Chapter 7 : The Escape Plan
The public library on Central Avenue opened at nine.
I was there at eight-fifty, watching the doors from a coffee shop across the street, running counter-surveillance like a paranoid professional. Two cups of black coffee sat cooling in front of me—one finished, one barely touched. My hands had stopped shaking sometime around dawn, but the memory of that knife glinting in the streetlight kept replaying behind my eyes.
Three days since the ambush. Three days of jumping at shadows, sleeping in two-hour bursts, moving between motels that accepted cash and didn't ask for ID. The scrapes from the fence had scabbed over. The ankle that I'd twisted in the drainage ditch had faded to a dull ache. But the psychological wound was still fresh—the knowledge that I'd come within inches of dying in an empty lot because I'd underestimated how fast this world moved.
The library doors opened. I waited five more minutes, scanning the street for anyone who might be watching, then crossed and went inside.
Public computers. No login required, no trail leading back to Pete Schwartz. Just anonymous access to every piece of information the internet contained.
I found a terminal in the back corner, positioned so I could see the entrance, and began my research.
NZT turned the search into something almost beautiful.
Information flowed through my enhanced mind like water through a sieve, the relevant pieces catching while everything else washed away. Medical tourism. Facial reconstruction surgery. Identity change procedures. The mechanics of becoming someone else.
Tijuana emerged as the obvious choice. Close enough to reach by bus. Far enough to escape American record-keeping. Home to clinics that specialized in clients who needed discretion—cartel associates, witness protection failures, criminals with too much heat. The doctors asked no questions because questions were bad for business.
Prices ranged wildly. Budget operations at $5,000, performed in conditions that made me queasy just reading about them. Mid-tier work at $8,000-12,000, acceptable quality with reasonable safety protocols. Premium services at $15,000 and up—real surgeons, real facilities, results that would hold up to scrutiny.
I needed premium. Cheap surgery meant complications, infections, faces that looked wrong in ways people couldn't articulate but definitely noticed. If I was going to become someone else, I needed to become someone forgettable—a face that blended into crowds, that triggered no alarm bells, that could walk through the world without leaving ripples.
$15,000 minimum. Plus travel. Plus recovery time—three to four weeks of healing before the results were presentable. Plus new documents afterward, because a new face without new papers was just a new face.
Call it $20,000 total, to be safe.
I pulled a scrap of paper from my pocket and started calculating.
Current assets: $200. The remnants of my information-selling income, minus the expenses of three days on the run.
Target: $20,000.
Deficit: $19,800.
Timeline: I wanted to be transformed before Walter White's partnership with Jesse solidified. Based on Jesse's comments about Mr. White looking sick, the diagnosis had already happened. That meant the desperation was building, the ride-along was coming, the moment Walt saw Jesse fleeing a meth bust was approaching. I had maybe four months before the machinery of Breaking Bad started grinding my friend into its gears.
Four months to accumulate $20,000.
That was $5,000 per month. $1,250 per week. Nearly $180 per day.
Information selling alone wouldn't cut it. The deals were too small, the margins too thin, the volume limited by how many contacts I could maintain without exposure. I'd made maybe $500 in the three weeks since transmigration, and half of that had gone to living expenses.
I needed a new model.
The options scrolled through my mind like a menu of bad choices.
Return to dealing? The money was better, but it put me directly in the world I was trying to escape. Every deal created exposure, every customer was a potential informant, every transaction increased the odds that I'd end up in a cell or a grave. Skinny Pete had spent years in that life and had nothing to show for it but track marks and a reputation. I wasn't going back.
Rob someone? The criminal's shortcut. Fast money, high risk, absolute heat if anything went wrong. And it violated something fundamental in me—not the old Marcus Gilbert's bourgeois morality, but a practical understanding that violence attracted attention and attention was fatal.
The third option crystallized slowly, emerging from the intersection of my resources and my constraints.
Brokering.
Not selling drugs. Not even touching drugs. Just connecting people who wanted to buy with people who wanted to sell, taking a percentage for the introduction. A finder's fee. A facilitation charge.
The risk profile was different. No product meant no possession charges. No direct contact with transactions meant plausible deniability. And the margins could be substantial—10% of a $3,000 deal was $300, more than I'd make in a week of information selling.
The model required trust. Buyers had to believe I could find quality sellers. Sellers had to believe I could find reliable buyers. Both sides had to trust that I wasn't setting them up, wasn't skimming, wasn't playing games.
Building that trust would take time. But I had four months, and I had NZT, and I had a network of contacts that Skinny Pete had accumulated over years of low-level involvement in Albuquerque's drug scene.
I wrote three words on my scrap paper: CONNECT. FACILITATE. DISAPPEAR.
Then I burned the paper in the library bathroom, flushing the ashes down the toilet.
The western novels section was in the back corner of the library, a quiet alcove that smelled like old paper and dust.
I'd wandered there without conscious intention, my mind still churning through logistics and timelines. The NZT high was fading—I'd taken my pill at dawn, and it was nearly noon now. Another few hours of enhanced cognition, then the gradual return to baseline human thinking.
My hand reached out and pulled a random book from the shelf. Louis L'Amour, The Daybreakers. The cover showed a man on horseback, silhouetted against a western sunset.
I opened to a random page and read:
"A man who travels much gets to know many names for the same thing, and a man who has moved among many people learns that folks are inclined to be folks wherever you find them."
Something about the words caught in my chest. A man who travels much. A man who has moved among many people. The frontier myth of reinvention, of riding into a new town and becoming whoever you needed to be.
That's what I was planning. Not the romantic version—no horses, no gunfights, no beautiful women waiting in dusty saloons. But the core of it was the same: the belief that a man could leave his past behind and build something new from the wreckage.
I read three more pages, standing in the quiet alcove while the library hummed around me. The story was simple, almost naive—good guys and bad guys, clear morals, justice arriving on schedule. Nothing like the world I was living in, where the lines blurred and the best you could hope for was survival.
But sometimes you needed a story that promised things would work out. Even if you knew better.
I put the book back on the shelf and walked out into the afternoon sun.
The motel room smelled like industrial cleaner and ancient cigarette smoke.
I sat on the bed with my invisible bag in my lap, counting pills I didn't need to count. Ninety-six. The same as yesterday, minus the one I'd taken this morning. A resource that wouldn't run out, that would keep my mind sharp through whatever came next.
The plan was solid. Brokering would generate income without direct exposure. The Mexico surgery would transform my appearance beyond recognition. New documents—available through the same underground networks that served the clinics—would complete the transition. In four months, Skinny Pete would cease to exist, and someone new would walk the streets of Albuquerque.
But plans were fragile things. They depended on variables I couldn't control, on people I couldn't fully trust, on a world that had already tried to kill me once.
I needed backup options. Escape routes. Contingencies for when things went wrong.
Tomorrow, I would reach out to Badger. He'd be the first layer of insulation—a messenger, a cutout, someone who could conduct business while I stayed invisible. If the model worked, I'd add more layers. Combo, maybe. Others as opportunities arose.
And I would keep watching Jesse. Keep monitoring the timeline, looking for signs that Walter White was making his move. When that happened—when the partnership formed and the empire began—I needed to be positioned to help. Or at least positioned to survive.
The afternoon light shifted through the motel room's thin curtains, casting long shadows across the stained carpet.
Phase one: become rich enough to disappear.
Phase two: disappear into someone new.
Phase three: save Jesse from the trajectory I knew was coming.
I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, letting the NZT's fading clarity organize my thoughts into neat compartments.
Tomorrow, the real work would begin.
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