THERE WERE police barricades at the intersection of Fifteenth and Spruce. Beyond the wooden barriers, contained by concrete façades, women and men and children clutched signs as they shuffled toward City Hall, shouting words Rachel couldn’t make out. As she’d driven into Boulder, radio commentators had estimated fifteen thousand; real numbers, they admitted, were hard to come by. On the sidelines, actually witnessing the thoroughfare packed from edge to edge, she knew their estimate was conservative. Slogans bounced in the cool, crisp air:
TRANSPARENCY NOW!
OPEN UP THE FILES
REMEMBER WATERTOWN!
THE TIME FOR ANALYSIS IS OVER
It had taken two very long days of driving, crossing Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming, to reach Colorado, and each mile she’d been plagued by the feeling that Johnson and Vale were in the car right behind her, or were in some control center full of monitors and blinking lights, spying on her through traffic cams she’d somehow missed when plotting her escape. She’d slept once during her journey, five hours of shut-eye parked behind a billboard for Vicodin outside Buhl, Idaho, and for the rest of the journey had sustained herself on convenience-store provisions: energy drinks, microwaveable meats, bagged chips.
Now, she stood on the tranquil side of the barricades, among locals who, like her, wanted to check the pulse of the city. Whether these spectators were sympathizers or critics, they, and she, hadn’t made the leap to participant. Not yet.
She backtracked and found a Starbucks identical to the ones she frequented in Seattle, and like those it was packed. On their phones, customers watched live coverage of the march a block away. When she finally reached the counter, she ordered a double espresso from a plump, fuchsia-haired teenager who, as she gave Rachel change, said, “You marching?”
“I’m just passing through town.”
“Well, that’s no excuse—is it? If I didn’t have this stupid job I’d be out there screaming with them.”
“Why?”
The girl looked as if the question made no sense. “I mean, look around. Is this really the world you want?”
Though she didn’t reply, Rachel could have, for she’d had two days to wrestle with some of these big questions. She could have said that we’re born into the world; we don’t shape it. We can adjust it and add to it, but thousands of years of history and patriarchy can’t be erased in a single lifetime, not even by a million people in the street; it can only be built upon. Everything is built on the past.
The same, she guessed, was true of this girl. After sixteen or seventeen years of felt history, her mind wasn’t going to be changed by a stranger on the other side of this counter. So Rachel only thanked her for the coffee and took it outside to the pedestrian street, where she could keep an eye on the car she’d stolen from a long-term lot near the Seattle airport. It had been easier than she’d imagined, waiting for the attendant to step out of his box for a bathroom break and grabbing a fob that led her to a white Chevy Impala. By the time the owner returned from his trip and discovered his car was gone, Rachel would be far away. At least, she hoped so. While she’d cringed at the idea of theft, there had been no other options. She’d only been able to withdraw a thousand dollars, split between two ATMs, before hitting her daily limit. Until she figured out what was going on, her cards were useless to her. As was her phone—her first precaution had been to shut it off and remove the SIM card.
While waiting for the parking attendant to leave, she’d struggled to get some kind of clarity. Had she misread the situation? Was she jumping out of her skin like the anxious, wild woman her colleagues saw in her? Really—in a city of six hundred thousand, did she really believe Sarah Vale was the only woman who smoked green-tipped electronic cigarettes?
In that moment, though, the who had felt less important than the what: a man with the labels cut from his clothes—the same one who’d failed to kill her seven months ago; the bathtub scene; the fact that her laptop had already been removed—the laptop that held the fifteen thousand words of her original report, the report that she had just been asked to regurgitate. These were the cornerstones, and she could only build on these facts, which was what she’d done endlessly over the past two days.
Whatever the truth, in those initial moments she’d known only one thing: to stay still was suicide; she had to move. First on foot, her hobbled run through wet alleyways, then a taxi out to Bellevue, suburb extraordinaire. Two ATMs, then an airport-bound bus in the other direction. Evasive maneuvers in a camera-ridden city like Seattle were nearly useless, though. So now in Boulder she just waited, watching the Impala, filthy from a thousand miles of American dirt. She waited for someone—anyone—to approach it.
In 2009, while working on her hallowed report on the left, she’d listened to a drug-addled Marxist lay out his evidence for the murderousness of the ruling classes. He cited stories ripped from the web that chronicled chilling deaths that had followed Hillary Clinton from her time as first lady through the beginning of her tenure as secretary of state—men and women who had served the Clintons and either had turned against them or were rumored to be in possession of damning evidence of one kind or another. Despite the drugs, he was a convincing orator, able to lay on questionable rumors at a rate that left the listener lost in a conspiratorial web. She tried attacking him with logic—despite multiple investigations costing millions, not a single charge had come close to being proven—but that only shored up his opinion: It pointed to a cover-up. The original proposition—that the first lady, New York senator, and secretary of state was a murderess—had morphed from a wild accusation in need of facts to a fact that was a litmus test for any documented evidence Rachel might bring up.
Was she doing the same thing? Was she beginning with a ridiculous proposition—that two Bureau agents had arrived in town to question and then kill her—and looking only at the evidence that might bolster the proposition?
But what else made sense? The only people who cut the tags from their clothes were professionals, not aggrieved radicals.
No—with her life on the line, she didn’t need proof. Suspicion was enough. Possibility led to radical moves: a stolen car, a disassembled phone, and disappearing from her life.
And now, Boulder.
She was like one of the deserters who’d gone off to join Martin Bishop. But she wasn’t joining anyone. She was down to $632, alone, standing outside of Starbucks with a now-cold double espresso, staring at her stolen car, waiting for her pursuers to show themselves.
But after an hour no one did, so after pouring the caffeine down her throat she tossed the cup and walked through the growing crowds back to the car. On the way she saw a young woman in a pink pussyhat, carrying a sign to the demonstration: THE FUTURE IS FEMALE.