Little Brother

This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver’s legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that’s when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover’s sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain — I knew I’d heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store — a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.

The Tattered Cover: 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070

None of the three guys were around at the moment, so I took off. My head hurt so much I thought I must be bleeding, but my hands came away dry. My twisted ankle had frozen up in the truck so that I ran like a broken marionette, and I stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletion on Masha’s phone. I turned off its radio — both to save battery and to keep it from being used to track me — and set the sleep timer to two hours, the longest setting available. I tried to set it to not require a password to wake from sleep, but that required a password itself. I was just going to have to tap the keypad at least once every two hours until I could figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. I would need a charger, then.

I didn’t have a plan. I needed one. I needed to sit down, to get online — to figure out what I was going to do next. I was sick of letting other people do my planning for me. I didn’t want to be acting because of what Masha did, or because of the DHS, or because of my dad. Or because of Ange? Well, maybe I’d act because of Ange. That would be just fine, in fact.

I’d just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when I could, merging with the Tenderloin crowds. I didn’t have any destination in mind. Every few minutes, I put my hand in my pocket and nudged one of the keys on Masha’s phone to keep it from going asleep. It made an awkward bulge, unfolded there in my jacket.

I stopped and leaned against a building. My ankle was killing me. Where was I, anyway?

O’Farrell, at Hyde Street. In front of a dodgy “Asian Massage Parlor.” My traitorous feet had taken me right back to the beginning — taken me back to where the photo on Masha’s phone had been taken, seconds before the Bay Bridge blew, before my life changed forever.

I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk and bawl, but that wouldn’t solve my problems. I had to call Barbara Stratford, tell her what had happened. Show her the photo of Darryl.

What was I thinking? I had to show her the video, the one that Masha had sent me — the one where the President’s Chief of Staff gloated at the attacks on San Francisco and admitted that he knew when and where the next attacks would happen and that he wouldn’t stop them because they’d help his man get re-elected.

That was a plan, then: get in touch with Barbara, give her the documents, and get them into print. The VampMob had to have really freaked people out, made them think that we really were a bunch of terrorists. Of course, when I’d been planning it, I had been thinking of how good a distraction it would be, not how it would look to some NASCAR Dad in Nebraska.

I’d call Barbara, and I’d do it smart, from a payphone, putting my hood up so that the inevitable CCTV wouldn’t get a photo of me. I dug a quarter out of my pocket and polished it on my shirt-tail, getting the fingerprints off it.

I headed downhill, down and down to the BART station and the payphones there. I made it to the trolley-car stop when I spotted the cover of the week’s Bay Guardian, stacked in a high pile next to a homeless black guy who smiled at me. “Go ahead and read the cover, it’s free — it’ll cost you fifty cents to look inside, though.”

The headline was set in the biggest type I’d seen since 9/11:

INSIDE GITMO-BY-THE-BAY

Beneath it, in slightly smaller type:

“How the DHS has kept our children and friends in secret prisons on our doorstep.

“By Barbara Stratford, Special to the Bay Guardian”

The newspaper seller shook his head. “Can you believe that?” he said. “Right here in San Francisco. Man, the government sucks.”

Theoretically, the Guardian was free, but this guy appeared to have cornered the local market for copies of it. I had a quarter in my hand. I dropped it into his cup and fished for another one. I didn’t bother polishing the fingerprints off of it this time.

“We’re told that the world changed forever when the Bay Bridge was blown up by parties unknown. Thousands of our friends and neighbors died on that day. Almost none of them have been recovered; their remains are presumed to be resting in the city’s harbor.

“But an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man who was arrested by the DHS minutes after the explosion suggests that our own government has illegally held many of those thought dead on Treasure Island, which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to civilians shortly after the bombing…”

I sat down on a bench — the same bench, I noted with a prickly hair-up-the-neck feeling, where we’d rested Darryl after escaping from the BART station — and read the article all the way through. It took a huge effort not to burst into tears right there. Barbara had found some photos of me and Darryl goofing around together and they ran alongside the text. The photos were maybe a year old, but I looked so much younger in them, like I was 10 or 11. I’d done a lot of growing up in the past couple months.

The piece was beautifully written. I kept feeling outraged on behalf of the poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she was writing about me. Zeb’s note was there, his crabbed handwriting reproduced in large, a half-sheet of the newspaper. Barbara had dug up more info on other kids who were missing and presumed dead, a long list, and asked how many had been stuck there on the island, just a few miles from their parents’ doorsteps.

I dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. What was the chance that Barbara’s phone wasn’t tapped? There was no way I was going to be able to call her now, not directly. I needed some intermediary to get in touch with her and get her to meet me somewhere south. So much for plans.

What I really, really needed was the Xnet.