She’s never noticed before that people are angry in political discussions, that much of the anger is personal, and that it often intentionally hurts feelings. Hers, for example.
The road thus far has been empty and quiet, and despite what the lieutenant at the start point said about roving packs of looters and the danger to anyone, particularly any woman walking by herself, she hasn’t seen anyone in the past few hours, her thighs are getting sore from trying to keep up with these guys, and she’s getting out of breath. Plus there’s still plenty of time to make it to Ixtepec by daylight walking at a pace that is comfortable for her.
Naomi gulps. This is the tough part. She has to do something entirely for herself; nobody else in the party seems to be tiring or to be getting harassed, so she can’t defend anyone except herself. That seems to stick in her throat and she doesn’t say anything for a whole additional kilometer after she makes her decision, but finally she remembers something Jesse told her once—the first time he had an orgasm with a woman, he had to pretend he was being stimulated by his own hand. She tries pretending that she is defending someone else. Like Naomi is another person, a woman being abused by these men … .
She tells them. They don’t even try to persuade her to stay with them; they pick up their pace and are gone over the hill in a matter of minutes as she slows to a comfortable, sustainable saunter.
Now that she can slow down, she can notice that it’s a hot, uncomfortable day, but not unusually so for the time of year; at least it’s sunny. The forest that once covered the hillsides has been battered and torn, with big bare muddy scars from blowdowns, flashfloods, and avalanches on every slope around her, and individual trees not sheltered by their fellows have been stripped of their leaves, so that what remains are blobs of deep green among the blacks and browns of the water- and wind-chewed hillsides.
Much of what she’s seeing was once small farms, tucked in wherever the ground was level enough; it will be a long time, she thinks, before the farmers have anything growing again. If there are still farmers.
She’s put four more kilometers behind her at this comfortable pace, and has smeared on sunblock from her pack and tied her outer shirt around her waist, when she hears the car on the road behind her. The guide transponders are still out, and not supposed to be back on till further notice, so it’s someone driving on manual, probably just an Army jeep.
The tank top she’s wearing is cut a little low and of course it shows her shoulders completely; she wonders if maybe she should pull the overshirt back on, but it seems like a lot of trouble.
What comes over the hill behind her is not a jeep, nor an official limousine or rescue vehicle. It’s just about the last thing she’d expect to
see—a brand-new, apparently freshly washed GM Luxrover, one of those big go-anywhere luxury-interior sedans much favored by the more imperialistic
corporados
and by various economic and political bigshots. It has international plates designating it as an American car that’s been a lot of places, and tinted windows so she can’t see anything of who or what is inside. It comes roaring over the hillside, going like it has somewhere to go, but as it passes Naomi, it suddenly slows and pulls to the side ahead of her.
She keeps walking toward it because she can’t think of what else to do. Odds are overwhelming that it’s some nice tourist, probably male, who saw the pretty girl and thought she might like a ride; of course it could be just about anything else at all, and she’s a little afraid, but she’d rather run the risk of the less-probable danger than insult the more-probable nice guy. And besides, if it is a ride, chances are that it’s a ride with air conditioning and a comfortable seat, and her feet are beginning to burn in a way that’s telling her she’ll have blisters by the time she makes Ixtepec.
What the hell, she survived Clem Two, she can probably deal with one little old crazy rapist if it comes to that.
The Luxrover’s door opens, and the driver steps out. He’s about thirty and he’s wearing a perfectly impeccable summer suit, the kind that the little cadcam studios in Oaxaca turn out, but made from—yep, as she gets closer she judges it’s silk. And that’s probably a real, fresh yellow chrysanthemum in his lapel. If he’s wearing a yellow flower, then he’s probably not Mexican and hasn’t been here long—
He’s also wearing huge dark shades. His blond hair is cut very short and he doesn’t have much of a nose, and like the rest of him his neck looks painfully thin. The total effect makes him look like a large bug.
“Hi, do you need a ride?” he asks, in English. His voice has that kind of whiny, reedy quality that she associates with unsuccessful salesmen.
“You’re American,” she says, though she knows already. It seems like a good stall until she gets a better look at him.
“I bet you wonder what I’m doing here.”
“No shit,” she says. She always found it irritating when Jesse said that to her, and she wants to annoy this guy just a little, so that if he’s got any romantic ideas they won’t start blossoming in the first five minutes.
“Well, I was taking a long drive, seeing the country and all that bullshit while I did biz over the net. Now there’s no net and no transponders so I’m just getting my ass back to the States. And I kind of thought giving a ride to a cute girl might be fun. Since you’re not dressed like a Mexican—”
“What’s wrong with a Mexican girl?” Naomi asks. The guy has just descended a point or two with her.
“Nothing except she probably doesn’t speak English.”
“Don’t you speak Spanish?”
“Not a word. I just drive from resort to resort and I hardly ever get out of the car; when the transponders are up, the car gets me there and I get everything I want by looking out the window.”
She feels like saying something judgmental, except that it’s occurring to her that all she’s seen, really, has been some
barrios
and various small towns. There are different ways of being narrow, perhaps. And besides, she’s close enough now to feel the cold blast from the air conditioner. “I suppose,” he adds, “that you’re down here to work on poverty or something like that.”
“Something like that,” she says.
“Not my kind of thing. But I wouldn’t mind listening while you tell me about it; I’m pretty bored with what’s in the audio library and I can’t do any XV or video when I have to drive the car.”
Time to flatter him a little, she decides; there’s been some distance established, and he appears to be exactly what he says he is—a
gringo
biz guy who likes pretty Mexican scenery and beautiful Mexican beaches but not Mexico. She can handle this for long enough to get back to Oaxaca—or even, she realizes, back to the States. Not a bad idea at all, really. “There’s not that much to tell about me,” she says. “I’m afraid you figured me out at the first glance. And can you really drive this thing yourself? I had to pass manual driving in high school but I haven’t used it since. You must have reflexes like a fighter pilot.”
He grins a little; with the dark shades hiding the rest of his expression, he could be laughing at the flattery or for that matter getting ready to bite her neck, but she makes herself choose to see it as friendly and as appreciating her admiration. “Heck, your grandparents all drove manual.”
She stifles the urge to tell him that her grandparents were early Deepers and never drove at all after they were in their thirties, just as they never touched meat or animal products. Instead, she says, “Well, I could use a ride. I was going to Ixtepec so I could catch the zipline to Oaxaca.”
“I’m going to Oaxaca,” he says, “and from there up through Mexico City and all the way out through Nogales. If you’ve been following the news, it looks like a good time to relocate to the Rockies, and I’ve got a vacation home up near Green River, Utah. You can ride along as far as you like or at least as far as we can stand each other. If we’re getting along at Oaxaca we can stop and get whatever stuff you have.”
She’s not sure how far they will be able to stand each other, but she says, “Everything I have in Oaxaca will go into two suitcases, and my parents live in Grand Junction. I’d
love
to ride with you.”
And then, like some suave guy in some old movie, he walks all he way around his car and opens the door for her with a little bow. She smiles—hell,
at the thought of air conditioning and the fact that she can see there’s a fridge in there, probably with things to drink, she practically
simpers
. If this didn’t look so wonderful, she’d be ashamed of herself.
As they overtake the still-walking Mexican college students a few minutes later, he says, “I’m no judge of people in this country—do you think we should give them a ride?”
“Naw,” she says, “I wouldn’t. That’s a bad-looking crowd.” They roar right by them, and the only thing that spoils her pleasure is that they probably can’t see her through the tinted glass.
“My name’s Naomi,” she says.
“I’m Eric,” he says. “Help yourself to orange juice from the fridge—you look like you could use it and you’re too polite to ask.”
As she takes the first wonderful, cold swig—and thinks of the guys back there still walking the road, she says, “You certainly know how to treat a lady, Eric. You sure you don’t have a white charger in the trunk or something?”
He grins again, under the sunglasses. “I’ve always figured money is the best armor.”
Harris Diem, one day, would like to open his basement door and find a bare concrete wall, rather than steps leading down. In fact, it would be better still to find no basement door. If that were to happen, then one of two things would happen to Harris Diem—either he would heave a great sigh of relief, or he would feel a scream in his nerves, a rattlesnake at the base of his skull that wouldn’t leave him alone. Most likely he’d feel that scream, just as he feels it, mildly now, and then he’d have to do insanely risky things.
But if all he felt was the relief … if only that. It seems too much to imagine.
And of course his basement door is still there. He told them at his office in the White House that he
had
to get home tonight, that he was stressing out, and that much was true; what he didn’t tell them, what was none of their business, what would destroy him if they knew, was just what kind of stress it is and just how he is going to unwind.
The basement door closes behind him and he heaves a little sigh of relief; the thin filament of rubber cement that he normally leaves stretched across the stairs here, so slight that you can’t see it except by pointing a flashlight in the right direction, as he is doing now, is undisturbed. The cleaning help has not been down here (his major worry) and no covert op has had a peek either (his minor worry).
He walks down the steps, turning on the low, orange lighting in the windowless room, and looks around with a little satisfaction; he wishes all
this were not here, he wishes he had no desire ever to come down here, and yet money and power have had their advantages—it’s one great setup.
The couch is carefully padded with a restraint system that will hold him only as long as he’s not conscious of it. The scalpnet has a comfortable soft satin cover; the powered merkin and butt plug, with their neural stimulator surfaces, are state-of-the-art; the large-muscle stimulators in the restraint cuffs are precise down to a hundredth of a newton in replicating a sensation.
As always, he opens the refrigerator, takes out a bottle of mineral water, and drinks it down; he’s going to be on the bed for three hours or so if this is a typical night, and the extra fluids help.
He hangs his bathrobe on its hook, and removes all of his clothing, putting it into the small laundry bag he used to bring down the bathrobe. The bathrobe is clean and soft, and he buries his face in the terrycloth for just a moment, making sure that he doesn’t touch it with the tip of his penis, which he can feel is already damp with that first secretion.
Diem lets go of the robe, letting it swing back silently to the wall. He walks to the little washer-dryer and pulls out the sheets, freshly washed from the last time he was down here.
He reminds himself once more that he doesn’t actually
have
to do this, that if he decides to he can just go back upstairs and call it a night right now, getting a lot of the extra sleep that he really does need; and turns with a light, happy step and presses his thumb to the print-reading lock on the cabinet.
The door swings open, and he looks over the inventory of recorded XV. Most of the wedges are in plain white boxes, and on the sides of the boxes he has written, in his neat draftsman’s slanted characters, various women’s names.
Girl’s names, really, he reminds himself, and that thought alone makes his penis rise a little. “Allie” is at the upper left corner; “Zulika” is at the lower right. Tonight, though, he wants something very special. After all, it may be the last for a long time, and, if what is about to boil out of the Gulf of Mexico is any indication, perhaps the last ever—this room, or Diem himself, or perhaps both, may be gone within a few days.
Well, “special” really only means one of three things, doesn’t it? Kimbie Dee, Michelline, or DeLana. Kimbie Dee is a perky little blonde, about fourteen, and the man is an old janitor with a hideous facial deformity who catches her alone in the locker room; it has its moments. Michelline is a red-haired, angelic-looking child, not yet in puberty, and it’s her drunken father late at night, with no one to hear her screams … . He reaches for DeLana.