Burning Paradise

At least Dowd—unlike the rest of Beck’s supposed army—had actually shown up for the battle.

Thomas’s eyes closed and his breathing steadied almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Nerissa tucked the blankets around him while Cassie stood at the window, looking past the wrought-iron balcony railing to the dusty back alley where a garbage truck groaned through the heat. “The next thing we need to do is get you and Thomas back to the States.”

Cassie closed the curtains. “Really? Is that even safe? After what happened with the man we killed—”

“The man Leo killed.” Nerissa had cringed when she heard this part of their story, but she hadn’t shied away from dealing with it. “There won’t be any legal problems. If it happened the way you said it did, there’s no substantial evidence to co

“Except for the man who saw us… the man Beth hurt.”

“At best, the police might have a vague description. And even if, somehow, they did come after you, it wouldn’t be hard to put together an alibi. But you won’t need one.”

“If the sims find us it hardly matters about the police.”

That was unfortunately true. “But it’s not you they’re after. You’re in far more danger here than you would be back in Buffalo.”

“No.” Cassie shook her head. “You’re wrong. It was me they came for. The sim that got run over on Liberty Street was looking for me.”

“You don’t know that. It might have been coming for me, or it could have been a ruse, or a feint, or even a way of getting at Beck through you and Leo.”

“I saw it looking at me from the street. It knew I was there.”

She seemed unwilling to admit any other possibility, and the

discussion was making her agitated. “Okay, Cassie, but even so, all we can do is take care of each other the best we know how. You, me, Thomas—”

“And Uncle Ethan?”

“Maybe. He’s in—”

“I know. He’s in the desert, looking for a place for Leo’s father and his soldiers to meet up,” Cassie said. (All Beck’s imaginary soldiers, Nerissa thought.) “Are we going to wait for him to get back?”

“I’d like to. But we may not have time. We need to be on a plane out of here as soon as it can be arranged.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, we can’t keep on exposing Thomas to this kind of danger. It’s not right.”

“Leo’s staying.”

“I’m not responsible for Leo. What Leo does is between him and his father.”

It had been Beck’s idea to send Ethan to San Pedro de Atacama.

According to Beck the plan was simple: get a mobile radio source and signal generator within effective range of the Atacama facility, shut it down by interfering with its internal and external communications, and destroy the facility while its inhabitants were incapacitated. Beck claimed to have laboratory evidence that this scheme would work. His faith in it was messianic and, Nerissa suspected, gravely misplaced.

But Ethan considered the idea plausible, and at Beck’s suggestion he had agreed to travel to San Pedro de Atacama to scout out a place where a truck full of radio gear, a similar cargo of incendiary material, and Beck’s supposed fifty-man army could assemble for the attack.

He had been gone for two days now. Because it would have been suicidal to report by telephone, there was no way of knowing whether or not he had been successful. And because he had been away, he hadn’t seen the most recent evidence that Beck’s scheme was jury-rigged if not downright delusional.

The signal-generating device, which Beck had designed himself, had arrived in the back of Eugene Dowd’s van, but the amplification and broadcast gear Beck had ordered from Valparaiso hadn’t been delivered—hadn’t even been shipped, according to the freight service; the vendor had declared bankruptcy. Beck sulked for an afternoon, then told Nerissa he could make do with off-the-shelf equipment from another supplier… which would nevertheless have to be discreetly purchased and delivered, delaying the attack by at least a few days more.

And there was the question of his army. Fifty men, Beck had claimed. More like a platoon than an army. Fifty men good and true, recruited from three continents, to be housed in five safe houses scattered across Antofagasta. But at last report none of the alleged volunteers had succeeded in leaving their native countries. For replacements Beck had managed to recruit a dozen men from the pool of unemployed stevedores at the dockside union hall. These men believed they were being hired to transport liquor to an unlicensed ware house in San Pedro de Atacama, and while they would be useful for lifting and carrying duties, not even Beck envisioned them as combatants.

It didn’t matter, he insisted. As long as the radio gear and the incendiaries were delivered to the desert, a handful of men—even three or four—could successfully conduct the attack. If all went well.

That was the plan on which Ethan had wagered his life.

Downstairs, Nerissa found Beth Vance sitting by herself in the common room near the kitchen. Beth was still coming to terms with the news that her father was alive.

A single unarmed sim had approached John Vance on the day Cassie and Thomas fled Buffalo. They had seen a body being removed from the apartment building where Beth lived with her father, but that had been the remains of the sim, which John had elected to shoot rather than engage in conversation. John had since gone into hiding, Nerissa didn’t know where, but someone in Buffalo would be able to put him back in touch with Beth when they got home.

Beth looked up at Nerissa with an expression that was hard to decipher. “Were you with my father when he killed the sim?”

“We can talk about that tomorrow.”

“I’d rather talk about it now.”

“Okay,” Nerissa said. “If you like. The answer is no, I wasn’t there. I’d left for home by then.”

“But you spent the night?”

“Yes.”

“I knew about that. He told me he was seeing someone. He just didn’t say who.” She darted another glance at Nerissa, looked away. “It wasn’t the first time. He doesn’t usually see Society women, though. Most women he doesn’t see more than once. Actually, that’s why I was at Leo’s place. He didn’t care where I spent the weekend, as long as I was out of the house.”

“Maybe so. And maybe it was a mistake, my seeing him. But I’m sure he’s worried about you.”

“Not worried enough to come looking for me. Not the way you came after Cassie and Thomas.”

“That’s not a fair comparison. He doesn’t know anything about Werner Beck or Leo. Your father never paid attention to Correspondence Society business.”

Which, ironically, was one reason Nerissa had accepted John’s invitation to spend the night. Like John, she had been co

“Well, that’s true,” Beth said. “He doesn’t even like me going to survivor meetings. Probably we wouldn’t have had anything to do with the Society, except he needed the pension. It wasn’t much but it made a difference. Do you like my father?”

“We’re friends, but I don’t think it was going anywhere.”

“Not your type, huh?”

“Maybe we just weren’t the people we thought we were.”

“He can be a real shit. I’m not going back to him.”

“What?”

“Don’t look so shocked. I know him better than you do. I’ll go back to the States, but I’m not living with him again.”

“But why?”

“He never, you know, touched me or anything. But he likes to look. And he likes to say things.”

After a few wordless seconds Nerissa said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. People aren’t always what you think they are. But I guess you know that.”

Nerissa slept fitfully by the door of the bedroom, startled awake by every sound the house made in its negotiations with the cooling night. And when she did at last fall into a deeper sleep, she slept shamefully late. She needed to talk to Beck about arranging her flight to the United States—she was determined not to spend another night here; she would take the kids to a hotel if that was necessary—but by the time she was dressed and downstairs Beck and Leo had already left on some errand. They would be back—Cassie relayed this datum—before di