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“That’s fine.”
He’d read through the material once, he said, on the plane. According to the legend created by the NSA, perhaps with input from the CIA, Baxter, whose new name would be Paul Jims, had run a ransomware attack on the Confederate Memorial Medical Center in Willow Branch, Georgia.
There had been an actual, real-world attack on the hospital, but the perpetrators hadn’t been identified. The attack had taken the ICU offline just long enough for an elderly patient to die, althoughsome news stories about it suggested the patient was about to die, or already had died, when the attack took place. In any case, the hospital’s insurance company had paid the attackers five hundred thousand dollars to turn the hospital back on.
One of the now-online news stories, from an actual newspaper, said that a confidential source told the paper that the attack had come out of Florida. The original story hadn’t said that, but the original story was now long forgotten in the stream of daily media crap. The new story, as placed by the NSA, was now the ongoing truth.
“That’s great, as long as Ordinary People didn’t do the hospital,” Letty said quietly.
Baxter shook his head. “They didn’t. I looked at the Russian attack and the hospital attack. Totally different software writing styles.”
“So we’re good,” Letty said.
“No, we’re not,” Baxter said. “We’re trapped in a bad movie. That’s what we’re in. A really bad fuckin’ movie, poorly written. Especially my part.”
They got to Gainesvilleand checked into a Hampton Inn near the university campus, a few minutes after midnight. They agreed they’d get up at seven o’clock, grab a quick sandwich and hit the campus, do a tour of student bars, try to get out of town before noon.
In the room, with two beds, Letty took her pistols out of her duffel bag, checked them, though they were in perfect condition, to make a point about guns and her familiarity with them. Baxter was curious, said he’d gone to a gun range with friends from Houston, where he grew up, and fired rifles, but had never felt the need to own a gun.
Letty let him handle the two weapons, explained the mechanisms, which he picked up on. After dry-firing them a few times, he said, “When this is over, maybe I’ll get one. Though I’m more software than hardware. Of course, that’s assuming that I’m still alive, which seems unlikely.”
Letty put the guns away, and said, “Let’s get down to our underwear. I need to know if you’ve got a hairy back.”
“I do.”
They undressed to their underwear, checked each other out: Baxter was pale, hairy, and overweight, with full sleeve tattoos—heavy on astrological signs and numbers, like fifty digits of pi—and breasts larger than Letty’s. He was unembarrassed. To Letty, he said, “You’re got four small moles on your back, under the wings, that look like the handle of the Big Dipper.”
She hadn’t known. “Remember that. You might be able to use it.”
“Yes. I’m not going to push on you because Delores said if I did, she’d ship me to Diego Garcia. But I gotta say, you’re not totally unattractive.”
“Thanks for the thought,” Letty said. “I’m going to need you to pull the dressings off my back and put new ones on.”
He did that and was gentle about it. He said, “Wings like a dark angel. No blood. Healing good. Day after tomorrow, it’ll look like it’s two years old.”
“A raven, not an angel,” she said. And, “What’s Diego Garcia?”
“Island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Listening post. The closest thing on earth to nowhere.”
When the pads were covering the tattoo, Letty fished a tee-shirt out of her bag and pulled it over her head, to sleep in. “I’m setting the phone to get up early.”
Baxter slept soundlyand silently; Letty didn’t, half-conscious part of the time, wondering if the bear-sized man was about to drop on her.
At five minutes before six o’clock, five minutes before the alarm was set to go off, and feeling foggy, she rolled out of bed, turned off the alarm, moved quietly to the bathroom, shut the door, showered, brushed her teeth and hair, and dressed. When she left the bathroom, she found Baxter sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, looking at the floor between his feet.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. He was the living definition ofmorose. “Give me thirteen minutes.”
Made her smile, a little, because it sounded so nerd-like. “Exactly thirteen minutes.”
He looked up and said, seriously, “Yeah. Thirteen. I’ll be out in thirteen minutes.”
He took his clothes with him and, thirteen minutes later, emerged from the bathroom, showered, shaved, dressed, and reeking of Drakkar Noir. “Let’s get breakfast and walk the campus. The buildings will be open pretty soon, if they’re not already. I’m not sure—when I was here, I never got up this early.”
They left the truck in a parking structure by the student union, walked through the bookstore, which had more orange and blue Gator shirts than books, and into the union, where Letty hit the Wells Fargo ATM for the receipt, and they got bagels and coffee at a Starbucks. With the food and drink in hand, Baxter led the way outside and across a broad lawn to an uncomfortable concrete picnic table under an enormous live oak.
As they ate, he pointed out a variety of classroom buildings: “What we’re sitting on is called the Reitz Union lawn, and that...” He pointed across the lawn at an undistinguished redbrick building, “...is the computer science building. Right next to it is the Marston Science Library. I spent ninety percent of my time here in those two buildings, along with the union. I lived close enough to campus that I could ride my bike in and... that was about it.”
