True Path Page 9

  When he left the room, Jay finally found his voice. “I’d be better off coordinating things from here. I don’t see what I can achieve in Washington.”

  Kappelhoff kept his face blank. “I’ll just call the commissioner back and explain that to him, shall I?”

  Jay subsided. “There’s no point sending anyone with me. It would just add to the waste of time and money.” It was a fait accomplis. There was nothing he could do about it except resign. And if he resigned, he could do nothing at all. Even so, he felt anger bubbling up inside him. He stood and took two paces away from the superintendent. “This is ridiculous. Doesn’t he know how important this is?” Kappelhoff raised an eyebrow. “To me, I mean. This is someone I care about, not just some random victim. She’s …” The woman I love, he was about to say, but he switched it to, “… the mother of my daughter. What am I going to tell Cara? Sorry but I can’t save your mother, I have to go on some bloody useless flag-waving trip to Washington. What does he care what the Americans want? Why does the Standing Committee care for that matter?”

  Kappelhoff shrugged. “You haven’t been reading the newsfeeds?”

  Jay’s heart sank. “The feeds?”

  “They’re predicting a very bad harvest this year in Europe. You know how the Gulf Stream has been shifting about since the Forties.”

  Jay blinked. What the hell did all that climate change legacy crap have to do with Sandra? Everyone knew the temperatures in Europe were still falling since the melting Arctic ice had moved the ocean currents around. “I don’t understand.”

  “Two years ago, the U.S. became self-sufficient in wheat again for the first time since the Adjustment. This year, they’re going to have a surplus. And Europe is going to need it. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in another recession. If we have to pay the Yanks too much for their wheat, things could get ugly. You remember the bread riots in 2061.”

  “But … But … we’ve been sending them aid since the Forties. No-one’s done more for them than us. Surely they wouldn’t …”

  “Shaft us? Just because they can? Don’t be naïve, Jay. Business is business.”

  “So we’re pandering to that bunch of despots just so we can save a few cents on a loaf of bread? You know what kind of government they have over there?”

  Jay could see that Kappelhoff was beginning to grow impatient with him. “You also know what kind of government our close friends and allies the Chinese have. It doesn’t stop us pandering to them now, does it?”

  “But the Lord’s True Path Party makes the Chinese Communist Party look like a bunch of benevolent—”

  “Jay!”

  Jay closed his mouth and drew a deep breath. Venting at Kappelhoff was absolutely pointless. The decision had been made. All he could do now was make the best of it.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just … I’ll go and get things organized. Pack a bag.”

  And get Cara on a plane back to the UK.

  Chapter 9: Texas

  “Roadblock,” Polanski said as they drove through the endless night.

  “Official?”

  Sandra opened her eyes in time to see Polanski shake his head.

  “Let me handle it,” the big guy at the wheel said. “You all just stay calm now and let me do the talking.”

  Sandra heard a bolt slide as the nozzle of a pistol poked into the small of her back through the car seat. “You heard the man,” Polanski said softly. He reached forward and spread his jacket across her lap, hiding the tied wrists.

  They were in an old Ford Greenie, one of the last Fords to be produced in the States before the company moved all its production to Africa and its corporate HQ to Berlin. The Greenie had been the Ford Popular of its day: offering affordable, petrol-free driving for the masses. But, when the Americans couldn’t even afford the Chinese-built, barebones Greenie, Ford, like all the other U.S. car manufacturers before it, took its business elsewhere.

  The big guy had joined them just north of the border, waiting on a side road in his thirty-year-old rattle trap. Sandra was sorry to see the large, comfortable Jeep knockoff turn around and head back to Mexico without them. Their new driver took the meaning of taciturn to a whole new level. After the initial “Howdy,” he hadn’t spoken a word until that very minute.

  For an unofficial roadblock, the structure ahead of them had a disturbingly solid appearance. Built of sandbags, it featured gun emplacements on either side of the road, and thick walls to channel traffic through a narrow, twisting passage between armed men in ragtag uniforms. Big floodlights came on as they approached.

  “How many?” Polanski asked.

  “I make it ten,” the big guy said, slowing to a stop beside a young man with one arm raised and the other holding a snub-nosed machine gun. Sandra guessed the guard could be seventeen or eighteen.

  “Bit late for a drive,” the young guard said, bending to look into the car through the open driver’s side window. His big, dark eyes wandered lazily across the occupants of the car. When they reached Sandra, they lingered for a long while.

  “We’re visiting folks up in San Antonio,” the big guy said. “Big family get-together.”

  The young man nodded. “Open the trunk.”

  “Sure,” the big guy said and reached down to pull the lever.

  The young man stayed where he was and another man went to look. “You got papers?” he asked, and held out a hand.

  “Sure,” said the big guy again and pulled a small bundle from the glove box.

  The young man took it, pulled off an elastic band and began idly flicking through the papers, glancing now and then at the silent passengers of the car.

  Sandra watched him carefully. It was a surprise that their IDs were recorded on paper. She wondered what it said about the level to which Texan civilization had fallen. One quick scan from a modern reader would pick up her ID from her commplant and this whole trip could end in a bloodbath. If things went badly, she would have to get out of the car and make a run for it, take her chances in the black moonless night and hope neither Polanski nor the roadblock guys got a good shot at her before she was out of range. She heard the boot close. The other guard walked back to join the kid at the window.

  “Traveling mighty light,” the man said. She felt the muzzle of Polanski’s gun move away from her back and imagined him training it on the men outside.

  “That’s OK,” the young man said, smiling. She saw him take a wad of paper from the bundle of ID documents and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he handed the IDs back to the big guy. Could that have been money? Paper money?

  “You folks have a nice trip now, ya hear? Via con Dios.” He stepped back from the car and shouted something in Spanish to the other men.

  The big guy thanked him, started up the engine, and drove slowly through the sandbag passage.

  -oOo-

  The next time Sandra woke, it was morning and Polanski was at the wheel. She looked around. The big guy was in the back and so was Peter. They were both dozing.

  “Where are we?” she asked. It was a town, dusty and run down.

  “Houston. We’re a bit behind schedule. Batteries ran dry in the night and we had to wait for sunup to get moving again.”

  “We’ve got a schedule?”

  “Sure. What kind of evil master plan do you think I’m running here?”

  “For a wannabe mass murderer, you seem very pleased with yourself.”

  “I guess I’m just a morning person.”

  She turned away from Polanski’s annoying smile to stare at the crappy town they were passing through. It was a poor town, full of poor people. There were few cars and no-one seemed to have anywhere urgent to get to. She called up a map on her commplant without thinking and got the usual “No network” message.

  “Shit. Don’t you have comms networks at all over here?” she asked. How was anybody supposed to function without even basic network services?

  “Sure. In the cities. Not so much elsewhere. You want to make a
phone call?”

  “Yeah. To the local police.”

  His cheerful mood seemed unshakable. He actually chuckled. “Boy, would that make the sheriff’s day!”

  Sandra decided she preferred Polanski grim and silent. This new jolly version made her want to scream. “So what’s making you so fucking cheerful? Did the boy wonder give you a blow job while I was sleeping?”

  The smile fell from Polanski’s face. At the edge of her vision, she saw the young man sit up in the back.

  “Peter,” Polanski said, his voice even and calm. “You remember what I said, now.” He turned to Sandra and studied her for a moment, then looked back at the road. In the same, steady voice, he said, “I know you must feel aggrieved, Sandra, and I apologize if you found my cheerfulness offensive under the circumstances. But my friends and me, we’re not used to a woman speaking with such a foul mouth. Do you think that maybe, despite the provocation you’re under, you could try to speak civilly?”

  Sandra looked from Polanski to the two in the back. It was not a joke. They were all taking this very seriously. What kind of terrorist killers had she fallen in with, here? She’d heard that the U.S. had tough public morality laws. She’d also heard they had pretty much abolished women’s rights, trying to turn the clocks back to some mythical heyday when nuclear families were the source of all happiness, and the husband was God’s representative in the home. That phrase Polanski had used, “we’re not used to a woman speaking with such a foul mouth,” was strangely chilling. It had never occurred to her to wonder what life was like in America for ordinary women. Something like life in the Middle East now, she supposed.

  “Well?” Polanski asked.

  “Go fuck yourself, you misogynist creep,” she answered, as politely as she could. Even as she spoke, the big guy put the barrel of his gun against her head and she froze. “You people are seriously fucked up,” she said through gritted teeth. “If you ever untie my hands, I’m going to stick your guns so far up your arses you’ll be coughing bullets for a month.”

  Polanski pulled over to the curb and took a length of cloth out of the glove box. He handed it to Peter. “Would you gag her, please.” The young man grinned, obviously happy to oblige. “Last chance, Sandra. Can you mind your tongue or do you want to wear a gag the rest of the way?”

  “Fuck you,” she said. Immediately, the big guy’s arm went round her throat and Polanski leaned over to hold her arms down. She struggled like a wild animal but, in the end, Peter got the gag in her mouth and tied it tight. But that did not stop her kicking and fighting and doing the best she could to shout for help.

  “Peter,” Polanski said. “Get the dope out of my bag in the trunk. We’re going to have to—”

  A rapping at the driver’s-side window made everybody, even Sandra, stop dead and look. A policeman was visible from mid-thigh to mid-chest. Easy to see that he had a hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. The cop bent down to peer inside the car window. He was looking at Polanski and hadn’t yet noticed Sandra.

  “Would you mind winding down your window, sir?” the cop said. As Polanski complied, he scanned the inside of the car, his gaze finally resting on Sandra. The sight of a woman bound and gagged in a car full of men did not seem to alarm him unduly. He straightened up and stepped back a pace.

  “Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle, please, sir?”

  As soon as the cop’s face was out of sight, Sandra saw the big guy slip a gun into Polanski’s hand. As Polanski got out the car, he pushed the gun in the back of his jeans and let his shirt fall over it. Sandra tried shouting to the cop that Polanski was armed, but couldn’t make herself understood. The policeman leaned in through the open door and looked at her. Even as he did so, she felt the big guy shove another gun into the small of her back. She stopped shouting. Meanwhile, the cop was taking a long hard look at Sandra, taking in the long legs in tight jeans, the trim waist and large breasts under her snug T-shirt. “I’ll get to you in a moment, ma’am,” he said and ducked back out to talk to Polanski.

  She heard their murmuring voices for a while. Then Polanski leaned in to grab the documents from the glove box. Sandra wondered if there would be another bribe involved. Surely the policeman would have to take them in for questioning. Surely he’d call for backup and arrest everybody. The conversation continued inaudibly outside the car for a minute longer and then Polanski climbed back in. He stared up the engine and drove away up the street, the cop standing watching them, not doing a damned thing.

  Peter and the big guy let out whoops of relief and amazement, slapping Polanski’s back and congratulating him.

  “How’d you do it, Zak?” Peter asked for the third time.

  Polanski turned briefly to Sandra and winked. “Told him Sandra here was my runaway sister, that’s all. Said she left her husband for some city-slicker from Austin and we’d just been down there to beat the guy’s brains out and bring li’l sis back home to her two heartbroke baby boys.”

  The others thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, judging by the howls of laughter and Peter’s shout, “Shame on you, you hussy!”

  Sandra added the Houston police department to the list of people who were going to come out of this badly when she got her arms free, and hunched down in her seat to fume in silence.

  -oOo-

  They crossed the Texas-U.S. border with Sandra unconscious in the boot of the car. Promising not to make a fuss didn’t persuade Polanski to let her sit up front with the gag off.

  “Those ain’t small-town cops at the border crossing, darlin’,” the big guy explained as he carried her back to where Peter was waiting with a syringe. “One false move and they’ll shoot the whole danged lot of us just to keep up their quota for the month.”

  As far-fetched as that seemed, she could feel the tension in the air. These men were scared. Crossing the border would be dangerous for them and they didn’t want a loose canon like Sandra to worry about.

  She let Peter inject her, hoping he could see the contempt in her eyes.

  When she woke up, she was in Louisiana, in the United States of America. She was lying at the side of a dirt road with Polanski and his sidekick sitting beside her. The taillights she could see in the distance belonged to the Greenie that the big guy was driving back towards Texas. It was nighttime and Sandra was cold, hungry and hungover from the drugs. With a shudder of revulsion, she realized her jeans were wet from having peed herself.

  Chapter 10: Mid-Air

  Jay pondered the view from the Airbus electroprop. Below him was an endless plain of bright white cloud that had looked so gray and dismal on the ground. It was a crowded flight and the aisle seat beside him was occupied by a chinless young man in a business suit who was on his way to sell bibles to the Americans. They’d exchanged a dozen words before lapsing into a silence that would probably last the rest of the Atlantic crossing.

  Jay’s flight was from Schipol to Mexico City. None of the major airlines flew direct to the U.S. mainland these days. Not after a series of incidents in which planes had been shot at and a couple even brought down. The U.S. Government had blamed anti-European extremist factions but had failed in the course of thirty years to bring a single one of them to justice. It was widely held in the intelligence community that some of the more radical States were funding and arming these extremist groups, with the Church of the Lord’s True Path’s tacit approval, to further their agenda of keeping America free from corrupting external influences. Nevertheless, small aircraft from South America were hardly ever attacked—possibly because they were indistinguishable from typical domestic air traffic to a man on the ground with a surface-to-air missile on his shoulder.

  Jay had never really imagined traveling to the United States. He’d never seen a reason to. From time to time, he’d sat in on briefings by the CIA. He knew that Interpol and other agencies still went through the motions of sharing intelligence as if the Adjustment had never happened and the U.S. had not become a nuclear-arm
ed theocracy. It definitely wasn’t a place Jay would ever choose to visit.

  His old boss, Jacques Bauchet, had often said the Americans would wake up one day, throw religion right out of the Whitehouse, and reclaim their freedom. Jay wasn’t so sure. After two generations of oppression and religious fundamentalism, it seemed to him that the people of America were now less able than ever to throw off their shackles. Most Americans had grown up learning nothing except what their religious schools told them. The universities had been burnt down or had become theological colleges. Anti-science fervor in the early days had seen mass executions and the razing of laboratories, museums and libraries all over the country. Intellectuals and liberals, Jews and gays had fled to Europe in droves—almost an exact mirror of the process that had so benefited the U.S. in the 1930s.

  “Hello.”

  Cara was standing in the aisle and smiling sweetly. Jay did a double take and was about to express his shock when he saw that she wasn’t addressing him but the young bible salesman sitting next to him.

  “I wonder,” she said, looking tragically apologetic, “but could I ask you to do me a huge favor?” Under the sunshine of that beautiful smile, the young man was visibly melting. When she explained about the mix-up at the check-in and how she and her father had been put miles apart, he almost literally fell over himself in his haste to swap seats with her. Jay’s scowl did nothing to curb either Cara’s simpering performance or the young man’s drooling gallantry.