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  There was still Gabriel. If she could focus on him, perhaps this could be managed. She had been able to cope with this sort of thing before; she had known then that she was needed. She had not given in, as had some others she knew, and put on her best clothes and walked toward the wall. She was still needed now. That was something. Gabriel lay in the hospital three miles away and knew nothing about any of this. In the morning she would have to go fetch him. And where would she take him? She crossed her feet at the ankles and rocked back and forth.

  They could not stay here. They could not escape.

  Flora did not understand the plump little soldier with his money and his computer and his evil giant. She understood that she did not understand him. What his motives were, what he really wanted and why, were beyond her. He was from another plane of existence, a circumstance that afforded him, in her world, the powers of a god. And he had used those powers against her, and her father, and, for all she knew, her brother that morning. Perhaps it was also he who had taken her mother and Jake.

  She began to rock harder, the wheel studs now hurting her back.

  One could not endure under such a brutal and capricious god. Not for long. He would be back for her and for Gabriel when it suited him. She knew nothing, but somehow she knew too much. A click of a mouse key was all that it would take; he had shown her that already. And their murder wouldn’t even warrant an army press release or a routine denial. They wouldn’t see it coming. Flora started to cry again, not so much for herself and Gabriel, who were yet to die, but for her mother and father and Jake, whose love would soon be forgotten forever.

  She stopped rocking. This thought was unbearable. They would have to be remembered. She would free Gabriel and herself from the Embargoed Zone: there could be no more lingering here. But how to escape? The soldier had hinted that they might be allowed safe passage to some other part of the world if she helped him, but that was only a hint, not a promise. And even his promise would have been meaningless; you couldn’t hold a god to account.

  But then, he wasn’t really a god. A real god wouldn’t wheedle or deal. If the little soldier needed something from her, his powers must be finite. So what powers did he really possess, and how were they derived?

  The sky was brightening now; the dawn would be somewhere behind the ruins of Hilltown. And then she became aware of something she had long ago learned to ignore: the sneer of a drone aircraft circling high and slow above her. She searched for it in the morning haze, finally glimpsing a flash of light as an early ray lit up its underside. It occurred to her that it might be the same armed drone that had killed her father and Tony. Then she lost sight of it again.

  The soldier’s power, she understood, was that he could see them and they couldn’t see him. And thanks to the wall and all the myths that went with it, the rest of the world—the real world—couldn’t see Flora and Gabriel and all of the rest of them either, not as people. They were members of a lower order, one to which bad things just happened out there in the darkness and dirt.

  But she had seen the little soldier. She had looked into his face. She knew that he existed. And she and Gabriel existed too. Not only in the Embargoed Zone but in the real world also: they would have been seen on television that day—Uncle Joseph had told her so. Just faces on the edge of another scene of violence, but for a brief moment they had flickered into a wider existence. Couldn’t she use that somehow to extort some measure of humanity for Gabriel and herself? Once they became human beings, they would not be so easy to kill.

  Uncle Joseph must help her. She would go and look for him again when the sun came up. Together they would find an angle. She was too tired now to think what it might be; that would be her uncle’s department, she hoped.

  And then she realized with surprise that for an hour or two she might even sleep, despite everything. After that, she could look for her miracle.

  She stood, then almost fell as numbness pinched her legs; she had been sitting there for a long, cold time. Leaning against the cab of the dead truck, she waited for feeling and strength to come back to her limbs. There was a cough close behind her. Please God, she thought, turning slowly, don’t let it be a caring neighbor. But there was no one there. There was another cough, a male one, coming from under the truck. Some kind of tramp, she decided, and she was stealing away when it came again, a terrible convulsive, retching cough. Flora found her conscience stirring. Whoever it was, he was clearly in a desperate condition. She peered into the shadow between the wheels.

  “Hello. Are you okay under there?”

  There was a flurry of movement, and then a dim face raised itself toward her. “Er, hello,” said the man under the truck.

  “Are you all right under there?”

  “Er, no.” There was a scrabbling sound, and a young man crawled out from under the cab.

  Using a mudguard for leverage, he pulled himself to his feet and stood swaying there, hunched miserably in on himself, squinting as he tried to make her out. Flora took in his smeared uniform and the rifle and magazine pouches that hung listlessly from either hand, and she turned and fled. But the sand sucked at her feet as they sought to pull clear of it, forcing her to lean forward, and she had gone only a couple of yards when a wire snagged her ankle and she fell facedown in a clump of scratching weeds. Footsteps crunched behind her, and she closed her eyes and balled her fists, waiting. She heard the cough again.

  “Er, excuse me,” muttered the gunman. “I’m sorry if I scared you, but I’m rather lost. Could I please borrow your cell phone, just for a local call? I can’t find mine, and I need to ring in sick.”

  Flora remembered then the phone that the captain had given her. It felt heavy in her pocket. Shuddering, she rolled over and sat upright, her back to the soldier, shielding her hand as she fumbled in her pocket. She felt a click, and the battery fell away from the rest of the handset.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning slowly. “I don’t have a phone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The first rays of day were spearing the dunes as Captain Smith rapped on the door of Colonel White’s chalet. He waited, then rapped again, and when there was no reply he turned to Daddy Jesus: “Break it in.”

  “Aren’t you going to pick the lock first, boss?”

  “Do it, Daddy Jesus. This is no time for finesse.”

  They found the colonel in the bedroom, stuck halfway out of the narrow window, his legs flailing inside the room. He yelped as Daddy Jesus hauled him back inside, then spun him around and pushed him against a wall.

  “Good morning, sir,” Smith said breezily. “I’m so glad we found you here. Your voicemail message said you’d gone back to headquarters for the night. Just a little mistake on your part, I’m sure.”

  Colonel White took a moment to rearrange his shirt, which had bunched around his armpits when Daddy Jesus had wrenched him from the window. Finished, he seemed to assume that he had also reasserted his dignity.

  “What’s this about, Captain? I’ve been very busy,” he barked, trying to slide away from them. Daddy Jesus turned and leaned smoothly into the wall so that his shoulder blocked the colonel’s escape.

  “We need to have a little talk about what I’ve been hearing on the news,” said Smith. “About how the air force dropped a one-ton bomb on a residential building in the middle of the night and how a drone attacked a clearly identified press vehicle, killing one accredited journalist, and then fired a hellfire into a street full of rescuers. Do you mind telling me, sir, what you were playing at last night?”

  Colonel White smirked. “Read the operational notes, Smith: the building was harboring a known terrorist leader. The vehicle was smuggling weapons or acting suspiciously, I forget which. And who cares? They were only terrorists.”

  Smith blinked slowly. “There were families sleeping in that building. You killed fourteen people, most of them women and children.”

  The colonel shrugged. “I acted in full accordance with the rules of engagement. As
usual, great care was taken to minimize civilian casualties. I could have dropped lots of bombs, but I only dropped one.”

  Captain Smith stared at him. Then he collected himself. “All right, Colonel. Be that as it may, what exactly were you trying to achieve by all this?”

  The colonel stuck his jaw out. “I was tidying up, Smith. You were dicking around in the Embargoed Zone, letting the situation slip away from you, so I had to step in and put a stop to things.”

  “And how do you presume to know what I was up to in the Easy? Were you listening in on my communications?”

  The colonel looked smug. “Afraid so, yes. Commander’s privilege.”

  “And you were eavesdropping on my phone call with Cobra, too, right? That’s why you wanted his number? And then for some reason you went totally mad and started flinging explosives around!”

  The colonel’s chin had climbed back to its normal cruising altitude. “The situation was spiraling out of control! It’s as important for us to stop the Iranians from getting that washing machine as it is to get it back for ourselves—imagine what they could do with that kind of technology: they’d sell it on to everyone at half the market price! So I took some precautions. Whoever had the machine is probably dead by now, buying us more time to find it if it hasn’t been destroyed. And even if it was caught in the air strikes, your ground assets can still go and pick up the pieces.”

  Smith surprised himself by smacking the wall hard with the flat of his hand. “You idiot! The machine could still be anywhere, and so could the Iranians! I had two good leads, and you’ve just destroyed both of them. Tell me, Colonel, is there any problem that you won’t try and solve by throwing ordnance at it?”

  “I played a percentage.”

  “No, you didn’t. You panicked and lashed out blindly! You stink of fear!” Smith’s voice abruptly resumed its habitually mild, conversational tone. “Am I right, Daddy Jesus? You know a flop sweat when you taste one.”

  Daddy Jesus teased a curl of Colonel White’s hair around a discolored spatulate finger. Then he put his finger in his mouth and slowly sucked it. He smiled.

  “You’re right, boss. He’s shitting himself.”

  The colonel shrank away from him. “Leave me alone, goddamn it! I’m a full colonel!”

  “Indeed you are,” mused Smith, “which makes me wonder: What was it that scared a full colonel so much?” Daddy Jesus let his hand drop from the colonel’s hair, brushing his cheek as it fell. The colonel turned pale but said nothing. Smith fixed him with a shrewd look.

  “So what was it that spooked you? The Iranians? Well, perhaps. But it wasn’t them that made you snap so suddenly, was it, Colonel? You already knew about them. No, you went to pieces right after you heard Cobra tell me that a TV crew had gotten wind of this thing. That’s what pushed you over the edge, wasn’t it?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Smith carried on as if he had not heard him.

  “Yes, it was the media involvement. You were frightened that this business might somehow go public. Which would be pretty bad for us, of course. But freak-out-screaming, spit-out-the-pacifier sort of bad?” Smith shook his head. “There’s something you haven’t told us, isn’t there, Colonel?”

  “I told you all you need to know for this mission! Everything else is classified, on a strictly need-to-know basis.”

  “Of course. So tell me: Who else needed to know about this operation, Colonel? If I were to pick up that phone over there and call our general, or the head of military intelligence, say, or the chief of staff’s office, or the industrial espionage division, and mention this amazing new technology which we’ve just stolen from the Americans, would they know what I was talking about?”

  The colonel was aghast. “You wouldn’t dare call them!”

  “Oh, but I’d have to, sir: it’s ass-covering time thanks to your antics last night. So let’s be honest with each other. Our commanders don’t know anything about the toploader, do they, Colonel? You’re flying solo on this one.”

  Daddy Jesus began to chortle like a compressor running on dirty diesel. The colonel sagged against the wall. Smith sighed and turned away, reaching for the bedside phone. And then the colonel spoke.

  “Please don’t call anyone,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ll cut you in on the deal. If you can somehow help me find that washing machine and keep your mouth shut, I’ll make you rich.”

  “Tell me more.”

  The colonel drew a heaving breath and, looking meekly up at Daddy Jesus, turned and sat on his unmade bed. He placed his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “That chip is extremely valuable not only militarily but commercially. Apart from the military-industrial applications—weapons for our own services, and for retail abroad, of course—there will be all kinds of civilian spin-off benefits for computer gaming, mobile phones, control systems—even for washing machines.”

  Smith nodded to Daddy Jesus, who sat beside the colonel and patted his back. The colonel cringed, then continued.

  “Obviously, we planned to give the chip to one of our own domestic tech companies to exploit both for our own military and for export abroad—a lot of countries will still pay top dollar for the first look at new American technology, especially if we let them think that the Chinese are ahead of them in line. But which of our companies should we give the chip to? Whoever got to decide that would be very popular with some very wealthy and influential corporations. Normally, of course, a secret committee of politicians and generals would thrash out the decision, but that’s a very inefficient way of doing things: it takes a lot of time and money to buy off an entire committee of big shots. So I thought, wouldn’t it be much cheaper and more efficient for the lucky arms company—and therefore better for our national interest too—if that company only had to pay one person for access to the chip? And what if that person was me?”

  “So you set up a freelance operation to steal the chip, and you didn’t cut in your bosses.”

  The colonel nodded. “My team in the States will be well looked after, of course, to keep them quiet. And so will you if you help me.”

  “What’s your end of the deal? A highly paid consultancy post when you retire, heading up some big aerospace project, with a team of engineers to do all the work for you?”

  White curled his lip. “That’s chicken feed. I’d get that anyway; all the senior air force officers get aerospace jobs when they go into the reserve. But if I had this chip on the table, I could buy my way in at the top of any corporation, with a golden hello and a seat on the board.”

  Smith nodded thoughtfully. “And of course you’d need your own highly paid specialist staff. People with a background in human intelligence and ground operations, that sort of thing. And they’d have to be on very handsome ironbound contracts so they’d have the focus and security they’d need to do their jobs properly.”

  The colonel nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I daresay they would.”

  Smith clapped his hands together. “Right, Daddy Jesus, it’s time we got cracking. Cobra should be awake by now: let’s try and get him on his cell phone.”

  “You’re forgetting,” said the colonel, mumbling into his hands. “I dropped a bomb on him last night.”

  Smith smiled fondly down at him. “No, you didn’t. You dropped a bomb on his cell phone signal, which is not the same thing at all. Cobra lives in a cellar; it’s actually one of our old interrogation centers; I gave him the keys myself when we disengaged from the Embargoed Zone. But there’s a very poor cell phone signal down there, so when he’s at home, Cobra has to plug his phone into a booster aerial which is attached to the roof of the building next door. That’s what your smart bomb homed in on last night.”

  “Oh, really? So who did I bomb last night?”

  Smith shrugged. “The press office hasn’t decided yet.”

  The colonel relapsed into gloom. “Still,�
� he said, “Cobra will hardly be in touch again. He must have figured out by now that we tried to kill him last night.”

  Smith lit a cigarette, then offered the colonel one. “I wouldn’t count on Cobra figuring out anything—he’s one of our most useful assets. But the girl, on the other hand, seemed rather clever. I doubt if we’ll be hearing from her again after you blew up that jeep outside her house, together with half of her neighborhood.”

  “What girl?”

  Smith exhaled a plume of smoke and turned toward the exit. “That, Colonel, is on a need-to-know basis. If you reflect on what you did last night, I’m sure you’ll understand why. And another thing—from now on I’m in charge of this operation. It’s just an informal arrangement, but I think you’ll find things work more smoothly this way.”

  The colonel nodded. Daddy Jesus followed his boss outside.

  Smith paused at the front door. “Make sure you don’t panic again, Colonel,” he called back. “So long as we keep our nerve, those Iranians don’t stand a chance against us in the Embargoed Zone: we know every last inch of it. We’ll get that toploader back—and before it reaches the spin cycle, eh?”

  Incredible, thought Driscoll as he watched Smith and Daddy Jesus drive off in their jeep. There it was again: the Toploader Project! And his surmise had been correct—it really was linked to the Iranians. Who really were inside the Easy!

  He closed the bathroom window and stepped down from his vantage point on the toilet bowl, rubbing his eyes. What a night. One tweet had led to another, one commentary thread to the next, until he had looked up from his screen to see pale morning in the window. Time to pack his gear, shave his face and scalp, and then—the urgent voices from the next bungalow and the captain’s indiscretion!

  He would cross now into the Embargoed Zone. He didn’t really need to, truth be told—he had found enough material on the Internet that night to back up half a dozen features about long-range mortars and Iranian antitank rockets and mutated swine flu aerosols. But he still had the chance to strike another blow against 24/7. And it would be nice to be able to put an Easy dateline on his pieces to give them that extra shine. He wiped the lather off his head and gave the mirror a cynical smile. Going somewhere dangerous just to get a dateline. If he wasn’t careful, he’d soon turn into an old-school hack.