Though the villagers were mostly self-sufficient, they got things they couldn't make for themselves—toothbrushes, mirrors, aspirin, and so forth—from the prison staff. In return they provided the guards with fresh fruit, fresh fish they caught out by the reef, and fresh meat from feral porkers they trapped in the jungle. Some guards visited Hilo, including Stink—that was why he'd been able to give Gomez directions for finding it—while others met the locals in a jungle clearing near the perimeter fence called the Trading Post. The guards paid willing women for sex, giving them colored beads and cheap watches that decorated wrists and necks all over Hilo.
Living in a place where food was abundant and work far from excessive, Gomez developed a bit of a paunch, while Andy turned robust and chunky for the first time in his life. He began to love the island that had been his prison and told Gomez he never wanted to leave. Daily rainbows came and went, sometimes three or four at a time. Prevailing westerlies had carried most of the volcanic ash toward the east coast, forming the peninsula where the prison stood, but elsewhere near-vertical cliffs plunged into the cobalt sea. Their rough slopes bore forests of man-high ferns, like a cloak of green feathers that glistened with rain or dew and rippled in the gentle trade winds.
Esperanza showed Andy a path that twisted through the woods, climbed a spur of the mountain, and dipped into a narrow valley. It was a mysterious place where shade lingered even at noon, and a tiny silver waterfall left pearls on spiderwebs before cascading through a fissure into a cavern below. Strange sounds rose from the old fumarole, sometimes a booming like iron bells, sometimes cries as of animals or men. The Kahuna disapproved of all magic but his own, and declared the place taboo. But Andy loved it, and often walked the path with Esperanza, or with Gomez, or alone.
One day when the two friends were together, they topped the spur and paused to catch their breath on a rocky shelf. The sheer cliff rose on one side, the fern forest fell away on the other, and they were about to move on when Sneak stepped as soundlessly as ever into the path ahead of them.
He wore a holstered pistol and raised his hand to signal Halt. The ex-cons were standing paralyzed when a small woman wearing a Security Forces uniform emerged beside the guard, and Andy whispered, "Faith."
She told Sneak, "I have things to talk about with this man. Give us some space, and take the other guy with you."
As ordered, Gomez fell back a couple of meters, wondering if he should attack while the guard's pistol was still in his holster. Then he decided to wait and see what happened between Andy and Faith. You share a futon with a man for a year, you learn a lot about him, and Gomez knew that a woman named Faith had been Andy's lover, back in the days when he was getting ready to shoot Mahmud Alonzo Sol. He sensed a tale of betrayal and waited with ears twitching, hoping to learn more.
She led Andy down the path, and he stumbled twice, as if unable to control his feet. He couldn't speak either, and found himself listening to Faith— Oh hell, he thought, why think of her by that so-called secret name? Even back at Yale he'd known her real name was Constance Griffin.
"I know this must be a shock," she said, inadequately.
When he still couldn't find words, she explained, "I wanted to make sure those idiots at the prison really had arranged your escape." She seated herself on a boulder of eroded lava and gestured for him to sit beside her. But he preferred to stand.
"I'm not a complete monster, you know," she said.
He couldn't stop staring. Her face both did and didn't belong to the woman he'd known. Her hair was dark now instead of blonde with dark roots, as it had been. She still had a spark in her eyes, but the fire was different, he didn't know how. Three years had passed since they'd parted in the loft in Washington, yet she looked older by a decade. Still the lecturer, like Miss Birch his fourth-grade teacher imparting knowledge, she explained herself in tones that reminded him of the days when she was recruiting him for the AFA.
"I was working undercover when I set you up," she said, quite calmly, as if such betrayals happened every day. "The world government was having problems, still is. Security wanted to provoke an act that would justify a general crackdown, and they were looking for somebody to put on the kind of spectacular but harmless show they needed. Provocation is a very common ploy in my line of work, but it has to be done exactly right. The fake assassination was the first big action I was completely in charge of, and I owe my meteoric rise in the Service to doing it right."
She paused to take a small white regulation handkerchief out of her sleeve and wipe her eyes with it. "What I didn't count on was the way I started to feel about you. You were such a child, Andy, so helpless, such a—"
"You can skip that," he said, suddenly finding his voice.
"Sorry. It's not easy, you know, talking like this, as if I'd been the one in the wrong. There's no natural right to be a fool, and really, with your education, you had no excuse."
He looked away from her. Ferns, bird-of-paradise flowers, heliconia, fire ginger, all were growing nearby. For some reason, it suddenly felt important to call everything by its right name.
"I was shocked when I heard those bastards at Hoover Square had worked you over. I mean, I knew the whole story from the inside. They didn't need to get a single thing out of you, but sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I suppose it was pretty rough."
Again he said nothing. She frowned at the weighted silence, as if he'd accused her of something.
"Well, I'm truly sorry. But I never intended it to happen. After that I tried to look out for you, I really did. I got your sentence commuted, also those of the other boys. I saved your life, not that you'll ever thank me for it. When I had a chance to come to Tuamotu on official business, I jumped at it. There's a dirty job underway—ironically, it's called Operation Clean Sweep—but at least it gave me a chance to make sure you'd been released and see you one last time. I found you by that chip in your neck."
She dabbed her eyes again, and her voice changed from a somewhat strident major to a minor key. "You were kind of…oh, I don't know. My fling at passionate faith and youthful enthusiasm, all those things I'd never had, never really wanted to have in my own life. I'd never met anybody like you, ready to die for your beliefs, and now I never will again."
Andy had to ask her one question, even though he already knew the answer. "What about our child?"
"Well, of course there never was one. Getting pregnant would've been strictly against the regs. Anyway, I had my tubes cut long ago. You've never held a real job in your life, so you don't know the kind of things people have to do when they're fighting their way up in the world. Especially women—it's always harder for us. There's nothing like a pregnancy to take you out of the loop long enough for your enemies to knife you."
Finally he understood the fire in her eyes—it was the glowing coal of ambition. She got up and they started back.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Is she sensible?"
"Yes."
"That's good. You really need somebody to take care of you. You're looking great, by the way. You must be eating right. Well, here's my escort. Good-bye, Andy. Stay on your tropical island. You need a place away from the real world, while I—"
"While you go on serving Mahmud Alonzo Sol."
"Not really. He dropped dead twelve years ago. The fat old fool was partying with hookers and coke and brandy, and it finished him. There was talk about replacing him, but the technology's gotten so good there's really no reason to have a President any longer."
"Then who in hell's been running things?" he demanded, feeling new outrage because he'd not only shot an image, he'd shot an image of a dead man.
"You're not authorized to know. Good-bye, Andy. We won't see each other again. I don't think I could take it."
She and Sneak reentered the fern forest. A few minutes later a silvery gyro lifted, briefly backed up in midair, then spun, banked, and vanished. Andy watched
it go, and Gomez, though palpitating with eagerness to learn what had happened, had the good sense not to ask. That was why, in his own good time, Andy told him everything.
BACK AT HOME, Esperanza took one look at him and demanded to know if someone had died. He answered that in the secret valley, the ghost of a dead lover had appeared to him and confessed that she had once betrayed him.
The lie—maybe because it wasn't all a lie—worked remarkably well. It was exactly the sort of romantic fable Esperanza loved and she swallowed it whole, including the ghost. Ghosts were common in Hilo—she often saw her deceased Mama, and every night put a small plate of fruit outside, in case the old lady felt hungry and wanted a snack. Of course she told Susan about Andy's encounter, and Susan told everybody else, so that his ghost became a part of village lore.
Next day he was called to assist the local midwife, and went willingly, hoping that work would help him forget. The birth was a breech presentation that went on for hours, and left three adults and a sore, squalling, purplish baby boy all smeared with blood and smelling like the bottom of a swamp. He was going home when Hilo's best fisherman—a thick-muscled man named Joe Aiaiea—passed him, a beautiful big tuna slung over his shoulder. Joe said he was headed for the Trading Post, because his girlfriend wanted a nice mirror and he hoped the tuna might get it for her. Andy only grunted, returned home, had Esperanza pour a bucket of water over him by way of a shower, fell on their bed, and passed out.
By the time he woke from his siesta, Joe had returned and so had the fish. That night he and his girlfriend baked it in a pit with sea salt and peppers and limes and other good things, invited the village, and served the food on chipped dishes and fresh-cut banana leaves. At the feast Andy learned that no bargaining had taken place, because no guards had appeared at the Trading Post. Puzzled, Joe had crept to the edge of the jungle, risking the lasers to find out why.
"Dey breakin' up da camp," he said through a mouthful. "Alla guards runnin' round like crazy. No trade for a while, damn shit."
That news was enough to send Andy, Gomez, Esperanza, and Susan next morning on a long walk up the mountain, to heights where the trees thinned out and winds blew cold off the snowcap. He and Esperanza shared the work of carrying the baby, until they reached a vantage point where part of the mountain had crumbled, leaving a sheer cliff. On the verge they rested, gazing out over the whole eastern end of the island, forest canopy and coves and inlets, beaches of black and white sand, the foaming reef, the encircling sea.
And the prison—an alien intruder on its promontory, the only place on Tuamotu where all lines were straight and all angles precisely ninety degrees. Cons were shuffling like columns of ants through the grid of red streets toward the Sea Gate. Offshore lay a missile cruiser gently rocking on the waves, while an old rust-bucket of a merchant ship towered over the quay. Even at this distance, flaking white letters that said Pelican were visible on the bow. The big portside cargo doors stood wide and the prisoners inched down the dock into the dark, cavernous opening.
Did the authorities, Andy wondered, intend to jam all those hundreds of men into that one ship? He tried to recall what Connie had said about Operation Clean Sweep. A really dirty job—but why was closing the prison and shipping the cons someplace else a dirty job? It sounded complicated, a problem in logistics, but that was all. Or—the thought came to him suddenly—could this be the reason Connie had arranged his escape? Did she want him out of the prison before something bad happened?
His head began to hurt as if another migraine were coming on. Some part of him already knew the score and Gomez knew it, too, for his face settled into grim lines and he began to mutter curses under his breath. Esperanza looked merely baffled, for she had lived her whole life among decent people and found acts of great cruelty unimaginable. But Susan was as old as Gomez, and—Andy noticed for the first time—her blind eye, an opalescent globe like a milky opal, had the thin pale scar of a razor slash leading up to it. This lady had lived hard, which might be one reason why she and Gomez got along so well. She sat tensely watching the scene, one hand over her mouth, the other closed in a fist between her scrawny breasts. Like the men, she knew what was about to happen.
Sunset was stoking a tropical effusion of red and yellow and green and purple fire in the west when the merchant ship left the dock. But not under her own power—the Pelican was under tow by the cruiser. About a kilometer offshore, the hawser either broke or was released, leaving the rust bucket to wallow helplessly in the waves. Andy could imagine the men in the hold, thrown this way and that, puking with seasickness and terror, maybe raving and fighting in the claustrophobic darkness. By now even Esperanza understood what impended, for she turned her back to the sea and lowered her face until her nose touched Corazon's belly. The others went on staring, unable to look away.
The first missile struck the old ship at the starboard waterline, causing it to shudder, list, and spin slowly around. A few seconds passed before the sound of the blast reached the watchers. The second missile hit astern on the port side, leaving the Pelican mortally wounded and settling fast. No more firing followed—missiles cost money, and the job had been done.
Punctured on both sides, the ship filled more or less evenly, the only drama coming when a hatch cover blew off amidships. For an instant the heavy metal square hovered like a kite, sustained by a geyser shooting up from the flooded decks below. Then it turned sideways and fell like a guillotine blade into the ocean. Within minutes the ship followed, its rust-stained sterncastle vanishing last of all. A whirlpool formed, then broke up into random turbulence, waves foaming and dashing and parting. Gradually the Pacific erased the maelstrom, and with it the last traces of the men who had lived and suffered in the penal colony.
Esperanza bent over folded hands, muttering prayers in Tagalog, her childhood tongue. Susan wept from both her live eye and her dead one. Gomez sat rigid, trembling with fury. Andy's head stopped hurting, but his heart turned to something much harder and colder than mere ice. All the failures and humiliations and agonies of his life fused into a single need to find vengeance, to strike back, to kill. He pronounced sentence in the tones of a hanging judge.
"Somebody will pay for this," he said, and Gomez growled, " Si. But who?"
Well, obviously, the man whose name Andy wasn't authorized to know, the name only Connie could tell him. He and Gomez kicked the problem around but reached no conclusion. How were they to get hold of her? And how could they make her talk?
For some reason, the fisherman Joe Aiaiea had been tapped as Fate's messenger. Two days after the Pelican incident, Andy was shelling beans for supper when Joe entered his house, bearing in his arms the stick figure of a man. He'd carried his burden all the way from the reef, yet wasn't even breathing hard as he laid him gently on the plank bed. "'Nother con like you," said Joe. "Damn shit, but he in bad shape, him."
He explained that when the hatch cover blew off the Pelican, the geyser must have thrown the man into the sea and the sharks, busy with the other bodies, hadn't wanted him. So he drifted with the onshore current and got caught on the reef, where Joe had been casting his net and found him.
"Enda da story," he concluded, shrugged, and walked away, leaving Andy to stare aghast at the dying man, his fellow conspirator Karl, aka Friedberger. He must have been serving time in the same prison, only in another barracks. The two had spent more than a year close enough to yell a greeting, yet like corpses buried in adjoining tombs, had never seen one another.
Andy dripped cool water into his mouth, watched him try to swallow but fail, and shook his head. Esperanza used a clean rag to wipe his eyelids, inflamed and crusted with salt, and then his bristly face. When his cracked lips moved, Andy put his ear down to listen. It was hard to tell what Friedberger was trying to say, maybe, They killed them all. What Andy heard was kill them, and he promised, "I will."
An hour later the man was gone. Andy called Gomez to help, and they buried him in the village graveyard. The Kahuna deli
vered another of his incomprehensible sermons, and the townspeople sang "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." Afterward, Andy went home and slept and slept and slept, as if he could put off the demands of Destiny by remaining unconscious. But his sleep was uneasy, beset by restless dreams, and he woke suddenly, smelling a goat.
That seemed odd, for Tuamotu had plenty of feral pigs, but no goats he'd ever seen. He raised his head from the bed of boards, and there in the brown shadows stood Stink, with George and Joe holding his arms. "Dis guy say he know you," said George. "We was gonna break his neck."
"It's okay," said Andy. "Let me have a word with him."
Stink sat down on the ground, holding a small paper-wrapped bundle in his lap and wiping nervous sweat off his face. For the first time in their long acquaintance, Andy took the trouble to read his name tag—Fowler. So the guard had a real name, possibly even a real life. When he spoke he sounded shaken.
"What'sa matter with these guys? I know 'em, we trade together, I get 'em things, they get me things, but today they wanna kill me."
"They blame you for the Pelican. "
"Why blame me? I didn't have nothin' to do with it."
Andy nodded. Of course that was true. To calm Fowler down, he summoned his bedside manner and asked about his family. Fowler had been born in Wyoming but grew up more or less everywhere, for his father had been in the American Marshal Service and the family moved often. "Law enforcement," he said proudly, "it's in my blood."
That was why he'd entered the world government's Prison Service, which paid better than anything impoverished America could offer. He took pride in his job. Guards were role models, he said, teaching cons by discipline and example how to live upright, honorable lives. Andy found this astounding. Sneak and Stink as role models? But Fowler was serious, and anger darkened his face when he spoke about the massacre.
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