“Oh, I believe it.” Carlucci raised his binoculars again; the crowd was still climbing the long slow slope of the hill, but they would be there in less than ten minutes. “Bolton, you drive. Take the two meanest-looking GAFEs with you. Wedge Roth between them in the back seat; Castro will bring her to you in a second.” Bolton was gone in an instant. Carlucci said, “Castro, get moving. I’m officially remanding the prisoner to the Department of the Future, as of this second.”
“Thanks. If you need somewhere to be, Dad’s got room for hundreds. Bring your families. Even if I’m gone, he’ll let you in if I tell him to.”
“I couldn’t—”
“You sure could. Your family too, ’kay? If you don’t bring them, Dad will make you go get them anyway. Food, a roof, a safe bed, and plenty of people working to keep it that way. You won’t get any better offer, trust me. Now you go stall, and I’ll go get our terrorist, and I’ll see you at Castle Castro.” Bambi raced down the hall to the interrogation room. “Mensche, sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got to relocate the prisoner, mob on the way, and they’re close, get details from Carlucci.” She grabbed Ysabel by the hand, saying, “This way, now.”
At the Hummer, she pushed the girl into the arms of one GAFE; the second one jumped in immediately, so that they had the prisoner wedged and seated. Bambi hopped into the front seat. She hadn’t had time to grab her bag, but there were probably ten “just in case Bambi comes to visit” closets at Castle Castro.
Bolton said,
“No levante su cabeza, por favor.”
Ysabel Roth gulped, nodded, and leaned forward so that she was completely below the level of the windows; one GAFE beside her tossed a couple of blankets and a towel in a disorderly heap on top of her. “All right, I hope you know the fastest way,” Bolton said.
“I know the best. Just keep this thing on the road and don’t outrun the sprayers on the tires. We have enough antiseptic juice to make it there?”
“Yep, I filled up when we got back.”
Mensche burst into the garage, waving his arm in a rapid roll:
go, go, go, go, go!
Bolton started the Hummer, and they rolled forward; Mensche ran ahead of them and yanked down on the manual chain to raise the door.
They lurched into the drive behind the office park, away from the main public parking area, and Bolton gunned it, turning away from Aero Drive. “It’s near the Harbor,” Bambi said.
“Yeah, I know, I’ll turn back by going another way I know, but I’m hoping we won’t be—”
Something made a clank and a thud; everyone jumped. “That’s a bullet being stopped by the Kevlar curtains under the body panels,” Bolton said. He threw the Hummer in a tight turn around a couple of dead cars and was on a main road, running flat out; another
clang-thud!
from the rear door announced a second shot.
“Hang on,” Bolton said, and threw the Hummer hard around another turn, down a ramp into a different office-building parking lot; he circled three-quarters of the way around the building, climbed a ramp on the other side, and shot around a long, arcing road. “We were probably out of range, but why take chances? Now I’m going to double us back onto Aero, a nice safe mile and a half from the office, and with a couple rises in the road between us and them. If the tires and the luck hold, we’ll be down to the Harbor in less than fifteen minutes. Castro, can you explain that to our two soldiers? The only Spanish I know is for making arrests.”
She snorted. “Dad has pretenses of Old Californianess. He was too proud of his heritage as a descendant of the conquistadors to let his daughter learn Spanish. I don’t suppose either of them knows French, Russian, or German.”
A muffled voice said, “My Spanish is fine. Can I sit up? It’s hot under here.”
“Wait till we’re on Aero,” Bambi said, “but please explain now for the soldiers. They must be confused as hell.”
Ysabel Roth spoke for a short while and answered a couple of questions. Then one GAFE spoke to her for a couple of minutes, and she translated, “Hey, they say that being in the GAFEs means always being as confused as hell.”
“Our kind of outfit.” Bolton slowed as they approached the Harbor; more and more wrecks and junk lay in the road. “Ms. Roth, get down and stay down; we’re going slow enough to be a good target, and it’s always possible that someone had a working CB or something and we might be ambushed.”
Once, as they passed an apartment block, people ran out toward the Hummer from the driver’s side, but the GAFE on that side lowered his window and showed them his weapon, and they stepped back. “Just need food for the baby,” one of the men yelled. “Just need some help.”
They kept rolling, and Bambi tried to think of anything else they could have done. She couldn’t seem to come up with anything.
Harrison Castro had been careful about not letting anything important about Castle Castro leak into the media, despite a whirlwind of attention while it was being built. The outer surfaces were thin brick-and-concrete facades that looked fake-medieval, with far too much glass to be defensible; inside that relatively fragile box there were what amounted to concrete bunkers, with recessed steel shutters to cover the windows as needed.
If anyone tries to shoot the place up,
he had often explained to her,
all that Hollywood-movie-castle crap will be blown into a heap of rubble, but behind it there’s bunkers you’d need
tanks
to take. And that’s the point where the asshole taxers, regulators, interferers, and Democrats find out that I’m an arrogant, practical, effective, energetic bastard disguising himself as an arrogant, pretentious, effete bastard.
Brush had been planted to conceal the turnoff, but Bambi had no trouble guiding Bolton into it. They bumped and rumbled up the apparent temporary dirt road to the first checkpoint. The guard was all business until Bolton lowered the window to talk to him, and Bambi said, “Hi, Mr. Duck!”
The guard was beaming. “Glad to see you home, and hope you’re staying. Are these friends of yours?”
“Terry Bolton here is, and I’d appreciate if you gave him an all-areas pass, and let him come and go as he needs. The rest are a case of bringing my work home with me.”
“You remember the way to the Secure Garage?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll let the house know you’re comin’. Mr. Castro will want to come down and say hi.”
“You still have a working radio or something?”
He grinned and shook his head, then pulled two flags from the holster at his side. “Mr. Castro always thought the world could end, and he made us all learn semaphore. Got a mirror for flashing Morse, too, but we’re being careful not to be conspicuous.”
On the way up the road, Bolton said, “Uh, his name is really Mr. Duck?”
“He was the only guy named Donald around when I was little, and I couldn’t pronounce Przeworski-Abdulkashian, but my father was not about to have me calling an adult by his first name, so I couldn’t call him Donald either. Hence . . .”
“Mr. Duck. He seemed to like it.”
“I was an awful kid but he thought I was cute.”
Bambi directed the biohazard Hummer through a complex, circuitous approach to the house along more than three miles of winding dirt roads. “What are all those branch roads, anyway?” Bolton asked. “Guest houses?”
“Some of them. Some are strongpoints, and some are both. And a lot are dead ends that are easy to cover from the house.”
“This place
is
a castle, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Did I mention my father is a bit eccentric?”
When they came around the last curve into the parking area in front of the Secure Garage, Harrison Castro was already there waiting for them, his shock of white hair billowing over his high forehead, bandito mustache curled up by his immense toothy grin, and in his around-the-Castle clothes—loose blue tunic and pantaloons, black boots, and an open, cowled red robe that made him look like he had escaped from the set of
Star Wars for the Color-blind.
“ ’Scuse my having a warm family-values moment while you stop giggling,” Bambi told Bolton, popping her door and running to her father.
After a long hug, the older Castro said, “Well, I know why you didn’t call ahead. You’d better introduce me to everyone else.”
Bambi explained quickly, and Castro shook everyone’s hand, even Ysabel Roth’s. “Bambi says you’ve come over to our side, and you’re trying to help with information?”
“Yes, sir, I don’t know what—I mean, I sort of—uh, I have been trying to—”
The girl looked as if she’d been punched in the gut, her face pale and sick, and abruptly she fell down in the parking lot. Bambi and Bolton rolled her over. Her pupils were dilated but the same size; her breathing was harsh, deep, and irregular; there were flecks of foam around her mouth, and little twitches in the muscles of her face, but her arms and legs lay still and limp.
“Well, that’s twice,” Bambi said.
“And both times when a stranger said something to her about defecting,” Bolton pointed out. “Maybe Daybreak really does have a mind-control virus or something.”
Harrison Castro turned back from where he’d been giving orders to a servant. “We’ve got four doctors sheltering with us, and I think one of them is a neurologist. And we have a clinic inside. We’ll patch her up.”
“Is there anything you don’t already have here, Dad?”
“No lawyers. Figured I won’t need them. A baron makes his own law.” He had his same old sly smile. It made Bambi edgy; Dad spoke too much truth in jest.
THE NEXT DAY. CHEVY CHASE , MARYLAND. 4:30 A.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.
“About two hours to dawn,” Lenny said, waking Heather. “Time to get moving.”
They made last use of the generator-driven pumps and auxiliary propane system, taking hot showers and fixing a big, hot breakfast. Sherry ate with them, saying nothing, but when they had finished, she said, “I’ll go with you, if one of you will go with me to get my hiking boots from Stan’s closet.”
Heather went with her, and because it seemed to make sense, she kept her hand on Sherry’s shoulder the whole time, as the young woman stepped around both the bodies and found boots, socks, and a big warm sweater. “Christmas last year,” she whispered, as she pulled it on.
With a half-sob, half-cry, Sherry turned back for a moment and grabbed two pictures from Stan’s desk, slipping them into the big pockets of the sweater. Heather held her for a moment till her sobs subsided, and they went out, not looking at the bodies.
Lenny had packed bags for Heather and himself, and after a last visit to “what’s probably the last working toilet in Chevy Chase, you can say you were here before they put up the plaque,” as Lenny explained it, they folded Lenny’s mountain racing wheelchair.
Down the stairs, Heather carried Lenny—he weighed less than a hundred pounds—and Sherry managed the folded wheelchair. They trotted back upstairs for the packs as Lenny sat in the dark lobby behind the front desk, with a path of retreat through three doorways, and the machine pistol in his hand.
“How’d you find him?” Sherry asked.
“Through work. We’re not in the same office but now and then we had to talk to each other.”
“He’s very cool. You’re so lucky.”
Oh, Christ, I’m no good at this social stuff. Do I ask her about Stan?
“Thank you,” she said.
“You both work for the government, for like, the army and stuff, or you’re spies or something?” Sherry grabbed up her own pack and Lenny’s, leaving Heather the single large one she was planning to take.
Heather pulled it on. “Yeah, I guess it shows.”
“Kind of. Not too many people have all those pictures of Republicans on their walls, or quite so many guns, or a big poster of a tank in the front room.”
“Actually it’s an armored fighting vehicle.”
“And
very
few women—even if they’re Lenny’s girlfriend—would know that difference,” Sherry added, smiling. “I’m glad to have you guys to walk out with, really. Didn’t mean to sound critical. I was just leading up to a question. If you know, and if it’s okay to tell me, you know? Did somebody do this to us, or did it just, like, happen?”
Heather checked one more time; Lenny had accidentally acquired a perfect weapon, a rebuilt M4 with the plastic parts replaced with good wood and metal, and all surfaces plated or anodized, about as Daybreak-resistant a gun as anyone could have made. Of course, there would be trouble later on as so much ammunition was reported to be deteriorating, but at least yesterday Lenny’s H&K had been working just fine.
She just hoped she would turn out, if necessary, to be as good a gun-fighter as this was a fighting gun.
“We should get going,” she said. “The answer to your question is we don’t know if it was an enemy action yet, or something that just sort of happened to happen, but whatever it was, the thing to do is get the country back to functioning.”
“Good enough.”
They went down the stairs quickly and quietly. “Nothing’s moved out on the street since you left,” Lenny said. “I vote for going as quick as we can, all the way south in one fast trip.”
“Makes sense to me,” Heather said.
“I’m just along for the trip,” Sherry said. “You know, you’re the first people I’ve ever seen who just
have
guns—not like showing them off the way the gangsta wannabes do, just like, it’s a tool is all. Right now, I wish I was that way.”
“There’re three spares in my pack,” Lenny said, “all loaded and ready. That’s why it was so heavy. Heather, when we’re going through open spots, in daylight, maybe you can give Sherry a fast course.”
“ ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Shooting People,’ ” Sherry said. “Sounds good to me.”
For the hour before the sun came up, they hurried south along Connecticut Avenue, occasionally having to dodge around clusters of abandoned cars but mostly able to just proceed quickly.
“Aren’t you worried about snipers?” Sherry said, after a while.