XXIV

 

 

There was a brief, terrible instant during which Sheklov found himself insanely wishing that he believed in a personal god who could be trusted to provide on-the-spot salvation for his worshippers.

How long has he known? And, worse yet:

Who has he told?

He continued to go through the right motions and drive the car, mechanically, like a robot: red light, slow down; green, step on the gas; miss that idiot pulling out from that parking-bay without looking. … But that had nothing to do with his conscious mind. It was all automatic.

“I think you’re out of your skull!” he husked at last. “I’m going to find a parking-bay and get out, and leave you to your—your mad fantasies!”

“Russian?” Lora said, as though the word had been in her throat for a short eternity, building up pressure until now it came blasting out like the plug of semi-solid magma that chokes the crater of a volcano until it erupts.

“Yes, of course!” Danty snapped. “Either that, or perhaps Polish, Hungarian, Czech—no, my guess is Russian. Well, Don?”

“You’re insane! You’re hallucinating or something!” But Sheklov’s mouth was so dry he could barely speak.

“Maybe you were right after all, Mag’,” Danty sighed. “Okay, put the gun back on him, but keep it well out of sight. He’s missed death by inches once in the past few days, when he came ashore. And that would have spread him kind of thin and all over everywhere, so—”

“Look out!” Magda exclaimed, and seized the wheel just in time, twisting it to the left and then straightening out. Lora let go a cry of alarm. Sheklov had nearly crashed into the back of a truck.

“That got to him,” Danty said softly. “Don, baby, didn’t you know the site was turned off when you came ashore? Didn’t you know that if it hadn’t been, the submarine would have been blasted less than a mile away? They weren’t so careful when they left as when they approached.”

“You just figured that out?” Magda said, and in the same breath added, “Pull over, Don. You’re not in a fit state to drive. You’re shaking so much. I’ll take the wheel as soon as you can put us in a parking-bay—ah, there’s one now.”

Dumb, Sheklov nosed the car into it.

“Well, it’s how it had to be,” Danty said. “I felt something bad on the way. And I can’t think of any other disaster that fits the picture. No, Don! Don’t get out! Slide towards Magda and let her climb over you!”

Sheklov, numb, withdrew his hand from the door-handle and obeyed.

As Magda took the controls: “So that’s the way I see it. If the site hadn’t been turned off, the sub would have registered on the detectors, and—pow.”

“But he’s been staying right in our apartment!” Lora cried. She was having to clamp her jaw to stop her teeth chattering. “A Russian! A spy!”

“You recommended the gas-station on Sixtieth, didn’t you?” Magda said, glancing at the dash. “Oh, shit! Lora! Lora! Stop your snivelling and tell me which of these damned dials is the gas-gauge!”

“Uh …” Wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “Doesn’t have a dial. It’s sonic.”

“Just say to fill up the tank,” Danty snapped. “Night-riders usually do.”

“Yeah.” Magda slowed to make the turn on to Sixtieth, a right. “But why the hell did you leave the site turned off?”

“I guess …” Danty swallowed hard. “I guess so that this would happen. So that we’d be here, now, in this mess.”

“Gas-station!” Magda said unnecessarily; it was blazing with light and huge mobile advertising figures, spotlighted, filled with helium, and tugged into a weird non-stop parody of a dance by fine wires attached to cams on electric motors, signalled drivers to pull in. “Don, you hold your tongue and behave yourself, hm? And you, Lora!”

“No! Let me out!” Lora cried, and as the car swung close to the side of the road, in order to enter the gas-station, she tried to snatch at the door-handle.

Danty stopped her, his dark hand closing over her mouth and his full strength forcing her back against the seat.

“I may only have one hand right now,” he said in a voice as cold as a Siberian winter, “but if I have to I’ll strangle you. Is that understood?”

For a moment Sheklov thought she was going to fight back; her fists curled over and her eyes widened in a look of fury. Then, abruptly, she yielded, and went limp. When he took his hand away, she stared at Danty with a kind of adoration, as though this were the first time in her life that someone had given her an order meant to be obeyed—and she liked the novel sensation.

“Full, please!” Magda called as they drew up to the pumps.

“Full it is!” came the reply over the remote speakers.

“I …” Sheklov licked his lips. “I meant to ask someone: Why do you lay your gas-stations out this way, with the attendants in those high glass booths?”

“Robbery,” Magda said. “Maybe the risk of sabotage, too. There was a time a few years ago, when I was in my teens, when gas-stations were closing down all over. They made such a lovely show when someone tossed a Molotov cocktail at the pumps.”

Cash-drawer. Credit card. Usual routine. During it, Sheklov noticed that Danty was tensing and biting his lower lip. Then, as soon as the card came back and they were leaving the station, he spoke up.

“I just figured out how they got on to us.”

“You and me, you mean?” Magda said, spotting a gap in the traffic and accelerating violently towards it. “So, how?”

“A cat called Rollins—get on the superway as soon as you can, hm?—gave me a ride back to Cowville. We stopped for gas and a suspicious pig came and checked the governor on his car. A Banshee. Thought it had been shorted out. I guess he would have filed a report. He looked at my redbook.”

“Ah-hah. And the sexies got to the tape of the report, hm? Yes, that fits. So this time wherever we go, we go for good.”

“I still think you’re crazy—” Sheklov began, but Danty cut him short.

“Look, Ivan or whatever your real name is! Get this into your head, will you? I was there on the beach when you came ashore. I saw you get into Turpin’s car—”

“What?” From Lora, a shrill-edged cry of horror.

“Yeah, you heard!” Danty snapped. “Your dad’s car! I saw it again in the garage under the tower you live in. Recognised the licence number, so don’t give me any shit! Like I was saying, Ivan! Do you want that lot to come out when they catch up with me and start feeding me interrogation drugs?”

Ahead, the superway access point loomed, brilliant with neon strips forming arrows and the letter N for north-bound. Sheklov caught a brief glimpse of the name of some city, and a distance, but failed to read them clearly.

“You’re in the laughing seat,” Magda said sourly, swinging into the traffic on the superway. As ever, there was a vast horde of it; this was about the time—midnight—when the night-riders took to the road. Here and there a heavy truck lumbered along in the slow lanes, and the drivers of private cars blasted their horns to register their opinion that all trucks should be forbidden these roads.

“Huh?” Danty said. “Oh, you mean what I was saying a few hours ago, I guess. Like about getting out?”

“Yeah.”

“I meant it,” Danty said after a pause. “But … well, tell Ivan here what happens to someone when the sexies put the knife in.”

“Oh, life simply stops being worth living,” Magda said. “Even if they don’t convict you of anything, the fact that you’re under suspicion gets around. They have computer-to-computer links, you know”—with a glance at Sheklov beside her—“for absolutely everything you may want to do. Your credit rating goes first, and your cards are cancelled, and as you probably know carrying cash in this country is a bad idea. Has been since God knows when. Before Danty was born, certainly.”

“Right,” Danty agreed.

“Robbery again?” Sheklov hazarded. He was on the verge of caving in; these people took it so matter-of-factly that he was Russian, and it didn’t trouble them at all—only the attention of the security force was on their minds.

“Not just that—I mean, not just the risk of being robbed,” Magda said. Now, already, at the high speeds permitted on the superway, the city was dwindling and the dark shell of the night was closing them in. “More the automatic assumption that if you’re carrying more than like fifty bucks—peanuts!—you’re the thief. Lose your credit rating, you might as well be bankrupt. After that, of course, if you have a job, they make sure your employers find out. Then your landlord; that’s the usual order. If you’re married, your spouse, and particularly your kids, if they’re over say eight or ten years old. I had a client once who came to me because her son, who was thirteen, had heard his father was under suspicion by the sexies, and wanted her to run away with him where Dad couldn’t find them, then inform on him to the pigs.”

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” Danty said, and made the quotation downright obscene.

“Is this—is this so literally true that you’re running out on your home?” Sheklov said in a bewildered tone, no longer sure whether he was Holtzer or himself.

“And our country, if we can make it,” Danty said. “Like Magda just told you, once the searchlight turns on you, life stops being worth living. Mag’!”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry. Truly I am. If I’d been any better at my thing, I’d have kept you from getting involved—”

“Oh, zip it up,” Magda cut in wearily. “I guess you were right when you talked to me earlier on. I don’t have anything worth staying for. Hell, it’s got to where if I order a book I’m interested in through the mail, a pig shows up the day after it’s delivered asking why I wanted it.”

“Yeah,” Danty said. “And … well, if it’s any consolation, I feel—beyond any doubt—that this is a right thing to do. It leads somewhere. It does something terribly important that I can’t understand. But I’m sure, I’m convinced it does it!”

Sheklov, listening, felt a renewal of that unaccountable exaltation that had struck him on the way into Cowville.

“Where are we going?” Lora said faintly.

“Canada,” Danty said. “Put you off a hundred miles or so from here, if you like. If you promise not to set the sexies on us, or the pigs.”

“Canada?” Sheklov snapped, before Lora could answer. “But it’s not as simple as—”

“The grapevine tells you where you can still get across,” Magda broke in. “We know a couple of places. Dodgy, but with Danty to take care of us, we’ll make it And of course the moment you set foot on Canadian soil, they’d die rather than turn you back …”

“I don’t want to be put out,” Lora said abruptly. Danty and Sheklov looked at her hard.

“No,” she emphasised. “If it’s true that—that my father brought a Russian agent into …?” It turned into a question, and died away. Danty nodded vigorously.

“Whatever Ivan says!” he insisted.

“Then he lied to me all my life,” Lora whispered. “I don’t want to see him again as long as I live. And that’s not crazy talk. I’m cold sober again, and I mean it.”

In which case …

Sheklov felt as though he were going over the edge of a cliff into deep, icy water. But he said, “My name isn’t Ivan. It’s Vassily.”