This will have to be done quickly, thought Owen.
The car directly in front of him entered the inspection point. Owen rolled down his window and trained his mind on the sequence of movements he would need to make, resting his forearm on the window frame as if he were on a casual holiday drive. The other car lurched forward and accelerated past the two black wagons. It was Owen’s turn. He eased the car forward.
“Good evening, officer,” he greeted the guard in a friendly tone. “What’s going on here, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I do mind. Your thumb please.”
Owen nodded amiably and stretched his right arm across himself and out the window. His hand was mere centimeters from the device when the guard on the opposite side spoke up. He was staring down into the back seat.
“What do you got under the blan….”
Owen flashed past the scanner and grabbed the soldier’s wrist, and in one swift movement pulled his own arm back across himself, jerking the man’s considerable frame into the side of the car as he lay on the throttle. The man in front of the car didn’t have time to gasp, let alone raise his rifle or step out of the vehicle’s path. Owen flattened him while dragging the first man alongside the car like a ragdoll, and came to an abrupt stop with the car high-centered atop a mangled body.
He opened his door and threw himself onto the soldier beside him. The man fumbled for the pistol on his belt strap, but Owen thundered five or six elbow strikes into his head. The first few merely served to force his head down onto the asphalt, while those that followed smashed fiercely into him. Caught between the hard road top and Owen’s brutish elbows, his skull cracked, and then crumpled, and then caved in. The man’s pistol hand had gone limp after the third blow, and now only the trembling of nerves twitched in his fingers.
Gun shots.
Small shards of shattered glass showered across Owen’s back as the last remaining guard fired through the back windows and into the rear driver’s side door, narrowly missing Claire’s feet, which were now shaking uncontrollably beneath the brown blanket. She jumped with each shot the soldier discharged, certain that it meant her death, or Owen’s, or their baby’s.
Owen snagged the pistol out of the holster of the man beneath him and flopped onto his right side, facing the car. His line of sight just barely cleared the lifeless, broken body beneath the vehicle, and he took aim at one of the two black boots opposite him. The first shot blasted through the ball of the guard’s left ankle.
The soldier fell onto his side and grasped at his mangled foot. Owen released three more rounds underneath the car. And then the man was still.
Hopping to his feet, Owen scrambled to open the rear door and pulled the blanket off of Claire.
“Please, please, please…” was all he could get to come out of his mouth. His eyes were wide and frantic.
“I’m ok,” cried Claire. “We’re both ok.”
A wave of relief and gratitude swept over Owen. He closed his eyes.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
He wasn’t sure exactly whom he was thanking.
“Ok, Claire, we need to move! You get our girl, I’ll get the rest. He reached down beside her and pulled the duffel from the car, and then swung around to the rear baggage compartment and withdrew two more large packs.
Turning to face the long line of traffic that stretched halted behind them, he didn’t see a single head for at least eight cars.
He approached the first and peered down through the open driver’s window. The driver had sunk down as far as he could have, his knees well beneath the dash and his feet folded beneath them. His back lay upon the padding of the seat, and his head was angled sharply forward, pressed firmly into the steering wheel. The whole of his face trembled and shook, and a more terrified man would have been impossible to imagine.
Owen stared down at him with a flat face.
“How much charge do you have?”
“I… I…”
“Spit it out!”
“I… about… about an hour and a half… I think. Please… please don’t kill me. I’ll do whatever you…”
“Get out.”
The man scurried to get himself unstuck, but he was pretty well wedged in and shaking with fear, so it took some time. In the meantime, Owen came around to the back of the car. Looking back, he started to see heads rising up behind steering wheels. He dropped the baggage at his feet and retrieved the pistol from his duffel, firing a few shots into the hood of the next car to make those heads disappear once more.
Claire scurried around to the front passenger seat and clambered in with her baby held firmly against her. Owen threw the bags into the back compartment and turned to the man who was only just getting clear of the car.
“Thank you,” he offered with a small nod. It never occurred to him to apologize.
Chapter Twenty
A man is never so poor as when he dreams of great fortune.
The voice was Lamar’s. The words were the General’s, his last, and their arena was Gabriel’s head. They echoed in his mind, their riddle becoming no easier to solve through the repetition.
Those words didn’t fit. They hadn’t fit the room in which they were spoken, filled with the men and women who had come together to build a world without money. They hadn’t fit.
It was his mantra.
This was Gabriel’s initial thought.
It was the thought that drove him. It was the idea that humanity was being poisoned by its own materialism. It was the driving force behind his revolution.
But still it echoed in Gabriel’s mind, leaving him growingly unsatisfied that he had solved the puzzle.
It did make sense. It did fit, there in that room, on that day, and with that audience. The General was too rational, too smart to be so nonsensical. He ended his life that day because it fit within his own convictions to do so. It was a statement, his suicide. A warning. It was a planned course of action given a certain set of circumstances. And so were his words planned, every syllable. Not one bit of it was irrelevant.
Gabriel had worked it over for months, not as a man would sit down with a pen to solve a crossword, and not as some quiet hobby borne of diligence. It was compulsion. He found no way to get those words out of his head, and they had only grown louder since Lamar put himself on that boat. Nearly every waking moment was spent approaching this riddle, interpreting and reinterpreting.
It was a warning, thought Gabriel.
That much is certain. Obvious. And it was a pained reflection. The man had seen his own shortcomings culminate in failure. His own blind eye had been exposed to him, and he had seen the many doors he had unwittingly left open, and the horrors he had made possible. He saw the future, and knew that it was not an isolated event; it was to be the product of the present, just as the present had been the product of the past.
He had overreached.
He had wanted too much. And although his desire had never been for material fortune, he had desired a fortunate world, filled with opportunity and, above all, content. We were to be content that we had all of the things a man might need to be happy in life, and we were to understand that it is harmful to want more than that.
But the end is only as noble as the means by which it comes to be, and it can only be justified through them. How can a man be happy without family? Without love? How can we be satisfied that we are helping the people, that we love them, if we are willing to sacrifice even one for the many? Could a mother of five justify killing one of her own children, that the other four might live?
Gabriel glanced down at the pistol that lay on his desk before him, just to the side of the keyboard. He wondered if Lamar had interpreted that day in this same light, and shuddered at the thought of the decades that had passed, preserving in Lamar’s own mind the metallic echo of a riddle that would not be solved.
Those words must have tortured him.
The bright glow of the monitor lit up Gabriel’s face, betraying the lack of sleep
that had defined these last weeks. He had spent nearly every waking moment at this computer, watching and listening. When sleep did come, it wasn’t all that restful.
He knew that he was being watched by Cecil’s people, and that a team of no less than four men had been camped out in his building, ready to crash through his door and drag him off.
He had watched countless hours of surveillance feeds, and read seemingly endless heaps of electronic mail, but he knew that Cecil was too careful to directly say or do anything of importance in either case. Cecil knew exactly what sort of inheritance had been passed from Lamar’s withered hands to Gabriel’s. He knew what capabilities Gabriel now possessed, not only in terms of surveillance, but also in regards to his absolute control over every aspect of the Frame’s operations.
But that isn’t to say that nothing of importance was ever said between Cecil and Geena and the other councilmen in their service. A code was in use. Gabriel was certain of this much, but he lacked the time and the expertise to even begin to try to crack it. But still he listened.
He watched.
He neglected to sleep.
And now this situation with Owen...
Owen. My friend. Gone. If only he had known the depths to which he could have trusted me. He could have vanished without ever leaving. He and the girl and the baby. I have no shortage of hiding spots here, no shortage of resources. If only I could have trusted him enough to tell him my own plans…
But maybe he doesn’t need my help after all.
Gabriel smiled.
Look at how neatly they got out of town, and that girl of his did quite a job on our system before they could catch on and cut her off. They make quite the team. Those matchmakers at the Program are maybe a little too good at what they do.
Gabriel rubbed at his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
Maybe it’s me who needs him. Oh, if I could only be on the run with them, to taste that adrenaline! That mayhem at the checkpoint made for good cinema, even if I never feel inclined to share the surveillance feed with the fine folks over in the military facility.
I knew Owen was good. Hell, I’ve felt it myself. It’s like getting hit by a bus. But seeing him do it for real… my wildest flights of imagination could never have framed him in that moment. Could never have captured that fluid efficiency. From the moment he grabs that first guard to the moment he drops the last, just twenty-seven seconds pass. No one has time to even think about using their radio.
And now I’ve disabled every camera for three hundred kilometers, highway and city. I would have disabled their car’s tracker, too, if Owen hadn’t beaten me to it. I’m in awe of his attention to detail. Were it me, my heart would have been beating so fast that I couldn’t have remembered my own name, much less go about the business of commandeering another vehicle and disabling its tracker.
He looked so damn calm. That was the really scary part. He killed three men in the space of time it takes to chew and swallow a bite of sandwich.
Gabriel turned his head to the last of the three monitors on his desk. The screen was split into four frames of live video feed from his own apartment building. One was a shot of his living room, where he had set up an office of sorts. Two frames were from the hallways just outside his flat, and the last was from the main room of the apartment adjacent to his own, where Cecil’s strike team had been living and waiting for the green light.
Just a matter of time till they want their cameras back, he thought. Then they will come for me. I wish they would just get it over with. I’m so tired.
Turning back to his first screen, Gabriel pulled up the bulletin that had been made public early that afternoon. There were pictures of both Owen and Claire. Some were from official documents, such as the mug shot and profile of Owen from his service dossier. Others were more recently taken, and by more covert cameramen. There was even one photo of the couple eating breakfast at the glass table in Claire’s flat, taken, Gabriel presumed, from a helicopter hovering at a great distance somewhere out over the sea.
They’ve been watching you for a while, Owen. As they have been watching me.
Also attached to this urgent alert were pictures of a severely battered midwife and the bloody, swollen remains of a man named Roberto who had been found tortured and beaten to death in his apartment.
There was a written statement from the midwife in which she recounted the horrors that she had lived through.
A large man, she said, had forced his way into the birthing suite in which she had been working. He beat and raped her in front of the patient, Claire, who was obviously complicit in the subsequent kidnapping, and who even seemed to delight in watching this violent sexual intrusion. A real sick couple these two. Dangerous people.
Cecil is a sick man, thought Gabriel.
Ruthless. Cold.
He didn’t know that the details had been conjured up and made real by Geena.
He glanced back at his surveillance screen. There they were, still as ever, in the flat beside his own. Three men sat at the dining table, ignoring each other in stiff silence. Two of the men’s pistols were out on the glass in front of them as they stared down into the screens of their tablets. Gabriel guessed that the fourth man must be sleeping, as the four of them seemed to be working in shifts, and not one of them had once left the apartment.
What are you guys waiting for? Come get me.
I’m so damn tired.
Chapter Twenty-One
Claire was asleep as they passed through the outskirts of town. Tall blue buildings towered on either side of the street, and a lush green median separated the opposing flows of traffic beneath the soft yellow glow of streetlights.
“We’re close.” Owen spoke gently, and then repeated himself with the same low volume until Claire stirred a little, raising a heavy head filled with the echoes of deep sleep. The child in her arms continued to slumber, wrapped snuggly in her blanket and resting still atop her mother, who lay back in the reclined passenger seat.
“231, right?”
Claire nodded.
Highrise number 215 passed by on their right side. Then 217. Then 219.
“You don’t need to be nervous,” she spoke in a whisper, studying the uncertainty in his face with her puffy eyes. “He wouldn’t turn us in. We were very close once, and I don’t think he’s forgotten any of it.”
“Close, huh?”
“Yes. Close.” She smiled to herself as she looked away and out at the passing residential blocks, pleased by what seemed an awful lot like jealousy in Owen’s voice.
“He said to pull around the backside of the building, and he’ll meet us there at the back entrance.”
“And you’re sure no else was privy to this exchange. I mean, I’ve never trusted that much of anything is private on those damn tablets. I’m not really sure we should have taken it with us at all.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ve got his name and his story, and they know we took his car, but I only used his account to force access to another one. A completely random one. That’s where I sent the message from, and I swept my trail so the government would have no way to track it. And then you saw me toss it out the window. Plus, I avoided using any conceivable hot words. I covered my tracks.”
“Hot words?”
“Yes. Hot words. Words that might pop up at central as indicators of possible delinquent activity.”
“In other words…”
“They are like flags. If you talk on a phone or write anything anywhere on the Frame and use a word that we’ve got on our list, it registers in our system and then alerts us to your activity. Then we can monitor your interactions and your history on the Frame and decide whether you are in fact engaging in criminal behavior, or if you are just some hapless fool who happened to use the wrong word, or combination of words.
“You are right when you say that nothing is private, but we don’t listen to everything. We couldn’t if we wanted to. There’s just too much traffic. So we use these triggers
… these hot words… to bring our attention to the conversations we ought to be listening in on.”
“Words like…”
“Well, as of right now, both of our names. And other terms specific to our situation, like ‘baby’ or ‘midwife’.”
“Or kidnap…” added Owen.
Claire carefully returned her seat to a more or less upright position, trying as best she could not to wake the baby. She was not successful. The little girl began to worm around inside her covers, pushing a few noisy breaths through her nose and then crying in a small but very sharp voice.
Claire rushed to pull the loose collar of her shirt down over her shoulder and exposed her swollen breast, pulling the crying child into her. The little girl fumbled blindly for the nipple, excited by the smell of her mother’s milk and angry that it wasn’t already in her belly. She screamed and snorted, her voice intensifying along with her desperation.
“It sounds like someone is slaughtering a goat. We can not stop with her crying like that,” said Owen matter-of-factly.
“You think I don’t know that!?” snapped Claire.
“I’ll drive us around a bit until you get things worked out over there.”
“You think this is easy?” Claire hissed over the infant’s screams. “Well it isn’t! She just won’t get on there right, and it pisses her off and then it’s even harder.” Claire was cradling the baby up to her breast with her right arm, and working with her left hand at getting her nipple into the child’s mouth.
“I don’t know how we ever made it as a species! Maybe it’s easier for some people to… there!” Claire’s voice calmed within the space of a breath. “Right there, sweet girl,” she half-whispered.
Owen glanced over and saw the child attached to her mother, working her little jaw up and down and breathing exhausted puffs of relief through her tiny nostrils.
“Looks like we’re good. Are we good?”
“We’re good,” responded Claire, the ringing of the infant’s screaming only just beginning to fade from within her skull. The effect of those cries was indescribable. They penetrated her head and shook everything from the inside until not a single thought remained apart from the vivid misery of the moment.
Keeping Luna Page 18