Islands in the Net (55 page)

“We are not ‘grabbing' anyone,” Frolova said.

Mbaqane cleared his throat. “You did say you wanted them for debriefing. Interrogation.”

“The clothes prove nothing! These woman have been in the hands of a provocateur and terrorist! He has already committed a serious information crime, with the help of Mrs. Webster. And now that I hear her, I can see that it was not unwitting help.” She turned to Laura. “Mrs. Webster, I must forbid you to speak any further! You are under arrest.”

“Good heavens,” Mbaqane said. “You can't mean that journalist fellow.”

“This woman is his accomplice! Mr. Easton! Please draw your weapon.”

Easton pulled a tangle-gun from his armpit.

Katje opened her eyes. “So much yelling … please don't shoot me, too.”

Laura laughed recklessly. “That's funny … it's all ridiculous! Tamara, listen to what you're saying. Gresham saved us from the Malian death cells—so he could cover our clothes with sifted uranium. Can you expect anyone to believe that? What are you going to say after Mali nukes Pretoria? You should be ashamed.”

Barnaard spoke to the Viennese. Wonderingly. “You
encouraged
us to attack Mali. You said we would have your support—secretly. You said—Vienna said—that we were Africa's great power, and we should restore order.… But you …” His voice trembled. “You knew they had the Bomb! You wanted to see if they would
use it
on us!”

“I resent that accusation in the gravest possible way! None of you are global diplomats, you are acting outside your experience—”

“How good do we have to be before we can judge you?” Laura said.

Easton aimed his gun. Mbaqane struck his wrist and the gun fell with a clatter. The two men stared at one another, amazed. Mbaqane found his voice: high-pitched, livid. “Captain! Arrest these miscreants at once!”

“Director Mbaqane,” the captain rumbled. “You are a civilian. I take my orders from Pretoria.”

“You cannot arrest us!” Frolova said. “You have no jurisdiction!”

The captain spoke again. “But I accept your
suggestion
with thanks. For an Azanian soldier, the course of honor is clear.” He pulled his .45 sidearm and leveled it at Mr. Neguib's head. “Throw down your weapon.”

Neguib pulled his tangle-gun carefully. “You are creating a serious international complication.”

“Our diplomats will apologize if you force me to open fire.”

Neguib dropped the gun.

“Leave this clinic. Keep your hands in plain sight. My soldiers will take you into custody.”

He herded them slowly toward the door.

Barnaard could not resist a taunt. “Did you forget our country also has uranium?”

Frolova spun in her tracks. She flung her arm out, pointing at Laura. “You see? You see now? It's starting all over again!”

11

She lost the journalists at the Galveston airport. She was getting pretty good at it by now. They weren't as eager as they'd been at first and they knew they could pick her up again soon.

“Welcome to Fun City,” the van told her. “Alfred A. Magruder, Mayor. Please announce your destination clearly into the microphone.
Anunce usted
—”

“Rizome Lodge.”

She turned on the radio, caught the last half of a new pop song. “Rubble Bounces in Bamako.” Harsh, jittery, banging music. Strange how quickly that had come back into style. Weirdness, edginess, war nerves.

The city hadn't changed much. They didn't let it change much. Same grand old buildings, same palm trees, same crowds of Houstonians, thinned out by a December cold front.

The Church of Ishtar was advertising openly now. They were almost respectable, flourishing anyway, in a time of war and whores. Carlotta had been right about that. She thought about Carlotta, lost somewhere in her holy demimonde, smiling her sunny, drugged smile and batting her eyes at some client. Maybe their paths would cross again, somewhere somehow sometime, but Laura doubted it. The world was full of Carlottas, full of women whose lives were not their own. She didn't even know Carlotta's real name.

Storm surf was up, backwash from a tropical depression, broken up on the Texas coast in a ragged, cloudy array. Determined surfers were out in their transparent wetsuits. More than half the surfers had black skin.

She spotted the flagpole first. The Texas flag, the Rizome emblem. The sight of it hit her very hard. Memory, wonder, sorrow. Bitterness.

The journos were waiting just outside the Rizome property line. They had cunningly managed to stick a bus in her way. Laura's van stopped short. The hat and sunglasses wouldn't help her now. She climbed out.

They surrounded her. Keeping ten feet away, like the privacy laws demanded. A very small blessing. “Mrs. Webster, Mrs. Webster!” Then one voice amid the chorus. “Ms. Day!”

Laura stopped short. “What.”

Red-haired guy, freckles. Cocky expression. “Any word on your impending divorce action, Ms. Day?”

She looked them over. Eyes, cameras. “I know people who could eat the lot of you for breakfast.”

“Thanks, thanks, that's
great
, Ms. Day …”

She crossed the beach. Up the old familiar stairs to the walkway. The stair rails had aged nicely, with the silken look of driftwood, and the striped awning was new. It looked like a good place, the Lodge, with its cheerful arches and sand-castle tower with the deep, round windows and the flags. Innocent fun, sunbathing and lemonade, a wonderful place for a kid.

She stepped into the bar, let the door shut itself behind her. Dim inside—the bar was full of strangers. Earth-cooled air, the smell of wine coolers and tortilla chips. Tables and wicker chairs. A man looked up at her—one of David's wrecking crew she thought, not Rizome, but they'd always liked hanging out here—she had forgotten his name. He hesitated, recognizing her but not sure.

She ghosted past him. One of Mrs. Delrosario's girls passed her with a pitcher of beer. The girl stopped, turned on her heel. “Laura. It's you?”

“Hello, Inez.”

They couldn't hug—Inez was carrying the beer. Laura kissed her cheek. “You're all grown up, Inez.… You can serve that stuff now?”

“I'm eighteen, I can serve it, I can't drink it.”

“Well it won't be long now, will it?”

“I guess not.…” She was wearing an engagement ring. “My
abuela
will be glad to see you—I'm glad too.”

Laura nodded toward the crowd from behind her sunglasses. “Don't tell them I'm here—everyone makes such a big deal of it.”

“Okay, Laura.” Inez was embarrassed. People got that way when you were a global celebrity. Tongue-tied and worshipful—this, from little Inez, who used to see her changing diapers and knocking around in her bathing suit. “I'll see you later huh?”

“Sure.” Laura ducked behind the bar, went through the kitchen. No sign of Mrs. Delrosario, but the smell of her cooking was there, a rush of memory. She walked past copper-bottomed pans and griddles, into the dining room. Rizome guests talking politics—you could tell it by the strained looks on their faces, the aggression.

It wasn't just the fear. The world had changed. They had eaten up the Islands and it had settled in their belly like a drug. That Island strangeness was everywhere now, diluted, muted, and tingly.…

She couldn't face them, not yet. She went up the tower stairs—the door wouldn't open for her. She almost walked into it headlong. Codes must have changed—no, she was wearing a new watchphone, not programmed for the Lodge. She touched it. “David?”

“Laura,” he said. “You at the airport?”

“No. I'm right here at the top of the stairs.”

Silence. Through the door, across the few feet that still separated them, she could feel him, bracing himself. “Come on in.…”

“It's the door, I can't get it open.”

“Oh! Yeah, okay, I can get it.” It shunted. She put her sunglasses away.

She came up through the floor and threw the hat onto a table, into a round column of sunlight from a tower window. All the furniture was different. David rose from his favorite console—but no, it wasn't his, not anymore.

A Worldrun game was on. Africa was a mess. He came to greet here—a tall, gaunt black man, with short hair and reading glasses. They gripped each other's hands for a moment. Then hugged hard, saying nothing. He'd lost weight—she could feel the bones in him.

She pulled back. “You look good.”

“So do you.” Lies. He took off the glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. “I don't really need these.”

She wondered when she was going to cry. She could feel the need for it coming on. She sat down on a couch. He sat on a chair across the new coffee table.

“The place looks good, David. Really good.”

“Webster and Webster, we build to last.”

That did it. She began crying, hard. He fetched her some tissue and joined her on the couch and put his arm over her shoulders. She let him do it.

“The first weeks,” he said, “about the first six months, I dreamed about this meeting. Laura, I couldn't believe you were dead. I thought, in jail somewhere. Singapore. She's a political, I told people, somebody's holding her, they'll let her go when things straighten out. Then they started talking about your being on the
Ali Khamenei
, and I knew that was it. That they'd finally gotten you, that they'd killed my wife. And I'd been half the world away. And hadn't helped.” He put his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. “I'd wake up at night and think of you drowning.”

“It wasn't your fault,” she said. “It wasn't our fault, was it? What we had was good, it was really going to last, to last forever.”

“I really loved you,” he said. “When I lost you, it just destroyed me.”

“I want you to know, David—I don't blame you for not waiting.” Long silence. “I wouldn't have waited either, not if it was like that. What you and Emily did, it was right for you, both of you.”

He stared at her, his eyes bloodshot. Her gesture, her forgiveness, had humiliated him. “There's just no end to what you're willing to sacrifice, is there?”

“Don't
blame
me!” she said. “I didn't sacrifice anything, I didn't want this to happen to us! It was stolen from us—they stole our life.”

“We didn't have to do it. We chose to do it. We could have left the company, run off somewhere, just been happy.” He was shaking. “I would have been happy—I didn't need anything but you.”

“We can't help it if we have to live in the world! We had bad luck. Bad luck happens. We stumbled over something buried, and it tore us up.” No answer. “David, at least we're alive.”

He gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Hell, you're more than
alive
, Laura. You're goddamn famous. The whole world knows. It's a fucking scandal, a soap opera. We don't ‘live in the world'—the world lives in us now. We went out to fight for the Net and the Net just stretched us to pieces. Not our fault—oh hell no! All the fucking money and politics and multinationals just grabbed us and pulled us apart!”

He slammed his knee with his fist. “Even if Emily hadn't come in—and I don't love Emily, Laura, not like I loved you—how the hell could we have ever gone back to a real human life? Our little marriage, our little baby, our little house?”

He laughed, a high-pitched unhappy sound. “Back when I was a widower, there was a lot of rage and pain in that, but Rizome tried to take care of me, they thought it was … dramatic. I still hated their guts for what they led us into, but I thought, Loretta needs me, Emily cares, maybe I can make a go of it. Go on living.”

He was as taut as strung wire. “But I'm just a little person, a private person. I'm not Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I'm not God. I just wanted my wife and my baby and my work, and a few pals to drink beer with, and a nice place to live.”

“Well they wouldn't let us have that. But at least we made them pay for what they did.”

“
You
made them pay.”

“I was fighting for us!”

“Yeah, and you won the battle—but for the Net, not for you and me.” He knotted his hands. “I know it's a selfish thing. I feel ashamed sometimes, worthless. Those little bastards out in their submarine, they're still out there with their four precious home-made A-bombs, and if they fire one, it's gonna vaporize a million people just like us. They're evil, they have to be fought. So what do you and I matter, right? But I can't see on that scale, I'm small, I can only see you and me.”

She touched his hands. “David, we still have Loretta. We're not strangers. I was your wife, I'm the mother of your child. I didn't want to be what I've become now. If I'd had a choice I'd have chosen you.”

He wiped his eyes. He was fighting the feelings back, becoming distant. Polite. “Well, we'll see each other sometimes, won't we? Holidays—that sort of thing. Even though I'm in Mexico now, and you're still in the company.”

“I always liked Mexico.”

“You can come down and see what we're working on. The Yucatan project … some of those guys from Grenada … their ideas weren't all bad.”

“We'll be good friends. When the hurt passes. We don't hate each other—we didn't mean to hurt each other. It only hurts this bad because it was so good when we had it.”

“It
was
good, wasn't it? Back when we had each other. When we were still the same size.” He looked at her through his tear-streaked dark face. Suddenly she could see the David she had lost in there, somewhere. He was like a little boy.

They had a reception for her downstairs. It was like the other receptions in her honor, in Azania, in Atlanta, though the room was full of people she had loved. They had made her a cake. She cut it, and everyone sang. No journalists, thank God. A Rizome gathering.