The blessing of a writer’s imagination was also a curse.
With only wild grass and no deep brush to hamper them, on terrain presenting no foot-twisting fissures, they were restrained from a flat-out run only by the darkness and the fear of falling off an unseen edge. They reached the top of the ridge in good time and paused and looked back to the south, high enough to see over the trees. For a long moment, gasping for breath, they stared at two sets of headlights in the distance, neither pair of beams currently on the move, both focused on what must have been the Hyundai Santa Fe Sport that they had abandoned.
“Who are they?” she wondered.
“Not just sheriff’s deputies. Someone bigger wants us.”
“Bigger who? Wants us for what?”
“Damn if I know, Tanny. But we’ve got to keep moving.”
Together they turned from the southern vista. North-northeast, beyond another ridge, the darkness relented to an eerie light, in fact three conjoined and distorted bubbles of light—one blue, one red, one yellow. The blue like a gas flame but constant in shade and brightness. The red not reminiscent of fire, but intense and darkish and steady like the ruby color of a lit glass cup on a votive-candle rack. A canted brim of canary yellow, as if the blue and red were borne on it like the twin crowns of a tipped hat.
For a moment, it seemed to Tanuja that she was being drawn through this extraordinary and fearsome night toward some ultimate mystery and revelation, as might be a mystified character in one of the stories in her preferred genre of magic realism. But then she realized from where the lights arose. She said, “It’s neon glow from Coogan’s Crossroads.”
The Crossroads was a restaurant, but less a restaurant than a tavern, and less a tavern than a tradition, the iconic gathering place to which the residents of the smattering of tiny communities in the remote east-county canyons were drawn for companionship, especially on weekend nights like this.
“Probably half a mile,” Sanjay said.
“We can get help there.”
“Maybe,” Sanjay said. “Maybe.”
“There’s sure to be at least a couple people we know.”
“We knew Lincoln Crossley—or thought we did.”
“The whole world can’t have been corrupted, Sanjay. Come on.”
With the threat of their pursuers no longer immediate, they descended the ridge, angling north-northeast toward the neon aurora, adopting a less reckless pace overland now that they had a place to go and the hope of help. The clouds were slowly unraveling. Through the ragged rents and thinning veils came a suggestion of moonlight. The only thing that could go wrong now—or so it seemed—was for one of them to stumble in the gloom and fall and break a leg. Sanjay held Tanuja’s left arm as together they proceeded with caution.
17
Maybe they kept the dead man between them because Jane still had second thoughts about involving this father of four in such a dangerous enterprise, and because Gilberto, for all his talk of semper fi and a debt owed to Nick, had doubts of his own.
Solemn and silent on the table, the decedent was a barrier to impetuous action, a reminder that they might die in the course of a kidnapping. Jane’s love for Nick was so intense that his death had not diminished it, and though Gilberto’s gratitude and admiration were less piercing emotions, Jane’s late husband served as a touchstone by which they both could test their commitment to what was good and true in a world of darkness and lies. But a touchstone had value only if they acted with reason, from a sense of duty, rather than because sentimentality overtook them. Jane knew—perhaps, so did Gilberto—that a touch, a hug, even a handshake in the early minutes of this reunion could twist honest sentiment into sentimentalism, inciting him to make a fateful decision on the wrong grounds.
“I appreciate you’d do this just for me,” she said, “just for Nick. But if they discover you helped me, they won’t care that all you did was drive. They’ll take you out. You need to understand what they’ve done, what they want to do, how much they have to lose.”
She looked at the dead man’s face, so eggshell white after his embalming, lips fixed as if they had never formed a smile, eyelids paper thin as though half worn away by all the distressing sights against which, in life, they’d been closed. Nick had been cremated. She preferred fire, too, if after her death a body could be found.
“These bastards, this conspiracy, cabal, whatever you want to call it—they have a computer model. It identifies people likely to steer civilization in the wrong direction, people in the arts, journalism, academia, science, politics, military….”
Gilberto frowned. “Wrong direction? How does a computer decide what’s the wrong direction for civilization?”
“It doesn’t. They decided when they designed the damn computer model. All it does is identify targets. They say, just erase enough carefully selected people, those likely to achieve positions to influence others with wrong ideas, then over time we’ll have Utopia. But it’s not about Utopia. It’s all about power. Absolute power.”
Gilberto had come back from war with an enduring sadness from which was born a gentleness and a desire to avoid all conflict. But anger enfolded the gentleness now, and his mouth was set tight when he said, “Just erase. Erase. Always the nice words for murder.”
“Joseph Stalin reportedly said, ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.’ You have a problem with that?”
“They’re gonna kill a million?”
“Eventually more. Two hundred ten thousand per generation, in the U.S. So eighty-four hundred a year.”
“They told you this?”
“One of them did. You’ll have to take my word for it. He’s not available to confirm it. I killed him. In self-defense.”
Although he’d been to war, Gilberto was shaken. War half a world away was different from battles in the streets of his own country. He put his hands on the steel table and leaned into it for support.
Jane said, “The people they kill are on something called the Hamlet list. Once they identify the targets, they go after them when they’re most vulnerable. When they’re away from home at a conference or traveling alone and can be drugged, sedated one way or another.”
“?‘Sedated’?”
“They don’t want it to look like murder. They sedate them and program them to commit suicide. Nick was on their Hamlet list. He cut his throat with his Marine Corps knife, his Ka-Bar, sliced so deep that he severed a carotid artery.”
Gilberto stared at her for a long moment, as if to determine what brand of crazy she had embraced. “Program them?”
“Life is sci-fi these days, Gilberto. And it’s not a feel-good family movie. You know about nanotechnology?”
“Microscopic things. Maybe machines so small they’re invisible. Something like that.”
“In this case, constructs made from a few molecules. Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—suspended in a serum, injected into the bloodstream. They’re brain-tropic. Once they pass through the capillary walls into brain tissue, they self-assemble into a larger network. A weblike control mechanism. Within hours, total control is effected. The subject doesn’t know anything’s happened. He seems himself. No one sees anything different about him. But days later, weeks, whenever, he gets a command to commit suicide…and obeys.”
“If I didn’t know you,” Gilberto said, “I’d think you were a candidate for a psych ward.”