them from-he’d be way too careful for that-but if we got Jed 1 talking about them, we might be able to suss out which post he’d seen last, and even maybe when he’d seen it, and that might give us a sense of how on the ball he was, Net-wise. It wasn’t much but it was all we had for now.
Otherwise, I just kept doing interviews about the trailer-teleconference only-to prop up the perception that I was soon to be the next Chris Hemsworth. I did okay, but in between gigs I kept getting bouts of unnecessary surliness. Sillily, my biggest emotional problem was that I knew Marena thought No Way had sold us out to the Guate military, but that she was just plain wrong. She thought I was in denial about this, but I knew him and there was just no way he’d do that. He’s dead, I thought. Still, I’d have to deal with that later. If there was a later.
As per my recommendations we kept putting out little bits of propaganda. For instance, at 4:55 EST on Sunday night, we posted something-coded, and in a very difficult-to-find location-about Kristen Stewart, the Twilight girl. We kept waiting to hear from the Jedster. Finally, on November 16, a caller ID popped up on Marena’s most private line: JED.
(88)
“H i, it’s Jed,” Jed 1 said. His voice was heavily processed to eliminate background clues, but Ana’s telephone technicians quickly determined that it was really him. You could hear that he was smiling.
Ana was all over it. “Okay, the second relay’s in.” This was the telephone code locator. “That’s-that’s U.S., so, it’s in, um-”
Antonio said, “Pawleys Island. North Carolina. Jed’s old beach house.”
“You’re sure?”
Ana snapped, “Probably.”
“Okay.”
“It’s about a two-hour drive from there.”
“Got it,” Ana said. “Okay, Antonio, you take the big chopper. We’ll find a car there.”
“Never mind, I’ll put in a bike.”
“Like, a chopper in the chopper?” I said.
“Right.”
“Good deal,” Ana said. “Just, keep an eye out for decoy relays. And bombs and the usual shit.”
“He’s not going to have any booby traps,” I said.
“Not your style, huh?” she said. I stared. “It’s classier to just vaporize the whole place, right?”
“Okay, let’s not bust Jed’s balls,” Marena said. “Jed-Sub-Three’s.”
“What’s left of them,” I said.
“Sorry,” Ana said.
The team also ascertained that Jed 1 was using a chain of physical relays-pairs of telephones set up in different locations around the country-to make the call difficult to trace, since by the time each location was tracked down, and the next one in the chain was identified, he’d be long gone. Even so, this was a huge step forward for the team, and I-trying to ignore the oddity of talking with myself-took over the call.
I said, “Aren’t you curious about what’s going to happen in the future?”
“There isn’t any future.”
“Don’t you want to meet Kristen Stewart?” I asked. “We just signed her for the sequel.”
“I know.”
“Oh.” Hmm, I thought.
“Look, get your heads together and poke me on HarpoCrazy,” he said. It was an anonymous-messaging site that I, or he, had used before for talking to the posse at La Sierra. Ordinarily it wasn’t anything that the Warren code spooks couldn’t crack, of course, but he’d be covering his digital trail anyway, way before the message ever got to the site. So I guess he just wanted to make sure nobody else would come across the exchange. One thing HarpoCrazy did do well was keep their text off search engines. Supposedly the NSA has a whole division that just keeps on breaking into the site, twenty-four hours a day.
“Uh, okay,” I said. “HarpoCrazy.”
He hung up.
“What the hell are you doing?” Marena asked. “You have to keep him on the phone!”
“He just screwed up,” I said.
“How?”
“He just told us where he is without realizing it.”
“Sorry?”
“Or because he didn’t think about it. He got that Kristen Stewart post. And he wasn’t looking for it. So he must have played the Game and just found it. I mean, the weekly Grandessa Game.”
“Okay, that’s terrific, so that tells you what?”
“Well, I do that, I mean, you know, he does that right after midnight Mass. That means it’s already Sunday there.”
“Where he is.”
“Right.”
“It’s only Saturday.”
“Right, so, where does that mean he is?”
She thought for about a half-second. “So it’s super-early there? So it’s in the Pacific. Near the international date line.”
“Correct. Right here, we’re, you know, we’re Coordinated Universal Time minus five hours. But wherever he is, it’s UTC plus fourteen.”
“So it’s an island. It’s, it’s some nudibranch thing?”
“Correct. And there was a big new species discovery out there, and it came out in the JMS, uh, the Journal of Malacological Studies, in December, I mean, it was the December issue, but it got published in October. Mexichromae zenobia. That’s a kind of possibly eusocial ’branch, uh, nudibranch-”
“Right, right, so where is he?” Her thumb hovered twitchily over the CALL icon on her tablet.
“Guess.”
“Come on, don’t bust my ovaries, where where where where where?”
“Where’s Zenobia from?”
The Recent Solar Obscuration as Witnessed at Ixmul
Curious Antiquities of British Honduras
By Subscription Lambeth • 1831
(89)
Google-Earth “Palmyra Atoll” and at first you won’t see anything there, but if you zoom down to the maximum you’ll bring up a linked pair of tiny islands, looking up at you like a white domino mask. If we’d had to stick to commercial travel, it would have taken us eighty-one hours to cover the 6,750 miles. But Marena’d been mending some fences with Lindsay and Boyle and she’d convinced them to lend us one of his Gulfstreams and a crew of three. They took us from Orlando to Twentynine Palms in five hours, and from there we got on one of their decommissioned C-17 Globemasters and flew to Wheeler Base in Wahiawa, in the center of Oahu, in eleven hours, and from there it took five and a half hours to get to Kiribati. We took a cigarette boat to Palmyra and met Ana’s crew, who were on a stealthier boat called the Gotengo, just before sunset.
As I’d explained, a bit breathlessly, to Marena, Jed 1 had to have used the Game to find that hidden post on Kristen Stewart. And he said, “I just got that,” which meant he’d found it during his Game of the Week. Which he does on Sunday night at seven P.M. And the only place where it was already seven o’clock was in the Line Islands,
