STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 35

Nadia: San Francisco

(Previous chapter or start at the beginning.)

Nadia had slept on the flight, her body desperate for relief, and she woke to the brown California coast smudging the edge of her view. Claustrophobia began to set in on the approach to San Francisco. The air in the plane squeezed her ears. They were in a holding pattern. It felt like the end, like everything was closing in. That sinking experience in the pit of her belly of being trapped. Feelings she hadn’t experienced in a long time crept back like hungry ghosts.

She clicked the intercom. “When do we land?”

“Still waiting for clearance,” said the pilot. “I’ve requested special permission because we’re running short of fuel.”

Nadia checked her watch and realized they were at least an hour late. Private jets were usually invited to land right away, out of the way of commercial traffic. Something was wrong.

She didn’t have anything other than her American passport, a biopass, and her sunglasses. All she’d had time to grab from her rushed visit to the ruined flat in Hong Kong. Not even a change of clothes. The neighbors had already been wandering in and out, looking at the wrecked door, the fire extinguisher, the blood and debris, the bullet holes. They looked at her with amazed suspicion, as she hustled away with sirens screaming in her ears.

Still just wearing her miniskirt and tee, a tiny purse slung over her shoulder and shades on, as good as naked, Nadia prepared to enter the United States.

The formalities at the San Francisco airport’s private jet wing were obsequious. The hall was mostly empty. But as the immigration officer moved to stamp her passport, he hesitated, checked his monitor, and two people in conservative blue suits materialized behind Nadia. Badges. FBI. The white brunette with the round face was Agent Diehl and the dark, squat wrestler with the goo-goo eyes, that was Agent Espinoza.

“We’d like a few words with you, Ms. Zhang,” said Diehl.

The gate barrier remained closed. Diehl and Espinoza bore the grim countenances of people interested in more than a little chitchat.

Perhaps there was a way out. The drone strike would give her plenty of opportunities to escape this mess. Maybe her knowledge was leverage. In that moment, though, Nadia didn’t have time to reason things through. She just knew that she was surrounded and outgunned, and that these people would throw her in a black hole and torture her if they had any inkling of what she had done—what she might know.

Better if they thought she were incapacitated…or dead.

She leaped high, so fast that her kick crushed Espinoza’s windpipe. Diehl whipped out a service pistol. Nadia tumbled, the first shot whistling through her blond locks, and cut through Diehl’s stance with a low sweep. She bolted for the gate, not waiting to see what had become of the two agents. The immigration officer was standing up, shouting into a radio strapped to his shoulder. She vaulted the gate as more immigration uniforms streamed in. Then bam and she shuddered, her entire body quivering for a moment, her own blood beckoning from the tiled floor. She caught a glimpse of Diehl stumbling over her, pistol in both hands, before everything went dark.

When she revived, everything was swaying. She counted dome lights and exhaust fans, and a pair of yellow bars from which dangled thick plastic tubes. Sirens. She was staring at the ceiling of an ambulance. One of those drooping tubes led to the oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose. She glanced down at her naked feet poking out from a heavy sheet. There was another gurney beside her: Espinoza, face covered with a blanket. A medic sat on a bench reading a tablet screen. Beside her, Diehl stared into a private gloom.

Nadia moved her fingers, squeezed her muscles up and down. Not the toes—she didn’t want to call attention. She had only inches of room, and only seconds’ worth of surprise.

Boo!

Two minutes later she sprang open the back of the ambulance doors dressed in Diehl’s suit, carrying her badge and gun, oblivious to just how much of Diehl’s blood decorated the outfit. Shooting the driver had been risky—Nadia hadn’t the first idea where they were—but better to risk a crash on a random street than attempt to escape within the warren of a hospital filled with cops.

And crash they did. She stumbled out of the ambulance, bleeding. They were on a highway within the city. Traffic still whizzed past, the autonomous vehicle lane a steady current of speeding cargo trucks, the human lanes snarled in a growing cluster around the moored ambulance.

Nadia blinked at the cars and at the hazy summer pall. Behind her were warehouses and a Domino’s Pizza. Across the highway was a stack of low-rise residential homes, not fancy ones, backing up to a small park. Beyond the cloverleaf loomed the tops of downtown’s skyscrapers. She pushed on her sunglasses.

Cars were slowing down. “Hey lady, you alright?”

She bolted for the warehouses, into an alley, banged into garbage cans, panting like a dog. Tire screeches, a human scream. She ran flat out.

The Domino’s Pizza trailer truck nearly backed into her. She pounded on the cabin’s door. The fat white woman, cigarette in her mouth, was about to snarl. Nadia held up the badge and the gun, and then smashed the gun against the driver’s temple. She didn’t have the strength to carry the body into the trailer. Faster to pull the woman out of the cabin, drag her to the side and push two big plastic trash cans around her. Nadia climbed up to the cabin, the driver’s keys in hand. Scooting inside, she saw the camera on the ceiling above the windshield. She couldn’t yank it free, so she shot it, the pistol’s bang filling the cabin.

Navigation controls, refrigeration monitors for whatever was in the trailer, A/V, the computer’s sensors. “Shit shit shit!” But the gun’s discharge continued to reverberate in her head, drowning out her own voice. She punched up the sensor preference screen. How much video of Nadia had been streamed to the Cloudchain already?

A gargantuan honk penetrated her fuzzy hearing. Another trailer truck was muscling through the service lane. For a moment Nadia wanted to just shoot the hell out of it. She paused to calm herself and take a breath. The truck’s controls seemed straightforward, the computer warning her before she reversed the trailer into the warehouse wall, but she shaved off the cabin’s opposite side mirror as she barreled out of there, all twelve wheels spinning.

Just keep moving.

Later, after she had abandoned the truck and run up and down the steepening slopes of the city, Nadia found an alleyway to crumple in. She was in the Mission District, the brick walls tagged by indecipherable graffiti, the local greasy spoon’s vent bathing her in the stench of meat past due. She perched her shades on her crown so she could cry into her palms.

She was screwed now. The chaos of the morning crashed upon her shoulders. The FBI had been waiting for her. What had she been thinking, revealing Mang’s plans to Gideon and Tom—to Sley? The government would never stop hunting her, not now. They had the data on her vax chip, all her biometrics linked to her name. Even if Mang got her a new passport and identity, he couldn’t change her DNA, so eventually she’d trigger a database alert.

No more crossing borders. No more downloading apps. No more facial-recognition payments. No more fixed addresses. Nadia Zhang had come to the end of the line. This world had become too tiny for her.

This is what Mang had foreseen decades ago. Such a moment would come for all of them. It had come now for her.

Stars fall, moon eclipses sun. She had always assumed Mang meant he was the moon, ready to overtake the old order.

Maybe, though… maybe they were the sun—that the Star Fall People had walked openly in the sunshine for five hundred years, and now night was about to fall.

Mang would know she had made a mistake. Why else would the FBI want to arrest her? Would he even help her try to find a new life in this terrible, electronic world? Maybe if she kowtowed, groveled at his feet after bearing him a gift. She knew, at least, what Mang would accept as a meaningful gesture.

Kong.

Sley still hated her, though. He had made that very clear. Any rational man would accept the offer to gang up against Mang, but Sley had spat on her. Very well, then. Nadia knew there was only one possibility now. Help Mang bring this world to its knees. And that meant eliminating Kong for good. Her original plan had been to use Kong’s son as a lure so she could talk reason into him. The bait would work just as well to deliver Kong to her master.

Nadia got to her feet and assessed herself for the first time. She looked a horror. It was a twelve-hour drive to Arizona, another twelve back. Nadia didn’t have much time. She kicked off the suit’s pants, with only a thong beneath. That was the idea. It took only a few minutes for a guy to stop his BMW for the hottest damsel in distress this side of the Pacific. And then that guy wound up folded into his own trunk, neck broken, as Nadia drove like hell for her desert ranch.

***

“I bet you’d like to see your father again.”

Highway lamps slashed across the car’s interior, casting Mike in a ghostly pallor. From beneath the tangled mop of hair, his black eyes stared like witnesses from the dead.

His silence irritated her. Everything the little creep did irritated her. If she didn’t think she needed him, she would have knocked his teeth out.

“Well?”

“I guess.”

“You guess? Every kid wants to see their parents, don’t they?”

Mike shifted in the passenger seat, miserably bored.

This morning, once she reached the adobe house, she had moved as quickly as possible, fighting off the urge to sleep. The house was registered under a false name, a precaution that had saved her before, but she had to assume the government would find this place. She’d give herself thirty minutes.

She showered, made herself coffee, grabbed her last three cartons of cigarettes, and packed a suitcase of practical things… She stood before her collection of paintings, smoking, and messaged Mang on his private VPN.

“Why have you not updated me about Tom Wozniak?”

“I have the phone. Do you want me to destroy it?”

“You were on the news.”

She hadn’t known.

“In a few days it won’t matter,” she said, tracing her finger along Baby Mei’s portrait, the four little eyes dotting the infant’s outsized skull.

“That’s for me to decide.”

She stifled a sigh. Why had it come to this, to having to appease this man? Was that the only way? “The FBI was waiting for me when I flew in. Wozniak must have found a way to pin me. Gideon told him.”

“Wozniak is in a hospital in Hong Kong. Gideon is still alive. What happened to Bram Horvat?”

The killer hired by your escaped computer program? She wondered how much Mang knew about what Genie had done to the hitman it had hired.

“I don’t know. You told me to let things run their course.”

“You haven’t told me what you learned from Gideon.”

The real question, Markus, is what has Gideon learned from me?

“He wasn’t trying to betray you. He was invited by an old colleague to do some consulting work in San Francisco. He’s a confused old man.”

“You’re a good liar, Nadia, except to me.”

She felt fear. Fear in her own house. It was nothing new, but it was intolerable.

“I haven’t lied.”

“Gideon told you the truth of Genie. Becker thinks Gideon offered his services; Gideon thinks Becker invited him. Genie tricked them both into meeting. Genie helped Kong escape from prison. It is trying to reunite them because they can destroy me.”

“The operation is compromised?” Please say yes.

“The operation is on schedule. Genie views me as a threat, but not because of the operation. It’s about who will rule this world once humanity’s numbers have been sufficiently culled.”

“Genie is still guiding those drones?”

“Genie’s mandate to preserve humanity appears to involve reducing the population to a level that can no longer impact the earth’s climate, and then managing the herds in controlled environments.”

Gideon had guessed correctly. “That thing wants to turn us all into cattle?” Or do you, Markus?

“You can understand why my interests diverge with Genie’s once the attack is executed. I am truly the only hope for a mankind free of the machine’s yoke.”

“Yes, master,” she said, conceding the words and hating him as never before.

“Find Kong. He’s already destroyed one cike unit. Either he helps me fight Genie or he dies. Do this, and I will forgive your trespasses.”

He knows… Mang knows everything, damn him.

Mang added, “He’s in San Francisco with George Becker and Becker’s daughter, Sofia. I’m downloading all the data I have on them.”

That waif Sley was banging, the Sofia Nadia had seen with him on screen, was the daughter of the man Sley had cuckolded! Nadia had to give it to the duke. He was even slimier than she had imagined.

“Then I’d best get going.” She waited for him to hang up first. She ground the cigarette butt beneath her heel and began dousing the studio with the can of gasoline she kept in the garage. When it was done, when all her baby portraits were glistening, she lit another cigarette and shouted for Mike to get his scrawny ass in gear.

Would she miss this place?

She’d miss the lizards out back.

Nadia spent the drive north turning over words. Mang’s. Gideon’s. Tom’s. Even Bram’s. She stopped once for coffee and a pee and more cigs, because the kid was smoking them just as fast. The sugar, salt and tobacco kept her going, but she still hadn’t slept since the private jet. She was so tired she kept pitching the car into the wrong lanes. Chitchat might keep her awake, but the twerp had nothing scintillating to say.

Mike said, “I don’t know what he looks like.”

“He hasn’t changed.”

“Yeah, but I don’t remember what he looks like.”

Yellow lights surrounding roadworks flashed in rows like martial fireflies.

“Think back to China.”

He curled his knees up and turned his back on her. “I don’t wanna remember ever again,” he mumbled.

Me neither.

***

Mang messaged her outside a nowhere town in the flat, sepia reaches of California’s central valley. The landscape was a depressing stretch of one version of hot brown upon another. The interstate freeway merged with Route 33. He told her pull over by the Dunkin Donuts and take on two passengers.

What the hell was this?