“They had a case for payback,” says Zeb. “I’d fishfooded their guard, pilfered their boat, robinhooded one of their maidens in distress; but worse, I’d made them look sloppy. I could see them wanting to stage-manage a public example of me – string me up in chains from a bridge or similar, minus a leg and all my blood; turn me into a gristle display. But in order to capitalize on the publicity they’d have to reveal what I’d done to them, so they’d still lose face.
“Anyway I couldn’t see them tracking me as far as Bearlift, way up there in Whitehorse. It was very far from Rio, and most likely they thought it was covered with snow and igloos, if they ever thought about it at all. But more than that, I couldn’t see a tightass like Chuck working for those guys. I couldn’t even picture them in the same bar together. The Hacksaw types needed to be in a bar with you before they’d take you on, and Chuck didn’t compute. He had the wrong wardrobe. None of the Hacksaw guys would be caught dead hiring a guy with such dorky pants.”
The more he thought about Chuck – about the yucky-clean Chuckiness of Chuck – the more he figured that was the key. The smarmy friendliness, the fake white-toothed geniality … He had to be Church of PetrOleum. But no way the Rev and his buds, even hired professional buds, could’ve tracked Zeb through all his twists and turns. Just no fucking way.
Then he figured he was looking at the whole thing backwards. The Rev, and the whole Church, and their religious joined-at-the-hippers like the Known Fruits, and their political pals – they were all death on ecofreaks. Their ads featured stuff like a cute little blond girl next to some particularly repellent threatened species, such as the Surinam toad or the great white shark, with a slogan saying: This? or This? Implying that all cute little blond girls were in danger of having their throats slit so the Surinam toads might prosper.
By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God’s Holy Oil, which were one and the same. And Bearlift, despite its fuzzy reasoning and its clumsy delivery system, was in a geographical area where more oil might well be discovered, or through which it might well be piped, with the usual malfunctions, spills, and coverups.
So naturally the Rev and his circle would’ve tried to infiltrate Bearlift. Which was none too choosy about who it let in. Chuck must’ve been a true PetrOleum believer, sent there to keep an eye on the furfuckers and report on the evils they were concocting. He wouldn’t have been looking for Zeb in particular, though when he stumbled across him he would’ve recognized him. He’d been close to the Rev, then: family picture sharing. The ungrateful son. But you … The son I wish I’d had. Sigh. Wistful smile. Hand on shoulder. Gruff, manly pat-pat. Like that.
The rest would have followed: the snitch report by Chuck, the instructions from the Rev, the obtaining of the knockout needle, the failed attempt in the ’thopter. The flaming wreckage.
Which made Zeb feel angry all over again.
He put on all his clothes once more and sallied forth to send another batch of messages. This time he used the other net café in town, PrestoThumbs, a seedier place in a mini-mall. It was right next to a haptic-feedback remote-sex emporium called The Real Feel: “The Real Feel, The Real Deal! Keep It Safe! Thrills, Spills, No Microbes!” But he resisted nostalgia and walked past The Real Feel and logged on at Thumbs.
First he sent a message to the ranking Elder at the Church of PetrOleum, attaching the Rev’s embezzlement data and informing him that the actual cash would be found not in the Canary Islands Grand Cayman bank account, where it actually was, but in the form of stocks, in a metal box buried under Trudy’s rock garden. He advised the Elder to take not only six men with shovels but also a team of security minions armed with tasers, as the Rev was armed and could be dangerous. He signed the message “Argus.” The hundred-eyed giant from Greek mythology, that was him: there were pictures of the guy on the same site that hosted The Birth of Venus. Not that having a hundred eyes made you attractive from an aesthetic point of view. There was a goddess on there with a hundred tits, yet another illustration of the fact that more is not always better.