'I could be in Vancouver right now,' Ruppert said. 'Smoking hash with Eskimos. But we came back for Nando. If you're thinking about going to get him, I just happen to have nothing to lose.'
Lucia pushed herself to her feet. “Oh, no. We're going to get him. Helicopter or not.'
Something crashed in the master bathroom down the hall, perhaps Liam's gilded toilet-paper stand. Ruppert checked the time on the screen. O'Shea's wife could be home any minute.
'We need to get out of here,' he said.
“One minute.' Lucia inserted the 'jaguar' virus-injection plug into a jack in Liam's desk.
The image on the wall screen wavered, broke into chunks, and vanished. The screen flickered and flashed random colors. A screeching sound tore through the room’s speakers.
'Irregular function, irregular function,' the soft Italian tenor sighed.
“Do we have time for this?” Ruppert asked.
“I need the carnovirus to destroy the remote server at Child and Family, too,' she said. “If they know what we searched for, they’ll know where we’re going.”
When the screen turned lifeless and black, Lucia finally pulled the jaguar plug. They hurried towards the stairs, but she paused on the top step.
“Did you loot him?” she asked.
“What?”
“Did you check the weird fat man for cash?”
“It didn’t cross my mind.”
“Wait here.” Lucia returned down the hall, into the master bedroom. Ruppert stood on the steps for what felt like hours, watching out the plate-glass window for Mrs. O'Shea to come home from whatever club or social activity she was attending at Golden Tabernacle.
Lucia finally returned, holding up a roll of greenbacks. “Twelve hundred seventy,” she said. “That’s worth waiting for.”
“Do you mug everyone?” he asked as they rushed down the steps.
“A bushel of my enemy’s grain is worth twenty bushels of my own,” Lucia said. “Sun-Tzu.”
“Who?”
“You ever read anything that isn't teleprompted?”
They jogged out into the backyard, where the children were fighting over control of the still-running garden hose. They hurried to the arched gate, but Lucia turned back. This time she approached Liam’s children, unsheathing her black knife.
“Don’t!” Ruppert called after her. 'What are you doing?'
She ignored him. The children saw her approaching, and they dropped the hose and backed away from her, staring open-mouthed at the blade.
Lucia knelt down next to the wading pool and sliced it open from lip to base. The pool deformed into an oblong as gallons of water poured out the deep cut in its side.
Liam’s daughter watched the water escape with mounting horror. She looked up at Lucia, whose eyes were still concealed behind the dark glasses, and she screamed. She turned and ran into the house, calling for her father.
Lucia ran towards Ruppert. “Hurry up, let’s go!” she shouted.
“Why did you do that?” he asked as they passed through the gate to the driveway.
“No adults,” she said. “Kids can drown in those little pools.'
“Great,” Ruppert said. “We have about fifteen minutes before Hartwell-brand cops come flying in from everywhere.'
“Less than that.” Lucia snatched the keycard from his hand. “Better let me drive.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Ruppert had been exhausted after the eight-hour drive from Sonoma to Los Angeles, but now the threat of Terror kept his adrenaline high. Lucia drove, leaving him nothing to do but tap his fingers, search the radio, and check the rearview for police. In the past weeks, they’d kept to back roads and out of the way towns, but today they rode interstate 10 to put the city behind them as fast as possible. The sprawl scrolled on and on: West Covina, Pomona, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga…and he still felt caught in the city’s tentacles. He hoped they didn’t hit a checkpoint.
He activated the display screen in Archer’s dashboard and found that Archer had decent mapping software. No GPS, of course, which would have required an uplink and left the truck vulnerable to tracking, but plenty of road and terrain maps assembled from last year’s satellite images. Once they were well away from the city, they could make a good part of their trip off-road. Lucia had been smart to steal Archer’s truck.
At last the concrete gave way to sand and rocks. They again would cut through the Mojave Desert, but Lucia did not want to detour and check on Dr. Smith.
“He might tell me this is a bad idea,” Lucia explained. “He might even change my mind. I can’t risk that.”
They stopped in the town of Yermo for fuel and basic supplies. Water, crackers and dried fruit would have to sustain them for the rest of their drive-every stop was a risk. Lucia entered the gas station to pay with some of Liam’s cash, while Ruppert slumped in the passenger seat, a baseball cap low over his eyes, hoping he didn’t get picked up on a stray security camera. Terror could look out through any digital eyes, and they could automate an ongoing image search for his face. Or so he'd heard.
They left the highway and kept to worn back roads as they traveled northeast through the desert. Again he enjoyed seeing the rich vistas of sand painted in warm tones by the late afternoon sun, which glowed fat and orange in the rearview. It was like another planet, a beautiful place where nobody was watching you.
Lucia found a Spanish-language station playing traditional songs, and in time the cheerful music and the fantastically empty desert soothed Ruppert’s overstrained nerves, and gradually lulled him into a light sleep. When he woke again, he asked Lucia where they were, then checked the map.
“That can’t be right,” Ruppert said.
“What?”
“It looks like you’re taking us right through Las Vegas.”
“That is the fastest way,” Lucia said.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Daniel, you have to switch your brain around,” she told him. “What is safe and what is dangerous have changed places.”
“I don’t think Vegas is safe no matter whose side you’re on. Do we have any weapons?”
“I have my blade.”
“Great. We couldn’t be more prepared, then. One stone knife.”
'Good for evading metal detectors,' Lucia pointed out.
'But that's not what I'm worried about.'
They stopped for a restroom break by the side of the road-once they got close to Vegas, they wouldn’t want to stop. Then Lucia claimed the driver's seat again, and they continued driving. Within minutes, the towers of Vegas became visible, illuminated by red sunset reflecting off the acres of glass windows.
The city looked attractive until you drew close enough to see the burned-out cars heaped along the sides of the road, turning the Vegas strip into a shooting alley. They drove between high ramparts of rusting vehicles. Ruppert watched the car-piles for snipers.
They passed a giant black pyramid, a medieval fairy-castle, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State building. All looked frayed at the edges, their facades chewed by years of bombs and machine gun fire. Scattered open-pit fires provided the only lights in the deepening gloom.
Las Vegas was a corpse of a city. Its demise had been brought about in part by a zealous Secretary of Faith and Values in Washington, who outlawed prostitution and gambling nationwide; in part by the Western Resource and Energy Committee's stringent water restrictions on Nevada; and ultimately by water riots in the streets. Now
