The Sensory Deception (50 page)

The plane is tied down now. O’Reilly sits on one of the pontoons watching the opposite bank burn. Tahir stands with his hands on his hips staring at Farley, waiting and not approving of the wait.

“Like waves,” Ringo continues, “the fire experiences interference. The combination of wind, geography, and available fuel can form nulls that the fire misses, passes right by, but it also can interfere constructively, adding together in a way that doubles the amplitude of the flames. I just ran the simulation. That island
is a peak, a constructive interference peak. Okay, here’s something you can use: the flames will converge at about a foot per second and there will be a time lag of no more than five minutes before it crosses the river. I don’t have any data like this. I mean, dude, you’re in the worst possible place. Listen to me: when the flames start burning on the opposite shore, you need to be in that plane lifting off or you’re going to die.”

“I’m not leaving without Chopper and Gloria.”

“Did you hear what I said?” Ringo yells into the phone. “The location I gave you is twenty minutes old and accurate to no more than a hundred meters—the location is consistent with her being safe and sound on the other side of the flames!”

“It’s also consistent with her standing a few feet away from me,” Farley says.

“Chopper is hunting Gloria and the girl. She told me so.”

“Told you?”

“Yeah, she’s got all the sensors on and knows I can see and hear everything she can. Chopper drugged her and now he’s using her to record the rain forest experiential database.”

“No,” Farley says, “there’s gotta be some mistake, a huge miscommunication. Chopper would never—”

Tahir steps forward. In a flash of motion, he takes the phone from Farley, wraps it in its nylon case, and jams it in Farley’s pack.

Farley coughs and shakes his head. Then he describes Gloria’s most likely position. “She must be on this island. If she were safe on the other side of the fire, we’d have seen her as we flew in. We have to assume that Chopper and Gloria are together, or at least that when we find her she’ll know how to get to him.” As he speaks, he sees the doubt on Tahir’s face.

Tahir says, “You work along the shore; I’ll go inland. If you find her, shoot into the air, one round every five seconds until we rejoin. If I find her I’ll do the same.”

Farley says, “Let’s go.”

He steps along the bank of the river, ducks under a branch, steps into the water, and lets the current push him to the next patch of open shore.

G
loria and Iara have been hiding on this island for three days. Since it is bordered in every direction by water, Gloria thought it was safe, but she’s starting to doubt. They haven’t seen Chopper in those three days, so why does she know to the marrow of her bones that he’s closing in on them?

It’s one of the most fundamental decisions in life. She’s made it a thousand times before, metaphorically. Do you hide out and hope for the best? Or run for it? Do you risk being found or submit to the chase? In business, she’s always demanded of herself that she not let fear shade her decisions. Passion, yes; fear, never.

She doesn’t know that the island will soon erupt like a pissed-off volcano. If she did, the decision would be easier.

Iara is a six-year-old orphan, and she does not want to stay where they are. She points up in the trees where the monkeys who led them here are now swinging in frantic circles.

Iara takes Gloria’s hand and pulls her back through the brush along the shady trail that leads to the river. It’s a short walk. The river is no more than twenty meters wide here and the current is swift. The fire exhales its hot breath in a blistering wind from the opposite bank. She can’t yet see the flames but knows they’re closing in. The wind has already withered the broad leaves on the tree branches that lean over the river.

They have to get out of here, and there’s only one way out.

Chopper herded her to this island and has been watching ever since. The contrast will be perfect. The island Eden will explode in hellfire. Every sensation of the experience will be recorded, and it will teach them. All of them.

He follows Gloria and the kid through the brush. Working his way through the trees, from canopy to canopy, he only touches the ground when he must. He likes it here and plans to stay. It’s perfect for him. There’s so much shade and wildlife, and up in the hills, the air will be clean and the water fresh.

He climbs a tree over the riverbank where he has a well-concealed view of Gloria and the kid. Gloria’s still wearing the equipment. It looks as though she’s straightened it. Chopper believes that, deep down, Gloria understands her role. She might not like the immediate and imminent pain, but she knows that if Farley were alive, this is what he would want them to do.

Then something odd happens. The child starts pulling vines down from the trees. Gloria drags three large branches to the bank. She sets the branches over the vines. The two of them wrap the vines around the branches, in and out, over and under—they’re making a raft.

Chopper leans back and lets the leaves close. A flash of red attracts his attention—an airplane. Now that he can see it, he can hear it. There’s no way that Gloria could hear it down on the ground.

He shimmies to a spot on a horizontal branch amid the high canopy where he can see the horizon. By rolling under the branch, he can fully conceal himself from above and still have
a barely impeded view. The plane circles a few times and then, upriver, it loses altitude and presumably lands.

Chopper can’t figure out why it would land. The fire’s going exactly how the oligarchs want. Other than a lingering feeling of irony in the strange bedfellows he seems to have sided with, he puts it out of his mind. It’s easy now. Farley’s death has taught him how to put things out of his mind. Denial is intoxicating, and he has found that it can be implemented by listening to the model of Farley in his mind as it repeats:
Get the experiential data for the burning rain forest app.

Farley reaches for a branch to guide himself back to shore. The branch moves and he jerks back his hand. He loses his footing and the branch strikes out at him. Fangs grasp air where his neck had been a quarter of a second before.

He lets himself fall underwater, kicks off, and swims around the outcropping of roots and vines. The current is nothing compared with a Santa Cruz undertow, but it’s tugging on his pack. The satellite phone is useless now, and maybe the rifle, too. He surfaces ten meters downstream and continues along the river. He’s tempted to dive right in, but where the river narrows the current accelerates, and the truth is, he doesn’t know how to swim in river rapids. He mulls Tahir’s statement, “There isn’t time for mistakes,” and stays near shore.

With a rifle in his left hand and a machete in his right, Tahir cuts a swath through the brush. One of his many concerns floats to the top. Farley is likely to greet Chopper in a much different
way than he would. He pushes forward at as close to a run as the brush allows.

Chopper has covered this island a hundred times in these three days. The monkeys don’t even shriek at him anymore. Just downstream, not a quarter mile from the point where the two forks of the river that define this island converge, the whole system makes a dramatic right turn, a dogleg. He can see it from this tree. The dogleg is caused by a long sheet of rock that Chopper figures is granite. As the currents of the two forks combine, the water velocity doubles. The river then flows another thirty meters before hitting the granite wall. It continues along and then around the rock and on downstream, but the disruption results in turbulent swirls that gyrate along the dogleg like so many tornadoes across an Oklahoma plain. Over centuries, the river has chipped away at the rock and, at the point where the river curves around the end of the dogleg, violent rapids rush through a maze of sharp boulders.

No way will that vine-joined raft survive the turbulence
.

Chopper has no interest in a VR experience of drowning.
No! Gloria must burn
.

He pulls himself farther up the tree. The branch bends and swings under his weight. The rifle strapped to his back catches on something and it takes a few precarious moves to get above the canopy. From here he can see the other side of the rock barrier.

Past the rapids associated with the dogleg, the river spreads out in an expansive, gently flowing imitation of the Mississippi. Chopper smiles when he sees a copse of trees that has fallen across the narrow, turbulent point where the river passes around the granite wall. The hot, dry wind has been blowing through
the dead branches for weeks, drying them to an explosive tinder. The trunks lie along the rock and the treetops hang over the river with the upended roots on land—the perfect fuse.

Chopper rolls over the branch, lowering himself until his feet reach another branch. He drops to that step, jumps to another, then to the primary trunk of the tree. He slides down to the ground and sprints through the underbrush maze. At the island’s north bank, a good fifty feet from where Gloria and the kid are putting together their raft, he dives into the water.