Mariposa (30 page)

Chapter Sixty-Seven

JPB

Across the taxiway, two smudged, bloody figures limped through a hellish nightmare of crackling, burning luxury jets, crashed or rolled maintenance carts, abandoned fuel trucks—mercifully intact—and the last confused, wandering minions of Axel Price's empire.

These remaining few had used whatever they could find to cut out the source of their pain. All trailed blood and wove random tracks over the tarmac, like rabbits and deer after a brush fire. They presented no menace.

As if homing toward each other—recognizing friend amid dazed foes—the two men trekked across the main runway, William waving Fouad on, Fouad waving in turn, until they met under the orange-smudged sun.

Fouad laid down his poleax.

William lifted him off his feet and spun him around on the concrete.

"Mr. Nabokov, I presume?" he said, putting him down.

"Mr. Griff, it is excellent to see you, after all this time," Fouad said.

"That's my father's name," William said, hanging back from their hug.

"Yes," Fouad said. "The cub is now the lion. But tell me—how is it you come to be here, on this of all days?"

"Later. Let's find some water," William said.

"Absolutely. It is parched out here."

"What happened?" William asked as they walked back toward the airport buildings.

"I have only a small idea," Fouad said.

"Did you arrange for this?" William asked.

"No. Did you?"

A Torq-Vee came rolling through the smoke, around two disabled airport maintenance trucks.

The passenger door flung open and a woman in black body armor stood on the running board. She whipped off her combat helmet and waved vigorously.

"Who is that?" Fouad asked, wiping his one good eye to see more clearly.

"Rebecca Rose," William said. "I think she's offering us a ride."

"Our own Rebecca Rose? Will she have water?"

"Probably."

The Torq-Vee stopped ten yards from Fouad and William and four men in black armor jumped out to surround them, weapons ready.

"Stand down!" Rebecca called. "Is that you, William?"

"Yes, ma'am!" William called back.

Forester held up a gloved hand and called for a medical kit.

"Fouad? I hardly recognize you."

Fouad could not bring himself to speak.

"We're meeting Jane Rowland at Buckeye," Rebecca said. "Can you show us where that is?"

Fouad pointed in the general direction of the campus.

"Climb aboard, gentlemen," Rebecca said. "Buckeye apparently has a hardened server farm. We've been told to take it out, and then get the hell out of Texas."

William and Forester took hold of Fouad and guided him to the Torq-Vee, where the team offered bottled water and began to administer first aid.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Corpus Christi

Nathaniel pulled a chair into the focus of the projector and sat watching as MSARC went deaf, dumb, and blind. The lines of code and floating symbols announcing his success—or Jones's success, more appropriately—were suddenly interrupted by straight ASCII.

Is that you, Jones?

Nathaniel watched for a moment as the old-fashioned cursor blinked and another message wrote over the old one.

Who is this?

No harm in replying.

Not Jones. Who is this?

And then,

Tom Cantor. Do I know you?

Nathaniel responded,

We met at MIT ten years ago. How's tricks?

CANT>
Won't do any good to complain. You must be Nathaniel. Becky Thatcher says hi.

NATH>
Hi back.

CANT>
We're knocking out Talos business and bank records.

NATH>
Me too.

CANT>
Did you get the backups in Dubai and Iron Mountain?

NATH>
They're wiped, all but the offline memory. That will go the next time somebody tries to access.

CANT>
Mr. Price is going to have to start from scratch—wherever he is.

NATH>
OK

CANT>
You should vacate pronto.

NATH>
You too.

CANT>
30 on all bad guys. We'll be watching. That means
you
, genius boy. Say hi to Jones. Outta here.

NATH>
Copy that.

Nathaniel shut down the projector and sealed off his portals. He closed the heavy door behind him, cinched up his tie, and waited for the elevator.

Carlos was watching the news on his desk monitor and barely looked up as Nathaniel passed. Then he jumped and checked him out as if seeing him for the first time.

Nathaniel shook his head. "Lots of shit going down," he said.

"Sure as hell is," Carlos said. "What's it all about, do you think?"

"Some kind of weird weather," Nathaniel said.

He was in the Bentley and driving away when the Vertexion building's external alarms went off and steel shutters began to fall over the big windows.

Carlos was going to lose his job.

Nathaniel turned left and drove along the beach, studying the ragged front.

Definitely heading east.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

El Paso

Jamey and Curteze walked like two ragged beggars along the lines of stalled cars and their puzzled, impatient passengers waiting to cross into Juarez.

The cars weren't going anywhere soon, perhaps ever; the offices and the security gates were dark, El Paso was quiet, and Juarez was equally quiet, but for sporadic gunfire and shouts.

The boy was no longer a boy, and Curteze had no idea who or what
he
was—only that their walk was almost over, the job almost done.

Jamey turned around between the lanes of cars and watched Curteze patiently as he caught up.

"Want to do this together?" Jamey asked.

"Turn ourselves in?" Curteze asked.

"Whatever it takes."

"Sure," Curteze said.

"I wanted to thank all of you," Jamey said. "Wish I could, now."

"We were idiots."

"Still . . ."

A few border security officers were trying to keep order in the lanes despite dead radios, fused spex, down Lynx networks, and no power anywhere.

"One of
them
should do," Curteze said, and prepared to flash his sparks—reveal that he was an agent, whatever that might mean in this part of the world.

"Am I your prisoner?" Jamey asked, staying close. "I mean, I don't want to get shot just because somebody's confused."

"You're nobody's fucking prisoner," Curteze said. "Once we're across, call your Daddy and tell him to pick you up in New Mexico. And then—we're done. You're a free man. You don't ever want to see me again, right?"

Jamey wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, then agreed with a nod.

They both straightened at the approach of a tall officer with thick spiky black hair. The officer looked sure and confident, even in the chaos, as if he was the man in charge—and he was drawing a visual bead on Jamey and Curteze because they were filthy and bloody and did not look at all like tourists.

"Help you two with something?" he asked, then stopped dead and stared. "Jesus Christ," he said. "Jamey Trues. I got people searching all over the desert for you. Welcome home, boy. My name's Mason."

"Can we get across to New Mexico, Mr. Mason?" Jamey asked. "As soon as it's convenient."

"Right. Follow me. Are you Kapp or Curteze?" Mason asked the dusty man in the denims and work shirt, noting the tissue and blood on his shoulder.

"Curteze," came the muttered reply. He remembered to lift his credentials. "Special Agent Kapp is dead. They blew his head off, the bastards."

"Either of you know what the hell happened around here?" Mason asked.

The two shook their heads.

"Not a fucking clue," Curteze said. "You?"

Chapter Seventy

ONE YEAR AFTER

Pensacola Beach, Florida

Rebecca Rose picked a picture window seat in the long, flat, air-conditioned Fisherman's Shelter Inn, and started with a big stoneware bowl of thick white clam chowder and seven bags of oyster crackers—twenty crackers per bag, one with twenty-two—plus a red plastic basket carrying seven slices of fresh baguette.

Then she moved on to a huge salad—crab Louie with avocado halves and six spears of steamed asparagus and two hard-boiled eggs.

Everything tasted unbelievably wonderful—as if she had never truly used her taste buds before now.

She had been stripped of all that she owned and faced at least half a dozen warrants for her arrest and detention. She was on the run, sought by state and federal authorities from Maryland to Texas, alleged by the Raphkind administration's newly appointed Attorney General to be part of a vast domestic terrorist conspiracy to bring down the nation's power grid.

Life had never been better.

Wearing a purple two-piece swimsuit under a white net cover, canvas boat shoes printed with cartoon flowers—tanned, hair almost strawberry from sun and salt—Rebecca looked like a surfer girl who did not know how to grow up. That was what she wanted and needed right now.

She felt like a teenager and she had the broken arm to prove it—from surfing a big surge wave with far too much confidence in her not-so-young bones.

The flexible blue cast on her left arm was alive with shifting patterns and drawings—paisley curlicues, constellations, sunbursts, and smiling moons. She would be losing the cast in a week and thought she might miss it.

She did not resemble in the least the former FBI agent featured on news shows, the Web, and plastered on wanted posters in every sheriff's office on the Gulf Coast—along with a handful of nefarious accomplices.

Alicia Kunsler was locked up in Cumberland, perhaps in the same cell once occupied by Edward Quinn. Daniel Haze, former director of the Secret Service, was rumored to be either dead—a suicide—or living in Chile.

Rebecca thought the latter was more likely.

Most of the cabinet members of the former administration were under house arrest. Their indictments and trial dates might never arrive. The whole story would likely collapse within a year—with unpredictable repercussions for President Raphkind, who was said to be neither a nice man nor a happy one.

Fouad Al-Husam and William Griffin were rumored to be in Singapore—perhaps following a trail. Whether or not they had remained in the Bureau and become witnesses for the government, no one could say.

Jane Rowland could have cleared them all. But of course Jane Rowland could not say a word. Her agency did not exist.

Tom Cantor also did not exist.

Little Jamey Trues met his family in New Mexico, which refused to extradite him back to Texas. Four months later, the governor of Texas was impeached and removed from office.

Half of the staff of the Texas Department of Corrections—along with the entire sheriff's department of Lion County—was relieved of duty.

Surprise, surprise—Axel Price and his large family had turned up six months ago in the Dominican Republic, to be warmly greeted by Colonel Sir John Yardley. Like the Saudi prince, Price reportedly sported two deep, unsightly scars, one on each cheek—and was said to be broken both physically and psychologically, perhaps because he had no idea where his fortune had gone, and so no idea what he was going to do next.

Fouad had never said a word about his actions at the Smoky.
But to Rebecca he had murmured, on the flight back to Maryland, "Bad kings kill the land."

After several days of gray, wet weather, the Florida sun had this afternoon returned to its powerful conviction that the Earth was not nearly warm enough. Its brazen light was as extraordinary as the food. The parking lot reflected a hot metal glow on her face, but she barely squinted.

Rebecca dabbed the second half of a hard-boiled egg in the pinkish dressing—rich with chunks of green olive—and watched storm-driven combers roar up onto the beach, throwing golden spray almost as high as the fishing pier.

The long drought was over. One after another, powerful hurricanes were pushing up from the gulf into Texas and Mexico, bringing muddy floods to Lion County, El Paso, and Juarez.

Excellent surfing, the best the locals had ever seen.

The waitress approached and Rebecca lifted her dessert menu as if to block the glare, but in fact she was covering the woman's face. Faces were too intense even now—she read too much into them, did not know how to stop her infinitely detailed interpretation of the twists and tics of so many muscles.

She had as hard a time with faces as she did with utter darkness. Darkness terrified her—and that was only one reason why she loved it.

She took joy in being scared.

Rootless.

Nascent
.

Still, she preferred daytime, wide white beaches, hot sun. And until yesterday, she had preferred to be alone.

Soon she would conquer both faces and darkness and society. She would come out of her cocoon and spread her wings, fully human again and stronger than ever.

Dr. Plover, the third time around, had finally gotten it mostly right—if you allowed for a long latency.

And some interesting new wrinkles.

The waitress asked her what she wanted for dessert.

"Key Lime pie," Rebecca said. "And malt vinegar."

"For the pie?"

"Just bring it," Rebecca answered curtly.

"Sure thing, hon. Coffee with that?"

Rebecca smiled behind the menu, her eyes crinkling.

"No thank you . . . hon," she said.

Vinegar acted on her much like coffee—which she could no longer drink. Vinegar was the new caffeine. Caffeine was the new cause of severe migraine headaches.

"Right." The waitress departed and Rebecca faced the sun again.

A man she did not know moved over from the bar, casually stopped by her table, and leaned in too close. "Waiting for someone?" he asked. In his thirties, sunburned, puffy from drink and worry, wearing a pink golf shirt and white slacks, he was from central Ohio, very likely on vacation from a recent divorce.

All this from the corner of her eye.

"Yes, I am," she said.

"Well, I'll be back if he doesn't show."

Rebecca forced herself to look the man full in the face. She lifted her upper lip, revealing eyeteeth, and blinked, eyes wide and green and pale, like a baby's.

Then she reached down for the black fiberglass cane with the shining steel head parked between her knees. Twirled it with two fingers.

The puffy sunburned man backed away as if stung, bumping into a table. He quickly paid his check and left the restaurant, but not before muttering something to the waitress.

She brought Rebecca her Key lime pie and Heinz malt vinegar in a dribble-top bottle. "Man, I need what you got. Can you teach me that trick?"

Rebecca shook her head. "Comes with baggage," she said.

She paid her bill just as the metallic blue Bentley drove into the parking lot, top down.

The waitress gawped. "Jesus, what's that kind of car cost? Where does he drive it, to the grocery—to the beach?"

To Brazil,
Rebecca thought.

Nathaniel came into the restaurant and stood by the antique brass cash register. With a big grin, he hoisted a cardboard sign with three words lettered in thick black marker: "Jones Motor Tours."

Rebecca picked up her cloth sling bag—all she had in the world, plus the cane—and walked over to take his arm.

They had not seen each other in a year.

They hardly knew each other.

The waitress gawped some more, lost in her dreams, then smiled broadly and silently applauded Rebecca.

Nathaniel led Rebecca to the parking lot and opened the Bentley's door.

"She's going to remember this," Rebecca said as he pushed the starter button and the Bentley purred to powerful life. "Can we be a little less obvious from now on?"

"Of course," Nathaniel said. "How's the cosmic mind?"

"Coming along," Rebecca said. "Killed anybody yet?"

"No," Nathaniel said. "Well, actually—I found Jerry Lee in New Mexico."

"Oh," Rebecca said.

"He was in a bad way. Not really a human being any more. I did him a mercy. There's still a couple of hundred of us out there . . . Could go either way, I guess. Not much I can do about them."

"What did Jones think?"

"Jones doesn't communicate with me anymore."

"Still working?"

"Who knows?" Nathaniel said. "Let's just say he was feeling generous. Mr. Price's money has been placed at your disposal."

"My disposal? Not yours?"

"I'm not sure Jones trusts me. We're too much alike."

The Bentley's warm cream leather heated her skin as they drove northwest along the Bayfront Parkway toward Pensacola.

"How long do we have, really?" Rebecca asked Nathaniel.

"What, until we can't stand each other, or we find something useful to do—or until we run out of money?"

"Any of those," she said.

"A day, a week, a thousand years."

"Which shall it be—good or evil?"

"More good would be interesting," Nathaniel said. "But it's really up to you."

"Jones trusts me?"

"He trusts you to keep things lively."

Lightly, cautiously, like a shy adolescent, Nathaniel touched her arm. Rebecca withdrew it, then relaxed. Creamy leather everywhere and rich wood and the wind rushing by, hardly touching her hair. It was okay. The bad stuff was over.

This time, it hardly left a mark.

She reached out and grasped his hand, squeezing it tight.

The sun vanished below the horizon with tropical haste. There was no green flash.

There should have been.

The world was that new.

THE END

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