pouring one for herself, she took a seat in the corner, where she could keep an eye on the other patrons. She knew she couldn’t stay here without ordering something, but was reluctant to spend what little money she had.
A waitress came over, an older woman who looked like everything from the chest up had slumped southwards in some terrible landslide of collapsing body mass a couple of years ago. She frowned at the youngster’s glass of water.
‘What can I get for you, darlin’?’
‘A plate of fries, thank you,’ said Sofia. ‘No cheese.’
They were the last thing she wanted, and her stomach turned at the thought of having to eat them. But fries were one of the cheapest things on the menu, and she could always string out the time by eating them one by one. It was the sort of thing the staff here would expect a teenager to do. The carbs would provide energy, too. Another lesson from those months on the trail: store energy whenever you can.
With her order placed, Sofia went back to surveying the room. It didn’t look too promising. The majority of the truckers were older men, enormously fat for the most part, probably as a result of sitting on their asses all day eating crap like this. There were a couple of younger drivers, but she didn’t like the look of them. The lines on their faces were drawn too long and too deeply. There was a crude ugliness of character that seemed to ooze out of their pores under the harsh, flat lights of the diner. Methamphetamine. The telltale signs were all there.
Unlike the fat pigs, the two meth heads were razor-thin with sunken cheeks. Their teeth were worn nubs, consumed by the constant need for sugar. You could turn a pretty good trade in Kansas City if you started cooking up crystal meth in an abandoned home or disused McDonald’s. Workers trying to get through gruelling shifts or long drives frequently resorted to it, trading short-term alertness for long-term health problems.
Their eyes stared out at her now from darkened pits. One man caught her looking at him, and smiled back with real malevolence. Not that one, she decided.
She wished she had something to read, something to hold in front of her face and hide behind, but no way was she going to waste money buying a copy of the local newspaper. It would just be filled with the usual garbage from the resettlement authorities, proclaiming Kansas City to be a paradise found. Not a word of the meth epidemic, of course, or the shootings, stabbings and other crimes that were a regular occurrence in the lives of most people here. Or at least, the people she knew. Sofia took to staring out of the window at the big rigs as they grunted and rumbled around on the tarmac. Occasionally one of her fellow diners would finish his meal, get up and leave, but most of them seemed content to sit for a while. She wasn’t sure what they were waiting for. The weather wasn’t likely to improve, and it wouldn’t be light for many hours. Perhaps they were all worried about bandits.
Sofia picked at her fries when they arrived, hating the oily taste. But the more she ate, the hungrier she seemed to grow. After half an hour, she had finished the lot.
She became aware that the two youngest drivers, the speed freaks, were staring openly at her. They appeared to be talking about her, pointing, greatly amused by something or other. It made her wish she’d been able to stop by the apartment. Papa kept three guns there in a cabinet: his saddle gun - a sort of sawn-off shotgun he’d always carried with him on horseback - his Winchester repeater, and the .357 Colt he had been teaching her to use. She would’ve been grateful to have that handgun with her now, tucked inside the waist of her Levi’s, hidden under the weight of her hoodie top.
Thoughts of the loft at Northtown, and her father, seemed to uncap a deep wellspring of sorrow, which bubbled up inside her so quickly she was almost overwhelmed. She took a deep breath and threw down the rest of the water. The drugs must’ve been wearing off, she realised. All she wanted to do was go home, crawl into her bed and wake up in the morning to discover that it had all been a horrible, cruel dream. To find her father there making breakfast for them both and teasing her about how grumpy she was in the mornings. If she could do that, she would promise Jesus and Mary to never disrespect Papa again. To always do as she was asked. And for ever after to appreciate what she had.
Sofia pressed her lips together, lest the merest whimper escape from them. She bit down and swallowed her grief. She would allow herself to grieve properly later on, in private. For now, she had other priorities. Actions changed the world for the better, not feelings. Papa had taught her that.
She looked over again at the meth-head pair and returned their stare, hoping to infuse it with enough hostility to forestall any interest on their part. So intently was she glaring at them that she completely missed the threat approaching her from the side.
‘Seems like you might be in a lot of trouble, Miss.’
17
DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Hours later, back in his office upstairs and nursing a Gentlemen Jack, Jed Culver had reason to ponder the role of serendipity. He was not somebody who believed in chance. Victory went to those who prepared, who stayed focused, and who did not relent no matter how much damage they were taking. And yet, sometimes the merest happenstance could change everything.
It was something Henry Cesky had said while he was bitching about Blackstone locking him out of government work down in Texas. Jed had no doubts at all that the businessman had been blacklisted for his role in toppling Mad Jack’s military junta a month or so after the Wave, and then for publicly and volubly aligning himself with Kipper during the election that eventually followed. Blackstone was indeed a vengeful cocksucker. Bill Gates wasn’t welcome down in Fort Hood either.
But he was a sloppy, arrogant, overreaching cocksucker too.
Culver sipped at his bourbon and enjoyed a warm, satisfied smile as he flipped through the folder he’d just received by safe-hand courier from Vancouver. Some things were worth sitting up late for.
He had seen this file before. Or rather, he had been briefed on its contents a few weeks earlier. The briefing did not cover the sort of information most people would’ve thought relevant to the files in front of him, amid his city scape of stacked folders and binders crammed with information about the government of Texas. But Jed Culver, alone in all the land, now knew there was a link. The safe-hand courier had travelled down from Echelon HQ in Vancouver because, a short while after Cesky had complained of being locked out of salvage operations in Texas, the vast archive of information stored inside Jed’s grey matter had begun to reformat itself around a potential link between two apparently disconnected data points.
He held in his hand an after-action report, written up, he was gratified to see, by a Special Agent Caitlin Monroe. He well remembered talking to this woman shortly before she had parachuted into New York in a last desperate attempt to lay hands on the Emir. Baumer was his real name, of course. But back in the old world, with its old wars and blood hatreds, he had also been known as al Banna, and he had been a medium-level functionary of al-Qaeda’s globally franchised jihad. The task of infiltrating and disrupting his particular cell of that hydra-headed monster had been the responsibility of one Special Agent Caitlin Monroe. Not surprising then, that she’d been the one to tag him as the provocateur behind New York.
Jed flipped slowly through the Echelon file.
‘Oh, Agent Monroe,’ he said softly to himself. ‘You are going to be my new best friend.’
He read and re-read the relevant paragraph.
‘My new best friend forever,’ he added with a smile.
Culver now turned his attention to the file balanced on his lap. A report from the Secretary of the Treasury’s office concerning contracts signed by the government of Texas,
‘Gotcha …’
18
