Mel relaxed, realizing for the first time that he was probably going to get out of Miami alive. "Could I get change for a hundred so I can pay off boy wonder over at the Texaco?"
Harold didn't like that. "Now slick, you just be careful. That's my nephew over there, and you bad-mouth any of my kin, you might be spending a night in jail."
Mel fumed at his own stupidity, considered a number of replies, and decided to shut up.
Honey gave him his change. Mel thanked her and resolved to get out of Miami as quickly as he could, saying as little as possible. He handed boy wonder a twenty.
"Seriously mister," the kid said, getting Mel's change, "take care of yourself. We had people go out there and not come back. Those shafts go down a couple of miles, and those crazy people are not accountable."
Mel got back in the Mercedes and drove carefully out of town, accompanied by Harold and his radar gun. That's all I need, he thought, to fall into one of Harold's speed traps. As soon as he got out of radar range, he turned the car toward Cacher and put the hammer down.
As he drove, the vegetation thinned away and vanished, and the rolling hills took on a steep, foreboding quality. The road itself was potholed asphalt that shook the Mercedes' frame. In the distance he could see the malevolent tips of the mine tailings, looking much like the Welsh coal tips that periodically unloaded and covered small villages in sad valleys. There were no farms, no ranches, only ancient weather-beaten abandoned shacks, a legacy of the thirties. Running along the road was a single telephone line. There was no evidence of electricity. On the road was regional roadkilclass="underline" armadillos, 'possums, the occasional dead cat. As the evening approached, the whole scene made Mel want to turn around and go back home.
And as he approached the scattered buildings of the town, he did just that. He stopped half a mile short of Cacher, turned directly north on to a section line road, and drove north at a hundred miles an hour, turning up a rooster-tail of yellowish lead-saturated dust. Mel prided himself on being a rational man. Usually that meant controlling his fear. Today it meant giving into it.
The faster he drove, the more frightened he became, and as the crossroads flashed by every six miles, he did not look either way. He was convinced that he was being pursued, and not until he crossed the Kansas line did he begin to slow down. His heart was pounding dangerously and his forehead was stiff from sweat, which poured out of his body and was dried to a crust by the air conditioner running full blast.
Cacher was made up of an old two-story brick school tilted at a precipitous angle, undermined by a mine shaft that went to close, or a water table that was drained. There was no sign of life, no dogs, no cats, no lights. Gas stations were boarded up. The only inhabited building was a shabby general store, the paint long since blistered away from its rough, knotty wooden siding. In front was a set of thirties-style, manually powered gas pumps, and, as an afterthought, a U.S. post office zip code sign bearing the WE DELIVER FOR YOU emblem.
Inside the store, it was as dry and hot as a sauna. The heat strengthened the smell of stale urine that emanated from Otho Stimpson, who was sitting in an old wooden swivel rocker with the canes busted out. His son, Otis, was standing by the entrance holding a small 9mm automatic weapon with a long clip. It was a crude and awkward device, almost as clumsy as Otis himself, but he had gotten good at using it. He would take it out among the mine tailings and fire clip after clip, lead thudding into lead. No one was around to complain about the noise.
If Mel Meyer had pulled into Cacher, the gun would have turned his Mercedes into scrap metal in seconds. Otis would have pushed the car down a mine shaft. It would have fallen a mile or two into the earth and never been seen again.
"Looks like the little Jew got scared," Otis said. "Got some sense in his head. Won't have much more trouble with him."
Otho said nothing. A couple of decades ago he would have sighed hopelessly at the racial slur, but he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that his son was a product of his environment and would never be as cosmopolitan as Otho was, with his fancy education at the Lady Wilburdon School for Mathematical Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum. "He's good," Otho said. "He's gotten closer to us than anyone."
Otho was shaken. No one had ever come to Cacher before. The very fact that Otis had been placed in this position - standing in the door of the old general store with a machine gun, locked and loaded - was disastrous. If the Network knew that they had been reduced to such methods, they would probably be cut off, and Otho's responsibilities transferred to someone else. Otho knew that there were others - like Mr. Salvador - waiting to take his place as soon as he slipped up.
"Should we kill him?" Otis said. It was a painfully stupid question, but it was good that Otis had come out and asked it. Otis had spent an unhealthy amount of time watching spy movies and thrillers on HBO. Since he had become aware of the nature of the current undertaking, he had let his imagination run away with him, thinking that they were in the middle of some asinine James Bond movie.
"That's not what this is about," Otho said. "This is not violence, son. It's not war. It's not espionage. The whole point here is to get this country back to basics: contracts, markets, keeping your promises, meeting your responsibilities. Meyer's an honorable man and if we killed him we'd cut the ground out from under our feet." Otho paused for a moment and stared through a dusty window-pane. "If we were killers, I'd kill Mr. Salvador."
"How come?" Otis said, astonished. "I thought he was doing a real good job."
"If he was doing a real good job," Otho said, "Mel Meyer never would have come here. He wouldn't even have known that anything was going on."
43
William A. Cozzano's National Town Meeting, which took place in Chicago in August, was the equivalent of a political convention. But because it was a pure media event, with no procedural nonsense to gum up the works, it was a lot more entertaining.
The opening event was held in Grant Park, a green swath that ran between the towering center of downtown Chicago and the lake. At the cost of permanently alienating the animal-rights and anticombustion constituencies, Cozzano's campaign managers had set up a huge Sunday evening barbecue. The ten thousand participants in the town meeting had been streaming into Chicago all weekend, checking into the big downtown hotels and getting themselves settled in the rooms where they would spend the next week. The Grant Park barbecue was an informal way for everyone to get together and goof around before the scheduled events got underway at the convention center on Monday morning.
From the balcony of her hotel suite along Congress Plaza overlooking the heart of Grant Park, Mary Catherine could see the barbecue developing through most of the day. Around five p.m., when the afternoon heat was starting to subside, the smoke rising up from all of those barbecue pits began to look appetizing, and so she put on a sundress. It was rather prim by the standards of an urban beach on a hot summer day, but racy by the standards of candidates' wives and daughters. Furthermore, it was light and loose enough that she could play Softball in it, though sliding into base would be out of the question. Since her display of place-hitting acumen in Tuscola on the Fourth of July, being spunky and athletic had become part of her job description.
She took the elevator down to the street and strolled through the park. Mary Catherine could now stroll anywhere in Chicago, wearing any clothing she wanted, at any time of the day or night, because she was always followed by Secret Service agents. She had decided that armed guards were a great thing and that every girl should have a few.