, sitting in an inconspicuous corner as the news played over the many full-screen walls. Most of the news reports dealt with the destruction caused by the earthquake. Chal caught only snippets of the newscasters.
“..biggest Phoenix has ever seen...”
“...projecting over two billion dollars of damage. That’s right, two billion...”
Alan had his arm around Chal, and Chal leaned into his body. The warmth made her drowsy in spite of her fears, and her head lolled against his shoulder. He pulled her close to him, planting a gentle kiss on her temple.
Chal felt herself respond to his touch and wondered at the reaction.
“Are you ready?” Alan’s words were full of meaning.
“Yes,” Chal said. It was an automatic response, but she felt something inside of herself cinch together in excitement.
“Yes,” she said again. “Are you?”
Alan’s body was warm against hers. “I think so,” he said. She didn’t know where his reluctance came from, but then the intercom announced that their plane was boarding and his hesitation, if indeed there had been any, was gone.
As they waited in line, Chal caught a familiar face out of the corner of her eye and twisted her head. She froze. Lieutenant Johnner’s face was projected across the main news screen.
“Alan,” she said, tugging him out of the line.
“—lowing an investigation of the destruction of a military base near Phoenix. Several high-level military officials have been accused of treason and selling military intelligence to Singapore. Coming on the heels of Singapore’s declaration of war, this revelation has increased tension between the United States and India, who has pulled their consulates out of Washington for the time being...”
An airport security guard walked by, and Chal turned her face away from the screen.
“Come on,” she said to Alan. “Let’s go.”
“Who is that?” Alan asked.
“One of the men from the lab,” Chal said.
“Did you know him?”
Chal looked back at the screen once more before handing her boarding pass to the ticket agent. They walked through the gate.
“Yeah,” Chal said. “He was the guy in charge.” Alan didn’t press her with any other questions, and she was grateful. Questions were swirling in her mind.
In the plane, Chal pressed her head against the window, looking for anyone in a suit. Alan was tense alongside her, and Chal thought it was for the same reason she was nervous. He jumped when the jets began to shudder the plane along the runway, and then she realized that he was afraid of flying.
“Harder when you’re not the pilot?” she said, amused by his apparent anxiety. Alan nodded, his jaw clenched in a hard smile.
“This is completely different,” Alan said. “It’s out of my control.”
“Then there’s really no need to worry,” Chal said. She put her hand over his. “It’ll be fine.”
The flight attendant paused at their aisle, looking at Alan for a moment longer than necessary before she continued into the back of the plane. Chal’s mind immediately jumped to high alert. Their pictures might have been displayed on the television screen, or their descriptions given to airport staff. They could be caught right there in the airplane. Her heart raced.
She craned her neck to see the woman in the back, talking with another attendant. Chal drew a sharp breath as they looked over towards Alan, and then the first attendant caught Chal’s eye. To Chal’s surprise, the woman’s eyes widened and her cheeks flushed faintly. She turned away quickly, and in her guilty expression Chal understood what was really going on.
Of course. Alan was handsome, after all. A perfect model of a man. There was nothing there, no real danger.
Still, Chal was not able to relax until the plane lifted off of the ground. Then she exhaled deeply. Alan was agape at the view out of the window, and Chal determined that they should switch seats at the first opportunity.
“Will you miss it?” Alan asked, looking out of the plane window at the rapidly shrinking countryside below them. They would pass over the desert in Arizona, Chal realized.
“America?” Chal asked.
Alan shrugged, a strangely human gesture. “Your home. Your friends.”
Chal opened her mouth to respond but could not come up with a suitable answer.
My home. She forced herself to consider what she was doing, what she was leaving. Until this point, she had been driven by force and circumstance, unable to think of anything except protecting Alan. Now, sitting safely en route to Portugal, she had a chance to think about what all of this meant.
She could still go back, of course. She could claim that she had been taken hostage. The airline videos would tell a different story, but she could always claim Stockholm syndrome. Claim that she had been mentally abused to the point where she was scared to run, scared to do anything, had actually begun to feel sympathy toward her captor. When they touched down in Portugal, she could turn right back around and get on the next plane and leave—
Leave Alan? The thought made her stomach turn, and she reached out unconsciously to take his hand.
“No,” she said, and knew at that moment it was true. She had spent her adult life in research, and while she had many colleagues whom she respected and liked, there was nobody in America who had any hold over her heart. What she was leaving behind was prestige and power, nothing else.
Would she miss it? Perhaps. But she felt now that there was something more to her life, and she wanted to hang onto that feeling for as long as it lasted. All of her work had led up to this. Alan was the culmination of all of her research goals for the past decade; she couldn’t leave him and start back over again. In Catalonia at least she would have her mother; she would have Alan.
Alan squeezed her hand, and Chal looked up at him. He was worried about her, and she didn’t know how to reassure him. Hell, she wasn’t sure how to reassure herself. She knew, though, that somehow they would get through it together.
***
At the Portugal airport, they disembarked with relief. Chal had slept fitfully after their brief layover in New York, with the toddler two rows ahead of them wailing in anguish for most of the overseas flight. She had put on headphones, but even her favorite music wasn’t a help. Still, she managed to piece together something of a plan to get them to Catalonia.
Between Portugal and Catalonia was the whole of Spain, a digital nation surrounded by its smaller, non-digital neighbors. Lucia was right – trying to get across the border by land was near impossible. Although they could try to sneak through, any city they stayed in would be likely to have video surveillance. The digital intelligence scanners were constantly on alert for any fugitive presence, and Chal was certain that she would be on a “persons of interest” list soon, if she wasn’t already.
But in Portugal, at least, they were safe from digital intelligence scanners. Still, Chal kept her head bent as they walked through the airport, stopping only briefly to purchase two dictionaries in Portuguese and Spanish. She wanted a Catalonian one for Alan, but they didn’t have any. It would just have to wait.
They stopped at a bank kiosk on their way to the coast and Chal thanked her accountant for having the foresight to open an overseas savings account for her in her mother’s name. It had been an easy way for Chal to help her mom out when she needed it, but now it proved to be a lifesaver. When they arrived in Catalonia, she would have to be careful about contacting her mother, since Chal was sure that would be one of the first places they would look for her to escape to. She took out as much cash as the bank kiosk allowed--$800—and prayed that it would be enough.
They arrived at the small port town around noon, just as the fishermen were coming back from the early morning’s work. The docks were redolent with the smell of seaweed and fish, and Chal walked w
ith Alan alongside the boatyard to where the sailboats moored just offshore.
If they took a motorboat, they would be forced to stop for gas along the Spanish coast, or they would have to carry gallons and gallons of fuel with them—a suspicious cargo if they were stopped by the coast guard. They might be able to motor out farther and avoid the coast guard altogether, but Chal didn’t want to risk being caught in a storm or strong current off of the northern cape of Spain. She had been out in the middle of the ocean before, and it was a dangerous place. Chal wasn’t an expert at navigating and didn’t want to try her luck just now when it would be impossible to phone for help.
No. Better to stick as close to the coast as possible, and as close to reality as possible. They were American tourists just out sailing for a day or two. They wouldn’t have to stop to refuel, and they would be able to sail straight north, hugging the coast until they reached Catalonia. The Catalan region of Spain had spread its influence north and west until the final nation-state encompassed the entirety of what used to be the Franco-Spanish border. There was a sliver of coastline between the north of Spain and the south of Franch, and that was what they would have to shoot for.
Chal stopped on the edge of the dock, looking out toward the people milling around, working on boats and cleaning fish. Seagulls swept the air overhead, filling the bay with their cries. She felt overwhelmed until she felt Alan’s steady hand on her back.
“Ready?” Alan said. His voice was full of trust.
“Ready,” Chal said, and she was.
After some negotiations in her broken Spanish, Chal was able to secure a sailboat from a small rental shop. It was a decent boat, a little over twenty feet long and sturdy enough to weather the Atlantic swells. The man who rented them the boat seemed eager to let them have it for only a hundred dollars a day, and Chal paid him for four days with another hundred dollars as a deposit. There was a market on the side of the docks, and by the time they were done packing the supplies another hour had passed. They still had some time before nightfall, enough to get some distance between them and Lisbon.