Steal Across the Sky (26 page)

“The Wayne,” which was total silence. Gone. Disappeared.

“The Eric,” which was a short, distancing response (
Really busy at work; be well
), followed by silence.

“The Martin,” which was defensive. (
As I told you, I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. I know I said I’d call, but my job is in jeopardy and my dog died and I have a hangnail.
)

And “the José,” which was a counter-attack. (
Are you one of those women who assume too much after three nights? Lighten up, babe
.)

Fuck it. Get it over with.

Her hands still smelling of garlic, Soledad punched savagely at her handheld and brought up her e-mail.

S.,

Where did you go? I rushed home early, but you’d left, apparently without changing or eating anything. Are you all right? I’m very concerned. Can I see you again? Please give me your phone number, or call me at 212-555-3644,
or at least
answer this e-mail. If I did something to offend you, I want so much to make it right.

James

She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. No, he wasn’t Wayne or Eric or Martin or José, but he wasn’t for her, either. She was in hiding after death threats and one attempt to shoot her, and he was a gorgeous Viking look-alike whose apartment didn’t match his story. To get involved with him, to even see him again, would be stupid. Diane, if she knew, would have a fit. Soledad could hear Diane now:
You ask for all the trappings of the Witness Protection Program, right up to plastic surgery, and then you take on a security risk like this?
And Diane would be right.

But Soledad was so lonely.

There were worse things than loneliness.

She washed her hands, wiped the garlic off the handheld, and keyed the wall screen to a newscast. No ditsy avatar this time, a real newscast. She listened to a talking head rehashing, for the thousandth time, the fact that the Atoners had not left the moon but had said nothing, nothing whatsoever, to humanity ever since the twenty Witnesses returned to Earth. Were the aliens still even there? Maybe they had left the moon by some means undetectable to every monitoring nation on the globe. Maybe they had, under their opaque and featureless Dome, dissolved into powdery molecules or into some unknown form of energy. Maybe they were indeed remote-controlled machines and had been turned off or turned themselves off. Maybe—Soledad changed news sites.

She watched the funeral of Emma Jane Taymor, the daughter of the vice president who had killed herself in order to arrive sooner at her teenage version of Heaven. As the screen ran clips of the girl—smiling at the Inauguration a month ago, scoring a soccer goal two years ago, climbing on her mother’s lap ten years ago—Soledad silently addressed Emma Jane:

Was this suicide the end of you? Or are you somewhere on the second road?

And is it partly my fault?

SHE KEPT THE NEWSCASTS
off the rest of the day. Outside, a cold, steady rain fell. In the late afternoon, after Lucca must have had his meeting with Frank Olenik, Soledad called him. Lucca was uncharacteristically short with her.

“Frank wanted money, that was all.”

“Money? For . . . for what?” Money embarrassed Soledad, as it did so many people who’d never had any. Once she’d found out how rich Lucca was, she’d castigated herself for even imagining they might have come together on the voyage to Kular.

“For some ridiculous scheme not even worth discussing. How is your friend, Fengmo?”

“The same.” She felt the tears prick her eyelids and pushed them back.

“Is he getting good care? I know your Universal Health is very new and there are gaps in what is done. . . . If you need money for him,
cara
, you have only to ask.”

But she never would. Did Lucca know that? And why was he so generous with her and so contemptuous of Frank’s request for money? Was it precisely because Lucca knew she would never ask?

If she kept thinking like that, she would end up as cynical as he was.

“Thanks, but Fengmo is getting very good care. Diane—my government contact—checked it out for me. How are you doing?”

“The same. I watch the newscasts and despair. This stupidity about life after death—you would think that we’ve learned nothing since the Middle Ages. We can only hope that the media circus dies down soon. Although I don’t see how that will happen, with Cam fanning those flames.”

“Ummm,” Soledad said neutrally. All at once she wanted to end the conversation, without knowing why.

Yet after she and Lucca had said good-bye, she was restless again. Three times she walked toward the handheld on the kitchen table, and
three times she walked into the other room. God, she was pitiful. Hours later, as she sat reading, trying to interest herself in Coltrane’s stint at the Five Spot Café, the phone rang again and her heart froze.

But of course James couldn’t have gotten this number. The screen ID’d Diane. When the agent’s face came on-screen, it was backed by an unfamiliar living room that must be Diane’s own. Usually she kept her private and work lives separate, but now Soledad saw a rocking horse on the carpet and an orange cat on the back of a sofa. Soledad’s stomach twisted. With no preliminaries Diane said, “Have you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Sara Dziwalski was murdered an hour ago.”

Soledad stared blindly at the rainy dark outside the kitchen window.

“Soledad?”

“I’m here.”

“She was at the medical center working an evening shift. A suicide bomber—”

“CCAD?” Fengmo, Sara, attempts on Cam and on Soledad herself—

“No. The bomber was a woman whose son was a member of Why Wait? and hung himself yesterday. A copycat act after Emma Taymor. The mother blew up Sara and herself and three other people. As if
that
would bring back her son.”

Soledad heard Diane’s anger, the anger of a good person helpless to stop madness. Soledad felt too stunned for anger.

Diane said, “You’re still safe, of course, nobody knows where you are. The Agency tried so hard to persuade Sara to . . . well. Just sit tight and stay home for now.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good. Did you know her well?”

“No,” Soledad said, as always cutting off sympathy, pity, anything weakening. “Thanks, Diane. Bye.”

She turned on a newscast and there it was, the whole bloody and monstrous scene caught on a Seton Medical Center security cam in Austin, as well as on somebody’s handheld. Soledad watched until she couldn’t stand it anymore, until the darkness outside her drawn curtains was as thick in her lighted living room as if she stood in the cold woods. When the owl hooted, she jumped and cried out.

She perceived that she had reached some sort of limit. Fengmo, Sara, Emma Jane, the incessant loneliness of her own chosen isolation—why had she ever thought that going to the stars would test her? Going to the stars had been for her—the insulated passenger in orbit—all too easy.
This
was hard, this constant hammering by her own kind on her own planet. Nobody should have to stand such hammering alone. Nobody could. And she no longer had Fengmo.

The phone rang, drowning out the owl. Lucca again, probably with the news about Sara. But Lucca, choosing his own isolation, couldn’t help, couldn’t hold her or stroke her or provide any of the only comfort she craved: warm human touch. It wasn’t Lucca she wanted.

Soledad lifted the phone receiver two inches, set it down, lifted it again. She turned off the visual and called Manhattan.

“James, this is Soledad. . . . Yes, I heard. . . . No, I . . .
Please, stop
. Just listen. Please. If I tell you how to get to my house by train, will you come? Right away? Now?”

THE BASTARDS HAD MURDERED HER.

Not that poor demented mother, although she had detonated the actual bomb. Probably deranged with grief over her son. Emotionally worked-up people were dangerous—just ask any cop who ever responded to a domestic disturbance—and there were other deranged groups out there, like the CCAD, who were clear enemies. When you have a clear enemy in your sights, you don’t send civilians out unarmed onto the battlefield. The government should have protected Sara. There should have been cops, FBI agents, Secret Service—whatever it took. But
no
. The protection went to senators and congressmen and mayors and even to criminals in jail, who got secure cells if they might get offed on government territory and cause a public stink. But no protection for an honest and helpless woman like Sara Dziwalski, who had just been trying to nurse sick people. “No direct death threats indicating this specific target,” the law-enforcement agencies always said, covering their asses. But anybody with an IQ above the speed limit knew that the spirit of the law was being violated even while the letter was being followed. Frank was ashamed of the profession he’d once wanted to join.

He cut Sara’s picture out of a flimsy, maneuvering the scissors with exaggerated care, and put it in a frame he’d bought at the drugstore. His mother called him to come down to lunch, but, for the first time ever, Frank ignored her. Judy Olenik didn’t insist.

Frank didn’t even know if his daisies had been delivered to Sara before she died.

He set the picture on his desk and opened his closet. The nine-millimeter Glock was where he’d left it, on the highest shelf behind a
heavy box, where his little sister couldn’t find it. Not that Darla ever went into his room. In his family, they were taught a decent respect for other people.

The government bastards had murdered Sara.

The phone rang and his mother called upstairs, “Frank, it’s for you.”

“Hello.”

“Jim Thompson here. Listen, I want to say how sorry I am about Sara. She was a great girl. And also to—”

“Don’t call me ever again.” Frank hung up.

He loaded the gun and stuck it in his belt. Any whacko who tried to take out Frank Olenik was going to meet with more response than Sara had been able to mount. But that was periphery. The central thing was to do what he was required to do. Now, more than ever, it was necessary. Now, he was somehow doing it for Sara as well as for God.

He looked again at her picture. So young, so pretty. But they would meet again. She would pass through the last door, if she hadn’t already, and Frank had no doubt that God intended someone like her for Heaven. Frank would do his best to get there, too. In fact, that was what he was doing right now, even if it involved some things he didn’t want to do. Saint Peter, Saint Paul, even Christ, all had to do things they probably didn’t want to. But they’d done them.

He picked up the phone and dialed Cam O’Kane in New York City.

THIS TIME THE REPORTERS
, a mob of them again, had the backyard covered, too. Probably they wanted a reaction to Sara’s death. Frank had Darla open the garage door while he sat ready on his Harley. He tore across the lawn and into the street before any of the jackals could do more than shout at him, and by the time they got in their cars he was seven streets away. Of course, they could track him with a helicopter, but he wasn’t a big enough story for that. Cam’s reaction might be big enough, and maybe that was why he hadn’t been able to reach her by phone. No matter. This would have required a meeting anyway.

At Mike Renfrew Toyota, he stashed the Harley and Mike let him have a ’17 minivan with 55,000 miles on it and dealer’s plates, no questions asked. Mike gripped his hand when he handed Frank the keys. It
paid to know who your true friends were. In less than half an hour after leaving home, he was on the interstate toward New York.

“
TELL HER IT’S FRANK OLENIK
and it’s important.” He hadn’t wanted to give his name, and for the last hour of phone calls from the Manhattan pay phone he hadn’t. But that had gotten him nowhere. Now it was dark and he was hungry and cold, and even with his cap pulled low there was a chance that one of the people hurrying past might somehow recognize him. Reporters came and went two streets over, in front of the fancy hotel where Cam stayed. Jackals.

“Frank Olenik, the Atoner Witness?” The polished voice on the other end of the line held disbelief and a trace of contempt.

“That’s what I said, and if you don’t tell her I called, she’ll chew you into little pieces.” Frank had no idea if this was true or not. How would he know how somebody like Cam dealt with an entourage?

“I’ll give Miss O’Kane your message,” the snotty voice said. “Please hold.”

He did, blowing on his gloveless hands, tasting the sour scum on his teeth. Eventually the voice returned, still snotty. “Miss O’Kane would like some verification of your identity. What can you tell her that might do that, ‘Mr. Olenik’?”

He clenched the fist not holding the phone and spoke very carefully, very slowly, as if to a five-year-old. “Tell her that Lucca Maduro has a mole on his back.” Frank had once overheard Cam tell that to Amira Gupta, and even then he’d wondered why a snobby guy like Maduro would get naked with someone as trashy as Cam. But some men would have sex with anything.

A few moments later Cam came on the line. “Frank! Is that really you? Where are you?”

“At Columbus Circle.” There had been a street sign. “I need to talk to you about something, but I don’t think I can get past your bulldogs.”

“Talk? To me?” She sounded surprised; he’d never talked to her before.

“Yes. It’s important. Tell them to let me through. And tell them to let me bring my gun in. I have an Ohio permit to carry.”

“Okay! Sure!” Now he recognized the note of hysteria and inwardly sighed.

He left the minivan parked on the street and walked to her building. A man met him on the corner: big, unsmiling, undoubtedly packing. Private security, Frank guessed, and hoped it wasn’t some rinky-dink square badge who was more show than brains and training. People peered at Frank and then started shoving questions and cameras in his face, but the big man hurried him into the lobby and shut the door behind him. Hotel types watched while Frank was patted down, while his piece and permit were inspected, while he was walked through the detectors. All reassuring. Good procedure.