Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  Would you feel fairly treated? Or mistreated by savages for violating a taboo that doesn't apply to you?

  The DEA had little choice, of course. The fiend in question, Mark Emery, had been in effect exporting B.C. marijuana—the undisputed best in the world—to anyone in the world who was bright enough to plant a seed. Joe Blow in New York, happily paying more than US$300 an ounce for B.C. Bud, could suddenly grow himself an endless supply of grass just as good for a couple of dollars, including postage—of which not one cent would flow as payoffs to the DEA, the FBI, the federal, state or local drug enforcement agencies . . . or to the mob that did the actual heavy lifting. Emery had to be stopped, or members of the many branches and layers of the drug war forces might have to start living on their salaries—

  Damn it, Russell—no more woolgathering! Focus.

  I hadn't considered Nika, yet. Where was she now, and what was she doing? It was not out of the realm of possibility that she could be somewhere on The Rock now. Lina might have decided after all to wait around for her, or she might have found some way to lay her hands on a rocket-boat and beat Lina back here. Either way, the timing would suggest that she might very well arrive any minute. Now what was the best way to—

  In the far distance, coming toward me, the sound of a car.

  For a few moments, I thought about waving down whoever it was when they reached me, and persuading them to turn around and take me a couple of hundred meters. I knew I must look desperate enough to pull it off—and at that point, even that short a ride would have been a godsend.

  But fortunately, it dawned on me in time that I heard a car coming, but I didn't see a car coming. And then I did—a car moving slow, with its headlights off.

  I hadn't realized that could be done with a modern car. And I couldn't think of a legit reason to go to the trouble. So I left the road, found a spot where the drainage ditch alongside it wasn't too steep for me, and crouched down in it to await developments.

  The dark car, a Camry, went past my driveway. Two curb cuts later, a little ways short of me, it slowed to a stop in the road and shut its engine. Then the driver put it in neutral and let it slide backward on the slight downgrade. When he reached my driveway again he backed into it. A few minutes later a small musical sound announced that he'd failed to completely miss the tree that's too close to the driveway on the left. Still, he'd done rather well without power steering to help.

  If I'd had the energy or the air, I'd have burst into tears of frustrated rage. All that effort, all that pain, all that determination . . . and I'd arrived only minutes too late! It was monstrous.

  No, God damn it, all was not yet lost. I beat back the despair—or maybe just lost the strength for that too. Perhaps he would decide to toss my office first—I would have, in his shoes—and would get hung up examining the hard drives and internet history of the new Powerbook there, long enough for me to slip into the spare bedroom and grab the old one. If I entered and left the house on the side opposite from the office, through the washer-dryer room, I might just pull it off.

  I gave him a little time to get out, check his surroundings, take a pee, and skulk off down my driveway to creep my place. But as I started to climb up out of the ditch, I froze. Another car was coming,

  Another car with no lights! Here it came now, even slower than its predecessor had.

  It did almost the exact same maneuver the Camry had. But it waited until it was well past me to shut its motor and drift back—I ducked my head—and then it went one driveway farther downhill. The one it chose to back into was that of Doug, my neighbor, and it was either better or luckier than the first, for there were no crunch sounds.

  For a moment I didn't know what to think. Which car was Pitt? Or did he have backup? What the hell was my move?

  Then I realized the second car had been an Echo, just like my own. Nika was back on the island! And on her way to back up Jesse. At last, some good news.

  As I climbed up out of the ditch, Nika walked back out to the road to see if her arrival had drawn any attention; we saw each other simultaneously. I waved hello. She waved get your ass down here. So I did.

  She must have noticed the way I was moving, and met me well short of my own driveway. "Jesus Christ," she whispered, "what the hell happened to you? You look like—"

  "Partial right lung collapse," I answered parsimoniously.

  She didn't need a diagram. "How bad?"

  "It only hurts when I'm conscious."

  "I'll get the car."

  "No! Just give me your shoulder."

  It felt like she carried half my body weight. Even so, I was breathing a lot louder than she was the whole way.

  Finally, my million-year-marathon was over—at least for a few minutes—and I found myself sitting on an actual cushioned surface, with a cushioned back that included neck support. It was a reward that put Paradise to shame. I bathed in it, basted myself with it, orgasmed behind it. At least ten seconds.

  "That was Agent Pitt in the Camry?" I asked with my first pain-free breath.

  She was fast. "Is that his name? Yeah, Jesse has him staked out from the barn up ahead like you said. And he scoped out a good spot for me around the other side of your house."

  "How do you know all that? You just got here too."

  She blinked at me, and showed me her cellphone, and I felt like an idiot. There's just no way around it; I really am an old fart.

  She didn't stop to rub it in. "The plan is to wait until he splits, go in and deactivate whatever boobytraps and bugs he left, and then try and figure out our next—"

  "No good."

  "What's the problem?"

  "The worst problem is I'm a moron. In my spare bedroom is a laptop so old the next time it needs parts it's a paperweight. Uses an OS nobody else has in years. Uses fucking MacWrite for a word processor; nobody else has in decades. It's just barely possible to connect it to the net, and I never—"

  Like I said, Nika was very fast. "Oh fuck me, tell me you didn't write down—"

  "Only thing I was afraid of was one of Allen Campbell's cybergenius monster friends hacking me. Figured if there was ever one inside my house, decoding and reading what look like twenty-year-old files in a junk computer, I was already fucked."

  "Christ, Russell, didn't you—"

  "Damn it, Nika, it's how I process, okay? Keyboard's always been my confidante. Only one I've had since Susan. It's my shrink. My bartender. My stranger on a train. You cops get training. How to handle this shit, where to put it. You can just kill a man and keep going, but I—"

  "I wrote mine longhand," she interrupted.

  "Really?"

  She nodded, embarrassed. "In Herzegovinian."

  "What's that, some kind of shorthand?"

  "A dialect of Croatian. My grandmother made me learn it."

  "Wow. That beats my MacWrite 2.2 with DiskDoubler."

  "Not for the CIA. But mine's in a safe deposit box nobody else knows about. Still, what are the odds this guy is going to even glance at an obsolete computer?"

  "Zudie says Pitt is really smart. Zudie knows smart, and he was in Pitt's head once, forty years ago. He's been hiding from him ever since."

  "Still—"

  "I left the damn thing connected to wall current, but not the internet. He'd notice things like that."

  "What . . . oh, I see. Whatever you use the thing for, why wouldn't you want e-mail and net access while you were doing it? Why have to go all the way out to your office to Google something? So you can't be hacked."

  "Exactly."

  "Hell. Where is Zudie now?"

  "Waiting offshore in a kayak for us to bring him Jesse. Zudie's going to get him out of the country and then dive in his hole and pull it in after him, and I won't blame him. It's the safest place I know in this part of the world. I don't want him anywhere near a guy like Pitt. Let's go tell Jesse." I started the painful process of getting up.

  "Sit," Nika said, and gave me her cellphone.

  I squint
ed at it in the dark. "I can't find the redial button."

  She looked at me like I was from Mars. "There isn't one. You push 'send,'"

  Feeling silly, I did. Jesse's number appeared onscreen. I put the phone to my ear.

  "And push it again," she prompted.

  Feeling sillier, I did. The word "dialing" appeared. She took it from me and turned on the speakerphone somehow.

  I will enter the twenty first century, yes I will. At my own pace.

  "Yah."

  "Jesse, I'm at the end of Doug's driveway with Nika."

  "Hi, Pop," he said very softly. "How are you?"

  The only thing to do with that question was fail to hear it. "He's a CIA agent named Pitt, Zudie says. Very smart. Very scary. So scary I'm speaking as softly as you are, and I'm a couple of hundred meters away. Where is he now?"

  "Just now coming up on the house through the woods. He spent some time making friends with your cats. He moves slow, like he's tired."

  "Don't bet on it. Listen carefully. This is important. If Pitt goes into the office shed first, slip in my back door. I left it ajar so the cats could get in to eat and out to shit. Go to the spare bedroom, the one at the far end of the hall. There's an ancient Powerbook, black. Plugged into the wall but not the net. Grab it and bug out. You hear him leaving the office, go out the window. Short drop and the office itself will cover you from his angle. We'll meet you at the barn."

  He was as fast as Nika. "Understood. Something on that laptop Pitt mustn't see."

  "A diary I forgot," I confessed miserably. "I'm sorry."

  To my surprise, all he said was, "Can he see any house windows from the office?" It had been a long time since my son had passed up a chance to break my balls, and this was a real good one.

  "Only the bathroom, and it's frosted anyway."

  "Good. Shit."

  "What?"

  "He circled the office and looked in the window, but now it looks like . . . yes, he's going in the house."

  "Damn."

  "He has to," Nika said. She was crouching by the open car door, close enough to me for the speakerphone to pick her up even at very low volume. "He can't trap himself in that office until he's absolutely sure we all really bugged out. Your car and mine are still parked in front of the house."

  "And after he's been through your house, he can ask your computer more intelligent questions," Jesse added. "While he goes about it, I've got two questions. First, are you having one of your lung collapses?"

  I nearly dropped the phone. "Jesus Christ, how could you possibly—?"

  "It's the only time you ever speak in short sentences. How bad?"

  For some reason my eyes stung. "Extremely minor. Little short of breath is all. Not much help to you guys. But I'm okay, and I'll be fine after a night's sleep. Second question?"

  "I'm glad it's not worse. Once I've got this laptop back here to the barn where I can pulverize it without him hearing—then what? What's the plan? I mean, Pitt searches your house, your office, your computer, then he'll probably go back to his B&B and work on locating you and Nika and squeezing one or both of you for Zudie. What do we do then?"

  "First thing we do is get you to the Yacht Club Beach. West end of the island. Zudie's waiting for you offshore. Two-man kayak. He'll take you to the mainland and you can get a bus to the airport. You need to be out of the country. You have your passport on you, right? I saw you grab it as we left the house." God, that seemed like days ago!

  "Yes.

  "A kayak's close quarters," he said dubiously. "I don't think he's going to find my mind as endurable as he does yours."

  "He knows that. He still volunteered. Trust me, he's endured much worse than you already, tonight."

  "What does he do after he drops me off?"

  "He disappears. He has a Fortress of Solitude, if you get the reference."

  "No, but I can figure it out. He has a safe house."

  "And you guys will meet him there and figure out what to do?"

  Nika and I looked at each other. Our eyes met. We had not discussed this. She had a very hard choice to make, and no time to make it. How far was she prepared to go, to keep Zudie out of the hands of a CIA agent he'd been running from his whole life?

  She was a police officer, a detective constable, with a career and a future to lose. She only had those things because a few years ago, Zandor Zudenigo had risked his life and sanity to save her—and me—from rape, torture and death at the hands of a sadistic supergenius with extensive experience. But now she had those things, and they were all she had.

  "Just a second," she said, and did something that apparently muted the phone. Because her next words were, "Damn it, Walker, just once I would like to visit you out here and not end up hiding a corpse."

  I was shocked speechless. And not just by her decision. As near as I could recall, it was the very first time Nika had ever said anything funny. I wanted to salute it by giving her the funny comeback I knew she wanted, but for the first time in my life I could not think of one. I settled for "Me too. Thank you." She understood everything I meant by that, I could see it in her eyes, and she nodded.

  She unmuted the phone. Jesse said, "He's in the kitchen now, I can see his flashlight through the window. I said, you guys have your own transportation to Zudie's, right?"

  I didn't seem to have any choices. I opened my mouth and lied. "Probably not right away. We need to decoy him in the wrong direction first while you're getting out of the country. Forget your luggage. It'll be here for your next visit. Turns out this isn't a good time for houseguests after all."

  "Don't be silly, Pop. You can't undo me. I boarded a plane, crossed a border, used my passport. I'll have to do it all again to go home. I'm documented. Agent Pitt has my voice on tape, for Christ's sake."

  "I want you documented off the board, very soon."

  "Why?"

  "Because bad things are about to happen."

  "Russell, do I have to remind you how many years I've been an adult?" His voice was still low and quiet—but he only used my first name when he was thinking of punching me. "Or what I do for a living? Burston-Marseller may not be more powerful than the CIA . . . but we've had more than one client who is. I've met the current assistant director socially. There are two guys in my address book right now I'm sure are CIA, and one or two others I suspect. But I also have the private numbers or e-mail addresses of six senators, a couple of congresscritters, a Supreme Court Justice and an ex-president. If you're planning on mixing it up with the CIA, I could be an—"

  "Pitt's not CIA," Nika interrupted.

  "He's not?" Jesse asked.

  "Ex-CIA, I'll buy. But he is definitely off the reservation on this. He's on his own time."

  "Why, because he has no partner?" I said.

  She shook her head. "The FBI always travel in pairs—so there'll be a witness. CIA prefers to go solo, so there won't be."

  "Then why—"

  "I've seen him. Just glimpses—but up close and in decent light, three times now. I'm the only one of us who has. The most recent time I saw him open a door, walk, get into a small car."

  "So?"

  "So I'm telling you: Pitt is pushing seventy, hard. A vigorous seventy; I wouldn't be surprised if he can take me. But the CIA has mandatory retirement at sixty-five, and they pull in field agents younger than that."

  "Oh."

  "Just a second." Nika took the phone from me again, did something that brought up a photo of the man, and then another. They were awfully tiny photos, but he did look too old to be on active duty. Then she did something else, and Jesse said, "Got 'em. Huh. You're right, he looks seventy."

  "If he had the seniority or the weight to override mandatory retirement, we'd have agents coming out of our ears. Which would be in Guantanamo."

  "I agree," Jesse said. "If he were still active CIA, Pitt could just make your chief order you to go see him, and then demand you give him everything you know about Zudenigo. Naturally you'd refuse, and a little
while later you'd wake up at home with a slight headache and that would be that. This asshole is acting like he doesn't want to show up on anybody's radar."

  "The car he's driving is not American, it's Canadian," Nika said. "So he stole it after he got here, and swapped plates with something in long-term parking at the airport. They do hot-plate searches out there now, not fast but steady. That car's got a shelf-life of about two or three more days. He's on a budget, improvising. He's probably already used three identities since he crossed the border."

  "Okay, you've both convinced me," I said. "He's a rogue elephant. That makes him more dangerous. Nobody at Burston-Marseller can tell you who he answers to, Jesse, because Pitt answers to nobody. I want you the fuck out of here. Out of the country, on your home turf surrounded by the most powerful friends you have. You're the only leverage Pitt could possibly use to squeeze Zudie out of me—"

  "But if—"

  "You're all I've got left, Jesse."

  "That doesn't—"

  "God damn it, you're all I've got left of her, don't you get it? I can't risk you."

  Nobody said anything for awhile. Nika's eyes were close to mine, little more than a cellphone's width away. They were studying mine intently. I studied hers back. We became aware of each other as male and female.

  "Okay, he finally finished casing the house, and he just went in your office."

  I yanked my eyes back to the woods ahead of me. "How the hell can you tell that from Doug's place? There's a house in the way, Have you—"

  "Chill, Pop: it was open and shut. I heard the front door open and shut. Then I heard the office door open and shut."

  "Oh. Sorry. So you are still in the barn, then?"

  "Not any more. Didn't you hear me? He's in the office. It's showtime. Time to see if your laptop diary's still in the house, and snatch it if it is."

  "Wait for me," Nika said urgently.

  "Why do I need you?"