“Oh, God, yes,” he sighed.
NANCI INSISTED on doing all the driving herself. She pushed on fast, finding ways around what looked like impossible traffic blocks. The silver Mercedes rolled on like a dream, the soft top down in the warm sunshine. South toward Los Angeles.
“I could spell you at the wheel,” he offered in midafternoon.
“This is not a casual spin out into the Sierras for transient pleasure. This is now and this is real.”
Camp was set for the night near Alta Sierra, close by Isabella Lake. They weren’t too far north of L.A., and on their way to closing in on Calico.
Jeff felt slightly sick from the long drive and he was relieved when Nanci didn’t call on him for sexual services.
She had lit a small fire and cooked the remains of a cat she’d snared in San Francisco.
“Nanci?”
“You’re going to ask me again about what I really used to do for a living. I’d prefer it if you didn’t, Jefferson.”
“You said you’d been a teacher. And a contract assassin for Central Intelligence. I believe both of them. By God, I do! But how do you know about Zelig? What’s going on, Nanci?”
She turned, hair tinted crimson by the fire’s glow, her eyes like burning rubies.
“It is probably a cliche, but it is honestly better for you that you don’t know too much. Either you trust me or you don’t. But don’t ask. One day, if the lords of chaos are willing, you’ll find out.”
Seventy miles short of Calico, beyond Mojave, Jeff saw a half-dozen figures strung out across the highway, stunted by the perspective and the shimmering desert heat.
Nanci took her foot off the gas, letting the Mercedes whisper down to something closer to fifty than ninety.
“They might be…” he began.
“Shut up and grab hold of that .45, there’s a good boy.”
The figures were closer, taking individual shapes. Dark blue pants, peaked caps with silver badges, polished mirror sunglasses that concealed the eyes. Four in leather jackets, the other two in shirtsleeves. All of them were holding drawn revolvers that glittered in the morning sunlight.
“Fucking cops,” said Jeff.
“Ten out of ten for surface observation. Zero out of ten for intelligence.”
“You mean they aren’t—”
He was pushed back in the bucket seat as the Mercedes suddenly accelerated hard toward the line of men.
Jeff had a splinter of a frozen second to wonder if this was where he became dead.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Captain James Hilton, lately the commander of the United States Space Vessel Aquila, stared down the sunlit main street of the ghost town.
There was the dazzle of the chromed hood of the sleek silver Mercedes sports car parked near the open front of what had once been a gift shop. Wind chimes still tinkled in the light breeze, and you could just taste the faint, elusive flavor of pinon pine candles.
There were five bullet holes in the car, not counting the smashed windshield. The front fender was crumpled and smeared with gobbets of brown, drying blood. One of the double headlights was gone, and Jim could still make out the macabre hank of blond-haired scalp that dangled from the socket.
He’d personally removed the severed finger from the radiator grill, noticing that the sterling silver ring was monogrammed C.H.P.
The rough surface of the old picnic table in front of him felt warm to the touch. Jim glanced at the sky, seeing it cloudless from east to west.
It was 15 November 2040.
The date and the place that Zelig had warned them to attend.
He looked around, seeing what changes the past seven eventful weeks had wrought in his command. Mentally he ticked off the names. Finding, to his dismay, that some of the faces had blurred.
Bob Rogers from Topeka, dead in his cryo-capsule.
Mike Man, the best chess player that Jim had ever known, dead in the landing crash.
Marcey Cortling, the Aquila’s number two, decapitated.
Ryan O’Keefe, their psychiatrist, also dead at Stevenson base.
Jed Herne, shot by a sniper, not far from San Francisco, his death described to them by Jeff Thomas that morning.