The Detachment

forces and intelligence services, who, even as I speak, are risking their lives to protect our homeland and our liberties. Let us pray for them, as well.”
    There was the clamor of reporters trying to ask questions, and then the announcer was back on, explaining that the president had left the briefing room.
    Dox glanced over at me, then back to the road. “What the hell are we going to do?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I mean it, John. I mean…this is some top level shit we’re mixed up in here.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I mean, false flag terror attacks? And we’ve been fingered for it? Forgive me if I sound gloomy, but I don’t see a clear way out of this.”
    “You do sound gloomy.”
    He laughed softly. “Well, cheer me up then.”
    “I’m working on it.”
    “Not to mention—”
    “I know. We cleared the way for it.”
    We didn’t stop again until Roanoke. It was nearly midnight and we’d been driving for over eight hours. Dox and I briefed Treven and Larison about the incident outside the White House. No one said anything, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing: we were fucked.
    We picked up fast food, gassed up again, and agreed to change positions. “It’s not that bad,” Treven said. “A lot cooler than before, and your friend was smart to pick up that bubble wrap. It’s actually pretty comfortable, if you’re lying down on it.”
    Dox and I had discussed our discomfort at the prospect of being closed up in the cargo area, helpless and blind, while Treven and Larison drove. If someone put a lock on the exterior, the truck would be turned into a prison. Not that anyone was carrying a lock or had time to buy one, but still. But in the end, it didn’t matter, because what choice did we have? None of us could risk public transportation. Dox had been right about our odds of hiding from the modern surveillance state. And Larison had been right when he’d told Treven that going off alone meant being the first one picked off. If we were going to resolve this, our best chance was to stick together, and to find a way to attack back.
    Treven and Larison were indifferent about what we ate, so I was glad when, on the morning of the second day, Dox insisted we stop at a Whole Foods outside Nashville. We loaded up with enough chow to see us comfortably all the way to the Pacific, then found a Wal-Mart and threw a couple futons and sleeping bags in the back. The futons were something, but Dox had been right, it was a damn sauna back there when the sun was high, and there wasn’t any good way to cool it down. We considered buying bags of ice but then decided against it. We didn’t want to take a chance on the melting runoff attracting the attention of some highway patrol.
    We also stopped at a Starbucks so I could access their free Wi-Fi, and I checked the secure site. I half-expected a message from Horton, trying to explain away the unexplainable. But he must have known how useless that would be under the circumstances. He’d used us, then tried to clip us like the loose end we now represented. We knew he would try again, just as he knew we’d be gunning to get to him first. The state of play was so clear that anything anyone might have said would have been useless, even absurd.
    There was a message from Kanezaki, though. He described the attack at the White House, which the media had gotten more or less right after the initial, confused reports. And he said the NSA was picking up chatter about more attacks coming. There were rumors about the president considering a major response. Kanezaki wanted me to call him, and I wrote that I couldn’t, not for another day or two. After the ambush at the hotel, my paranoia was at a full simmer. Maybe Horton had managed to stitch together enough data from airport surveillance cameras and satellite imagery to track us to the Hilton. He’d been expecting us in the city, after all. If so, and if he’d lost track of us after the hotel, then even with all the technology in the world, for the time being we’d be the proverbial needle in a haystack. I didn’t want to take any chance at all about a call being traced to a location this far west, from which the opposition might predict our further trajectory. From which Horton might even guess where we were ultimately heading, and why.
    On the afternoon of the second day, Treven was driving while I rode shotgun. Mostly the roads were eerily quiet, but periodically, the quiet would be shattered by a passing