"Understandable," says Toby. "They might have thought that even without the bear skin."
"You being snarky?"
"It's a compliment."
"I'll mull that over. Anyway, I wasn't sad about the way it turned out."
Fast-forward to Whitehorse again: there he was, washed, dressed, and in his right mind, supposing there was such a thing. He was avoiding the Bearlift headquarters and the usual drinking holes because those people thought he was dead, and why would he want to sacrifice the advantages that non-existence can bring? So he was spending a fair amount of time in the motel room eating faux-peanut objects and sending out for pizza and watching pay-per-view, never mind what, and trying to figure out his next move. Where to go from Whitehorse? How to get out? What was his next incarnation of choice?
Also he was wondering, Who set Chuck up to stick that needle into him? Which of the several parties with an interest in his ill-being would use an inept, A-sombrero dink like Chuck as their choice of poison-dart launcher?
Cold Dish
He existed in two states: his actual camouflaged mode, an anyface with a bogus name; and, in his previous guise, fried to a crisp in a 'thopter crash. Pity about that, some might say, but very convenient for others. And convenient for himself as well.
But he didn't want Adam to think he was dead - there'd been a long communications hiatus during the Bearlift caper - so he needed to make contact before news of that kind leaked out.
He put on all his clothes, including the aviator helmet, the fake goosedown puffy jacket, and the sunglasses, and made a foray to one of the two local net cafes, a tidy operation called Cubs' Corner that served turgid organic soy beverages and undercooked giant muffins. He ordered both: eating the local foods was a principle of his. Then he paid cash for a half-hour of net time and sent a message to Adam via the zephyr dropbox. "Some shithead tried to mort me. Everyone thinks I'm f-ing dead."
He picked up the answer in ten minutes: "Renouncing profanity will improve your digestion. Stay dead. May have job opportunity. Get to New New York area ASAP, connect with me then."
"OK, get me jobcheck ID?" he sent back.
"Y. Will be waiting," Adam replied. Where was he? No clue about that. But he must have landed in a place where he felt safe, or safe enough. That was a relief to Zeb. Losing Adam would be like losing an arm and a leg. And the top part of his head.
He went back to his motel room and thought through the logistics of getting himself to New New York. As a dead person, and with the aid of the temporary patchwork ID he'd put together, he might chance the bullet train once he'd Truck-A-Pillared as far as, say, Calgary.
But the main puzzle was still bothering him. Who'd wanted to nab him via Chuck? He tried to narrow it down. First of all, who could've figured out where he was? Fingered him at Bearlift? By that time his name was Devlon, and before that it was Larry, and before that, Kyle. He didn't look much like a Kyle, but sometimes it was better to go counter-type. And he'd been through at least six earlier names.
He'd bought the better part of the identities on the greyer than grey market, and there was no upside for those guys to sell him out: they had their businesses to run, they had to maintain customer confidence, and anyway they wouldn't have been able to pinpoint a buyer for him. To them he was just one more shirker on the run from bad debts, or rapacious wives, or embezzlement from a Corp, or IP theft, or robbing a convenience store, or a string of psycho murders involving crossdressing and crowbars; they didn't care what. They'd do a preliminary ask, they pretended to have standards and ethics - no baby-fuckers - and he'd serve them up some platters of refried bullshit they both knew was crap. But it was polite to exchange this kind of pewl, just like they'd say, "Happy to help" and so forth, which meant "Let's see the cash."
So for any cybersleuth to pry him out of his layers of fake shell would've meant the expenditure of considerable resources. He'd covered his trail well enough unless they'd known exactly where to look. Whoever it was would need to be very motivated.
He more or less ruled out Ristbones because what did he have on them that could mess them up if leaked? Voting machine hacking was an open secret, but though there was grumbling in the so-called press, nobody really wanted to go back to the old paper system, and the Corp that owned the machines, picked the winners, and took the kickbacks had done a lunar PR job, so anyone who objected too much was smeared as a twisted Commie bent on spoiling everyone's fun, even the fun of those who weren't having any fun. But spoiling the fun they might have later. Their fun-in-the-sky.
So he was no threat to Ristbones because even if he did try to rouse some sort of mouldy civil-society rabble, anyone who'd listen to him would be credited with a terminal case of brain herpes. If he'd been crazy, he might've tried to double-hack the machines - code in his own virtual senator or something - just as a demo project about how easy it was.
"But you weren't crazy," says Toby.
"I might have done it for the lulz, if I'd had the time. It would have
been one of those ephemeral pranks by which sulky keyboard geniuses like me used to signal their ineffectual objections to the system."
"So, not Ristbones, then," says Toby. "Must have been Hacksaw?"
"They had a case for payback," says Zeb. "I'd fishfooded their guard, pilfered their boat, robinhooded one of their maidens in distress; but worse, I'd made them look sloppy. I could see them wanting to stage-manage a public example of me - string me up in chains from a bridge or similar, minus a leg and all my blood; turn me into a gristle display. But in order to capitalize on the publicity they'd have to reveal what I'd done to them, so they'd still lose face.
"Anyway I couldn't see them tracking me as far as Bearlift, way up there in Whitehorse. It was very far from Rio, and most likely they thought it was covered with snow and igloos, if they ever thought about it at all. But more than that, I couldn't see a tightass like Chuck working for those guys. I couldn't even picture them in the same bar together. The Hacksaw types needed to be in a bar with you before they'd take you on, and Chuck didn't compute. He had the wrong wardrobe. None of the Hacksaw guys would be caught dead hiring a guy with such dorky pants."
The more he thought about Chuck - about the yucky-clean Chuckiness of Chuck - the more he figured that was the key. The smarmy friendliness, the fake white-toothed geniality ... He had to be Church of PetrOleum. But no way the Rev and his buds, even hired professional buds, could've tracked Zeb through all his twists and turns. Just no fucking way.
Then he figured he was looking at the whole thing backwards. The Rev, and the whole Church, and their religious joined-at-the-hippers like the Known Fruits, and their political pals - they were all death on ecofreaks. Their ads featured stuff like a cute little blond girl next to some particularly repellent threatened species, such as the Surinam toad or the great white shark, with a slogan saying: This? or This? Implying that all cute little blond girls were in danger of having their throats slit so the Surinam toads might prosper.
By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God's Holy Oil, which were one and the same. And Bearlift, despite its fuzzy reasoning and its clumsy delivery system, was in a geographical area where more oil might well be discovered, or through which it might well be piped, with the usual malfunctions, spills, and coverups.
So naturally the Rev and his circle would've tried to infiltrate Bearlift. Which was none too choosy about who it let in. Chuck must've been a true PetrOleum believer, sent there to keep an eye on the furfuckers and report on the evils they were concocting. He wouldn't have been looking for Zeb in particular, though when he stumbled across him he would've recognized him. He'd been close to the Rev, then: family picture sharing. The ungrateful son. But you ... The son I wish I'd had. Sigh. Wistful smile. Hand on shoulder. Gruff, manly pat-pat. Like that.
The rest would have followed: the snitch report by Chuck, the instructions from the Rev, the obtaining of the knockout needle, the failed attempt in the 'thopter. The flaming wreckage.