On a Clear Day (21 page)

Maybe, I thought. Or maybe it’s time to find out what “real” means.

W
e were back at the Paradise hotel. When you walked in, you had to pass through security. Huge, ugly suckers packing heat. Drego was on the phone again and headed for the elevator without saying anything to me. I dragged ass behind him and signaled that I had something to say.

“What?!” he asked, covering up the phone.

“I’ll have a game plan and a tablet model in the morning,” I said.

“Have it tonight,” he barked at me. “Ten o’clock.”

The macho crap kept coming at me, kept pissing me off, but I gave him the thumbs-up sign anyway. I felt like the bitch on the back of the motorcycle, and I didn’t like it.

I had to stop for a minute. The first floor of the hotel
was a casino. I looked around me. It was like a bad art installation. Hundreds of colored lights moving around the gaming machines, the weird noises the machines made—they sounded like cartoon animals making out. There were more old people around than I thought there would be. They were kind of freaky. I knew that wasn’t right, but that was me.

People sat in front of the machines. They put in coins and pressed a button to see if they’d won anything. The machine made some noises and then told them that they’d lost. It was pathetic. I focused in on one woman and saw she was spacey. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She wasn’t really alive or really dead, just in the waiting zone.

These were the High Gaters, with guards and security beams and alarms to keep the bad people in line. Not like my family, Low Gaters, with only pathetic little fake wood fences and statues of the Virgin Mary in front of every house to keep us safe. Oh, yeah, and the barbed wire. I didn’t want to become a Low Gater, or a High Gater. I just wanted to have a life.

“Cocktail, dearie?” A waitress offered me a drink from one of six she was carrying around on a tray. She was wearing what looked like a bunny outfit. It could have been a rat suit, I don’t know.

Upstairs. Javier greeted me and told me that Anja was in the next room. I didn’t know why he was telling me this, but I went in and found her. She was sitting in front of a tablet, in her shorts and a T-shirt with birds printed on
the front. She looked cute. She had a plate in front of her. On the plate was a huge cheeseburger, and I realized that I was starving. But this was so different from what I’d just been through. Food, and birds, and people with the same ideas that I had, or maybe just the same hopes. How many worlds were there?

“Can I have a bite?” I asked Anja.

“There’s another one over there on the desk,” she said. “Help yourself.”

I saw the serving tray and the aluminum cover over the plate. I lifted the cover and found the cheeseburger next to a bed of fries. There was a small bowl of some kind of salad next to the plate.

“How did it go?” Anja asked me.

“Mmmfh!” I answered. My mouth was full, and I wanted to get more in it as soon as possible.

“Is that bad or is that good?” she asked, smiling. Home girl, all the way.

I pointed to her tablet and made a circular motion with one finger. “What are you doing?”

“Still organizing the lies,” she answered. “I’ve got a fake network going of people denying the rumors about C-8 not really being connected to Sayeed.”

“Details,” I said. The cheeseburger was awesome. I had grease all over my lips and something sticky on my chest.

“If I get enough people denying the rumor, then people are going to start believing that it was true,” Anja said.

“People know about C-8’s connection with Sayeed?”

“No, but they know about the”—she checked a counter on her tablet—“four thousand and nine messages saying it’s not true.”

“That’s what you do all the time?” I asked. “Deal in truth and lies?”

“That’s all you need, I think,” she replied. “How did your day go? Did Drego turn you into a ghetto chick?”

“I think everything I thought I knew about the world was wrong,” I said. “I went into the black section of Miami tonight. It looks like it’s been bombed for about six months straight. Met with some people who know about Drego. They’ve got a lot of respect for him down here. We met with one of the local gang bosses and his girl. Maybe his girl, I don’t know. Anyway, she tipped into the room, and then she took out her works and shot herself full of dope right in front of us! Can you believe that?”

“Right in front of you?”

“Yeah!”

“Weird.”

“No, not weird—just like there’s no real life left for some of these people,” I said. “Where did you get the cheeseburgers? Room service?”

“Javier’s hooked up with a guy.” Anja was working the tablet furiously. “He got food for us. Javier ordered something funky, like lobster Oldburg or something like that. I wouldn’t eat a lobster.”

“Why?”

“They’re ugly,” Anja said.

“What are you typing?”

“I’m getting on my mad voice about the rumors,” Anja said. “I’m saying that it’s people on the left who are spreading them.”

“That’s a lie too, right?” I said. “It’s just us?”

“It’s just me, mostly,” Anja said. “But more people are coming online and registering their complaints. A lie is a terrible thing to waste.”

Wild. The girl who could tell if anybody else was lying could lie like a champ. Loved it.

Copping some downtime. I got my room assignment from Anja and a key card. I found the room and fell across the bed. The whole Miami scene was depressing me. I finally knew why people didn’t fight back against C-8, or why they hadn’t fought back against dictators in the past. The shit was just too hard.

I almost fell asleep, but I kept thinking about the girl we had dragged into the car. Somewhere, somehow, I was going to have to figure out what her life was about. Then I was going to have to find her and explain it to her.

Knock on the door. I got up because I thought it was Anja. It was Michael.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Okay. Drego knows some pretty scary people,” I said. I moved aside and let him into the room.

“What do your models say?” Michael asked as he sat on the edge of the bed.

“None of them look good,” I said. I sat on the bed next
to him and flipped open the laptop. I searched through the files until I found the ones modeling Sayeed’s probable attacks, and scanned them. “So far they all show a lot of killing, not that many variations, and C-8 coming out the winner in all of them.”

“You going to come up with something different?”

“I’m going to try,” I said. He shifted slightly so that our legs were touching. I looked up at him and he moved his leg away.

No, Michael, I can’t switch between worlds that easily
.

“You look like you could use some sleep,” he said.

“Sounds good,” I said. “Drego wants my models in”—I checked the time—“forty-five minutes.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

To sleep, to dream, and there’s the fucking rub
.

B
ack to the tablet. Look at the models. Look at the rules I laid out for Sayeed, and the ones for Drego. The most probable scenario, by about 16 percent, was that Sayeed would attack exactly as Drego had thought. He wouldn’t vary even if he knew Drego’s people were waiting for him. It had worked for him in Morocco, and he would stick with it.

Looked at the maps of Miami. The city was divided into three large sections: gated communities with subdivision names like Garden of Eden and Jalel Valley; the Casino section that stretched from the waterfront to a position almost abutting the Gaters’ section; and then the rest of the city, where the poor lived.

The poor section was itself divided into two sections, with a row of low but dense shrubbery separating them. I ran the maps through again to see which of the two outside lanes Sayeed could take to most effect. I picked one with only a slightly better possibility of being right.

Ran everything again, finally realizing I wasn’t inputting anything different and would come up with the same results. The phone rang. Drego. There’s a meeting in Michael’s suite on the third floor.

“Five minutes,” he said.

He said it like he was giving me an order. I thought of the girl he had hit in the street. Maybe that kind of crap turned Mei-Mei on. I didn’t go for it.

Michael’s room. There were about forty guys, all white, in the room. I looked again and saw that some of the guys weren’t white, but they looked white, even the black ones. Like a football team. They were mostly built, some of them were good-looking, all serious as shit. Michael was talking.

“Each of you has a squad of eight fighters. I hope it doesn’t go that far, but we need to interrupt Sayeed’s grandstanding and the buzz it can create. The intelligence, from Drego and Dahlia, is that Sayeed is looking to make a move early Wednesday morning, most likely before the sun comes up. Drego will be in overall command and will lay out the plans for you. If Sayeed does have a lightning force, a unit going from spot to spot to disrupt the fighting,
it’ll be Tristan’s responsibility, and the guys he has with him, to neutralize that threat. Drego?”

“There are three ways into the inner city,” Drego started. “We can’t be sure which way he’ll try or if he’ll try to come in all of them. Dahlia, do you have an opinion?”

“In the past he’s attacked on the sides, so I think he’ll continue that operating method,” I said. My throat was going dry. “The tablet model suggests one of the entries over the others as being the most advantageous to him. But if he doesn’t trust his foot soldiers, then he’s liable to send them in the riskier way, and save his own guys—the guys from Morocco—for the better one.”

I looked around the room. They weren’t following me! I realized that the projections I was making didn’t make sense to them. They wanted clearer answers than I was giving them. No, not clearer, simpler.

“People, these are video-game examples. In the best-case-scenario breakdown, people are going to die. People are going to be blown away and end their lives not knowing what happened to them. Everything we know, or find out, or guess correctly, is just going to make it more likely that we survive.”

“That works for me, Dahlia,” Tristan said. “Sometimes survival is all you got going for yourself.”

“We’ll go to the sites Dahlia has mapped out and take a look,” Michael said.

“C
heck this out! Check this out!” Mei-Mei’s voice went up three tones. We were gathered around Javier’s van in the Belle Harbor section. Javier had put a television monitor on the tailgate.

On the screen, a pale-looking man with a big head was talking to a group of younger men and a young woman to his left.

“Who is he?” Drego.

“Florida’s lieutenant governor,” Javier answered. “I wonder what he’s up to.”

The woman came up, whispered something to the lieutenant governor, and then stepped back.

After a voice-over announced who he was, Lt. Governor
Adrian Rogers smiled into the camera and relaxed his shoulders. “This afternoon I spoke to the board members and the executive committee of Natural Farming. There have been some fairly persistent rumors about some bizarre connection between Natural Farming, one of the oldest companies in North America, and some black terrorist group from North Africa. I’ve known Tom Pettaway over at Natural for more than thirty years. He’s a good family man, a Marlins fan, and he supports the Seminoles. What more can you ask for? The rumors aren’t true, so I asked what Tom and the board made of them.”