Two uniformed deputies got out of the cruiser and climbed the steps to the porch, stood there for a moment surveying the parking lot, and then went inside.
“We’re so chodu if we stay here,” Tanuja said just as Sanjay said, “They don’t find us in there, they’ll check these vehicles.”
One at a time, they slipped over the tailgate and out of the landscaper’s truck.
They expected to be on foot again, a dismal prospect with miles between them and any pocket of civilization in which they might be able to hide and buy time to think. Plus they would be unarmed at night in coyote country, just when those prairie wolves might venture forth, sharp-toothed and merciless, in the wake of the rain.
Then a crackle of police-band radio static drew their attention to the cruiser and alerted them that its engine was idling.
“We can’t,” Sanjay said.
Tanuja said, “In like three minutes they’ll know we’re not in Coogan’s.”
She hurried to the black-and-white, and Sanjay followed.
The window in the driver’s door had been rolled down. The voice of a dispatcher sought assistance on an 11-80 in Silverado Canyon, whatever an 11-80 might be.
Tanuja got behind the wheel and popped the emergency brake as Sanjay slid into the other front seat. She reversed away from the tavern.
19
The unforgiving light in the windowless basement room, the air as cool as that in a meat locker, the chemical smell, the underlying odor best left unanalyzed, the funeral director’s voice soft with respect and sympathy, and the settled sorrow in his eyes…
He repeated what she’d told him regarding anyone injected with a nanotech control mechanism. “?‘No way out except death’?”
By turning her words into a question, he was asking not for her to confirm the fate of those injected, but for her assurance that she truly believed, even in the face of her massed enemies and the unprecedented threat she had described, that there was a future for her, some way out of this other than death. If her sole hope was to save the life of her child at the cost of her own, if her truest analysis of the situation convinced her that she could bring down the conspirators only with a mortal sacrifice, she was not like the Marines with whom he had gone into battle. They had fought for their country and no less for one another, but they also had gone into every fight with the conviction that survival was likely.
As the wife of a Marine, Jane understood Gilberto’s concern. A warrior couldn’t be without fear, for the fearless were often also reckless, putting the mission at risk. However, neither should anyone enter combat with the expectation of certain death, because no fighter fought well in such a state of diminished spirit.
“I need to live for Travis,” she said. “I will live for the pleasure of seeing these arrogant creeps ruined, their power ripped from them, imprisoned for life, although I’d much rather see them lined up against a wall and shot. I’m not fearless or nihilistic. I’ll make mistakes. But I won’t throw my life away—or yours.”
“Sorry to make you say it.”
“I would have done the same if I were you.”
“So who’s this Department of Justice guy we’re kidnapping?”
“Name’s Booth Hendrickson.” She zippered open her tote bag and took from it a manila envelope, which she passed to Gilberto. “Study this photo till you’re sure you’ll recognize him, then destroy it.”
“When do you need me for the job?”
“Tomorrow at ten-thirty in the morning, you’ll pick him up at the private-aircraft terminal at Orange County airport.”
As if the dead man’s pallor were caused by what he heard being discussed, eyes closed as though in prayer, he lay between them like some priest without vestments, distressed and rendered supine by the weight of the crimes that they were confessing.
“Our hearse can’t pass for a limousine,” Gilberto said.
“I’ll have a limo for you. His brother owns a limousine company in addition to a lot of other things. He’ll feel safe getting in one of his brother’s limos, with one of his brother’s drivers.”
She talked him through how it would be done, then took from the tote a leather shoulder rig with a weapon in the holster, a polymer-frame Heckler & Koch .45 Compact like the one she carried.
“I don’t see any way you’ll need a gun,” she said. “But this is the devil’s world, and he never rests. It has a nine-round magazine with semi-staggered ammo stacks. Allows for a nice grip.”
Instead of accepting it, he said, “I have a gun of my own. I like the feel of it. I know its quirks.”
“But it might be traced back to you. This one has no history. Take it. Use it if you have to.”
She put the rig and pistol on the shrouded chest of the dead man. From the tote she took a spare magazine and a sound suppressor for the Heckler. She also put those on the corpse and then added a disposable phone. “You’ll need a burner phone during the operation. The number for my burner is taped to the back of yours.”
Gilberto said, “Even if you win some kind of safety for you and Travis…even then you lose.”
“Maybe.”
“Because you can’t put the nano genie back in the bottle.”
“No one could uninvent the atomic bomb, either. But here we still are.”
“At least for today.”
“None of us ever has more than this moment. Tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday. The best I can do for my boy is give him enough todays that he can make a past for himself that will have had some meaning in it.”
She zippered shut the tote bag. She came around the mortician’s table and put one hand on the back of Gilberto’s neck and pulled his face to hers until their foreheads touched. They stood that way in silence for a long moment. Then she kissed his cheek and left the room and left the building and went into the night, which always held the promise of being the last night of the world.
20
Tanuja was driving fast and well, not perturbed by her lack of familiarity with the vehicle. But the events of the evening were so extraordinary, whipsawing her emotions so violently, she felt almost as though reality was plastic and being remade around her, as easily as she might reimagine it in fiction, the land on both sides of the police car like a black and alien sea, the wild rolling hills not hills at all, but the humped backs of Devonian beasts swimming as they swam four hundred million years earlier.
Because he had written a few stories featuring police, Sanjay knew where to find the controls for the siren and the lightbar. Tanuja used them only in the no-passing zones, when she needed to encourage slower traffic to pull off the road and let her pass.
They dared not use the car for long, and Tanuja wanted to get as deep into the communities of west county as possible. The more populous the territory, the more options they would have, although at the moment she couldn’t grasp what one of those options might be.
“We’ve gotta hole up tonight, think this through,” Sanjay said.
“Hole up where, with whom?”
“Not friends. We don’t know what we might bring down on them.”
“Anyway,” she said, “who do we trust? We don’t even know why.”
After a silence, Sanjay said, “Stop at the first Wells Fargo ATM. All I have is like a hundred eighty bucks. You?”
“Not a dime.”
“They tracked our car’s GPS. So maybe they’ll also know when I use a credit card for a motel room.”
“Is that possible? Tracking credit-card use in real time?”
“I don’t know what’s possible anymore, Tanny. It seems like any damn thing is possible. So we need as much cash as we can get.”