Axis

They spent the night in what passed for public accommodations in Kubelick's Grave, a tile-roofed motel in which Brian shared a unit with Sigmund and Weil. Two beds and a cot—Brian got the cot.

Most of the afternoon and evening he spent listening to Sigmund make and take calls. The name of the Executive Action Committee was frequently invoked.

That night, unable to sleep in his cot, cold despite the banging antique electric heater, it occurred to Brian to wonder whether they had found out about Lise's last call to him.

Were his calls tapped for audio? Lise's callback code had been unfamiliar to him, probably a disposable loaded with anonymous minutes, so they wouldn't have been able to trace it. And there hadn't been anything really incriminating about the call. Apart from the fact that Brian had failed to report it. Which would suggest that his loyalties were divided. That he might not be a trustworthy DGS man.

He wanted to be angry with Lise. Hated her pointless personal involvement in this fucking mess, her obsessive need to sort out her father's disappearance and turn the story into some kind of memoir.

He wanted to be angry with her, and he was angry with himself when he didn't succeed.

Reports on the round-up of fugitive Fourths began to come in before dawn, Sigmund shouting into his phone while Brian hurriedly dressed.

Success had been mixed, he gathered.

"At least half the population of the compound is still at large," Weil said. "Our guys intercepted three vehicles carrying a total of fifteen people, none of them the major players. The good news—"

Brian braced himself.

"The good news is, a small plane registered to Turk Findley attempted to refuel at a little utility airport a couple of hundred miles west of here. The airport manager recognized the plane from a legal bulletin—Mr. Findley's former employer wants it impounded for back rent. He called the Provisional Government and somebody there was kind enough to refer the matter to us. Our guys arrived and detained the pilot and passengers. One male, three females, all refusing to identify themselves."

"And one of them is Lise?" Brian asked.

"Maybe. That's not confirmed. And there may be higher-value targets along with her."

"She's not a target. I wouldn't call her a target."

"She made herself a target when she ran."

But not high value, he thought, clinging to that. "Can I see her?"

"We can be there by noon if we get a move on," Weil said.

It occurred to Brian to wonder, as the town of Kubelick's Grave vanished behind them, who Kubelick might have been and why he was buried out here in the badlands; but nobody in the car had an answer to that question. Then the little cluster of buildings was behind them, Sigmund driving away from the mountains toward the razor-flat western horizon. The road ahead quivered in the morning heat like a figment of the imagination.

Sigmund couldn't make his phone work, though he kept banging it with one hand while he steered with the other. Even communication between the widely-spaced cars of the convoy—this vehicle plus three heavy trucks containing hired soldiers—was intermittent and unreliable. Weil couldn't explain it: "A half-dozen aerostats anchored between here and the west coast and not one of the fucking things doing what it's supposed to do. Lucky we got the news from the airfield when we did. Jesus!"

And it was not only the ruptured communication that seemed remarkable to Brian. He called attention to the steady flow of traffic in the opposite direction, not just oil-company traffic but a number of private vehicles, some so sand-pitted and sun-scarred that they looked barely functional. As if they were evacuating the inhabited outposts of the Rub al-Khali, and maybe they were—some new tremor, maybe.

Sixty miles farther on the convoy pulled onto the gravel verge and stopped. Sigmund and Weil went forward to talk to the leader of the paramilitary company. It looked more like an argument than a conversation, but Brian couldn't make out the words. He stood at the roadside watching the eastbound traffic. Eerie, he thought, how much this part of Equatoria looked like Utah: the same dusty blue horizon, the same torpid daytime heat. Had the Hypothetical designed this desert when they assembled the planet, and if so, why? But Brian doubted they paid that kind of attention to details—the Hypothetical, it seemed to him, were firm believers in the long result. Plant a seed (or seed a planet) and let nature do the rest. Until the harvest… whatever that meant or might one day mean.

Not much grew out here, just the peculiar woody tufts the locals called cactus grass, and even this looked dehydrated to Brians eye. But among the umber patches of cactus grass at his feet he spotted a place where something more colorful had taken root. He crouched to look, for lack of anything better to do. What had caught his attention was a red flower: he was no botanist, but the bloom looked out of place in this barren scrub. He put out his hand and touched it. The plant was cold, fleshy… and it seemed almost to cringe. The stem bent away from him; the flower, if it was a flower, lowered its head.

Was that normal?

He hated this fucking planet, its endless strangeness. It was a nightmare, he thought, masquerading as normalcy.

They came at last to the airfield off the highway, a couple of quonset-hut structures and two paved landing strips at contrary angles to one another, a bank of fuel pumps, a two-story adobe control tower with a radar bubble. Ordinarily the airstrips customers would have been oil company planes ferrying executives to and from the Rub al-Khali. Today there was just one plane visible on the tarmac: Turk Findley's aircraft, a sturdy little blue-and-white Skyrex baking in the sun.

The Genomic Security caravan parked in front of the nearest pavilion. Brian was a little shaky getting out of the car, his fears surfacing again. Fear for Lise, and under that a fear of Lise—of what she might say to him and what she might deduce, correctly or not, about his presence in the company of men such as Sigmund and Weil.

Maybe he could help her. He clung to that thought. She was in trouble, deep and perilous trouble, but she could still keep herself afloat if she said the right things, denied complicity, shifted the blame, and cooperated with the inquiry. If she was willing to do that, Brian might be able to keep her out of prison. She would have to go back home, of course, forget about Equatoria and her little journalistic hobby. Given the events of the last few days, though, she might not be so haughty at the prospect of a trip back to the States. She might even learn to appreciate what he had done, and was willing to do, on her behalf.

He hurried to keep up with Sigmund and Weil, who brushed past a cluster of airstrip employees and hurried down a makeshift corridor to the door of a tiny office guarded by an airport security guy in a dusty blue uniform. "The suspects are inside?" Sigmund asked.

"All four of 'em."

"Let's see them."

The guard opened the door, Sigmund went through first, Weil behind him, Brian in the rear. The two DGS men stopped short and Brian had to crane to see over their shoulders.

"Fuck!" Sigmund said.

Three women and one man sat at a stained conference table in the middle of the room. Each of them had been handcuffed to a chair.

The male was maybe sixty years old, judging by his looks. Probably older, since he was a Fourth. He was white-haired, he was ski

The three women were of similar age. None of them looked like Sulean Moi. And certainly none of them was Lise Adams.