The boat was longer than a three-man canoe but just as narrow. Flat-bottomed, it was propelled by a long polelike paddle worked from the side. Similar vessels had been made according to the local design for two or three hundred years at least. It was a serviceable craft, more than capable of doing what Ferguson needed.
The wood creaked as he put one leg over the gunwale, pushing off into the soft mud with the other. The boat rocked beneath his weight, its sides giving slightly as he leaned the rest of his body inside and rolled into it. He turned onto his stomach, then knelt upright, half-expecting to feel his leg going through the wood. But the hull held.
The boat shifted back and forth abruptly as Ferguson took up the oar and tried to figure out how to work it. The water was very shallow, making it easier to push than to paddle, and after a few strokes he got a rhythm going.
He’d found the boat near a cluster of houses overlooking an arm of water that was separated from the rest of the bay by a swampy peninsula. To get into the main part of the channel where he could get across, Ferguson had to turn in front of the settlement, rowing directly past the houses.
It was still before dawn, but already smoke rose from several chimneys. There were other boats, bigger, tied to a dock closer to the houses. If someone saw him they would have an easy time coming after him; he was moving at a snail’s pace.
He couldn’t blame them if they came after him. The boat he had stolen undoubtedly represented a good portion of the community’s wealth.
Ferguson thought of the girl he’d stolen the ID from at Science Industries: fired probably, though now he wouldn’t put anything beyond Park.
He’d done things like that a million times. He never thought about the consequences.
He couldn’t. Once he started to, he couldn’t do his job. The girl, the villagers—they had to remain in the background, part of the scenery. If he stopped to think about them, if he focused on the pawns instead of the players, he was done.
Push, he told himself. Push and don’t think. Go. Go!
Go!
No one would think about him as anything but another piece of cannon fodder, ultimately expendable. It was the way it had to be.
The chain that connected his arms clanged against his chest as Ferguson started the turn. He leaned forward, pushing through the muck that lay barely a foot below the boat’s shallow hull.
A gust of wind hit him in the side as he cleared the marshy finger of land. He turned into the teeth of it, poling so hard against the mud that he nearly lost the paddle.
Go, he told himself. Go.
Ten strokes later, the river deepened, and Ferguson once more struggled to figure out how to paddle properly. He barely made headway at first. He finally tried standing up, and after nearly losing his balance two or three times, started stroking steadily across the gaping mouth of water.
The rays of the sun lit the squat white faces of the houses on the opposite shore as he passed the halfway mark. Ferguson tacked to his left, in the direction of the sea, hoping that by staying far enough away from land he would seem just another villager. In truth he had no idea what a villager would look like; the real keys to his survival were the shadows on the water around him and the indifference of people trained by the dictatorship to keep their eyes focused firmly on the ground.
When he neared the other side, Ferguson saw that the land wasn’t really land at all but muddy swamp and wild vegetation. He continued to paddle westward. Perhaps an hour passed before he saw ground solid enough to walk on. As he approached the embankment, he spotted a vehicle moving just beyond the reeds. He ducked down, waiting until it had passed, then landed and abandoned the boat.
A one-lane dirt-packed road ran through the swamp about twenty yards from where he had beached. Ferguson followed the road for roughly a mile before it curved northward. Twice he ducked off the road when he heard bicycles approaching. The marsh on both sides made for plenty of cover.
Shortly after it turned northward, the road joined a paved highway. Ferguson guessed it was the coastal highway. He was no more than five miles, and probably closer to three, from the emergency cache.
He told himself he had less than half that: one mile, a fifteen-minute stroll, an easy jaunt.
It wasn’t a very effective lie, and as the sun climbed higher he felt bad about it. As a CIA officer he lied all the time but never to himself. He’d required brutal honesty his whole career; he was the one person he could count on for an honest assessment.
Honesty became even more important when the cancer was diagnosed. No one—not the doctors, not the lab people, not anybody—told him the whole truth. They thought they did, maybe they even tried, but they couldn’t really face it. In the end they slanted things to make themselves feel better.
Not that honesty changed the thing that counted. The cells mutating out of control cared not a whit for truth.
What had Chaucer said about the knight?
Forget the knight, forget Chaucer, just walk. Just go. Go!
Think of it as two miles, Ferguson told himself, pushing his stiff legs faster. Two miles. A cakewalk.
Ferguson had no idea how far it really was. He started looking for the signs way too early and then when he was near, almost missed it.
The blotch of white was on a rock about five feet from the road. It looked so random that even when he stood over it he couldn’t be absolutely sure.
Because he wanted it, desperately wanted it, to be the sign.
He stood over the rock, found the direction due west, then counted off ten yards, or what he thought was ten yards.
Another splotch.
I’m here, he thought. Here.
He’d planned to circle and scout the area but that was nothing more than wishful thinking. He began looking for the hidden packs. Before he’d taken more than two steps he tripped over something. He got his hands out to protect himself, but he was too weak and they collapsed. The chain cracked his ribs.
Wincing, he saw the packs lying beneath the nearby brush.
I’m here. I am Goddamn here.
Ferguson crawled to them on all fours. He grabbed at the nearest one, pulling it open. He took out a small Russian PSM pistol, then took out one of the bottles of water. He drank so fast his stomach cramped, and he had to lay down on his back for a good half hour, watching the white puffy clouds passing in the bright blue sky until the pain eased.
“Long way to go,” he told himself as he got back up. “Long, long way to go.”