Zero Option

41

Carson pulled off the interstate into a rest area at a little after 3:00 a.m. He was about fifty miles out of Atlanta on Interstate 85, which ran northeast toward Greensboro and the Carolinas. He had been having trouble keeping his eyes open as the adrenaline finally wore off. He parked the pickup at the far end of the parking area, backing it hi to conceal the government license plate, and shut it down. He leaned back in the seat and immediately sat straight back up. He put his right hand between the windbreaker and the back of his shut and felt the large wet stain across his back. Jesus, he thought. This is all I need. The damned fence wire must have gotten me.

He carefully peeled the windbreaker off to see if it was stained through, and it was, but only on the inside lining. He felt his back again, and this time his hand came away with blood on it. Shit, he thought. Then he noticed the hole in the side of the windbreaker. He grabbed it, stared at it, and then turned the jacket over and found another hole on the other side. It hadn’t been the fence. Those two bastards had shot him.

He opened the truck door and got out gingerly, because now his entire back was really hurting. He slipped the jacket back on, then reached into the backseat of the truck for his trip kit, a small bag containing toiletry articles and a hand towel to use at rest stops. He locked the truck up and walked over to the facilities, which at this hour of the morning were empty. He went into a stall and took his jacket and shirt off and then his undershirt. The undershirt was soaked with blood, and the shirt was only in marginally better condition. He went back out to the sink, turned around, looked at himself in the mirror. There was a long red furrow cutting across the top of his back at a slight diagonal.

It did not appear to be very deep, but it was red and angry-looking.

Even as he watched, a thin trickle of blood seeped out on the left-hand side.

He got out the towel and tried for some hot water, but only the cold faucets worked. He wet the towel, considered putting some soap on it, decided against that, and then folded the towel into a long bandage and draped it over the cut. The stinging was intense, but then it subsided.

The towel didn’t reach around to his chest, so he put the shirt back on, trying to hold the towel in place with the shirt. He put the bloody undershirt in the trash can. He thought about that for a moment, fished it back out, and flushed it down a toilet. It took two tries before it disappeared. If they were hunting him, there was no sense in making it easy. He put the jacket back on, adjusted the towel under it all, and went back outside.

A large van had pulled in next to his truck, backing in just like Carson had done. The driver, who appeared to be a fat man with a huge mountain-man beard, was already asleep in his seat, his mouth partially open and his snores audible outside the van. Magnetic stick-on signs on the van announced an Atlanta-based heating, plumbing, and air conditioning company.

Carson got back into his truck and tried lying sideways on the front seat. His eyelids felt like lead, but sleep would not come. He kept seeing the holocaust at the DRMO. He imagined he could still feel the intense heat of the flame wall in the brush as he escaped. But he had escaped, at least for now. There had been MPs at the front gate when he drove out, but they were on the incoming side and had waved his government truck right through. The cylinder was now stashed out in a toolbox in the back of the pickup. The bags of money were undoubtedly long since toast.

So Tangent had been planning to double-cross him all along. A million bucks. He should have known. They’d probably planned to take him to some dark alley hi south Atlanta and donate him to the city’s nightly body count. The real question was, Where in the hell had those other guys come from, the guys in helmets and goggles, throwing incendiaries into all the warehouses? Certainly that hadn’t been Tangent.

Despite his fatigue, his eyes opened as the answer came to him. Those had been Army guys. Soldiers. The Army had sent a team in to destroy the DRMO!

Fucking Stafford had talked.

He put his head back down on the seat and closed his eyes again. The packs of hundreds he’d put into his pants pockets dug into his thighs, but he was too tired to care. The rumble of idling diesels came through the partially opened window as he tried to figure out what had happened tonight. The Army had gone there twice to search the place. But there was no way in hell you could search a DRMO, not in under a year’s time.

So someone very important had elected to burn the whole damn thing down and, hopefully, the missing cylinder with it. That fire would have done the job, too. He was amazed at the scope of the Army’s reaction. They must be some desperate sum bitches indeed, he thought.

He tried to think clearly, to overcome the drugged feeling that was seeping into his brain. A dull, throbbing pain was pulsing in his upper back. He would have to get that cut cleaned up and disinfected pretty soon. He wondered what had happened to Tangent and his little crew. Had the Army sent some kind of Special Forces team, or had there been lots of Army hidden out there in the dark on that airfield? If so, had they captured Tangent? That would be interesting.

He wondered now a Washington arms dealer was going to explain what the hell he and a dozen accomplices were doing there hi east bumfuck Atlanta, Georgia, in the middle of the night. Even the Army would have to make a connection between Tangent and the missing weapon.

He shuddered. If the Army was sufficiently upset about the cylinder to Burn down a government installation, they probably wouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble getting information out of a bunch of civilians. And if Tangent was singing, then the Army had to know by now that he, Carson, had the cylinder. None of them would know, of course, that he’d lost the money, although those two soldiers might have seen the bags, and seen the back wall collapse on top of them. But probably not. They’d fired at him all right, but then they would have been shagging ass.

The big question was, What would the Army do about this new situation?

If they were ready to admit the cylinder was missing, then he was screwed. Every law-enforcement agency in the country would be looking for him. But if they weren’t, well … He still might have a chance to get away. He knew he must have a couple thousand dollars in cash in his pockets. And a government-issue pickup truck.

That woke him up. Here he was, sitting in a public rest stop in an Army-green government pickup truck, complete with a government license plate and a bunch of U.S. Army serial numbers stenciled on the doors.

Need to do something about that. He heaved himself up, looked out the window, and saw the magnetic signs on the van next door. Those signs would cover up the stencils on his doors. Steal his license plate, too.

Hell, put the government plate on the van, throw some shit in the game.

Fully awake now, he grabbed a screwdriver out of the glove compartment and slipped out of the pickup truck. His back let him know it wasn’t pleased with that maneuver. He went around to the back and stopped to look and listen. Behind the parking area was a dense stand of loblolly pines. He could hear occasional traffic beyond that, out on the interstate. The rest stop was well lighted, but he was in shadow behind the truck and the van. The nearest vehicle was parked on the other side of the parking area. He listened. The man in the van was still snoring away. He bent down and removed his plate and switched it with the van’s plate. Then he stood up, — looked around again to make sure no one was walking to or from the rest rooms, slipped between the van and his truck, and lifted off the magnetic sign, which he transferred to the door of his pickup truck. He went around to the other side and took that one, too, which he slapped on the driver’s side of his truck.

He got back into his truck, careful not to lean back, and started the engine, watching the snoring man through the window on the passenger side. The big man never even twitched. Carson drove out of the rest stop in his newly commercialized pickup truck, which in Georgia made him practically invisible. He got back on the interstate and drove for twenty minutes before realizing that he was poking along at fifty-five in a seventy-mile an hour one. This won’t hack it, he thought, with a mighty yawn. I’ve got to get some rest.p>

Ten minutes later, he rolled up to a budget motel and rang the bell for the night attendant. An aroma of curry accompanied the sleepy young Pakistani man who took his money through a sliding glass door and handed him back a key. He drove around to the back wing of the motel and parked. He got out and looked around. Almost all the parking spaces in the lot were filled, with every vehicle’s windows made opaque by a heavy dew. There was a low drone coming from several climate-control units. He debated with himself about what to do with the cylinder. Take it in or leave it in the truck? He decided to leave it.

He went into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed, exhausted and depressed by the night’s events and his escape from Atlanta. Everything he had worked for was gone now. The DRMO was gone, the money was gone, he was wounded, and his fancy Washington fence was probably singing to the military police, which meant that the government would be looking for Wendell Carson gangbusters in very short order. That fucking Tangent.

Okay, so he still had the cylinder, but what the hell could he do with it? Tangent’s arms-sales channel had” been his best and probably only bet for making something of the cylinder, but now … tired. Too damn tired to think. Get some sleep. Figure out what to do in the morning.

What to do and where to go. Maybe he could approach the Army somehow, sell them back then-precious little horror. His last thoughts were of Stafford, that interfering son of a bitch who was behind all this somehow. However this all came out, he knew he had a score and a half to settle with Special Investigator David Stafford.

He lay back on the bed, cried out, and rolled quickly over to his side.

He’d forgotten about the wound. You need to clean it, he thought. You need to go take a hot shower, get some soap on that. I will, he thought.

In just a minute. And then he was asleep.