Flashback

But the pilot wouldn’t fly until after dark—actually, until almost midnight—since all flights into the city were illegal, so Nick had too many hours to kill in Las Vegas. The delay drove him crazy, but all the bootleg pilots flew only after dark, so he had no choice but to wait.

After dinner, toward sunset, Nick made his way to the high wall that surrounded modern Las Vegas. He decided to walk the six miles around the south end of the city along the top of the wall, then the other mile back to the airport. It would help him get rid of some of his nervous energy.

Just after sunset, Nick paused to look out at the hundreds, possibly thousands, of trucks and the tent city that had grown up in the desert beyond the southern edge of the city. He could hear motorcycles roar, gunshots, and shouts. Countless vehicle lights illuminated the hardpan out there and torches and bonfires roared in the tent cities that catered to the hard-assed independent truckers.

Nick knew that convoys headed west to L.A. had been shut down, but some convoys were still coming east from the city. Looking out at the lights and listening to the distant roars, he realized that if Leonard and Val had somehow bought their way onto one of those final convoys, they could be out there in the desert right now, part of that light and noise, less than a mile away.

Is Professor Leonard Fox savvy enough—connected enough—to get Val and himself out of town that way? thought Nick. And even if Leonard were that smart and connected, Nick would have no idea where to look for them.

No, getting into the battlefield hellhole that was Los Angeles was Nick’s best shot. Nick had no idea what the odds were of him getting out of L.A. alive—much less of actually finding Val and getting them both out, Leonard too if he wanted to leave—but he’d worry about that later.

Nick tore himself away from the sight of the torches and bonfires and truck lights. His loaded Glock holstered on his hip and his small duffel bag in hand, he continued walking east along the southern wall around Las Vegas, planning to get back to McCarran International Airport with at least two hours to kill before his pilot tried to get him and the little Cessna into Battlefield Los Angeles.

3.03 I-25 and Denver: Friday, Sept. 24—Saturday, Sept. 25

Professor emeritus George Leonard Fox was seventy-four years old and knew that he might not see many more years of life, if any. If this adventure he and Val were on didn’t kill him soon, there were the cough and pain in his chest that his doctor had been worried about. The X-rays had been inconclusive, so the doctor had ordered a CT scan and an MRI to determine if it was cancer and, of course, with the National Health Service Initiative, neither test would cost Leonard a cent. But since the waiting time for both of those NHSI-covered procedures now ran to nineteen months and longer, Leonard suspected that he’d be dead from whatever was causing the pain and cough before he got the test. This was the way it had been for seniors without private wealth for many years now.

It was no one’s fault—Leonard had been an enthusiastic supporter of the original health reform bill that had guaranteed eventual government control of all health decisions—but sometimes the irony of it all, and the reminder of what his college mentor, Dr. Bert Stern, had called the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences, made Leonard smile a bit ruefully.

But however long he had to live, Leonard knew that he would never forget this last night of the truck convoy through Colorado.

Leonard had paid little attention to the Rocky Mountains during the years he’d lived and taught in Boulder, so this long night of crossing the mountainous part of Colorado held surprises for him.

He wished, of course, that Val weren’t riding separately all that day and night, first with the solo trucker Gauge Devereaux and then with Henry Big Horse Begay. Leonard was extremely anxious about what his grandson might do when they were reunited with Nick Bottom the next day in Denver and hoped he could allay the boy’s suspicions. And Leonard also needed to talk to Val about the password for the encrypted part of the text on his late daughter Dara’s phone. What Leonard wanted was to try the password he felt might be the correct one and read the encrypted file by himself—just in case it did contain something damning that would make his grandson even more intent on attacking Nick Bottom—but Val kept the battered old phone with him wherever he went.

After hours of this fruitless anxiety, Leonard tried to relax and talk to the driver, Julio Romano. Julio’s wife, Perdita, was asleep in the lower-rear sleeping compartment and her high-decibel but not unfeminine snoring came through the curtains as they moved closer to the Continental Divide.

Julio had wanted to talk politics and recent history and—after ascertaining that the driver seemed to be one of those rare fellows who could discuss such topics without losing their temper, even with amusement—Leonard had complied.

“Good,” said Julio earlier that night. “It’s not often that I get a tame professor of literature and classics in my cab. Do you prefer to be called Doctor or Professor?”

“Leonard, actually.”

“Well, good, Lenny. That’ll make things easier. But I won’t forget that you’re a professor emeritus.”

Normally, Leonard would have been irritated at anyone calling him Lenny—no one ever had—but coming from Julio, after Leonard had ascertained that the middle-aged driver wasn’t using the name as an insult, it sounded all right.

As the climb over Loveland Pass approached, Julio was leading a discussion on the decline of nations. Leonard was continually surprised at how well informed and literate the truck driver was.

“But I don’t think the United Kingdom chose decline,” Leonard was saying, trying hard not to slip into his lecturing-prof tone of voice. “After World War Two, it was just an inevitable outcome of Britain having bankrupted itself fighting the war… that and the people’s innate refusal to return to the prewar class system after five years of sharing hardships and scarcity.”

“So they fired Winston Churchill without so much as a thank-you-sir and chose socialism,” said Julio, shifting down several gears as the huge truck followed the convoy off I-70 before the blocked Eisenhower Tunnel and up the narrower, twisting Highway 6 rising toward the night sky.

“Well, yes,” said Leonard. He was a little anxious at the prospect of a discussion of “socialism” with a working man. All those working fellows he’d known, the few he’d known, found the word and concept toxic, sometimes reacting to it in violent ways.

“But the British Empire would have been finished no matter who they’d kept as prime minister or what system they’d adopted,” said Leonard, raising his voice slightly so he would be heard over the rising roar of the truck’s engine. “The scarcities would have been as real after the war, socialism or not.”

“Maybe,” said Julio Romano with a smile. “But remember what Churchill said.”

“What’s that?” asked Leonard. The first sharp turns were approaching and he grasped the padded armrest to his right more firmly.

“ ‘Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery,’ ” cited Julio. “I agree with old Winnie that once a society has declared that the sharing of misery is a virtue, then there’s going to be a lot of scarcity and misery in that culture’s future to share. Certainly you and I have lived through that change of outlook, Lenny.”

“Yes,” said Leonard. The red taillights of the trucks ahead of them kept swerving and disappearing with the sharp curves of Loveland Pass, as if the trucks were hurtling over the edge and out of sight down into the abyss. Leonard could see by their own truck’s headlights that the road was patched and broken and the guardrails to the side were largely missing or collapsed. There was nothing but Julio’s attention to his driving to keep them from hurtling through the gaps to a fiery death below. “Yes,” he said again, trying to regain the thread of the conversation, “but choosing a more… ah… communitarian approach to the rationing of scarcity and the social amelioration of misery does not necessarily mean that a culture has chosen decline.”

“But have you ever known a modern culture that chose socialism—the enforced redistribution of wealth of the sort we saw about twenty-five years ago, Lenny—that didn’t inevitably have to embrace decline? Decline as a world power? Decline in its people’s productivity and morale?” said Julio, shifting down three