Directive 51 (33 page)

Abruptly, Chris laughed. Norcross, sitting on the other side of the lounge reading his Bible, looked up over his reading glasses. “Someone send you something funny?”

“Not exactly
funny
. I’ve just done my best interview ever and I got a big raise this morning, and probably the network will be gone before my next paycheck.”

Norcross nodded, turned, and called, “Robbie? We need a plan to deal with the disappearance of electronic money in the next forty-eight hours.”

Robbie, his economic advisor, sitting up from a nap, rubbed his face. “Right. Of course. So you need a plan in forty-eight—”

“No, I mean all electronic money will disappear for good in forty-eight hours. That’s what, ninety percent of the economy?”

“Old figure. Nowadays, more like ninety-seven percent.”

“We’re an hour from Reagan National. Have a plan when we land.”

Robbie groaned, but he sat down and unfolded his laptop. A moment later he looked up, and said, “I’m getting ‘Try again later,’ from all the Internet connections—which is about thirty line-of-sight stations. Better make that ‘our plan for what to do with the money already gone,’ I guess.”

Jason stayed low on the ridgeline and watched. He didn’t know why he was so stupid that he had to see what had happened to the commune.

Beth,
he thought.
Just couldn’t run out on you, babe, not while there was a chance you were still alive.

The main house had been burned to a hollow black shell. There were bodies in the farmyard, but without binoculars, he wasn’t sure who. He was pretty sure the one hanged from the barn pulley was Elton. Two men with rifles guarded the farmyard, so he couldn’t go down to look for clues.

A very soft voice said, “Hey.”

He turned. Beth had streaks of soot on her face and looked pretty sick. She sat down beside him. “We should get away from here. Then can you tie up my wrist?”

“Sure.” They moved cautiously back down from the ridge line, and he found a couple of thick pine sticks and, with some junk line from his pack, lashed together a sort of splint.

“Needs a real doctor,” he whispered, apologetically.

“You’ll do.” She kissed his cheek. “We better walk while I can. If you can find us somewhere warm for the night, that’ll help; I think I’m a risk for shock.”

They crept along the ridge trail, back into the state park. On the broad, well-marked trail, he asked, “How’d you know I’d be there?”

“It’s where you used to take me for sex, hon. About the only place where we could watch the commune to make sure no one was coming and still have some privacy. And if you’d went any place else, they’d’a catch you.”

They filled his water bottle and shared long drinks at the first public pump. “I think they’ll be looking along the roads,” he said, “but we can take this trail over to the camping area in the next drainage; won’t be a lot of hikers out and nobody’s gonna think of it as transportation just yet. Gonna be a long day, baby.”

She shrugged, and winced at how that pulled her wrist. “Then we better get going.”

They walked. After some time he ventured, “Uh, how’d you get away?”

“I fucked the three guys that took me off to kill me, and then cried, and promised no one wouldn’t ever know if they let me go. They didn’t really wanna kill me, I guess. Probably it was like their first lynching, and they weren’t real good at it, you know?”

“How did you feel about—”

“Like I feel about taking a big old painful crap when I really have to. Better’n not having done it. Prolly I’ll have bad dreams and stuff later.”

The sun was still high in the sky when they topped the ridge; Beth looked sick, but she seemed to be bearing up, and after he added a couple more sticks to the makeshift splint, she seemed to do better.

Somewhere,
he figured,
there’s a place we can blend in and not be looked for. I just hope we don’t have to join a mob and kill any Daybreak people, because I think if she had to, to live, Beth could do that. And I’m not sure I could.

Almost everywhere in the world, the first thing a cop does, when bringing a visiting cop into his territory, is to offer coffee, and any visiting cop to whom it is not allergenic death or spiritual anathema had better accept. “So,” Carlucci said, “I didn’t even know we
had
any future cops. What do you do, arrest crooks before they’re born?”

Bambi ignored the joke she’d heard too often. “I’m one of five DoF employees that have the power to make an arrest. Congress in their wisdom realized it was always possible we might stumble across some present-day crime. You’re lucky
all
of us didn’t come. This is the first real case we’ve ever had.”

“I guess that—” Carlucci’s phone rang, and he picked up. “Carlucci. Yeah, I—right. On my way. I’ll bring as much backup as I have. See if you can reach anyone en route and re-route them to give us some more backup. I’m on my way.” He asked Bambi, “You reasonable on the G-54?”

“Fully qualified.”

“Great. Follow me.” A few steps down the hall, he leaned into a room where two men sat on desks facing each other. “Terry Bolton, Larry Mensche, this is Bambi Castro, she’s badged with OFTA and coming along; gear up, and set Castro up with a Glock. Now, because we need to be rolling ten minutes ago.”

Bolton pulled on holster, coat, and all in one fluid motion; Mensche arose from a pile of papers, tucking away reading glasses as he went, and was halfway into his coat by the time Bolton was opening the arms locker on the wall. “Can you tell us what it’s about?”

“That number one high-priority suspect we were expecting? She, a couple AFIs, and a few Mexican Army GAFEs are all trapped in a DN-7 with collapsed tires on Imperial Avenue. Big mob that wants them to hand her over for a lynching.” Carlucci sounded no more excited than if he were talking about picking up muffins for a church breakfast.

Bolton handed Bambi the holster, three clips, and the G-54. She checked it out; perfectly maintained, of course. Carlucci was explaining, “—local patriots got wind and barricaded the 805 around exit 12A, which wasn’t too complicated since practically no cars are able to move, so they just dragged a bunch of stuck cars together to form a line across the freeway.”

In the bright sun, they all flipped on shades automatically; Bolton took shotgun in the hazmat Hummer, leaving Bambi next to Mensche.

Carlucci pulled out fast. “Mensche, best route? We need to get onto Imperial south and west of exit 12A, with—”

“Fifteen down to El Cajon, over to 54th Street, south to Imperial, hang a right,” the agent said quietly. “You don’t think there’s going to be anybody blocking alternate routes?”

“Sounds like they’re improvising. They didn’t actually ambush the DN-7—the Mexican commander got a tip-off from a traffic cam and had already end-run the crowd, he’d have gotten away clean but they lost five out of six tires in one big spinout. The mob up on the 805 saw that and ran down and surrounded them.” Carlucci’s eyes never left the road, a good thing at the speed he was driving.

“Anyway,” he added, “the mob can’t really get at them—they’ve got twenty-millimeters on robot turrets, so by way of explaining ‘stand back,’ they shredded a couple of parked cars—but we’ve got to go get them out. Just now, Mexican troops in uniform are having a hard time talking to Americans, especially Americans who think they’re bringing in Ysabel Roth to personally lead the looting and burning.”

They hurtled down the empty freeway, dodging between wrecks and abandoned cars. “This thing has a tank of antiseptic and sprays a mist of it on the tires as we go,” Carlucci explained, “just in case anyone is wondering if I’m trying to kill us all. Siren and light, you think?”

Bolton said, “If they’re going to shoot at us, they’ll do it with or without the sirens, eh? Give ’em a fair shot at doing the right thing.”

Carlucci turned on the noisemakers. Approaching the crowd at a sedate twenty miles per hour or so, they allowed everyone plenty of time to consider.

“We got this,” Mensche said. “Lot of folks doing the old slow fade, they want to be at the back of the crowd when we tell them to clear out.”

A space opened around the armored personnel carrier as people drifted back into alleys, or behind cars, a mob that all wanted to be bystanders—out of the situation but not so far they couldn’t see it.

The DN-7 looked like most APCs since World War II; the triple auto-turrets on top, only ten centimeters high, were remote-controlled, so that the operator watched through cameras and aimed and fired without being exposed to enemy fire. Fly-eye bubbles in the center of the roof and on all the corners meant there would be no blind spots, and the turrets were far enough out to sweep anywhere from next to the wheels to dead overhead. The black and brown glop on the road showed where the DN-7’s foam-cored tires, invulnerable to bullets, had succumbed to the biotes.

“Bold Hammer One, this is Bold Hammer Four, I have you visually and I’m approaching behind the crowd surrounding you,” Carlucci said.
I guess we’re Operation Bold Hammer,
Bambi thought.

“Bold Hammer Four, this is Bold Hammer One, I copy.” The accent was slight;
federales
in Sinaloa worked so often with their American counterparts that most were fluently bilingual.

“How you doing in there, Lieutenant?” Carlucci asked.

“Not bad. No injuries. If we could move we’d be fine.”

“What’s the situation with Bold Hammer Two and Three?”

“Could be an hour till they get here.”

“Does the passenger understand that if she tries to run in any direction except into our vehicle, that mob will kill her?”

“Yes, Bold Hammer Four, she understands that. She’s terrified. Let me see if she’s willing to try the transfer.” During the long pause, Carlucci worked the loudspeaker, telling people to go home, explaining that he was the FBI, that they were going to take the prisoner into custody, that it was vital for her to be captured alive and unharmed for interrogation. He reminded everyone that Mexico had been hit hard by Daybreak, too, and that “on this issue we are allies and shoulder to shoulder; this is no way to treat a friend and an ally.” Over and over, he urged everyone to head for home.

The DN-7 had armored extensions around its main troop door that could reach out to the Hummer, but Murphy’s Law dictated that the door would be on the far side. Making a virtue out of necessity, Carlucci drove the Hummer in a slow circle around the DN-7, twice, as if just trying to clear the crowd; more of them faded away, leaving the street almost empty except for a few stragglers.

“Not much of a mob, now,” Bolton observed. “Back to being pain-in-the-ass civilians.”

“That’s the way I prefer them,” Mensche said.

As he finished the second circuit, Carlucci said, “Mensche, I’m going to match your door up to their troop door; the extensions will slam out at you, then you open. Drag Roth in if she isn’t moving fast enough. Castro, try to look friendly and welcoming—as freaked as Roth must be by now, she might bolt in the direction of a woman who looks sympathetic.”

As the armored extensions thudded against the body of the Hummer, Mensche flung the doors outward, and the troop door retracted vertically. Two masked GAFEs in uniform threw a small woman in a baggy green coverall forward; Mensche caught her and turned in his seat, dragging her across his lap. Bambi pulled her the rest of the way in by the shoulders; Mensche slammed the door and shouted “Go!”

They had covered four blocks when the left front tire blew; Carlucci said, “Sniper, hardware store—” before a hole appeared in the windshield and he barked as a slug hit him on the Kevlar vest. He crouched low and zagged into a side street to the left; Bolton and Mensche had lowered their windows and returned fire; Bambi was lying across Roth to protect her.

Another shot clanged harshly off the rear fender.

“Just one shooter I think,” Bolton reported, “and he’s running. Give it a block and hope the rims hold out.”

“They’re supposed to.”

In a residential street, they stopped and Bolton and Bambi jumped out to look at the situation.

The spare was dripping off its rim; it looked like lumpy chocolate pudding. “It was exposed to the biotes and it wasn’t being sprayed with antiseptic.”

“Yeah, the spray for the tires was so the car wouldn’t spread germs—not because anyone ever thought anything would eat it.” Bolton folded out a spray gadget from the roof, sprayed the pavement, stood on it, and wetted himself all over.

Bambi followed his example. “I’d just like someone to know that I’m probably destroying the last good Italian suit I’m ever going to wear.”

Bolton snorted. “I started out in fire and bombs, where you buy the cheapest suit you can ’cause you’re always buying new ones. This thing’s all poly; it’ll probably rot off me by nightfall.”

Every tire on the cars on the street was rotted and flat, but knocking on doors, Bambi found an older lady willing to donate the apparently unharmed spare from a pickup parked in her garage.

They finally returned to the FBI office on Aero Drive four hours after setting out; the Mexican troops got there almost immediately after, having walked the whole way. Only two more of the ten expected observers for the interrogation had arrived; both were local.

Carlucci said, “I vote for showers and food all around; there’s lunchmeat and bread in the fridge, and we might as well eat it since god knows how long the power will stay on. Ms. Roth?”

The girl looked up, dazed; she had said nothing other than that she wasn’t in pain and didn’t need water, on the whole trip in. “Yeah,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What I wanted to ask,” he said gently, “is if you’d like to clean up. I understand you’re a vegetarian; I’m afraid all we have is a tub of coleslaw and some bottled water, and every shop I’ve seen on the trip had a sign saying ‘No more food.’ But you might feel better if you ate something. You do realize you’re safer here than you would be anywhere else?”