“Mr. Smith. Our appointment wasn’t supposed to be until tonight.” The balding man’s voice had a slight edge to it.
“Let’s just say I was impatient for your scintillating company, Mr. Jones.”
“Well, have a seat, then.” Mr. Jones gestured at the sand beside him, favoring the other man with a rather reptilian smile. Impatience could mean money. Money meant beautiful, long-legged women in much more intimate arrangements. He could make time for Mr. Smith.
“Your other information checked out, as I’m sure you knew when you checked your bank balance. This raises the prospect of more business, of course. We would be prepared to pay handsomely, for instance, for an organization name.”
“I’m a big believer in job security, Mr. Smith. Too much too soon renders me too replaceable. Or worse, disposable. How about another agent name where you’re penetrated?”
“We’d pay one hundred thousand FedCreds for that.”
“What?! That’s only half of what you paid for the last one.”
“They don’t know anything, Mr. Jones. As you doubtless know. We want a little more. We want something in your organization, Mr. Jones. Oh, we’ll pay for the names of more agents in our organization. Have to do the housecleaning, after all. But we’ll pay far more for, well, more. More, Mr. Jones. But one hundred thousand FedCreds is a lot of money. Of course we’ll understand if you’d rather play it safer and settle for less.”
The balding man gritted his teeth as the military man smiled at him. It wasn’t a particularly nice smile. It had a knowing element to it that was rather offensive.
“I’ll have to think for a bit about what I can offer you in that line.”
“I can understand that, Mr. Jones. Just remember that we will pay more for more. And less for less.” The man stood and brushed sand from his swim trunks, as if he wasn’t used to walking around in clothes that were less than immaculate. “Until tonight, Mr. Jones.”
Cally sat bolt upright in bed, searching the room as an unknown voice cheerily boomed, “Dude! Rise and shine. Surf’s up and it’s gonna be a righteous day!” Reefer groaned and tried to hide under his pillow. She stretched across him and shut his damn PDA off, getting back off of him quickly. At least part of the sleeping deadhead knew it was morning.
“Hey, Reef, convoy time.” She shook his shoulder and took his pillow away.
He opened his red-rimmed eyes and bleared at her, blinking, before swinging his legs over the side and pulling on his jeans.
“Morning,” he pronounced, “is an unutterably egregious thing.”
She tilted her head and looked at him assessingly, pondering the wisdom of riding in a vehicle driven by this man.
“Provigil?” she offered brightly.
“Shit, yes, if you’ve got any,” he said.
She rummaged in her pack a minute and came up with a tablet, pressing it into his hand. His eyes widened when he saw the “C” inscribed in the center of the sky-blue pill.
“You’ve got some good sources.” He dry-swallowed it then grimaced and chased it with some beer left in a bottle from the night before. “This shit’s mil-grade.”
“Do we have time for me to grab a five-minute shower?” She rubbed the side of her face that smelled like unwashed male, telling her he’d been her pillow in the night.
“If you really mean five minutes and you don’t care if I foam my face and brush my teeth while you’re in there. I need one too. I’m pretty ripe. Sorry,” he said.
“No problem.” She snagged her backpack in one hand and went.
Later, as they waited for the convoy to finish assembling and pull out, she drank coffee and munched a protein bar, looking up at the mountain that rose above the Urb. Scott Mountain, the sign said. She didn’t know the name of the smaller one to the east, but she could still see the remains of the old defensive works through the trees. Unmanned, now, of course. With each winter the ice must work a bit further into the cracks.
“Thanks for last night,” the deadhead interrupted her reverie. “Um… Janet says you’re, like, welcome to ‘trip’ at her place, any time.”
“I was half asleep.” She took a healthy swallow of coffee. “Do I want to know what you did with them?”
“Probably not.” He grinned.
“Was it fatal?”
“Oh, hell no! You can’t just go around killing cops, no matter how bogus they are. It’s, like, unhealthy, man.”
“Okay.” She shook her head. “Sorry, I’m still not awake. They were cops? Are they, like, going to be able to track us down or catch us or something?” She looked around anxiously as if police were about to sprout from the parking lot around them.
“Don’t panic.” He laid a reassuring hand on her arm. “In forty-two years of my life, I’ve only been caught twice, you know? And none in the last ten years. Cops are, like, only human.”
“Did you have to go to jail?” Her eyes got a little rounder as she looked at him over the rim of her cup.
“Nah. I learned the trade from my mom, like, she was fabulous. She knew the right people, you know? It was, like, expensive as hell, though.” He looked off into the distance and popped a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. “My mom said that, like, before the war, the cops and politicians used to be really anal about, you know, what people took to get high. Like, now, though, some of the cops care, but most of ’em are on the take, and you just have to go up the line until you get high enough, and poof, for the right price, it all goes away. But, like, killing cops — they’re still real anal about that. There’s nothing’ll make that go away. Or if there is, I don’t know it, you know?”
“Quit talkin’ about killing people, dude.” She shivered delicately. “You’re starting to scare me.”
“Oh, well, like, yeah.” He shrugged, punching in his favorite cube and setting it to shuffle. “Looks like we’re starting to move.”
She opened her PDA and went back to Marilyn’s novel, yawning occasionally at the altitude changes as they moved on out to I-40 and the Smokies.
…Never mind how I stumble and fall. You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot for a taste of your elegant pride…
The funny thing about the Smokies was that it didn’t matter how many times you’d been through them, they always kind of took you by surprise.
The Blue Ridge was no kind of preparation for the great, sweeping walls of wet, dark rock, almost any of which could have served for wartime fortifications way back when, but none of which had, given the ease and economy of rigging the I-40 tunnel for rapid demolition. Fortunately for the people back in Asheville, it had never been necessary.
There was obviously less time and money spent on road maintenance through here than had apparently been the case in an earlier age. Remnants of netting or fencing or whatever still clung to the bare cliffs above the highway, but the going was far slower than it had to be, because you never knew when you’d have to swerve around a boulder sitting in the middle of the road that nobody had gotten around to moving yet. A few places, probably some of the worst judging from ancient, rusted signs warning of falling rock, had been Galplased over at some point, but judging by the dingy and mottled finish of those surfaces, it had been in the distant past.
After the tunnel and crossing the state line into Tennessee, the road maintenance improved dramatically, but, then, UT had made the Tennessee economy one of the bright spots of postwar Earth. With federal highway funds a thing of the past except in very rare circumstances, like the stretch from Charleston to Green River Drawbridge, a state’s plenty or need could be clearly read in its roads.