Worlds in Chaos (84 page)

They followed a different road a few miles to a disused gas station, which Marie entered, parking on one side of the forecourt. They waited in the darkness for a little under twenty minutes. Then a car drew up on the roadway outside and flashed its lights once. Marie started the engine, turned on the lights, and exited to pull behind it. The car led them about a mile and then pulled off onto an expanse of open ground that seemed, in the moonless night, to be bordered by trees. Marie’s phone beeped again. She answered it, listened for several seconds, and announced that she was to leave Cade here for a while. Meanwhile, the car ahead had moved on a distance and doused its lights. Marie got out, closed the door, and disappeared on foot in the same direction. Cade waited for about another fifteen minutes, feeling as if he had been pitched into the middle of one of those movies that he’d never really managed to connect in his mind with reality; or maybe a country that you read about but never thought about long enough to realize might actually exist. If he got out of this in one piece, that was it, he told himself. No more heroics or dabbling with intrigue and subversives. From now on he would . . . But even as the thought formed, he realized he was no longer so sure. The voice on the phone in the hotel room came back to him.
There are people out there right now for whom it’s costing their homes, their families, their lives.
The picture of himself running back to his world of comfort and security didn’t sit very well with him either.

Figures materialized from the shadows outside. A flashlight played on him through the glass. Another light showed papers with a picture in somebody’s hand, being scrutinized. Finally, the door was opened, and a voice directed, “Come with us, please.” Cade got out and found himself between two muffled figures wearing hats. Another was visible on the far side of the car. Cade and the two with him began walking the way Marie had gone, over uneven gravelly ground. When they had covered twenty yards or so, the car started behind them, and its headlights came on. Cade looked back to see it begin moving, turning back toward the roadway. “It’s okay. You won’t be needing it again,” the same voice told him. For a chilling moment Cade wondered how he was supposed to take that. Getting too imaginative, he told himself.

A pickup was waiting along with the car that they had followed, he saw as they got closer. Marie was standing with two more figures. “Okay, it looks as if there’s a place where we can stay for a few days at least,” she told him. “This isn’t the best time to hold a conference. It’s been a rough day. We can talk more about options in the morning.”

A big man with a bearded face and pulled-down baseball cap ushered them into the pickup and then got in on the other side. As he started up, the car with the three others departed back in the direction of town. They pulled back onto the road, continuing in silence in the same direction as before for a couple of miles, and then turned off onto a dirt track climbing uphill through trees. It led to a camper trailer standing in the corner of a field behind what looked like a farmstead outlined dimly in the darkness. “There’s linen inside and some grub. Just help yourselves,” the big man said as he dropped them off. “You’ve got a phone that connects to the house. It would be best if you didn’t show yourselves there, at least for a while. . . . Oh, and you can call me John.”

The camper had seen better days, but the power and the plumbing worked. From the clothes in the closets and other signs of occupation, it seemed the place had been vacated for Cade and Marie’s benefit. They made themselves a salad and cooked a couple of pork chops. Were it not for the day’s events, this might have been a little like old times. The news on TV described a “terrorist hideout” in Chattanooga, which security forces had surrounded following a tipoff; they’d been met by gunfire. Five terrorists had been killed in the ensuing assault, and two had escaped. There was no mention of any incident at a motel. Cade’s and Marie’s pictures were shown as the two escapees, described as armed and dangerous.

By that time they were both too exhausted to talk more. Cade took a fold-down bunk in the camper’s living and dining area. Marie used the bedroom, farther back. As Cade lay thinking back over the day, it occurred to Cade that the photograph of him that they had shown on the TV was one that had been taken around six months previously. How had the authorities gotten it? The only thing he could think of was that it must have come from Julia.

CHAPTER TWENTY

By daylight, the farm revealed itself to be in a dilapidated condition, with little to mark it as a going concern. The fields, for the most part, had been left fallow, and rusting machinery stood among the outbuildings. A few scrawny looking cattle were penned in a muddy patch on the far side of the house.

John called on the phone to ask how things were. Marie took the call, said they were comfortable, and thanked him again for helping out. Right now, they needed a little time to make plans. She listened for a short while longer and then hung up.

“The police are all over the area and still stopping traffic,” she told Cade. “They’re showing our pictures everywhere.” She shook her head. “It was stupid for both of us to have gone into the coffee shop like that. We shouldn’t have been seen together. Let’s hope there weren’t any wrong people there with sharp eyes and good memories.” It wasn’t something that could be changed now. Cade put on the coffeepot, popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, and turned back to the eggs he was about to scramble. Marie set dishes and cutlery on the table, poured two glasses of orange juice, and slid into the narrow bench seat behind.

“Roland. . . . In case we end up going separate ways in all this, or maybe if we both don’t come through . . . there’s some information that I need to give you. It’s important that it doesn’t get lost.” Cade got the feeling she had been thinking hard about this. He looked over his shoulder to indicate that he was listening. Marie paused, as if searching for the right place to begin.

“Rebecca wasn’t being infiltrated so much to find me. It was the particular group I was associated with. It’s the group that was blamed for that assassination in Washington a couple of weeks back—when the Hyadean flyer was shot down. What the media are saying is all a lie. We had nothing to do with it. No part of CounterAction did. You have to believe that.”

Cade slowed his stirring, and then resumed again just in time to avoid burning the contents of the pan. That was right. . . . The ISS people who came to the house two days after it happened had told him Marie was suspected of being with the cell the Hyadean plasma weapon supposedly found its way to. With all that had been going on, he had forgotten about that connection. “A senator, wasn’t it?” he said. “Farden. . . . And some general . . . ?”

“Right. Meakes.”

“A couple of Hyadeans too.”

“They shouldn’t have been there. The targets were Farden and Meakes. The reason the cell I was with got picked was that it had been compromised somehow. Therefore, it could be targeted to be taken out. Get the idea? Nobody who had been implicated would be around to deny it. That was the intention, anyway. But we were warned ahead of time, and disbanded.”

Cade turned, frowning, as he scooped the eggs out onto the plates. “So that wasn’t what happened yesterday at wherever that call came from—where Len went?”

Marie shook her head. “That was a place in Chattanooga that we were using in transit to wherever next. But there was another man there, who went by the name Otter. He had the information on how those assassinations were really carried out. That’s the information I’m going to give you now. The more chance it has to get around, the better. His real name was Captain Wayne Reyvek of the ISS. He’d had enough of what he’d seen and decided to switch sides. They couldn’t afford to let somebody like him talk.
That’s
who I think Rebecca was sent to track down.”

Cade added bacon strips from a plate he had set aside earlier and sat down to pour the coffees while Marie buttered the toast. “But they set me up to lead Rebecca to
you,
” he pointed out. “What reason would they have to think that you and Reyvek . . . I guess he’s history now?”

“Seems like it.”

“What reason would they have to think you and he would be together?”

“I’ve been wondering that too,” Marie said. “All I can think of is that they guessed he’d be asked to compare notes with the people who were being blamed.” She shrugged. “The controllers monitoring a trace that Len took back found they had hit lucky, sent in a hit team—and you saw the cavalry heading the other way when we were leaving the motel. Guess who’d have been next.”

Cade had already figured that much out. He went over what had been said so far while he began eating his breakfast. It still didn’t make sense. “Why go to all that trouble?” he said finally. “If Reyvek knew who really did it, then presumably the ISS knew too. So why not simply go for them in the first place? Why go out of your way to lie about some other group, and then have to take them out in case they get a chance to disprove you?”

Marie sat back and smiled, as if something about the way he still couldn’t see it delighted her. “
Because they did it themselves!
It was engineered within the ISS! Reyvek was involved in obtaining the Hyadean plasma cannon. It came from some that disappeared in South America, were recovered but not acknowledged, and found their way into an unofficial stockpile at Fort Benning in Georgia. It was fired by a colonel called Kurt Drisson, who specializes in deniable dirty work for friends in high places. Reyvek wasn’t sure, but he believed that a financier called Casper Toddrel was behind it. Toddrel is mixed up in big land deals that are going on in Brazil and Peru. Reyvek had evidence to substantiate his story, which he mailed to a private box in Baltimore. I guess the key’s lost, but there are ways around things like that.”

Cade was listening, but he couldn’t relate any motive to what he was hearing. The story the two ISS agents had given when they came to the house seemed straightforward enough. He shook his head uncomprehendingly. “But why? Farden was pushing bills that would open up big markets for cheap minerals that the Hyadeans are pulling out of Bolivia, right? Now, okay, sure, I can see how that might drop the bottom out of a lot of industries here that have seen their day, and make him unpopular with a lot of people. That would make him a natural target for an outfit like CounterAction, that looks for popular support. But why should somebody like Toddrel care? He’s not a titanium miner who got let go last year with no place to go.”

“You’re buying the standard line that they put out,” Marie told him. “Simple. Easy logic. Gives us an instant Enemy of the People to hate.”

“Well . . . what other line is there?” Cade invited.

“Farden had enemies within the Terran Globalist elite. He was working with other interests—I suspect British, but I’m not sure—who were being paid by South American land agencies and development investors to expand the Bolivian extraction operations. That earns the Hyadeans the foreign currency they need for their land deals, and in recycling it everyone in the loop gets rich.”

Cade still couldn’t quite buy it. “But that still doesn’t explain why Toddrel should want to get rid of Farden. I mean, isn’t he in the loop too?”

“It’s a different loop,” Marie answered. “Farden’s scheme is under-cutting a lot of U.S.-capitalized mining, which makes it too radical for some people. Toddrel is part of a more cautious approach to cashing in on the Hyadean economic system by marketing Terran creative skills, which sell at a huge margin on the alien worlds. That means selling out middle-class professionals instead, which doesn’t create powerful enemies. Also, you’re not giving foreign governments a green light to rush into handing over big chunks of this planet, which not everyone is happy about.” She waved her fork by way of conclusion. “Hence, eliminating Farden was convenient for a lot of people you don’t find at Washington protest rallies. If you can do it and discredit the opposition at the same time, then so much the better.”

Cade nodded reluctantly. It was starting to make sense now. “How come you know so much about all this?” he asked curiously.