“?‘Pala’? I never heard of Pala.”
“It’s a little pissant town. But they have one of the early California missions there, and it’s been restored. It’s considered worth surveilling the intersection there to have after-the-fact evidence in case of terrorism. I don’t know why.”
“All the missions are of historic value,” Jergen says.
“Petrified dinosaur dung is of historic value, but we don’t keep a camera on every pile of it.”
Jergen is appalled, but it’s not the first time a statement by Dubose has appalled him. “Well, ISIS and all those off-with-your-head types love to destroy historic buildings and erase the past.”
“What matters to me is the now,” Dubose opines. “I live in the now. Anyway, check out those Pala cameras. They’ll be in the NSA archives, too. See if the Rover went by there within maybe half an hour of when it should have turned off S13.”
Jergen needs ten minutes to retrieve an image of the Land Rover passing the junction of State Highway 76 and County Highway S16. This kind of catch always thrills him. It’s like magic. “Got him!” he declares.
“Of course you do,” says Dubose, again ignoring Jergen’s laptop to focus on what he’s doing on his own. “Now, about fourteen miles past Pala, County Highway 6 turns north off Highway 76 to the even tinier pissant town of Palomar Mountain. Two low-profile cameras at the junction. Because of Palomar Observatory. Again, don’t ask me why.”
“They have the two-hundred-inch Hale telescope,” Jergen says. “It’s an important national asset. They study the stars, the universe.”
“The stars haven’t changed in, like, several million centuries. Says here Palomar opened in the 1930s. If they need so many years to study what never changes, then some of these guys are sitting around up there smoking weed and jerking off.”
Sometimes it seems as if perhaps Dubose says things he doesn’t really believe, just to see if he can get Jergen to pop a cork. But Jergen tries his best not to respond in a way that will give the hillbilly hulk satisfaction.
Without responding, he seeks out the archived video from the cameras at the highway junction south of Palomar.
21
The cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink were a few years old but still effective. While Jessie and Travis set about giving the kitchen a preliminary scrub, Gavin went through the connecting door into the single-stall garage and turned on the light.
Cornell had abandoned his Honda four years earlier, when he moved into his secret residence to read through Apocageddon. Since then, he’d come out only once a week to get his mail; when Gavin visited, Cornell gave him the paid bills to post. Cornell no longer drove anywhere. In spite of his millions, he had purchased the car used; though twelve years old, its odometer registered only 47,566 miles. According to Cornell, he’d driven less than two thousand of those, traveling in and out of Borrego Springs to shop at Center Market and Desert Pantry during the construction of his end-of-the-world bunker. He didn’t like to drive. He felt the speed at which an automobile could travel was deeply unnatural.
On his once-a-month visits, Gavin had looked after the Honda, keeping it in good running order, against the day when his cousin might decide that society wasn’t going to collapse after all. Ever since he and Jessie had taken in Travis, he’d had another reason to take care of the sedan: so they could use it in a pinch.
After he had driven the Honda out of the garage and parked it beside the house, the fullest recognition of what had happened hit him. He needed to sit for a while in the yard, on the stump of an Indian laurel that had been cut down ages ago, in the shade of the palm trees planted later. If their comfortable life wasn’t gone forever, it was gone for at least as long as Jane’s crusade lasted and perhaps longer. If she failed, their lives would not only be less comfortable, but would unspool day after day in an atmosphere of tension, even dread.
Of course, if Jane failed, not just he and Jessie, but most of the country—in time, most of the world—would fall into a darkness without exit. Three months earlier, he would not have found credible the notion of a future in which an elite class with unprecedented power ruled a fearful population, some enslaved by nanoimplants, others intimidated into obedience by the millions who were thus programmed. Those millions could in minutes be transformed from your friendly neighbors into ruthless killers who would slaughter anyone identified as a rebel, including their own parents, even their own children. Now he was finding it difficult to believe that such a future would not happen. By comparison, an army of the walking dead would be a feeble force.
He and Jessie had believed enough in the need to defend freedom that they’d given years of their lives—and Jessie her legs—to the fight. They were grateful for each other, for their life after war. To have it upended now seemed almost too much to endure. Not that they would fail to endure it. They were good at enduring; adversity was the touchstone by which they proved their value to themselves.
He knew what Jessie would say, because she had said it before: Nobody ever promised me that life would be a party; as long as I have you to laugh with and hope with, nothing can defeat me.
He felt the same way.
Nevertheless, when he got up from the tree stump, he turned in a circle, surveying the day, and he knew that everything that seemed so solid and eternal was in fact fragile. The bleached-denim blue of the desert sky, the queen palms with their feathery pendent fronds, the great flatness of desert soon to be flowering all the way to the distant mountains: All of it might seem mundane, but it was, in truth, astonishing if you took the time to think about it, precious beyond any price, every place in the world a fantastic dream that had been given substance. But you could wake from it when you woke into death—or now into a life of nanoimplant slavery.
He pulled the Land Rover into the garage and closed the big tilt-up door. In a day or two, he would put together a simple spray booth, from a little lumber and a lot of plastic sheeting, and paint the Rover blue.
Now, he went back into the house to shave his head.
22
Although Carter Jergen is keen to get Travis Hawk and use the boy to bring the mother to her knees, he almost wishes that Dubose is proved wrong, that the cameras at the turnoff to the Palomar Observatory will not reveal the Land Rover. If the Washingtons have somehow pulled off a disappearing act between Pala and Palomar, what a pleasure it will be to see the West Virginia yeti gape-mouthed and bewildered. But, no, there it is, the target vehicle, motoring past Palomar.
“About twelve miles farther,” Dubose pontificates, “Highway 76 terminates in Highway 79. From there, maybe they went south on 79. There are two low-profile cameras at Santa Ysabel, related to the mission there, the Santa Ysabel Asistencia. Check it out.”
“You could’ve been checking it out while I was reviewing the Palomar video,” Jergen observes in as neutral a tone of voice as he can manage.
“I’m thinking. I’m looking at the maps and thinking. Someone has to do the thinking,” Dubose says.
After a while, Jergen has a report to make. “They should have passed through Santa Ysabel maybe half an hour after Palomar. I’ve fast-forwarded through ninety minutes of video. No Land Rover. Have you been thinking? We need more thinking.”
“I never stop thinking,” Dubose says. “I wish we had a few more of these stupid missions in the area, but we don’t. That’s okay. I’m on it. Stand by.”
“Stand by?”
“I’ve got an idea shaping up,” Dubose says.
The big man sits before his laptop, shoulders straight, head raised, chin jutting forward, his expression almost a parody of what a man might look like when he is full of virtuous purpose. Damn if it doesn’t seem as if he’s trying to look like Dudley Do-Right.
23