Rift (16 page)

The road goes on and on. A jolt of adrenaline shoots through me as I remember the gas tank. The gauge rests on empty. Will I even—

And then the trees melt away on my left, revealing a spectacular, elevated look at hills in the distance. A gold Buick sedan is parked facing those hills. The road ends before a large gate, and farther ahead on the left I see what looks like a sign for the trailhead. Do I drive over there? Do I park next to the Buick? What if Ivan and Ed are inside waiting for me?

The passenger door opens and a man steps out whom I don't recognize. My first instinct is to turn the car around and go back down the mountain, but it's too late now. The driver's side door opens next. A mane of blond hair emerges. Relief gushes through me like warm water.

Wearing a white sweatshirt and faded jeans, Crystal's beauty in daylight is terrific. She jogs toward my car, and I am barely out the door before she takes me into her arms. Even now, in this time of duress, the swell of her breasts between us electrifies me.

“You made it,” she says, releasing me. “What a long shot. I can't believe you actually found us up here.”

“Guessing Flagstaff was easy enough, but it wasn't until I got here that the ‘highest point' thing made sense.”

“Hey, great minds think alike, right?”

Her friend walks up to us, hands jammed in his pockets, staring at his shoes. He's wearing a long-sleeve black T-shirt and gray pants, his hair a black cord thrown over his back. Crystal sees him and introduces us.

“This is Lee Garrett. He's an old friend from high school.”

Thin and pale, he sports a scruff of fuzzy hair on his chin, and his hand feels ten degrees colder than mine when we shake. “Hi, Lee.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Lee is going to help us get the goods on NeuroStor.”

His eye contact with me lasts for about a nanosecond before his attention turns to the distant hills.

“Those people are wrong, man,” he adds. “Money-hungry assholes.”

“Well,” I say, not really sure how to respond. “I certainly appreciate your help.”

Lee nods, still looking at the hills. He's either painfully shy or doesn't want to be here. I can't tell which.

“I got another instant message after yours,” I tell Crystal. “Batista said they knew where I was, and if I didn't wait there, he would kill my wife.”

“Shit. And you left right then?”

“What could I do? He could be bluffing about my wife, but what if she's—”

“You did the right thing. If they decide to mess with your wife, it won't make any difference what you do. You can't let them find you, no matter what.” She motions toward the Buick. “We should go,” she says. “They'll figure out this ruse soon enough. Whose car is that?”

“It belongs to the woman in Scottsdale who helped me. I drove it here on fumes.”

“What are you supposed to do with it now?”

“Park it somewhere safe and hope someone reports the license plate number to the police. Do you think it will be okay here?”

“It'll probably be fine, but you never know. I think the woman who lent you this car must have been willing to part with it. Pretty generous of her.”

I place the keys under the Maxima's floor mat, lock the doors, and then join Crystal and Lee in the Buick. I have the backseat to myself.

“Generous isn't a big enough word.”

Crystal starts the car, and we wind our way back down the mountain.

         

One of the forgotten joys of childhood is the blanket of security that lies waiting, ready to be called into action whenever danger looms. Mother's warm breast after a screaming nightmare. Father's iron grip when your new bicycle pitches toward the ground. The reassuring thickness of your locked front door when the neighborhood bully has been chasing you for two blocks.

Male adulthood offers few examples of such protection. When something goes bump in the night, it's up to you to check it out. Dangers are real. Mortality is severe. And when you want to cry out to your mother, reach for your father, you find the blanket disturbingly absent.

But here, now, if only for a fleeting, counterfeit moment, Crystal has stepped into the place long since vacated by my mom and dad. She has assumed the role of protector, and for the first time since the golf course, I relax.

Crystal asks for a recap, for a quick summary of the past thirty-six hours of my life, and I begin with the moment I left The Wildcat. My identification of Ivan in the parking lot, the initial encounter at the golf course, the moment when the chase began. Our standoff at the river's edge. My battle with the churning water. The choking incident with Nicole. I carefully weave around the scene where she ordered me out of her house at gunpoint and instead focus on her initial grace and willingness to help me.

“I thought you looked pretty clean for a guy who fell into a flooded river,” Crystal says.

“You have no idea.”

She guides the car to the bottom of the mountain and then back toward Flagstaff. The town opens before us. Houses, stores, signs directing us to this museum or that one. Back the way I came before.

“Is this the only road in town?”

“Pretty much,” Crystal says. “Route 66 is the other. It cuts through town on a general east-west track.”

A police car is parked in front of the convenience store where I stopped for directions. Through the glass windows I see two human forms. A cop and the clerk who watched me convulse, perhaps. I guess I should mention what happened to me there, but I don't feel like talking about it.

“Crystal, I really appreciate your help. Both of you guys. After I got away from those two men, I didn't know what to do next.”

“We're glad to help,” she answers.

“So what do you suggest I do now? The only thing I can think of is to call the police.”

Crystal and Lee exchange glances.

“What?” I ask. “Is that the wrong thing to do?”

“There is a lot you don't know about this,” Crystal says.

“Like what?”

“We suspect considerable government involvement. Politicians and federal agencies being paid to look the other way when NeuroStor goes public, for instance. Or worse.”

Government conspiracies have always seemed like paranoid fantasy to me. How could a bunch of glad-handing politicians elected by special interest groups ever work closely enough to hold a conspiracy together? They already have this country paralyzed with their endless two-party bickering. Am I really supposed to believe they can somehow put aside their differences long enough to deceive the American public? And why? Why would they want to?

“Worse how?” I ask.

“Do you remember David Duke?”

“The KKK guy? From Mississippi or Louisiana or wherever?”

“Louisiana. You probably first heard his name when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990. He was an acknowledged racist, or separatist, or whatever it is he calls himself, and he was nearly elected.”

“So?”

“
So?
He won over forty-three percent of the vote in an election for a United States Senate seat. And sixty percent of the white vote.
Sixty percent.
Almost two-thirds of the whites in Louisiana voted for a racist.”

“Okay, but what does it have to do with NeuroStor? Is David Duke a big investor or something?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what does he have to do with anything?”

“What he did was illustrate that our country isn't as tolerant as we'd like to believe. There are a lot of frightened citizens out there, people who think their culture is under constant assault from the media, from races other than their own, who feel as though they are backed against a wall and are being forced to strike. Voting for a white supremacist is just the tentative first step toward mobilizing forces for domestic terrorism.”

“Nice speech, but you didn't answer my question.”

“Your company is financed by extremists,” Lee growls, contributing his first words to the conversation. “That's your answer. Freakos who want to use the transmission machine as some kind of weapon.”

I can think of absolutely no response to this statement.

“Doesn't that bother you?” Crystal asks me.

“I can't really say. I don't think I understand.”

“We don't fully understand ourselves, but the AFA almost certainly operates NeuroStor in some capacity. We also haven't fully grasped how they plan to use the machine offensively.”

“The AFA?”

“American Federation of Aryans. Don't tell me you haven't heard of them.”

“No, I haven't. But you're telling me that this AFA developed quantum teleportation as some sort of means to terrorize the country?”

“Terrorism is just the beginning of what they hope will turn into an all-out war,” Lee says. “Those fuckers want either an entire new government or they want to assume control of a portion of the country and secede.”

“That's nuts. Who came up with this theory?”

“It's not a theory. I know people who've been on the inside, who have left because they realized just how crazy and serious the AFA had become. A group of these defectors put their heads together and decided to do something about it, because the government won't. The FBI shoots their fucking wad at these standoffs like Waco and Ruby Ridge. Politicians are more concerned with legislating morality and raising money than working together to help the country. So maybe someone else has to pick up the slack. Put a stop to this shit before it gets out of hand.”

“Before what gets out of hand?”

“I
told
you! It's a fucking war, man! A war in the cities, in your fucking middle-America cow towns! Blacks are tired of getting shit on. Hispanics are pissed, too, but they don't get much press yet. Just wait until they become a majority in Texas and California.”

I fear the conversation is getting away from me. “Look, I know the race situation isn't as fair as it could be, but I don't see the war you're talking about. And I live in Houston, where Hispanics must be thirty or forty percent of the population.”

“Oh, yeah? Do you work downtown?”

“Yes. So?”

“So it probably takes you an hour to get to work because you live as far away from the crime-infested city as you can. Am I right? And you get in your Lexus or Cadillac or whatever and drive on elevated freeways all the way into town. If some hood is going to rip you off, he'll have to climb onto the highway and try to catch you going eighty miles an hour. Tell me I'm wrong.”

I can't. I drive a Lexus along Highway 59 into the city every morning. The road is ten lanes wide. Inside the Beltway, people call it “murder row” for reasons that don't require explanation.

“You don't see the war because you don't want to see it. You sit in your suburban fortress and—”

“Lee,” Crystal says.

“—with your Midwestern pseudovalues that—”

“Lee!”

“What?”

“I think you made your point.”

“If we're going to help this guy, I think he needs to—”

“I think he understands. Don't you, Cameron?”

“Sure,” I say amicably. And because I can't think of anything else.

Silence follows this exchange, and I make a point of looking out the windows to avoid any more confrontation. We turn off the main road and head into an old neighborhood. The yards here are small, the houses either quaint or run-down. Another turn and then we pull into a driveway. The home is paneled with aging white siding and needs a new roof, the lawn a mixture of unmowed brown grass and weeds. An empty brick planter stands in front of the covered porch.

“This is Lee's house,” Crystal says.

We get out and head up the walk. My eyes, automatically now, sweep the yard and adjacent houses for anything unusual. I turn a full circle and look everywhere. There are too many places to hide. We'll never escape if they've found us already.

“Worried?” Crystal asks me as Lee unlocks the front door.

“Can't be too careful.”

The house could stand redecorating. The carpet is old, the paneling and fixtures ancient. Everything smells musty. Any minute now, my late grandma is going to step around the corner in a blue polyester pantsuit and ask me if I want some homemade cinnamon rolls.

“So what are we going to do now?” I ask.

“Lee has been trying to break into your company's computer system so we can look for sensitive information. Anything about their internal power structure, planned operations, that sort of thing.”

“This is something we should do before calling the police?”

Lee rolls his eyes.

“What?” I ask.

He walks by me and disappears into another room.

Crystal takes me by the shoulder and together we follow him. “Lee can be kind of temperamental. Can't you, Lee?”

“Whatever,” he yells.

We walk down a hallway and into a small bedroom. Lee is already sitting in the center of a U-shaped desk. Monitors of different sizes stand on all three surfaces, and the middle screen spans at least twenty inches or more. The rest of the room is a landfill of unused or discarded electronic equipment—monitors burned out (or perhaps deemed too small), circuit boards, computer cases, stereo components, an ancient Nintendo game system. An off-road bicycle wheel stands in one corner next to an aluminum baseball bat. Forty-five-rpm vinyl records litter the floor. And who could miss the dartboard with Bill Gates' face printed on it?

“Don't let the computer nerd decor fool you,” Crystal says to me. “Lee's not as one-dimensional as he seems.”

The computer screen blinks on, and a text prompt appears that I can't read from here. Lee turns around and begins typing.

“He's actually a physics instructor at NAU here in Flagstaff. And he's going to be an author.”

“Really? What do you write about?”