Greg Bear - Mariposa

"If you ask me," Camp said, "you might go all psycho on my ass any minute."

"I'm okay with women," Nathaniel said, and grinned at Camp, showing his teeth.

"How about male colleagues?"

Nathaniel pirate-squinched his face, then let it relax. "Sorry. Nothing."

"Fuck you," Camp said.

The new coordinates would take them out of La Jolla entirely, up into the hills overlooking Camp Pendleton.

Camp chuffed. "The Doc thought Lee was the most stable-but then, he's always looked cool and collected. In Arabia, Lee was cooler than the Talos goon squad-even with his arm in shreds. But right now, it's you, isn't it?"

"I go day to day. I want to know what's happening. Don't you?"

"Curiosity worth dying for?"

"Life is discovery. The Quiet Man wants us to follow a trail. Maybe he wants us to put a stop to what we've started."

"Never met him," Camp said. "Just took orders from the rest of you and did my work. But it takes a strange man to work a thirty million dollar contract for three years and then get all moral and weepy."

"Then maybe he just wants revenge."

"That I can get behind," Camp said.

The drive was going to take longer than Nathaniel expected. He turned east on 76 and headed toward Vista. Camp's hand had stopped its periodic tremor and his face was regaining its color, but his head nodded to some internal, irregular beat.

"It changes all the time," he said. "If we're coming unglued, if our genes are getting shut off in weird sequences… Who knows what that could do, medically? Maybe it'll end up killing us."

"They tested it on animals," Nathaniel said.

"That's so reassuring," Camp said. "Maybe it's like a way to make assassins better killers, easier to brainwash. Wouldn't Price want something like that?"

Nathaniel thought that over as he turned off 76 and headed north. The country here was gray and dry, the trees by the side of the blacktop roads mostly dead. This area used to be covered with groves and farms. Now it looked blasted. This wasn't drought caused by global warming, however; this was the way California always looked when the money and the water went away.

It looked like much of Mexico.

"I don't feel easy to indoctrinate, and I don't like taking orders any more than I did before, maybe less," Nathaniel finally said. "How about you?"

"No," Camp admitted. "I'm like a cranky baby. But I am more coordinated, in a weird way-better at physical stuff. And quicker at learning some things. You?"

Nathaniel nodded. "Up to a point." His shoulder and wrists were still sore.

"I wouldn't much care if I actually did kill somebody, though. Guilt tank running on empty. Feels good-liberation plus. About this little trip-you're taking us someplace you've never been, without a map, just some coordinates. How?"

Nathaniel tapped the rearview mirror, which displayed a compass rose and NNE. "The compass, the speedometer, and the clock."

"In your head? Were you always that good?" Camp asked.

"No," Nathaniel said. "Runs down the blood sugar. Sometimes it hurts. There's energy bars in the glove box. Hand me one and help yourself."

The Hyundai did well enough on the next part of the journey, a rutted dirt road across a low plateau of scrub. At the end of the road, still within sight of the ocean-perhaps three miles down the gentle west-facing slope and surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire-they spotted a square concrete blockhouse and a smaller shack, separated by about a hundred feet.

No visible power lines stretched this far, and no evidence of any sort of receiver dish or telecom setup, either.

"The middle of nowhere," Camp said.

Nathaniel pulled the car up to a gate. A weather-beaten keypad-speaker combo and video camera mounted on a pole poked up from the dirt to the left.

Several old metal signs lay face down inside the fence perimeter.

The keypad was new and looked more than interesting. It provoked another variety of bee vision: brilliant warm colors for objects of particular significance, other areas cool and subdued or totally grayed-a way for his mind to leap-frog the old lines between conscious and subconscious reasoning.

It might take him months to harness this talent-or he'd never get the trick of it.

For now, Nathaniel suspected both he and Camp shared the same opinion. If this property had ever belonged to the Quiet Man, none of the Turing Seven had been informed. And likely the Quiet Man had kept it secret from Price as well.

The speaker crackled and the camera angled to take them in. Then the Quiet Man's voice-unmistakable-said, "Nathaniel! Come on in. Is that Camp sitting beside you?"

"Yes, sir," Camp said with a toothy grin.

"The gate's open. See you at the first stop-the tumbledown place. Glad you could both make it."

Lion City

For many years, Texas had been touchy about the death chamber in Huntsville. Texas still led the world in per capita executions, and also in DNA exonerations, but that did not stop the fatally grinding wheels of state justice. Lion City alone had sent fifteen of its former citizens to the Walls Unit in the ten years since the town's incorporation, so many that both the Bureau of Prisons and JPATS-the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation system, a decades old mash-up of the U.S. Marshals and Border Security-had refused to transport their prisoners, leaving it to the Department of Corrections to "haul their own garbage," as the local Fetch bloggers put it.

JPATS was having a tough enough job dealing with hundreds of thousands of Mexicans eager to get north, get work, get food; away from death squads, cartels, and paramilitary reprisals. In the drought, Mexico was coming apart like a piñata in a major league batting cage.

Add in the U.S. near-bankruptcy and the efforts by twenty Texas counties to go their own way and not pay taxes…

Tacitly supported by the Governor…

Border Security, the Department of Justice, and Texas state law enforcement had long since put up brick walls between their operations. No federal agency wanted to be tarred by Texas justice.

The Tunnel began a third of a mile from the Lion City Correctional Center, a spare, sandstone-faced building with tiny narrow windows adjacent to the historic county courthouse. The Tunnel had been expensive but it kept out reporters-though lately very few reporters had been covering the case of Little Jamey Trues.

Too dangerous.

This was where Talos Corporation got its justice served out to Axel Price's secret orders, and there was no reason to let the outside world know every little detail, including who was being sent where.

The dwindling national press-those journalists who still had a travel budget, who still worked for networks or newspapers or the five prime news sites and could afford to travel rather than just sit in front of a screen and suck back coffee and pontificate on what others saw and wrote-was as worn out and discouraged as the rest of the nation.

Screw the bastards.

He touched the temple piece on his spex and went off grid, then removed the glasses, folded them in a leather case, and stuffed the case into his shirt pocket.

Most federal agencies had been quietly but steadily releasing private companies from their sensitive law enforcement activities. Texas, however, had dug in. Working through Talos, the state DOC relied on Midland-based PerpTrans Inc. to transport its prisoners.

PerpTrans drivers were allowed to park their prisoner transport vans at home. Some used them to haul kids to birthday parties and carry college students back and forth to binges.

And that was one gap in Price's steel gauntlet.

The Tunnel scanned William's new chip and the truck's serial number and accepted the Econoline through its automated steel doors. The Vanilla Extract team had been told that people (and only people) monitored the security cameras that sprouted like shiny black mushrooms around the concrete entrance. No automated face recognition.