Arthur looks around to make sure they are still quite alone. “Tonight.”

The Whopper does a little backstroke in Jim’s stomach.

But this is his chance. His chance to make some meaning out of his life, to strike back against … everything. Against individuals, of course—his father, Virginia, Humphrey, his students—but he doesn’t think of them, not consciously. He’s thinking of the evil direction his country has taken for so long, in spite of all his protests, all his votes, all his deepest beliefs. Ignoring the world’s need, profiting from its misery, fomenting fear in order to sell more arms, to take over more accounts, to own more, to make more money … it really is the American way. And so there’s no choice but action, now, some real and tangible form of resistance.

“Okay,” Jim says.

Chapter 20

20

So that very night Jim finds himself tracking with Arthur through the network of little streets on the east side of the City Mall, in Garden Grove. They turn down Lewis Street, which is a tunnel-like alley through the underlevel, walled on both sides by warehouse loading docks, all of them closed in the late evening. Arthur turns his headlights off and on three times as they turn into a ten-car parking lot between two warehouses. Parked in this cubbyhole is a station wagon. Four men standing by it, a black a white and two Latinos, jump to the back of the station wagon as Arthur and Jim slide into the lot. They lift out some small but apparently heavy plastic boxes, put them in the backseat of Arthur’s car. With a few muttered words and a quick wave he’s out into the alley again, tracking toward the freeway.

“That’s the usual method,” he says matter-of-factly. “The idea is to keep hold of this stuff for as short a time as possible. No one has it for more than a couple of hours, and it’s constantly on the move.”

And no more than an hour after that, Jim finds himself crawling on his belly up the dry bed of the Santa Ana River, scraping over sand, gravel, rocks, plastic shards, styrofoam frag ments, bits of metal, and pools of mud. He’s dressed in a head-to-foot commando suit Arthur has provided out of one of the four boxes. This suit, as Arthur explained, is completely covert. It holds Jim’s body heat in, so that he gives out no IR signal; one layer is made of filaboy-37, Dow Chemical and Plessey’s latest stealth material, a honeycomb-structured synthetic resin whose irregular molecules not only distort but “eat” radar waves; and it’s a flat bland color called chameleon, very difficult to see.