by Bart Kosko
“The people of the Republic of Azerbaijan want to know.”
“Fine. Give me my drink.”
Davis reached for the vodka and then slammed the heel of his right hand on the back of the gangster’s neck. At the same time Davis grabbed the young man’s oiled black rat tail of hair and gently lowered his face to the cedar table. The Sturgeon would have a concussion from the blow but he would live.
Few failed attempts at blackmail ended this well. Davis would have liked to have killed the young man but after all it was his country and his oil.
Joel Davis stood and smiled at one of the nude belly dancers and walked to the door. No one seemed to notice the young gangster passed out in the back of the club. Davis tipped the fat Algerian at the door when the man gave him back his black windbreaker. Davis put it on and felt through the pocket to his cotton pants. The sealed hologram cartridge was still in his pants pocket.
His life would not be safe until he gave the small gray tube to his courier and then left Kirovabad for Baku and on to Cyprus and on back to Tel Aviv. Now the Azer gangster had forced him to abort his rendezvous. He would have to drive close to the border of Armenia and hide the car and then cross on foot in the night. His monitor at AMAN or what he called Agaf Modi’in would have an agent there to pick him up and fly him to Cyprus. Or so he had to bet.
Davis felt them when he hit the cool night air.
He did not see them but his instincts made his stomach tighten and his nostrils flare. The feeling always made him think of his first mission in Damascus. He and his team had gotten out all right but it had been close. There was the guilt of killing a man he had never met and the fear that at any moment he might have to answer for it.
Joel Davis walked faster to the dirt parking lot and hoped they did not know which small Honda was his. Something moved to his right and his left but moved faster than he could see.
The last thing he saw was a flash of blue lightning from one of the two tasers. Then came the long spasms of pain that shot through all his muscles and much of his central nervous system.
He never knew the darkness when it came.
Chapter 8
Searchlight
Nevada
John Grant’s Jeep slowed to 40 miles per hour as he drove through the small Nevada town of Searchlight. He had 10 more miles to go on Highway 95 before he crossed into Southern California.
John always liked this stretch through the gray and purple Castle Mountains and the stark stands of green yucca and Joshua trees and greasewood shrubs. He looked away from the WNN windows on the windshield and out to the Mojave. He often grew tired of the man-made world of bits and longed for the real world of atoms.
The desert was the real world.
The desert was free and open and harsh and full of its own rewards for the taking. Most people could not wait to drive through it or fly over it and get back to a city. John liked the thought of the desert as much as he liked to look at it from his house trailer sunken into the hard red and brown gravel. And there still lay beneath it all that gold and silver slowly working its way up through the crust from the magma. Who would have thought gold and silver would outlast oil?
Searchlight made him think of gold and the hard men who had long ago tried to bring it out of the ground. John opened his window to let some of the hot dry air shoot in the Jeep. He wanted to feel some of the heat that they had had to live with most of the year. Jism knew not to disturb him at such moments. Jism tried to match John’s mood by softly playing a new version of Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Jism also gave the windshield a soft but dark green tint to match the D-minor texture.
John looked out the other window and saw once again the twisted remains of a gold mine from the early 1900s. The brown rotting timbers and its old pulley system still stood on a desert hill across from the new Exxon station in Searchlight.
Someday he had to go down that mine shaft.
A young man who worked the gas pumps at the station and who spit green mint juice on the pavement had once told him that the old miner who dug the mine shaft went down one day and never came up. John had talked to the young man more than once as he filled up the tank of his Jeep. He used to kid John about buying the mine claim. The young man said no one had ever gone in after the old man. The cops still tried to keep kids from playing near the mine shaft.
The small gold vein had run out but the old man would not quit. John tried to picture the old man at work. The old man had thought he might strike a new vein each time he swung his pick or blasted out a few more cubic feet of granite streaked with white quartz. He had sunk the main shaft and chipped out the side shafts by himself. He had worked for years in the desert just as he pleased. The old man had never paid federal taxes or worn pain patches on his joints or male-hormone patches on his shaved scrotum.
John was not sure if the old man had ever married and he wanted to know. He faced the prospect of marriage himself. The young man at the Exxon station said no one could ever locate any of the old man’s next of kin. So John had to infer the rest.
John did not know what the old man looked like besides being thin and bent and having white hair and white beard stubble. He could never picture the old man’s face. But John knew that the old man had never watched the yield on a 10-year bond rise or fall on a car windshield’s heads-up display or brushed his teeth with antiplaque enzymes or even felt the cool false breeze of an air conditioner.
John also knew something else about the old man. The old man had been a hundred times tougher on his worst day than John Grant was on his best. And the old man had been a lot freer. He just chose to spend that freedom chipping out a gold mine on a claim he had staked in the Nevada desert. Today the state would likely not even sell him the permit.
John wanted to meet such a man but did not believe they still lived. The best John could do would be to meet a dead one. That was why he wanted to work out a way to climb down the gold mine. Maybe Richard would help him set up the ropes and run a winch that they could rent from the Exxon station. John would climb down the main shaft with a good flashlight and carry a .44 Magnum with bird shot in it to shoot any rattlesnakes or rats.
He would find the old man’s bones and try to figure out how the old man had died. What had it been like at the end when the old man knew he had truly dug his own grave? Did a man like that have the courage to take it straight at the end or did he fall back on a cartoon? John would go down and think it through one more time and then give the bones a proper burial. A man with those balls deserved at least that.
But the young man who chewed crushed spearmint and spit green juice had once said something that seemed to ruin John’s plans. He said gangsters and bootleggers used to shoot people in Las Vegas or Los Angeles and then drive out to the desert and throw them down old gold mines and silver mines. He said an old-timer had told him that that was why no one ever went back down the old man’s mine. There were too many rotted corpses at the bottom of it.
John still did not know if he believed that. He did not like even the thought of sorting gangster bones from the old man’s bones. He wanted to find the old man’s white skeleton still holding a pick stuck in the rock wall.
John checked the gas gauge to make sure the tank was three fourths full. He thought about turning back to stop at the Exxon station. His mouth was still dry despite the bottled water. He could stop and buy one of those sour red Tootsie Pops made of fake sugar and fake raspberry flavor. So much of the junk food in the West was fake these days and yet his mouth watered when he thought of it.
John pulled out a gingersnap instead and chewed on it. He knew he did not want to stop for the sour candy. He just wanted to find the young man who spit green mint juice and ask him some more questions about the gold mine. But there was no time for that.
The Jeep picked up speed as it passed the retirement parks of Searchlight.
John thought of the parks as high-tech death camps for seniors. He tried not to think of the old folks and thei
r nearby green desert golf courses that drank their fill from the Colorado River. He never wanted to be old like the boomers. Most were grandparents now but they still played their love songs from the 1960s on their tennis courts and in their nursing homes.
The baby boomers had had it all and then had left their credit-card bills to John’s generation. They had grown the largest state in history and got used to its rate of growth. First the boomers had bankrupted the federal government. Then when they retired they drained their mutual funds in a panic and sank the U.S. stock market. John and his friends disagreed on many things but they all despised the old boomers. The trouble was that the old boomers still held most of the power. They had organized well and now they shared the common goal of dying well.
The boomer parks were part of the price of driving on old Highway 95. Interstate 15 would get him to Los Angeles faster than Highway 95 would but he did not like the border crossing on I-15. The Southern California desert patrol there would watch his approach the whole way in. Their laws made it clear that driving there was a “privilege” and not a right. There was no way to escape the wireless eyes of the state. Driving through Southern California just put him in fuller view.
A window panel flashed red with the image of a black old-fashioned phone. The Bruckner symphony died down.
“Jism. Who is it? Eytan?”
No. It is your fiancée.
“Where the hell is Eytan? I sure hope he made it through that bombing. We may be wiped out if he didn’t. That’s the last thing I need to tell Denise. All right. Put the Dragon Empress through.”
Half the windshield turned to high resolution voxels or 3-D picture elements. Denise Cheng appeared in full view. She smiled much the same smile that her twin Richard Cheng had smiled at John a few minutes before. She wore her long black hair straight with long bangs on her forehead. The bangs and microsurgery made her nose look much thinner than Richard’s.
The Cheng twins had science in their nature as well as in their nurture. Their parents had met as liberated multimedia engineers at Berkeley. They had kept all but the sex chromosomes the same in the twins. That had put an end to their family dispute over the old Chinese desire for sons.
John liked to look at her face. Its resemblance to Richard’s face surprised him when he had not seen her for a few days. Sometimes it disturbed him. Still John loved her smile and had to answer hers with his.
But he hated that he had taken her money.
“Guess what?” Denise said.
“I hope it’s good news. The Saudis just bombed us.”
“I know. This is much more important.”
“Really?”
“Uh-hum. Your son just started kicking again.”
“Of course. He’s like his father and wants out of his cage. Right now I can’t even get out of this moving coffin. Let me see him.”
Denise twisted back and around on her yellow-flower divan and looked behind her at the egg shelf on the black wall.
A new window opened on John’s windshield. It showed the large clear birthing egg. The egg had a fine clear skin of pseudodiamond. The fluid inside was a mix of dark red blood and yellow nutrient sap. Denise had had the egg custom-made. She and John had both put blood samples into it to seed the fluid. That kept their consciences clear and kept her body in shape.
The pink fetus kicked against the side of the bloody egg and turned itself slightly.
“You’re right,” John said. “That is more important. Thanks.”
John felt the gene thrill of knowing the child was his and that Denise was as good a woman as he would ever find and that he loved her as much as he would ever love any person or thing. But it still scared him now as it scared him at night in his dreams. The child would constrain what freedom he had and freedom was what he fought for so hard. John also feared that money had been part of why he had agreed to have a child.
It was too damn bad that the bond market had wiped him out and his first partner.
Now he had mixed his genes with hers and had taken her money. The two events were less than a year apart. John kept asking himself whether it was chance or design. He was not sure. But he was sure that he who has a partner has a master.
Genes and money.
Jism would see a causal connection between the two events but he never said so and John did not ask him. He had trained Jism not to poke him where it hurt. Now the sharp jolt of gene fear made him want to wipe the screen clean and scramble his comm ports. It made him want to head off the road through the desert to some new place he had never been. There were thousands of canyons out there that he would never explore or camp in.
Then the gene fear made him think of how the old man would just shake his head and go back to chipping away at his gold mine.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“We still don’t know if the Arab missiles hit our lab in the hydroplant. We may be out of business.”
“You care too much about money.”
“It’s a great way to keep score.”
“Spoken like a true Rockefeller.”
“Just give me time,” John said.
He grinned and held up the green porky ball. Denise rolled her eyes.
“When will you get here?” she said.
“As soon as I go over the damage assessment with Richard. I have to be on-site for most of it.”
“You’re not coming by here first?”
“Denise. Did you see what happened in Eilat?”
“Don’t you want to come fuck your financier?”
“Jesus. Where do you get that language?”
“How about telling me you love me?”
“You know that. Okay. I should be at Cajon Pass in less than three hours if all goes well.”
“What would you like to eat when you get here?”
“Apple butter smeared over your nipples.”
The windshield blinked red in priority interrupt.
John. It’s Eytan.
“Denise. I’m sorry. Have to take this. Jism. Put him through.”
John winked at Denise but she frowned and signed off. He pushed the dashboard to start the transmission but it did not go through.
“What’s wrong?” John said.
We are synching random protocols. It will take a few more seconds.
“Christ. Fiancée and financier. Jism. Never take money from a friend or from his sister. Make a note of it.”
I shall. Synch complete.
The chiseled face of Major Eytan Baum with its old acne pockmarks and endless slight smile looked at John. Baum had captured a tank division in the two-day ground and smart war with Jordan and Iraq. He now ran the group on molecular engineering at two Tel Aviv state labs and ran the smart-water test site at the Eilat desalination plant.
John’s contract with the Israelis was part of the licensing agreement. It gave John and Richard a lot of free rein but they had to clear all changes with Eytan. John also had to report to him once a week.
“Did you get hit?” John said.
“Shalom to you too. Confirm triple spread-spectrum mode.”
“Okay. It’s your shekel.”
John leaned forward and typed a random code into the dashboard. His contract said that he could not share the code with any person or intelligent agent. But he had told Jism the code for backup and had sworn him to secrecy.
The full windshield screen fluttered in static and white noise. Then the white random dots turned blue and red and dissolved back into Baum’s round face. The consulting meter ran in red numerals at the base of the screen. The Israeli government had to pay John for this call even though John had called Eytan first.
“Confirmed,” John said. “Do you want Richard to join us?”
“No. He has no need to know.”
“Eytan. He’s my partner. You license my patent and our netware. I’d say that gives him a need to know.”
“Not for this. As you said you hold the patent and he doesn’t.”
“You wer
e hit that hard?”
“There was damage to the main water line and of course the mirror banks. Much of our group is still operative. No scuba diving for a while. But that’s not the reason.”
“What is?”
“First things first.”
“No,” John said. “Back up. What do you mean by ‘much of our group’? Is Alon okay?”
“Alon didn’t make it.”
“You mean he’s dead? Alon?”
“John. This is not the time.”
“Hold on. I don’t want to sound cold-blooded. But if the bombs killed Alon, then what happened to the Weizmann laser?”
“Don’t worry. We’re getting a new one from Ben-Gurion.”
“Jesus. We’re wiped out.”
“Nonsense. We’ll mourn later. Now let me get to my next point. Ready? The demo next week is canceled.”
“What? I just left the Hoover Dam a half hour ago. Ramachandra said it was all set when I left.”
“It was. I just told him to move it up to Thursday.”
“Thanks. That gives us less than two days. I still have to drive to L.A. to help Richard tune the damn thing. That’s not enough time.”
“John. It’s too bad you were never in my squad. You might have even made it.”
“Fuck you too.”
“Fact is we have no choice. The good news is our people got your Department of Energy to agree to a five-year contract at Hoover. So congratulations. The trade-off is we have to let three Texas oil partnerships buy in. The demo on Thursday is for the Texas execs. They set the schedule. And frankly after the bombing we need to show your government that we can still deliver. Our people won’t sleep until then. Be there.”
“We’ll be there.”
“Good. And don’t worry about the smart strike. It was political.”
“That’s why I worry about it. Eytan. Just what do you do in the government anyway?”
“Wish I knew. Now listen. Here is where you have a need to know. Why don’t you put down the cookies for a minute until we’re through. Are you ready? Good. We have evidence that your government is watching you.”