teenagers I'd seen earlier, running errands in the Admin Building.
I took another look when I turned in at the parking lot gate. He'd stopped at the sidewalk to the Neophyte Building, not seeming to do anything, just standing there as if waiting, or listening to the birds.
A minute later, as I stopped my car to pay the gateman, I saw the kid still there, watching the gate now. He saw me, then looked the other way and started to walk back toward the Admin Building. That, it seemed, was a signal. There was a parking lot across the street, with a sign that said Staff Only, and by the time I'd rolled out into the street, a veteran white Dodge Westerner was nosing out. I turned north and so did it.
It hadn't been near enough that I knew what the driver looked like, beyond being white and beardless.
I drove to the next cross street, Villamere, and turned west. I'd gone maybe half a block when the Dodge turned west too. I stayed on Villamere west to Vermont, and turned north. So did he. Vermont had a lot a traffic, but he stayed near enough to keep me in sight, and when I came to the on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway east, I took it. He did too. He still had me in sight when I exited onto the Harbor Freeway south. He did the same. Which almost guaranteed he was following me: If he'd wanted to go south on the Harbor from the Campus, it would have been shorter and quicker to take Wilshire.
But how could Thomas have gotten someone on me that quickly? Or had he set this up before he had me brought to him?
So far I hadn't tried ditching the guy behind me. Now I did, changing lanes, ducking behind delivery trucks, then making a last-minute move into an exit lane and onto the Santa Monica Freeway. And saw no more of him. I'd tried not to be too obvious about it; hopefully they wouldn't realize I knew I'd been followed.
I exited the Santa Monica onto LaBrea and drove back to the office. Why, I asked myself, had I been followed? The likeliest answer was, to find out where I'd come from. That could mean where I worked out of, or where I lived.
My tail should have seen my Colorado plates. Which should put them off. But would it? I couldn't be traced by them. The owner's—the firm's—address was confidential, available only to California and Colorado motor vehicle departments and to law enforcement agencies.
Did the church know that private investigation firms could use out-of-state plates? It had worked its way into detective dramas on TV and holos, much to Joe's disgust. And Prudential was the biggest and most prominent investigation firm in California; it would be the logical place to start checking. The Colorado plates would have to come off, just in case. Because Thomas could be dangerous; I felt sure of it now.
12
VIC AND TORY
The next day Tuuli and I drove to the Hollywood-Burbank Airport, and from there took a skybus to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. After a thirty-minute wait at Sky Harbor, we took the mail-stop shuttle that serves Wickenberg, Lake Havasu City, and places north from there. Places that didn't have scheduled air service in the days before AG.
All to the good, right? Skybuses can be small and still economical to operate, which means you can have a lot of small ones with frequent departures. Also they're a lot cheaper to build than airplanes were. They land and take off vertically, make slow and almost silent approaches, and they're a lot cheaper, easier, and safer to fly than the big, clumsy, noisy, polluting airfoil craft of six or eight years ago. And they don't require roads, runways, or large fields. All in all they're like a clean, superfast bus service, which is why people started calling them skybuses.
Almost no one today wants to go back to the old ways of travel. Or telephoning. Or going to the library or heating a building, or . . . You name it. The problem is, you never have a chance to get used to things. You learn a trade today, and it may disappear tomorrow. Not mine, but a lot of them. Forty or fifty years ago, a guy named Toffler wrote a book called
Sorry. That's not what you're here to record. Blame it on the Veritas. So. Where were we? Oh yeah. Tuuli and I were going to visit the Merlins. Vic was waiting for us at the Wickenberg airport. He turned out to be a sprightly old guy. I'd have judged him at a lively seventy-five and been short by ten years. He was also taller than I'd expected, but thin: close to 6 feet and probably 130 pounds. But in jeans, a twill workshirt, and work boots, he looked lean and wiry, not frail. He shook my hand with a strong grip, and appreciated Tuuli with his eyes. I could tell she loved him right away.
My first impression was, he'd never murder anyone.
He led us to his pickup and we sped away from town, at first on a highway, then on a narrow blacktop road too minor to rate a center stripe. The air was dry, the April sun bright, and the desert had more vegetation than you might think. It was dominated mainly by what Vic identified for me as mesquite—broad, thorny, 6- to 10-foot shrubs—and in places by what he called creosote bush. There were also lots of spiny cane cactuses 3 to 5 feet tall with big pink flowers, and similar ones so thick with stiff pale spines, they seemed to wear a white aura. He called both kinds chollas. There was a scattering of saguaro cactus, too, some of them 30 feet tall. Vic said they were getting toward their upper elevation limit there. Graceful ocotillas were scattered almost everywhere. Shrubs I guess you could call them, thorny shrubs without twigs or branches, their leaves tiny and sparse, but bright green. Their spiny, sprawling, multiple green stems grew from a common base, to spread 20, maybe 30 feet across, each stem ending with clusters of vivid red flowers.
I could get to like that country, at least in the spring.
After a while we came to a mailbox that read Vic & Tory Merlin, and from there left the blacktop for a private road that obviously had never known an engineer or road grader. In about a mile of gradual climbing, we reached a range of hills that, farther on, grew to a long low mountain, and the road entered a small canyon. A little brook trickled down it, among rounded stones, with groups of distorted old cottonwoods along its banks. During the occasional storm, according to Vic, the brook could become quite a stream, though most of the time it was dry.
About a mile up the canyon we came to their home, a low, pink-tan adobe ranchhouse with narrow, deep-set windows. Behind it, a windmill pumped water to a tank on a roof-high timber platform, the water supply for the house. They had a GPC-driven pump that did their pumping when the wind was down—gravity is always there, and as cheap as the wind—but Vic said they enjoyed having the windmill do it.
Tory was on the porch to greet us, a small woman, not much bigger than Tuuli. Her hair was still red-tinged, though she was probably as old as her husband. Her eyes were chestnut brown like Molly Cadigan's, and just as direct and powerful. But her look was less aggressive than Molly's, more calm and—
