"He works for you?"
"Yes, sir."
The young, shaven-headed policeman passed by and into the bathroom, only three feet from Ruppert, where he urinated noisily without bothering to close the door.
"Then I'll need to see your employer permit and his worker permit, won't I?" the cop asked Maya.
"I'm certain they're in the state database," Maya said.
"I don't want to check the database. I want to see your permits in my hand."
Ruppert held his breath, and he felt the muscles in Lucia’s back tighten. She fell completely still. Though she couldn’t see anything but towels and detergents from where she sat, she was responding to Ruppert’s own reaction, sensitive to his nervous energy.
“Have you seen anyone unusual in the area?” the policeman asked Maya. “Any foreigners? Anyone from out of town? Anyone handing out political literature or media?”
“Sir, I’ve hardly left the house in ten years,” Maya said.
The laundry room door rattled. The young policeman was coming back, trailing his fingers down the wooden slats. Ruppert craned his neck and was able to see the man looking carefully at the door, then leaning forward, hands cupped around his eyes, to look between the slats.
Ruppert and Lucia froze.
“Why don’t you have a screen in this house?" the cop asked. "What do you watch?”
“I have an old box in the living room. Movies on disc. I just don’t like people to see me when I phone them.”
The lead cop ordered a full search of the house-fortunately, he called away the bald pisser to search the upstairs. He continued asking Maya about her personal, political and religious affiliations, though the police would have all that information on file.
Ruppert and Lucia remained folded up against each other in a hot, tense silence, neither willing to risk even a whisper. The sounds of the police slamming doors and overturning furniture spread through the house.
After the sounds of their searching had died down, Ruppert relaxed a little, breathing deeper, and then the folding door suddenly rattled open.
“They’re searching the outbuildings now,” Maya said. She’d managed to climb back into her wheelchair. “Hope the rust gives them all tetanus. You better get underground.”
Lucia slipped away and dropped to her feet. Ruppert hurried after her to the back bedroom with the false closet wall, and down to join the others underneath the house. They huddled together in the dark, eight people who did not want to be found, and they waited.
TWENTY-THREE
Though the bomb had only demolished a rotten, long-disused water tower, and there were no victims, Terror never missed an opportunity to flex its muscles. Over the following days, the swarm of local Hartwell cops gave way to the black coats of state and federal Terror agents, knocking on doors, inviting themselves into homes and businesses if nobody answered. Helicopter formations patrolled the sky.
Ruppert and Lucia remained underground with the others. They lived off the only available food, which happened to be a pantry of canned vegetables and rack after rack of aged wine. Occasionally Turin brought down a loaf of bread or carton of milk. They slept on nests of blankets and clothes-Ruppert had a bare foam pallet. Nobody spoke more than necessary, and never above a whisper.
On their third night underground, Ruppert and Lucia slipped off to a remote room that might have been a well or cistern in the forgotten past. They shared Lucia’s last cigarette.
“What do we do now?” Ruppert whispered. “Do we have a plan?”
“When Terror finishes beating their chests, and gets tired of kicking in doors up and down the valley, we’ll leave here with copies of your interview. We’ll pass them along to others by hand, and we’ll upload them to some people we know internationally. We have to send it everywhere.”
“People like me, or whoever has my job now, will just ignore it," Ruppert said. "If it ever got too well-known to ignore, they just call it enemy propaganda. They’ll bring in experts from Terror and an Ivy League university or two, who will explain just how fraudulent it is."
“You don’t think I know that?” Lucia snapped. “We just have to put it out there. Let people make their own decisions.”
“‘He who has hears, let him hear,’” Ruppert said. It was an expression of Pastor John’s-and, if Ruppert remembered correctly, Jesus.
“Terror will want you to die,” Lucia said.
“I was a little concerned about that, too.”
“You’ll go north, into Canada.” She didn’t need to say why they wouldn’t go south-they would never make it through the walls, land mines and guard towers along the Barrier. Originally built to keep out immigrants and refugees from the Mexican civil war, the Barrier was equally good at keeping people in. “Archer will take you, probably.”
“You aren’t going?”
Lucia shook her head. “I don’t know anything about the escape routes. Compartmentalization. And I always have more work to do.”
“I could stay and help you.”
“With Terror out for your blood? You wouldn’t really be an asset. Sorry,” she added.
Ruppert felt a gnawing discomfort in his gut. He’d lost his entire life, and even as unhappy as he’d been, he felt rootless and without any purpose. Going north might be his best hope of survival, but then what? He’d be alone in some remote, frozen place-he would never be able to return to a city, with all the security systems picking up his image. Terror could find him as easily in Vancouver as they could in Los Angeles.
He thought of Liam O’Shea, the pudgy man with the rubbery smile who worked at Child and Family Services. Ruppert had been thinking about him off and on since they’d stayed with Dr. Smith in the desert.
“I can help you,” Ruppert said. His voice was very low.
“You’ve helped us enough,” she told him. “You should go north.”
“I mean about your son.”
She shook her head and turned away from him. “Don’t talk about that. I should not have told you.”
“I know someone,” he said. “A senior case analyst manager, or some arrangement of those words, in Family Services. He’d have access to their databases, probably even from home.”
Lucia looked back at him. Her mouth was trembling, from anger or from fear. “He would help me?”
“No. I think I could make him help.”
Lucia stared into the dark, then shook her head. “It won’t work. Terror will be looking hard for you, and he’ll know that by now.”
“That’s not the point. I have an idea of how we could-”
“Don’t speak about this to me again.” Lucia glared at him. Her eyes were wet. “Never mention my son.” She threw the cigarette stub on the floor and left the room.
Lucia stopped speaking to Ruppert. After several days, Terror lost interest and the agents in black faded away. According to Turin, the news media had settled on blaming unspecified Chinese agents, allegedly trying to spread fear and disorder along the West Coast. There would likely be more attacks, or so the Department of Terror warned the nation.
“Fear,” Turin muttered as he recounted the official narrative. “Keeps the swine in line.”
The underground rooms had initially seemed to Ruppert like a good and fortunate place to hide, but he was beginning to feel more like a prisoner. There was a restroom but no bathing facilities, and everyone looked dirty and unshaven. They slept in the same clothes every night, and the rooms took on an odor of sweat and stale air. Lucia still refused to talk to him, and that made the dark rooms even more suffocating.
At last, Maya judged that the federal dragnet had ended, and people could soon begin to leave. Each one would leave in a different direction, smuggling thousands of tiny discs on which Turin had copied the interview. Ruppert heard there was more evidence on the disc, linking Westerly to a high-level official in the Department of Terror. He didn't ask to look at it. He'd done enough journalism.