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  Moon understood that although she was still plainly terrified, she was no longer frightened of him. Back to that, he told himself a little regretfully.

  After another half mile they passed from the broken-backed ruins into the more open terrain between Hilltown and the city. The few buildings here were two- or three-story farmhouses set in a checkerboard of scorched fields and splintered groves, the fields separated one from the next by sagging strands of wire. Only a few other people straggled on the road, and the girl allowed Moon to fall back a little way until all he could see of her was the frayed hem of her jeans bobbing along in front of him. Then her feet slowed, and Moon lifted his head and saw a crowd of people milling around two Red Cross ambulances. The ambulances were idling in the middle of the road, facing away from him, the drivers leaning out of the windows and staring ahead. Three hundred yards beyond them the road was choked between two small but steep hillocks that rose on either side of it. A bank of dirt and rubble had been bulldozed across the chokepoint. Smoke was rising beyond the small hills.

  The girl weighed the situation. “You stay back here,” she decided. “I need to ask those people what’s going on.”

  Moon tried to object, but she was already walking ahead with hesitant steps. And then he saw that several of the men in the crowd were wearing masks and carried rifles and RPG launchers.

  He cast about for an escape route: there was nothing on either side of him but ragged, wintery groves. Behind him was the nightmare of Hilltown, along a road that his imagination already saw as swept by humming bullets. In a moment of inspiration, he decided to go into the trees and pretend to take a piss: if the girl betrayed him to the terrorists, he would be able to see them coming and could run for it into the grove. He was too frightened to go for real. As he peered through the leafless twigs, he saw the girl talk briefly to one of the gunmen, then turn and start back toward him.

  Something slammed into the earth somewhere just beyond the hillocks, a dull lurch in the soles of his feet. Then there was another louder, brighter concussion, followed by three jackhammer bursts of heavy machine gun fire. Moon sank to his knees behind the tree. The crowd in the road split and contracted, balling up in the lee of the ambulances like shoals of frightened fish. The gunmen vanished into the weeds by the road. The girl faltered, glanced over her shoulder, and stepped on again. She reached the point where she had left him and stood, frowning, her hands on her hips, as he skulked back onto the road. Ahead, the people were drifting back into the open, out from the illusory shelter of the ambulances.

  “The army has blocked the road to the city,” the girl told him. “We’ll have to go another way.” She set off down a path that led through the trees toward the coast.

  Moon caught up with her again. “What were those explosions and that shooting?”

  “Just some tanks. They weren’t shooting at us. They’re invading the next village.”

  A standard up-tit operation, Moon realized: uprooting the infrastructure of terror. There would be tanks protecting the armored infantry and the bulldozers. Sniper teams hidden on the taller buildings—and doubtless on the two hillocks in front of him—would be watching over the tanks. There would be artillery on standby and attack helicopters. And above it all, tying the whole thing together, would be the drones. Making an effort, Moon could hear at least two of them loitering smugly overhead: it was amazing how easily you forgot that they were there, like the cameras in a reality show. He took stock of the nearby farmhouses that rose above the groves. The closest, on the girl’s line of march, was a hundred yards away. It stared back at him through glassless windows, its walls a mosaic of discolored concrete and flaking plaster. There was, he noticed, a small round hole in the wall near the roof: a sniper’s loophole or merely a drain?

  Moon felt naked. “Wait a minute,” he called after the girl. “There could be more tanks or snipers hidden this way. Or what if a drone sees us? They might think we’re terrorists, sneaking off through the trees.”

  The girl shrugged. “There’s no other way,” she said. “Unless you want to go back to Hilltown.”

  He had to think about each step again, although the way was level and unobstructed and the pain in his feet no longer concerned him. The path led them under the walls of the farmhouse. Moon felt a curious tightness in his throat and chest and an urge to sigh and to curl his toes and fingers as he walked toward it. The right side of his body, the one facing the house, seemed to swell in size. He dared not look at the house itself, as if it were a dangerous animal and it was better not to challenge it. An old bicycle lay in the weeds along its wall. Only feet away now, the windows yawned at him, exhaling a musty breath of mildew spores and ancient cooking. They were past the house, crossing the edge of a weedy dirt yard scattered with faded plastic toys, then entering the groves again. Moon felt the house watching him through the spot between his shoulders, still trying to make up its mind.

  The girl tramped onward. He felt as if he were tethered to her. They left the groves and entered a stretch of fields and scrubby pasture where smoke rose from kitchen fires, and sheep grazed, and dogs barked from higgledy-piggledy shacks. Cresting a dune, they saw the sea before them, blue and wrinkled and windblown, its horizon broken by the gray scaffolds of offshore gas platforms. Closer in, the conning tower of a patrol boat bobbed on the waves, its hull intermittently hidden in the troughs. Moon stared at the boat, then turned to the north, toward the distant gray smudge of the wall and—just beyond it, he knew—the lost Eden of his base.

  “It’s so close,” he said, but the girl had already started down the dune, slipping and stumbling in the loose sand. Behind them, just over the crest, there was another brace of explosions, dulled now by distance and the rattle of automatic fire. Invisible jets moaned in from the sea.

  They slid down the last few feet of the dune and turned southward onto the road that skirted the coast. Beyond the road, straggling along the beach, were the houses and huts of what had been a fishing village before the army banned boats from taking to sea. A knot of children was hunkered down in the shelter of a beach shack, clutching twigs, while an old woman walked back and forth in front of them, her face veiled against the stinging sand, pointing with a stick of her own.

  “What are they doing?” he asked the girl’s back.

  “Learning the alphabet.”

  “What? In the sand?”

  The towers of the city reared over the dunes. “Paper and ink are very precious here. The army doesn’t let them in. We can’t get chalk, either, or textbooks.”

  Moon understood now that he had for some time been looking for something to fight about. “That’s absurd!” he retorted. “We would never ban schoolbooks, not even for terrorists’ children!”

  She answered without looking. “I didn’t say you banned them. You never ban anything openly—that might look bad overseas. You just stop letting it in for months at a time, saying it’s for security reasons, then let a little bit in, then block it again. It has the same effect as a ban, but without having to admit that you’re doing it.”

  “Why would we want to stop your children from learning? That would just make them even more savage when they grow up.”

  The girl stopped and turned. “Did you see those boys back there at the barricade, the ones with the guns?”

  He glared at her. “I saw the terrorists, yes.”

  “Do you know what they were doing there?”

  “Planning some terrorism, I expect.”

  “Sure, if you like. They were hanging around there, trying to work up enough courage to make a terrorist attack on the tanks you sent into their village. And if they do attack, they’ll almost certainly be killed, most likely without even seeing your soldiers, let alone harming them.”

  “Serves them right for being terrorists. And what has that got to do with schoolbooks?”

  The girl closed her eyes. “Do you know anything about bullfighting?” she asked finally.

  “God. Can’t you get t
o the point?”

  “I am getting to the point. Apparently, the bulls they use for bullfighting are selectively bred, down the generations, to be fast and strong and aggressive. But they’re also bred to be stupid; otherwise they’d be too dangerous to get in a ring with. They’d ignore the red rag and go straight for the man and kill him every time.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

  “There’s a lot of money in bullfighting, apparently. Both for the people who fight the bulls and for the people who breed them. And there’s power, too. That’s why the Roman emperors spent all their money on circuses—the Romans had bullfights in their circuses, along with the lions and gladiators.”

  “That is the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Thanks,” she said, setting off down the road. “I heard my father say it once in a fight with my big brother. My brother didn’t listen, but I did. And there was something else my father said: he said that this isn’t a real war, it’s a war in a bottle. Whenever it suits them, the politicians and generals just give it a shake.”

  “So where are your father and brother now?” demanded Moon. “There was no one else in your apartment.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  They were rounding a shallow curve of the seashore, and Moon saw the scree of rubble and twisted metal heaped about the feet of the tower blocks ahead. The sun, dipping to the west, shone in the few intact panes still facing the sea. Howitzer shells were stalking the land again off to the southeast. Smoke rose from several points above the dunes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Captain Smith felt indecisive, an unfamiliar sensation for him. On the one hand—the hand that was about to close the door on a fridge full of beer—it really was too soon to celebrate: the bird was in this hand, so to speak, but not yet in its cage. On the other hand—the hand that had reached in to gather two bottles—he had never yet failed to win after drawing such excellent cards.

  A delicious smell rose from the two steaming plates of goulash and fries set on the tray in front of him. The smell urged yes. But the captain’s professional caution, the glare of a blank, random day through the mess-room skylight, told him no. He slid the beerless tray along the rails, bypassing the cakes and the fancy cellophane-wrapped granola bars, until he reached the cash register, operated by a pert blond sergeant who had rather less than the regulation number of buttons done up. Having signed for both meals himself, Smith pushed the tray to its penultimate halt at the condiment and cutlery counter. Then the phone in his pocket rang. Answering, he listened for a few seconds, then abruptly walked out of the mess room and into the corridor, the phone clamped to his ear. Colonel White reached a hand out to stop him as he whisked past their table, but Smith sidestepped, dipping his hips and shoulders like a good running back.

  When he returned to the mess a few minutes later, he saw that Colonel White had retrieved their tray from the counter and was stealing some of his fries; the colonel’s own plate was already wiped clean. White froze, guilty, but Smith ignored him, tripping back to the counter to collect two bottles of beer. He signed for them both with a flourish and returned to the table, beaming at the colonel.

  “Wouldn’t you like another one of my fries, sir? Please, help yourself.” He opened both bottles and set one down in front of each of them. “We’ve just had some very good news.”

  Colonel White eyed his beer suspiciously but scooped up another handful of fries. “What’s that?” he grunted, filling his mouth.

  Smith leaned toward him, still smiling, his eyes flicking around the room to make sure that none of the other early diners was close enough to eavesdrop. “Cobra just called,” he confided. “Guess what: he’s got the Iranian!”

  “What? But that’s brilliant! How did it happen? I thought the girl had him.”

  “That’s just it—Cobra picked him up outside the girl’s house in Hilltown about an hour ago. He’d been roughed up a bit, and he was babbling about how the girl was trying to kill him because of the washing machine. I guess he must have worked out that she was going to double-cross him and sell the machine to us, and he made a run for it while he still could. It looks like I underestimated that girl—she has some serious muscle working with her.”

  “No matter. And it’s definitely our man?”

  “It has to be. He was babbling hysterically about Iran and the toploader—Cobra had to gag him to shut him up. Also, Cobra messaged a picture of this guy to Daddy Jesus, which is normal procedure when we take an interest in someone. When Daddy Jesus fed it into the computer, it didn’t match anyone on our terrorist database.”

  “Fantastic! It must be the same guy as the one in the girl’s picture! Are you going to compare the pictures to make sure?”

  “As soon as I get back to my office. It’s a formality, though.”

  “So where is this Persian prick now?”

  “That’s where it gets even better. He’s all trussed up and ready for collection. And there’s a routine up-tit operation south of Hilltown right now, which Daddy Jesus can use as cover to scoot in and pick up the Iranian. With your permission, of course, sir.”

  The colonel raised his beer to Smith. The two men clinked bottles. Smith picked up his phone again, glanced at White, and switched it to speaker.

  “Hello, Daddy Jesus?”

  “Boss.”

  “The colonel says go get him. Just wait until it’s getting dark.”

  “After I pick him up, do you want me to put him in the program?”

  “Good Lord, no! He’s a bona fide Iranian spook! If we bring him in alive, I’ll retire on a general’s pension. No, take him to the lockup and loosen him up a bit so he’ll be ready to chat when the colonel and I come to see him.”

  “Right, boss. Loosen him up. And what about Cobra? Is he still going into the program?”

  “No . . . no, I don’t think so, Daddy Jesus, not yet. We may still need him to help retrieve the washing machine. We’ll just give him some more money to buy him off for now.”

  White took a long pull on his beer and groaned. “Oh, man, how I’ve earned that. Tell me, Captain, where do you propose to get the extra money you need to keep Cobra happy?”

  “I was just getting to that.”

  The colonel smiled archly. “How much do you need?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The attack on 24/7’s jeep, coming so soon after Joseph and Tony’s big scoop, had driven the rest of the Embargoed Zone’s press corps underground. When Flora and the pilot reached the media center that evening—sore, hungry, no longer pretending to be on speaking terms—the Land Rovers were all parked outside the building, abandoned by their crews. Locked doors greeted the pair on each darkened landing. The frosted glass in 24/7’s door was unlit, but Flora knocked and tried the handle a few times, hoping that her uncle might still be lurking inside. The pilot stood close behind her, trying to recover his breath.

  “Let’s try the roof,” she said, looking away from him. “My uncle often goes up there.”

  “Your uncle?”

  The stairs brought them up into the last of the daylight. Flora saw at once that Joseph’s couch was empty. But she looked around anyway among the ventilation ducts and service huts and satellite dishes. The pilot leaned back against the parapet, still breathing heavily, and she felt his eyes on her.

  “Your uncle isn’t here, is he?”

  She turned. “No, he’s not. I’m sorry.”

  “Couldn’t we try his home?”

  “He doesn’t have one. He lives in his office. He must have gone into hiding after what happened to Tony.”

  The pilot yawned, raising one hand to cover his mouth. “Okay,” he said, drawing the syllables out. “Okay,” he said again, “so there’s a Tony in the story now? What do I need to know about this Tony?” When his hand dropped away, he was smiling, but not in a nice way.

  Flora felt her temper stir. She welcomed it: it was a familiar thing. She leaned against the farther parapet with
the sunset behind her and smiled back at the pilot equally unpleasantly. “Okay,” she said, mimicking his cadence. “I’ll tell you about Tony: Tony worked for 24/7 Television, and so does my uncle. Tony was murdered last night by one of your drones while he was driving down my street in a press jeep. That’s the same jeep I took your picture with earlier, as it happens.”

  The pilot bounced away from his wall and stalked across the roof toward her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he spit at her. “We respect the freedom of the press!”

  He loomed over her, stiff with rage and resentment, and Flora noticed again how much taller he was than she, and stronger, and she remembered for a moment the fear she had felt of him at first. And then she found herself laughing. At what, exactly, she could not be sure. The pilot had started it, no doubt, but there was much more to it than that: a cartoon image of Gabriel and Tony and herself hunted merrily through Day-Glo canyons by fizzing Acme rockets; a glimpse of her father in a heaven of useless appliances; Cobra, falling off his donkey cart, and his bald bony henchman begging her for his life! And there was Adam and the surprised, slightly peeved look that had remained on his face after he was dead. Flora closed her eyes and bent forward and laughed until sobs were tearing themselves from her and tears burned down her face. When she opened her eyes again, still whimpering, she saw that the pilot had retreated several steps from her. The look on his face sobered her. She ought, she heard her mother whisper from somewhere, to remember her manners.

  “Please excuse me—it’s not you,” she lied, raising a hand to detain him. She saw the bitterness drawing down the corners of his mouth. He backed another step away and half turned, as if to go.

  “Listen,” she called after him. “You may as well hear what I have to say; you don’t have to believe it. My friend Tony really was killed last night by one of your drones. Why exactly I don’t know, but it ties in somehow with the washing machine, and with the dead children, and—”