Mail it blind, of course, no return address, and from another state, not
Wyoming.”
“Shouldn’t you do this?” Paige asked.
“I’ll try again if you don’t get the kind of reaction I expect you will.
But it’s better coming from you first. Your disappearance, the action
in Mission Viejo, the murders of your parents, the bodies I’ve made sure
they found in that bell tower near your folks’ cabin–all of that has
kept your story hot. The Network has made sure it’s kept hot, ’cause
they’re desperate for someone to find you for them. Let’s use your
notoriety to make it all backfire on them if we can.”
The day was cool but not cold. The sky was a crystalline blue.
Marty and Karl went for a walk along the perimeter of the woods, always
keeping the cabin in sight.
“This Alfie,” Marty said.
“What about him?”
“Was he the only one?”
“The first and only operative clone. Others are being grown.”
“We have to stop that.”
“We will.”
“Okay. Suppose we blow the Network apart,” Marty wondered.
“Their house of cards collapses. Afterward . . . can we ever go back
home, resume our lives?”
Karl shook his head. “I don’t intend to. Don’t dare. Some of them
will slip the noose. And these are people who hold a grudge from Sunday
to Hell and back. Good haters. You ruin their lives or even just the
lives of people in their families, and sooner or later they’ll kill all
of you.”
“Then the Gault name isn’t just temporary cover?”
“It’s the best ID you can get. As good as real paper. I got it from
sources the Network doesn’t know about. No one will ever see through
this ID . . . or track you down by it.”
“My career, income from my books . ..”
“Forget it,” Karl said. “You’re on a new voyage of discovery, outward
to worlds unknown.”
“And you’ve got a new name too?”
Yes.”
“None of my business what it is, huh?”
“Exactly.”
Karl left that same afternoon, an hour before dusk.
As they accompanied him to the Range Rover, he withdrew an envelope from
an inside pocket of his tweed jacket and handed it to Paige, explaining
that it was the grant deed to the cabin and the land on which it stood.
“I bought and prepared two getaway properties, one at each end of the
country, so I’d be prepared for this day when it came. Owned them both
under untraceable false names. I’ve transferred this one to Ann and
John Gault, since I can only use one of them.”
He seemed embarrassed when Paige hugged him.
“Karl,” Marty said, “what would have happened to us without you? We owe
you everything.”
The big man was actually blushing. “You’d have done all right, somehow.
You’re survivors. Anything I’ve done for you, it’s only what anyone
would have.”
“Not these days,” Marty said.
“Even these days,” Karl said, “there are more good people than not. I
really believe that. I have to.”
At the Range Rover, Charlotte and Emily kissed Karl goodbye because they
all knew, without having to say it, that they would never see him again.
Emily gave him Peepers. “You need someone,” she said. “You’re all
alone. Besides, he’ll never get used to calling me Suzie Lori.
He’s your pet now.”
“Thank you, Emily. I’ll take good care of him.”
When Karl got behind the wheel and closed the door, Marty leaned in the
open window. “If we wreck the Network, you think they’ll ever put it
back together again?”
“It or something like it,” Karl said without hesitation.
Unsettled, Marty said, “I guess we’ll know if they do . . .
when they cancel all elections.”
“Oh, elections would never be canceled, at least not in any way that was
ever apparent,” Karl said as he started the Rover. “They’d go on just
as usual, with competing political parties, conventions, debates, bitter
campaigns, all the hoopla and shouting. But every one of the candidates
would be selected from Network loyalists. If they ever do take over,
John, only they will know.”
Marty was suddenly as cold as he had ever been in the blizzard on