Distress

Who was it? Who was the extremists' assassin? Who had had the opportunity to infect me with the engineered cholera? Some stranger I'd passed in the Phnom Penh transit lounge, or the crowded bazaar of Dili airport? The Polynesian businessman who'd sat beside me, on the last leg of the flight? Indrani Lee!

I was shaking with horror, certain that a bullet would pierce my skull in a matter of seconds—but part of me still wanted, badly, to break open the door and see.

I could have broadcast the moment live on the net—and gone out in a blaze of revelation.

Another shell exploded nearby, the shock wave resonating through the building so powerfully that the frame almost flexed itself free of the lock.

I turned and fled.

* * *

The procession out of the city was an ordeal—but perhaps never more than it had to be. From my snail's-eye view of the crowd, everyone looked as terrified, as claustrophobic, as desperate for momentum as I was—but they remained stubbornly, defiantly patient, inching forward like novice tightrope walkers, calculating every movement, sweating from the tension between fear and restraint. Children wailed in the distance, but the adults around me spoke in guarded whispers between the ground-shaking detonations. I kept waiting for an apartment block to collapse in front of us, burying a hundred people and crushing a hundred more in the panic of retreat—but it failed to happen, again and again, and after twenty excruciating minutes we'd left the shelling behind.

The procession kept moving. For a long time, we remained jammed in a herd, shoulder-to-shoulder, with no choice but to keep step—but once we were out of the built-up suburbs and into the industrial areas, where the factories and warehouses were set in wide expanses of bare rock, there was suddenly space to move freely. As the opaque scrum around me melted into near transparency, I could see half a dozen quad-cycles ahead in the distance, and even an electric truck keeping pace.

By then we'd been walking for almost two hours, but the sun was still low, and as the crowd spread out a welcome cool breeze moved in between us. My spirits were lifting, slightly. Despite the scale of the exodus, I'd witnessed no real violence; the worst I'd seen so far was an enraged couple screaming accusations of infidelity at each other as they trudged along, side by side, each holding up one end of a bundle of possessions wrapped in orange tent fabric.

It was clear that the whole evacuation had been rehearsed—or at least widely discussed, in great detail—long before the invasion. Civil defense plan D: head for the coast. And a planned evacuation, with tents, with blankets, with solar-rechargeable stoves, didn't have to be the disaster, here, that it might have been almost anywhere else. We were moving closer to the reefs and the ocean farms—the source of all the island's food. The freshwater arteries in the rock could be tapped with relative ease, as could the sewage treatment conduits. If exposure, starvation, dehydration and disease were the greatest killers of modern warfare, the people of Stateless seemed to be uniquely equipped to resist them all. The only thing that worried me was the certainty that the mercenaries understood all of this, perfectly. If their aim with the shelling had been to drive us out of the city, they must have known how relatively little misery it would cause. Maybe they believed that selective footage of the exodus would still be enough to confirm the political failure of Stateless in most people's eyes—and with or without scenes of dysentery and starvation, there was no doubt that the position of the anti-boycott nations had already been weakened. I had a queasy suspicion, though, that merely evicting a million people into tent villages wouldn't be enough for EnGeneUity.

I'd transmitted the footage from Buzzo's suite, along with a brief deposition putting it in context, to the FBI and to the security firm's head office in Suva. It had seemed the proper way to let the families of the three men hear of their deaths, and to set in motion as much of an investigation as was possible under the circumstances. I hadn't sent a copy to SeeNet—less out of respect for the bereaved relatives, than out of a reluctance to choose between admitting to Lydia that I'd concealed the facts about Mosala and the ACs… and compounding the crime, by pretending that I had no idea why Buzzo had been assassinated. Whatever I did, I was probably screwed in the long run, but I wanted to delay the inevitable for a few more days, if possible.