The Plain Man (The Max August Magikal Thrillers) - Hardcover
Magick and reality collide in a new, fast-paced Max August thriller
Max August is not invulnerable, but he never ages—a gift he earned while studying under the legendary alchemist Cornelius Agrippa. August, now an alchemist himself, is using his magickal abilities to fight the right-wing conspiracy known as the FRC, which seeks to control all aspects of society. At the top of the FRC is a nine-member cabal, each member of which is a powerful force in one area of society, such as media, politics, finance...and wizardry.
When Max learns that two members of the cabal are en route to Wickr, a Burning Man–like festival held in the American Southwest, he stages a plan to gather information from them and, he hopes turn one member against the others. Max has been careful not to leave a trail, but the cabal sees all, and an “accident” at a nuclear waste facility just 100 miles from the festival would send a clear message to those who oppose the FRC. Max may be timeless, but he is running out of time to stop the FRC and save millions of lives.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
STEVE ENGLEHART is best known for writing for such comics series as Spider-Man, Captain America, Superman, The Fantastic Four, and Batman for DC and Marvel Comics, and for his novels The Point Man and The Long Man. He has been named Favorite Writer at the Eagle Awards, and has also won an Inkpot Award for his comics work. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he is currently working on a new Max August novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2009 · 1:12 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME
5 Jaguar (Empowering Clarity)
“A sex caper?” Pam Blackwell said skeptically. “My name isn’t Mata Hari.”
“And I’m not Heidi Fleiss,” Max August answered. “But honey traps have existed as long as spies have, because they work.”
“I suppose so, but still ... kind of ballsy, no?”
Both of them chuckled in the sweltering night.
They were lying on a blanket spread over the sand, on a hill in the ass-end of Arizona, watching the sky above. An hour after midnight, it was still eighty-seven degrees with no breeze at all. But this far from pollution and city lights, the sky was brilliant, blazing with stars, planets, and the satellites that swept across the expanse like clockwork. Pam was twenty-nine years old. Max was thirty-five even though he’d been born in 1950, and he’d be thirty-five until somebody killed him, because he was Timeless. Both were blond, he with hazel eyes and her with blue. They could have been two lovers on a picnic—which, in fact, they were—but they were also two alchemists, and they were going to war.
Max said, “Everybody thinks with their body sometimes, lady.” His features were striking, dominated by the full mouth of the deejay he’d once been. That mouth produced a voice just as striking, deep and rich and round.
Pam studied his silhouette against the night, and said, “Everybody wants a relationship. Everything wants a relationship, because everything is related—the first magickal secret you ever told me.”
“Mike and Di are no different. They want each other and they’re coming together like crashing meteors.” He gestured toward the sky, which was devoid of meteors. “See if you can shoot this down. We’ve got time.”
“Okay.” She put her hands behind her head and stretched.
“Well,” he said, “Dave does data mining for me. It’s small-scale, but he’s only looking for a few things. One is intelligence concerning Michael Salinan and Diana Herring.”
Pam’s eyes narrowed as she ran the information she’d gathered over the year and a half she and Max had been together. Dave was his computer jedi. Michael Salinan was a well-known political guru, usually but not always right-wing, and Diana Herring ran Full Resource Channel, which owned radio and television stations of all networks all across America. Several years before, Dave had uncovered a relationship between Michael and Diana that suggested a love affair, though they’d tried hard to hide it—just as they’d tried to hide their membership in a cabal known only by the initials “FRC,” or three words beginning with those initials. The FRC had run the American government during the Bush/Cheney years, embedding its people throughout the bureaucracy to maintain as much control as possible after Obama took over, and judging from the results, they’d succeeded. Rather than end the wars as promised, the government had recently announced its intent to assassinate American citizens if it wanted. This was duly reported to the citizens months afterward at the bottom of page A-12 and most people missed it. But for Max and Pam, “of, by, and for the People” was not just a slogan, the way it was to the FRC.
“Dave discovered a run of credit card numbers that seemed to have been dropped down a black hole,” Max went on. “Everything before that run was issued, and everything after, but those cards were just gone. So he kept an eye out. One of them was used last month to buy tickets for Wickr under an assumed name, and Dave applied his standard cross-checks. He traced the transaction as far as KSN-TV in Wichita and then hit a brick wall, at first, but he checked the station’s FedEx shipments and found one to a hotel on the south side of Chicago. There was no record of what happened there, but Diana operates her FRC out of Chicago, so he kept going and found airline tickets on the same card, from O’Hare and Dulles, both to Las Vegas, arriving later today. And Wickr starts today, three hours north of Vegas.”
“Nice work on Dave’s part,” Pam said. “I couldn’t even master Windows. But what’s the deal with Wickr? You’ve been before, right?”
“I went in ninety-eight. It was a whole lot smaller and more intimate than it is now, but I doubt if the vibe has changed. It’s a festival in the high desert during the week leading up to the Midsummer solstice. Upwards of fifty thousand people, all ages and persuasions, come together to live in an instant city far from view; there is a lot of energy. It’s held at the base of the Silver Peak Mountains, at a point where the hills sweep into the distance like stone wings. On either side of that point, Wickr plants two two-hundred-and-twenty-foot towers. A fifty-foot sphere made of curved wooden slats, like massive rattan, simple and primitive, hangs one hundred feet in the air, suspended from a cable on an arc between the towers. That’s the Sun; it hangs above the landscape, swaying in the breeze, all week. Then, at the Midsummer solstice, it’s raised all the way up to two hundred feet and set ablaze against the sky. The solstice moves forward a quarter of a day every year, so the Burn takes place whenever Midsummer comes—morning, afternoon, evening, middle of the night. You get a different gathering every year, depending on who’s awake. This year’s the evening year; the best blaze, biggest crowd, biggest party.”
“Is it a straight takeoff on the old Wicker Man festival?” Pam asked, interested. When we started, Pam thought, there was so much to take in. But you get inside it and it’s simple. “Eight festivals mark out the year, at each of the four seasons and the four points halfway between. We met on one—Hallowe’en. Wicker Man’s for Midsummer, the longest day of the year, when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky and the Earth is in the fullest of bloom below. Both sides at their most radiant—because after Midsummer, the Sun will grow lower in the sky and the Earth’s vegetation will fade, and we puny humans certainly have no control over whether they’ll do it again next year. So everywhere in the world, humans came together and showed off their own considerable life-force with sex and sacrifice—usually an animal but sometimes a man if they were really worried about how things were going.”
Max’s hand found hers on the blanket, and he chuckled. “As far as I know, the Wickr festival’s just a festival. Nobody’s into human sacrifice, but there’s almost any other thing you want if it doesn’t hurt somebody else. There’s dancing and drugs and conversations and costumes and art and wacky cars and vision-quests and girls on stilts, with a permanent techno soundtrack from dance floors in all directions. Wickr is essentially an alternate reality you live in for a week; it’s a very cleansing experience. There just happens to be plenty of sex if you want it, and Mike and Di want it.”
“Are you and I having plenty of sex?” Pam wanted to know.
“With each other. If we want it.”
She jabbed him with her elbow. “Not other people?”
“Up to you, my love, but I’m not.”
“No, I’m good.” She pulled her hand from beneath his and placed it on top. “We’ll keep our magick to ourselves.”
There was silence for a while.
“Anyway,” Max said finally, “Wickr’s like a free-thinker’s Renaissance Faire that you get to live in.”
“So that brings up the question,” Pam said, “of why two members of the FRC would choose it.”
“Two members having an affair,” Max reminded her. “They’ve kept it quiet because they don’t want their bosses to find out about it. Now comes a chance for a week of heavy petting, in a place their bosses would never go. As Di would be the first to say, ‘Win-win!’”
“Still, there will be fifty thousand people there, and both Mike and Di have been on TV a lot.”
“But how many of those fifty thousand, who like a little alternate reality in the desert, watched Meet the Press clips like us? Probably not too many. Plus, Mike and Dican disguise themselves.”
“With wigs and makeup, maybe,” Pam responded with ironic dismissal. “We can bend light to actually change what people see.”
“True, but we won’t actually be dealing with them.”
“Right. Because then we’d have to sleep with them.”
“Yes, but also because the more I reveal of myself to the FRC, the more openings I give them to come after me. I prefer to remain invisible as long as I can, because soon enough I’ll be right up in their face and I want every advantage I can get.”
“We can get.” Pam rolled over in place onto her side, supporting her head with her hand. “So this is where Sly and Rosa come in.”
“Right.”
“Why them, particularly?”
“They’re both creatures of illusion.”
“And they’re good with the sex?”
“Sly is ecstatic.”
“What about Rosa?”
“If she didn’t want to do it, believe me, she wouldn’t.”
“That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.”
“With her, it is,” Max said. “She’s not what you’d call demonstrative.”
“So that’s another question,” she said. “Are you sure they can pull it off?”
“Pull what off?”
“Seducing Michael and Diana.”
“Sly and Rosa can seduce anybody,” he said with confidence.
“And why is that?” Pam pursued. “I have no way of evaluating them because I don’t know them and you can’t tell me much about them, thanks to the frikkin’ code of the magi. But what else can you tell me, Max?”
He hesitated, then said, “Nothin’.”
“You know,” Pam said darkly, “you’re adorable when you do that deejay folksy thing, but I still heard ‘nothing.’”
“Their secrets are their secrets, Pam. That is indeed the code. Nobody wants his secrets spread around—we wouldn’t want them spilling ours.”
“But you can’t trust me to keep their secrets.”
“That’s exactly right. I can’t trust you,” Max said. “It’s not up to me. Only they can trust you, which they will, once they get to know you.”
Pam thought about her one meeting with the pair. They had been strangers in the night—jostling through the crowd of a Mixed Martial Arts match in Barbados. Sly and Rosa both looked to be teenagers, almost like kids playing dress-up in that crowd, but even then Pam felt that they were far older than Max was. Creatures of illusion, indeed.
“So how are they going to work it?” was all Pam said out loud.
“That’s up to them. We’ll brief ’em and then turn ’em loose,” he responded. “But we might get a few ideas. What’s today going to be?”
“Ah,” she said, and looked down across her hip at a thick manuscript lying beside her, gray in the night. It was her well-thumbed copy of the latest version of Max’sCodex, which he kept current with everything he knew about the occult systems he’d mastered. The Mayan calendar was a basic one, and he put her through her paces every day.
“In the Mayan system,” she said, “days have names, created from a simple shorthand: a verb plus a noun. In the calendar that counts the days for average people, there are thirteen numbers corresponding to verbs, times twenty names corresponding to nouns—for a total of two hundred and sixty days per calendar cycle. Every day begins at dawn; until then, it’s still the old day. So right now, at ... one thirty-four in the morning, we’re still in Five Jaguar. ‘Five’ is ‘Empowering’ and ‘Jaguar’ is ‘Clarity,’ so the energy around us now is Empowering Clarity. Which is probably why I’m trying to get everything clear before we begin.”
“Probably,” Max agreed.
Pam said, “Yeah, so you’ve done this longer. It’s still hard to grasp that we’re living in the midst of all this energy.” She tapped his chest. “The energy flows forward forever, we call it time, and alchemists make use of it. By the time we get to Wickr, it’ll be after dawn, so the day will be Six Eagle, which means Responding to the Storyline. We’ll be surrounded by other people, all of whom have their own agendas, and the energy will be there for improv. Which, I remind you, we would be doing on any day that Wickr got under way.”
“Sure, but on Six Eagle it’ll be the dominant concept. On other days, other things would be more important—bad weather, cranky vehicles, the things we brought, the things we forgot to bring. This day, the flavor of the flow is Responding to the Storyline, so you and I are going to scope out Mike and Di and have everything nailed down before Sly and Rosa get here tonight. We’ll get them ammunition they can use tomorrow—then we’ll kick back till their part is done.”
“Yeah, that’s the part I still have trouble with,” Pam said off-handedly. “Mike’s hot.”
“If you think a bald-headed guy with big ears is hot—”
“It explains why you made the cut, too; is that what you were going to say?”
“No.”
“It would explain a lot.... But it doesn’t explain why I haven’t left you for some slightly less hideous guy. Maybe there is no one less hideous....” She touched his face. “Ah, well,” she said, smiling, “I like hideous.”
“Me, too.”
They nuzzled in the sweltering night.
MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2009 · 1:49 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME
5 Jaguar (Empowering Clarity)
After a while, they packed up their deli wrappings, shook and folded their blanket, then half slid down the sandy slope to their rented Volkswagen camping van, parked in a turnoff by U.S. 95. They could have chosen something roomier or newer for their ground transportation, but both of them had fond memories of trips in VWs—Max in one of the original puke greens. So they’d flown into Tucson from Acapulco yesterday afternoon and picked up the rental. They had used assumed names they’d never before assumed, and paid cash (a suspicious circumstance with airplane tickets but not camping vans, at least if you were obviously white Americans). They checked the van thoroughly for bugs both physical and metaphysical, just to be sure, then drove to a Big 5, a Costco, and a Walmart, where they outfitted themselves for a week of camping—and finally, found the Goodwill for a week of costumes. As the sun was lowering, they left Tucson and traveled over 250 miles, taking a nonobvious route around Phoenix toward Blythe on 10, then up 95 toward Lake Havasu, staying out of California to avoid the agricultural inspection stations at the border. And nowhere along that journey had Max sensed anyone or anything paying the slightest bit of attention to them, though he never for a moment stopped checking.
Now, as they pulled back onto the two-lane blacktop, heading north, he savored the hot desert breeze. It might well have been cooler with the windows up, let alone with air-conditioning, but he liked nature as it was. He glanced at his watch with its luminous dial and calculated the distance. “We’ve got to get to four-tenths of a mile past milepost 378 by two forty-five. Should be a piece of cake.”
Pam, uplit by the dashboard greens and ambers, still thinking over what they’d discussed, said, “Okay, we’re sure the FRC isn’t tracking us, but we’re on our way to meet someone they could have tracked. What’s up with that?”
“They can’t track Dave.”
“Why not? He’s a computer genius, but he’s not an alchemist or a mysterious pair of w...
STEVE ENGLEHART is best known for writing for such comics series as Spider-Man, Captain America, Superman, The Fantastic Four, and Batman for DC and Marvel Comics, and for his novels The Point Man and The Long Man. He has been named Favorite Writer at the Eagle Awards, and has also won an Inkpot Award for his comics work. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he is currently working on a new Max August novel.
MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2009 · 1:12 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME
5 Jaguar (Empowering Clarity)
“A sex caper?” Pam Blackwell said skeptically. “My name isn’t Mata Hari.”
“And I’m not Heidi Fleiss,” Max August answered. “But honey traps have existed as long as spies have, because they work.”
“I suppose so, but still ... kind of ballsy, no?”
Both of them chuckled in the sweltering night.
They were lying on a blanket spread over the sand, on a hill in the ass-end of Arizona, watching the sky above. An hour after midnight, it was still eighty-seven degrees with no breeze at all. But this far from pollution and city lights, the sky was brilliant, blazing with stars, planets, and the satellites that swept across the expanse like clockwork. Pam was twenty-nine years old. Max was thirty-five even though he’d been born in 1950, and he’d be thirty-five until somebody killed him, because he was Timeless. Both were blond, he with hazel eyes and her with blue. They could have been two lovers on a picnic—which, in fact, they were—but they were also two alchemists, and they were going to war.
Max said, “Everybody thinks with their body sometimes, lady.” His features were striking, dominated by the full mouth of the deejay he’d once been. That mouth produced a voice just as striking, deep and rich and round.
Pam studied his silhouette against the night, and said, “Everybody wants a relationship. Everything wants a relationship, because everything is related—the first magickal secret you ever told me.”
“Mike and Di are no different. They want each other and they’re coming together like crashing meteors.” He gestured toward the sky, which was devoid of meteors. “See if you can shoot this down. We’ve got time.”
“Okay.” She put her hands behind her head and stretched.
“Well,” he said, “Dave does data mining for me. It’s small-scale, but he’s only looking for a few things. One is intelligence concerning Michael Salinan and Diana Herring.”
Pam’s eyes narrowed as she ran the information she’d gathered over the year and a half she and Max had been together. Dave was his computer jedi. Michael Salinan was a well-known political guru, usually but not always right-wing, and Diana Herring ran Full Resource Channel, which owned radio and television stations of all networks all across America. Several years before, Dave had uncovered a relationship between Michael and Diana that suggested a love affair, though they’d tried hard to hide it—just as they’d tried to hide their membership in a cabal known only by the initials “FRC,” or three words beginning with those initials. The FRC had run the American government during the Bush/Cheney years, embedding its people throughout the bureaucracy to maintain as much control as possible after Obama took over, and judging from the results, they’d succeeded. Rather than end the wars as promised, the government had recently announced its intent to assassinate American citizens if it wanted. This was duly reported to the citizens months afterward at the bottom of page A-12 and most people missed it. But for Max and Pam, “of, by, and for the People” was not just a slogan, the way it was to the FRC.
“Dave discovered a run of credit card numbers that seemed to have been dropped down a black hole,” Max went on. “Everything before that run was issued, and everything after, but those cards were just gone. So he kept an eye out. One of them was used last month to buy tickets for Wickr under an assumed name, and Dave applied his standard cross-checks. He traced the transaction as far as KSN-TV in Wichita and then hit a brick wall, at first, but he checked the station’s FedEx shipments and found one to a hotel on the south side of Chicago. There was no record of what happened there, but Diana operates her FRC out of Chicago, so he kept going and found airline tickets on the same card, from O’Hare and Dulles, both to Las Vegas, arriving later today. And Wickr starts today, three hours north of Vegas.”
“Nice work on Dave’s part,” Pam said. “I couldn’t even master Windows. But what’s the deal with Wickr? You’ve been before, right?”
“I went in ninety-eight. It was a whole lot smaller and more intimate than it is now, but I doubt if the vibe has changed. It’s a festival in the high desert during the week leading up to the Midsummer solstice. Upwards of fifty thousand people, all ages and persuasions, come together to live in an instant city far from view; there is a lot of energy. It’s held at the base of the Silver Peak Mountains, at a point where the hills sweep into the distance like stone wings. On either side of that point, Wickr plants two two-hundred-and-twenty-foot towers. A fifty-foot sphere made of curved wooden slats, like massive rattan, simple and primitive, hangs one hundred feet in the air, suspended from a cable on an arc between the towers. That’s the Sun; it hangs above the landscape, swaying in the breeze, all week. Then, at the Midsummer solstice, it’s raised all the way up to two hundred feet and set ablaze against the sky. The solstice moves forward a quarter of a day every year, so the Burn takes place whenever Midsummer comes—morning, afternoon, evening, middle of the night. You get a different gathering every year, depending on who’s awake. This year’s the evening year; the best blaze, biggest crowd, biggest party.”
“Is it a straight takeoff on the old Wicker Man festival?” Pam asked, interested. When we started, Pam thought, there was so much to take in. But you get inside it and it’s simple. “Eight festivals mark out the year, at each of the four seasons and the four points halfway between. We met on one—Hallowe’en. Wicker Man’s for Midsummer, the longest day of the year, when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky and the Earth is in the fullest of bloom below. Both sides at their most radiant—because after Midsummer, the Sun will grow lower in the sky and the Earth’s vegetation will fade, and we puny humans certainly have no control over whether they’ll do it again next year. So everywhere in the world, humans came together and showed off their own considerable life-force with sex and sacrifice—usually an animal but sometimes a man if they were really worried about how things were going.”
Max’s hand found hers on the blanket, and he chuckled. “As far as I know, the Wickr festival’s just a festival. Nobody’s into human sacrifice, but there’s almost any other thing you want if it doesn’t hurt somebody else. There’s dancing and drugs and conversations and costumes and art and wacky cars and vision-quests and girls on stilts, with a permanent techno soundtrack from dance floors in all directions. Wickr is essentially an alternate reality you live in for a week; it’s a very cleansing experience. There just happens to be plenty of sex if you want it, and Mike and Di want it.”
“Are you and I having plenty of sex?” Pam wanted to know.
“With each other. If we want it.”
She jabbed him with her elbow. “Not other people?”
“Up to you, my love, but I’m not.”
“No, I’m good.” She pulled her hand from beneath his and placed it on top. “We’ll keep our magick to ourselves.”
There was silence for a while.
“Anyway,” Max said finally, “Wickr’s like a free-thinker’s Renaissance Faire that you get to live in.”
“So that brings up the question,” Pam said, “of why two members of the FRC would choose it.”
“Two members having an affair,” Max reminded her. “They’ve kept it quiet because they don’t want their bosses to find out about it. Now comes a chance for a week of heavy petting, in a place their bosses would never go. As Di would be the first to say, ‘Win-win!’”
“Still, there will be fifty thousand people there, and both Mike and Di have been on TV a lot.”
“But how many of those fifty thousand, who like a little alternate reality in the desert, watched Meet the Press clips like us? Probably not too many. Plus, Mike and Dican disguise themselves.”
“With wigs and makeup, maybe,” Pam responded with ironic dismissal. “We can bend light to actually change what people see.”
“True, but we won’t actually be dealing with them.”
“Right. Because then we’d have to sleep with them.”
“Yes, but also because the more I reveal of myself to the FRC, the more openings I give them to come after me. I prefer to remain invisible as long as I can, because soon enough I’ll be right up in their face and I want every advantage I can get.”
“We can get.” Pam rolled over in place onto her side, supporting her head with her hand. “So this is where Sly and Rosa come in.”
“Right.”
“Why them, particularly?”
“They’re both creatures of illusion.”
“And they’re good with the sex?”
“Sly is ecstatic.”
“What about Rosa?”
“If she didn’t want to do it, believe me, she wouldn’t.”
“That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.”
“With her, it is,” Max said. “She’s not what you’d call demonstrative.”
“So that’s another question,” she said. “Are you sure they can pull it off?”
“Pull what off?”
“Seducing Michael and Diana.”
“Sly and Rosa can seduce anybody,” he said with confidence.
“And why is that?” Pam pursued. “I have no way of evaluating them because I don’t know them and you can’t tell me much about them, thanks to the frikkin’ code of the magi. But what else can you tell me, Max?”
He hesitated, then said, “Nothin’.”
“You know,” Pam said darkly, “you’re adorable when you do that deejay folksy thing, but I still heard ‘nothing.’”
“Their secrets are their secrets, Pam. That is indeed the code. Nobody wants his secrets spread around—we wouldn’t want them spilling ours.”
“But you can’t trust me to keep their secrets.”
“That’s exactly right. I can’t trust you,” Max said. “It’s not up to me. Only they can trust you, which they will, once they get to know you.”
Pam thought about her one meeting with the pair. They had been strangers in the night—jostling through the crowd of a Mixed Martial Arts match in Barbados. Sly and Rosa both looked to be teenagers, almost like kids playing dress-up in that crowd, but even then Pam felt that they were far older than Max was. Creatures of illusion, indeed.
“So how are they going to work it?” was all Pam said out loud.
“That’s up to them. We’ll brief ’em and then turn ’em loose,” he responded. “But we might get a few ideas. What’s today going to be?”
“Ah,” she said, and looked down across her hip at a thick manuscript lying beside her, gray in the night. It was her well-thumbed copy of the latest version of Max’sCodex, which he kept current with everything he knew about the occult systems he’d mastered. The Mayan calendar was a basic one, and he put her through her paces every day.
“In the Mayan system,” she said, “days have names, created from a simple shorthand: a verb plus a noun. In the calendar that counts the days for average people, there are thirteen numbers corresponding to verbs, times twenty names corresponding to nouns—for a total of two hundred and sixty days per calendar cycle. Every day begins at dawn; until then, it’s still the old day. So right now, at ... one thirty-four in the morning, we’re still in Five Jaguar. ‘Five’ is ‘Empowering’ and ‘Jaguar’ is ‘Clarity,’ so the energy around us now is Empowering Clarity. Which is probably why I’m trying to get everything clear before we begin.”
“Probably,” Max agreed.
Pam said, “Yeah, so you’ve done this longer. It’s still hard to grasp that we’re living in the midst of all this energy.” She tapped his chest. “The energy flows forward forever, we call it time, and alchemists make use of it. By the time we get to Wickr, it’ll be after dawn, so the day will be Six Eagle, which means Responding to the Storyline. We’ll be surrounded by other people, all of whom have their own agendas, and the energy will be there for improv. Which, I remind you, we would be doing on any day that Wickr got under way.”
“Sure, but on Six Eagle it’ll be the dominant concept. On other days, other things would be more important—bad weather, cranky vehicles, the things we brought, the things we forgot to bring. This day, the flavor of the flow is Responding to the Storyline, so you and I are going to scope out Mike and Di and have everything nailed down before Sly and Rosa get here tonight. We’ll get them ammunition they can use tomorrow—then we’ll kick back till their part is done.”
“Yeah, that’s the part I still have trouble with,” Pam said off-handedly. “Mike’s hot.”
“If you think a bald-headed guy with big ears is hot—”
“It explains why you made the cut, too; is that what you were going to say?”
“No.”
“It would explain a lot.... But it doesn’t explain why I haven’t left you for some slightly less hideous guy. Maybe there is no one less hideous....” She touched his face. “Ah, well,” she said, smiling, “I like hideous.”
“Me, too.”
They nuzzled in the sweltering night.
MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2009 · 1:49 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME
5 Jaguar (Empowering Clarity)
After a while, they packed up their deli wrappings, shook and folded their blanket, then half slid down the sandy slope to their rented Volkswagen camping van, parked in a turnoff by U.S. 95. They could have chosen something roomier or newer for their ground transportation, but both of them had fond memories of trips in VWs—Max in one of the original puke greens. So they’d flown into Tucson from Acapulco yesterday afternoon and picked up the rental. They had used assumed names they’d never before assumed, and paid cash (a suspicious circumstance with airplane tickets but not camping vans, at least if you were obviously white Americans). They checked the van thoroughly for bugs both physical and metaphysical, just to be sure, then drove to a Big 5, a Costco, and a Walmart, where they outfitted themselves for a week of camping—and finally, found the Goodwill for a week of costumes. As the sun was lowering, they left Tucson and traveled over 250 miles, taking a nonobvious route around Phoenix toward Blythe on 10, then up 95 toward Lake Havasu, staying out of California to avoid the agricultural inspection stations at the border. And nowhere along that journey had Max sensed anyone or anything paying the slightest bit of attention to them, though he never for a moment stopped checking.
Now, as they pulled back onto the two-lane blacktop, heading north, he savored the hot desert breeze. It might well have been cooler with the windows up, let alone with air-conditioning, but he liked nature as it was. He glanced at his watch with its luminous dial and calculated the distance. “We’ve got to get to four-tenths of a mile past milepost 378 by two forty-five. Should be a piece of cake.”
Pam, uplit by the dashboard greens and ambers, still thinking over what they’d discussed, said, “Okay, we’re sure the FRC isn’t tracking us, but we’re on our way to meet someone they could have tracked. What’s up with that?”
“They can’t track Dave.”
“Why not? He’s a computer genius, but he’s not an alchemist or a mysterious pair of w...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 0765324997
- ISBN 13 9780765324993
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages352
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