Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (45 page)

E
verybody up!”

Leila sat upright. She was in a different sleeping bag.
Oh, yeah
.

A too-bright lantern came to life in the main room below them. Trip was down there, clapping his hands loudly.

“Diarists,” he yelled. “There’s been a breach and we’re evacuating the farm. We’re leaving now. I’m going to the greenhouse. I’ll be back in eight minutes.” He moved, then stopped. “Scratch that. Constance, check the go-bags, and see that the cabin is clean. Roman, go get the saddle and panniers on Little Nell. Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot up there, you guys grab your shit and get outside. Scratch that. I need one of you with me. Mark, you ever use a flamethrower?”

Mark was sitting up in bed, buckling his ruined shoes. “I have not,” he called hoarsely. “But I’m game to try.”

Leila was quick down the loft ladder. Leo behind her.

“What can I do, Constance?” Leila asked.

“You and Leo stand there. Await my instructions.” Constance began to remove fancy backpacks from a wardrobe. She was opening and checking each one.

It was just Leila and Leo, waiting in a corner.

“About last night, in the barn,” he said to her.

Really?
she thought.
Now?

“I definitely do want to live in Rome with you,” he said. “I just don’t know what comes between here and there, now and then. I think I’m strong enough for almost anything, but I’ve thought that before.”

“Can’t you just settle for a minute?” she said. “You sound so certain, and then you get all
Or it could be this other way too.
” He nodded to concede the point, which annoyed her even more. “How can you be sure about us, then, Leo, that we have this big story in front of us?”

“Because of our numbers,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He looked almost embarrassed to have to tell her. “I’m your square root, Leila.”

A zap in the air between them, audible, like the snap of twig, the
thwang
of a snapped trap. In her mind, his number leaped up, its digits sparking, marrying, and multiplying. Indeed, multiplied by itself, it was her number. She felt the key find its tumblers and then a door open inside her. Nothing about eye tests or shadow governments. Just love. That expansion of the soul, that reaching out. Her story ran through his.

“The bags, Montes,” said Constance. “Out to the barn. Chop-fucking-chop. I want us over the ridge in twenty minutes.”

Leo moved to grab the bags, but Leila stood there, dazed.

“Lola?” said Constance, more loudly, waving a hand impatiently at Leila. “You with us?”

“Leo says he’s my square root.”

Constance looked at Leila and then at Leo. Roman turned and did the same. Then they each nodded.

“Well, that
is
remarkable,” said Constance.

L
eo wished Trip had given him a job. Mark was getting to use a flamethrower. But this way, he could stay near Leila. He had woken with such desire for her. Her face was still soft from sleep.

He and Leila each grabbed three of the fancy knapsacks, heavy and full. They left the cabin and walked into the creeping dawn outside. The eastern horizon was the color of a peach, but the sky above them was still an azure bowl.
A brand-new day,
he thought.

He looked back. A thick plume of gray smoke, darker against the dark sky, rose from inside the forest of novophylum. Leo could hear
whump
s and a rising
crackle,
presumably the sound that a greenhouse makes as it’s being flamethrown.

“Which one of us is which, did he mean, do you think?” he asked Leila as they crossed the wide meadow.

“Which one of us is
which
which?” she said.

“Trip said Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. You think I’m Foxtrot? I bet you’re Tango. I’m probably Foxtrot.”

With a nod, she allowed that he was Foxtrot.

“What about my code name?” she said. “You think I should stick with Lola Montes? I didn’t choose it.”

“Stick with it. It suits you.”

“You chosen a name yet?”

“Pace Backenforth?” He saw that she saw the joke in that. “No. I’m going with Leo Crane.”

“I see what you did there,” she said.

Did she? Did she see that he had forgiven himself for not being a genius? Did she see that he was ready to stand up and start pushing back against the world, no longer a fugitive or an apologizer; that he wanted a child and a task and to row in with all he had; that it was all due to her somehow, that she had turned a key? Of all the times and places, she lived in this one, and he did too, and they had come upon each other. That could be luck or something grander; either way worked for him.

“Did you have any dreams?” he asked her. His dream of her had been so vivid, she must have dreamed of him also. The world turned out to have hidden languages and plant computers. Probably, in such a world, you can co-dream with your square root.

She squinted up at him. So beautiful. So close.

“Oh. They were amazing. Something about my dad driving his hospital bed around an apple orchard. But then I was driving it instead, and it was a boat instead of a bed, and my mother was throwing baby rabbits at me from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Nope. Still a mystery.

Mark caught up with them, huffing, sweating. He smelled like he’d just rolled in a bonfire. “You know where we’re going?” he asked them both.

“No idea,” said Leo. Through the open door of the barn ahead of them, he could see Roman slipping a bridle over Little Nell’s head. Then he saw another man in the barn. But who? Trip and Constance were behind them. “Stay here a sec, you guys,” he said. He slipped up to the barn door and peeked in. He came back.

“Who’s the other guy?” Leila asked.

“I dunno. Some guy. Maybe our ride out. There’s also a Thing in there.”

“What kind of a thing, Leo?” asked Mark, with strained patience.

“A Thing. You know. Like a buggy.”

“A
Volkswagen
Thing?” said Mark.

Constance rolled up behind them, pushing a wheelbarrow full of laptops.

“Where are we going, Constance?” asked Leila.

“Mark’s going to the coast, quickly. The rest of us are going to Seven Ranch, in Enterprise.”

“Is that my ride in there?” asked Mark. Constance nodded.

The man stepped out of the barn. Leila craned her neck and squinted at him.

“He’s one of us?” asked Leo.

“He may be. But he’s also a government agent, and he hasn’t been tested,” said Constance.

“That’s no good,” said Leila.

With a nod, Constance confirmed it was sub-ideal. “But we need him right now. He backs up what Mark told us, that our SineCo asset has been playing us. But he has real assets, inside Pope’s shop. Double agents.”

“Triple, if you think about it,” said Leo.

“He’s got someone on that boat. Someone you’ll need, Mark, when you get there.”

“So I’m supposed to ride down the mountain, alone, with an untested government agent?” said Mark. “I thought you people had rules.”

L
eila went intently toward the barn.
There was something about that man.
When she walked in, yellow light spilled from an overhead fixture. Her eyes took a moment to adjust. Roman was putting panniers on the pony. The new man was checking under the hood of a car. It was one of those faceted VW buggies from the seventies, faded orange. When he turned and nodded at her, she knew exactly who he was. It was Ned. The one who’d first turned her onto Ding-Dong.com. In Mandalay, he’d looked like a doughy, slightly-too-large-headed guy. That cologne he’d worn to their meeting. Here in the barn, he was handsome and strong-jawed.

The others came in behind her. Mark and Leo flanked her like lieutenants. “Lola Montes, this is Inspector Ned Swain,” said Constance. “Of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service—”

Leila cut her off. “Yeah, I know Swain,” she said. “He lied to me.”

“You know this guy, Leila?” said Leo, stepping up beside her.

“Sorry about that, Leila,” said Ned Swain.

“It’s Lola,” she said evenly.

“Swain represents the last of the uncorrupted U.S. intelligence apparatus,” said Constance. “He’s the one who says we need to evacuate.”

“Don’t those guys guard mailboxes?” asked Mark.

“That’s the Postal Police,” Ned answered. “I work for the Postal Inspection Service.” He closed the hood of the silly car. “America’s oldest intelligence agency. Born before the Republic. Ben Franklin’s shop, originally.”

“Swain’s been trying to find us for a while,” said Constance. “He followed you in, Lola. You’re why we have to leave here. And this has been my home for five years.”

Leila nodded to say sorry.

“He was probably running that Committee team that was trying to find you, but actually he must have been trying
to keep them
from finding you.”

Ned nodded proudly. “I also had to
really
find and follow you, using only postal resources,” he said, addressing Leila. “Tricky. We had you in Heathrow, but we lost you there, picked you up in LA, and then followed you to Portland. I had the bad guys lose you at that gas station but then I lost you on the bridge.”

“Then how’d you find us here?” queried Leo.

“We spotted an anomalous satellite cross-feed at nine thirteen last night. Pot farmers can’t do that.”

“How’d you get here so fast? You drive?” asked Mark, pointing to the Thing.

“He parachuted out of a drone half an hour ago,” said Constance. “He came to warn us. And he came alone.”

“Yeah,” said Ned. “You guys could have made me into plant food.”

“Make him take the eye test,” said Leila.

“Not at this time,” said Ned.

“It’s okay, Lola,” said Constance. “There are extenuating circumstances. Roman and I waived the eye test. We invoked the common-cause clause.”

“You wouldn’t want to overuse that clause,” said Mark. The three of them were still standing together, a united front.

“Look,” said Ned. “We both want to save America from a clutch of greedy dukes, right? That’s our common cause.”

“I’m not really in this for America,” said Leila.

“Do we still have to call it America after we save it?” asked Leo.

Swain was caught off guard by Leo’s question. “We’ll have to table that point, Crane. There’s no time now. The Postal Inspection Service isn’t the only shop that can locate people. I managed to slow their feed, but if I’m here, the Bluebirds won’t be far behind. We have an hour, maybe.”

“Your friends’ black helicopters?” said Leila.

“They’re not my friends and they’re not helicopters. They’re called Kestrels and you won’t see them coming.”

“He’s right,” said Constance. “We have to move. Right now.” She started loading laptops from her wheelbarrow into the pony panniers. She was losing her cool, moving too fast.

Trip Hazards staggered into the barn, his eyes wide and white and bloodshot in his soot-blackened face. A corner of his heavy coat was still smoldering. He hacked and spit and hunkered down on his knees.

Constance ran to him. “Tom, are you okay?” She held him and batted at his smoldering coat.

“I’m high as fuck. But yeah.”

“You destroyed everything?”

“All but the latest cultivars,” said Trip, lifting proudly a bouquet of novophylum wrapped in a big cone of soggy paper.

His smoky entrance had dumped a bunch of haste and urgency into the barn. Leo moved to load laptops onto the pony. Mark went to the silly car.

Leila didn’t move. She needed a few more seconds. She thought of her little family behind her, and the maybe-one-day baby inside of her. Was this the best way to help them? Like on a Magic 8 Ball, the answer soon floated up.
All signs point to yes.
Then she heard Constance say to Trip, quietly, “Baby. Outside just now, Ticonderoga mis-pronouned. He said
you people,
not
we.
You have to verify him.”

M
ark was scoping the VW that was supposed to get him down a mountain thick with forest and then two hundred fifty miles up the Oregon coast. The seats looked like lawn chairs. The floor was bare metal. The windshield was folded down, its glass badly cracked.

“This thing really gonna get us outta here?” he asked Ned.

“Well, we can’t parachute
up,
you know?” said Ned. “But, yeah, don’t worry. I’ll get you to those coordinates. And this is no ordinary Thing, I gotta say. I think these came with those one-point-six, flat-four, air-cooled engines. This has a big-bore kit. Two-point-six, two-point-seven, maybe. Plus six inches more suspension. Bigger brakes.”

It meant nothing to Mark. He was annoyed when men assumed shared mechanical knowledge; he didn’t know how anything worked, or ran. But this was no Gulfstream V. Then Mark realized with disappointment that if all this went down the way it should, his private-aircraft days were over. That eye test had made him more open to the politics, but he knew that he still liked nice stuff, probably always would. The kind of stuff that there wasn’t enough of to go around. That six-burner French cast-iron stove. The wine fridge.

He was getting into the passenger seat of the Thing when he saw Hazards coming at him quickly. Smudged as he was, and red-eyed, he looked like a demon. In a swift motion, he had the back of Mark’s neck held tight in one of his huge hands.

“What the fuck!” Mark yelled, resisting as Hazards put his other hand on Mark’s sternum, and brought their faces close together. Mark was about to deploy the head-butt for the second time in two days, but then he felt the other man’s hand lying soft on his own heart; no threat, no danger. On the contrary, there was a sort of rise in Mark that he was not at all comfortable feeling so close to another man’s face and looming body. Hazards held Mark’s head and gaze for a long time—four syrupy seconds, maybe—and then released.

“He’s good,” Hazards called back to Constance. “He still wants stuff. But he’s good.”

“I’m glad we got that out of the way,” said Mark huffily; he sat down quickly in the Thing. Roman rolled open a door at the other end of the barn. Ned Swain got in the driver’s seat and started the engine, which did indeed sound more powerful than such a vehicle’s engine is supposed to sound. He handed Mark a World War I Flying Ace sort of goggled leather helmet and put one on himself. Mark donned the headgear and looked around to show Leo and Leila. Leo was putting a heavy-looking backpack on Leila. Mark whistled sharply, and they both turned. Though burdened beneath her pack, Leila gave him a real thumbs-up.

“Be careful, Mark,” she said.

“Go with God,” said Leo Crane.