On a Clear Day

  “Right in front of you?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Weird.”

  “No, not weird—just like there’s no real life left for some of these people,” I said. “Where did you get the cheeseburgers? Room service?”

  “Javier’s hooked up with a guy.” Anja was working the tablet furiously. “He got food for us. Javier ordered something funky, like lobster Oldburg or something like that. I wouldn’t eat a lobster.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re ugly,” Anja said.

  “What are you typing?”

  “I’m getting on my mad voice about the rumors,” Anja said. “I’m saying that it’s people on the left who are spreading them.”

  “That’s a lie, too, right?” I said. “It’s just us?”

  “It’s just me, mostly,” Anja said. “But more people are coming online and registering their complaints. A lie is a terrible thing to waste.”

  Wild. The girl who could tell if anybody else was lying could lie like a champ. Loved it.

  Copping some downtime. I got my room assignment from Anja and a key card. I found the room and fell across the bed. The whole Miami scene was depressing me. I finally knew why people didn’t fight back against C-8, or why they hadn’t fought back against dictators in the past. The shit was just too hard.

  I almost fell asleep, but I kept thinking about the girl we had dragged into the car. Somewhere, somehow, I was going to have to figure out what her life was about. Then I was going to have to find her and explain it to her. Knock on the door. I got up because I thought it was Anja. It was Michael.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Okay, Drego knows some pretty scary people,” I said. I moved aside and let him into the room.

  “What do your models say?” Michael asked as he sat on the edge of the bed.

  “None of them look good,” I said. I sat on the bed next to him and flipped open the laptop. I searched through the files until I found the ones modeling Sayeed’s probable attacks, and scanned them. “So far they all show a lot of killing, not that many variations, and C-8 coming out the winner in all of them.”

  “You going to come up with something different?”

  “I’m going to try,” I said. He moved slightly so that our legs were touching. I looked up at him and he moved his leg away.

  No, Michael, I can’t switch between worlds that easily.

  “You look like you could use some sleep,” he said.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Drego wants my models in”—I checked the time—“forty-five minutes.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

  To sleep, to dream, and there’s the fucking rub.

  19

  Back to the tablet. Look at the models. Look at the rules I laid out for Sayeed, and the ones for Drego. The most probable scenario, by about 16 percent, was that Sayeed would attack exactly as Drego had thought. He wouldn’t vary even if he knew Drego’s people were waiting for him. It had worked for him in Morocco, and he would stick with it.

  Looked at the maps of Miami. The city was divided into three large sections: gated communities with subdivision names like Garden of Eden and Jalel Valley; the Casino section that stretched from the waterfront to a position almost abutting the Gaters’ section; and then the rest of the city where the poor lived.

  The poor section was itself divided into two sections, with a row of low but dense shrubbery separating them. I ran the maps through again to see which of the two outside lanes Sayeed could take to most effect. I picked one with only a slightly better possibility of being right. It wasn’t going to be very useful.

  Ran everything again, finally realizing I wasn’t inputting anything different and would come up with the same results. The phone rang. Drego. There’s a meeting in Michael’s suite on the third floor.

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  He said it like he was giving me an order. I thought of the girl he had hit in the street. Maybe that kind of crap turned Mei-Mei on. I didn’t go for it.

  Michael’s room. There were about forty guys, all white, in the room. I looked again and saw that some of the guys weren’t white, but they looked white, even the black ones. It looked like a football team. They were mostly built, some of them were good-looking, all serious as shit. Michael was talking.

  “Each of you has a squad of eight fighters. I hope it doesn’t go that far, but we need to interrupt Sayeed’s grandstanding and the buzz it can create. The intelligence, from Drego and Dahlia, is that Sayeed is looking to make a move early Wednesday morning, most likely before the sun comes up. Drego will be in overall command and will lay out the plans for you. If Sayeed does have a lightning force, a unit going from spot to spot to disrupt the fighting, it’ll be Tristan’s responsibility, and the guys he has with him, to neutralize that threat. Drego?”

  “There are three ways into the inner city,” Drego started. “We can’t be sure which way he’ll try or if he’ll try to come in all of them. Dahlia, do you have an opinion?”

  “In the past he’s attacked on the sides, so I think he’ll continue that operating method,” I said. My throat was going dry. “The tablet model suggests one of the entries over the others as being the most advantageous to him. But if he doesn’t trust his foot soldiers, then he’s liable to send them into the riskier way, and save his own guys—the guys from Morocco—for the better one.”

  I looked around the room. They weren’t following me! I realized that the projections I was making didn’t make sense to them. They wanted clearer answers than I was giving them. No, not clearer, simpler.

  “People, these are video-game examples. In the best-case-scenario breakdown, people are going to die. People are going to be blown away and end their lives not knowing what happened to them. Everything we know, or find out, or guess correctly, is just going to make it more likely that we survive.”

  “That works for me, Dahlia,” Tristan said. “Sometimes survival is all you got going for yourself.”

  “We’ll go to the sites Dahlia has mapped out and take a look,” Michael said.

  20

  “Check this out! Check this out!” Mei-Mei’s voice went up three tones. We were gathered around Javier’s van in the Belle Harbor section. Javier had put a television monitor on the tailgate.

  On the screen, a pale-looking man with a big head was talking to a group of younger men and a young woman to his left.

  “Who is he?” Drego.

  “Florida’s lieutenant governor,” Javier answered. “I wonder what he’s up to.”

  The woman came up, whispered something to the lieutenant governor, and then stepped back.

  After a voice-over announced who he was, Lt. Governor Adrian Rogers smiled into the camera and relaxed his shoulders. “This afternoon I spoke to the board members and the executive committee of Natural Farming. There have been some fairly persistent rumors about some bizarre connection between Natural Farming, one of the oldest companies in North America, and some black terrorist group from North Africa. I’ve known Tom Pettaway over at Natural for more than thirty years. He’s a good family man, a Marlins fan, and he supports the Seminoles. What more can you ask for? The rumors aren’t true, so I asked what Tom and the board made of them.”

  He wiped the beads of sweat away from his upper lip with his hand as he went on.

  “He was straight up with me, as I fully expected him to be. And he pointed out something that we can all take home with us today. Which is that anybody can say that they don’t want people going hungry in their country, but it’s another thing to actually implement a plan to end hunger throughout the world. Natural Farming is a very well-respected American company. An American company that proposed, merely proposed, holding a demonstration in North Africa. In six months, the company would turn what had been a country on the brink of starvation into a food exporter. That’s quite a turnaround, if you ask me. In the wake of this offer—one that has been tentatively accepted by the
Moroccan government, by the way—several groups have claimed that they, and not National Farming, first came up with the idea.

  “In a way, I guess that a terrorist group taking credit for something a democratic company is doing is a compliment. Natural Farming won’t and can’t partner with any group or organization that has terrorist ties or even a shaky reputation. I only hope and pray, for the sake of the people of Morocco, that this group has the decency to distance itself from Natural Farming and allow the people of the African region they claim to represent a path to the kind of living they truly deserve. The good people of Florida have nothing to fear from this group and certainly nothing to fear from Natural Farming. My office will issue a press release later giving more details. Thank you.”

  Rogers wheeled quickly away from the camera, and the two men who had been standing behind him began handing out a written statement. He didn’t take questions.

  “He’s sealed it!” Anja said. “He’s publicly denied the connection between Natural Farming and terrorists but established the connection between Natural Farming and the North Africans! No one is going to believe that load of crap.”

  “You thinking we can pack it in?” Michael asked. “If people are making the connection between Natural Farming and Sayeed—and they are—I don’t think they’ll have the balls to think they can sneak a takeover past the public.”

  “They’ll just wait a few weeks and try something else,” Tristan said. “Maybe run a game about how much they’re helping the Moroccans.”

  “Then we’ll go after them again,” Michael said. “But the important thing is that we don’t have to get into a street battle and end up killing a lot of people.”

  “Yo, Michael, how the hell do you think Sayeed is going to react?” Drego asked. “You’re looking at what Natural Farming is thinking and what you’re thinking, but what about Sayeed? Us pushing Natural Farming to back down leaves Sayeed high and dry. If he just folds his tents and walks away, Natural Farming doesn’t have to give him nothing, and maybe they’ll even get some local police to mess with him. He’s got nothing to gain by walking away. They just forced him to make a move—what did Mei-Mei call it?”

  “Zugzwang,” Mei-Mei chimed in. “He’s got to make a move. If he’s cut off from Natural Farming and has to go home empty-handed, he’s going to lose face in Morocco. If he acts on his own, he’s taking a big risk of being ineffective, but he’s got to do something.”

  “I don’t think so.” Javier. “What’s he got to gain?”

  “He’s been promised three-dimensional printers,” I said. “And he needs to maintain his reputation as a badass. Right now, all he sees out there is Natural Farming walking away from him. He doesn’t just want the alliance, he needs it.”

  Silence.

  The van door opened and a blond boy stuck his head out and said that there was some movement along the upper park line, about a mile and a half away.

  “Call Sayeed’s phone and see what you get.” Javier took a quick glance at Michael. “If his phone is on at all, it will react by connecting with a tower, maybe even two or three towers. We can trace that within a few hundred yards.”

  “There’s lot of interference …,” the blond boy started.

  “Do it!” The veins in Javier’s neck began to throb.

  There had been interference all afternoon, and we were sure that C-8 was messing with the radio signals for the Internet. Javier sent out the strong signal and watched his monitors.

  “You think he’s actually going to attack?” Michael.

  “You betting that he won’t?” Drego shot back.

  I could see the doubt on Michael’s face. I felt it too. It would have been easier to believe that the problem had been solved.

  Tristan told us to grab some cover just as Blond Boy returned. He said that there were two groups on the move. One was coming toward our position, and the other was moving left.

  I was feeling sick. An armored vehicle pulled up. Its camouflage was light and medium brown. Desert disguise, but we were in Miami. The vehicle stopped, and the gun mounted on its rear moved menacingly from left to right. It looked like some huge robot animal. I thought of a praying mantis.

  My stomach turned, and things seem to slow down around me. Javier beckoned me over, and I watch as he powered his wheelchair into the back of the vehicle.

  I didn’t want to go in, but I didn’t want to stay outside either.

  The combat command van was dark except for the orange light that bathed the interior sides. The dials were all weird green. Javier lit up a computer screen, and I saw the layout of the area. It was fantastic, a combination of a map projection and photographic images.

  “I can direct things from in here,” Javier said. “You can help if you want.”

  “How do you feel?” I asked as the driver pulled a lever and closed the rear hatch.

  “As if I want to do something about Ellen,” Javier said. “Something personal. Something with a lot of violence.”

  “I don’t think I should be in here,” I said. I was thinking again. Nervous, but thinking again. “It doesn’t seem real. I don’t want to confuse the reality of this scene with a computer projection. This isn’t a game.”

  “In a way …” Javier’s voice trailed off. I thought he was going to say that in a way it was a computer game. I was feeling that, too, and I didn’t like the feeling.

  “Kevin.” Javier touched the driver’s shoulder. “Get the door. Dahlia’s leaving.”

  It was harder to breathe outside than it was in the van. The air was heavy with humidity. In the distance, the morning sun played along the edges of the squat buildings, bending the rays so that the outlines of the decrepit housing lost their shape. I saw Drego surrounded by a bunch of lean black guys. Some wore brown-and-yellow armbands. These were the local dudes whom Drego had already said we couldn’t trust.

  Anja listening to her phone. She was nodding. Then she reached out and touched my arm. I looked at her and saw sadness in her smile. She said she was going into the van with Javier. We were both out of our element.

  With the sound of the first gunfire, the guys around Drego quickly parted, creating space between them. This was how you handled a drive-by shooting, I thought. No use letting one bullet hit two guys. Mei-Mei was with them, in the middle, wearing a short skirt that covered the top half of her fat thighs. She saw me looking at her, and for a moment we tried to make contact. Then I turned away.

  Tristan was dragging barriers across the wide street using a jeep. It was all so crude. Translation: It was no longer a matter of board meetings or prostaglandin levels. It was about wood and metal to hide behind, steel vehicles and men with death and dying on their minds. I was scared out of my mind.

  21

  The battle. Down the street, less than a quarter mile away, they were coming. Young men, boys, wannabes with assault rifles, scrambling like dark insects past the parked cars, the streetlamps, the garbage Dumpsters, toward us. They saw the barriers and stopped. Then they spread out across the street. Two of them were setting something up on the sidewalk that rimmed the park. A shot came from my left, and one of the boys near the park stood and tried to run. He was limping badly and soon fell. I hoped he was hit only in the leg. I hoped he wasn’t going to die. My mouth went dry.

  The raiders were retreating, scattering with the first wounded warrior. Then, suddenly, there was a roar that grew quickly. From where I crouched, kneeling on one knee, I saw a cloud of smoke headed toward us. It was twenty feet high, then thirty and still rising. It was a smokescreen that loomed like a friggin’ nightmare in the distance, and it was growing. It became a moving cloud of black smoke that rose up a hundred or so feet, maybe more. At the base of the smoke, there were lights and grills.

  They were driving cars toward us, shooting from the windows and improvised holes in the tops of the vehicles. It was insane, until I heard the first bullets hit the steel barriers that Tristan had put up. The bullets rattled loudly against the bar
riers. The ones that missed the barriers, that whined and buzzed over our heads, were scarier.

  The cars were zooming toward us. I thought they wanted to crash into the barriers, and I wondered if they were being driven automatically. The cars seemed too old, and I saw black hands firing from the windows. No one was firing back at them, and I didn’t know what was going on.

  Then, simultaneously, there were noises from our side. From either side, there were two somethings being shot across the road like the old pictures of snakes striking that I had seen in National Geographic Classics. They shot across, the ones from the park side going all the way over the wide road, the ones from the street side going three quarters of the way. The somethings were black and weird-looking. And then they began to expand, and I saw that they were huge coils of wire that expanded, and tangled, and bucked as if they were alive. When the first car hit the wire, it pushed it forward, then stopped, shuddered, and slowly was being pushed back. A dark figure jumped out of the car, then turned and ran as he realized that the wire, stretched by the car, was now recoiling toward him.

  The wire hit the kid, lifted him off the street, and held him jerking spasmodically some fifteen feet above the tarred street.

  There were more shots from the cars. They had all stopped and were shooting through the barbed wire. A few shots from our side had a deeper, more ominous sound. There were people running away. The smoke was clearing; they were trying to back the cars away. A few bodies lay on the ground just beyond the wire; a few more were caught in the wire. I was crying and I couldn’t stop myself. Nothing made this right. The numbers could add up to what they needed to be and this would not be right. No, God, this would not be right!