“I filed a flight plan to El Paso.”
“El Paso?”
“It’ll take us near Moab. Near enough that we can look down on it like you said. But we’ll be at forty thousand feet—above the box.”
“The box?”
“The box of airspace around Moab where the FAA doesn’t want us to go.”
“El Paso’s a lot farther away,” Corvallis pointed out.
Frank nodded. “The only thing that’s a little sketchy about this is that we really don’t have that much fuel. I mean, we could stretch it, but we’d be in the red zone. So we’ll have to land somewhere else, short of El Paso.”
“That’s okay,” Corvallis said, “everything will be different by then.”
“It’s okay for you,” Frank said, “but it makes me look like a fucking idiot for filing a flight plan that doesn’t make sense fuel-wise.”
“Just tell me who I need to talk to. I’ll take responsibility.” Corvallis generally didn’t like looking people in the eye, but from watching Dodge he knew that there were certain times when it was a deal-breaker. So he forced himself to look Frank in the eye. “I will personally take responsibility for this and I will get you off the hook.” Frank shrugged, raised his eyebrows, and went back to the cockpit.
Corvallis had been thinking about a detail that had passed under his gaze while he’d been clicking around learning about Maeve Braden. He had to dig surprisingly deep into his browser history to find it. This was complicated by the fact that he had been checking her out both on the public Miasma and in Lyke’s secure file system. Eventually he tracked it down in the latter. It was the personal data record associated with her account—the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she’d joined Lyke, and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics. But anyway, she had listed several telephone numbers, including one that began with “011,” which was the prefix for dialing international calls from the United States. He had already learned of her Australian background and so upon scanning this for the first time he’d made the obvious assumption that it was an Oz number. But it wouldn’t make any particular sense for her to go to the trouble of entering such a number into her profile unless she was actually spending a lot of time in Australia.
On a second look, the country code was 881, which wasn’t Australia; it was a special code used by satellite phones.
Corvallis wasn’t hugely knowledgeable about sat phones, but he knew a couple of people who owned them, either just because they were geeks or because they did a lot of travel in places with no cell phone coverage. It seemed pretty obvious that Maeve was one of the latter. Her whole job was taking groups of tourists on trips deep into the canyons of the Colorado River, where cell phone use was out of the question. Of course Canyonlands Adventures would own sat phones, and of course they’d issue them to their guides.
Whether she would keep the thing turned on, and within easy reach, was another question. For all he knew, it might have been turned off and buried in a waterproof bag at the bottom of a raft. But then it might get dumped overboard if the raft flipped—which was exactly the kind of situation where you’d need it. It would make more sense for the lead guide to carry it on her person.
It was worth a go, anyway. Corvallis’s cell phone wouldn’t work on the plane, but he had pretty good Internet and he could make voice calls through his laptop. He plugged in his headphones for better audio, booted up the relevant app, and typed in the number. There was a long wait—much longer than for conventional calls.
“Hell-low!?” said a woman. She sounded Australian, and pissed off that someone would call her. In the background it was possible to hear other people chattering and laughing. Corvallis visualized them on the raft, in a quiet stretch of the Colorado. He heard a splash and a kerplunk. Someone had jumped in for a swim.
Just from this, Corvallis had already learned what he needed to know: that Moab had not been nuked. But it seemed only polite to explain himself. “Maeve, I’m sorry to bother you but this is important. You don’t know me. My name is Corvallis Kawasaki.”
“As in the town of Corvallis? Oregon?”
“Yes. You can Google me when you get home, I’m an executive at Lyke. The social media company.”
“You work for Lyke?”
“Yes.”
“Is there something going wrong with my account? Did I get hacked or something?” He liked the way she asked it. Her tone wasn’t apprehensive. It was more as if she would find it wryly amusing to have been hacked.
“No. Your account is fine. Everything is fine where you’re concerned.”
She laughed. “Then why are you calling me? To ask me out on a bloody date?”
“That would be a violation of our confidentiality policies,” Corvallis responded. “This is about something else that you should probably be aware of.” And he went on to explain, as best as he could without taking all day, what had been happening. During this time, Maeve didn’t say much. It was a lot to take in. And for all of its complexity, for all of the millions of people on the Miasma who sincerely believed in its reality, it must have seemed ridiculous and dreamlike to her, gliding down the Colorado with her sun hat pulled down over her head and her paddle on her lap, looking at the ancient rocks, watching the Jones family gambol in the cool water.
“At about five twenty this morning, you were still in or near Moab, right?”
“I was at the office,” she said, “loading up the van.”
“In downtown Moab.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see anything like a bright flash in the sky?” He already knew the answer, but he had to ask.
“No. There was no such thing.”
“But the Internet had gone down.”
“I’d got up at four thirty and it worked. Half an hour later it had crashed. Nothing.”
“Did you try to use your cell phone at all?”
“The Joneses did. They tried to ring me at five thirty, five forty, something like that. Nothing worked.”
“Why’d they want to call you?”
“To tell me they’d be late.”
“But you met at the sandbar and got off without anything unusual happening.”
“Yeah.”
“And the sandbar is, what, only a couple of miles outside of Moab?”
“That’s right. Hang on.” The phone went shuffly/muffly. Corvallis heard enough snatches of Maeve’s voice to guess that she was trying to explain matters to her clients, who had overheard enough to be curious.
“I’m here,” she assured him.
“Maeve? There’s a lot more we could say to each other,” Corvallis said, “but I’m betting that the Joneses have friends and family who know they were in Moab this morning and who are frantic with worry right now. You should probably hang up and call them.”
“Why haven’t they called already, I wonder?”
“They probably don’t have the sat phone number. To get the sat phone number, they’d have to reach your main office, and …”
“And all the comms are down, yeah. All right. How can I call you back, Corvallis?”
He