The Plutocrat

CHAPTER 1

It was a quiet house, dug in on a quiet street, low down in the quietest neighbourhood of a quiescent and sequestered town, on a spoiled and subdued frontier, buried in the interior of a vast and under-populated continent that determinedly meant to go on about its business — until the Earth gave out or its luck did — with unquiet satisfaction.

But it hummed with electricity, this house. And it held all the world’s secrets within it.

Or it would, if Ricky Ponton had his way. And if he didn’t, he was prepared to destroy it. Today might even be the day.

The house lay on the far side of town, but he could see it remotely, on the thin device he held between his trembling thumb and his delicate forefinger. Every room, every corner, every window, every door. The view from all four sides. The front yard, with its deliberately-neglected foliage. The weedy drive, with its undriven car. The side passageway, with its carefully-positioned rubbish bins and over-spec air-conditioners. The never-used barbecue deck at the rear, its planks prickling in the heat.

If he wanted to, he could observe, from the vantage point of a shaggy eucalyptus across the road — named for a happily-unpronounceable mineral — whether or not there were intruders on the buckling roof.

But Ricky, a mischievous elf in a broad-shouldered country, would already have known that. The sensors would have alerted him. And the house, a shonky fibro bungalow you weren’t supposed to look twice at, would have known what to do without even asking him.

He slipped his state-of-the-art control surface into the breast pocket of his specially-tailored, mud-coloured safari shirt, sat back on the bonnet of the bashed-up Holden VX Commodore he’d purchased for three hundred dollars the day before, raised his military-grade binoculars, aimed beyond the railway tracks, and squinted down at the town from the monumental pile of rubbish that gave it its name.

What was he looking for? A car. A white Toyota rental with a distinctive mascot nodding on its rear shelf: a blue crow, but no beady eye. The eye would be missing. The car would drive slowly north-east along the Silver City Highway, then turn right on Iodide Street and ascend, in plain view and via a crumbling switchback track, to where Ricky waited, high up on the remnant of the Line of Lode, with the miners’ memorial and the restaurant (not yet open) to his right.

And if he were to ask himself what was he feeling, at this moment, as the Corolla of destiny presumably approached — which he wouldn’t, because all sentimental solipsism had long been purged from his system, like corrupted data — it would be this: desperation tunnelling through his innards like a suffocating miner grasping for a chink of light. It was ninety-four days since they’d taken her. You could do a lot in ninety-four days; it was all online to read, if you could bear it. It sank to the bottom of his servers, and pooled there. If he were to get her back, he needed something to bargain with.

Something big.

Come on, little Toyota. I’m waiting for you. I’m dying here.

But then, today might really be the day. It was the stupidest — noblest? — risk he’d taken so far. You never met a provider in person. You wanted safety? It lay in the realm of machines; in data wrapped and re-wrapped, passed along, encrypted and re-encrypted, until it turned into fossilised gibberish whose sedimentary layers only Ricky could strip away and interpret. After that, data turned into information and information became — what? Hadn’t someone once told Ricky that information wanted to be free? What the hell did that mean? Ricky didn’t know and didn’t care. What mattered was that secrets got out. People hated when that happened — some people. Yet Ricky loved it, and he knew it was right.

But standing up here, alone, on this mountain of spoil wasn’t right at all. Okay, you couldn’t lock up data. And all that freedom-loving information couldn’t be un-liberated. Plastic restraints and sensory deprivation meant nothing to bit streams or databases. They didn’t fear the earth beneath their water-cooled cabinets. Such terrors were for people. Just ask Kerri.

He would have to leave Broken Hill soon; he knew that. Australia, too, in all probability. You could feel when the whole match started to go that little bit extra-legal: the crowd went quiet.

So, bye-bye too-generous homeland, hello foreign lawyers.

Once more through the binoculars: no person of interest on the Silver City Highway. And again with the remote vision: no special ops on the veranda, no hazmats checking out the bone-dry hot tub.

Instead, the surprise came from directly behind him. He turned around. Sloughing across the scrappy parking lot towards him was some bloody crate of a vehicle — a pumped-up, jacked-up Land Rover? Where had it come from? There was only one road up to the top of the Line of Lode — and he’d been watching it. That was the whole point, after all.

He stood his ground; whatever the hell this thing was, it didn’t look official. As it got closer, he saw the splatter across its radiator grille and lights. No fly wire, no bug screen — had it driven up from Mildura? It was another big year for locusts. What kind of idiot braved the swarms without protection?

The Land Rover pulled up behind the Commodore. As far as Ricky could tell, it contained a single occupant. This occupant didn’t dismount immediately. He — but a slight, feline figure, so maybe she? — cut its engine, and waited. Ricky shrugged, provocatively, then made a so-what-then gesture with his cupped hands.

The driver’s door opened — it seemed to take a kick from the inside. And what then emerged, Ricky thought, was something that didn’t belong in the outback — not even the near-outback. A thin, sinuous man, with sticking-up blond hair, designer wrap-around shades, immaculate drainpipe jeans and shiny, black, wing-tip shoes. He rubbed the tops of these shoes, in turn, against the back of his turn-ups. Then he spoke.

‘Now, you must be Ricky Ponton. Am I right? The bad guy with all that wicked data?’

American, Ricky thought. Where were the others? They never came singly.

But the American was ahead of him.

‘Hey, relax. It’s just me. For now.’

Just him. Just some crazy Yank — but which variety? Not a journalist — look at that fancy leather jacket; journos wore suede or what they liked to call sport coats. And this bloke wasn’t over-weight. Not private security; they didn’t customise their vehicles. And they didn’t smile. Random whistle-blower? Shocked at what was really going on at that big new special-ops base up in Darwin? No. Didn’t look terrified. Some kind of post-modern spy? Again, no: totally unarmed, as far as Ricky could tell.

What, then?

‘Look down there,’ the American said.

On the Silver City Highway — a small white car.

‘He’s not in it.’

‘What?’

‘Check out the car. Go ahead. See the big blue bird up back? That’s the car, as advertised — okay? But your guy’s not in it. Go ahead, zoom in.’

Through the binoculars: white Corolla, blind crow, driver in shades with collar up and hat pulled down despite the mounting heat of the morning.

‘I don’t know who that is,’ the American said. ‘But it sure ain’t your Mr Lin.’

Ricky, Ricky! You don’t need to be in control all the time. You understand that now, don’t you, love? Shut up, he thought, shut up and let me breathe. Take charge, Ricky, you young bludger. Stop whinging. Don’t buckle under.

‘Who the hell are you anyway?’

‘Well, Ricky, you can call me Jay. We’ll do the get-to-know-you later. Take another look.’

He felt his head turn, almost against his will.

‘See there?’ Jay said. ‘Far side of Iodide?’

A big, black SUV with darkened windows. Not a model common in Australia.

‘And back here — see? Corner of Chloride?’

A second.

‘And then, way back on Silver City?’

The third. Three would be enough, wouldn’t it? One for Ricky, one for Mr Lin, one spare with all the hardware.

‘Your people?’

‘No, Ricky. Not my people.’

‘No? Fuck you.’

He stepped towards the Commodore, but Jay grabbed him by the wrist with a grip that belied his fussy-neat, middle-aged cool.

‘No, that’s not gonna work. Allow me.’

The American threw Ricky aside and dropped into the Commodore’s wasted leather seat.

‘Follow me in the Jeep.’ He indicated the Land Rover. ‘Keys are in it. Just up to the edge of the lot, okay?’

‘What is this? What are you doing?’

‘You really wanted to meet with Mr Lin, isn’t that right?’

Ricky stared at him. Mr Lin was already history on Iodide Street.

‘Isn’t that right?’ Jay repeated.

‘Yeah, but —’

‘Well then you need to come with me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I got him.’

‘You —’

The Commodore’s creaky door slammed and its window squeaked down.

‘Get in the Jeep, you hear? And don’t worry about me, I’m used to driving on dirt.’

Jay snapped on his seat belt and yanked it tight — way tight. Then the Commodore tore a trench across the spoil of the parking lot in the direction of the access ramp. Ricky watched. Then he turned to the Land Rover. What choice was there? Stay here and be buried? Suffocate while the lawyers tried to dig him out with a spoon? Or bust out for the outback and the red dirt of freedom with this lunatic Yank?

And what might he have done with the real Mr Lin?

The Commodore had vanished. Ricky scraped his way up into the Land Rover, then had to shuffle himself across the gearbox because the steering wheel was on the wrong side. Had Jay imported this piece of crunky British crap from the States?

Ricky got the thing rolling and juddering and pulled it around at the top of the ramp. And there was Jay, some fierce kind of grin on his face, pumping up the slope towards him. Oh and yeah — there was the Commodore: upside-down, smoking, blocking the ramp at its narrowest point, just after the final hairpin.

Jay jumped into the Land Rover.

‘So how much d’you pay for that? Two-fifty?’

‘Three hundred.’

‘Aussie?’

‘Aussie.’

‘Well worth it, in my opinion. You want to drive?’

Ricky began to think, but gave up in disgust.

‘No.’

They switched seats. The Commodore belched into flames.

Jay stuck the Land Rover into low-range.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ he said, tapping Ricky on the breast pocket.

‘Shit!’

He took out the controller and checked all the cameras. Nothing happening. Everything normal. No SUVs.

‘They know about your little data centre,’ Jay said. ‘So...’

Ricky winced. Whether or not this cocksure, clothes-horse cowboy was truly poor little Ricky’s friend-in-need, he had no idea. But the bloke seemed to know the game.

The Land Rover jerked forward. Jay pointed it towards the rear edge of the parking lot, on the opposite side to the empty restaurant, the unvisited memorial and the exhausted boomtown that still tantalised itself with dreams of a new life to be achieved, any day now, through civic partnership and specialty tourism. And there, at the edge, were Jay’s tyre tracks. Somehow, he’d driven this dirt-bucket up the bare, industrial scree left behind by Australia’s original wave of dedicated diggers. (If you cared to see how the present wave chose to memorialise itself, you could contemplate all that real estate wedged around the rim of Sydney Harbour — and a lot of secrets there, too, Ricky thought.)

‘You better do it,’ Jay said, as they took the plunge.

Ricky scrolled to the extreme right and tapped at the red icon. Next, he entered the passkey, and confirmed his intentions, twice. Then he switched to the view from the eucalyptus. There would, of course, be nothing to see — not unless entry were forced. In which case, there would be a firework display. But he could almost feel in his bones the chattering and skittering of the drive heads as they zeroed out each and every one of his secrets — again and again and again.

‘You got backups, I presume?’ Jay said, spinning the Land Rover past a concrete culvert.

Ricky couldn’t help it; he began to laugh.

‘I guess you’re a pretty smart guy,’ Jay said.

He was, wasn’t he? Cool, smart — and in control. The bastards hadn’t got him yet — and they never would. But that didn’t mean they didn’t still have a heap of shit to make amends for. Of course he was smart. Look at that: a flip of the thumb told him that his servers in Brazil and Norway had already taken up the strain. More secrets for everyone! Courtesy of Ricky P., the pint-sized Aussie battler-brat, now the scourge of the secret classes, keeping them awake at night, proving once and for all that it wasn’t who you knew, but what you knew.

‘This evil, subversive, troop-endangering conspiracy of yours?’ Jay said, as they hit the bottom of the slope and the Land Rover battered its way across waste ground towards the highway. ‘What do you call it, again?’

‘What?’

‘Big something.’

‘Oh. Big Data Underground.’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’ Jay made a clucking sound with his tongue. ‘Kinda pretentious. I woulda called it something different.’

‘Oh? Like what?’

‘Uh, something like, say, Leaks-R-Us. You know, user-friendly.’

They bumped up on to the highway. Ricky closed his eyes.

‘So where are we going?’

‘To see Mr Lin.’

‘And where is Mr Lin?’

‘He’s on my ranch.’

‘Ranch? What ranch? You’ve got a ranch?’

‘No, what do you guys call it? It’s a sheep station.’

Ricky opened his eyes again and stared at side of the American’s face. He was concentrating on the road — the Land Rover drifted at speed — and he wasn’t grinning any more.

‘You have a sheep station?’

‘Sure. Just bought it.’

‘You...’

‘Don’t believe me? You’ll see. Sheep and everything. Not sure what I’m gonna do with them. Maybe you can advise me.’

‘You want sheep advice from me?’

‘I feel responsible. Okay, we turn off here.’

Jay flung the Land Rover off the highway into an industrial zone. They bumped past loading bays and refrigerated warehouses and entered a road train marshalling yard. Jay aimed the Land Rover at a double-trailer livestock carrier and accelerated.

Ricky felt himself tense up. Why more crazy driving, he wanted to know; was it really necessary?

‘Hold tight,’ Jay said.

They hit the trailer ramp, barrelled up inside the trailer, skidded the length of it and came to rest against two tractor tyres that someone — Jay? — had fixed to the end.

‘Have to take kind of a run at it,’ Jay said.

‘What are we doing in this thing?’

‘Don’t you have drones in Australia?’

‘Well, I —’

‘I know you have planes.’

A lot of laughs, this bloke.

‘Now, you can stay here,’ Jay said. ‘If you prefer. Or you can ride up front with me. It’s a long way.’

Ricky took a deep breath. A long ride. Maybe put the control thing aside for a little time-out?

‘We can talk. There’s a refrigerator in the cab.’

Ricky looked at his new friend. The man was enjoying himself again.

‘There’s beer in it.’

‘All right,’ Ricky said. ‘All right. We’ll talk. I’ve got a couple of things I want to know about you.’

‘Cool. Let’s get this rig rolling. You ever driven one?’

‘No. You?’

‘No. Came with the ranch. I mean, station.’

Between them they hitched up the rear ramp. Then they stood and looked at their new ride.

‘Hey, how hard can it be?’ Jay asked.

Who was this bloke? Had he really snatched Mr Lin out from under the clampdown and penned him up with his hapless sheep? What chance now for Kerri?

Ten minutes of blood-pumping manoeuvres, and they were back on the highway. Burning up inside the road train’s monstrous cab, Ricky flicked the sweat from his unlined forehead and checked the outlook from the eucalyptus.

The bungalow was on fire.

CHAPTER 2

Sandy Quayle shivered in the cold. Winter had come early, sweeping in with a brutality that seemed vengeful, and almost personal. She could take it, now. At first, it had been hard — so hard that survival had seemed impossible. And so it would have been, she felt sure, had she not found her way to the village.

Here, the physical dependence of one person upon another was made manifest. And the kind of debts that you incurred served only to anchor you in solidarity against misfortune, rather than isolating you in misery.

Sure, technically, she was homeless. But she had found a home.

It lay in an unregarded and barely visible crevice, a sloping, wooded gully in an angle between the interstate and the state highway. As she surveyed it now, with its tents, tepees, improvised shacks, log fires and washing lines, she remembered that she had once believed herself to be rich and self-sufficient. She had been wrong on both counts.

A woman very much like herself — but four years younger, at forty-eight, and going by what now seemed the more formal and pretentious name of Sandra, rather than Sandy — had truly thought that she had achieved success: the beautiful home; the secure and rewarding career; bullet-proof good health; the go-getting businessman husband with plans for the future. That whole Dream thing, in other words.

Wrong on all counts.

Another one of those financial things had blown in, like a moral tornado, picking its victims. Such events weren’t any more predictable or preventable than real tornados — so respectable opinion held — but they sure did punish the guilty. Or some of them, at least, Sandy thought.

And as the wind whipped around her well-wrapped ankles and shook the pine trees above her head, Sandy Quayle reminded herself that she was to blame, somehow. She knew this, and believed that it was only right that she should suffer the consequences. Well, at least for a time.

So had her adult life been one big mistake?

Young Sandra — home-schooled in math, motherhood and modesty, and brimming over with what she sincerely believed, at the time, to be Christian charity — would have said so. But then along had come Johnny-boy, and young Sandra’s eyes had been opened to what might just be possible, if you only got wise to the ways of money. You know, like those folk on Wall Street, or on cable TV.

Now, she felt as though she’d been suckered into a cult. Money was dangerous. The idea of money was seductive, and corrupting. And, sometimes, it might just be evil. Thus she was ready to give the faith of her youth another try. Could you do that? Was it allowed? God welcomed sinners back, didn’t he? Sure, unless there was something in the small print.

So, anyway, she felt that she could atone. Perhaps, once she’d atoned enough, grace would follow. It was worth a try.

And you could never kill a dream, right? Forget the sex and the violence and the Hollywood politics — that was the one thing the movies got right. Some things you never surrendered, however defeated you were.

The village was good. Despite the privations, and the personal problems of some of its residents, it was a place of peace and even — if you were prepared to look at things in a certain way — of dignity and equality.

But the village felt under threat. The land it stood on, though useless for any other purpose, belonged to the Country Club. Rumour said that something was going to happen.

And, despite her feelings for the village, Sandy Quayle had resolved to leave. There was still some fight left in her; she felt healthy again and there was a renewed clarity in her mind. This was still America. Things were still possible. Dreams did not have to die. They could be put on hold. She just had to find a way. Any way. And she needed to think.

She would have to wait a while yet for her turn in the ‘kitchen’, and there was little else to do. So she arranged her insulating layers for maximum warmth, stooped to scoop up the shopping bag in which she stowed her special possessions and made her move.

For privacy, she parked herself on a thick, dry root under cover of one of the pine trees that common opinion held too big and dangerous to fell for fuel. The pine-needle thatch above her cut out some of the fall chill, and blocked the accusatory glare of the full moon.

Luck, she thought. She needed luck. So much depended on luck. If she saw the merest hint of it, she would grasp at it, and not let go.

But before she could conjure any, an intervention came. It wasn’t providence, or the kind of petty good fortune she seemed to remember but which ran at a premium these days, like a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, and it certainly wasn’t grace.

It was Hunter Bill, with a sack over his shoulder, looking older, mangier and yet more enthusiastic than ever. His offerings were better than road-kill, but they turned her stomach and she always politely declined.

‘Oh, Bill,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m going to say.’

‘Rabbit? Squirrel?’

‘No thanks, Bill. Appreciate it and all, but...’

‘You sure? Got raccoon tonight!’

‘Raccoon? How’d you catch a raccoon, Bill? No, don’t answer that.’

‘What’s a matter, Sandy? You a vegetarian now?’

‘Maybe I am, Bill. I don’t know.’

Technically, she was. Her dinner would consist of pasta from the pantry on Mellon Street. If she got lucky, someone would spice it up for her with some vegetables.

‘It’s fresh and it’s organic,’ Bill insisted, with that pitiful sincerity of his.

‘I believe you.’

Actually, if he caught his racoons or his other critters up on the golf course out back of the Country Club, or anywhere nearby, then they were most likely laced with Emerald Lawn and Verminator Supreme. That stuff couldn’t be healthy. The mainstream media were probably right about that.

‘Listen,’ Bill said. ‘You want to come by later to my, uh...’ Bill didn’t really have a tent. ‘To my place...’ He rounded off his invitation with a nod and a jiggle of his sack.

‘Bear it in mind, Bill. See ya.’

Bill stood his ground for a moment and pursed his lips. Then he looked up at the moon.

‘You know what’s happening, right?’

‘No, Bill. What?’

‘China.’

‘What about China?’

‘Damn moon-shot. They’re up there now. Think I can see ’em.’

She waited. Bill’s shoulders slumped.

‘Know what worries me?’

Sandy shrugged. Bill pointed at the moon with his free hand.

‘We left our flag up there. You follow me?’

‘I follow you, Bill.’

Hunter Bill rubbed his bony brow, then shook his head and waddled off in search of potential new markets. He might well find them, she thought.

So how had Bill ended up in the village? There was something about him, hidden behind that folksy-woodsman style of his, that made Sandy think that he’d fallen further than she had. No doubt bad luck was involved. It always was. But had there been pride, too?

Sandy knew about pride.

On the far side of the interstate, down a twisty, landscaped private road, just off the state highway that led into Stimsonville (remember all those car dealerships?) you could still see it: her beautiful, prideful home. So artfully built! All those extraneous gables; double pillars by the front door; windows so narrow that you had four to a room, but with classy sashes that used actual weights instead of friction; more bathrooms than bedrooms! And so on.

You deserve this mini-mansion! Or so said the broker’s brochure.

Look, Sandra, I watch the market, okay? It takes a tumble, we flip out. No-brainer, sweetie.

Well, they flipped out all right. And then Johnny-boy flipped out permanently, in due course — but that really came under Anger.

Hunter Bill claimed he’d scouted the area recently. The house might be bank-owned, he’d told her, but the rabbits in the front yard sure weren’t.

Sandy suspected — no, to be truthful, she was pretty certain — that there had been something fishy about the paperwork. But wasn’t it better to be punished too much than too little?

So much for Pride.

There had also been Sloth.

When you watched TV, as Sandra did before she became Sandy, you learned that exercise, in large amounts and with the right clothing, kit and attitude, made you a better person. From this it followed that you would be a healthier person. Virtue conquered disease.

Sandy had to conclude that, despite all those power-walks with Candace and Melanie, she had fallen short. Sure, she had recovered, but insurance was a thing of the past, and these things came back, didn’t they? And sometimes she felt dizzy and too tired to move. Maybe it was just hunger; but could it be diabetes? Next time they had one of those open-air clinics at the mall, she would walk over and get in line.

She paused. This stuff was too depressing. Fight back, Sandy!

And look — life went on: over by the ‘kitchen’ people were eating hot food and enjoying it; on the far side of the encampment, Hunter Bill was sharing a joke, at least, if not his catch of the day, with those two girls who slept in the old Mercury. (The car was some kind of violation, it seemed. Nothing had happened yet, but its loss would be a blow to the community.) And tomorrow, Thursday, she would get to have her weekly shower.

Thursday was Ladies Night, and quite a scene. The shower had been rigged by Gary, who said he used to be a contractor, and claimed to have installed the ‘waterfall’ shower that Johnny-boy had thought so essential. Where the water came from was a little mysterious. The rumour was that Gary had found a way to tap into the automatic irrigation system up on the golf course.

And human progress continued. The Chinese were going to land on the moon!

Wow, and, if that wasn’t enough, it was dinner-time! Her slot in the ‘kitchen’ had opened up. She headed for the warmth of the fire. Someone had moved her dried pasta, but it looked like it was all still there. Gary, useful as ever, offered her a pot of water.

While she was waiting for it to boil, she noticed a commotion at the side of the camp nearest to the road, a little-used country lane that came off the state highway and functioned mainly as service access to the Country Club. Bright vehicle lights shone between the pine trees, generating a confusion of shadows.

The Stimsonville tent city was really more of a tent village. The population varied, but was currently about a hundred. And since it hid amongst the pines and was cut off on two sides by the interstate and the state highway, it didn’t attract much attention. Unlike the much larger, more famous encampments in California and Tennessee, it didn’t get visits from New York feature-writers or west coast independent documentary film-makers. Sandy thought this was a pity, because small towns really were the soul of the nation.

Anyway, the only regular visitor was the local sheriff, a lugubrious and generally sympathetic fellow — excepting the issue of the Mercury — whose rationale for stopping by was always simply that he was ‘monitoring the situation’. He came by on his own. Sometimes he brought canned food. But tonight there seemed to be multiple vehicles.

She glanced at the pot. Still not boiling; what she needed was some more dry wood for the fire. But before she could begin to search, she heard raised voices from the direction of the road. It was the two girls. They were yelling at their car, which looked to be moving under its own volition. But no, there was some kind of a tow-truck. The Mercury was being hauled up on to it. Well, we had that coming, she thought. You couldn’t get away with breaking the rules forever.

Then came more lights; and the slamming of doors; and an angry voice yelling something though a bullhorn. To her left, she glimpsed Gary slip away into the darkness, his most prized possession — his toolbox — under his arm. To her right, over on the road, she saw three black vans. Each bore the same logo on its side — a stylized sun beaming down upon green fields. There was a name: Fairmeadow something. Behind the vans was a heavy dumpster truck. And beyond that, almost out of sight, was the sheriff’s patrol car, with its lights out. A still shadow in the driver’s seat.

Something buffeted against her shoulder and a camera flashed in her face. When her sight returned she saw that her cooking fire had been kicked over and her dinner lay in the dirt. The camp had been invaded by men in black uniforms and ski masks. They carried long sticks — those things that people used to call billy clubs. What couldn’t be smashed — the nylon tents, for example — got thrown into the dumpster.

She wondered if the sheriff could see what was happening, because surely... But something caught her attention. It was Hunter Bill, teetering out from behind a tree at the back of the camp. His frantic gestures could only mean follow me. She decided this would be a smart thing to do, even if it should turn out later that he really just wanted her to help him catch more critters or foil the Chinese moon mission.

So she grabbed her shopping bag and ran.

The woods were full of fugitive shapes, stabbing beams and heavy breaths. Nobody spoke. It was a silent scramble for sanctuary — though where that might be, Sandy had no idea. The Country Club? How would that work? Wouldn’t it be a little — what was the word? — impertinent? Her fellow villagers, who mostly kept out of the woods, seemed to have little sense of direction. Most of them would end up down on the service road. Hunter Bill, by contrast, was taking the high road in his long stride and she struggled to keep up with him. As for the Mercury girls? They were not to be seen.

On she went, straining her eyes as her manic woodsman flitted this way and that through the trees. The shopping bag slapped against her chapped shins.

Eventually, Bill must have realised that he’d gotten too far ahead of her and had stopped to let her catch up. By now, they were in the bushes that skirted the golf course. Amazingly, the whole thing was lit up. Somebody was playing golf at night.

Bill looked like he was lit up, too.

‘You know what this is?’

Did Bill have a conspiracy theory? He often did.

‘You know, it makes sense.’

Right then, very little made sense to her — except for one, simple, obvious fact: that her term in purgatory still had some time to run.

Bill gestured to her to sit. She plumped down on a patch of dry grass, taking care not to spill the contents of her shopping bag.

‘Shh!’ Bill said, as if she had any breath left with which to speak. He withdrew a child’s toy telescope from the cavernous interior of his coat and aimed it at a gap in the bushes. Was this what he used to track his prey?

‘Look!’ he said, passing her the telescope.

‘Oh, no — I don’t think —’

‘You gotta look!’ he said, forcing the instrument into her hands. Sometimes you just had to humour him, so she wiped the eyepiece with her sleeve and peered through the thing.

She saw two men standing at the edge of a beautifully-trimmed circle of grass. In the centre of the circle was a flag. About five or six feet short of the flag were two neon-yellow golf balls — vital accessories for playing at night? — but the men appeared to have suspended their game in order to conduct a spirited conversation.

Perhaps ten years apart in age but neither younger than sixty, they dressed similarly, in warm slacks and wind-proof bomber jackets. The older, shorter man’s jacket bore some kind of military insignia; the other’s made Sandy think Ivy League. Their faces and hairstyles might have been purchased from the same catalogue, she thought: strong brows, square chins, perfect noses, fulsome hair — grey-streaked and swept back. The older man used grease on his; the younger’s shivered in the breeze like cotton candy. And while the younger man’s face retained some softness, the other’s looked tough and creased. This aggressive cast was accentuated by his steel-rimmed glasses, shoulders that seemed too wide for his body, and the way he flicked at the grass with his putter.

‘Recognise ’em?’ Bill said. He sounded excited.

‘No, Bill. Should I?’

‘Hear what they’re saying?’

‘No, they’re too far away.’ She lowered the telescope. ‘Perhaps we should —’

‘We gotta get closer.’

‘No, I really think we should —’

But Bill had produced a cell phone from that junk-filled coat of his. And it looked very familiar, in its sparkly pink case!

‘Bill! That’s Donna-Marie’s phone! Did you steal it?’

Bill looked taken aback. His mouth fell open.

‘Now, you know that’s wrong!’

Donna-Marie ran what she called her cell phone stand in the village. Whenever she managed to get enough credit on her account and sufficient juice in her battery she would put out her shingle and wait for business. If you had fifty cents you could make a domestic call. International calls were available by special arrangement and prices were negotiable. Cell phone reception was iffy in the camp, and Donna-Marie didn’t do refunds, so customers were routinely advised to seek higher ground.

‘I was making a call!’ Bill said. ‘But then all hell —’

‘You know I don’t like that word. Did you pay for it?’

‘Sure! Fifty damn cents!’

She gave him the kind of reproachful frown she used to give Johnny-boy’s wild-girl nieces when they were all living together in the trailer.

But really — a call? Who could Bill possibly be calling? She felt a pang of sadness; Bill lived in a fantasy world.

‘Looks like a conspiracy to me,’ Bill said, brandishing the cell phone like a Bowie knife. ‘There’s an app on here. I’m gonna bug ’em.’

Well, that just proved her point for her, didn’t it?

Bill got down on his hands and knees and, like some demented attack-rabbit, bobbed off into the bushes. She decided to wait for him. You didn’t want to be alone in the woods; terrible stories circulated in the village. Even if only some of them were true, well...

With a quick, mumbled prayer — the first in a while — and a supreme effort of will, eyes closed, she erased them from her mind. There followed a long moment of floating in the void, and then it hit her: she was truly homeless.

Not homeless in the sense of losing the mini-mansion; not homeless in the manner of a person living in someone else’s trailer; not homeless as in sleeping in your car. She had no money. Should the temperature drop even further, the clothes she wore might not be enough to keep her alive through the night.

Her friends and associates — all but one of them — had been dispersed. Where would they all go? The shelter in Stimsonville had been closed since the last elections.

She believed that her behaviour in the camp had been exemplary. That she had been a good neighbour, a friend in need, a shoulder to cry on — none of this could be in doubt. Then again, she lacked the skills and resources of people like Gary and Donna-Marie and Hunter Bill. And this meant that her contribution had inevitably been... Well, she didn’t quite know how to think about it.

Those hateful words that had become so common these days — moocher, freeloader, deadbeat, subprime — well, they didn’t apply to her, surely. They couldn’t. And yet she felt a debt, a nagging guilt. What did it mean? Ah, but if you really thought about it, there was some small solace to be had: out there somewhere, walking about, heads held high for all she knew, were people who were guilty as you-know-what — but whose guilt didn’t nag. She, Sandra Quayle, was superior to such people.

Then came the merest rustle in the bushes: Hunter Bill was back. She felt glad that she was a person, not a critter. Bill’s face looked flushed — with triumph?

‘Just as I thought,’ he said.

‘Aha! And what conclusion did you come to, Bill?’

‘It looks bad, all right. The old guy with the nine-iron? I know him. I don’t trust him, Sandy.’

It occurred to her again that Bill must have had a former life quite different to hers and, for a fleeting moment, she wondered what it had been like.

‘No, I mean, did you figure out the conspiracy?’

‘Maybe. Need to do some research.’

Research? Even before tonight’s events the camp had lacked Internet access. And the public library in Stimsonville had shut down years ago, about the time they were turning off the street lights. If you bought a cup of coffee you could have Wi-Fi. But the coffee cost three dollars.

‘Well, you do that. Then we can all sleep safe in our beds!’

Bill gave her that sour smile of his. Really, he did lack for the personal graces sometimes.

‘Let me ask you something,’ he said.

‘Okay.’

‘You really don’t recognise those two guys?’

‘No.’

‘Not even the old guy?’

Had there been something about him? Did it matter? She shook her head.

‘You keep up with the news, Sandy?’

‘No. Why on Earth would I want to do that?’

The news was always terrible. It was mayhem, vileness, pornography. Why did the mainstream media need to say all those horrible things about America?

‘So you didn’t catch the Journal this morning?’

That sour smile again. She really ought to tell him to stop it.

‘No. I did not.’

And where, for that matter, did Hunter Bill get his newspapers delivered?

‘Then I guess this’ll come as a surprise to you.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a Committee to Save America.’

Now if he was going to get all political, or disrespectful, then she might just have to consider taking her chances on her own in the woods.

‘Is there now? Bill, do you really think America needs a committee to save it?’

Bill looked at her as if she’d said something truly weird. Which was weird in