“Because if what you’ve said about your successful cash-diverting activities is true, we have accumulated enough money,” said Adam. “Also the Church might catch you doing the diverting. Time to go, while we still can. Before they send you off to die in the tar pits,” he added. “It would be called an accident. Of course.”
Zeb was touched. Adam was looking out for him. He always thought further ahead than Zeb did.
They waited until the next day, when the Rev had a board meeting and Trudy was heading up the Ladies’ Prayer Circle. Then they took a solarcab to the bullet train station, exchanging fake info for the benefit of the driver’s flapping ears. Most of those guys were snoops, formal or informal. The script was that Adam was on his way back to Spindletop and Zeb was seeing him off. Nothing unusual in that.
From a net café at the station, Zeb cleaned out the Rev’s Grand Cayman hidey-hole account while Adam acted nonchalant and scanned for anyone who looked too interested. Once the Rev’s funds were secured and transferred, Zeb sent the infected gonad a couple of messages, using a lilypad pathway to delay potential cyberhounds as long as possible. He hacked into a men’s underarm deodorant video ad, clicked on the gleaming, depilatoried stud’s belly button — he’d gone through that pixel wormhole before — then skipped to a home and garden site, appropriate under the circumstances, and chose a trowel. From it he launched his messages.
The first message said, “We know who’s under the rocks. Don’t follow us.” The second contained the details of the Rev’s thefts from the Church of PetrOleum’s charity initiative funds, and another warning: “Don’t leave town or this goes public. Stay put and await instructions.” That would give the mildewed old bugger the idea that they’d be back in touch soon for blackmail purposes, which must be their motive, and he could lie in wait for them.
“That should do it,” said Adam, but Zeb couldn’t resist adding a third message: a copy of the details of the Rev’s Feel-iT haptic site transactions. Lady Jane Grey had been his favourite: he must have decapitated her at least fifteen times.
“Wish I could watch,” said Zeb, once they were on the train. “When he opens his mail. And even better, when he finds out his Cayman bank stash is gone.”
“Gloating is a character flaw,” said Adam.
“Up yours,” said Zeb.
He spent the trip looking out the window at the passing scenery: gated communities like the one they’d just fled, fields of soybeans, frackware installations, windfarms, piles of gigantic truck tires, heaps of gravel, pyramids of discarded ceramic toilets. Mountains of garbage with dozens of people picking through it; pleebland shanty towns, the shacks made of discarded everything. Kids standing on the shack roofs, on the piles of garbage, on the piles of tires, waving flags made of colourful plastic bags or flying rudimentary kites, or giving Zeb the finger. The odd camera drone drifted overhead, purporting to be scanning traffic, logging the comings and goings of who-knew-who. Those things were bad news if they were hunting for you specifically: he’d gathered that much from web gossip.
But the Rev wouldn’t be searching for them yet. He’d still be at the board lunch, gobbling down the labmeat hors d’oeuvres and the farmed tilapia.
Hackety-hack, railroad track,
Momma’s in the garden, so don’t look back,
Zeb hummed. He hoped Fenella’s death had been sudden, with none of the Rev’s more puke-making obsessions involved.
Beside him Adam was asleep, looking even whiter and thinner than he did when awake, and more like an idealistic statue of some annoying allegorical figure: Prudence. Sincerity. Faith.
Zeb was too high for sleep. Also jittery, despite himself: they’d crossed a big thick barbed-wire line, they’d robbed the ogre, they’d made off with his treasure. There would be fury. So he kept watch.
Who killed Fenella?
A really evil fella.
Hit her on the head,
Gave her quite a whack,
Everything went black,
Now she’s fuckin’ dead.
Something was running down his face. He used his sleeve to wipe. No snivelling, he told himself. Don’t give him the satisfaction.
Once in San Francisco, Adam and Zeb decided to separate. “He won’t sit still for this,” Adam said. “He’s got a lot of contacts. He’ll put out a red alert, use his OilCorps networks. We’re overly noticeable together.”
True enough: they were too disparate. Dark and light, hefty and frail; anomalies like that were memorable. And the Rev’s description would be of the two of them, not one at a time.
Mutt and Jeff, Zeb hummed to himself. Mute and Theft. Cute and Deft.
“Don’t make that pseudo-musical noise,” said Adam. “It draws attention to us. Anyway you’re flat.” He did have a point. Two points.
In a pleebland grey-market hourly-rental morph-your-backstory kitshop, Zeb crafted identities for them — cardboard, wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, time-sensitive, but good for the next stage of the trip. Adam went north, Zeb went south, each heading for camouflage.
He and Adam had agreed on a dropbox in space. It was the topmost rose being strewn by the zephyrs in a print of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, posted on a much-visited Italian tourism site. Zeb opted for the left tit nipple of Venus, but Adam overruled him: too obvious, he said. It would also be too obvious for them to attempt to contact each other for at least six months, he added: the Rev was vindictive, and by now he’d also be frightened.
Zeb pondered the likely consequences of this vindictiveness and fright. What would he himself do if two young wiseass descendants of his that he’d never liked anyway had made off with his foul secrets? The rage. The betrayal. After all he’d done for Adam. And for Zeb, because weren’t his physical chastisements in the best interests of the lad’s spiritual development? He was probably still deceiving himself with righteous barf like that.
Among other things, he’d hire some DORCS: digital online rapid capture specialists. They charged a lot but were said to produce results. They’d set up a search algorithm geared to detect likely profile matches online. So it was necessary to stay away from digital as much as possible. No surfing. No purchasing. No socializing. No wisecracking. No porn.
“Just don’t act like yourself,” was Adam’s parting advice.
Deeper into the Pleeblands
Zeb cut his hair in San Fran. He was growing a moustache, and he’d bought some coolish contact lenses on the dark-grey market that not only changed your eye colour but also gave you astigmatism and spurious iris features. But though these might get him through a casual scan, he didn’t want to risk closer scrutiny, and the Fickle Fingers of Fake fingerprint distorters he’d also bought were laughable in any professional sense, so it was better not to chance the bullet train again. Also, most of those riding it still believed in the legality of law and the orderliness of order, and might report anything suspicious, as they were constantly being nagged to do.
So he chanced the highways. He hitched south as far as San Jose, working the Truck-A-Pillar convoy stops for rides and trying to look older than he was. Some of the drivers hinted at blowjob payment, but he was too big for them to force it.
The other hazard was the quick-trick pros working the roadside bars. But the only sex he’d had so far had been online, via the haptic-feedback sites; he wasn’t ready for actual flesh on flesh. Plus, he was wary of making connections with other people, however brief: who knew how many of them might be trading information on the side? Some of those hustlers were suspiciously well dressed and did not look hungry.