Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (25 page)

Both Monroe and Larrison were silent and still now as Jed spoke with more passion and genuine fear than he had for a long time.

‘When you’ve done your homework there,’ Culver said in conclusion, ‘you get down to General Musso’s and find out how and why Blackstone entered an arrangement with a company owned by Ahmet Ozal, one week before Ozal took ship for the new world, there to make an enormous and fatal pain in the ass of himself.’

‘It sounds like I’m going to have to get right up next to Blackstone,’ she said. ‘Why would he let me do that?’

Jed dismissed the question with a snort.

‘Mad Jack’s jumping around with a red-hot poker up his ass at the moment,’ he said. ‘Has been for months. The poker got jammed up there thanks to Roberto Morales.’

He could see he’d surprised her for the first time.

‘Yeah, I know. I don’t really understand it either, but Blackstone is convinced Roberto looks towards his little patch of heaven down Texas way with covetous eyes. He’s been trying to convince the President to pull forces out of the Pacific and put them in the Caribbean. That’s your way in. You’re going down as my personal envoy to give the governor a chance to make his case. Off the record. We keep everything informal. That’s how I do my best work and Blackstone knows it. He’ll give you an audience. Access. You use that as you see fit.’

‘What about Musso?’ asked Monroe. ‘He was the guy at Guantanamo, wasn’t he? Is he in the loop on this?’

Wales Larrison answered the question. ‘He is. It’s not my preference, but Mister Culver has his reasons and I can live with them.’

‘Tusk Musso’s a patriot,’ said Jed. ‘And he worked a goddamn
miracle
down at Gitmo. But the Corps, they dropped him like a turd at a tea party because he ran up the white flag. I got him that job in Temple, running the Federal Centre there, because it’s not all that different from what he had to do in Cuba, dealing with a hostile power hunkered down just outside his fenceline. The President didn’t need much convincing, I might add. He thought Musso did a great job too. Bottom line – you can trust Musso, he knows the score. But only him, okay? He won’t be your overwatch authority, but you can go to him if you need to.’

‘And you’re cool with this, Wales?’ asked Agent Monroe. The familiarity between them wasn’t lost on Jed. He was very much the outsider here. That made him vulnerable. He could use these people, but he couldn’t trust them.

The deputy director didn’t look happy, but he shrugged.

‘We don’t have the luxury of time with this, Caitlin,’ he said. ‘You spent years building your case file on Baumer, but —’

‘But we don’t have years,’ Jed put in. ‘We don’t have months or even weeks. Every day that Mad Jack sits down there getting stronger is an affront to the Republic and a hazard to its future. I think he fucked us in New York. And I intend to fuck him back, severely and without consent. With your help, Agent Monroe.’

‘It will be my pleasure.’ Caitlin smiled. It was a thin smile, which only hardened her face.

She should have fangs
, he thought.

‘Your pleasure will be finding shit out and doing nothing about it,’ Culver emphasised. ‘Do you understand? You will bring any evidence you discover to me. And I will ensure that Mad Jack Blackstone pays with his life for this treason. But
you
won’t be taking that life. It is owed to the American people. Is that clear?’

Caitlin Monroe nodded. Slowly. Once.

Jed leaned back. Spent. He had rolled the dice on the largest bet he’d ever made in his life. Indeed, he may well have just bet his life on the outcome.

Traffic on Interstate 35 picked up as they approached the Oklahoma–Texas border, their small convoy augmented by another three trucks they’d picked up in Wellington. The snow thinned out too, revealing a layer of grey-brown weeds beneath the icy slush. Sofia had long ago lost interest in gawking at the vehicle wrecks strung along the side of the highway and the charred ruins of towns that had burned down to war-torn streetscapes. She focused her thoughts instead on Fort Hood.

Snuggled up in the SpongeBob blanket, warm inside the surprisingly comfortable steel cocoon of
Mary Lou
’s cabin, she dozed on and off, roused only by the grinding of gears or a particularly nasty bump. The convoy wasn’t able to risk going much faster than thirty-five miles an hour on some stretches due to ice, snow and giant potholes.

Cindy French had passed the early leg of the journey talking about her family in a bit more detail. The interior of the cab was plastered with pictures of her ‘grandbabies’. Dozens of images, following the lives of five little tykes from baby blankets to sleep-outs in the back yard. And then, of course, the pictoral history stopped. From time to time, Sofia caught the trucker looking at one of them, tearing up before wiping her eyes and waving her hands to drive the sadness away. The teenager wondered if she herself might one day feel something other than a cold background rage.

Cindy had the truck’s short-wave tuned to a station playing endless loops of old comedy, all from comedians who, like her family, had not survived the Wave. It was a uniquely American type of humour, which often lay well beyond Sofia’s comprehension. Jokes about bodily functions, jokes about private sexual things, and so many jokes about the insecurities of the comedians themselves. Some were funny, but most were just embarrassing. She shuddered to think what the nuns would’ve thought of them.

She asked Cindy once, as they drove past the wreckage of a downed passenger jet, whether they could pick up any news stations.

‘We’ve got the real world all around us right now, kid,’ the truckie replied, chewing on a drinking straw. ‘Whenever I listen to the news, all I hear is “Blah, blah, blah.” Ever watched
Charlie Brown
, the cartoon?’

‘Yes,’ said Sofia. She’d seen a video of the cartoon dog Snoopy in the refugee camp in Sydney. It was funnier than the comedians she was forced to listen to in Cindy’s truck, that was for sure.

‘And ever noticed how all the adults sound muffled, like “Wah-wah-wah”? Well, that’s what the news is like for me. Can’t stand it. Wah-wah-wah.’

Okay. No news
, Sofia thought. A pity. She was hoping to start building up her knowledge of life in Texas under Blackstone, especially within the limits of Fort Hood. She knew from listening to the news in Kansas City that you couldn’t always trust the radio to tell you the truth about things. Or about the details, anyway, and the meaning behind those details. But even the broad outlines could be useful to know.

She craned her neck to follow the flight path of a pair of gunships that hammered overhead as afternoon settled across the bleak Oklahoma landscape. They surprised her, completely unexpected. Cindy hit her horn three times, snapped off the short-wave and turned on her CB. ‘Ardmore, coming up. We stopping?’

‘
Reckon so
,’ Dave said. ‘
Time to stretch the legs, get a late lunch, and the like.
’

They didn’t go into Ardmore proper, though, the ruins of which Sofia could see as Cindy pulled into yet another Flying J truck stop, this one on Cooper Drive, just off the highway. Unlike so much of the Midwest, Ardmore appeared to be marked for resettlement and redevelopment. Sofia had passed through here on the way north, late in the spring, and the town then had been deserted. They hadn’t even stopped for salvage, preferring to move quickly after having encountered signs of bandits on the trail the previous day. If those ne’er-do-wells had made their camp in Ardmore, as her father suspected, they had obviously been driven off in the months since Sofia had last been here. But by who? Her heart beat a little heavier inside her rib cage as she wondered whether she might be about to encounter the TDF for the first time. They used the same equipment as the US Army, of course, so there was no way of telling if those helicopters had belonged to Blackstone or President Kipper.

‘Is this a Blackstone settlement?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

Cindy smiled. ‘No. We ain’t quite in the belly of the beast yet, my friend. Seattle runs this here burg. Those were air force birds flew over us before. You can unpucker for now – nobody’s gonna press you into a work gang here, Sof.’

The Kenworth rolled slowly into a parking bay, crunching and hissing down through the gears before jolting ever so slightly to a complete stop.

‘Come on, hon, let’s go get us some supplies.’

‘Cindy . . . I only have a few dollars,’ Sofia confessed, feeling unexpected shame. She had taken so much from this kind woman, and all under false pretences.

‘Ppfft!’ The trucker blew off her worries. ‘Look, there’s a federal salvage depot across the road from the J. Anything you need, you can pick it up there. Is there something you need?’

A shrug.

‘I would like a map of Fort Hood and of this place Temple, where the
federales
are,’ she said. ‘And a small radio, if I could. I should’ve thought to get one earlier, in Wellington when we stopped and met those other lady drivers.’

‘Well, come on then. We’ll get fed and head on to the depot before we light out. See what we can do. I don’t know about the radio, but they’ll have maps for sure.’

Sofia followed the blue-clad truck driver’s lead and hopped out of the cab, with her spirits lifted slightly, glad to be able to stretch her legs and empty her bladder. Her breath fogged up again, but the cold was nowhere near as unpleasant as Kansas City had been. The borrowed jacket was more than enough to ward off the chill.

A tall, thin man approached from the rear of Cindy’s rig. She’d met Dave Bowman back at Emporia. He was a little strange, she thought, and unlike so many of the middle-aged drivers here, he didn’t have a potbelly. Dave seemed to glide across the cement surface.

‘Coat still warm enough for you, young lady?’ he asked.

Sofia nodded. ‘Yes, thank you.’

‘No problemo,’ Dave said.

Cindy circled around from the driver’s side, chatting with another female trucker, who also wore a furry creature hat. A rabbit of some sort, thought Sofia. Perhaps Bugs Bunny.

‘Mel, where’s Brian?’ Cindy asked the other woman.

‘Feeding the bunnies,’ this Mel said. She was about the same height as Cindy French and seemed rather too refined to be a trucker. With her unusually straight posture and precision of movement, Sofia wondered if she might be a veteran. They all moved the same way, she thought.

‘You keep the rabbits for food?’ Sofia asked. ‘I had my share of them. I could cook a pot for you if you’d like.’

Mel actually took a step back as a wash of pale horror fell across her features.

‘
Pets
, hon,’ Cindy said quickly, taking the teenager by the shoulder. ‘Melissa keeps bunnies as pets in her rig. They’re kinda cute . . . Hey, Mel, is Brian gonna come too, then?’

‘No,’ the woman in the bunny hat replied, recovering herself but smiling a little awkwardly at Sofia. ‘I’ll take him something. Let’s go eat.’

Inside the Flying J’s government-run canteen, it smelled of fresh paint, disinfectant and greasy food. As she joined the line of diners, Sofia kept one eye on the television suspended from the ceiling in a corner of the dining area, but it only seemed to be playing re-runs of some pre-Wave show hosted by a man called Jerry, where fat people attacked each other in a TV studio. Sometimes they wore costumes that made them look like perverts. It was incomprehensible and eventually she gave up.

Soldiers and civilians moved down the queue, each clutching a metal tray. Occasionally they’d glance over at the TV screen too, but mostly they busied themselves scooping up piles of the usual bland but plentiful government food. Stiff, dry potato bake, frankfurters, bacon like jerky, fatty ham, and the always popular shit on a shingle. In front of her in the line, thin Dave Bowman shook his head at it all, deeply unimpressed.

‘Give me an apple and a whole-wheat roll,’ he said.

‘Don’t want much, do ya?’ the man serving behind the counter replied. He tossed a sad-looking yellow apple over. ‘Bread’s over at the bench, dude.’

Dave noticed Sofia focusing again on the television and elbowed her gently. ‘Sure you want to go to Fort Hood?’ he asked. ‘They’re all like that down there, you know.’

‘My sister’s there,’ Sofia lied, yet again. ‘I have to help her. What do you know about the place, Mr Bowman? Anything you can tell me would be useful. I’ve heard it will be difficult for me, because I’m from Mexico. Although, that seems unfair. I don’t remember anything of life before the boat journey to Australia. I am from nowhere now.’

Bowman gazed off into the distance for a moment, apparently able to see through the clouded windows of the canteen as Sofia filled a bowl with beans and bacon chunks. He worked at slicing his mushy apple up into manageable components before they took a seat at the table with the others. But not Cindy yet; she was still in line, picking over the sad, grey franks.

‘Fort Hood’s not what Seattle says it is,’ Dave said. ‘On the other hand, not everything Seattle says is wrong either. It isn’t the old Unreconstructed South, for instance.’

‘I’m sorry, what?’ Sofia asked, confused.

‘I mean, it isn’t a bunch of rich white folks owning everything, including other people. A lot of army vets live down there. The other services too, but mainly army. Drawn there by money, benefits and the kind of jobs Seattle can’t or won’t provide.’

‘What about Mexicans?’ she asked. ‘My sort of people.’ She wondered if Dave wasn’t someone who agreed with Blackstone. Perhaps even supported the tyrant.

‘I’ve seen them down there as well,’ he said. ‘Normally, if they aren’t in the military, they’re stuck doing the menial jobs in town, in Killeen, or labouring on the big farms. That isn’t all that different from before the Wave, is it? Or down under, where you were, from what I’ve heard tell.’

‘No,’ Sofia admitted. ‘Although, the farm my family worked on in New South Wales was not a prison either. And the homestead killings – are they truly as people say, the work of Blackstone’s agents?’

Bowman regarded her warily now. ‘Well, there’s some that say that, of course. But I wouldn’t be so free with my opinions when I reached Fort Hood if I was you, young lady.’

‘Well, it’s a hell of a thing when a young woman can’t feel free with her opinions, don’t you think?’ interrupted Cindy, having arrived from the chow line hauling a tray loaded up with cheesy taters and franks. Almost as large a stack as she’d had of chicken when Sofia first met her.

‘No politics at the table,’ Melissa called over, adopting a warning tone.

Thin Dave Bowman’s face had been clouding over, but that seemed to pass now like a single cloud on a clear day.

Cindy hooked out a plastic chair with one foot before sitting herself down next to Sofia. ‘Old Dave here is quite the fan of Governor Blackstone,’ she smirked.

‘Now, you know that’s not true, Cindy . . .’ he protested. ‘I have issues with the man, too. Serious issues. But I don’t think he’s as bad as everyone makes out back in cloud-cuckoo-land.’

‘Where?’ Sofia chimed in, looking to her friend for a translation.

‘He means Seattle, hon.’ The trucker turned back to Bowman. ‘Now then, Dave, Sofia here is heading down to Fort Hood to rescue her sister from a brothel – as you well know, because I explained it to you, chapter and verse, back in KC. A government brothel, Dave. Of the sort that is utterly illegal back in cloud-cuckoo-land. So you can see why she might have
issues
with a Blackstone policy here and there.’

He had the decency to look mildly embarrassed, going so far as to take off his baseball cap and sweep it in front of him while performing a half bow. ‘You’re right, I was being an ass,’ he said by way of apology.

‘It’s all right,’ replied Sofia, even though it was not.

Dave leaned forward slightly. ‘Was there something specific you needed to know about Fort Hood? Out of all these reprobates,’ he added, indicating his fellow drivers, ‘I’ve probably hauled more loads into and out of the Hood than anyone.’

Sofia swallowed a mouthful of beans and tried to forgive the man opposite her for not thinking ill of Jackson Blackstone. If this Dave Bowman could be of help, she would take his help, just as she’d taken his jacket.

‘I will need to find this bordello where they are holding my sister,’ she said. ‘How will I do that, and how will I get there from Temple without getting into trouble myself?’

Bowman grinned. ‘Well, I’m not at all familiar with the brothels of Fort Hood,’ he said, to the scoffing laughter of some of the other truckers. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn’t be going there alone. I think you’ll be fine getting around town without someone holding your hand, but a girl of your age really doesn’t want to be heading into the red-light district on her own.’

She nodded appreciatively. She had no interest at all in the red-light districts of Fort Hood, but a great deal of interest in how much attention she might draw to herself while wandering the streets of the town on her own. Back in KC, people had made it sound as though Fort Hood was completely segregated. Sofia Pieraro resolved to put aside any resentment she felt at finding out that Dave was a Blackstone supporter. Instead, she was determined to pick him clean for every useful detail on Fort Hood that he might provide.