assorted luxuries of modern life. Allen spied a pickup truck and a dilapidated VW bug a few slots and one row over. Because the cars were too far from the grocery to belong to shoppers, he assumed their owners were store employees. A regular pattern of lampposts poured pools of rain-hazed light onto the vast asphalt. One such lamppost rose out of sight just to the right of the van's rear window but returned no light. He scanned the pavement below for broken glass, saw none. He doubted Stephen would have thought to shatter the bulb, but Julia would not have hesitated.
He eased down on the mattress and gazed through the window at the clouds. Beyond, stars twinkled as raindrops passed over them. He wondered how long until the sun came up and the others woke. Then he drifted off again. When his eyes fluttered open, it was daylight and the van was moving. Stephen and Julia talked quietly in the front seats. To orient himself, he turned back to the rear window. The sun stung his eyes.
'Good morning.' It was Julia, looking much more refreshed than he felt. She had spun her chair around and was ducking under the table that held her computer equipment. She positioned herself in the bucket behind Stephen.
'Is it?'
'We're alive,' Stephen called back. 'I'd say that makes it a good morning.'
'I suppose.' Allen groaned and swung his legs off the mattress. He tugged at his shirt to align the buttons with the center of his chest and asked, 'Where we going?'
'McDonald's,' Stephen chimed. 'Hungry?'
'I don't know yet, but I sure could use a mug of Java.' His mouth tasted like something had died in it; probably smelled like it too. Julia was massaging her neck, and he remembered the awkward position she had slept in. He felt a little guilty that he'd hogged the only bed, but only a little. He lined up the toe seam of a sock and pulled it up. He looked up to find her smiling at him.
'What?'
'Nothing,' she said, shaking her head slightly.
That smile. She really could break hearts without any trouble.
'It's just that I've never seen your hair mussed up before.'
His hands flew to his head as if she'd said his hair was on fire, and he began combing it with his fingers. Her smile broadened, and as much as he could have bathed in her charms all day, he was irked to realize that he was the cause of her amusement. He noticed the laptop lid was closed. When he'd decided to check out the mattress, it had been open and still receiving the decrypted data from Julia's friend.
'Did you get the data?'
She grinned and nodded. 'It took even longer than the program had calculated. It was still downloading when we parked and fell asleep. When I checked this morning, it said file transfer complete. I almost opened the directory, but I figured you two would want to be part of it.' She was almost giddy.
'Doesn't matter to me who checks it out.' Allen shrugged. 'As long as it's something we can turn over to someone else and get back to our lives.'
The van stopped, and Stephen killed the engine. Through the windshield, a pair of men in paint-stained coveralls pushed through a glass door marked with golden arches.
Stephen turned to face them. 'So what's say we stoke up on some greasy fast food and do some good today?'
The three collected their toiletries, invaded the restaurant's washrooms, ordered breakfasts, and met back at the van, bags of food in hand. The men climbed into the front seats while Julia took her position facing the laptop. Immediately she began clicking away, taking bites out of a biscuit whenever the computer paused to perform a command. The aroma of Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and coffee quickly usurped the odor of old cigars as the van's dominant smell.
'Okay,' she said after a few minutes.
Allen tossed her a quick glance, then turned his full attention to her when he noticed that she was sawing her top incisors over her bottom lip. He wondered if she'd have much of a lip left when this thing was over.
'Ready to see what's on that memory chip Vero left?'
Allen thought she was trying to sound optimistic. Truth was, they were all hoping for something that probably didn't exist: an easy answer to their dilemma—
Stephen choked on his coffee. It spewed from his mouth and into the forest of his beard as he snatched at a pile of napkins and slammed them over his mouth. He turned his watery eyes toward her.
'I'll take that as a yes,' she said, popping the cables from the back of the laptop and positioning it on the chair behind Allen so all of them could see. She collapsed the van's pseudo-table as though she'd been doing it a long time, put it on the floor at her feet, then turned back to the laptop. The fifteen-inch screen was black except for a palette of five colorful buttons hovering in the lower right corner.
Allen recognized the symbols on the buttons from audio-cassette players: a triangle with the acute angle facing right for PLAY; a triangle pointing left for rewind; two vertical lines for PAUSE; and a square for STOP. The fifth symbol he didn't recognize; it looked like the circle and crosshairs of a rifle scope.
Julia moved a cursor over the palette of buttons.
Something struck the van.
Her pistol appeared in her hand so quickly, Allen wondered if it had always been there. As for himself, he might not have even noticed the sound, had Julia not moved so urgently. Before he realized it, his head was between his knees. He steeled himself for the windshield's inevitable shattering under the impact of the next round. His mind filled with things he wanted to yell out:
But he heard Stephen's words first: 'Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!' He was leaning almost out of the chair to stop Julia's movement toward the sliding door. 'The door lock, Julia!' he said. 'I just locked the doors.' He reached his hand back and toggled the switch twice:
She stared at him in disbelief, whether at Stephen's actions or her own, Allen couldn't tell.
'It
She settled back in her chair, calmly slipping the weapon under her blazer. 'It's okay,' she said, closing her eyes. 'Bit jumpy.'
Her lips stretched into a fat grin; then her eyes snapped open. 'Told you I was raring to go.' She reached out to the computer and clicked play.
fifty-six
The black man emerged from a doorway set in a whitewashed wall. With a perfectly round head and pencil- thin body, he resembled an upside-down exclamation point. He wore blue jeans, which were mostly white and hung loosely on his narrow hips, and a threadbare flannel shirt, buttoned tight at the neck. Dangling from the tips of three fingers was a beat-up metal lunch box, the kind kids toted to school in the sixties. Whatever had decorated it— images of the Brady Bunch, Speed Racer, or King Kong—had long since faded and chipped away. After appraising the sky, he started up the unpaved street, his heavy boots kicking up little plumes of dust. He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. A big smile broke like a crescent moon on a starless night. He raised his unencumbered hand and yelled,
'What's that? What'd he say?' Allen didn't take his eyes off the screen.
Julia shook her head. Stephen said, 'Shhh.' All three had rotated their captain's chairs to face the laptop. By now, each was leaning forward—even Allen, whose nonchalant posture had succumbed to intense curiosity around the time the man on the screen had assessed the sky for rain. If the McDonald's restaurant suddenly exploded, it was doubtful the three people in the blue conversion van would have noticed—except maybe to turn up the volume on the computer they encircled.
From the left side of the monitor, another man came into view, dressed in equally depreciated clothes, carrying a stained paper sack. He said something unintelligible and clapped the first man on his back. As the two continued on, the camera jerked and followed, wobbling with the camera operator's hurried gait.
A column of numbers lay to the right of the video image. The first appeared to be a date, European style with the day first— 5 April of last year. Below that, presumably, the time the video was shot—06:08:21 when the action started and now just changing to 06:11:00.
