Directive 51 (16 page)

Now I know exactly where I am,
Samuelson thought,
and they don’t know I do. I just need to figure out how to use that.

The plane began a steep descent; the pilot said something over the loudspeaker, but Samuelson’s tourist-Arabic from thirty years ago wasn’t adequate to make out what.

They leveled off at low altitude, flying down a canyon toward the Gulf of California. They must be—

The hand on his shoulder made him jump. “Time to make your statement.”

“That is impossible,” he said. “I cannot betray—”

The man punched him, in the face, hard enough to numb it. He hit Samuelson again, drew back his fist and looked into his eyes, waited for the vice president to realize what was happening.

He hit him again, much harder. “You must make your statement now.”

“I will not,” Samuelson said, “and you can’t make me.”

Those are the rules, where they come from. When anyone offers you anything, or asks for anything, refuse twice, accept on the third. Basic negotiation principle: Behave in a way that the other side is at home with.

He thought about that while they held him up and beat his ribs sore, leaving him coughing and unable to wipe the tears and mucus from his face.

When Samuelson had caught his breath, the man said, again, “Now, your statement.”

“What must be in the statement?” Samuelson asked.

They dickered and haggled. Samuelson insisted that he did not want to read the official statement because it dishonored himself and his nation. He pleaded with them—couldn’t he make his last words his own, and speak the way he always did to American audiences, wouldn’t that be more believable? And could he please begin by saying farewell to his wife? Well, because a man can be in love, can’t he?

One of his best negotiations in a life of negotiations. He had nothing to offer, and everything to gain, and the other side did not realize that he got everything he wanted.

When they had agreed, he was permitted a quick trip to the bathroom. Two guards watched him while he took a dump; did they expect him to hang himself in the toilet paper or pull a concealed machine gun from the electric shaver?

Face freshly washed. Calm. Ready.

The little light glowed on their camera.
Here goes.
“My fellow Americans, by the time most of you see this, I will be dead, because the men sitting just a few feet from me are planning to kill me, along with themselves. They demanded that I make a statement, which they are sending out in some kind of live webcast via cellular broadband, I’m afraid I don’t understand the technical details, but apparently they fear that we may be fired on before they can transmit a recording. So, they tell me, I am speaking to you, right now, live, in streaming video, and this is going out over the web, and they’ve notified millions of media outlets and bloggers and so on to record it; I’m sure many of them will broadcast it.

“First let me just say, Kim—my wife, my one and only love ever—I love you as much as I did on our honeymoon in Guerrero Negro, when we hiked the canyons to the north and sailed up the Gulf of California, if—”

A rough hand grasped his hair. Someone shouted. He tried to jab his handcuffed hands upward into the crotch of the man holding him, but other hands pushed them down, so he tried to turn and bite the man’s leg, but his head was held too tight. A knife pressed against his throat.
Well, I tried.

The pressure slackened. His head was released. He saw that they were pointing the camera at the one who had been pressing the knife to his neck.

The man seemed to shake off the murderous rage as if it had never been, and handed the knife to one of his friends. The cameraman counted down, three, two, one, and the active-light went on. The man said, “We had hoped to present an honest—”

Samuelson screamed, “Bullshit! What’s in those barrels? What’s in those barrels?” as they yanked him around, trying to reach his mouth while he bucked and curled away from them.

He screamed,
Barrels on this plane!
twice more, and
Bullshit!
just as he got an elbow into someone’s balls. One of them shoved a fist into his mouth.

He tried to bite the fist, hurting his jaw but getting no real grip, and then they forced something into his mouth; he was retching and couldn’t breathe. He badly wanted to drift down into the darkness and pain, but he wanted more to see how all this came out.

Ysabel jumped when her phone rang. She grabbed it and said, “Yeah?”

“It’s time. Do it.” The connection went dead.

She couldn’t quite place the accent but that was okay, too, she knew this was an international effort. It seemed strange that it wasn’t a Spanish accent, though.

Oh, well. She jumped up, peed quickly, put her purse by the door, looked around to make sure there was nothing else for her to forget. She reminded herself again to drop the cheapie convenience-store cell phone in some place where it was likely to be stolen.

Then she sat down and worked the Stinger gadget. Really, this wasn’t as hard as most video games. She tabbed over to the button that said, ARM ON LOCK, clicked on it, and typed the password—DAYBREAK, of course.

A red message flashed Missile will arm when target acquired.

She’d practiced acquiring the target all afternoon; she just slid the crosshairs across the television screen, using the little thumbwheel controls, till the red glow told her it had found the diesel exhaust (imagine the jackass nerve of those Border Patrol assholes, dumping diesel exhaust right out above a city, of all things!)

She pushed the key combination, and jumped at the roar of the Stinger’s exhaust against the roof, a couple of feet above her ceiling. On the screen, the thread of smoke ended in a ball of fire under the aerostat.

“That’s not where we had our honeymoon,” a soft voice said. Heather thought,
That must be Kim Samuelson, when did they bring—

On the screen, John Samuelson’s head was grabbed and a knife went to his throat; after a burst of shouting and a wildly swinging camera, the screen went dark.

Lenny Plekhanov, reading NSA feed, said, “We’ve got the cell-phone towers they relayed through—east coast of Baja—”

A young Asian woman said, “Confirmed, we have that tower’s location, thanks, and an angle on them. North and east of Guerrero Negro, latitude—”

A message flashed up on Heather’s screen; she looked down and said, loud enough so people could hear, “E-bomb attack on the Mexican Navy’s Guerrero Negro station about forty minutes ago. Took out radio, cell phone, and the local landline station, along with the radars on the frigate and cutter in port, and at the airport. Several visual sightings of a big white plane.”

The young Asian woman added, “Alerts out to ICE, Air Force, Air Guard, Navy, all the—shit. Yuma aerostat radar is out, and—Air Force says hostile action.”

On the screen, one big green curve across the Gulf of California blanked out; the remaining green curves peeled back like the cross section of a bullet hole.

“Either that’s the way they’re coming, or that’s the diversion,” Garren said. “We’ll—”

“They’ve killed him, you know. Or they will any minute. Shoot that plane down.” Roger Pendano looked haggard and sad.

Did he even realize that he’d given the order for that almost an hour ago? Or that the operation isn’t being commanded here anymore?
Heather was afraid she might find out.

The silence went well beyond awkward before Garren said, “We are working on that, sir.”

Pendano sank into his chair, hands on his head; he didn’t move as everything else went on around him.

Jason’s Goo-22 search had found an all-organic restaurant about an hour away, on a route that would take them back to I-25 eventually, so they headed east and south. “We’ll miss being able to find places like this so easily,” Jason said, as they pulled into the gravel parking lot, “but on the other hand, instead of having these little islands of spiritual meaning in an ocean of Big System, we’ll all make meaning where we are, till the whole
world
will have spiritual meaning.”

“Spiritual?”

Jason shrugged. “There’s more to spirit than just God.”

Once seated, with a big pot of coffee for the table to share, and a big meal ordered for each of them, Jason sighed. “It feels good not to be driving; thanks for giving me a ride clear back to Raton. The mountains are beautiful and the challenge is fun, but after a while, dude, it’s all ‘hand on the throttle, eye on the rail.’ ”

“Back to the spiritual already.”

“A bunch of us at the commune like to play traditional stuff, and traditional includes gospel. No offense, but when I’m singing ‘You Got to Walk with Your Lord Every Step,’ it doesn’t mean I believe what I’m singing.”

Zach grinned. “You look way too much like one of the original disciples to be a current one.”

Jason nearly shot the coffee through his nose, and said, “I thought Christian types were supposed to try to convert people and didn’t have much of a sense of humor about it.”

“That’s another outfit. They get all the . . .” Zach froze, staring.

When Jason turned, the television over the bar showed flat Gothic letters, blue on yellow: ATTACK IN THE DESERT. SPECIAL REPORT.

One of the waitresses, braids and big skirt flying, ran to the TV and turned the volume all the way up.

“—joining us, again, the plane carrying Vice President Samuelson on a confidential diplomatic mission was seized earlier today, and government sources confirm that the streaming video webcast that appeared about forty minutes ago was
not
a hoax. Here’s a clip of that webcast; we apologize for the poor quality of the video and remind you he was being held prisoner and threatened. You may want to take small children out of the room.”

Samuelson’s image appeared, too big, too grainy, and with the color uncorrected. They watched him speak the plane’s position, the terrorists wrestling him, the knife at his neck, Samuelson dragged off camera. The network helpfully supplied subtitles so that they knew someone had shouted in Arabic not to kill Samuelson on camera, and “read our statement, read it now, we may have no time,” over the sound of the vice president shouting
Bullshit!
and
Barrels on the plane!
, and that the thuds off camera must mean he was being beaten.

An announcer cut off Samuelson’s scream of
Bullshit!
“We’re taking you right away to live coverage from our San Diego affiliate where—excuse me, I’m not sure—” The man listened intently to his earpiece. “Should I?”

“That’s some last words,” Zach said.

Jason nodded. “How many vice presidents ever say anything
that
close to the truth?”

The announcer said, “We are going direct to live video from the traffic reporting plane from our network affiliate in San Diego. We have—”

A blink in the feed cut the anchor off; the picture stabilized into a military jet streaking across the blue sky, seen from beneath and behind.

“That’s an A-10,” Zach commented. “I built a model of that when I was a kid. Weird. It’s a ground-attack plane, basically a tank-buster, not a fighter. Maybe something is going on on the ground?”

The camera angle widened to show four streaking contrails around the A-10, then rotated down to include the empty, ridge-scarred desert below. Sound resumed: “—believe are US Air Force A-10 attack planes en route to intercept a terrorist attack aimed somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, which is apparently being delivered via the hijacked Air Force Two—the plane carrying Vice President John Samuelson. For those of you who just joined us—”

“Television is the medium for people who just got here,” Jason said.

Zach nodded. “That’s why children love it.” The planes flew on, parallel white streaks in the blue sky, two of them big enough to show as glints of metal. The voice-over commentator began to go through it all again. Very softly, he added, “And why we need Daybreak.”

Ysabel plunged down the stairs just slow enough to be silent; above her, she could hear Neil’s high old voice, like an unhappy child, over and over, asking if anyone knew what that sound was, and didn’t they smell smoke?

She popped through the ground-floor fire exit and walked quickly across the street, making herself not look back.

Stunned, exhilarated, scared, she held her cell phone to her ear and walked along the busy street, saying “unh-hunh, unh-hunh, yeah you’re right.” At the corner pay phone, she let herself look up and see the people staring over her head and behind her.
Just like acting class back at the community college, “acting is re-acting,” nothing hard here.

She turned and gawped like everyone else. The aerostat was sinking slowly, a tangle of junk hanging from it, but it didn’t look like the diesel fuel had caught fire; good, less chance that anyone would be hurt. The Stinger had torn some big holes in the lower, air-filled part (to judge by the flapping bits of fabric) and small holes in the upper, helium-filled part (to judge by the way it was sinking).

Aaron had explained about the upper and lower parts, and it had been one of the few things he said about the aerostat that she could follow. She liked the way he tried so hard to be non-condescending and non-technical for her. That and his Latin-poet eyes.

Ysabel pictured
campesino
families, desperate for work, over the border in San Luis Rio Colorado. They would see the big balloon that had always been like a Yankee fist in their face sinking like a bad dream. She imagined them packing their few treasures from the old village and heading north tonight. Her face was aching for a chance to grin, but she kept it slack as she slumped heavily against the pay phone’s metal hood and slid her phone onto the little metal shelf. Someone looking to make a pay-phone call would be happy to find a prepaid cell phone with no security on it.