Then she walked out into the storm without looking back, Lewis and Faraday hard on her heels.
47
Peter
With two minutes to spare, Peter turned the Tahoe onto the service road for the enormous outlet mall. Its vast parking area was bounded on two sides by a band of wetland and the cloverleaf intersection of two state highways. The other two sides were lined with fast-food restaurants, a movie theater, and a Walmart superstore.
Forty acres of discount retail, Peter thought. American as apple pie. And all of that was just a single node in a seemingly endless sprawl of freight warehouses, corporate distribution centers, big box stores, airplane parts manufacturers, construction supply wholesalers, stacked shipping containers, and semi-trailer sales offices, all the ugly essentials that made the modern economy function.
According to Circuit Rider’s Telegram message, the meet was in the farthest corner of the lot, where the oily runoff from all that blacktop drained into a series of retention ponds. Peter pulled over by theguardrail and turned on his flashers as instructed. Night was coming on.
The rain fell in buckets. On the far side of the guardrail, the retention pond gleamed darkly under low clouds, its surface dimpled like hammered iron. The mall itself was at least four hundred feet away and there were no other cars visible from that part of the lot. Either the place had fallen on hard times or the mall’s designer had vastly overestimated the amount of parking required.
He didn’t know for sure if Durant was actually involved with the Messenger and Circuit Rider. But assuming he wasn’t got Peter nowhere. Assuming he was, Peter still had no clue how much of what Durant had told him was actually true. Whether the investigation into the murders at the motel truly was ongoing, or even whether there was a warrant out for Peter’s arrest because he hadn’t left Ellie with the social worker.
After hanging up with June, he’d reached out to Detective Kitzinger again. She still wasn’t picking up, but he was able to leave a long message detailing everything they’d learned, including the contents of the cassette tape, the burner phone, Durant’s possible involvement, Ellie and Carlotta’s kidnapping, and Peter’s plan to trade himself for their safety. He tried not to sound too much like a guy wearing a tinfoil hat. He also gave her June’s number and said she had a copy of the recording. Peter hoped Kitzinger was a good enough cop to follow up, regardless of orders from her boss.
He was doing his best not to think about handing himself over to these assholes. The white static wasn’t happy. Peter assumed Sanjay Mishra was dead, which meant they’d killed at least three people to make this happen. Peter was betting there were others. Like most soldiers Peter knew, his greatest wartime fear was not that he might get killed, shot, or blown up, but that the enemy would take him captive. There were too many online videos of jihadis torturing prisonersbefore beheading them. In every mission on every deployment, Peter had made a point to keep one last bullet set aside for himself. So he could control the manner of his own death.
He was no longer at war, but that same fear remained with him. The fear of being helpless and alone at the hands of bad people.
—
In the distance, a pair of headlights made the same turn onto the service road that Peter had made. Half-hidden by the rain, it headed directly for him. After a few moments it resolved itself into a black Bronco with big knobby tires and fog lights mounted on the roof.
Peter got out of the Tahoe to watch them approach, making sure his empty hands remained visible. The sheeting rain beat down on his hood and the shoulders of his jacket. At the prospect of what was to come, the white static began to crackle up his spine like a battery under the skin.
The Bronco came to a stop twenty yards away. The passenger door opened and Durant stepped onto the pavement. He wore the same black cowboy hat and long black coat he’d worn at the motel, but now he had a heavy black pistol in his right hand.
“Take off your jacket and turn around,” he called. “Slowly.”
“I need to talk to Ellie and Carlotta,” Peter called back. “I need to know they’re free.”
“You’re not in charge, Mr. Ash.” Durant leveled the gun at Peter’s chest, then tipped his head toward the Bronco’s open door. “My friend is on the phone with the others right now. Remove your coat or the females will suffer.”
“You’d allow that to happen?”
“It was my idea,” the captain said. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
The veteran cop had been a patrolman and a detective. He haddecades of practice in situations like this. His hand was steady, the gun was ready. Peter couldn’t take him down now if he wanted to. Besides, he’d left the Beretta in the Yukon.
He unzipped his jacket and let it fall. “Are you going after the tech conference?”
Durant’s mustache lifted in a slight smile. “No, but it was fun to watch you get wound up about it. There’s far too much protection from multiple agencies. I can’t run interference on it the way I did on the Katelyn Thorsen investigation. Besides, it wouldn’t make a dent in the problem. The Zuckerbergs of this world, the true tech oligarchs, will pull into the sheltered parking garage in armored limos with their security details. You might get one of them, even two, but you’d just make martyrs out of them. You won’t slow the march of technology. The problem is systemic. We need a larger, more long-term solution. Ted Kaczynski had the right idea all along.”
“The Unabomber? What the hell happened to you, Durant? You’re a sworn officer of the law.”
“The law is a joke, Mr. Ash. Innocents fall victim and the guilty walk free. I see it every day. The world is becoming lawless. Nobody respects the police anymore. They think we’re the bad guys. The courts prevent us from getting justice for victims. We can’t get decent recruits. We’re paid peanuts to risk our lives for a lousy traffic stop.”
Peter actually agreed with him on this point. Being a cop was a difficult and dangerous job. Not unlike being a soldier. But he couldn’t agree with Durant’s conclusions. “So rather than work to change things, you’re just going to fuck everything up?”
“People have tried to change things for generations. The world has only gotten worse. As ever, those with money and power think only of themselves. Do you really believe all this new technology will change that? It won’t. It will only make things worse. Until a few men are kings and the rest of us are slaves. The Movement’s actions willprevent that from happening. It’s a question of morality. We’re restarting society from the ground up.” Durant gestured with the barrel of his pistol. “Raise your shirt and turn. I need to see if you’re carrying.”
Peter hiked his fleece past his belly button and spun on his heel. The rain was cold on his face and neck. He knew it would soak through his fleece sweater before long. “Restarting society, huh? Sounds like ending the world as we know it. How will that make anything better?”
“People will no longer be slaves to the Industrial Machine. We know freedom won’t be easy. We’ll have to work hard. Every individual will be responsible for the safety and well-being of everyone else. Penalties for failure will be swift and merciless. But the rewards will be immense. Community, purpose, and meaning. Folks will own their lives again. They’ll be truly free. Exactly what’s missing in the Machine world now.”
Durant had really drunk the Kool-Aid, Peter thought. “So how will it happen, the Dark Time? What’s the plan?”
