Lex was debating with herself whether she should risk going into the nearest city. From there she could find an internet café and start searching for Iversson online but it was risky; did she dare to step out onto American soil? "I can't just waltz into Reno and go and sit in a café as I am, I imagine I'm on America's most wanted list!" She thought "My picture's probably been circulated; every police station around here will have it."
In the end she decided it was worth the risk if she used the cloaking device. She left Scar at the shuttle, but not without resistance from him "I should follow you." He said "I can remain unseen, but I do not like the idea of you going on your own."
"One of us has to stay here with Selim." She said firmly "And it has to be me who goes, I might have to talk to someone. I will have to de-cloak to use the computer or someone will notice. You have to stay and make sure Selim is alright."
He wasn't happy about it but he had to concede she was right. She didn't tell him that she also wanted to keep him away from densely populated areas because she feared it would only be a matter of time before temptation got the better of him. Aside from the morality of it, an urban bloodbath would be much too high profile. "You don't take the wolf with you if you want to pass through a flock of sheep unnoticed."She thought with a wry smile as she walked towards the city, unseen in the sweltering afternoon heat, feet crunching in the bleached white dust.
It meant some petty theft but she managed to get hold of the things she needed to go unnoticed on the street, salving her conscious with the thought that if she had time she'd go back and leave some money for the store-holder. She stepped invisible into the restroom of a gas station and stepped out again in human clothes for the first time in six years, stowing the cloaking device in a sturdy backpack along with her bodysuit.
She'd chosen the most inconspicuous outfit she could find; cargo pants with useful pockets, a vest top, cotton jacket; all dark or neutral colours. None of them featured a logo or any distinctive design and all were loose enough not to restrict her movements. She kept her own boots on but they were mostly hidden under the pants.
The main problem was the clan blood mark on her cheek, it was so distinctive and it was in a place that was hard to cover up without looking peculiar. Somehow she didn't think walking round town in a mask or with a bandana over her face would be a good idea.
In the end she swiped a concealer stick the rough approximation of her skin tone over it. Her own hair she hid under a jaw length wig of chestnut waves with a long fringe that swept down over one eye. She arranged the crisp fake hair so that a portion of it hid the acid mark. Then she pulled on a dark coloured baseball cap along with huge dark glasses to hide her eyes. She checked the restroom mirror to make sure that the wig was straight. "Not very flattering." She thought "But it'll have to do." It was a way off evening yet and the sun was still shining, so she could get away with shades.
The city was overwhelming; she'd forgotten what it was like to be amongst so many people. The noise of the traffic; the glaring neon lights; the appalling stink of exhaust fumes, food, body odour, garbage; the constant contact with other sweaty bodies; it was a sensory overload.
It might have been dwarfed by Vegas as the gambling capital but Reno was still a party town and the cacophony of voices was bewildering, her ears were being assaulted by bursts of music and half overheard conversations.
"So I said to 'em you can't just expect me to - "
"Hey baby why don't you come over here and - "
" – that's fifty per cent more bang for your - "
" – repent all ye sinners! For none of you know - "
Nonsense, gibberish, like a foreign language!
A pack of guffawing young men pushed past her, elbowing her off the sidewalk as they made their whisky and beer fuelled pilgrimage from one casino to the next. She had to stop herself from spinning round and punching the nearest one as hard as she could, suddenly very aware of the knives in her boot tops, the gun in her pocket. You didn't allow yourself to get pushed aside in yautja society; that was a sign of weakness and appearing weak could get you killed. She retreated into an alcove in the wall, out of the stream of people and drew a deep breath, trying to focus.
Selling the gold was easy enough. She just walked into the Gold Exchange right there on Virginia Street. She didn't sell all the gold at once of course, that might look strange, and so she'd only brought a few pieces with her. She tapped her foot impatiently to the country and western station playing softly on the store's stereo system whilst the little wizened white-bearded man behind the counter turned the nuggets over for what seemed the hundredth time. She was vague when he asked where she'd got them but made sure he knew he'd better give her a good price.
The sky was turning cerise pink as she walked out of the Exchange with a fat roll of notes in her pocket. It took a little more searching to find a suitable internet café. She wanted somewhere off the beaten track, dark and inconspicuous but not so small that other bored patrons might start looking closely at her face when she took her shades off. Eventually she found a bustling café down one of the backstreets. It seemed to be mainly full of tourists and the occasional student. Buying herself a coffee, she sat down at the terminal with the best view of the door. The coffee was nothing special but it had been so long since she'd tasted it that she paused, taking a moment to really appreciate the taste. Coffee was one of the few things about civilisation that she truly missed.
Opening up the search engine, she typed 'Professor Jeanette Iversson' into Google. There were quite a few Jeanette Iverssons but only one Professor she could find, however the information on offer was not very useful. There was some sort of profile of her in an online science journal – to do with something called astrobiology, whatever that was – but it was almost twenty years old. There was also a stub of a staff profile on an old governmental website but again it was years out of date. She systematically went through every result that looked promising but didn't manage to glean even a scrap of useful, recent information.
"It's like she just disappeared," She thought in frustration "But I guess the job she's in, they didn't exactly want to go around advertising their presence to the general public."
She looked through some of the Jeanette Iverssons listed on social media but none of the pictures looked right "Probably the wrong generation and too busy for that type of thing," She thought "Can't imagine her killing time in the lab, checking her updates."
She blew out her cheeks and then, surreptitiously making sure that nobody was looking at her screen, she typed her own name into the search bar. The very first result that came up was the FBI's 'Most Wanted' page. She noticed she was in the section classified 'Most Wanted Terrorists'.
She clicked on the link and saw a mug shot photo taken at the secure facility in Nevada; her own blank gaze stared back at her, dark circles under her eyes, some light bruising still visible around one of them from the beating D'Kand and his friends had given her in the gymnasium. The symbol that Scar had traced on her cheek with the acid showed up clearly. Next to it were listed the charges "Act of Terrorism - Domestic Terrorism; Hostage Taking; Arson; Attack on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death; Murder - "
She hastily scrolled down to the summary below and read:
"- wanted for her alleged involvement with a break-in at a secure government facility… believed to be politically motivated…" She raised an eyebrow "Hmmm, so that's how they've spun it; a break in?" She thought "And here I thought I was trying to break out!"
"…kidnapped and held a member of research staff hostage…killed eleven armed forces personnel … skilled in the use of knives and handguns… considered armed and extremely dangerous… do not approach… may be travelling with a young child… gained a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania…. speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese amongst other languages… has links to New York, Brazil, Alaska, Peru, Nepal… professional climber…"
The distinctive marks section mentioned the acid burn on her face and there were several other photographs there that must have been taken from the Karl Woods Foundation, the organisation she had set up in her father's name. Some of this information must have come from them as well, she had certainly never talked with Coulter or Iversson about her education or the other languages she spoke and they had never asked her about them, apart from the hunters' language.
She looked around again to check nobody was in sight of her monitor but the café's other occupants seemed deeply involved in whatever they were seeing on their own screens.
She clicked back to the summary and saw with a shocked hiss of breath what she hadn't noticed before "… offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction…"
A twenty-five million dollar bounty?! She blinked in disbelief. They must really want her then. She could just go and hand herself in… maybe then they'd take her to Iversson. Maybe then they would give Selim the treatment he needed…. or maybe they wouldn't.
She had no way of knowing if Iversson still worked for the unit or if it even existed, any more than she could know what the government's agenda was in offering such a high price on her head. Were they anxious to recapture the scientific find of the century? Or did they just want the woman who'd destroyed their expensive facility under lock and key? Maybe they would just execute her as a multiple murderer. They didn't have the death penalty in this state but what was to stop them moving her elsewhere? One thing was certain; once she'd handed herself in she would lose all control over her destiny and that of Selim. It was too big a gamble.
As she thought her eye flickered over the summary again;
"… has links to environmental extremist groups…"
She suddenly sat up as a thought struck her. It seemed plain that she wasn't going to find Iversson via the internet but perhaps someone else could, a name dredged up from the depths of her old life – Jonas Haagens.
She had first met Jonas when they had both been taking environmental studies together at Pennsylvania. At first they had been rather unlikely friends. Lex had always been a very physical person whilst Jonas was much more at home behind a computer keyboard. She was generally confident and outgoing, whilst he was nervous and introverted.
Despite these differences a chance conversation led them to discover they had plenty of other things in common. Jonas and his brother had been brought up by their mother. She hadn't had much money and had tried various different jobs and places to try and make a life for herself and her two children. As a result he'd had a pretty nomadic existence. There weren't many parts of the states he hadn't lived in at one time or another.
Lex had spent a similarly rootless childhood. Her father was a mountaineer and conservationist, and her mother had basically taken it upon herself to do her father's PR. Home was whatever part of the world his work happened to take them to. As a little girl she'd gotten used to having to fit in wherever she landed up; Peru, Patagonia, Tibet, Nepal. Wherever you were, the trick was to learn to assimilate quickly; befriend the other children in the camp or village; learn enough of the local language to get by. The other students with their nice suburban upbringings couldn't understand.
They also shared a love of the beautiful wildernesses in the world; youthful rage at the injustice of it all, that these same wildernesses were being destroyed and a determination to do something about it whether that was going on demonstrations, leafleting other students or fund raising for conservation charities. "What a couple of sanctimonious pains in the ass!" She thought with a rueful smile
That was where their paths had diverged. Lex had (until Antarctica) always stuck to the more official channels. Her father's foundation and the work they did was all strictly legitimate and above board. Jonas had always preferred more direct action and she was one of the few people who knew that as his hacker alter ego, 'Infiltrator', he had perpetrated some pretty audacious take downs of individuals or companies whose environmental excesses he considered to be unacceptable. He'd told her one night, unburdening himself whilst drunk.
There was a corporation whose very incriminating emails about a chemical spillage that caused birth defects in a nearby village suddenly ended up on a news website. There was a senator whose backhanders from oil companies to allow them to drill in areas of outstanding natural beauty somehow ended up on the front pages of the newspapers after his instant messenger suddenly became public. That type of thing. In the morning he'd begged her not to give away his secret but she had reassured him. Officially Lex had to disapprove of such vigilante tactics but secretly she'd always felt a sneaking satisfaction to hear of these people getting their comeuppance. She certainly wasn't going to rat out a friend for the sake of those morally bankrupt scumbags who were finally getting a taste of long-averted justice.
He was so relieved he'd had to vomit in her sink – or perhaps that had been the hangover. Either way, despite their ideological differences they had always remained friends.
After that she'd sometimes called him 'Phil' (or 'Fil'), a nickname that nobody else knew the real significance of. It had always tickled her that someone so outwardly unassuming and mild-mannered could be such a gung-ho persona in cyberspace, it was as if he was making up for his timidity in the real world; the proverbial revenge of the nerd.
The reason she had to trust him, however, had nothing to do with his activities as a hacker and everything to do with the time when she'd saved his life. He'd come on an ice-climbing expedition with her once. Fil, being as great a lover of the outdoors as she was but not so strong and athletic, had always sought to prove himself in her eyes and those of her climber friends. He'd kept asking and in the end she signed him up, against her better judgement.
It had been a freak accident whilst they were out glacier walking. She didn't know if he'd swung his ice-axe and misjudged it or if he'd slipped or if his hands had been too numb to hold it properly – but somehow the point had wound up buried in his foot. She didn't really remember the screaming or the blood. She just remembered clicking into an adrenalin fuelled trance where she radioed for help, put a tourniquet round his ankle, wadded cloth around it, kept him warm, kept him calm, gave him tea from her flask as he started to go into shock. She'd stroked his head, kept him talking and conscious until the mountain rescue helicopter came.
He'd been very lucky not to lose the foot, something he put down solely to her quick thinking and calm actions. He called her his Guardian Angel.
By the time she set out on her ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic, Jonas had all but retired his Infiltrator persona – ironically having taken a job as head of online security at one of the companies that now bestrode the web like a colossus. The poacher had turned gamekeeper.
Well it was the poacher that she needed now, she wanted someone who could gain access to secret government documents and find out for her where Iversson had gone. If anyone she knew could do that, she imagined he could.
She typed 'Jonas Haagens' into Google along with the name of his employers and – bingo! – there he was, his little photo sitting alongside a short biog that unsurprisingly mentioned nothing at all about his eco-terrorist, hacker credentials. She didn't worry much that he was amongst the 'environmental extremists' mentioned by the FBI either. Infiltrator had never been unmasked – the fact that he was still in his job was proof enough that hadn't changed – and Fil was good at covering his tracks. She also knew many of the perfectly legitimate environmental groups she'd had dealings with over the years bore the label of 'extremist' as far as the government was concerned.
She took a moment studying the little picture, it was black and white and though hard to tell if it was recent or not, it was definitely him. The goatee beard and spikey hair looked a little more neatly groomed than she remembered and he was wearing a suit in this photograph but she recognised him right away.
He had a Facebook account – of course he did – he'd have to be all over the competition. It took her a few minutes to set herself up with one which she called Angela Gabriel and sent him a message.
Hey Fil, She wrote Long time no see.
She hoped he was still the kind of person who checked their updates constantly as she didn't want to have to wait around. She sat for a few minutes tapping a nail against the sleek black mouse, sipping her now lukewarm coffee.
Her luck was in. Just five minutes later she was rewarded by a little ping from her machine. He'd sent back Who is this?
She replied immediately Your Guardian Angel. Miss me?
"Where the hell have you been?!
Behind her two of the tourists burst into noisy laughter making her glance round uneasily. A quick appraisal reassured her that they were not even looking her way but at something on their shared terminal.
She bent back to her conversation, eager to be out of there quickly now and wrote Can't explain now but do you have a number I can call you on?
There was a short pause before he sent back the number. She snatched up a pen off a nearby desk and scribbled it on a bit of paper, stuffing it hurriedly in her pocket. She sent him a brief sign off I'll call you soon
Then she closed down all the windows on the computer, deleted the browsing history and left the café, pulling her cap down over her eyes and after a moment's thought, slipping the shades back on. It was dark now so they might look odd, but probably no odder than many of the night-time denizens of this gambling city.
On the way out of town she stopped at the store she'd swiped the clothes from to buy a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile and fifty dollars' worth of credit. She left an extra fifty on the counter while the clerk wasn't looking.
