CAN YOU FIND a secure line?”
Janine reads the text on her phone. The bearded man cringes; they are driving fifty miles an hour over the Bay Bridge, heading to San Francisco. Janine, steering with a knee, texts back: “Um, yeah, this one.”
Seconds later, her phone rings. She presses a button and a voice comes onto the speaker.
“I won’t repeat this,” the voice says.
The audio quality is bad, choppy, with static. But the bearded man feels a moment of awe. This must be the master Guardian, the one calling the shots.
“We have access to the code.”
The bearded man doesn’t understand. The code? He looks at Janine, who seems to blink rapidly. Processing, troubled.
“Didn’t we always have the code?” she asks into the phone.
“Sabra, there was no point in telling you we didn’t have it when we knew we’d get it.”
She smiles, willing herself to find some external expression that doesn’t match her fury. What was the point of going through all this, the months of prelude—the years—if they didn’t have the code in the first place? I’m not your fucking Sabra. That’s Hebrew, not the right language. I’m Syrian, Christian, Arabic, and no less righteous.
“Actually, we don’t have it,” says the quiet, patient voice.
“What?” She thinks: Wasp. But she senses he’s so much deeper than that. Calmly: “We know where it is. Exactly?”
“Look up!” the bearded man says.
Janine, who had been focused on the conversation, notices she has drifted into the lane to her right. She swerves back.
“Hello, Eli,” says the voice on the phone.
“Hello.”
“We must have the code,” Janine says.
“That’s why I have called you. It is your time.”
The bearded man sees Janine grimace. “You are a Guardian. Since my father found you. We are like siblings, Sabra.”
He tells her what they need to do.
She hears a click.
The van has nearly passed over the bridge. The bearded man marvels at the magnitude of downtown San Francisco. The massive man-made kingdom. Not long for this world.
“The code?” he asks.
“For the weapon. It needs a code. So it can go bang. And apparently we don’t have it.”
“But . . .”
“It will be easy to get. The one who has it—he’s a . . . tortured fellow, pathetic, lost in the things of this world. Easy enough to get his cooperation.”