"All I know is that the FBI is after her. I think they can find a law."

"Jesus. When it rains, it pours."

"Don't worry about the rain. Just move as fast as you can."

Norman had to smile. How long did you have to live in a country before you picked up the catchphrases? "Okay. If Rory agrees, we'll be out long before dark."

"If she doesn't agree, you leave by yourself, okay? All this s.h.i.t in Washington."

"Sure. I'll get packing. Buenas." Qabil said good-bye and Norman turned off the phone. Of course he wouldn't really leave Rory behind. Both or neither of them would go to Washington. To be buried. In s.h.i.t? He wondered what Qabil meant by that.

He'd pack for both of them, though. He set out two bags, small enough for carry-on, on the bed, and neatly stacked warm-weather clothing in each. He a.s.sumed Rory would rather go to Mexico, for the winter, than Canada. Besides, she didn't speak Canadian.

With both of them packed, he carefully lifted out the contents of Rory's bag. Let her check through and make changes.

She should be here by now, he thought. He went to the phone and punched RR, Rory roving.

"Buenas?" No picture, of course.

"Where are you, darling?"

"In a cab. Home in two minutes. Where did you think I'd be?"

"Just making sure."

"How are you taking it?"

"Um ... not on the phone. Talk to you in two minutes." He pushed the "off" b.u.t.ton and rummaged through the drawer under the phone for a joint. It was old and dry. He found a match and lit it. Took one puff and stabbed it out in the sink. Wrong direction. He poured a gla.s.s of port and sipped it, waiting, thinking.

This might not have anything to do with the interview. The FBI might have linked him and Rory to whatever that superweapon was, that may or may not have been an invention of Pepe's.

The doork.n.o.b rattled and Rory knocked. Of course her thumb-print didn't unlock it unless the house was on. He went down the hall and opened the door.Aurora "What, is the house off?"

Norm held the door open and shut it behind her. "Yeah. The s.h.i.t has. .h.i.t."

She nodded. "I know. G.o.dd.a.m.n governor on top of everything else. But why the house?"

"The governor?"

"Yeah. Why's the house off?"

"The FBI. What did the governor do?"

Rory rubbed her wet hair with both hands. "The governor got me fired, you know that? Did he call the FBI?"

"Fired?"

"You didn't know." Norman opened both hands and made a noise. "The governor leaned on Mai because of an interview I did this morning. So I'm on sabbatical. What does the FBI have to do with it?"

They were in the breakfast nook. "Sit down. Let me get you something to drink."

She sat down. "Just water. What's the FBI? The a.s.sa.s.sination?"

"Somebody got a.s.sa.s.sinated?"

She kneaded her forehead. "Of course. Why would you know? The president and all her cabinet, killed in a bomb blast. The vice-president, too."

"My G.o.d. Bombed! Was it France?"

"No. Grayson Pauling carried a briefcase full of explosive into a cabinet meeting. Suicide-murder."

"Pauling."

"He was serious about changing the agenda. Lunatic, martyr, I don't have it sorted out. What about the FBI now?"

He got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. "Qabil called."

"Oh, good. That's all we need."

"No. That's not it. He found out, as a cop, down at the station, he heard the FBI is coming to get you. Take you to Washington."

"Oh, s.h.i.t." She took the water but didn't drink. "They can't do that. I didn't break any law."

Norm sat across from her with a small gla.s.s of wine. "I don't know. Maybe we could talk our way out of it. What Qabil said is they think we're agents for France-"

"We've never been to France!"

"Verdad. I think they know that. It's just an excuse."

"Was it before or after the a.s.sa.s.sination?"

"Just now. I think Qabil a.s.sumed I knew about the president dying."

She shook her head. "State of emergency, I guess. But do you really think they can just call us spies and lock us up?"

"I don't know. That's what Qabil thinks. And he's sort of in their line of work."

"Oh, h.e.l.l. Double h.e.l.l." She slid the water bottle back and forth in a small arc. "Is that port you're drinking?"

"Get you some?"

"Ah, no." She threw out the water and went to the refrigerator and squeezed herself a tumblerful of the plonk. "So what does your boyfriend recommend that we do?"

"He's not my boyfriend. He's just looking out for us.""I'm sorry." She sat down and leaned into her hands; her voice was m.u.f.fled. "It's been such a day."

"And it's just begun."

She sipped the wine. "Qabil said?"

"He said we should disappear. Before night. Stay on local transport so we can pay cash, and make our way to a country that doesn't need a pa.s.sport."

"Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean?"

"You'll do it?"

"I'd like about thirty seconds to think about it."

"Go ahead. I'm going to pack some music cubes."

"Packing? You'd leave without me?"

"Of course not. I just want to be ready if you decide to go. I can hear the hounds yapping." He found a cheap plastic box that held a hundred cubes, and started at the beginning, Antonini.

"Oh, h.e.l.l. Put some jazz in there for me." She stood up. "I'll pack some clothes."

"I already put out a few things. Warm weather?"

"Yeah. Canada doesn't really appeal."

He heard her opening and closing drawers, slamming them. "How about Mexico?"

"Cuba's closer," she said. "Some stuff I wanted to check there, too."

He pulled a couple of handfuls of cubes from her jazz collection, totally random. "Cuba it is." They would have to avoid the Orlando-Miami monorail, unfortunately; that was ticketed like a plane. Have to zigzag their way down.

He took the cube box and a small player into the bedroom and put them in his bag. Rory was almost packed, rattling around in the bathroom. "You have the sunscreen?" she said.

"Both kinds, yeah. Though I guess we could buy it in Cuba."

Rory came out with a plastic bag of toiletries, put it in the travel bag, and zipped it closed. "So. You ready?"

"Yes." He held out a hand. "I'll take your bag.

"I can-"

"On my bicycle. We can't risk a cab."

"Oh, joy." She handed him the bag. "Mother said if I married you I was in for a rough ride. But bicycling through the rain in December?"

"Fleeing the FBI. Sort of strains your sense of humor, doesn't it."

It wasn't too bad, though. The rain was a cool mist, and they only had to go a mile, to the Oaks substation.

They left the bicycles unlocked, trusting that it wouldn't take long for thieves to remove that particular bit of evidence of their flight, and walked into the venerable, not to say crumbling, mall.

It had seen better days, most of them more than a half century before. A whole block of stores had been demolished, their walls knocked down, to make s.p.a.ce for a huge flea market, and that drew more customers than the low-rent purveyors of cheap imported clothing and s.e.xual paraphernalia.

There was a weird youth subculture that had taken over one part-the beatniks, who dressed in century-old fashion and smoked incessantly while listening to century-old music. Rory liked the sound of it as they walked by, but it made Norman cringe. They had to go through there to get to the ATMs.

They thumbed two machines to get the maximum from different accounts, four thousand dollars each. The machines didn't hold any denomination larger than one hundred, though, so they wound up with a conspicuously large wad of bills.Rory looked around. "Uh-oh." She turned back to the machine. "There's a guy staring at us. From the cafe."

Norm glanced sideways. "Yeah, I see him in Nick's sometimes. Always writing in that notebook."

"Yeah. Now that you mention it."

The historian They don't look like the kind of people who come down to the Oaks, he thought, familiar from somewhere. The Greek restaurant. He drank off the rest of his strong sweet coffee while it was still warm. He snapped his fingers twice to get the waitress's attention-a very local custom-and shook a pseudo-Camel out of its package. He lit it with a wooden match and got a sudden rush of THC. Real tobacco must have been something.

He had been staring for a half hour at the image of .the Gainesville Sun for 24 November 1963, the last time a president had been a.s.sa.s.sinated. Maybe getting back to work would cut through the feelings of despair and helplessness. He had gotten up to the year before the year he was born.

He tried to ignore the old-fashioned but seductive Dave Brubeck chordings and rhythms, and toggled through the two old newspaper articles that were relevant to this part: Local government found itself in a condition beyond chaos when, in the fall of 2022, the mayor, two city commissioners, and the entire county commission wound up in jail for violating a cl.u.s.ter of real-estate laws, mostly about zoning and eminent domain- but really about bribery on a stunning scale. The result of their machinations, the Alachua/Archer monorail, changed Gainesville irreversibly, in ways that not everybody agreed were bad.

City revenues declined as industries moved north to Alachua and south to Archer, for cheap real estate and tax relief. But the net result was to give the city back to the university, making it again the college town it had been for most of the twentieth century.

There was a short but intense crime wave in 2023, which led to a five-year suspension of the fraternity system at UF, when it was discovered that four of the fraternities had aligned themselves with individual street gangs. They would pinpoint lucrative robbing sites and then help the boys hide and "fence" the stolen goods. In exchange, they took a percentage of the ill-gotten gains, and bought alcohol for the boys (at the time, the drinking age in Florida was twenty-one), as well as illegal ammunition, which is what led to the discovery. The federal program of "tagging" ammunition had begun secretly, and the so-called Gunfight at the Gainesville Garage was one of the first times it had been used as evidence.

Two policemen and five members of a gang called the Hairb.a.l.l.s died in the altercation, and the gang's ammunition was traced to a member of the Kappa Kappa Psi fraternity, who, under interrogation, detailed the depth and breadth of the fraternity's involvement with the gang, and implicated the three other fraternities ...

in December An unprecedented heat wave scorched Australia and New Zealand, thousands of people and millions of cattle and sheep dying in the heat and drought. Canada and Alaska and northern Europe all suffered protracted blizzard conditions, which took hundreds of lives.

The war in Europe entered into an uneasy truce, the peace talks moving from Warsaw to sunny Rome, as troops on various borders sc.r.a.ped ice and snow off their war machines, and then went back to huddle around fires. The peace was partly due to logistics-no one was really prepared to fight in an unrelenting blizzard-and partly due to apocalyptic suspense as the calendar counted down to the Coming.

Preachers and priests and even a cautious pope saw a connection between the h.e.l.lish weather andthe Coming. The aliens had not denied a connection with G.o.d and Jesus, and there were appropriate prophecies in the Bible, as well as a lesser authority, Nostradamus. In his prophetic quatrains, the farthest in the future where he had predicted a specific year was 2055, the year the aliens were going to land.

Writing in 1555, he said: For five hundred years more one will take notice of him Who was the ornament of his time: Then suddenly a great revelation will be made, Which will make the people of that century well pleased.

One "ornament of his time" was Nostradamus's contemporary Thomas More ("for five hundred years more ... "), who wrote Utopia. To some, this was proof positive that the aliens were going to bring about a heaven on earth. Of course that word "more" doesn't appear in the French-"De cinq cents ans plus compte l'on tiendre"-but the people who write for the tabloids probably didn't know about that, and certainly didn't care.

A musical group that had renamed itself 55 Alive went to the top of the charts with a convoluted song, "We're Coming," that used all of the words of the Nostradamos message recombined into a message of hope, which could be interpreted in either secular or religious terms.

The survival stores came back, and merchants who didn't overstock for the two-week wonder made a quick and large profit. It did take a pessimistic kind of optimism, or vice versa, to a.s.sume that the aliens would leave humanity alone, but humanity would turn on itself.

The United States launched its killer satellite in a state of total secrecy, which lasted less than a day.

An international coalition of scientists and engineers came forth with absolute proof that the deed had been done. They demanded that the weapon be destroyed in place. President Davis called their doc.u.ments "a bucket of bulls.h.i.t," saying it was just a weather satellite, and G.o.d knows we could use a few.

A gallup showed that 62 percent of French citizens considered the launch an act of war. In America, only 18 percent believed the president was telling the truth, but 32 percent "stood behind his actions."

During the month of December, the leading cause of death in the United States was suicide.

Aurora and Norman felt conspicuous in their flight; almost all of the trains were nearly empty, most of the nation staying home glued to the cube. There were plenty on the Miami-to-Key West "Havana Special," though; people hoping to lose themselves in that island's peculiar attractions.

Of all possible points of exit from the United States, Key West was probably the best one for people who didn't want to be identified. The same fine old Italian families who controlled gambling and prost.i.tution in Havana owned the boats that made the ninety-mile trip, as well as the dock where people stepped aboard the boats, in total anonymity, safe even from overhead orbital surveillance. Some patrons bragged about their "Havana weekends"; others claimed to have had a great time at Disney World.

Aurora and Norman bypa.s.sed the fleshpots of the capital city and found a modest apartment in the nearby fishing village Cojimar. Norman rented a keyboard and MIDI recorder and continued to refine his composition. Aurora had her own research project, which took her all over the island. Fortunately, travel was dirt cheap compared to America.

By December 21, orbital telescopes were able to form an image of the approaching s.p.a.cecraft. It looked like a cross with a gamma-ray star in the center, which made some people rejoice, but their joy was premature. The next day it was obvious that the image was of four tail fins surrounding the exhaust of a very hot engine. The aliens were coming in tail first, braking, the way a human s.p.a.ceship would.

The gamma-ray beacon disappeared on the twenty-fourth, as the ship abruptly changed course, detouring toward Mars with a profligate waste of fuel. It swung around the red planet, as promised, and cracked Phobos in two. Hubble III gave a tiny image of the ship pa.s.sing close, and a bright flare. Then the two halves of the small moon tumbled apart.