Yeah, it was. Carter leaned his face in his hands. “We’ll have water restored to the local lines by morning. I’ve got a crew working all night on it. I’m going to do some horse trading and I think we can make up the difference without cutting The Dalles much. I’ll have the final numbers by tomorrow night, I hope.” If he could stay out of the doctor’s clutches. “For the interim, I have the power to set the flow. But we may have to cut after all.”
“We’re both going to have our work cut out for us.” Dan gave him a crooked smile. “But you boosted my stock by arresting me. That shut up the people who claimed I was in bed with you.”
“We’ll do our best, I guess.” Carter noticed the fresh bruises on Dan’s face and the red weals on his wrists where he’d been cuffed or tied. “You need a ride back?”
“Not really safe for you folks right now. I’ll stay at the plaza tonight. Nita’s really worried about you.” Dan levered himself to his feet. “She cares a lot about you, Carter. Just so you know. I didn’t . . . know what she could do.” His eyes flickered.
“I didn’t either,” Carter said. It bothered Dan. You could see it in his face. It would be scary. To think that someone knew what was going on inside your head. How did he feel? He scowled and forced himself to his feet. He didn’t know. Not tonight.
He’d have to answer that question.
“I’ll get you an escort to the gate.” He pulled out his phone, surprised at how much it weighed. “Dan? How the hell do you get in here?”
Dan gave him a crooked s mile. “There’s a low spot on the riverbed side of the fence, out behind the kitchen compost bins. This kid was stationed here about two years ago. He was a Corps electrician, and he was Sandy’s nephew. He diddled the fence a little, just enough so that you can slide under without getting zapped or setting off the alarm. Sandy and I know about it. Nobody else.
“Thanks,” Carter said. “Use the gate after this, okay?”
Dan lifted a hand in a half salute as the escort knocked on the door. Carter felt a small flash of relief as he recognized Private Wasson. “Make sure this man gets out the gate safely,” he told her, then held up a hand. “Private, were you out at the Shunt today?”
“Yes, sir. We got sent in as backup, sir.” Her eyebrows rose. “What happened?” Awe colored her tone. “Do you know what it was? Some kind of hologram or something?”
“Something,” Carter told her. He glanced at his watch as Dan followed her toward the main gate. He’d give Johnny a half hour to show.
He knocked less than five minutes later.
“You must have been breaking speed records.” Carter stood aside as Johnny breezed into the room.
“You weren’t making any sense at all. Are you sure you shouldn’t be in the infirmary right now?” Johnny peered at Carter. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”
“Not quite yet.”
“What happened at the Shunt? Fill me in, will you? And where’s the stuff you found at Greely’s house?” Johnny sat down on the sofa Dan had just vacated. “What was it?”
“How did you know I found anything at Greely’s?” Carter leaned against the door.
“Uh . . . that guy. He said you had something in your hand when you left.” Johnny shrugged. “Why else go tearing off like a crazy man?”
“I didn’t have anything in my hands when I left.” Carter crossed his arms. “Tell me about Pacific BioSystems, Johnny.”
“What about ’em?” Johnny’s eyelids flickered. “We’ve got inside information that they’ve cut a deal with Hastings, we just don’t have any proof yet.” He sighed. “That’s what I was hoping we’d find at Greely’s. No luck, huh?”
“I want to know what you were trying to do.” The words came out leaden. “Why frame Hastings and Dan Greely? Why ruin the farmers along the riverbed? What does it gain you?”
“What are you talking about?” Anger flashed across Johnny’s face, turned into sudden comprehension. “That Latina chick of yours.” He snapped his fingers. “What’s her name? She’s been giving you an earful, hasn’t she? Carter, I know how you feel about her.” He shrugged, his face full of sympathy. “I think you’re going to have to face the fact that she’s Greely’s lover. I saw it for myself. She’ll say anything to clear that guy.”
“Heard from Delgado this evening?” Carter watched Johnny’s face go still.
“Who’s . . .”
“You planted the information that ties Greely and Hastings to PacificBio systems, Johnny. A better hacker than the one you hired found the real deal.” He sure as hell hoped Nita was right about that. “So proof exists, Johnny. You hear me? Proof.” He paced across the room, turned back to stare at Johnny. “Hastings is dead. So is Delgado, so he can’t testify against you. But you can’t slip out of this clean.” He drew a shallow, painful breath, remembering those cell bars, so long ago, the slippery feel of blood on his fingers. “I won’t cover for you,” he said unsteadily.
“I didn’t kill anybody.” Johnny looked away from him, his face twitching. “You got to look out for yourself, Carter. The world won’t look out for you. You’d do better to save your friends, let the rest go.”
“Delgado said something like that.”
“He was crazy. He wasn’t supposed to kill that girl.”
“Just Hastings and Greely?” Carter’s blood chilled. “What about Private Wasson, Johnny, the one who could identify the corporal who helped kidnap Greely?”
“Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?” Johnny lurched to his feet. “You wouldn’t have gotten hurt. I had it all set up. You were going to come out of this like a hero.”
Like a hero. He stared at Johnny, realizing he had wanted him to deny it, wanted him to come up with a good reason why Nita was wrong, why it wasn’t him. He had been as ready to believe him as he had been ready to believe in Dan’s guilt. “Why, Johnny?” he asked numbly. “Why did you do this? You’ve got it all.”
“Yeah, I have it all,” Johnny whispered. “Do you know how fast I could lose it? After Amber and I split, I went a little crazy for awhile. You were so busy with your Army games and I . . . was on my own.” He stared down at Carter, haggard in the yellow light of the overhead fixture. “This little whore I’d been seeing tried to shake me down. Yes, she was underage, but it was no rape, that’s for sure. She solicited me. I didn’t mean to kill her. It . . . was an accident. And then . . . Morissy showed up two days later. With pictures. They could do a DNA match, of course. The cops. If she tipped them off. She’d set the girl on me, planning to lever me with the sex charge. And I handed her my ass on a platter.” His face had gone white.
“Morissy thought she owned me, Carter. No one owns me. No one. This was the way out. Do you know what would have happened once it came out that Pacific BioSystems had bribed a Corps general to give them extra water, that they had caused a local water war? The media would crucify them with joy, and we’d have an excuse to really bring them to heel. Someone needs to yank them into line, and if they leaned on me then, I could claim it was a frame. Revenge for exposing them. Carter? His lips trembled. The girl . . . it really was an accident.”
“Did you give Wasson’s name to Delgado?” Carter asked softly.
“Yes.” Johnny wouldn’t meet his eyes. “She could ID the guy he was working with in Bonneville.”
“What did you think Delgado was going to do? And meanwhile, The Dalles ends up another Chicago.”
“I told you, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.” Johnny made a chopping gesture with his hand. “I made sure of that. Hastings and Greely would have taken the heat and you would have been a hero for finding out about it. I’d never let you get stuck in the middle. Your ass has been covered the whole time. Everything would have worked out fine,” he said bitterly. “They should be growing bushes along the Columbia anyway.”
“I fried out in the Dry. Did you have your hired help dump me out there just to turn me against the locals? Ten people died down in the riverbed today. Ten! Delgado
almost shot me. Did I mention that?”
“We knew where you were, “ Johnny said sullenly. “You were right about a chip. That’s what the grab was for. Delgado wouldn’t have shot you. He was supposed to . . .”
“Shoot Greely? And any other witnesses? My God, I don’t believe you’re saying this stuff.” Carter buried his face in his hands. “Does it matter so much? A seat on Water Policy?”
“Yes, it matters.”
The hissing intensity of Johnny’s voice brought Carter’s head up, raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
“My father’s one of the top economists in the world. He’s an icon, and I’m just Trevor Seldon’s son. Not John Seldon. All my life I’ve been Trevor Seldon’s son.” Johnny’s eyes glittered. “But now I’m Water Policy. I control his water. He drinks because I let him. He’s never had this much power, Carter. He never will.”
Carter looked away, hearing Nita’s voice in his head. You mean nothing to him.
“I didn’t shoot anyone,” Johnny said hoarsely. “No one can connect those deaths to me. I didn’t murder that girl. What do you want from me?”
“I should turn it all over to the media.” He stared at the flowered paper on the wall. It would exonerate The Corps and Hastings. It would exonerate Carter. “If you resign from Water Policy . . . I won’t,” he said softly. “Because once . . . you were my friend.”
“I can’t just resign. Listen, wait a minute!” Johnny bounced to his feet, his voice high and tight. “I think we can cut a deal. You brought a civilian into the infirmary, yeah, I still have my sources, Carter — is this a friend of yours?” Johnny’s eyes were desperate. “I heard he’s in very bad shape. I’ll pay for whatever it takes to put him back together — if you’ll dump anything incriminating — just forget we ever had this conversation. I’ll keep my hands off the Corps and your command. Do we have a deal?”
His hand on the knob to open the door and usher Johnny out, Carter hesitated. What had Hastings said — that there were no innocent people along the riverbed? He’d been wrong. There was at least one innocent person in all this: Jeremy. He had never taken sides in this war, and he had saved an awful lot of people.
Carter closed his eyes briefly. Johnny would always come first. Not the numbers, not the thirsty men and women who lived or died by Water Policy’s decisions: it was Johnny Seldon, first and foremost. “No,” he whispered. What had Jeremy said about the Dry? – that sometimes you had to make ugly choices. “I want to hear on the news tomorrow that you’ve resigned.”
Johnny marched past him and into the night, his face set like a stone.
Nita would know. She would know that he had done this to Jeremy. He closed the door behind Johnny and locked it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The hospital corridor oppressed Nita. It was white and sterile, filled with echoes of pain and sickness. Everybody hurried and seemed to be very busy. She tiptoed down it, her skin tight with gooseflesh even though it wasn’t particularly cool, half expecting someone to stop her and demand to know what she was doing here. She had been surprised at Renny’s ready agreement to drive her all the way here to Portland, to the big city hospital where Jeremy had been transferred. The receptionist downstairs had told her his room number, but the numbers didn’t want to behave rationally up here. Nita closed he eyes briefly, her head buzzing with the fog of discomfort that filled this place.
A chunky young woman in green pants and a loose green shirt passed on her way down the corridor. “Are you lost?” she asked with a smile.
“I’m looking for Jeremy Barlow. In four twenty-one,” Nita said. The woman’s pleasant feel eased some of her tension. “I think I am lost.”
“Not really. He’s down here.” The woman nodded down an intersecting corridor. “I’ll take you.” She fell in beside Nita, her curiosity like the smell of flowers in the air. “He has quite a talent, Jeremy. Everybody in the entire psych department here has been down talking with him and testing what he can do. We moved him into a room where he could look out at the Willamette bed. Has he showed you the city he sees? It was so beautiful.” Her eyes had gone dreamy. “Pictures just don’t do it, do they? You know, when I see it, really see it, I can believe it’ll be like that again, some day.”
Nita halted in the middle of the corridor. “He shows you?”
“Sure.” The woman raised a quizzical eyebrow at her reaction, but decide to let it pass. “The more I do it, the better I can see it. I just caught a few glimpses at first, but some people see everything the first time. Cara, one of the surgical nurses is really good at it. Doctor Lazarus, the head of Psych, had a name for what he does, but I can’t remember it now.”
“That’s wonderful.” Nita felt dazed. He was doing this? Here? Where he couldn’t escape?
“This is the place.” The woman lifted a hand, smiling. “I’m Amelia Cary, by the way. A lowly intern. Say hi to Jeremy for me, will you? I’m supposed to be elsewhere five minutes ago.”
“I will,” Nita said, and pushed the oversize door open as the woman hurried away.
Jeremy was asleep. His face looked pale and fragile on the white pillow, haloed by his fair hair. Tubes trailed across the bed, IVs and a catheter, dripping fluid into his veins, carrying away the excess, as if Jeremy himself had become nothing more than some kind of living filter removing a few nutrients from the slow, steady trickle of liquid. It frightened her. She shivered suddenly, wanting to shake him, wake him up so that she could be sure he was still Jeremy.
As if he had felt her anxiety, Jeremy’s eyelids fluttered. “Hi.” He turned his head on the pillow to look at her, and his smile was his own. “When did you get here?”
“A little while ago. Renny drove me down.” She reached for his hand, closing her fingers tightly around his. “Jeremy, it’s my fault. I should have heard Delgado. If I’d listened, I would have known he was there. But Carter was going to kill Dan, and I just didn’t listen . . .”
“Hey, stop.” He squeezed her hand. “It’s not your fault. Any of us could have ended up dead. It’s kind of a medium-sized miracle that we didn’t. And I’m not going to die, so relax.” He squeezed her hand again, then grimaced and fingered the tubing taped to the back of his other hand. “It itches,” he said. “I guess I’ll be on this thing until they’re all done with the treatments. But they don’t have to do any more surgery. That’s what Dr. Carey told me this morning. Although she said some of the doctors were talking about working on my hands. And my knees.” He stretched his knotted fingers. “If they decide to, they’ll do it for free. I guess they’re seeing more cases of this and they want to see if they can fix it.”
He wasn’t sad. Or scared. “Jeremy?” Nita framed the question she wanted to ask, but the words wouldn’t come. Spinal damage, Dan had told her. He might never be able to walk again.
“Dr. Imenez was in this morning.” Jeremy smiled now, reaching up to touch her cheek. “He’s the one who’s been doing the fancy stuff — something with stem cells. He stuck me with a needle this morning. Up and down my legs. I couldn’t feel anything when he did it before, but this time . . . I did. Not all the sticks, but some of them. He was pleased, Nita.” He pushed her braid back over her shoulder. “I guess it looks good.”
“Jeremy, I’m so glad.” She held his hands, smiling with the bright glow of his hope. He wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life in a bed in Dan’s house. Surely. “I met Dr. Carey. She said hi. And she told me you’re showing people your visions.”
“No kidding.” He smiled, a little more tentatively this time. “I guess I really stirred things up. A whole bunch of doctors are trying to figure out how I do what I do. It scares me some . . . you can feel that, right? But it’s okay. They’re running all kinds of tests while I’m making stuff. They don’t have a clue. But the nurses all sneak in here to look at the river. I still don’t know why everybody saw that flood in the riverbed like they did.”
“It had to be because of all the people,” Nita s
aid. “I knew it was you, and it still panicked me. I think it was like a few people saw it, and their reaction sort of set off others around him. Does that make sense?”
“No, but it happened anyway.” Jeremy closed his eyes. “You were right, you know? About my not wanting to face what I could do. The visions, I mean. My dad could see them. I showed him what the land had been like once, and . . . I think something broke inside of him. I think he died sooner . . . because of that.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You could have told me, right?” He kissed the back of her hand, lightly. “Too bad you weren’t there. Or maybe I’m right. We’ll never know. And I am . . . facing it. The visions. Trying to figure out what they’re good for.”
“Dr. Cary said they gave her hope,” Nita said softly. His face looked thin, shadowed with recent pain. “She said they made her believe the world could be like that again one day.”
Jeremy’s smile warmed her. “It’s still going to scare some people, make some people crazy. But I guess there’s a price for everything, right?”
“Yes.” Nita felt the smile tremble on her lips, made it stronger.
“What’s wrong?” Jeremy’s fingers tightened around hers. “Carter?”
“So who reads minds now?” She laughed, but it caught in her throat.
“I don’t need to try very hard. He was here earlier this week.” Jeremy wouldn’t let go of her hand. “I asked him about you. He said he hadn’t seen you.”
He was sad for her. “He’s been pretty busy and…I don’t feel comfortable walking up to that gate. Even though the base isn’t closed anymore. I got the proof he needed from Renny’s hacker friend. Dan gave it to Carter. Johnny resigned from Water Policy. I heard it on the news. I’ve been busy.” She made her voice light. “Dan, Sandy, and I have all been busy trying to smooth things out between The Dalles and the Corps. It’s not easy.” We. “You know, I’m doing what I told Dan I’d never do — what my father did.”
“You’re doing what you need to do.” Jeremy smiled.
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