Chapter Fourteen

The van pulled up beside them, and a flashlight shone in Casper’s face; he blinked, but resisted the temptation to shield his eyes.

The light moved on to Cecelia, then to Mirim, then went out.

“I don’t believe I’m really doing this,” Mirim muttered from the back seat. I mean, why am I sitting here in a deserted parking lot in the middle of New Jersey meeting a bunch of crackpot revolutionaries?”

“Because the government is trying to kill me to cover up their own mistake,” Casper said, “and you’ve got the guts and the morals to join me in trying to stop them.”

“Christ, Cas, you sound like a video hero,” Cecelia replied.

The van door slammed; a thin young man in black, wearing a black ski mask, had climbed out. He came over to the Mustang; Casper rolled down the window.

“You’re Beech?” the man in black asked. He did not bend down to bring his face closer; that, Casper knew, would make him too easy to grab.

“Yes,” Casper said.

“Which one’s the lawyer?”

Casper jerked a thumb at Cecelia. “Ms. Grand,” he said.

“And the other? The phone call wasn’t real clear.”

“Her name’s Mirim Anspack,” Casper said. “She’s just a friend who got caught in the crossfire.”

The man in black considered that.

“I’ll vouch for her,” Beech said. “If that’s worth anything.”

“It isn’t,” the man in black said. He looked around at the empty parking lot—a church lot on a Tuesday night. The van and the Mustang were the only vehicles in sight.

“Get out of the car,” he said.

Casper obeyed promptly. Cecelia and Mirim were slower, but eventually all three were standing.

“You armed?”

Casper nodded.

The man in black held out a hand, and Casper handed over the Browning 9mm—the .357 was in the glove compartment.

“I’d like it back later,” Casper said.

The man didn’t answer. “What about the car?” he asked.

“Hotter than hell, I’m afraid,” Casper replied. “I took it off a man who tried to kill us this afternoon. I’d suggest running it up to New York and ditching it somewhere in the city.”

“Leave the keys,” the man said.

“They’re in the ignition.”

“Get in the van.” He opened the back door of the vehicle.

“Casper, are you sure about this?” Mirim asked.

“Get in the van,” Casper said.

Reluctantly, Mirim got in the van.

Casper was fairly certain that at least half the subsequent twenty-minute drive was just misdirection and doubling back, but he didn’t try to keep track. He had no intention of escaping from these people.

He’d been doing some thinking on the way here. He couldn’t just hide out until the heat blew over, not after killing four feds; the heat wasn’t going to blow over, ever. And he couldn’t lose himself forever and create a new identity—his fingerprints and voiceprint and retinal patterns were on file, and sooner or later he’d be spotted somehow, his voice recognized on a random phone check or his style spotted on the nets.

Not to mention that he’d have to open new online accounts, and a standard background check might nail him.

So he didn’t intend to hide; he intended to take the offensive, and he couldn’t do that alone. These people he was meeting weren’t just a temporary refuge; they were his hope for the future.

He intended to recruit them.

Bob Schiano gulped his personal caffeine-sugar mix and studied the screen.

Smith wanted him to locate Beech so that Covert could kill him, and Schiano was indeed doing his best to locate Beech, but he wasn’t at all sure about this killing stuff.

It wasn’t that anything in Beech’s file from before the optimization made him sound especially appealing; he’d been a corporate nonentity, working at a dead-end job for an obscure member of the Consortium, with nothing of particular interest in his background. He was an orphan who had inherited his parents’ massive debts—they’d lived just long enough to be covered by the revised bankruptcy laws and Enhanced Creditor Recovery Act, so that half Beech’s after-tax income went toward paying the interest on their decades-old medical and legal bills. His work performance evaluations were inconsistent—his superiors consistently rated him as “marginal,” while the actual productivity figures were well above average, and Schiano knew that that meant he was a loser, a scapegoat, someone his bosses felt free to dump on.

There were no files on his personal life—no one had cared about him enough to start one, he’d always managed to stay out of any government aid programs that would have called for evaluation of his mental or social state, and he’d never had the money for any sort of private therapy. Schiano noticed, though, that Beech had never married and had no acknowledged offspring, and had never been named in any divorce action or custodial suit. Apparently he wasn’t much of a success with women, either—though he hadn’t struck out completely, since he did have this lawyer, Cecelia Grand, he was seeing.

Grand had a much juicier file—lawyers got a lot more attention than liability analysts—but Schiano doubted any of it mattered. Beech wouldn’t be taking Grand’s advice; he’d be doing what he, in his optimized state, thought best, and he’d be taking along whoever he wanted.

Beech didn’t own a car—he had once, but lost it in an insurance scam.

In fact, Beech had been dragged into court an average of once every sixteen months for his entire adult life on one petty complaint or another, and had always either lost or settled out of court, though Schiano could see no evidence that he’d ever actually been at fault.

The man was a complete and classic loser, beaten down by fortune and society, with no known talents beyond some minor skill with computers and, according to interviews with his co-workers, a decent sense of humor.

But then had come the imprint session and the subsequent optimization. For a few days nothing had changed—he’d called in sick, but that was about it.

And then Tuesday he had killed four trained assassins and escaped a government dragnet, taking along two women; he had used another assassin’s own computer to get onto the net.

That last was something Smith didn’t seem to have paid any attention to, but Schiano did. Beech hadn’t just tied up Leonid Chernukhin and fled—or easier still, shot him and fled. Instead Beech had spent precious time on the computer, even though, from Chernukhin’s account, Beech knew that Covert was after him.

He must have been after something important to him, and Schiano could guess what it was. He’d told Smith that Beech’s first choice would be contacting an existing rebel organization, and Smith had dismissed the idea, but Schiano had gone through the access log for Chernukhin’s machine—getting through Leonid’s cheap firewall had been absurdly easy.

He couldn’t tell exactly what Beech had and hadn’t read, since he’d had the sense to dump the cache and erase the user log, but it certainly looked as if he’d gone through the latest information on subversives and terrorist groups.

And after that he’d headed north out of Philadelphia.

Schiano guessed that he did, indeed, plan to contact some rebel organization, somewhere in New York or New Jersey—and take it over.

That was very interesting indeed.

Schiano had never intended the File for use in any country as big and complex as the United States, and he was fascinated watching it in action.

Smith wanted Beech killed before he could do anything—but Schiano, who had compiled the Spartacus File, wanted to see how far Beech could get, and what, if anything, he’d do about the apparent conflict in his programming between pro-Americanism and the need to overthrow the government.

Schiano was beginning to suspect it wasn’t that much of a conflict, actually. After all, sending asssassins after him hardly reflected the highest ideals of American society, or any great respect for Constitutional rights.

Not that he’d ever say anything like that to Smith. If Smith had any ideals, Schiano doubted they resembled anything in the Constitution. The entire Covert Operations Group didn’t much resemble anything in the Constitution.

And Schiano already had a sneaking admiration for anyone who could elude Covert this long. Beech might have been a loser, but he also had the potential to be a new Spartacus.

Of course, Spartacus wound up crucified.

Schiano took another gulp of mix and wondered whether Beech knew what had happened to him.

And whether someone should tell him.

“So you’re Casper Beech,” the redheaded man said.

“Sure am,” Casper agreed.

“The word on the net is that you stole some fancy government files. Are you trying to sell them? Because if that’s it, why did you come to us, rather than the Iranians or the Germans? They’ve got a lot more money.”

“You believe what the government says on the nets?” Casper asked.

The redheaded man smiled. “No,” he said. “So suppose you tell me why they’re really after you—if they are, and this isn’t all a sting of some kind.”

“Suppose you tell me first who all you people are, and how I’m supposed to be sure this isn’t all a government trap,” Casper replied.

The redhead glanced at his companions—two women and three men, seated around a battered kitchen table. One of them had been the man in the ski mask who picked up Casper, Mirim, and Cecelia; another had driven the van, and one of the women had been aboard, as well.

“We are the executive committee of People for Change,” the redhead said. “We are dedicated to the overthrow of the corrupt rule of corporate America and its political lackeys, and the destruction of the military-industrial complex.”

“I didn’t ask for a speech,” Casper snapped. “How am I to know I can trust you?”

The redheaded man frowned at him for a second; then the woman who had not been in the van interjected, “You aren’t. We can’t test your statements, you can’t test ours, so either we can agree not to trust each other and we can take you out and dump you somewhere, or we can get on with it.”

Casper grinned. “Fair enough,” he said. “Just wanted to make sure we understood each other.”

The redheaded man threw the woman an angry glance.

“Fact is,” Casper said, “I didn’t deliberately steal anything from the government. I just went in for a neural imprinting, and they screwed up and gave me the wrong one—some kind of secret government imprint.”

“What kind of secret government imprint?” the redhead demanded.

“I don’t know yet,” Casper said, shrugging. “All I know is that it’s important enough that they tried to kill me, and the imprint was good enough that they couldn’t do it. I survived at least three attempts in a single day.”

The members of the executive committee glanced at one another.

“I don’t know,” said the man who had driven the van. “Sounds pretty unlikely.”

Casper shrugged. “If I were lying, wouldn’t I have come up with something more convincing?”

“Oh, Christ,” muttered a bearded man. “Not that old argument again—that we have to trust anything that sounds stupid because the feds know better!”

“Good point,” Casper said. “Yeah, I’m sure the feds can be stupid, or sometimes they can be smart enough to look stupid. I withdraw my question; instead, I’ll just say that I know I’m telling the truth, but I don’t have any simple way of proving it to you.”

“So suppose it’s true,” the redheaded man said. “You got this top secret imprint, and the government decided to kill you, because you can’t erase an imprint any other way, and you managed to survive three tries at killing you. Okay, fine. But what are you doing here? What do you want from us?”

“I want to stay alive,” Casper replied. “I want a place to hide, for now. And I’m not interested in betraying my country to the Iranians or the Germans or anyone else; I wanted to find Americans who would be willing to protect me from the feds.”

“And what’s in it for us?”

Casper smiled. “I could get idealistic and argue that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all foes of the oppressive machinery of the oligarchy should join in common cause, but you know that’s bullshit. Instead, I’ll just point out that the government must think whatever they put in my head is dangerous to them, or they wouldn’t be so eager to destroy it—and if they’re right, and it is dangerous to them, then you people want it on your side.”

“And suppose,” the bearded man said, “that this is all a trick, that what they actually imprinted you with is instructions to betray us, that the attempts to kill you were faked, and that you honestly don’t know this, but it’s true, and at the right time you’ll turn on us.”

Casper smiled. “Could be,” he said, “but I didn’t just escape from those feds—I killed four of them. And the word’s on the net that I’m to be shot on sight. Isn’t that a bit drastic, just to get at you folks?”

They didn’t like that one; Casper could see it in their expressions; the bearded man in particular looked annoyed. Casper had thrown their own ineffectuality and insignificance in their faces. They’d like to believe that yes, they were important enough that it would be worth the lives of four G-men to infiltrate their organization.

They had to recognize the truth, though.

“We’ll want to check you out, verify as much of your story as we can,” the redhead said.

Casper shrugged. “Of course,” he said. “I’m in no hurry; as long as I’m safe for the moment, whatever you want is fine.”

The redheaded man considered, then gestured. “Tasha will show you to your room,” he said. “We’ll let you know.”

The shorter, plumper woman, who had guarded them in the van, led the way out of the crowded kitchen and up the stairs of the old house, and Casper followed cheerfully.

Tasha, they called her. A revolutionary named Tasha ought to be tall and thin and seductive, with straight black hair and a beret; this woman was about five-one and fat, wearing jeans and a baggy black sweatshirt and with frizzy blonde hair that could use washing.

Casper liked that. This Tasha was real, not just a Hollywood stereotype. People For Change was real. They were real Americans, fighting against the corrupt power structure.

Maybe they didn’t look like much, but according to the reports on them they had taken credit for blowing up a precinct station in New York four years ago, saying the police had been torturing suspects there, and they had killed a cop in the process. They apparently weren’t as ineffectual as they appeared.

They weren’t exactly friendly yet, but they hadn’t just shot him, either. They hadn’t even questioned Mirim or Cecelia—he wondered how long it would be before they noticed that little oversight.

It was a perfectly satisfactory start.

He wished he had a better idea just what he was starting; the thing in his head hadn’t told him that yet.

But he could guess.