Distraction - Bruce Sterling [60]
“What a horrible thing to say.”
“We could do it, all right. Especially if you weighed in with us, if you’d let us advise you and help you. My krewe and I, we took an architect who had five percent approval ratings and we made him Senator from Massachusetts. Your sad little fishbowl has never seen people like us.”
“Well …” She sighed. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“Good. You do that. I’ll be gone for a while. Washington, Boston.… Give the subject some serious thought.” His stomach rumbled. “After all that ranting, I’m not a bit sleepy. Are you sleepy?”
“God, no.”
“I’m starving. Let’s go get something to eat. You brought a car, right?”
“It’s a junker car. Internal combustion.”
“It’ll get us into a real town. I’ll take you out tonight. We’ll go out somewhere, we’ll paint the town together.”
“Are you nuts? You can’t do that. Crazy people are trying to kill you.”
He waved a hand. “Oh, who cares? We can’t live that way. What’s the use? Anyway, the risk is minimal here. It would take a major-league intelligence operation to track us down here in this dump. I’m much safer at some random restaurant than I’ll be in Washington or Boston. This is our only night together. Let’s be brave. Let’s find the nerve to be happy.”
They dressed, left the beach house, got into the car. Greta started it with a metal key. The engine growled in ugly piston-popping fashion. Then Greta’s phone rang.
“Don’t answer it,” Oscar said.
She ignored him. “Yes?” She paused, then handed it over. “It’s for you.”
It was Fontenot. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Are you still awake? We’re going out for dinner.”
“Of course I’m awake! I was up as soon as you left the safe house. You can’t leave Holly Beach, Oscar.”
“Look, it’s the middle of the night, nobody knows we’re here, we’re in a rented car with no history, and we’re picking a town at random.”
“You want to eat? We’ll bring you in some food. What if you get pulled over by a parish sheriff? They’ll punch you into the state police net. You think that’ll be a fun experience for a Yankee who’s crossed Green Huey? Think otherwise, pal.”
“Should that happen, I’ll lodge a complaint with the American embassy.”
“Very funny. Stop being stupid, okay? I finessed the Holly Beach thing for you, and that wasn’t easy. If you depart from the itinerary, I can’t be responsible.”
“Keep driving,” Oscar told Greta. “Jules, I appreciate your professionalism, I really do, but we need to do this, and there’s no time to argue about it.”
“All right,” Fontenot groaned. “Take the highway east and I’ll get back to you.”
Oscar hung up and gave Greta her phone. “Did you ever have a bodyguard?” he said.
She nodded. “Once. After the Nobel announcement. It was me and Danny Yearwood. After the big news broke, Danny started getting all these threats from the animal rights people.… Nobody ever threatened me about it, and that was so typical. They just went after Danny. We shared the Nobel, but I was the one doing all the labwork.… We had some security during the press coverage, but the stalkers just waited them out. Later they jumped poor Danny outside his hotel and broke both his arms.”
“Really.”
“I always figured it was the fetal-tissue people who were the real anti-science crazies. The righters mostly just broke into labs and stole animals.”
She peered carefully into the moving pool of headlights, grasping the wheel with her narrow hands. “Danny was so good about the credit. He put my name first on the paper—it was my hypothesis, I did the labwork, so that was very ethical, but he was just such an angel about it. He just fought for me and fought for me, he never let them overlook me. He gave me every credit that he could, and then they stalked him and beat him up, and they completely ignored me. His wife really hated my guts.”
“How is Dr. Yearwood, these days? How could I get in touch with him?”
“Oh, he’s out. He left science, he’s in banking now.”
“You’re kidding. Banking? He won the Nobel Prize for medicine.