John Barnes - Directive 51

At the Hummer, she pushed the girl into the arms of one GAFE; the second one jumped in immediately, so that they had the prisoner wedged and seated. Bambi hopped into the front seat. She hadn’t had time to grab her bag, but there were probably ten “just in case Bambi comes to visit” closets at Castle Castro.

Bolton said, “No levante su cabeza, por favor.” Ysabel Roth gulped, nodded, and leaned forward so that she was completely below the level of the windows; one GAFE beside her tossed a couple of blankets and a towel in a disorderly heap on top of her. “All right, I hope you know the fastest way,” Bolton said.

“I know the best. Just keep this thing on the road and don’t outrun the sprayers on the tires. We have enough antiseptic juice to make it there?”

“Yep, I filled up when we got back.”

Mensche burst into the garage, waving his arm in a rapid roll: go, go, go, go, go!

Bolton started the Hummer, and they rolled forward; Mensche ran ahead of them and yanked down on the manual chain to raise the door.

They lurched into the drive behind the office park, away from the main public parking area, and Bolton gunned it, turning away from Aero Drive. “It’s near the Harbor,” Bambi said.

“Yeah, I know, I’ll turn back by going another way I know, but I’m hoping we won’t be—”

Something made a clank and a thud; everyone jumped. “That’s a bullet being stopped by the Kevlar curtains under the body panels,” Bolton said. He threw the Hummer in a tight turn around a couple of dead cars and was on a main road, running flat out; another clang-thud! from the rear door announced a second shot.

“Hang on,” Bolton said, and threw the Hummer hard around another turn, down a ramp into a different office-building parking lot; he circled three-quarters of the way around the building, climbed a ramp on the other side, and shot around a long, arcing road. “We were probably out of range, but why take chances? Now I’m going to double us back onto Aero, a nice safe mile and a half from the office, and with a couple rises in the road between us and them. If the tires and the luck hold, we’ll be down to the Harbor in less than fifteen minutes. Castro, can you explain that to our two soldiers? The only Spanish I know is for making arrests.”

She snorted. “Dad has pretenses of Old Californianess. He was too proud of his heritage as a descendant of the conquistadors to let his daughter learn Spanish. I don’t suppose either of them knows French, Russian, or German.”

A muffled voice said, “My Spanish is fine. Can I sit up? It’s hot under here.”

“Wait till we’re on Aero,” Bambi said, “but please explain now for the soldiers. They must be confused as hell.”

Ysabel Roth spoke for a short while and answered a couple of questions. Then one GAFE spoke to her for a couple of minutes, and she translated, “Hey, they say that being in the GAFEs means always being as confused as hell.”

“Our kind of outfit.” Bolton slowed as they approached the Harbor; more and more wrecks and junk lay in the road. “Ms. Roth, get down and stay down; we’re going slow enough to be a good target, and it’s always possible that someone had a working CB or something and we might be ambushed.”

Once, as they passed an apartment block, people ran out toward the Hummer from the driver’s side, but the GAFE on that side lowered his window and showed them his weapon, and they stepped back. “Just need food for the baby,” one of the men yelled. “Just need some help.”

They kept rolling, and Bambi tried to think of anything else they could have done. She couldn’t seem to come up with anything.

Harrison Castro had been careful about not letting anything important about Castle Castro leak into the media, despite a whirlwind of attention while it was being built. The outer surfaces were thin brick-and-concrete facades that looked fake-medieval, with far too much glass to be defensible; inside that relatively fragile box there were what amounted to concrete bunkers, with recessed steel shutters to cover the windows as needed. If anyone tries to shoot the place up, he had often explained to her, all that Hollywood-movie-castle crap will be blown into a heap of rubble, but behind it there’s bunkers you’d need tanks to take. And that’s the point where the asshole taxers, regulators, interferers, and Democrats find out that I’m an arrogant, practical, effective, energetic bastard disguising himself as an arrogant, pretentious, effete bastard.

Brush had been planted to conceal the turnoff, but Bambi had no trouble guiding Bolton into it. They bumped and rumbled up the apparent temporary dirt road to the first checkpoint. The guard was all business until Bolton lowered the window to talk to him, and Bambi said, “Hi, Mr. Duck!”

The guard was beaming. “Glad to see you home, and hope you’re staying. Are these friends of yours?”

“Terry Bolton here is, and I’d appreciate if you gave him an all-areas pass, and let him come and go as he needs. The rest are a case of bringing my work home with me.”

“You remember the way to the Secure Garage?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll let the house know you’re comin’. Mr. Castro will want to come down and say hi.”

“You still have a working radio or something?”

He grinned and shook his head, then pulled two flags from the holster at his side. “Mr. Castro always thought the world could end, and he made us all learn semaphore. Got a mirror for flashing Morse, too, but we’re being careful not to be conspicuous.”

On the way up the road, Bolton said, “Uh, his name is really Mr. Duck?”

“He was the only guy named Donald around when I was little, and I couldn’t pronounce Przeworski-Abdulkashian, but my father was not about to have me calling an adult by his first name, so I couldn’t call him Donald either. Hence…”

“Mr. Duck. He seemed to like it.”

“I was an awful kid but he thought I was cute.”

Bambi directed the biohazard Hummer through a complex, circuitous approach to the house along more than three miles of winding dirt roads. “What are all those branch roads, anyway?” Bolton asked. “Guest houses?”

“Some of them. Some are strongpoints, and some are both. And a lot are dead ends that are easy to cover from the house.”

“This place is a castle, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Did I mention my father is a bit eccentric?”

When they came around the last curve into the parking area in front of the Secure Garage, Harrison Castro was already there waiting for them, his shock of white hair billowing over his high forehead, bandito mustache curled up by his immense toothy grin, and in his around-the-Castle clothes—loose blue tunic and pantaloons, black boots, and an open, cowled red robe that made him look like he had escaped from the set of Star Wars for the Color-blind.

“ ’Scuse my having a warm family-values moment while you stop giggling,” Bambi told Bolton, popping her door and running to her father.

After a long hug, the older Castro said, “Well, I know why you didn’t call ahead. You’d better introduce me to everyone else.”

Bambi explained quickly, and Castro shook everyone’s hand, even Ysabel Roth’s. “Bambi says you’ve come over to our side, and you’re trying to help with information?”

“Yes, sir, I don’t know what—I mean, I sort of—uh, I have been trying to—”

The girl looked as if she’d been punched in the gut, her face pale and sick, and abruptly she fell down in the parking lot. Bambi and Bolton rolled her over. Her pupils were dilated but the same size; her breathing was harsh, deep, and irregular; there were flecks of foam around her mouth, and little twitches in the muscles of her face, but her arms and legs lay still and limp.