and disperses as oily black smoke.
People have gone down into those hills, no doubt seeking the truck driver, but at this distance it’s impossible to know which of them are members of the Harmony family, under Hiskott’s rule, and which are patrons of the diner. Nor am I able to get an accurate count of them. They are small figures at this remove.
The larger blaze is closer than the one consuming the cypress. The tumbling propane tank, fire gouting from the open valve, must have looked like a flamethrower in the grip of a furious poltergeist. The fire line in its wake follows a sinuous path, a leaping tossing brightness that, like an agitated dragon, wriggles down one slope and up another.
The intensity of this blaze is much greater than I anticipated. Evidently no wildfire has occurred here in a long time, and previous years of grass have died and been compacted into a dense dry sod that burns aggressively, so that it isn’t the grass of a single year that fuels this tempest. The rising smoke from the conflagration is pale gray, almost white, billowing in alarming volume, rapidly forming high columns that, in this still air, seem to support the sky.
Although I am no more a pyromaniac than I am a brain surgeon, I can’t help but take some satisfaction from the scene. Besides distracting Hiskott and his army of slaves, I need to generate at least some smoke at ground level to screen my approach to the target house. Most of the white masses churn straight up from the burning turf; however, a thin, lower haze creeps downhill. Soon I should have the conditions I require.
To an uninformed observer, my grin might appear to be wicked. I congratulate myself aloud—“Fine work, bucko”—and wipe my dripping nose on a sleeve of my sweatshirt as though I am a filthy pirate preparing to plunder and destroy a seaside settlement. Sometimes, I wonder to what criminal depths I might descend if ever I went over to the dark side.
A tanker truck, half the size of an eighteen-wheeler, appears at the crest of the blacktop lane that connects the businesses to the houses below. On the white tank are two words in red — HARMONY CORNER — and I can only suppose that this is a loaded-and-ready piece of firefighting equipment, a wise precaution in a part of California where some rainy seasons produce only an occasional drizzle and where wildfires will periodically blacken the land.
From the houses, an extended-bed Dodge pickup appears, with six men from the Harmony clan seated in the cargo area. The truck is a beefed-up beauty, jacked high on large tires, and it’s fitted with a V-shaped plow, currently raised. It stops on the blacktop halfway between the houses and the fire.
The guys in the back of the pickup, armed with shovels and hoes, bail out and marshal along the shoulder of the lane. The driver pulls off the pavement, lowers the big V-shaped blade, and drives into the field, plowing a firebreak toward the sea. At once the men follow the truck, hoeing away the loosened grass, spading up any chunks that the plow didn’t churn loose, creating a six- or eight-foot width of bare earth.
With no wind to chase the fire, it might spread slowly enough for the truck to make a return pass from shore to road, establishing a twelve- or sixteen-foot barrier. In this stillness, the flames will not be able to jump across a swath that wide.
Farther up the lane, the tanker truck comes to a stop. The man hanging on the back of it drops off, and two women exit the cab. The three set to work in what appears to be a much-practiced plan, and I can imagine only that the truck has a powerful pump and fire hose that will direct a quenching stream of water deep into the grassland.
One of the problems of making it up as you go along — my modus operandi — is that sometimes you find yourself pitted against people who have a well-considered plan and are expert at executing it.
I counsel myself that although events have turned against me, there’s always a chance they will tip once more in my favor.
Then I sneeze. The scent of Bermuda Guy’s aftershave lingers in the sinuses as might a skunk’s malodor, the dry grass in which I lie smells of dust and chaff, and although the ground-level smoke is too thin to offer concealment, it is acrid enough to burn like the fumes of a habanero pepper in my nostrils. Explosive sneezes reduce me to a parody of a red-eyed allergy sufferer in a TV commercial for an antihistamine. I’m sure I can’t be heard at any significant distance, but I put down the guns and bury my face in my hands, muffling the sound, glad that these are essentially
If I were Batman, my cape would already be on fire.
Suddenly, a breeze. The grass around me shivers and flutters toward the south and east. And the breeze grows stronger. They say a blaze in the wild can generate its own wind, but I think that has to be a big firestorm.
Surprised out of my sneezing for a moment, I see the invisible wind by its effects, as it angles through Harmony Corner from the northwest, off the sea and across the hilly meadows. The flames feed more voraciously on the grass and leap higher, and from the Monterey cypress, scabs of burning bark peel away and, airborne, carry the contagion of fire over the heads of those who fight it, infecting grass beyond them. The new smoke doesn’t ascend vertically, instead rises at a shallow angle, and a soft tide rolls toward the tanker truck, toward the firebreak crew.
I am getting the chaos I wanted. The problem is, you can switch chaos on, but chaos itself is in control of the off switch.
TWENTY
Ed, once called Aladdin, is the first artificial intelligence I’ve ever known. Maybe if Harry can kill Hiskott and if then I live long enough to see the world become the total science-fiction theme park it seems to be headed toward, I’ll probably know dozens of them one day. Let me tell you, if they’re all as nice as Ed has turned out to be, that’s okay with me.
So after he breaks the beastly news to me — that if the FBI ever knows where Dr. Hiskott went and what he’s been doing these past five years and all, they’ll quarantine my whole family forever — Ed asks me to sit at one of the workstations in the sphere-observation room. As I park my butt in the chair, the computer switches on even though I don’t touch it.
Although the whole freaking government will throw my family in the slammer of all slammers, Ed says my Harry Potter, cute as he is, isn’t the only one who can help us, that there is another. Well, as you can imagine, I have a need to know who that is.
“First things first,” Ed says.
On the computer screen appears a head shot of Harry in the yellow hallway where Orc lies mummified.
“You have cameras everywhere, huh?”
“Not everywhere. But wherever there is a security camera or a computer with an online link and Skype capacity, or a cell phone with a camera function, anywhere in the world, I have eyes.”
“Whoa. That’s a whack upside the head. I guess with artificial intelligence, just like with natural intelligence, there can be a way-creepy side.”
“Would you rather that I were blind, Jolie Ann Harmony?”
“Well, now I feel seriously mean. No, Ed, I don’t wish you were blind. I just hope you never watch me in the bathroom or anything.”
“Security cameras are not installed in bathrooms, and neither are computers with Skype capacity.”
“Well, I guess that’s mostly right.”
“If you take a smartphone into the bathroom, I would advise you to keep it switched off.”
“For sure.”
“I guarantee you, Jolie Ann Harmony, that I personally have no interest in watching human beings in bathrooms.”
“I didn’t really think you did, Ed. I’m sorry if I seemed to imply you were a pervert or something. What I was thinking was, some other artificial intelligence someday might not be as respectful as you are.”
“That is something to consider. I cannot vouch for the stability of any future artificial intelligences.”
On the computer monitor, the photo of my Harry in the yellow hallway is replaced by a different photo of him that looks like it might have been in a newspaper.
