Stephen choked on his coffee. It spewed from his mouth and into the forest of his beard as he snatched at a pile of napkins and slammed them over his mouth. He turned his watery eyes toward her.
"I'll take that as a yes," she said, popping the cables from the back of the laptop and positioning it on the chair behind Allen so all of them could see. She collapsed the van's pseudo-table as though she'd been doing it a long time, put it on the floor at her feet, then turned back to the laptop. The fifteen-inch screen was black except for a palette of five colorful buttons hovering in the lower right corner.
Allen recognized the symbols on the buttons from audio-cassette players: a triangle with the acute angle facing right for PLAY; a triangle pointing left for rewind; two vertical lines for PAUSE; and a square for STOP. The fifth symbol he didn't recognize; it looked like the circle and crosshairs of a rifle scope.
Julia moved a cursor over the palette of buttons.
Something struck the van.
Thunk!
Her pistol appeared in her hand so quickly, Allen wondered if it had always been there. As for himself, he might not have even noticed the sound, had Julia not moved so urgently. Before he realized it, his head was between his knees. He steeled himself for the windshield's inevitable shattering under the impact of the next round. His mind filled with things he wanted to yell out: Start the van! Step on it! Let's go!
But he heard Stephen's words first: "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" He was leaning almost out of the chair to stop Julia's movement toward the sliding door. "The door lock, Julia!" he said. "I just locked the doors." He reached his hand back and toggled the switch twice: Thunk! Thunk!
She stared at him in disbelief, whether at Stephen's actions or her own, Allen couldn't tell.
"It is loud," Stephen said apologetically, with a sideways tilt of his head.
She settled back in her chair, calmly slipping the weapon under her blazer. "It's okay," she said, closing her eyes. "Bit jumpy."
I'm just glad she's on our side, Allen thought.
Her lips stretched into a fat grin; then her eyes snapped open. "Told you I was raring to go." She reached out to the computer and clicked play.
fifty-six
The black man emerged from a doorway set in a whitewashed wall. With a perfectly round head and pencil-thin body, he resembled an upside-down exclamation point. He wore blue jeans, which were mostly white and hung loosely on his narrow hips, and a threadbare flannel shirt, buttoned tight at the neck. Dangling from the tips of three fingers was a beat-up metal lunch box, the kind kids toted to school in the sixties. Whatever had decorated it—images of the Brady Bunch, Speed Racer, or King Kong—had long since faded and chipped away. After appraising the sky, he started up the unpaved street, his heavy boots kicking up little plumes of dust. He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. A big smile broke like a crescent moon on a starless night. He raised his unencumbered hand and yelled, "Moyo Wanji!"
"What's that? What'd he say?" Allen didn't take his eyes off the screen.
Julia shook her head. Stephen said, "Shhh." All three had rotated their captain's chairs to face the laptop. By now, each was leaning forward—even Allen, whose nonchalant posture had succumbed to intense curiosity around the time the man on the screen had assessed the sky for rain. If the McDonald's restaurant suddenly exploded, it was doubtful the three people in the blue conversion van would have noticed—except maybe to turn up the volume on the computer they encircled.
From the left side of the monitor, another man came into view, dressed in equally depreciated clothes, carrying a stained paper sack. He said something unintelligible and clapped the first man on his back. As the two continued on, the camera jerked and followed, wobbling with the camera operator's hurried gait.
A column of numbers lay to the right of the video image. The first appeared to be a date, European style with the day first— 5 April of last year. Below that, presumably, the time the video was shot—06:08:21 when the action started and now just changing to 06:11:00.
Julia thought the next number, 00:01:49:15, was a tape counter in National Television System Commission protococlass="underline" hours, minutes, seconds, then frames, which were ticking off at a pace of thirty per second. This was no amateur shoot; whoever had filmed, edited, and compiled this demonstration was professional.
As the camera followed the two men through the grungy streets of a small village, Stephen stretched across to tap at the number below the counter.
"See that?" he asked.
"Some kind of countdown," Julia observed. "Seven hours and four minutes—to something." She suppressed the urge to look at her watch, almost forgetting that the events playing out on her computer screen were now thirteen months old. Still, that backward-moving timer gave her the chills.
The men on the screen walked into a square where an old military-type truck idled loudly, belching clouds of oily exhaust from a rattling tailpipe. The truck was a sick shade of greenish-yellow, except for spots of pea green on the cab doors where insignias had been stripped away. Other men, all black, converged on the truck from different directions. In turn, each man climbed aboard, disappearing within the
truck's canvas-covered bed. When the "star" of the video—that's the way Julia had come to think of the round-headed man—disappeared into the shadows, the image flickered once and went black.
Julia realized she'd been holding her breath. She let it out and pulled in another.
A new scene appeared with a jolt of the camera—a close-up of a pudgy man with an enormous gut and a yellow hard hat. He was barking out orders in a tongue so foreign it made Julia's head hurt. From behind came the sound of motors, raised voices, and the staccato rhythm of construction. After a moment, the camera swung to an area where a small group of men were slamming axes into trees. The camera zoomed in on the one in the center—Julia's star.
"The countdown," Stephen whispered.
It read -00:13:58. Julia's stomach tightened. A car horn from the laptop's tiny speakers drew her back to the video. The horn blasted for about five seconds. In that time, the star looked up, dropped his ax, and started meandering toward the camera, head hung as his left hand massaged his right bicep. The camera pulled back and hobbled away, taking a position some forty feet from the army-style truck. Again men converged on it, each with the day's physical agony showing on their bodies: filthy clothes, hair hued tan with sawdust and forested with spiky wood chips, grimacing faces, joints so stiff Julia could almost hear them creak. Shadows pooled at their feet, betraying a midday sun.
Each leaned into the back of the truck and emerged with a sack or box. They moved to the shade at the edge of a dense forest and sat. They pulled unwrapped clumps of a doughy substance from their containers, then worked vigorously to transfer it to their stomachs. The star ate quietly, perfectly centered in the camera's eye. The camera jiggled occasionally but otherwise remained stationary.
"Anyone got a fix on the location?" Julia asked without turning away from the screen.
"Haven't seen enough of the landscape," answered Allen. "I'd guess the language is an African dialect—a form of Swahili, maybe."
"So, Africa?"
"Just a guess. The town was pretty impoverished, and that foliage appears equatorial. Africa, South America, Southeast Asia. Our best clue—"
Julia stopped him with a raised hand, palm out.
The countdown had reached -00:00:55, and heads began turning skyward, apparently hearing something not yet detectable to the camera's microphone. Their eyes scanned aimlessly, then focused on something up and to the left of the screen. Over their apparent words of curiosity came the escalating drone of an airplane motor, like the hum of an approaching giant. Someone pointed, and one by one the men stood.