Unfortunately, she fled home without her phone’s charging cord. The battery is down to 26 percent, and she must preserve it in order for Michael to find her by the GPS signal. She can check the phone briefly to discover true west, and follow a harvesters’ alley to its end, where the fertile flats give way to rugged, rising land. Beyond those wild slopes and ravines, within a mile or two, perhaps three, lie busy multitudes in a chain of towns nearer the coast. Even here in the orchard, however, the ground is treacherous; already, both she and John have stumbled and fallen more than once. Two points of mild pain afflict her, one in her left knee, the other in her left ankle. Nothing is broken, but nothing is as it should be. In the brush-covered hills beyond the orchard, sustaining a fractured ankle or leg would be a serious risk even if she weren’t already limping. Besides, they need to stay somewhere that Michael can more easily come to their assistance.
“Here,” she says.
John agrees. “Yeah, but where here?”
They move among the buildings, none of which is the same scale or style as any other, suggesting that construction occurred over several decades, as the orchard grew to require ever more servicing, with an immense crop that had to be processed in a timely manner. A few bear huge block letters on the gable walls, above the great doors, and although the white paint is badly faded, the words can still be read, seeming to identify different processing strategies: One building declares CIDER & JUICE, and the largest announces WHOLE FRUIT; here is SPECIAL ACCOUNTS, and there is SPECIALTY PRODUCTS. The smallest is labeled OFFICES, and the second largest, lacking block letters, might once have been a long garage in which company vehicles and farm equipment were stored.
Their pursuers are unlikely to decide to devote a precious hour or more to these rambling buildings. For one thing, in the dark and under the cover of the storm, Nina and John could conceivably move from one building to another in a prolonged cat-and-mouse game. More to the point, Aleem knows that she never hides from anything, that she always pushes forward. Because he isn’t aware that she’s been hurt and slowed by a limp, he will most likely assume that she’s quickening south, toward the help that lies beyond the orchard, in the first homes on the outskirts of the valley’s only substantial town.
Nina favors the largest structure because its immensity seems to provide more hiding places if a search of this crumbling complex occurs. She leads John to the maw once shuttered by a great door, and inside. Big roll-ups are missing from all the buildings, perhaps salvaged in bankruptcy. As the boy stifles two sneezes in one hand and blows his nose in a Kleenex, Nina switches on her Tac Light, shields the beam with a cupped hand, and probes the darkness. She finds an uneven concrete floor that, on a dry night, might reveal their footprints in a thick layer of dust and debris. However, with the roof leaking and floor drains not functional, water rises to the thresholds of the missing doors, an inch deep in most places.
Turning, she sweeps the cowled beam across the ground behind them. The muddy surface, thatched with a mat of dead wild grass, retains impressions of their passing only briefly before the wet broom of the storm erases all evidence.
She leads John into the foul-smelling ankle-deep water of the packing plant. The night is cool, but the pool through which she moves is colder, eliciting a shudder both physical and mental. She halts, wondering if this place offers the refuge that they need.
The Tac Light reveals a cavernous structure longer than a football field, perhaps a hundred feet wide. Support columns rise about thirty feet to the ceiling. The processing machinery is long gone. Along the right-hand wall are what might have been a series of offices and storage rooms.
Nina turns to look back through the space where the great door once hung. This isn’t an accounting problem that can be solved by finding an error of addition or subtraction. She has no mathematics by which to calculate and compare the risks of the two courses of action open to her. She looks at John, who clutches the duffel bag, his rain-wet face glistening. She almost asks what he thinks—this building or the night—but she doesn’t want to frighten him further by expressing her doubt.
“This is best,” he says, as if he can read her thoughts. Maybe to some extent he can. Their love for each other binds them not only heart to heart, but also mind to mind. “With your ankle, this is best, Mom.”
The only windows are thirty feet above the work floor, near the ceiling. Little light can rise to those panes, which are occluded by grime and the diligent work of generations of spiders. Nevertheless, she dims the Tac beam with two fingers across the big lens.
She wants to tell her boy everything’s all right, they’ll come safely through this night, but she never lies to him. In her mind’s eye, she can see Aleem and his homeys, those rats with their faces concretized by the lust for power and hatred that is the essence of them, challenging her with that hard stare they call “the red eye,” which demands submission and threatens murder. There is no safe place tonight. She kisses John’s brow and leads him through the foul-smelling water in this walled lagoon, toward the rooms along the right-hand wall.
SAFE HOUSE
This particular property in the ISA portfolio is a safe mansion rather than a safe house, on an acre of land behind a gated estate wall, in a gated community of multimillion-dollar residences. The architecture is Tuscan, as the community’s design committee imagines that to be, though they seem to have in mind a different Italy from the one in Europe. It has seven bedrooms, ten baths, a home theater, as well as indoor and outdoor swimming pools, among other amenities.
Calaphas puts down the window of his sedan and gets his hand wet as he enters his nine-digit agent-ID number in the keypad. The handsome gate rolls open as he puts up the window. He follows the driveway to the portico at the front entrance.
Several dangerous people of interest to the agency have been interrogated in this residence for days or even weeks at a time, without being charged with crimes and without the interference of attorneys. They generally are brought here in a state of sedation, in the trunk of a car, and are kept in a windowless basement room. Once vital information has been extracted from them and their guilt has been confirmed, they are processed by a PowerPak cremation system that reduces them to ashes and bits of stubborn bone, humble remains that are more easily disposed of than awkward corpses.
The primary purpose of the place, however, is to temporarily house people—often entire families—from other countries, people who serve the New Truth movement and whom the agency wants in the United States without informing immigration officials about the backgrounds of these individuals. Here, they are assigned new names, given life histories to memorize, supplied with documents to support their new identities, and put on the agency payroll. In a few cases, they are provided with the services of a superb plastic surgeon.
Leaving his sedan in the protection of the portico, Calaphas climbs four steps and enters his nine-digit agent ID in a keypad by the front door. The electronic lock disengages a trio of deadbolts, and the door swings open, and he steps inside.
The safe house is overseen by Bob and Joy Klink, who have an apartment here. Having been made aware of his arrival when he passed through the front gate, they are waiting to greet him in the foyer. They know Calaphas, but Bob examines his agency ID anyway, and Joy requires him to submit to a retinal scan with a handheld device.