by John Ringo
None of this was on the mind of the trim and balding, but otherwise young-looking, man in a speedo, lying under a beach umbrella, enjoying the salt air and a mai tai with one of those little paper umbrellas in it. His mind was instead occupied, as it frequently was, if truth be told, with money. Specifically, with the challenges of acquiring more of it while simultaneously keeping his primary employer safely ignorant of both the source and very existence of his extra funds.
His present location had a lot to do with meeting those challenges. He liked fast cars, big houses, and designer clothes as much as anyone, but those would have been a dead giveaway in his daily life. Instead, he had worked out a compromise that allowed him to use some of his moonlighting income while continuing with other little luxuries he'd come to enjoy. Breathing, for example. So in his daily workaday life, he lived on his inadequate, in his opinion, salary. Then, once or twice a year on his vacations, he dropped off the map. As far as work was concerned, he was a hiking buff who enjoyed roughing it in out-of-the-way places. Actually, of course, he would end up in places much like this one, where he could wear expensive clothes, eat expensive foods, stay in expensive hotels, fuck expensive women, and generally live in the style he preferred. At the end of his vacation, the clothes had to go in some charity bin, which bothered him not a little bit, but it was one of the temporary sacrifices he would just have to make until he could afford to retire. Very anonymously, of course.
A pair of very definitely male legs suddenly blocked his previously entirely satisfactory view of a slim brunette in a monokini. She didn't have much in the way of assets, but what she had was attractively distributed. He squinted up in annoyance at his unwelcome visitor.
"Mr. . . . Jones. Fancy meeting you here," the other man said. He was slightly built and dressed in swim trunks, but something about his haircut and bearing suggested either a law enforcement or military background. With dark hair and eyes, he looked almost like a late teenaged or early twenty-something kid, but the old eyes marked him as a fellow juv.
"Mr. Smith. Our appointment wasn't supposed to be until tonight." The balding man's voice had a slight edge to it.
"Let's just say I was impatient for your scintillating company, Mr. Jones."
"Well, have a seat, then." Mr. Jones gestured at the sand beside him, favoring the other man with a rather reptilian smile. Impatience could mean money. Money meant beautiful, long-legged women in much more intimate arrangements. He could make time for Mr. Smith.
"Your other information checked out, as I'm sure you knew when you checked your bank balance. This raises the prospect of more business, of course. We would be prepared to pay handsomely, for instance, for an organization name."
"I'm a big believer in job security, Mr. Smith. Too much too soon renders me too replaceable. Or worse, disposable. How about another agent name where you're penetrated?"
"We'd pay one hundred thousand FedCreds for that."
"What?! That's only half of what you paid for the last one."
"They don't know anything, Mr. Jones. As you doubtless know. We want a little more. We want something in your organization, Mr. Jones. Oh, we'll pay for the names of more agents in our organization. Have to do the housecleaning, after all. But we'll pay far more for, well, more. More, Mr. Jones. But one hundred thousand FedCreds is a lot of money. Of course we'll understand if you'd rather play it safer and settle for less."
The balding man gritted his teeth as the military man smiled at him. It wasn't a particularly nice smile. It had a knowing element to it that was rather offensive.
"I'll have to think for a bit about what I can offer you in that line."
"I can understand that, Mr. Jones. Just remember that we will pay more for more. And less for less." The man stood and brushed sand from his swim trunks, as if he wasn't used to walking around in clothes that were less than immaculate. "Until tonight, Mr. Jones."
* * *
Asheville Urb, Thursday, May 16
Cally sat bolt upright in bed, searching the room as an unknown voice cheerily boomed, "Dude! Rise and shine. Surf's up and it's gonna be a righteous day!" Reefer groaned and tried to hide under his pillow. She stretched across him and shut his damn PDA off, getting back off of him quickly. At least part of the sleeping deadhead knew it was morning.
"Hey, Reef, convoy time." She shook his shoulder and took his pillow away.
He opened his red-rimmed eyes and bleared at her, blinking, before swinging his legs over the side and pulling on his jeans.
"Morning," he pronounced, "is an unutterably egregious thing."
She tilted her head and looked at him assessingly, pondering the wisdom of riding in a vehicle driven by this man.
"Provigil?" she offered brightly.
"Shit, yes, if you've got any," he said.
She rummaged in her pack a minute and came up with a tablet, pressing it into his hand. His eyes widened when he saw the "C" inscribed in the center of the sky-blue pill.
"You've got some good sources." He dry-swallowed it then grimaced and chased it with some beer left in a bottle from the night before. "This shit's mil-grade."
"Do we have time for me to grab a five-minute shower?" She rubbed the side of her face that smelled like unwashed male, telling her he'd been her pillow in the night.
"If you really mean five minutes and you don't care if I foam my face and brush my teeth while you're in there. I need one too. I'm pretty ripe. Sorry," he said.
"No problem." She snagged her backpack in one hand and went.
Later, as they waited for the convoy to finish assembling and pull out, she drank coffee and munched a protein bar, looking up at the mountain that rose above the Urb. Scott Mountain, the sign said. She didn't know the name of the smaller one to the east, but she could still see the remains of the old defensive works through the trees. Unmanned, now, of course. With each winter the ice must work a bit further into the cracks.
"Thanks for last night," the deadhead interrupted her reverie. "Um . . . Janet says you're, like, welcome to 'trip' at her place, any time."
"I was half asleep." She took a healthy swallow of coffee. "Do I want to know what you did with them?"
"Probably not." He grinned.
"Was it fatal?"
"Oh, hell no! You can't just go around killing cops, no matter how bogus they are. It's, like, unhealthy, man."
"Okay." She shook her head. "Sorry, I'm still not awake. They were cops? Are they, like, going to be able to track us down or catch us or something?" She looked around anxiously as if police were about to sprout from the parking lot around them.
"Don't panic." He laid a reassuring hand on her arm. "In forty-two years of my life, I've only been caught twice, you know? And none in the last ten years. Cops are, like, only human."
"Did you have to go to jail?" Her eyes got a little rounder as she looked at him over the rim of her cup.
"Nah. I learned the trade from my mom, like, she was fabulous. She knew the right people, you know? It was, like, expensive as hell, though." He looked off into the distance and popped a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. "My mom said that, like, before the war, the cops and politicians used to be really anal about, you know, what people took to get high. Like, now, though, some of the cops care, but most of 'em are on the take, and you just have to go up the line until you get high enough, and poof, for the right price, it all goes away. But, like, killing cops—they're still real anal about that. There's nothing'll make that go away. Or if there is, I don't know it, you know?"
"Quit talkin' about killing people, dude." She shivered delicately. "You're starting to scare me."
"Oh, well, like, yeah." He shrugged, punching in his favorite cube and setting it to shuffle. "Looks like we're starting to move."
She opened her PDA and went back to Marilyn's novel, yawning occasionally at the altitude changes as they moved on out to I-40 and the Smokies.
. . . Never mind how I stumble and fall. You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot
for a taste of your elegant pride. . . .
* * *
The funny thing about the Smokies was that it didn't matter how many times you'd been through them, they always kind of took you by surprise.
The Blue Ridge was no kind of preparation for the great, sweeping walls of wet, dark rock, almost any of which could have served for wartime fortifications way back when, but none of which had, given the ease and economy of rigging the I-40 tunnel for rapid demolition. Fortunately for the people back in Asheville, it had never been necessary.
There was obviously less time and money spent on road maintenance through here than had apparently been the case in an earlier age. Remnants of netting or fencing or whatever still clung to the bare cliffs above the highway, but the going was far slower than it had to be, because you never knew when you'd have to swerve around a boulder sitting in the middle of the road that nobody had gotten around to moving yet. A few places, probably some of the worst judging from ancient, rusted signs warning of falling rock, had been Galplased over at some point, but judging by the dingy and mottled finish of those surfaces, it had been in the distant past.
After the tunnel and crossing the state line into Tennessee, the road maintenance improved dramatically, but, then, UT had made the Tennessee economy one of the bright spots of postwar Earth. With federal highway funds a thing of the past except in very rare circumstances, like the stretch from Charleston to Green River Drawbridge, a state's plenty or need could be clearly read in its roads.
* * *
Coming into Knoxville, she looked up as they reached the Tennessee River, looking out over the water as they crossed the bridge. On the road from Asheville, especially after the exit to Gatlinburg, they'd seen more and more nonconvoy traffic joining into the mix of cars and trucks on the roads. Even midmorning, they slowed surrounding traffic a bit coming into the Asheville Highway exit.
"We're, like, coming up on the end of the convoy up here at Volunteer Park," he said as they pulled off the interstate. "You've been a pretty cool passenger, you know? You're, like, totally welcome to, you know, hang out with me all the way up to Cincinnati, man. You won't, like, technically be a guard or anything, but, like, with no convoy dudes to maybe narc on me to my boss for having a passenger, it, like, doesn't really matter anymore. I can always say I dropped you off in Knoxville, you know?"
The parking lot was freshly paved and recently painted, and large enough to accommodate about twice as many vehicles as the present convoy. The park had a couple of ball fields, vacant in the middle of a school day, and, surrounded by a handful of cedars and well-tended flower beds, a brightly colored playground where a few mothers watched a gaggle of toddlers and small children swarm over the climbing gym and slides. Two of the little girls, in shorts and T-shirts, one with wispy child-blond hair and the other with tangled light-brown curls, were busily building a sand castle in a sandbox shaped like a giant turtle.
"So, like, if you need to take a leak or anything, you might want to hurry and get in line before the bus unloads, you know?"
When Reefer spoke, she jumped slightly as if for a moment she'd forgotten where she was, looking at him blankly as he continued, "It'll only take me a couple of minutes to check out from the convoy list and get my deposit back, and then we can, like, really make up some time. Gotta have the convoy for safety but, damn, it's slow."
He shooed her out the door and as she hurried across the parking lot to beat the rush, she saw him walk off towards the circle of drivers gathering around the convoy master.
The restrooms were in a strictly utilitarian cinderblock building, but there was a whole line of them. Having beaten the bus, she didn't have to wait. Never miss a chance to eat, sleep, or pee goes double when you're female—at least for the last bit.
She checked her reflection in the mirror. The perm was, as expected, holding up well. Contacts were fine, but she'd want to take them out and clean them tonight. Nail polish was chipped and needed a touch-up—bad.
She got back to the van before Reefer did, so she sat down on the back bumper and took out the rose nail polish. She made her hand shake very slightly to keep the inexpert effect going. When he got back a minute or two later, they were already dry.
Back in easy wireless range, she downloaded another couple of novels while he checked his tanks. "I've got one stop downtown, you know? We can, like, grab some food in Lexington."
"I was surprised you sold off any of your stock in Asheville. I mean, wouldn't they pay more in Chicago? I know what I'd pay for live blue crab in Cincy, if I could find it."
"Oh, well, like, they would. This dude, I make the detour because he's a friend, but he pays Chicago prices just like anybody, you know? The rest of the way, I call ahead when I know about what time I'm coming through, and, you know, if they want any they meet me at an exit and make the buy. But really, almost all of it goes all the way there. If it weren't for the big money stock trader and banker dudes, there just wouldn't be enough demand to pay for the route."
As they drove into downtown on I-40, the view of the Knoxville skyline made a nice change from farms and mountains, even blurred as it was by a gentle haze of smog.
"What's with the giant microphone?"
"Huh? Oh, like, you mean the tower with the ball on top? Yeah, man, I guess it does look a bit like an old-timey microphone. It's way pre-war. It's, like, left over from some prewar 'World' something or other, you know?" He pulled onto 158 and headed for the riverfront
"Oh. That's kind of neat. Where's your friend's restaurant?"
"Oh, like right on the river. Awesome place, got a dock and everything."
"Is there something wrong with my eyes, or has everything gone suddenly orange?" Once they turned onto West Cumberland, the streets had suddenly sprouted big orange streamers and balloons with a silver atom symbol blazoned on them. They drove under a large orange banner that spanned the street, proclaiming "AntimatterFest '47!" Another welcomed them to historic downtown Knoxville, "Birthplace of the Antimatter Age!"
"Aw, man!" he groaned. "I forgot! They go, like, totally nuts for this thing. Parking will just be hell." He scratched his head and thought for a minute. "Can you drive?"
"Oh, sure. . . . Why?"
"Well, like, these people will jump all over my butt if I even think about double parking on the street, here." He waved a hand casually at the pedestrians, about half of whom were wearing orange beanies with revolving silver atom holograms overhead. "Geez, like never combine a consumer electronics town with a dorky festival. Antimatter fireworks and everything. Totally bonkers," he said, shuddering.
The light in front of him turned yellow and he slowed down and stopped behind the cars in front of him.
"Switch!" He slammed the gearshift into park, hit his seatbelt release, and was out the door, yelling, "Don't take off before I'm in the back, man!"
She snapped her jaw shut and scrambled over to the driver's seat, grabbing the door he'd left open, adjusting the seat, and checking her mirrors as he yanked the back of the van open and squeezed in between his tanks, shutting it behind him.
"Uh, like, I need to get some stuff out back here. Hang a left at the next light, and a left onto West Main. Just, you know, keep going around the block for a little while. Please?"
She restrained the impulse to laugh as he lurched around in back, avoiding the tanks, unbolting a false panel, stubbing his toe, yanking a couple of vacuum-sealed bricks of familiar dried vegetation out of the cavity, and fumbled with the false panel, trying to get it back in place with the van in motion. Finally, he got it and sighed, grabbing his backpack and shoving the packages in the bottom, covered by clothes.
"Okay, now don't turn this time, straight, farther up now, turn down this side street. Yeah, like, perfect. Okay, pull in beside this one, see the blue loading sign? Okay, stop right there." He grabbed his PDA and punched in a number from memory. "Hey, Pete, guess who, dude? Yep, like, in the flesh. On your loading dock, dude. Like, now. Well, I would have called ah
ead, but, like, I was busy trying to avoid all these people on the streets, you know? Oh, there you are. . . ." He hung up as a short, fat man in a white apron rushed out and yanked open the van doors.
"Geez, Re— Mister Jones, you know I only take delivery of the crabs here, I haven't had time to get Joey in place, he's still here, my reputation, I can't afford to get caught. This is not good, Mister Jones."
"Look, let's get this shit under cover. You would have been at more risk sending Joey out with all these people around and you know it." Cally smiled secretly to herself as some of her ride's surfer accent fell away.
"Awright. This time. Come in and grab a bucket. I got lots of extra customers today and I can move a few more of these. Who's she?"
"She's cool. Come on." He hurried the man away towards the doors. The shorter man looked like he was about to explode. After they disappeared Cally surreptitiously checked the sidearm Reefer had left for a full magazine and a round in the chamber, carefully smudging her prints as she set it back down. Not that hers were recorded anywhere, but it didn't pay to take chances.
He came back out alone with a large bucket of salt water and shoveled a bunch of soporific crabs into it, muttering under his breath as he hefted the full load. "It's, like, okay, Marilyn. It's all cool. My . . . friend, he's, like, shy, you know? We'll be totally back on the road in five minutes."
Her body language was casual and relaxed, but very still, until he came back out alone, emptier backpack on his shoulder, closed the back of the van, and came to the driver's side, motioning her to move over. She kept one eye on the mirrors while she did it, relaxing infinitesimally after they made it onto 275 headed out of town.