The Sacrifice Game

(88)

“H i, it’s Jed,” Jed 1 said. His voice was heavily processed to eliminate background clues, but Ana’s telephone technicians quickly determined that it was really him. You could hear that he was smiling.

Ana was all over it. “Okay, the second relay’s in.” This was the telephone code locator. “That’s-that’s U.S., so, it’s in, um-”

Antonio said, “Pawleys Island. North Carolina. Jed’s old beach house.”

“You’re sure?”

Ana snapped, “Probably.”

“Okay.”

“It’s about a two-hour drive from there.”

“Got it,” Ana said. “Okay, Antonio, you take the big chopper. We’ll find a car there.”

“Never mind, I’ll put in a bike.”

“Like, a chopper in the chopper?” I said.

“Right.”

“Good deal,” Ana said. “Just, keep an eye out for decoy relays. And bombs and the usual shit.”

“He’s not going to have any booby traps,” I said.

“Not your style, huh?” she said. I stared. “It’s classier to just vaporize the whole place, right?”

“Okay, let’s not bust Jed’s balls,” Marena said. “Jed-Sub-Three’s.”

“What’s left of them,” I said.

“Sorry,” Ana said.

The team also ascertained that Jed 1 was using a chain of physical relays-pairs of telephones set up in different locations around the country-to make the call difficult to trace, since by the time each location was tracked down, and the next one in the chain was identified, he’d be long gone. Even so, this was a huge step forward for the team, and I-trying to ignore the oddity of talking with myself-took over the call.

I said, “Aren’t you curious about what’s going to happen in the future?”

“There isn’t any future.”

“Don’t you want to meet Kristen Stewart?” I asked. “We just signed her for the sequel.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” Hmm, I thought.

“Look, get your heads together and poke me on HarpoCrazy,” he said. It was an anonymous-messaging site that I, or he, had used before for talking to the posse at La Sierra. Ordinarily it wasn’t anything that the Warren code spooks couldn’t crack, of course, but he’d be covering his digital trail anyway, way before the message ever got to the site. So I guess he just wanted to make sure nobody else would come across the exchange. One thing HarpoCrazy did do well was keep their text off search engines. Supposedly the NSA has a whole division that just keeps on breaking into the site, twenty-four hours a day.

“Uh, okay,” I said. “HarpoCrazy.”

He hung up.

“What the hell are you doing?” Marena asked. “You have to keep him on the phone!”

“He just screwed up,” I said.

“How?”

“He just told us where he is without realizing it.”

“Sorry?”

“Or because he didn’t think about it. He got that Kristen Stewart post. And he wasn’t looking for it. So he must have played the Game and just found it. I mean, the weekly Grandessa Game.”

“Okay, that’s terrific, so that tells you what?”

“Well, I do that, I mean, you know, he does that right after midnight Mass. That means it’s already Sunday there.”

“Where he is.”

“Right.”

“It’s only Saturday.”

“Right, so, where does that mean he is?”

She thought for about a half-second. “So it’s super-early there? So it’s in the Pacific. Near the international date line.”

“Correct. Right here, we’re, you know, we’re Coordinated Universal Time minus five hours. But wherever he is, it’s UTC plus fourteen.”

“So it’s an island. It’s, it’s some nudibranch thing?”

“Correct. And there was a big new species discovery out there, and it came out in the JMS, uh, the Journal of Malacological Studies, in December, I mean, it was the December issue, but it got published in October. Mexichromae zenobia. That’s a kind of possibly eusocial ’branch, uh, nudibranch-”

“Right, right, so where is he?” Her thumb hovered twitchily over the CALL icon on her tablet.

“Guess.”

“Come on, don’t bust my ovaries, where where where where where?”

“Where’s Zenobia from?”

The Recent Solar Obscuration as Witnessed at Ixmul

Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

By Subscription Lambeth • 1831