The Oracle Year(86)

“Almost done,” she said, not looking up. “Hurry up, Will.”

The bedroom was tiny and cluttered, occupied mainly by instruments, recording gear, and an unmade bed. Will reached under the bed and pulled out a duffel bag. He looked around the room, trying to decide if he actually needed to bring any of this with him.

“I can’t believe you called me,” Leigh Shore said. “We got off that helicopter yesterday and I thought I’d never see you again.”

She was leaning against the wall in jeans, a black misfits T-shirt, and an unzipped hoodie.

“I felt like I owed you one,” Will said, throwing a few changes of clothes into the bag. “And I wanted to tell you that you’re safe. They won’t come after you. At least until November, and this should all be over by then.”

“November?” Leigh asked, making no move toward any sort of recording or note-taking technology. “I’m safe until . . . November?”

“Yes. From the president, anyway. From the rest of the world, I don’t know, but the U.S. government is off our backs for the next six months.”

“How did you do it?” Leigh said. Her tone was flat, odd. “I thought we were dead. How did you make them let us go?”

“I knew we were all right as soon as I saw U.S. flags,” Will said. “I was always afraid it’d be Libya, or someplace like that.”

“Libya?” Leigh said.

“Libya, North Korea, whatever. France. You know what I mean. Some country we wouldn’t want to be kidnapped by. It doesn’t matter.”

“Will, please,” Leigh said, a note of frustration creeping into her voice. “How did you do it?”

“The president was there. Just in the other room,” Will answered, speaking quickly. “After they took you guys out, that Leuchten guy fed me a line of bullshit about the government sending me the predictions in the first place.”

“What?” Leigh said, her voice sharpening.

“It’s bullshit, Leigh. And I’ll tell you why.”

Will tossed a few framed photos into his bag.

“One of the predictions was . . . well, if the U.S. government was behind the Oracle, they would never have sent it. There’s no way. You know I didn’t put all the predictions I got up on the Site, right? I held some back?”

“If you tell me that’s what you did, then all right, that’s what you did,” Leigh answered.

“Well, I did. Not even Hamza knows them all, and some of them I held back because it seemed like they could come in handy if certain things . . .

“Look. I’m getting off track,” he said. “Back in Virginia, I insisted that I needed to talk to President Green directly. After a while, they let me, and then I told him two things, and all of us were out of there ten minutes later.”

Leigh looked at him.

“Are you going to tell me what you told the president, Will?”

Will hesitated. He knew better. But then he thought about this woman, who had been sucked up into the Site’s tornado through no fault of her own. Worse than that—it wasn’t like it was an accident. He had picked her, and now she would spend the rest of her life wondering what had actually happened down in Virginia, and if it would ever happen again.

He asked himself whether that was something he should be particularly concerned about, considering the big picture of everything else the Site was doing. And then he decided that, yes, it absolutely was, because this—unlike every other terrible thing he’d caused in the world—was something he could fix.

“Off the record,” he said. “It has to be, and you’ll understand why as soon as I tell you.”

Leigh nodded, making a zipping gesture across her lips.

“I told the president that he was going to be diagnosed with Stage IV lymphatic cancer in January of next year. And then I said that I had set up all my predictions to be released on the Site, including that one, unless I tell the system once per day to hold them back.”

Leigh whistled.

“Jesus. Is that true? Is he going to die?”

“I don’t know if he’ll die, just that he’ll get diagnosed.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, at first. I mean, what do you say to that? His face went really still. You could see him thinking it through. If the country finds out about the cancer thing, then no second term. No one will vote for a terminal president.”

Will shrugged.

“I told Green to let us go and gave him my word that I wouldn’t let that particular prediction leak before voting day. But if he comes anywhere near us, out it will go.”

“That’s why you said we’re safe for the next six months,” Leigh said.

“Until the first Tuesday in November,” Will said. “Election day. Hopefully longer, though. We knew something like this might happen eventually—we made plans.”

Will took a small hard drive that held demos of most of his original songs and stuffed it into the bulging duffel. He looked at the basses and other instruments leaning against the walls, some in cases, some not. Some of them he’d had for ten years or more. There was just no way.

Will zipped his bag closed. He stepped over to Leigh and looked her in the eye.

“For all I know, you’re taping this. Maybe you’ve got me on video. I don’t know. I don’t really know you. Hamza’s pissed at me for bringing you here.”