We slowed in the commute heading north on 5. There was some chance we’d be pulled over at the San Onofre checkpoint, but we had to get to LA to meet some people Cousins knew and there’s no quick way around la Migra. We were all white, I was no longer a suspect. We took the chance.
They did pull us out of the line at the checkpoint. They searched the car and gave us the long stare. We were fugitives from something or somebody, they could see it in our eyes. Cousins talked pleasantly. They had nothing on us, so they let us go.
I hate the law.
I snoozed most of the way to LA. We were deep in Laurel Canyon when I awoke. Banning drove up a twisting private road to the ridgeline. Late in the afternoon, the tree-filled hollows were sunk in shadow. Quail darted across the cracked asphalt behind us. The air blew sweet with eucalyptus and sage.
Banning stopped the car before a heavy steel gate. Cousins got out and spoke a few words into a box on a long, curving pole.
“Our safe house,” Cousins explained, climbing back in and slamming the car door. “This will take a minute. Lots of security to disarm.”
I was alert after my long nap. Now seemed the time, before we had to deal with anyone new. I could not explain my behavior back in El Cajon. I wanted to apologize, but that wasn’t appropriate, either. Maybe they were the ones who should apologize.
“What happened to me?” I asked.
Cousins looked over his shoulder. “Jail cuisine,” he said. “Someone doped your food when you were in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They wanted you to kill Rudy and me. That’s why they left the gun in your house.”
It seemed suddenly hard to breathe, sitting in the backseat, even with the windows rolled down. “Thanks for warning me,” I said.
“Did you get a phone call from someone you love?” Cousins asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Your dead wife?”
“Yeah . . .”
Cousins turned his focus on me like a teacher with a problem pupil. “I’m not sure who actually called, or who doped your food in the jail,” he said. “We suspect there are a number of agents in California, and elsewhere, working to intimidate us or kill us.”
“So why didn’t I shoot you?”
“Do you remember, you answered once and got an empty line?”
“Yeah.”
“That was me,” Cousins said. “The night before, when I brought dinner and dessert, I sprayed some bacteria on your cheesecake, harmless, but infected by my own special phages. I hoped they would give you at least partial immunity against later attacks.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said. I folded my arms over my stomach and felt like curling up and pulling a blanket over my head.
“Ideally, I would have given them forty-eight hours,” Cousins said, so matter-of-factly my fists clenched. I had to hold back from striking him. “By the time you were in jail, you were less than half-protected. When I learned you had been released, I phoned until I caught you at home. You were suggestible, but you weren’t their zombie yet, so I turned the tables. I ran you, in a way—gave you a list of numbers and asked you to describe the colors each one evoked. Then I told you this would take priority over everything else.”
“You called me first, made me jump through some hoops—and I forgot all about it?”
Cousins nodded. He didn’t seem to find any of this very funny, or even unusual. I had to put a shine on this shit and make it pretty. “You vaccinated me against mind control. Is that it?”
“Mostly,” Cousins said. “It still needs work.”
“And that stopped me from shooting you?”
“It was a little dicey,” Banning said with a sniff. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.
“You did set me up. I was a guinea pig.”
“We’re all guinea pigs,” Cousins said. “It was for your own protection, and ours, too. We don’t know what Silk is capable of, the size of their operations now, but at one time they had thousands of agents around the world.”
I rubbed the door handle, seriously considering just getting out and walking away. But Cousins threw his arm over the back of the seat. His eyes tracked my arm to the door, and he looked straight at me and shook his head.
I released my grip on the handle. “Tell me again, what we’re doing here,” I said.
“Let’s wait till we get to the house,” Cousins said. “Tammy’s laying out dinner. Clean food.”
“It’s quite a story,” Banning said.
The gate swung open. In the road ahead, a spiked caltrops rolled into its iron sheath.
“All clear,” Cousins said with a sigh.
Up the long drive, over a cattle barricade with big green transformer boxes on either side, past video cameras mounted on tall steel poles, through a no-man’s-land surrounded by barbed wire, Banning drove the old Plymouth as if it were a limousine carrying heads of state.
A dark, tubby, cheerful-looking fellow met us at the Spanish-style double door, under the deep overhang of the front porch. Cousins introduced me to Joseph Marquez, our host. He wore silk pajama bottoms over a tight potbelly, had a thick-pelted chest and arms, a flowing Maharishi beard, and long, curly, jet-black hair topped by a little embroidered yarmulke. He looked a lot like Jerry Garcia. His eyes were small, amber, and shrewd, and he had expressive lips and perfect teeth.
Marquez circled suspiciously. “You check him over?”
“He’s okay,” Cousins said. Marquez scowled and repeated my name, enunciating every syllable, until I wanted to curse. Then he lifted his arms in the air and shook them like a preacher getting his daily revelation.