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"Can I smoke?"
"It's your house."
"You with the Control?"
Valentine set the gun down on the trunk next to his thigh. "No."
Champers waited.
"Champers, you're going to have to come up with a reason to abandon these works. Go fifty miles west toward the Mississippi, go fifty miles east toward Lexington. Just don't build here."
"How do I-"
"That's not my problem. You're an expert. Say the ground's too soft for a tower of that height, or there's malaria in the river. You have men on your construction crew with malaria? Show them one. Hell, I heard the Control's mostly run by humans. Bypass this Kurian and take it up with the Control. Say Center City's a no go."
"You must be a Kentuckian. The rebels. You don't sound like one, you're more northern."
Valentine shrugged. "Doesn't matter. What does matter to me, very much, is that this tower never goes up. Now, we could stop it with a big fight, lots of explosives, God knows how many deaths. Or you could kill it with an engineering reason."
Champers cleaned his glasses with a corner of his sheet. "You really want this project stopped?"
"Yes."
"I can kill it. Permanent as a big air strike. But I need some help, and I need to get away. With my men. Every damn one of us, or the deal's off and you'll have to kill me and try your luck with the Control garrison."
Valentine felt control of the conversation slipping away. He'd intended to come in, bluff and talk round a powerful Quisling, and instead, purely by accident, learned a name of an engineer of top-rated technical competence but doubtful loyalty to the Kurian Order. A strange man to put in charge of a tower. He was either a Kurian agent under very deep cover or truly a brilliant misfit.
"Define help," Valentine said, smelling a bottle of bay rum aftershave on the dresser.
Champers adjusted his glasses. "You're with the resistance, right? Look, me and my crew's expendable. It's a bunch of men and women on their last legs with the Control. Records like blotting paper, all of us. They've put us out here on the spear tip because if we get sheared off, no loss, we're headed for the recycling bin anyway. Maybe once the tower's finished, we'll be the first official sacrifice. Just like the Control to save a tank of fuel bussing us back."
"I sat handcuffed in a recycling bin a couple years ago myself, Champers. I don't like to see others tossed into a black van."
The engineer's eyebrow went up. "The Control uses white."
"I didn't say it was in the Control. Why would they get rid of you? You look pretty healthy, except for your eyesight."
"I've got a reputation as a bit of an unmindful. I skip the Church and community stuff."
"Unmindful?" Valentine asked. Strange phrase, it reminded him of Orwell's doubleplus ungood. For a moment, he was back in Father Max's leaky one-classroom school in a forgotten stretch of Minnesota lake country.
"I don't toe the line. I've also kept my people out of the can. Not the easiest thing to manage. The Kurians are always getting rid of 'idle hands' in the building trades. Idle meaning not pulling a fifteen-hour day, six days a week."
He seemed a little too eager for a guy who'd just made love to his woman and had a man barge in on him as he was considering a postcoital cigarette. That or he was a man who felt increasingly trapped, and finally saw a way out.
Valentine hadn't stayed alive in the Kurian Zone so long by trusting, but something about this man was sympatico.
"Can you trust your woman?"
"Carrie's been my admin for six years. She's made all the right paperwork disappear. Could have turned me in for a nice promotion hundreds of times."
"It's your choice. Maybe we should all have that coffee and see about arranging a long-term retirement plan from the Control. We could certainly use some trained construction engineers in Kentucky."
Champers had an engineer's mind. He adjusted to new factors quickly and settled on an efficient course of action. He'd argue for a new location for the tower's foundation. If they listened and switched, it would mean a week's delay or more. If they overrode him, he could arrange for an accident that would prove his original objection.
Meanwhile, Valentine would organize a breakout for the misfit construction camp.
With the woman named Carrie, he didn't seem so much the tanned accountant, more the attentive boyfriend. She needed it. Perhaps it was the strain of being assaulted in the shower and tied up showing, but she seemed terrified by the idea.
