Burning Paradise

  Sometime after midnight Cassie snuck out to pee, squatting over the sand behind a mile marker. The highway was empty, the desert a vast silence. A quarter moon leaned into the shoulder of the western mountains. Mexico, she thought. Or somewhere farther south. A rendezvous with Leo's father. And what then?

  In the morning they crossed the Colorado River at Topock and pushed west, heading for what Dowd called a "mail drop" somewhere in Los Angeles. Strange how peaceful the desert seemed, Cassie thought. Something about the sunlight, the solemn authority of it. Then through Barstow, where they stopped at a roadside store and Thomas gawked at a terrarium populated by pea- green lizards, and across the San Gabriels into the Los Angeles basin, the distant city white with gneiss and marble. "Where they make movies," Thomas said, and yes, Cassie said, Hollywood wasn't far away, nor were the vast industrial plants that manufactured commercial aircraft, including the planes her little brother excitedly pointed out in the cloudless sky: six- prop passenger aircraft arriving or departing from Los Angeles International Airport, even a few of the new jetliners. The mail drop turned out to be a box- rental place in Vernon, and there was nothing to pick up but a set of export permits and cartage documents that covered the contents of the van— but that was okay, Dowd said; there would be other mail drops along the way, maybe with news from Leo's father. From there they drove south past thriving farms and olive orchards, road signs not just in English but in Spanish and Japanese, enormous federal aqueducts that soared above the road, seasonal- workers' housing complexes with stucco facades in rainbow colors. How much of this would survive, she wondered, if the machine in the back of Dowd's van did what Dowd believed it would do? Because, like any other good and necessary act, destroying the hypercolony might have unintended consequences.

  But she thought of her parents as she had last seen them. Murdered, though they were guilty of no crime but the possession of unauthorized knowledge. Her own life distorted, Thomas's future in doubt . . . It wasn't revenge she wanted (though she wanted that too: yes), it was justice. But justice would come at a price. Inevitably. And persons other than herself might be forced to pay it.

  On the radio the local stations were playing villancicos: Christmas carols. Los peces en el río. Hoy en la tierra. Ahead, as the afternoon shadows lengthened, Dowd's van began to slow. They were close to the border now, and they needed a place to stay for the night.

  Back in his Kansas garage, Dowd had thrown open the rear doors of the dusty white van and smiled like an impresario. Cassie, peering into that windowless metallic enclosure, had seen what looked like a piece of hand- wired radio gear about the size of a shipping trunk. Leo said, "That's it?"

  "You don't know what you're looking at," Dowd said. "I don't understand it myself. But it was your daddy who delivered it to me. Your daddy did a lot for me. Bought this garage for me to work and live in. No charge, as long as I was willing to be a soldier when the time came. He delivered this piece of equipment just last summer. Keep it here, he says, and when you get the cue, take it and yourself down to Antofagasta for a meet- up. You showing up, that was the cue. Time to go."

  "All right," Leo said dubiously. "What's it do?"

  "By itself it doesn't do anything. It's part of something bigger. You're not the only soldier in the army, your daddy told me. Other folks'll be coming with other kinds of gear. Pieces of a puzzle. Best if you don't know anything about that. What you don't know, you can't tell. But it's a weapon— part of a weapon. He was pretty clear about that."

  "Doesn't look like a weapon."

  "I trust your daddy's judgment," Dowd said, smirking. "Don't you?"

  They rented two rooms in a Chula Vista motel where fan palms stood like liveried doormen between the swimming pool and the highway. Dowd and Beth took one room, Cassie and Leo and Thomas the other.

  Thomas slept on a roll- out by the door. Cassie and Leo shared the double bed. Thomas was a heavy sleeper, fortunately, and Leo turned on the room's radio at low volume to disguise any other sounds. Noche de paz . . . , some choir whispered. Todo duerme en derredor.

  It was the first time they kissed. It was the first time Cassie touched Leo, the first time she allowed herself to be touched. An exploration, she thought. The exploration of Leo. His mouth tasted of cinnamon and smoke. His hands, she discovered, were generous and wise.

  In the morning they gathered in Dowd's room for a planning session.

  "I've got ID for myself and a commercial permit for transporting radio gear," Dowd said, "so I'm good for the border. You all have identification you haven't used yet, so use it today. Beth can ride with me. But it's too dangerous to cross in a stolen vehicle, even with new plates and a paint job. So we ditch the car and you guys buy yourselves bus tickets, San Diego to Tijuana. We'll meet up at the depot on Avenida Revolución. Leo, you still have that pistol you shot a guy with?"

  Leo gave Eugene Dowd a cold stare. Beth must have told him the story. "Yes."

  "Give it to me."

  Leo didn't move, though his eyes darted to the green duffel bag he had carried all the way from Buffalo.

  "Come on," Dowd said. "What are you gonna do, cross the border with a gun in your luggage? That's just stupid. Give me the pistol and we'll ditch it along with the car."

  "What if I need to protect myself?"

  Beth, standing next to Dowd with a proprietary hand on his arm, said, "You should listen to Eugene. He knows about these things."

  Leo scowled but retrieved the gun from his bag and handed it to Dowd, who checked the safety before tucking it into the waistband of his jeans.

  "One other thing," Dowd said. "I know your daddy gave you my Kansas address, and he told me I should watch out for you if you showed up. That's fine. That's part of the deal. But he didn't say anything about her," Cassie, "or him," (Thomas). "And I'm not real happy about looking after children on this junket, especially when we have a few thousand miles of the Trans-American Highway ahead of us."

  "They don't need you to look after them," Leo said. "They're with me."

  "Well," Dowd said, "leaving them behind isn't safe either, considering they're wanted criminals. I suppose we could shoot them." He smiled to show this was meant as a joke. "But once we're in Mexico you might fix them up with a little hacienda and a cash stake for the duration. Safer for all of us."

  "No!" Thomas said before Leo could answer.

  "Didn't ask your opinion," Dowd said.

  "They're with me," Leo repeated, "at least until I can talk to my father."

  "Yeah, well . . ." Dowd shrugged. "The next mail drop's in Mazatlán. I guess they can tag along that far. But then this business gets serious. Everyone clear on that?"

  They were all clear.

  At the San Ysidro crossing a bored customs agent strolled down the aisle of the Greyhound bus asking desultory questions and examining papers. Cassie sat with Thomas, and for the purpose of the crossing they were brother and sister en route to visit their uncle in Rosarito Beach. The guard gave their documents a cursory look— the Common Passport Accord had made this a formality— and moved on. Neither Cassie and Thomas nor Leo a few rows back, appeared to arouse his suspicion.

  The bus idled a little longer in a cloud of diesel fumes, then grunted into motion. Cassie listened to nearby passengers chatting in in Spanish as they passed under the Port of Entry gates and crossed the brown Tijuana River. "You going to Rosarito?" a woman asked her as the bus pulled into the station on Avenida Revolución. "I heard you say."

  Cassie stood to shuffle out, taking Thomas by the hand. "Rosarito, yes."

  "Very nice! Feliz navidad!"

  Rosarito, no, she thought. No, we're not bound for Rosarito Beach. We're bound for Antofagasta, Chile. We're bound for the Atacama desert. We're bound for the end of the world.

  20

  JOPLIN, MISSOURI

  "WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO INTERCEPT THEM in Sinaloa," Werner Beck said. "Failing that, we'll meet them in Antofagasta."

  He had explained about Chile, about t
he facility the hypercolony had supposedly constructed in the Atacama desert, the beams of high- intensity light. He hadn't seen it himself, but he had talked to an eyewitness, and there was plenty of corroborating evidence: from shipping manifests, from suppliers of industrial parts and rare earths, from inexplicable lacunae in the routes by which commercial aircraft passed from Chile to Bolivia and Brazil. Beck had made a study of it.

  The facility in the desert, he insisted, was the hypercolony's reproductive mechanism. Strike there and you strike at the heart of the beast. Or at least, Nerissa thought, its balls.

  Ethan seemed convinced. Nerissa wasn't, but that didn't matter. What was important was that she might at last be able to put her arms around Thomas and Cassie and shelter them from Beck's militant fantasies.

  While Ethan was showering she sat in the kitchen with Beck and raised a question that had been troubling her. It was about what the sim Winston Bayliss had said, that there was a parasite at work in the hypercolony, that the hypercolony was divided against itself. Could that be true? If not, why had Bayliss been attacked in Ethan's farm house by a different party of sims?

  "It's possible," Beck said. "There are certain signs."

  "Such as?"

  "All the cultures from Ethan's ice cores are identical and compatible. But we've cultured fresher strains, and the two samples sometimes compete for resources in vitro until one is eliminated. But I'd hesitate to draw any conclusions from that."

  "Still, what Bayliss said—"

  "Nothing a sim says is trustworthy, Mrs. Iverson. And all warfare is based on deception."

  "You're quoting Sun Tzu."

  "I suppose I am. Of course, what emanates from the hypercolony isn't even a conscious lie."

  Nerissa's busy mind turned up a different quote, from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson: But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons."So it is possible there could be some kind of internal conflict going on."

  "Sure, but it's impossible to know."

  Ethan came into the room fully dressed and with his suitcase in hand. "Packed and ready."

  They waited while Beck built a fire in the living- room fireplace and systematically burned the contents of his files, including Dr. Wyndham's ghastly photographs. Nothing must be left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy.

  Beck drove one hundred and fifty miles to the international airport in Kansas City, where he paid for long- term parking in a lot where the car wouldn't be disturbed for at least three weeks. At the terminal he booked seats on the next available flight to Mazatlán. Not long after dark, a gleaming six- prop aircraft lofted them into

  the night sky. Nerissa, sleepless in a window seat, watched prairie towns pass beneath the plane like luminous maps of a world she could no longer inhabit and which her traveling companions had sworn to dismantle. Several times she caught Beck looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite read— suspicion? Curiosity? As if he wondered what secret motive she might be concealing.

  But her motives weren't secret, not secret at all. Let Beck conduct his war against a hostile abstraction; let Ethan join him, if that was what Ethan wanted to do. She would follow a certain distance down that road. But she was fighting a different war, for a different cause. And maybe Beck understood that truth about her. And maybe that was why she was so frightened of him.

  21

  MAZATLÁN

  THE MEXICAN HOLIDAYS HAD PREVENTED Eugene Dowd from checking the prearranged mail drop for three days now, and he resented it.

  Mazatlán was a pretty town, but the concept of "silent night" was lost on the locals. The Christmas Eve street party had nearly deafened him. Live bands, fireworks, noisy crowds in the Mercado, after which everything shut up tight for Christmas Day. The mail drop was just an ordinary storefront mailbox service on a side street near the Centro Histórico, where Eugene was supposed to check a certain box number before proceeding to Antofagasta. But the business had been consistently closed, nothing to see but a locked door and a cardboard sign on which the words CERRADO POR NAVIDAD were printed in green crayon.

  So he had been closeted in a three- story tourist hotel with Beth, Leo Beck, and what he continued to think of as the two kids, Cassie and Thomas. (Cassie wasn't much younger than Beth, but her flat face and unimpressive figure made her look like a child to Eugene.) He shared his room with Beth, which helped pass the empty hours, but Beth's charms had already begun to wear thin: she was clingy, easily frightened, and not half as smart as she liked to pretend.

  Today Mazatlán was finally open for business. Eugene left the

  hotel at ten in the morning and began walking toward the historical part of town, Leo Beck tagging along behind him. Eugene would have preferred to do this alone, but Leo, whose poorly- concealed hostility toward Eugene probably reflected the haste with which he had been dumped by Beth, had insisted on coming with him. And since Leo was Werner Beck's son— it would be a mistake to forget that— Eugene had grudgingly agreed.

  The street was crowded with the local golf- cart taxis called pulmonias, most of them ferrying tourists to and from the Zona Dorada. The sky was faultlessly blue above the brick- and- stucco storefronts, the temperature 70 degrees Fahrenheit and gliding steadily higher. The sheer pleasantness of the day was an invitation to relax, which Eugene was careful to decline. Everything he had seen and done in the Atacama, plus Werner Beck's lectures on the nature of what he called the hypercolony, had been Eugene's education in the operating principles of the world. All the pious high- school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking. These kids he was traveling with, they claimed to know that; but did they? No. Not the way he knew it.

  They were within a block of the mail drop when Leo grabbed Eugene's arm and said, "Wait, hold on. . . ."

  "What is it?"

  Leo had come to a full stop and was squinting back down the avenue at the traffic of tourists and locals. Eugene hated being made conspicuous, especially in a strange place when he was in a state of high vigilance, and passing pedestrians were already craning their necks in an instinctive effort to see what ever this excitable turista was gawking at. He wished Leo had inherited even a fraction of his father's sensible caution.

  "Thought I saw someone," Leo said, sounding a little sheepish now.

  "Yeah? Who?"

  "I don't know. A face. A familiar face."

  "Familiar how? Someone you recognize?"

  "No. I guess not." Leo shrugged with obvious embarrassment. "Nobody I could name. Just a feeling, like, you know, I've seen that guy somewhere before. . . ."

  "A guy?"

  "If I had to guess, I'd say an American. Not much of a tan. Forty or fifty years old."

  "Okay," Eugene said. "I'll take that under advisement." Probably it meant nothing. Probably Leo was just nervous. But Eugene was carrying a pistol— the same pistol he had taken from Leo before they crossed the border, and which Eugene had brought into Mexico in a concealed compartment built into the dash of the van. It was tucked into a sling he had made from torn pieces of an old shirt attached to his belt, hidden under the XL tee he had worn to obscure its presence, and he was conscious of its weight.

  Eugene's father had taught him to shoot. The Dowds were farmers from way back, well- acquainted with long guns, but Eugene's father had also been fascinated by pistols and he'd been an experienced target- shooter. He had owned a fully- registered antique Colt revolver, which he had treasured and which he had eventually used to take his own life after Eugene's mother lost her fight with pancreatic cancer. Eugene blamed his father's grief for the suicide, not the weapon. Eugene felt a sentimental attachment to the gun and wished he had inherited it; but he had been in Chile when his father used it to blow
a half- dollar- sized hole in his left temple, and the Colt had been handed over to the police for lawful disposal. At the moment Eugene didn't even have a license to carry. He had applied back in Amarillo, but by that time there were too many DUIs on his record. The laws around gun possession were annoyingly strict even in Texas.

  The fact was, Eugene had come back from the Atacama kind of fucked up. How do you process an experience like the one he'd had in the Chilean desert? Finding both his parents dead, his mother of cancer and his father of .45- caliber self- administered euthanasia, had only compounded the problem. For a while it had seemed to Eugene that he was fated to end up a chronic drunk, pissing away his dole money in a secondhand Fleetwood trailer home, and that had been unsettlingly okay with him. The unexpected advent of Werner Beck was what changed everything. Or, no, not Beck himself, though Beck's can- do attitude was bracing— it was the prospect of taking action, of recalibrating the mysteries of the Atacama as a personal attack and bending himself in the direction of revenge. Of going back to Chile, not as a victim but as a soldier. With other soldiers beside him and a suitable weapon in his hand. That was another promise Beck had made: there would be a weapon, one to which the green- on- the- inside- men and the spiders- with- faces were uniquely vulnerable.