The Messenger (39 page)

All-in
.

Too destructive to prepare for.

Asleep in the lee of the rock ledge, she alternates between bouts of unconsciousness and dreams of running down Florentine streets. Haunted faces peering from the arched doorways. She sees her
mother, and someone who must be her father, but when she looks again, he’s vanished.

She follows him—in and out of houses, beneath stairs, into tiny crawlspaces dank as tombs. Long after the man-who-must-be-her-father disappears, she’s still being impelled down the streets, only now it’s Manhattan and she is dodging traffic. Her father is laughing at her, turning around in the taxi and laughing at her … The dreams shift and churn. She does not really surface, but only slides deeper, dying a little more with each breath.

It’s the helicopter that wakes her.

She feels it first as an earth tremor, then a great roar crashing over her so quickly that even with a bullet wound in her side she still jerks into a sitting position. The sky is a rim of blue above the mountains, and the distant police flashers throw spastic shadows out into the desert.

She is much too far away to see Niv-L’s car. The helicopter has buzzed over at a low level, wheeled, and now curves away across the valley. A thin white searchlight stabs the desert floor.

And more distant, miles across the desert, she can see vehicles approaching, jittering lights—red, blue, and yellow, a chorus of sirens faint as an insect’s whine.

Behind the ridge the sky is beginning to lighten and she lifts the rucksack. The camera is there in the dirt. She leaves it for the archaeologists and begins walking, trying to put some distance between her and the forces gathering at the highway.

She lets gravity take her down the slope toward the wide valley. She’s too exposed up on the slope. Below there are blasted hulks, shell craters full of noxious water. Somewhere she will find a place to hide.

She is walking hard, almost running, but she hasn’t eaten since … It doesn’t matter. She’s tired almost immediately and can only keep up the pace for a short spell. But it’s still dark in this wide valley, and she keeps trying to push, now, when she can hide in the shadows.

She takes the water in little sips, roiling it about her mouth, letting it trickle down, wetting her T-shirt and clamping it over her
nose and mouth … just the vapor will keep her cooler. Wouldn’t the fierce Wahhabists be proud of her now? She could star in an adventure epic … wounded, dying.
Desert Girl—Terror Queen of the Tuareg
 … She has become a true nomad, her head sheltered from the sun … her face and hair covered and no longer giving offense to God.

What can she learn in this silence? Written in the sky: a wide contrail … that she realizes is a formation flight of six fighter jets, scratching a yellow scar in the sky.

The wind picks up. Her knees are shaky and her side is either on fire or numb. She can feel her heartbeat pulsing in her throat. She needs more water but she also needs to make it last. She’s not running anymore, she’s barely staggering. Only halfway across the valley and now she can go no further.

A helicopter is cutting across the desert floor. Pointed straight at her, coming at a tremendous rate of speed. She slumps to the ground, and takes a long drink. Her face is dry and she has pushed herself too hard. There is no food. She is shivering.

The helicopter slams over her, the wind scours the desert around her, the fine alkaline sand stinging her eyes.

Then she hears a radio. Someone talking on a radio.

Someone close by.

She digs the gun out of the pocket of the rucksack, and aims it behind her. Nothing. No one. Or, no one she can see. The helicopter is making a wide circle over the valley and is angling back toward her.

Ahead of her is a blown-apart hulk—what was once a tank, or an armored personnel carrier. A ghost from some past war.

Too tired to run any longer, she crouches in its shadow as the helicopter passes, and once it’s gone, she finds a stick and uses it to poke around and scatter the snakes she imagines are nesting in there. There are hatches and holes punched through the armor and she crawls in, waving her stick ahead of her like a blind woman, smooths out a place, and collapses. She will wait out the helicopters here, hide from the radios.

Keep the gun ready and wait.

* * *

The landing wakes him, and a moment later comes the vibration of his cell. He digs it out and puts it between his ear and the cool window of the jet.

“Hey, Sam.”
It’s Marty Grimaldi.

“Hey, kid … We just landed. I can see the helicopters …”

“How are you? Did you get some sleep?”

“I got some … daze, is what I would call it.”

“Agent Schumacher wants to patch you in to the deputy sheriff who is on the ground at Vermiglio’s location.”

“Sure. Okay.”

“She does not have any gear beyond her medical kit.”

“Okay. Who’m I talking to?”

“It’s a deputy sheriff and she’s first on scene. She’s the one who found the car and is tracking Vermiglio. She’s a veteran and is described as very capable. She’s had emergency medical training.”

“Okay.”

“Good … I’m going to put you through. Just hold on, Sam.”

“… be advised that you will be receiving special instructions, do you copy?”

“Copy that.”

“Stand by.”

Acting Deputy Suárez walks cautiously through the low light of early morning. Blue shadows and a certain thickness to the air. When the helicopter buzzes her side of the ridge, she has to put her finger in her ear to hear. The radios that have been passed out back at the Socorro County HQ are crap, not like the ones they had in Afghanistan with earbuds that would fit under your balaclava, little microphone wands that could pick up a whisper and leave your hands free. No, these are outdated police bricks that you wear on your belt and drop everything you’re doing just to use them. Awkward. They slow you down. They endanger you.

The helicopter makes another pass, banking toward the valley,
following the slope and raising dust and grit. She turns away, holds her breath, closes her eyes, and keys the microphone.

“This is seven-six. Request copy heli units that friendly is in the area,” she shouts into the radio, but there is no response. Those guys tend toward the trigger-happy at the best of times, and in the early light one blur looks like any other.

She has been following Vermiglio’s tracks up the side of a low ridge, and down again. She has found the camp where the girl was hiding under a rock shelf, and she has found her camera. Her flashlight is getting dimmer so she snaps it off to save the battery.

The radio has been on constantly, directions and then redirections. Orders and then counterorders. Everybody is squabbling over the jurisdictional turf, and finally she ends up patched in to the White Sands base commander. He’s sending out a team of MPs; they’ll be there within the hour, he assures her. Less than a minute later someone phones to counter that. The MPs aren’t coming at all, stand by to ground-assist a heli-assault unit that’s spinning up. Luci is informed, in case she didn’t know it, that Vermiglio is a terror suspect and the effort to find her is a Homeland Security matter. She is hot with Berlin. Suárez’s mission is to locate Vermiglio, then wait for units to come to her assistance. She turns on her cell phone so they can try to GPS her that way, and switches on the flashlight and waves it until one of the choppers picks her up and drops a box of flares.

“Seven-six?”

“Seven-six.”

“Stand by …”

I’m already standing by
, she wants to scream. This is the worst she’s ever seen it. All these different levels of government. Confusion and then more confusion. Somebody’s learning curve caught up in someone else’s pissing contest. The radio is a sea of static, and floating in it may be the one crucial message that you’ll probably miss if the helicopters are too close.

“Hello, Deputy?”
It’s a different voice. Not the dispatcher, but a man. It sounds like he’s been patched in through a new line. She
stops and wedges her finger into her free ear.
“Hello?”
says the strange voice. Civilian.

“Roger. I copy.”

“Is this Deputy Suárez?”

“Roger that.”

“Oh, good. Great. You know about the special instructions?”

“No, sir. Negative on special instructions,” she adds, just to prod the voice back to proper procedure.

“This is Watterman here.”

“Roger. Are you the negotiator?”

“No, that’s me,”
says a female voice.
“Go ahead, Sam. You’re speaking with Deputy Suárez.”

“Okay, thanks. Look, this girl needs to be apprehended alive. It’s absolutely crucial.”
The voice has risen in pitch. Luci can hear the man starting to lose it.
“Whatever you do, don’t hurt her.”

“Roger. I copy that,” she says.

“We will be evacuating her to a Level 4 quarantined hospital. Uh … do you copy?”
the man says.

“Roger. I copy.”

“Great. Good. Fantastic. Thank you. Alive. Whatever happens, okay, Deputy? We’re on our way …”

“Sure … I got it,” she says. “I thought she was armed and dangerous?” she says, but there is no answer.

“Seven-six?”
The dispatcher comes on again.

“Seven-six.”

“Stand by …”
the voice says again.

The negotiator comes on the line. Schumacher. She’s in another chopper. Watterman is a doctor. He’s from CDC, Schumacher says. They’re all less than five minutes away, she promises.

Then Watterman again.
“The important thing is not to panic,”
he tells her. Even with a crappy radio she can hear the fear in his voice.

“Stand by …”

She follows the girl’s path where it skids down the side of the ridge. It looks like Vermiglio is running, trying to get out ahead, not
even thinking about somebody following her. It’s like she doesn’t care, Suárez thinks.

Shapes loom in the darkness. Broken construction equipment, rusted school buses, ancient cars and pickup trucks. Corroding strips of aluminum blasted out of the side of some USAF station wagon. She hears dogs barking. There’s probably a canine unit out there somewhere.

In high school, to prepare the class for their visit to the Trinity nuclear test site, they showed a film. A shock film. Like the ones of traffic accidents to warn them about drinking and driving. But in this there was footage of entire houses being blown away by a not-so-divine wind. Trees burnt instantaneously and bent over like straw. A typical living room from the fifties, re-created with all details correct. Department store mannequins standing in for the family. Then the blinding light from the picture window. Even in slow motion it was quick. The shattered glass, the burning skin, and then the shock wave. Everything blown away … Down there somewhere, Luci thinks, peering into the shadows of the mountains.

Back at Socorro headquarters the sheriff comes on to ask how she’s doing. “Good. I’m good,” Luci says. But to be honest, she doesn’t know how she’s doing. Basically she is in pursuit of an armed and dangerous suicide terrorist who has nothing to lose.

There is a popping over her head and she instinctively goes into a squat. A line of pink flares fall; off-target, bisecting her route. All it does is add to the crazy shadows, and fill the mountainside with hissing that makes it hard to listen for whatever she is approaching.

Someone from the FBI gets patched in. She stops to take it. Ahead of her in the shifting light, she can see several large lumps; the scuff marks from Vermiglio’s shoes.

The FBI man is easy. His voice reminds her of the one that pilots use when you’re about to take off. Settle back, everything’s cool and cowboy. But she’s the one on point, so she says as little as possible, and sticks to procedure.

“We’re going to redefine the mission,”
the FBI man says.

“Copy that.”

“The important thing is to interrogate her.”
They will provide the questions.
“Keep her awake, keep her talking. Let her know she can exchange information for her life.… You got all that?”

“Copy,” Suárez says.

Another helicopter has joined the team; this one has a spotlight that plays across the scrub below her.

One of the dark lumps is a vehicle, blasted upside down. Squashed against the rocky edge of a crater. It’s not a tank, or at least not a modern one she can recognize. It’s something else—maybe a fifty-year-old self-propelled howitzer left over from the Vietnam era. Something dragged out there and left for the observers and bombardiers to aim at. The tracks are rusted steel with rubber treads that have split and crumbled. The hatches have been blown out and there are jagged holes gouged through the armor plate.

That’s where Vermiglio’s tracks go.

“Contact …” Luci whispers into the radio.

They land in a great cloud of dust and Sam is pushed out of the helicopter by two Evacs on either side. Both have toy-sized automatic weapons and are wearing the latest in biohazard suits. He hadn’t even seen them, these little ninjas, in the shadows when he was loaded into the helicopter. Their faces are sheathed like insects, and they wear tight suits that make them look like lightly armored motorcyclists. There are microphones and cameras built into a ridge atop their armored skullcaps. You can’t even see eyes behind their lenses.

They wait while he kneels in the dust and gets on his suit, a typical hazmat bunny suit that has come out of a locker somewhere at White Sands. This is the worst place in the world, he thinks, for a hazmat suit. Thorns, every kind of cacti under the sun. Shards of exploded metal and glass strewn underfoot. He gets his hood latched on, turns on his air, and they all get going again.

Two other helicopters converge on their location. One is the medical chopper that will take the girl to the hospital once they capture her. Farther out he can see a different series of helicopters.
They touch down like mosquitoes to the surface of a puddle, then roar away, and he realizes that they are landing Special Forces out there.