Vortex (32 page)

It should have been impossible. But it happened again as we watched. A dark crack widened and expanded and intersected another, and suddenly a piece of the Arch separated and began to fall. It moved with the elephantine grace of its own inertia, and I guessed it might circle the planet a couple more times before it began its final burn and tumble.

I looked at Turk, he looked at me. We didn’t have to say anything. We both knew what it meant. It meant the door to Equatoria had been closed forever. It meant our plan had failed. It meant we had nowhere to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SANDRA AND BOSE

Bose followed a line of hedges down the street, keeping low and hoping the rain would help disguise his presence. The kid with the plastic bag—Turk, presumably—strode down the sidewalk, out in the open and half a block ahead. Another couple of yards and he’d be within sight of one of the guard cars Bose had identified earlier, an anonymous-looking gray vehicle with two sullen and undoubtedly well-armed men inside it.

Bose recognized the moment the kid spotted the car by the hitch in his step, a momentary hesitation you’d never notice if you weren’t looking for it. The kid gave no other indication. He kept walking, head down, rain running off his poncho. He walked straight past the car. The guards inside watched as he passed, their heads turning in unison as if they were attached to a string.

A left turn would have taken the kid down another block to the front entrance of the Findley warehouse, but he kept on going, sensibly. Bose took the opportunity to cut through the weedy lot in back of an industrial building, which shielded him from the guard car but also cut off his view of Turk. The rain was coming down so hard it felt like brusque hands trying to get his attention. His shoes were already saturated. At the next corner he caught sight of the kid again, still kept walking in the same direction, well past the warehouse now.
Just keep on going,
he thought.
Catch another bus
.
Make my life easier.

But the kid turned left. He was circling the warehouse from a distance, Bose realized, looking for a way past the cordon.

*   *   *

Bose tried to put himself inside the kid’s head, on the assumption that this really was Turk Findley, more or less as described in Orrin’s notebook. It wasn’t easy. Bose had worshipped his own father. Patricide—even symbolic patricide—was a foreign concept to him.

But he understood rage and impotence well enough. It was what he had felt when the thieves had broken down the door and come into his father’s home in Madras. Bose’s father had sent him to hide under the desk in his room, and Bose had stayed there, dutifully, his heart beating madly in his chest, his lungs starved for air because he kept trying to hold his breath. “I’ll deal with this,” his father had said, and Bose had believed him. He didn’t come out until he heard his father’s first and final scream. Which was followed, soon enough, by his own.

His father hadn’t taken the Fourth treatment himself, though he had facilitated the treatment for many others. He had still been in the broad midstream of his life, not yet ready to assume the duties and obligations of longevity. Bose’s mother had been less scrupulous: she arranged the treatment as a life-saving intervention for Bose himself. Bose was far too young for it, but Martian ethics made an exception for life-or-death cases. Typically, she had administered the treatment first and asked for her colleagues’ approval only later. Bose had never been as grateful as he knew he should have been; often, when the memories of the Madras attack came back to torment him, he thought it wouldn’t have been so bad if she had just let him die.

The kid in the rain kept walking at a steady pace. He passed a second guard car. The perimeter was even better defended than it had been when Bose did his first drive-around, hours earlier. So what was going on at the warehouse that required all this security? He guessed Findley had been alarmed by the news that Orrin had escaped from State Care. Probably he was afraid some federal agency might issue a warrant for the premises. But what he was doing to counter that threat remained an open question.

Bose hoped Turk would simply give up and go home; failing that, Bose might have to intercept him and warn him away. Too much time was passing and he still had Orrin Mather to worry about. He sped up a little, avoiding streetlights and keeping to the Dumpster-and-delivery lanes whenever possible.

The next time he came within sight of Turk the kid was only a dozen yards away, standing still. He was south of the Findley warehouse by a couple of blocks and there were no guards in sight. Bose ducked back as the kid surveyed the street in both directions, seeing nothing but locked doors, shabby sidewalks, the endlessly falling rain. The kid was nervous, shifting the heavy plastic bag he carried from hand to hand. Bose was about to step out, either to confront him or to scare him off, when the kid suddenly turned left, cradling the bag in his arms, and ran between two darkened buildings.

Shit,
Bose thought. He followed quickly but cautiously, hoping the kid wouldn’t be spotted and get them both killed.

But the kid was quick and, at least in the tactical sense, smart. He knew the neighborhood was riddled with alleys and laneways, many of them poorly lit, and he managed to make his way undetected to the street on which the warehouse had its front entrance. That street was well watched, but Turk sidled up between two empty parked cars, dashed across the open space in a particularly heavy gust of rain, and made it unseen to the mouth of another alley. It wasn’t the front of the warehouse Turk wanted access to, Bose surmised. It was the back lane with the loading bays. Just like in Orrin’s story.

Bose followed along the same route, feeling absurdly conspicuous. He reminded himself that his only objective was to keep the kid from making a huge mistake and getting himself or someone else hurt. The problem was, any attempt he made to approach Turk at this point might startle him into unpredictable action. Nevertheless, he had to make contact.

He was weaponless but he brought some skills of his own to the situation. Unlike the hacked pharmaceuticals the longevity-sellers traded in, the Martian treatment suppressed and enhanced certain neurological functions. It suppressed spontaneous aggression, which meant Bose was what people called “slow to anger.” It enhanced empathy and it suppressed fear. It also improved visual acuity and reaction time, which had helped gain Bose his police academy reputation as a first-rate sharpshooter.

Turk moved up the laneway to the place where it intersected the alley behind the warehouse. He crouched down, almost invisible in his black poncho, darting his head out to see what was happening. Bose used the opportunity to move up behind him.

Now or never. “Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low but just loud enough to be heard over the rattle of the rain.

The kid jerked out of his crouch and whirled around. Bose held his hands out, palms up. “I’m unarmed,” he said, taking a couple of steps closer. “And I’m not one of
them
.”

“Who are you, then?” the kid managed. He had the jug of methyl hydrate in it in his right hand, holding it so he could swing it like a mace.

“I used to be a cop,” Bose said. “You’re Turk Findley, right? The owner’s son?” The kid said nothing, but his unsurprised silence served as confirmation. “All I want,” Bose said, “is for us both to turn around and get out of here. Whatever you’re thinking of doing, it’s not practical. Not tonight.”

Rain guttered down from the kid’s sodden black hair into the collar of his poncho. He looked at Bose through the downpour. Then he said in a small, flat voice, “Behind you.”

“What?”

“They’re behind you.”

The kid crouched down hastily. So did Bose. He risked a look back. There were two men coming up the alley, wraithlike in the rain. They hadn’t seen Bose or Turk yet—the angle of the wall had hidden them—but unless they turned around they surely would.

Turk seemed reassured by Bose’s reaction. “This way,” he said.

Bose had no choice but to follow him around the corner into the back lane, where they would almost certainly be spotted … but no, there was a narrow gap between a green steel Dumpster and the ledge of a loading bay, just big enough for the two of them to squeeze into. Bose tried to get a good look around during the brief moment he was exposed. The bays of the Findley warehouse were half a block to his left. Three cars were parked in the alley and a white unmarked van had pulled up to one of the bays. The loading bay door had been rolled up, spilling a rectangle of light into the darkness. Bose tried to fix the scene in his mind, calculating relative distances and possible avenues of escape. Then he hunkered down next to Turk, who was shaking like a wet dog.

The two guards came up the alley and into the open. Bose caught a glimpse of their yellow rain jackets as they passed the Dumpster, heading back to the open loading dock. The presence of the van explained what was going on at the warehouse, Bose thought. Findley had gotten nervous and was cleansing the building of contraband. There were boxes stacked floor to ceiling in the back of the van—probably chemicals from Lebanon or Syria, bound for black-market bioreactors.

Bose decided he needed a better look. He went from a crouch to a kneeling position and then down onto his belly. The asphalt under him was wet but still warm from the heat of the day; it smelled like some kind of oil-drenched animal. He snaked forward and peered past the rim of the Dumpster. All he had for camouflage was his dark hair and dark skin.

He got a good look at the man supervising the loading, a middle-aged man with a haggard expression and a flashlight in his hand. Bose recognized him as the elder Findley. “Your father’s here,” he whispered.

After a pause the kid said, “You know my father?”

“I know him when I see him.”

“Are you going to arrest him?”

“I wish I could. But I’m not a cop anymore. I can’t arrest anybody.”

“Then what are you
doing
here?”

“Helping out a friend. What are
you
doing here?”

No answer.

Bose was about to suggest that they attempt to head back the way they had come—dangerous though that might be—when a fourth car pulled up by the van. The driver got out and climbed onto the concrete loading bay and approached Findley, who gave him a
what now?
look. The driver said something inaudible, pointing back down the alley. Suddenly Findley clapped his hands and began to shout loud enough to be heard over the rattle of the rain, telling the loading crew to finish up and pull in the security perimeter.

Bose checked his watch. The next bus was past due: it would have arrived minutes ago.
Orrin,
he thought. His best guess was that one of Findley’s security men had spotted Orrin Mather and brought the matter to the boss’s attention.

The elder Findley climbed into a car with one of his security guys. The car rolled down the laneway, its wheels splashing Bose and Turk where they crouched in the shadows. Bose saw Turk blinking at the ripples left by the car in the pavement’s skin of rainwater, aware that his father had passed within a few feet of him. Much of the rage that had carried him here seemed to have collapsed into confusion.

More footsteps down the alley behind them: the lookouts had been called in.

“We need to get out of here,” Bose said. He added, “We might need a distraction.”

The kid turned up a near-tearful face. “What are you talking about? What distraction?”

Bose said, “You happen to be carrying anything flammable?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ALLISON’S STORY

Our aircraft could have flown days more without exhausting its supply of fuel, but there was no point in circling aimlessly. Turk found a small, steep island off the southern flank of what had once been the Indonesian archipelago and landed us there. The island was far enough south to be out of range of the falling fragments of the Arch and high enough to protect us from any resulting tsunami. The aircraft came to ground on a fairly gentle slope. The land around us was as blank and poisoned as any other part of the planet, but we could see the ocean to the southwest of us. We could have left the ship and gone outside—there were masks and protective gear in the storage lockers—but there was no reason to do so and it might have been dangerous to attempt it: gale-force winds were blowing steadily, maybe as a result of the monstrous impacts farther north.

We discussed the possibility that the Arch might still be functional, that even in its fractured condition it might still be able to detect Turk and allow us passage to Equatoria. That was almost certainly wishful thinking, however, and it would have been insanely risky to try an approach. As soon as we had landed, the ship detected two more fragments inbound from orbit. We couldn’t see them through the cloud deck, but the impacts created a shock wave that rattled the vessel’s hull even these many hundreds of miles away. An hour later the sea receded from the shore of the island, revealing ancient dead corals and black sand, then came rushing back in a surge that would have been catastrophic had there been any living thing in the path of it.