He realized, too, that he had missed two meals that day and had nothing with him to fill the void. The thought was enough to awaken an empty-bellied hunger which had lain dormant to that point.
Extracting the stylus from his holder, Dryke began to doodle idly on the slate—filling the frame with patterns of nested diamonds, blanking it to fill it with concentric circles, then with the squares of a chessboard grid. It did not amuse him, but it occupied him, and that was almost enough.
He thought ahead to Jeremiah, ahead to the mission. There was little doubt in his mind that the team would succeed. The end of the chase was in sight, if not yet in hand.
But, oddly, there was little pleasure in the anticipation. After all the travel, all the trauma, he would have thought he’d be happier. Even his curiosity had been dulled. He no longer cared to know what moved his adversary, what tricks and tactics had prolonged the siege. The weariness ran deeper than blood and muscle. It had infected his spirit as well.
It’s time to move on.
The thought surprised him. Move on to what? To serving Mikhail Dryke. To carrying on a normal life. But he wondered if he knew how to do either. To keeping all those promises consigned to the future—Castillo de San Marcos, Loches, Peveril Castle. To walk the ruins of the Great Wall from Shanhaiguan to Jia-yuguan and the edge of the desert—
“Are you a historian?” asked the woman beside him.
“Eh?” He turned toward her. “Excuse me?”
She pointed toward his slate. “I was wondering if you were a historian?”
Dryke looked down at his lap and laughed despite himself. The last sketch that had come from his deft fingers and idle mind was a half-completed plan for an assault on a mountain redoubt he had labeled Fort Jesus.
“No, ma’am,” he said, his voice soft and weary. “Not a historian. Just a boy playing soldier.”
She left him alone after that, even though he might have ultimately welcomed the distraction. The thoughts that possessed him were black and joyless. Victory is a more difficult art than war. Which American President had said that? Wilson? Roosevelt? Gingrich? Dryke could not remember. Others had learned the same lesson. The Duke of Wellington explaining to Lady Shelley: I always say that, next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. An old secret, indeed, now being revealed to Dryke.
It was a decision he did not want to make, wrapped in questions he did not want to answer. If there was a Katrina Becker in Munich, an Evan Silverman in Houston, a Javier Sala in Madrid, who might there be in Prainha, or Kasigau, or Takara? How long would it take an organization which had intercepted company mail and jammed Newstime to find where their Prophet was hidden?
Would the people who had knocked down a T-ship and spilled poisons on the ground be any less bold in trying to reclaim their leader? Could he rest easy knowing that his enemies played breathless electronic tag on the nets unimpeded, and found the Project’s defenses as intimidating as the Maginot Line?
There were a hundred questions, and yet they were all the same question: How long would it go on if he let it go on? He hoped that circumstance would save him from having to find an answer, save him from touching that place inside where white fire lived and no act was forbidden.
All of the decisions were coming hard.
They had two targets, each difficult in its own way: the Peterson Road house, a hundred klicks outside the city, and Pacific Land Management, ten stories up in the heart of Portland’s financial district. Dryke had too few troops to cover both at once— the small size of the team was part of the price for moving quickly and quietly. Nor could they touch local law enforcement for help. There was no way to control what went out into the net. There was no way to know who was Jeremiah’s friend.
One or the other. It had to be one or the other. But if they chose wrong, Jeremiah would have a chance to run. And a man like Jeremiah with a network like Homeworld could run for a long time.
But which one was Fort J?
It came down to probabilities. Pacific Land Management had nineteen registered partners, twenty-eight comlines (counting eight on the building’s Sky LAN), and its fingers in half a billion dollars’ worth of land and real estate in four countries—a splendid foundation for the infrastructure of a revolution. By contrast, the Peterson Road house had a modest four comlines, an overdue property tax bill, and a reclusive owner with legitimate connections to most of the state’s business and political leadership.
Dryke chose the Peterson Road house.
He hedged his bets by calling the texperts down from Seattle and leaving one, the brooding man named Ramond, to play stakeout at Pacific Land Management. But the rest went with him to Hoffman Hill, a six-hundred-meter summit just six klicks from Peterson Ridge and belonging to the same whorl of valleys and steep-sloped tree-covered fold mountains. Hoffman Hill was a nearly ideal staging area—just a one-minute dash from the target for the armed and armored Beech Pursuit that Ramond and Dru had leased for them in Seattle.
By that time, all of them were well into their second dose cycle of Watchman. While Dru set up sky monitors and spotting snoops on the ridge line, Dryke huddled with the others in the predawn chill to lay out the logistics. They made a skeptical audience.
“We come in from the top, he’s got a lot of room to hide. We come up the road and hit his gate, and he’ll sky,” said Loren, the most senior of Dryke’s recruits.
“I know,” said Dryke. “That’s why we’re going in both ways.”
“I’d sure rather be doing this with fifty bodies than five.” Loren’s frown was dyspeptic. “What do you know about the defenses?”
“Boundary fenced and a hailer. That’s all that’s on the books. I’m sure that’s not all there is.”
“Anti-air?”
“Maybe.”
“How many people up there?”
Dryke reached down to the open kit by his feet and tossed the corpsec a clear-skinned frag helmet. “Can’t tell you. So flash goggles, bug-heads, and torso armor for everyone. And keep your fagging heads down.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to just pump a rocket or two into the house from here?” asked Liviya with a grin. She was cradling her frag helmet under her arm like a basketball while she checked her pistol.
“I’m sure,” Dryke said. “Dru will do battle management from here if it comes to that. But I really don’t want this drawn out. If it’s not over in five minutes, we’re going to be in more trouble than I want to think about.” He looked up through the trees at the brightening sky. “Any questions?”
“I want another look at this guy’s picture,” Loren said.
Dryke keyed the frame and wordlessly handed Loren the slate.
“With five minutes warning, they’ll be able to dump all their files and break both ends of every link,” Dru called to them without looking up from her work. “Five seconds would be enough if it’s all volatile storage.”
“We’re not going in for files. We’re going in for Jeremiah— or whoever speaks with his voice.”
“If we have to shoot to stop someone—” Liviya began.
“Then shoot straight,” Dryke said. “Any more questions?”
In the silence, Loren handed back the slate.
“Dru, anything?” Dryke called to the texpert.
She shook her head. “Outside lights went off a minute ago. Two comlines active, looks like background traffic. Might be there. Might not. Nothing conclusive.”
“Do you have the tracer ready?”