Just past an abandoned husk of a mountain town called Glenwood Springs—with food distribution all but broken down except for major cities, little towns across the nation had just dried up, but especially impossible-to-get-to-in-winter mountain towns—there was a twelve-mile stretch of canyon, Begay said, that had been one of the most spectacular dozen or so miles in the entire continental U.S.’s grid of Interstate highways.
No more.
What had been double ribbons of elevated two-lane highways, the westbound lanes rising forty feet above the eastbound lanes for miles and miles, punctuated with lighted and well-ventilated tunnels through stubborn outcroppings of the sheer cliffs that rose more than a thousand feet on either side, slicing the sky into a thin sliver of stars, was now a narrow two-lane gravel road, filled with potholes and hard curves around fallen boulders and tumbled sections of the Interstate itself, where the convoy crept and bounced and jounced along in low gear beside the churning, dam-broke, no-longer-harnessed Colorado River.
But after ninety minutes or so to get through those twelve miles, they were back on battered but serviceable concrete and asphalt again and Begay was shifting up through the gears.
“God, I’d love to learn how to do that,” said Val.
Henry Big Horse Begay looked at him and then back at the road and taillights ahead of them. “What? Shift gears? There’s sixteen forward gears on this lovely baby. Four back. That’s what you want to learn? How to shift and split gears on a big rig?”
“Just how to drive a truck,” said Val. The fatigue and withdrawal were working on him like sodium pentothal. Or just turning him into a baby again, he thought.
Begay nodded. “Yeah, Gauge said that you was going to ask me that. The answer’s yes… maybe. I’ll give you a week or two’s tryout, riding shotgun. Learning the gears. You can pay me as we go. Providing you got the NICC, of course.”
“I don’t,” said Val. He was very close to tears. If he started blubbering like a baby here, he thought he might throw himself out the door toward the white-watered Colorado churning by to their right. “I won’t have one,” he managed. “No fucking money to buy one with. And no fucking time.”
“Time?” said Begay.
“Devereaux says it takes weeks… sometimes a month… to get the NIC Card, even when you can pay for it. You guys are leaving… when? Sunday morning in the middle of the night sometime?”
“For Chrissakes, kid. I wasn’t talking about this weekend. I’m coming back through Denver in late October, right before Halloween. You got the NICC then, I’ll give you a week or two probation. No promises, though. You fuck up the way I think you probably will, I’ll leave you by the side of the goddamned road. That’s a damn promise.”
Val could only stare and keep himself from bawling after all.
Begay turned the radio up.
“… that president pursued a policy that flattered and encouraged our enemies, alienated our allies, and abandoned Israel to be destroyed by a country that had nuclear weapons that we could have prevented, my friends! The United States could have prevented the Islamic Republic of Iran… the heart of the current Global Caliphate… from ever having those weapons! Now that country… and that Caliphate… have thousands of atom bombs and this country, after our big deal with the Russians five years before that country went belly up, has, by the final START treaty, twenty-six bombs. Twenty-six! And no way to deliver ’em and no will to deliver ’em and…”
Val dozed off.
They came out of the mountains above Denver at about ten o’clock in the morning. The roar of gears and engine had wakened Val during the climb over Loveland Pass and it would always remain one of the most terrifying things he’d ever experienced.
The long 6 percent and steeper grade of the last dozen miles or so out of the mountains toward Denver, the high-rises gleaming in the midmorning light ahead, was all lower-gear, high-revving engines braking by compression, and the stink of overheated brakes. Two of the trucks in the convoy had to use runaway truck ramps.
And then they were down. Val could see other cars on I-70 and the adjoining roads and highways. It was the first real traffic they’d seen for hours. It made him dizzy.
“One thing I gotta ask you before we seal this maybe deal,” said Henry Big Horse Begay, switching off the radio. This close to a major city, it was NPR and the other official stations.
“What’s that?” asked Val. He was terrified that the Indian was going to renege on his offer. With a month to get the $200 old bucks—maybe steal it from the Old Man before shooting the bastard, although Val doubted that the old flashback addict would have that much anywhere—and then to get the NICC, he might just be ready for Begay.
“That piece you had in your belt in the back and been shiftin’ around, furtive-like, all night so it wouldn’t dig into your back or side or gut. You ever shoot it?”
Val hesitated. Finally, not knowing what the right answer was, he said, “Yeah.”
“Not at a goddamned target or rabbit or some such, I mean,” said Begay, taking his full attention off the road ahead and laying it on Val. “I mean at a living person. A man.”
“Yeah,” breathed Val.
“Hit him?”
“Yeah.”
“Kill him?” Begay’s eyes were flinty lie detectors.
Val tried to swallow. Couldn’t.
“Yeah.”
They were approaching the interchange with I-25, but the old one had been blown up. There was a temporary gravel ramp. The convoy was shifting down, bouncing down the grade in unison.
“Did he deserve it?” asked Henry Big Horse Begay.
Val started to answer with the same syllable he’d been using and then stopped. This question had been most of what had kept him awake at night the last week. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t know,” said Val. “Probably not. But I think it was either him or me. I chose me.”
Begay drove south on I-25 in silence for several minutes.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’m gonna be coming back through here—Ăttsé Hashké permitting—around October twenty-seven. Supposed to be at the big loading docks at the South Broadway GOVCO Center all that afternoon. I’ll look for you. Schedule now says the convoy leaves at eight p.m. You ain’t there, I won’t ever look for you again.”
“I’ll be there,” said Val.
1.13
Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico—Thursday, Sept. 16
The rest of the voyage to Santa Fe had gone without incident with paramilitary “technicals”—pickups with large-caliber machine guns mounted in the back—escorting them the last seventy miles or so from Las Vegas, NM, to Santa Fe.
The three mercenaries, Sato, and Nick stayed at the Japanese consulate in Santa Fe, formerly the old La Fonda Hotel right on the plaza. Joe’s remains were taken into the basement of the complex for cremation.
Upon arrival, Sato had led Nick and the others to the consul’s medical clinic—better equipped and more modern and clean than any medical facility left in Denver, Nick was sure; while Nick and the others had a quick checkup, Sato had his burns and cuts treated and his serious fracture was set into one of those expensive new polymorphic sports casts—a smart-cast, they called it, too expensive for any Americans other than the top athletes, or rather, those athlete templates for their digital avatars—that allowed full use of the arm even as the bones healed.
Nick’s interview with Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev at his hacienda compound outside of town was scheduled for 10 a.m. The invitation had gone to Mr. Nakamura and the specifics were clear—neither the Oshkosh vehicle nor Hideki Sato was to come within ten miles of the don’s home. Nick had been told to be at the St. Francis Cathedral—formally, he knew, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi (and, Dara had told him when they’d come to Santa Fe on vacation early in their marriage, the cathedral which the archbishop spent his life seeing constructed in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop)—at 9:30 a.m. Alone.