“So you’ve been in touch with it recently?”
Oliver kicked himself for letting that information slip. He’d been a CIA bureau chief, for God’s sake. “Five contacted me, yes.”
“What did it want? To reminisce about the good old days?” A touch of bitterness leaked into her tone. She swept her long black hair, now infused with strands of white, out of her face in a gesture that was painfully familiar.
The smart thing would be to latch on to Vanessa’s suggestion, laugh it off, but Oliver couldn’t bring himself to tell her an outright lie. “If you really want to know, ask me again in six months and I’ll tell you.” One way or another, it would be safe to tell her in six months. By then the secret would be out. Because, Oliver realized, if he had a say in this, they were going to go through with it. Not because Five’s little gesture of remorse had moved him in the slightest; it was the cold, hard data in that email message that convinced him. If they did nothing, 80 percent of the world’s population would die. If they acted, they put the final 20 percent at risk, but at least everyone had a fighting chance. If the Luyten double-crossed them, so be it. They’d beaten the Luyten once; they could do it again.
Vanessa had said something. Oliver had been so lost in thought he’d missed it. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, I’m sorry to bother you.” She glanced over her shoulder. For a moment Oliver wondered if someone was waiting in the car for her—a husband or boyfriend—but he couldn’t see the street from his door. “I would have called, but the Luyten refused to give me your number. Although this was probably too sensitive to talk about on the phone anyway.”
“You’re probably right.” He wanted to ask if she was married, or seeing someone. He knew that she and her second husband (whose name Oliver had forgotten—all he remembered was, it wasn’t Paul) had divorced six or seven years earlier. Fifteen years ago, he would have been stupid enough to ask that sort of question. Not now, though.
He held out his hand, and Vanessa took it. “It was good seeing you, Vanessa. I’ll get Five to leave you alone. I promise”
“Thank you. It was good to see you, too.”
She turned. Oliver closed the door and went to the window to watch her climb the steps. For a moment the terrible sadness returned, the hollowing loneliness that had tormented him after their divorce. He turned his thoughts to the work ahead, and the pain receded.
76
Lila Easterlin
October 24, 2047. Washington, D.C.
Kai pointed into the woods. “Look at that.”
Lila spun, scanned the terrain. She didn’t see anything through the lattice of bare branches, nothing moving on the floor of fallen brown and orange leaves.
“Higher.”
She followed his pointing finger up into the trees, and spotted it: a huge woodpecker perched on a dead tree, poking at it with her long beak.
“A pileated woodpecker,” Kai said. “They’re rare.”
She was about to ask where Kai the city boy had learned about woodpeckers when she spotted Oliver heading toward them, head down, hands in his pockets. Lila tried to read his face for a hint of what he might have found out, but Oliver always looked worried.
“Not good news,” he said as he reached them. “Defenders are definitely clearing out of the cities Five gave us, and not out of others. I think the Luyten are telling the truth.”
He looked at Lila. She knew what he was going to say, and she didn’t want to hear it.
“I think we have to accept their offer.”
Lila cursed, turned away.
“I wish I was more confident we can trust them. I’m not at all confident about that, but, honestly? I think it’s our only chance.”
She didn’t want to agree to this. She would be the one who would actually hand the Luyten the power to wipe them out; it would all be on her shoulders.
“What other choice do we have, Lila?” Oliver asked. “Do nothing, while the defenders gas two billion people, quite possibly including your family?” Lila looked up at him. “They wouldn’t kill you, because you’re too valuable, but I could picture them whisking you off to Easter Island just before they gas the entire D.C. area.”
“It would take at least three months to get enough altered defenders trained and in place. What if the defenders carry out their plan before then?”
That’s why they’ve pressured you to ramp up production. They want to reinforce their numbers before they act. They want overwhelming force before they reveal their intentions, in case you fight back.
“Hello, Five,” Oliver said. “Are you in the immediate vicinity.”
I’ll be there in a minute.
“Why do you risk coming here if you can communicate with us from eight miles away?” Lila asked.
I think it’s important that we meet face-to-face.
“You don’t have a face,” Lila said.
“If we do this, we’ll need able military commanders and strategists ready to go, all over the world,” Oliver said, ignoring her crack. “How are we going to recruit them, now that Earth2 is no longer an option?”
It hurt Lila to hear him say it aloud. Almost as soon as she’d learned Dominique was still alive, Lila was back to not knowing if she was or not.
We’ll contact them directly, as soon as the altered defenders are in place.
They could do that, couldn’t they? Every time Lila thought she grasped the magnitude of the Luyten’s advantage, another facet of it surfaced. If they were allied with the Luyten, humans would suddenly have an effective means of communication with no chance of defender interception.
“What about weapons?” Kai asked. “The defenders have total control of weapons.”
Five pushed out of the brambles behind them.
Getting access to weapons will be the focus of our initial attacks. We’ll use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks. In the United States and Russia, there are large caches of outdated weapons buried in various unguarded locations. We’ll liberate those as well.
“You have all the answers, don’t you?” Lila said. Then she thought about what Five had just said. “Hang on, your initial attacks? Are you picturing a guerrilla war, like you fought against us?”
Of course. When you’re facing a larger, better-armed force, it’s the most effective—
Five stopped there, Lila assumed, because it was reading her thoughts. She laughed out loud, relishing a rare moment when a Luyten looked foolish. “You see it now, don’t you? That’s not going to fly against defenders.”
“What? Why?” Oliver asked.
This is why we need to work together.
“What is?” Oliver asked.
Lila turned to face Oliver. “Guerrilla wars work because the larger force can’t catch the enemy. They attack, then duck back into the woods, or melt back into the population.”
“So?”
Lila folded her arms. She was going to have to spell it out for him, wasn’t she? “The defenders don’t care who they kill. As soon as you start attacking, they’ll turn and lay waste to the population, just like they’re planning to do anyway.” Oliver was nodding now, and so was Kai. “They’re not going to go chasing after each individual attacker; they’re going to point their tanks at crowds and open fire.”