“Oh-oh,” Kurtz said.
“What should I do, boss?”
“Pull right in behind him,” Kurtz said. He spoke cheerfully, but picked the nine-millimeter up off the seat again. “We’ll see what our new friend wants.” Although he believed he knew. “Freddy, what do you hear from our old friends? Are you picking them up?”
Very reluctantly, Freddy said, “Only Owen. Not the guy with him or the guys they’re chasing. Owen’s off the road. In a house. Talking with someone.”
“A house in Derry?”
“Yeah.”
And here came the plow’s driver, striding through the snow in great green gumrubber boots and a hooded parka fit for an Eskimo. Wrapped around the lower part of his face was a vast woolen muffler, its ends flying out behind him in the wind, and Kurtz didn’t have to be telepathic to know the man’s wife or mother had made it for him.
The plowman leaned in the window and wrinkled his nose at the lingering aroma of sulfur and ethyl alcohol. He looked doubtfully at Freddy, at the only-half-conscious Perlmutter, then at Kurtz in the back seat, who was leaning forward and looking at him with bright-eyed interest. Kurtz thought it prudent to hold his weapon beneath his left knee, at least for the time being.
“Yes, Cap’n?” Kurtz asked.
“I’ve had a radio message from a fella says his name is Randall.” The plowman raised his voice to be heard over the wind. His accent was pure downeast Yankee. “Gen’rul Randall. Claimed to be talkin to me by satellite relay straight from Cheyenne Mountain in Wyomin.”
“Name means nothing to me, Cap,” Kurtz said in the same bright tone-absolutely ignoring Perlmutter, who groaned “You lie, you lie, you lie.”
The plow driver’s eyes flicked to him, then returned to Kurtz. “Fella gave me a code phrase. Blue exit. Mean anything to you?”
“‘The name is Bond, James Bond,”” Kurtz said, and laughed. “Someone’s pulling your leg, Cap.”
“Said to tell you that your part of the mission’s over and your country thanks you.”
“Did they mention anything about a gold watch, laddie-buck?” Kurtz asked, eyes sparkling.
The plowman licked his lips. It was interesting, Kurtz thought. He could see the exact moment the plowman decided he was dealing with a lunatic. The exact moment.
“Don’t know nawthin bout no gold watch. Just wanted to tell you I can’t take you any further. Not without authorization, that is.”
Kurtz produced the nine from where it had been hiding under his knee and pointed it into the plowman’s face. “Here’s your authorization, buck, all signed and filed in triplicate. Will it suit?” The plowman looked at the gun with his long Yankee eyes. He did not look particularly afraid. “Ayuh, that looks to be in order.” Kurtz laughed. “Good man! Very good man! Now let’s get going. And you want to speed it up a little, God love you. There’s someone in Derry I have to” Kurtz searched for le mot juste, and found it “to debrief”
Perlmutter half-groaned, half-laughed. The plowman glanced at him.
“Don’t mind him, he’s pregnant,” Kurtz said in a confiding tone. “Next thing you know, he’ll be yelling for oysters and dill pickles.”
“Pregnant,” the plowman echoed. His voice was perfectly flat.
“Yes, but never mind that. Not your problem. The thing is, buck”-Kurtz leaned forward, speaking warmly and confidentially over the barrel of his nine-millimeter-“this fellow I have to catch is in Derry now. I expect he’ll be back on the road again before too long, I’d guess he must know I’m coming for his ass-”
“He knows, all right,” Freddy Johnson said. He scratched the side of his neck, then dropped his hand into his crotch and scratched there. “-but in the meantime,” Kurtz continued, “I think I can make up some ground. Now do you want to put your elderly ass in gear, or what?” The plowman nodded and went walking back to the cab of his plow. The light was brighter now. This light very likely belongs to the last day of my life, Kurtz thought with mild wonder.Perlmutter began uttering a low sound of pain. It growled along for a bit, then rose to a scream. Perlmutter clutched his stomach again.
“Jesus,” Freddy said. “Lookit his gut, boss. Rising like a loaf of bread.”
“Deep breaths,” Kurtz said, and patted Pearly’s shoulder with a benevolent hand. Ahead of them, the plow had begun to move again. “Deep breaths, laddie. Relax. You just relax and think good thoughts.”
10
Forty miles to Derry. Forty miles between me and Owen, Kurtz thought. Not bad at all. I’m coming for you, buck. Need to take you to school. Teach you what you forgot about crossing the Kurtz Line.
Twenty miles later and they were still there-this according to both Freddy and Perlmutter, although Freddy seemed less sure of himself now. Pearly, however, said they were talking to the mother-Owen and the other one were talking to the mother. The mother didn’t want to let him go.
“Let who go?” Kurtz asked. He hardly cared. The mother was holding them in Derry, allowing them to close the distance, so God bless the mother no matter who she was or what her motivations might be.
“I don’t know,” Pearly said. His guts had been relatively still ever since Kurtz’s conversation with the plowman, but he sounded exhausted. “I can’t see. There’s someone, but it’s like there’s no mind there to look into.”
“Freddy?” Freddy shook his head. “Owen’s gone for me. I can barely hear the plow guy. It’s like… I dunno… like losing a radio signal.”
Kurtz leaned forward over the seat and took a close look at the Ripley on Freddy’s cheek. The stuff in the middle was still bright red-orange, but around the edges it appeared to be turning an ashy white.
It’s dying, Kurtz thought. Either Freddy’s system is killing it or the environment is. Owen was right. I’ll be damned.
Not that it changed anything. The line was still the line, and Owen had stepped over it.
“The plow guy,” Perlmutter said in his tired voice.
“What about the plow guy, buck?”
Only there was no need for Perlmutter to answer. Up ahead, twinkling in the blowing snow, was a sign reading EXIT 32-GRANDVIEW/GRANDVIEW STATION. The plow suddenly sped up, raising its blade as it did so. All at once the Humvee was running in slippery powder again, better than a foot of it. The plowman didn’t bother with his blinker, simply took the exit at fifty, yanking up a tall rooster-tail of snow in his wake.
“Follow him?” Freddy asked. “I can run him down, boss!” Kurtz mastered a strong urge to tell Freddy to go ahead-they’d run the long-eyed Yankee son of a bitch to earth and teach him what happened to folks who crossed the line. Give him a little dose of Owen Underhill’s medicine. Except the plow was bigger than the Hummer, a lot bigger, and who knew what might happen if they got into a game of bumper cars?
“Stay on the pike, laddie,” Kurtz said, settling back. “Eyes on the prize.” Still, he watched the plow angling off into the frigid, windy morning with real regret. He couldn’t even hope the damn Yankee had caught a hot dose from Freddy and Archie Perlmutter, because the stuff didn’t last.
They went on, speed dropping back to twenty in the drifts, but Kurtz guessed conditions would improve as they got farther south. The storm was almost over.
“And congratulations,” he told Freddy.
“Huh?”
Kurtz patted him on the shoulder. “You appear to be getting better.” He turned to Perlmutter. “I don’t know about you, laddie-buck.”
11
A hundred miles north of Kurtz’s position and less than two miles from the junction of back roads where Henry had been taken, the new commander of the Imperial Valleys-a woman of severe good looks, in her late forties-stood beside a pine tree in a valley which had been code-named Clean Sweep One. Clean Sweep One was, quite literally, a valley of death. Piled along its length were heaps of tangled bodies, most wearing hunter orange. There were over a hundred in all. If the corpses had ID, it had been taped around their necks. The majority of the dead were wearing their driver’s licenses, but there were also Visa and Discover cards, Blue Cross cards, and hunting licenses. One woman with a large black hole in her forehead had been tagged with her Blockbuster Video card.
Standing beside the largest pile of bodies, Kate Gallagher was finishing a rough tally before writing her second report. In one hand she held a Palm Pilot computer, a tool that Adolf Eichmann, that famous accountant of the dead, would certainly have envied. The Pilots hadn’t worked earlier, but now most of the cool electronics gear seemed to be back on-line.
Kate wore earphones and a mike suspended in front of her mouth-and-nose mask. Occasionally she would ask someone for clarification or give an order. Kurtz had chosen a successor who was both enthusiastic and efficient. Totting up the bodies here and elsewhere, Gallagher estimated that they had bagged at least sixty per cent of the escapees. The John Q’s had fought, which was certainly a surprise, but in the long run, most of them just weren’t survivors. It was as simple as that.