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  “So you see how easy it is to change things,” he told Flora. “You’d be surprised how many people in the Easy have quietly managed to work their way down from four to two by being cooperative. Level twos can be allowed to leave here when they’re no longer needed so long as some third-party country will take them in. But people who are asked to cooperate and who refuse . . . ” He paused, for effect it seemed, and then paused a little longer, and the pause was becoming just a little awkward when a clap of thunder tore the stillness of the night, followed by a howling, whirring moan. There was an explosion just behind the building, flashing red through the broken kitchen door, and the concrete walls lurched and settled. The girl clutched the arms of her chair.

  “Ah,” said the captain, pleased. “That will have been that weapons store you used to have out back. Shame about those rabbits and chickens. But if anyone in the outside world should ever ask about them, which is highly unlikely, we’ll just point out that it was the terrorists’ fault for using them as shields.” Daddy Jesus guffawed in the shadows.

  “What do you want?” she asked quietly.

  “You know what we want: we want the washing machine. We want to know where they took it.”

  “I don’t know where anyone took anything. I already told you.”

  “You must know something. Or do I have to show you our computer model of Hilltown hospital, and the list of patients currently admitted there, and who’s in which bed?”

  She was silent for a while, and he knew then that he had her. “It’s Cobra you want,” she said finally. “He’s the one behind it all. He brought the machine here. We didn’t want it.”

  “So where has Cobra taken it?”

  “Cobra? He hasn’t taken it anywhere. He was here earlier, trying to get it back from us. But it was gone already. Somebody must have taken it while I was out.”

  “Gone? You mean someone else has it?”

  Captain Smith began to wonder whether for the first time in his career he might have stumbled into matters too deep for his comprehension. Were there really forces at work in the Embargoed Zone that he could not command? Iranians? Venezuelans? Nigerians? Koreans? Were the legends true? He steeled his voice. “Who has it, Flora? And where has your father gone?”

  Smith leaned forward and stared into her eyes. She looked scared but held his gaze. “I don’t know where he is. I wasn’t here when he left. Perhaps whoever has the washing machine took my father with them. Perhaps they kidnapped him. I don’t know.”

  Smith stared at her for a few moments, then looked at Daddy Jesus. “We’d better get out of here,” he said. “It’ll be dawn soon. Go and round up our escorts.”

  His face resumed its earlier kindly expression. “Flora,” he said, “you seem like a nice girl. I don’t know why you would refuse to help us; I suspect that loyalty to Cobra would not be among your reasons.” He lifted the flap on his bag and held it open before her.

  “There’s five thousand euros in here,” Smith told her. “That’s the reward for helping us recover the washing machine. And this”—he pulled out a wad of notes—“is an advance payment. Five hundred euros, to show I mean business and to help with expenses. If you hear anything—and I think you will, Flora—you give me a call on this.” He took a cell phone from a pocket in the bag. “Here’s a power adapter to go with it. Do you have any way of keeping the phone charged when the power here is off?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Keep the phone on you at all times so I can get hold of you. Switch it to vibrate; you don’t want it to ring when strangers are present.”

  “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t want people to think I’d become an informer.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Colonel White sat alone at a drone console, smoking a cigarette, while the fingers of his free hand caressed the shaft of a joystick. Smoking was banned in the drone room no matter how exalted one’s rank, but so too were computer games, even on the graveyard shift. As the evening dragged on, however, he and the two duty drone jocks had come to an unspoken truce. He could do whatever he liked now as far as they were concerned; engrossed in their online multiplayer game of Bitchslapper III—Curb Sandwich, they hadn’t even noticed when he blew up that chicken coop.

  His cell phone buzzed. “Yes,” he said, and heard the hiss of static and the rumble of an engine. “Have you got it?”

  “Er, no.” Smith’s voice crackled in his ear. White shut his eyes tightly and allowed his forehead to sink into his cigarette-bearing hand. “Then where is it?”

  “Don’t know yet. We have a couple of leads, though. Won’t be long.”

  Colonel White opened his eyes and looked back over his career. From the age of eighteen onward it had never seemed anything less than glittering. For it all to end here . . . Over in the corner of the control room, their faces gray in the light from their screen, the drone jocks were garroting a rival pimp so they could make off with his Bentley.

  “What about this terrorist mastermind of yours? What have you got from him?”

  Smith’s reply had the squared-off modular distortion of a voice that had been scrambled well and then badly reassembled. “We’re still trying to contact him, sir. But he has deactivated his cell phone. As soon as he puts the battery back in, we’ll know where he is.”

  “What’s his name and phone number?”

  “Dear Lord, I can’t tell you that, sir! Even if we weren’t on the radio! He’s going to be my confidential agent; his identity is need to know only!”

  White had to think somewhat harder than he was used to doing. “Don’t worry about being overheard, Captain,” he managed. “This is a specially scrambled line we’re on now—air force encryption, the best there is. If you give me his number, I might be able to trace his phone even if he has taken the battery out—through its electromagnetic resonance, that sort of thing. It’s a new technology we have in the air force. Very secret. You won’t have heard of it.”

  There was a long pause during which Colonel White listened to the APC’s tracks grinding through some structure or other, and then Smith spoke again. “Oh, all right,” he said. “Have you got a pen?”

  Cobra’s donkey was a clever beast, with a nose for the weeds that sprouted unseen in the hidden corners of bombed-out lots; it had taken Cobra half the night to find it again. Wearily, he locked the massive gunmetal-gray door of his lair, then plodded down the damp concrete steps that led to the damp concrete floor of his cellar. Reaching the bottom, he dropped his keys and his pistol on a walnut occasional table, then took out his lighter and lit a fresh candle. Its flame revealed a corridor that stretched to the far end of the basement, set on either side with half a dozen metal doors. The walls were stacked head-high with cases of expired military field rations and boxes of plastic shoes, out-of-date antibiotics, Chinese batteries, weevily flour, and condemned baby formula. Above this hoarded wealth, the candlelight flickered on posters of Cobra’s martyred heroes, the early ones, boys and young men who had died when there was still paper and ink left to spare for them. Once glossy, the faces in the posters had become dull with dust and age, and the light failed to catch in the blacks of their eyes.

  The nearest door opened into a small, low-ceilinged room that Cobra had made as cozy as a former interrogation cell could hope to be. There was a single bed dressed with a cotton quilt with yellow flowers on it, and on the wall above it hung a hyperrealistic, supersaturated image—whether photograph or painting it was difficult to tell—of a lake with green trees and snowy mountains. Cobra put his candle on a dresser by the bed, beside the photograph of his exiled wife and children, and stripped down to his underwear, sighing and grumbling. He put on his pajamas, then fished around on the floor for a phone adapter that was attached via an inverter to an old truck battery under the bed. Plugging his phone into the charger, he attached another cable to the phone’s data port, then pressed the “On” button. No sooner had the phone flickered back to life than it began to beep angrily at him again a
nd again as text messages and missed-call notifications jostled onto its screen.

  It’s late, thought Cobra. I ought to let that bastard stew. It would serve him right. But when the last beep had echoed off the concrete walls, he pressed the call key and sat back on the bed.

  “Hello, Captain? Yes, it’s me. Now calm down; it’s not my fault. My phone was dead—the battery ran out, and I only got home a minute ago. Never mind where I was; we have to be quick—this battery I’ve plugged into isn’t going to last long either. It’s on its last legs; I told you to get me a new one. Look, if it’s about that washing machine, then I don’t know where they took it . . . . What do you mean, ‘Who is “they”?’ . . . Well, if you don’t know who ‘they’ is, what’s it worth to you to find out? . . . Now calm down, Captain. I’m not trying to hustle you. I just want to get paid, for a change . . . . A hundred euros? You must be joking! I want five. I saw them taking it away this evening, before I could stop them . . . . Calm down, I’m getting to ‘who’; I saw them myself this evening, at Sam Miller’s repair shop in Hilltown—you might remember Sam’s son, Jake Miller. He was one of my mine; I set him up for the drone strike myself. Anyway, I persuaded old Miller to buy that junk you foisted on me. But then you asked for it back, so I went to collect it this evening, only to see old Miller carting it off in the back of a Land Rover . . . . No, I’m not talking nonsense. They really did have a Land Rover; it was one of those armored press jeeps. That Tony guy was driving it. I don’t know his surname; he’s a cameraman or producer or something for 24/7 News.”

  It could have been his tired nerves, it could have been the dancing candle or the ectoplasmic residue of all the screams and prayers that had soaked into the walls of that dark little room, horrors to which Cobra was normally indifferent, but he was sure that he heard a ghostly howl on his cell phone, keening across the ether, over the spectral rumbling diesel and the grinding of the gears. “Hey, was that you, Captain? Did you hear it too? . . . No, it wasn’t me, either . . . . Strange.”

  Not for the first time that night, Tony cursed himself for his foolishness. Here they were, past midnight, driving around the northern fringes of the Embargoed Zone, the only vehicle moving in the black, curfewed night. The streets here, what was left of them, were laid out in a grid pattern, and every hundred yards or so the Land Rover had to cross the yawning mouth of a cross-street covered in enfilade, Tony knew by the machine guns on the wall. It was less than a half mile away, here. The cross-streets presented themselves to Tony, not normally a fanciful young man, as dizzy concrete chasms toppling away toward the hard certain death of the wall. He had to fight the urge to accelerate wildly through each junction to the relative shelter on the other side. But this could be interpreted as suspicious behavior and fatally penalized. He imagined fingers tightening on bored and sleepless triggers and forced himself to stay calm.

  Flora’s father half lay in the passenger seat, his face pressed against a window, sleeping peacefully. They could have been home hours ago, but Sam had insisted on waiting for the boss man to return to the camp so that he could be paid in cash in full. Tony had a very strong notion, as he turned into the street where Flora lived, that she was not going to thank him for keeping her father out in the drone-haunted night. He reached over to shake him.

  “Hey, Sam,” he said, “wake up.” And then Tony saw Flora running out into the cone of the headlights with a joyful expression on her face, and he left Sam where he was, still stirring groggily. His foot was just pressing on the brake when his cell phone rang. Tony picked it off the dashboard.

  ‘Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

  Cobra was drifting into his first true dream of the night when he was lifted a foot off the bed. He fell back again, his heart racing and his lungs coiled up into his throat. For a moment the terror was absolute, an injection of pure adrenaline right into the brainstem, and then he fell back on the mattress, his heart still stuttering. Sonic boom, he told himself. Few people would sleep properly again in the Easy that night: man, woman, or hysterical child. The booms always came in pairs, like shoes being dropped on the ceiling: at some point between now and the dawn it would amuse the air force to rip the sky open again, right over their heads. Well, it might traumatize the children, but he, Cobra, was too old a campaigner to let it bother him. He could sleep from one boom to the next. Still, he thought, there was no reason to make it hard on himself. He reached out from under the bedclothes, switched off his cell phone, then settled down to sleep again.

  Flora halted in the roadway, waiting for the jeep to coast up to her. Then its headlights twitched as if it had been stung, its back wheels slid out from behind it, and it lurched broadside to a stop. Flora saw Tony open his door quite slowly, and then he took one step away from the jeep and fell to the ground and started to crawl; only then did she hear, or perhaps notice, or remember, the brisk sound of metal punching metal and the hiss of air escaping from blown-out tires. Dust lashed her eyes, and gravel stung her face. There was another crack—this time she heard the whirr that preceded it—and the Land Rover lurched again and settled down on its belly with an air of finality, like a poleaxed ox, its headlights staring in mute dismay.

  Sobbing, choking on grit, Flora scrambled on her hands and knees toward the lights and the smoke that now trickled from the Land Rover’s engine. Her hand sank into something soft and hot and wet, and she heard Tony gasp, and then he spoke to her.

  “Get away from here,” he murmured, as if from another room. “Run.”

  Tony’s right leg and the right half of his pelvis had been replaced by a thick bloody fringe of shredded cloth and skin and flesh and vital organs. With a strength she had not suspected in herself, Flora managed to heave and tug him another four or five yards from the Land Rover, into the partial shelter of a flatbed truck that sat rusting by the road. She cradled his head on her shoulder as what was left of his blood pooled black and oily in the dirt around them. She could think of nothing good to say to him.

  Figures were converging on the scene from all sides, flashing in and out of view in the zigzagging flashlight beams. Candles flickered in windows up and down the street, and hands pulled her away from Tony, though she tried to fight them. She was looking at the Land Rover again as it was lit by the flames that licked out from under its hood. A little two-inch hole had appeared high in the armored hull just behind the cab. Orange in the light of the flames, a human figure was sprawled in the passenger seat. Blood dribbled from the open door onto the sand, meandering on for a few feet to make a common pool with Tony’s. It seemed incredible to her, almost funny, that no one else had noticed this yet. And just as she launched herself toward the stricken jeep there was another concussion in the sky, louder this time, a throatier whirr, and then the Land Rover, the flashlight beams, the shouting rescuers, the clamoring boys, were erased from the scene, screen wiped into oblivion by a sunburst, which flared, blossomed, and died, fading to a new tableau of smoke, burning debris, and carbonized bodies and rancid soot. The white Land Rover was now black, its armored hide peeled open like a banana. Savory blue flames licked the mass on the passenger seat.

  Flora picked herself up from the stinking earth and slowly raised both hands to her face. Then she turned and picked her way—thoughtfully, a witness might have said—off into the darkness.

  “Where’s Colonel White?” Smith asked from the doorway. The two drone jockeys looked up, startled, from their illicit computer game.

  “Uh, don’t know, Captain,” said the older of the two. “He was here until a little while ago. Then I guess he must have left.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s a good thing. Must have been a quiet night.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The drone jockey glanced at the monitors, and then he looked again more closely and frowned. “Uh, actually, Captain, that’s not quite true.” He punched a few keys. “It says here in the log that the colonel took out a terrorist weapons factory tonight. Wow—they were making some new kind of Ebola bomb, according to
his notes.”

  “Right,” Smith grunted, and turned to go.

  “Oh, and there’s more, sir. He also destroyed a terrorist’s headquarters that was disguised as a residential apartment block. He must have been a major terrorist—the colonel sent a fighter-bomber to drop a one-ton smart bomb to home onto his cell phone signal.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. And there was another drone strike too. On a Land Rover that the terrorists were using to move weapons. It says here that the colonel used two kinetic missiles to immobilize it and then a hellfire, one of the new thermobaric ones, to sterilize the scene. All targets confirmed destroyed. Do you want to see the videos?”

  But Captain Smith had already vanished, leaving the door to swing slowly shut behind him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The sand blew in from the seashore day after day, year after year, pushing its fingers inland. There were places, gaps between the rusting cars and crumbling walls, where it pooled so white that it seemed to glow in the darkness. The sand was better than nothing, Flora told herself over and over until, not long before daybreak, she began to wonder what she meant by that. You could use the sand to clean your hands; perhaps that had something to do with it. She thrust her blood-caked fingers into it repeatedly until they felt raw. Perhaps that too was better than nothing. She could not feel the predawn cold, but she noticed how it shook her, as if she were still sobbing.

  She was sitting on a patch of wasteland that ran behind her street, a tongue of the no-man’s-land that stretched from the edge of Hilltown north to the wall. Her back rested against the cold steel of a truck’s wheel, half buried in the sand. Stars shone through the holes in the low cloud. Before her she could see the back of the building where she and her parents and brothers had lived. The family washing still flapped on the clothesline where she had pegged it the morning before. Weeds nodded at her from the garbage.