with dreadlocks and one silver earring, he managed to look as intellectual and dignified as he had ever been in a three-piece suit or in a police captain’s uniform, in the days when Phil had served under him in the West Los Angeles Division of the LAPD. His ink-black skin seemed even darker and glossier in the tropical heat of Miami than it had been in Los Angeles.
The Padrakians climbed into the back of the van, and Phil sat up front with the driver, who was now known to his friends as Ronald — Ron, for short — Truman. “Love the shoes,” Phil said.
“My daughters picked them out for me.”
“Yeah, but you like ’em.”
“Can’t lie. They’re cool gear.”
“You were half dancing, the way you came around the van, showing them off.”
Flashing a grin as he drove away from the hotel, Ron said, “You white men always envy our moves.”
Ron was speaking with a British accent so convincing that Phil could close his eyes and see Big Ben. In the course of losing his Caribbean lilt, Ron had discovered a talent for accents and dialects. He was now their man of a thousand voices.
“I gotta tell you,” Bob Padrakian said nervously from the seat behind them, “we’re scared out of our wits about this.”
“You’re all right now,” Phil said. He turned around in his seat to smile reassuringly at the three refugees.
“Nobody following us, unless it’s a look-down,” Ron said, though the Padrakians probably didn’t know what he meant. “And that’s not very likely.”
“I mean,” Padrakian said, “we don’t even know who the hell you people are.”
“We’re your friends,” Phil assured him. “In fact, if things work out for you folks anything like the way they worked out for me and for Ron and his family, then we’re going to be the best friends you’ve ever had.”
“More than friends, really,” Ron said. “Family.”
Bob and Jean looked dubious and scared. Mark was young enough to be unconcerned.
“Just sit tight for a little while and don’t worry,” Phil told them. “Everything’ll be explained real soon.”
At a huge shopping mall, they parked and went inside. They passed dozens of stores, entered one of the less busy wings, went through a door marked with international symbols for rest rooms and telephones, and were in a long service hallway. They passed the phones and the public facilities. A stairway at the end of the corridor led down to one of the mall’s big communal shipping rooms, where some smaller shops, without exterior truck docks, received incoming merchandise.
Two of the four roll-up, truck-bay doors were open, and delivery vehicles were backed up to them. Three uniformed employees from a store that sold cheese, cured meats, and gourmet foods were rapidly unloading the truck at bay number four. As they stacked cartons on handcarts and wheeled them to a freight elevator, they showed no interest in Phil, Ron, and the Padrakians. Many of the boxes were labeled PERISHABLE, KEEP REFRIGERATED, and time was of the essence.
At the truck in bay number one — a small model compared with the eighteen-wheeler in bay four — the driver appeared from out of the dark, sixteen-foot-deep cargo hold. As they approached, he jumped down to the floor. The five of them climbed inside, as though going for a ride in the back of a delivery truck was unremarkable. The driver closed the door after them, and a moment later they were on the road.
The cargo hold was empty except for piles of quilted shipping pads of the kind used by furniture movers. They sat on the pads in pitch blackness. They were unable to talk because of the engine noise and the hollow rattle of the metal walls around them.
Twenty minutes later, the truck stopped. The engine died. After five minutes, the rear door opened. The driver appeared in dazzling sunshine. “Quickly. Nobody’s in sight right now.”
When they disembarked from the truck, they were in a corner of a parking lot at a public beach. Sunlight flared off the windshields and chrome trim of the parked cars, and white gulls kited through the sky. Phil could smell sea salt in the air.
“Only a short walk now,” Ron told the Padrakians.
The campgrounds were less than a quarter of a mile from where they left the truck. The tan-and-black Road King motor home was large, but it was only one of many its size that were parked at utility hookups among the palms.
The trees lazily stirred in the humid on-shore breeze. A hundred yards away, at the edge of the breaking surf, two pelicans stalked stiffly back and forth through the fringe of foaming water, as if engaged in an ancient Egyptian dance.
Inside the Road King, Ellie was one of three people working at video-display terminals in the living room. She rose, smiling, to receive Phil’s embrace and kiss.
Rubbing her belly affectionately, he said, “Ron has new shoes.”
“I saw them earlier.”
“Tell him he really has nice moves in those shoes. Makes him feel good.”
“It does, huh?”
“Makes him feel black.”
“He is black.”
“Well, of course, he is.”
She and Phil joined Ron and the Padrakians in the horseshoe-shaped dining nook that seated seven.
Sitting beside Jean Padrakian, welcoming her to this new life, Ellie took the woman’s hand and held it, as if Jean were a sister whom she hadn’t seen for a while and whose touch was a comfort to her. She had a singular warmth that quickly put new people at ease.
Phil watched her with pride and love — and with not a little envy of her easy sociability.
Eventually, still clinging to a dim hope that he could someday return to his old life, unable to fully accept the new one that they were offering him, Bob Padrakian said, “But we’ve lost everything. Everything. Fine, okay, I get a new name and brand-new ID, a past history that no one can shake. But where do we go from here? How do I make a living?”
“We’d like you to work with us,” Phil said. “If you don’t want that…then we can set you up in a new place, with start-up capital to get you back on your feet. You can live entirely outside of the resistance. We can even see that you get a decent job.”
“But you’ll never know peace again,” Ron said, “because now you’re aware that no one’s safe in this brave new world order.”
“It was your — and Jean’s — terrific computer skills that got you into trouble with them,” Phil said. “And skills like yours are what we can never get enough of.”
Bob frowned. “What would we be doing — exactly?”
“Harassing them at every turn. Infiltrating their computers to learn who’s on their hit lists. Pull those targeted people out of harm’s way
Bob glanced around at the motor home, at the two people working at VDTs in the living room. “You seem to be well organized and well financed. Is foreign money involved here?” He looked meaningfully at Ron Truman. “No matter what’s happening in this country right now or for the foreseeable future, I still think of myself as an American, and I always will.”
Dropping the British accent in favor of a Louisiana bayou drawl, Ron said, “I’m as American as crawfish pie, Bob.” He switched to a heart-of-Virginia accent, “I can quote you any passage from the writings of Thomas Jefferson. I’ve memorized them all. A year and a half ago, I couldn’t have quoted one sentence. Now his collected works are my bible.”
“We get our financing by stealing from the thieves,” Ellie told Bob. “Manipulate their computer records, transfer funds from them to us in a lot of ways you’ll probably find ingenious. There’s so much unaccounted slush in their bookkeeping that half the time they aren’t even aware anything’s been stolen from them.”
“Stealing from thieves,” Bob said. “What thieves?”
“Politicians. Government agencies with ‘black funds’ that they spend on secret projects.”
The quick patter of four small feet signaled Killer’s arrival from the back bedroom, where he had been napping. He squirmed under the table, startling Jean Padrakian, lashing everyone’s legs with his tail. He pushed
