Midnight Empire (17 page)

The service held for Dupont was widely attended and coincided with his Washington funeral. It was a simple affair—nobody spoke but the chaplain—yet it was clear that people had made the effort to come, staying long after their shifts or arriving well before, even coming in when they weren't rostered. By the time the service concluded, hundreds had gathered. It was a rare event, an on-base ceremony for a death at war, and they all felt the urge to be there.

As the crowd began to break up word went around: Airman Billy Malone's wife Rachel was certain that she'd been followed by a white van, all the way with her two kids from Aloha Park to their Desert Shores home. Billy said he'd told his wife about what was potentially occurring, the killers, but he didn't believe that she'd imagine being followed. To forestall a kidnapping, the FBI had put them on the first plane to Rachel's mother in Wyoming. Now the rumour was that the bureau would soon call a voluntary evacuation, with the air force paying for bus tickets and board for families who wanted to get out.

At the loft, Daniel told this story to Ania, who looked at him gravely. She asked whether they scared him, these murders. He said he didn't think so. Why not? It would scare her: men driven by religion and injustice, plotting executions, killing people where they lived. I don't know, he said. Did the FBI think the terrorists were foreign, she asked, or did they believe they were Americans? Was the reason Daniel was not afraid the fact that he was Australian and still considered himself uninvolved? I'm involved, he said. You are, she said, but you do not think you are, I can tell by the way you talk; I think because you do not pull the trigger or give the orders you believe you have an excuse.

They could target me, he said hastily—me just as easily as anyone else. But you do not believe they will, she said. And if they did, you would believe it to be unjust or absurd. He said what was she talking about, why did he get the feeling that she thought the killers were Justified. Justified! she said. Please give her credit—she knew the world more than he and there was rarely such a thing as that. He wanted to know why they were arguing. She knew about the drones, she said, she had a connection to the internet. Because you yourself are untouchably moral, he said. Because the way you live and have lived is only good. We are arguing because you are afraid, she said. The situation is that you do not want to say your place—not aloud and not even to yourself: you do not want to admit that you are responsible, you are part of what you are doing. What about your husband? he said. You married him but you were always going to leave. You were always going to use him for citizenship. That's right, she said. But I told you this. And I told myself.

He said he didn't know what she was trying to tell him. I am just saying
think
, Daniel, she said. I am just saying there are choices—there are decisions to make. Can't we just go to bed? he said. I don't like fighting. Don't you want a shower?

In the morning he felt silly—mad at himself for arguing. He watched Ania while she slept. A rift between them was the last thing he wanted.

He woke her gently. Quietly, he asked did she want to go out to breakfast?

She looked at him with sleepy eyes. ‘Where?'

‘Wherever you want.'

They went to a place called Roger's at the Wynn. It had the décor of a diner, and Ania didn't say why she liked it, if she did at all. They sat in a booth and waited. The novelty of a Roger's breakfast was they brought you coffee before you ordered it.

He wanted to apologise. At the same time, he was happy not to bring it up. Ania had her fingers crossed in front of her. She reached over the table and touched his and he thought that everything would be alright.

‘I will warn you,' she said. ‘I think I am changing my mind. About this place. I think this city is coming to an end for me. It's not just my husband. This is a place in the middle of the desert and it is losing its allure. I smell the dust in the air. I am no longer able to overlook how barren it is, how life here is so temporary in state.'

‘Europe,' Daniel said.

‘Yes,' she followed him, ‘maybe I am ready again for Europe. Certainly, I am ready for architecture that has soul. Green hills. Perhaps I want the pull of history again also. I can tell you that I am tired of floating. I have insisted there is a course here but perhaps I am adrift. It's no great deal. It could be that I move on.'

She was looking strangely at him now, almost quizzically. He got the distinct feeling that there was something he wasn't getting, something that he should have been able to see. Where was her usual directness?

‘I don't want you to leave,' he said.

She looked down at the table. ‘You know, it isn't so easy for me,' she eventually said. ‘This.'

He wasn't sure what she was talking about.

‘So you know,' she said.

He didn't know. What was she saying? He waited for her to speak again. Eventually, a waiter came with coffee. They ordered and an odd look overtook Ania's face, one that slowly turned into a smile.

‘You have an incredible number of gaps, you know,' she said.

‘Some are so wide they are like caverns. You could run inside and scream and nobody would hear.'

‘What?'

‘I'm saying you have a lot of faults.'

‘Such as?'

She was leaning forward, her elbow on the table and her head resting in her hand. ‘For one, overall, you're far too tight. In the big blind, defend more. Show aggression. Stop calling off and bloody re-raise.'

‘Oh.'

‘Yes, your game needs work. But maybe there's a player in you. If you came with me.'

‘To Europe.' He paused. ‘Is this what you're asking?'

‘I'm talking out loud.'

‘To play cards with you?'

‘It's an idea.'

‘Yes, it's an idea,' he said. ‘It's just . . . it's a bit crazy, isn't it? Not for you, it's what you're doing. But what would I be doing? I have a job. You want me to quit to follow you around?'

‘Of course. Why not? You came to Las Vegas and it is no less strange a thing to do as that.'

She couldn't be serious. He told her he couldn't do it. He didn't want her to leave but he couldn't go with her if she did. Maybe it was a failing on his part, but he wouldn't really know how to do something like that. And besides, he didn't feel like he was finished here. If only for the trust given him by Linklock, he had to see this out.

‘Well then, Daniel,' she said. ‘If that is what you feel.'

Their breakfast came. He felt nervous suddenly, uncomfortable and a little disconnected. He wanted things to be simple. He wanted to please her. The only thing he could think to ask was how the game had gone the previous night. When her eyes lit up, he was thankful.

‘Now this is interesting,' she said. ‘There was a man at my table who claimed to live under the city. In tunnels. He said down there below the Strip is a network of storm drains, a flood system that runs for miles. And a community of people—they construct makeshift homes to keep themselves. They have beds and even showers. Everything must sit on something else because the floors are always wet.'

‘Is this true?'

‘He said they live by coming out at night. They drink free and gamble for the food discounts, but mostly they survive by doing rounds of the slot machines, searching for money that tourists have left, a quarter here, two or three dollars there. It is enough to stay alive and to feed a drug habit, which he said most wanted to do in reverse order.'

‘This is made up.'

‘He had a brown hat and one of those T-shirts—GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS. I asked him if it was dangerous and he said he slept at night attached by the leg to a surfboard in case of radical flooding but it hadn't happened to them yet.'

Daniel looked at Ania to see if she would laugh. She didn't. Alright. He asked how this man came to be playing poker against her, if he had to scavenge to live?

‘Because he is a pathological gambler,' she said. ‘Almost all he scavenges, he spins. He'd found twenty dollars in a video poker machine and having played it up to more than a thousand he wanted to try the real thing.'

‘What happened?'

‘He went broke almost straight away. He played every hand. He did not win a pot, then a Frenchman shipped him. People felt bad and some of us gave him money for his story. Somebody wanted to buy him a club sandwich but he went back to the video poker.' She paused. ‘Aren't you interested, though?' she said. ‘That people would be able to do this—exist somewhere beyond the rest of us, surfacing, emerging at night, a strange, midnight empire, you would almost say traceless.'

‘Do I believe it?'

‘Of course you believe it.'

‘People under the city.'

‘I see parallels. What do they do that differs so much from a professional player?'

‘Now you're not being serious.'

‘It is slowly occurring to me.'

‘They sleep in drains.'

‘They're isolates. They live by their wits.'

‘They're addicts.'

‘Yes.'

‘They're afraid of floods.'

‘Well.'

‘It's not much of an existence.'

‘It is a way of checking out.'

‘Not much of a future.'

‘I don't think this concerns them. When you are living on a mattress in a tunnel someplace in a concrete network, thoughts of the future are dangerous to have.'

At Creech, Gray wanted to talk to him. In the briefing hut, he had a toothpick between his fingers and was trying to scrape something from between his teeth.

Daniel sat down. Gray sucked a little more on the toothpick then said that it was probably time to develop some automation. ‘LinkLock,' he said. ‘I think it's working perfectly. How long now, and only the tiniest glitch? I believe we'll be expanding.' He leaned back in his chair. ‘I want you to create a framework of commands. Build a system so that the operators can pull secure links up and down by themselves. Of course, we'll need you to supervise, but, essentially, I want them doing your job.'

Daniel couldn't help but feel rejected. He knew it was unreasonable—Gray's instruction was a perfectly logical request. But the feeling lingered, bile at the back of his throat, and he wanted to protest. A commonsense request but also a way to get rid of him, or at least begin to. He wondered if they'd decided that he'd seen enough.

Suddenly it started to bite. A fast glimpse of what he had given up to come here and the thanks that it had brought.

‘I'll have to check of course,' he snapped. ‘With head office.

I don't know if what you're asking is permitted by the contract.'

Gray watched him.

‘There'd also be the question of intellectual property,' Daniel continued. ‘Whatever I wrote, you wouldn't be able to own it.'

Gray clasped his hands together, leaning forward. ‘It's a simple task though. Not difficult.'

‘Maybe. Remember, it's a system still in development. So far it's been performing under an expert hand. I can code a layman's interface, but you wouldn't want to rely on it.'

Wolfe came into the hut. Outside the day was hot and airless and he was sweating. He saw the two of them seated at the table, inhaled in an exaggerated way, looked up and gave the sign of the cross.

‘Daniel's going to build some automation,' Gray told him.

‘That so?'

‘He might have contractual trouble, however.'

‘I'm sure he'll get around it.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘Coffee? Daniel?'

Wolfe reached for the pot. Gray and Daniel waited in silence. It was half an hour before the day's flight was due to commence. Wolfe stirred sugar into his coffee and sat down. Daniel thought he saw Gray look at his colleague, communicate something. He wasn't sure what it was exactly, whatever was being said. But it was about him, he knew it. And whatever it was, it wasn't good.

•

The drone was aloft, high above the city, when the next bomb went off, nothing they heard or saw. A message came from Raul to get over the Khyber bazaar. Something had happened, he wasn't sure what.

When they got there it was all bodies. The flaming wrecks of several cars. There was smoke, black and oily. Three ambulances were small and white with red and yellow lights. The scene was chaos, people dragging the dead and injured, motorcycles moving through the crowd and men in military uniforms walking with guns. It appeared at first that a car had been targeted. Then they understood that the car was actually the bomb and that the target had been a building. Daniel counted eight bodies on the ground. The front of the building (an office of the provincial assembly) was blackened but it seemed to have survived.

The crowd got larger. Two police cars worked their way to the site, their fat light bars looking particularly American. It seemed to be the people who were organising the responders, standing grouped around the casualties, urgently waving to the ambulances.

Daniel imagined the shouting that would be happening, the hot wash of the air. He saw someone prod something with a stick, possibly a body part.

One of the ambulances moved cautiously through the crush towards the road to the hospital, followed by further casualties in two civilian cars. Someone passed a water bottle into the twisted shape of a van beside the burning wrecks. Occasionally a person would rush through the crowd to the face of the blackened building then stop, visibly aghast.

By the end of the day, the death toll was eighteen. Not the worst attack in the city's history but thereabouts. It was counted as a miracle that no one who worked for the provincial assembly was killed—most happened to be across town at a budgetary meeting. The members made statements that the people responsible for this event would meet with justice. For his part, Raul was certain the party in question was Abu Ja'far. Revenge for Abu Yamin; but also, in addition to workers of the assembly, the building had for five years also housed an anti-terrorist police unit that had shifted offices only last month.