A smoldering spot in Siberia would seem to be confirmation that the prototype was exactly what Venn intended it to be, Traeger knew. The horror that the physicist had conceived now inhabited the world as a reality.
All thanks to Simon Lynch.
Thirty
The drive to Pueblo took nearly four hours. Simon Lynch didn’t say a word until the pickup they’d stolen slowed.
“Why are we stopping?”
Emily pulled off the highway and turned into a driveway, junkyard beyond visible through the open gate.
“We’re picking up a car,” she told him.
“We have a car,” Simon said.
“By the end of today this will be the most wanted vehicle in the United States,” Emily explained. “Besides, this is all arranged.”
She pulled through the gate and cruised slowly past stacks of wrecked cars and rows of others slowly being devoured by those who paid to scavenge parts. There was no one in sight, though, the hour too early and the weather too cold. It wasn’t scavenging weather, she imagined.
Then she saw it, just as Kirby Gant had described, the old Ford, weathered silver paint dusted with snow. It was parked near a row of menacing machinery, bits of mangled automobiles scattered about around each. This was where vehicles came to die, some violently in the machinery which would shred them to pieces which would be sold as scrap.
Emily stopped the truck a few yards from the waiting Taurus. She climbed out and motioned for Simon to follow her. Together they approached the old sedan. She looked in and saw a single key resting on the driver’s seat.
“Okay, Simon, let’s—”
“Not so fast.”
The voice came from behind them. Simon turned toward it just before Emily and saw a large, heavy man holding a double-barrel shotgun, the weapon aimed at them from twenty feet away.
“You’re not who I was expecting,” the man said.
“You must be Mr. Walton,” Emily said, keeping her hands in the open. “Percy Walton, right?”
“Knowing my name is no big trick, little lady,” Walton said.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening, Emily thought. The plan was for Kirby Gant to alert the man whom Art had known about the change in plans. Why this was turning into a confrontation was more than a mystery—it was unsettling. Had something larger gone wrong in the overall plan? Maybe. But she would have to deal with that later. Right now she had a pair of side-by-side 12 gauge barrels that required her attention.
“I also know you’re a felon in possession of a firearm,” Emily said. “I don’t know if Art Jefferson would remind you of that, but I am.”
Percy Walton eyed the woman for a moment, giving the seemingly meek man next to her hardly a glance, then he tipped the shotty up and rested it on the side of his bulging stomach, barrels pointed to the sky.
“Art would have said the same thing,” Percy told Emily.
“We need to get moving,” Emily told the man as she came around to the driver’s side of the Taurus and opened the door.
“Your friend said you’d be arriving in something else,” Percy said, nodding toward the pickup.
“Change in plans,” Emily said. She looked to Simon. “Get in.”
He did, sliding into the passenger seat as Emily stood half in and half out of the car.
“Stolen?” Percy asked.
“Unconventionally acquired,” Emily told him.
Percy nodded and glanced toward the hulking machinery just beyond the Taurus. “I think a run through the shredder might be in order.”
Emily smiled at the gruff and wise former criminal. “That would be appreciated.”
“Consider it done.”
Percy stepped clear as Emily got behind the wheel and started the car. He watched them drive away and then looked to the pickup that, in half an hour, would be nothing more than a pile of metal shavings, with some plastic and rubber mixed in. There’d be no trace that it had even been there.
* * *
Damian Traeger approached the TSA checkpoint just beyond the customs desk within the private aircraft terminal at Baltimore Washington International Airport.
“Deposit all your personal items in the bin, sir,” the female TSA agent instructed.
Traeger complied without hesitation, placing the contents of his pockets into the small plastic tub. He’d expected the procedure, one almost reverse of those boarding outbound commercial flights. It was logical to give those arriving in the country via private aircraft a level of scrutiny. His bags had already been checked—or, rather, those of Lawrence Oberlin had been inspected after being offloaded from the Gulfstream—and now it was his turn.
“You have more than one cell phone,” the TSA agent commented, eyeing the devices Traeger had deposited in the bin.
“I receive multiple calls constantly,” he explained. “It’s a matter of necessity.”
“They function?”
Traeger nodded. “Would you like me to show you?”
“Please,” the TSA agent said.
He activated the devices, showing the woman the screens. She nodded and gave the remainder of his personal possessions a quick check as he passed through the metal detector.
“Thank you, sir,” the TSA agent said.
“Have a wonderful day,” Traeger told the woman, then gathered his belongings and his suitcases and made his way toward a man holding a small sign that read ‘Oberlin’.
“Mr. Oberlin,” the man said, taking control of the luggage as Traeger reached him. “I’ll get you to your hotel without delay.”
“I need to have you drop me somewhere first,” Traeger said. “You can then take my luggage to the hotel.”
“Of course, sir. Will you need me to come back for you?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Traeger said. “I can manage.”
“Very well,” the man said as he led Traeger outside and opened the back door of the black SUV for him. He loaded the luggage and took his place behind the wheel. “Where will I be dropping you, sir?”
“Stanford, Holt and Garvey in downtown Baltimore,” Traeger said.
The man punched the name into his navigation system and, in seconds, had directions to what was listed as a large law firm serving corporate clients. Nearby on the electronic map, though it made no difference to the driver, was a large square structure. Large enough to be afforded its own label in the digital mapping software.
The Markham Tower.
* * *
They crossed the border of Colorado and entered Kansas just before noon. Simon watched the large sign welcoming them to the state with a bright facsimile of a large yellow flower come and go as they sped past at sixty-five miles per hour.
“The sunflower state,” he said.
“That’s right,” Emily said. Her eyes moved constantly, from road to mirror, even angling upward to the sky both in front of and beside them, searching for some aerial dragnet which might have snared them. But none had. Not yet.
“How did you know how to unhook the snow plow?”
Emily looked to Simon as she drove, his question coming out of nowhere.
“What?”
“You said it wasn’t interesting, but you’d explain it later,” he reminded her.
She thought back, to the moment just hours ago that he’d seized upon. That exchange was just about the furthest thing from her mind right then, and her response at the time had been off the cuff. In truth, she didn’t very much want to revisit the time where the answer lived.
“It was not really worth talking about,” Emily said.
“I don’t mind listening,” Simon said. “I haven’t had any opportunity to listen to someone just talk since I’ve…since I’ve been like this.”
This was all for him, all about him, and Emily didn’t want to shift the focus, even in a small way, to her. To her life. To her past. But he was asking, and he was unconnected to any of what she’d experienced. It was a simple question, and the answer could be offered just as
simply.
“I spent time watching online videos,” Emily said. “These kind of homesteading videos where people live off the land, away from cities. They have to do things on their own. It was kind of an escape for me.”
“Like plow snow,” Simon said, and Emily nodded. “You saw how they put the attachment on and took it off.”
“They’re all pretty similar,” Emily said.
Simon quieted as he processed what she’d said. And what she hadn’t said.
“What were you escaping from?”
“What?”
When you watched those videos,” Simon said. “You said it was an escape.”
The simple answer she’d expected to satisfy his question had only directed him to the very thing she wanted to avoid. But that was his nature, wasn’t it? That’s why the government had sequestered him. Because he could look at things, hear things, and find his way through obstacles to some fuller understanding. To some truth.
Emily had imagined that Simon Lynch’s talents were limited to issues mathematical in nature. This newer version of that old self saw deeper, she was realizing. All the way into the human condition.
“I was undercover,” Emily told him. “Do you know what that is?”
“I do.”
“It was…stressful. It was difficult. And I…sometimes the only way I could not think about where I was, and what I was doing, was to imagine being somewhere else, doing things that were entirely…peaceful.”
“Living off the land,” Simon said.
“Just away from everybody and everything,” Emily added.
She waited, for more questions to come. In what she’d shared there was certainly a door to be opened. A path to more questions. But Simon Lynch did not ask anything more. When Emily glanced to him he was looking ahead, out the windshield at the bleak Kansas prairie surrounding them. It was just a momentary look, but in that instant she gained an understanding of the man. One beyond what she’d formed just a few minutes earlier. He wasn’t just some human computer which had aimed itself at her like some equation to solve. No, he wasn’t that at all.
He was simply human, and he knew, somehow, that sometimes the best question to ask was no question at all.
“It won’t be much longer,” Emily said.
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace safe,” she told him.
And secret…
Thirty One
It was the last secret she had. The only piece of information she’d kept from everyone. The criminals she’d infiltrated. Her FBI handlers. Kirby Gant.
Everyone.
Not even in the debriefing after she’d come in from the cold had she shared what lay at the end of the long dirt driveway miles from the nearest interstate. It was Kansas, but to those who were in pursuit of her, and Simon, it might as well have been on the moon.
“What is this place?” he asked, eyeing the wide swath of brown fields interrupted only by two old structures just ahead.
“A farm,” Emily said. “Well, once it was. The fields are still planted and harvested by a neighbor. He leases the land.”
“This is your farm?”
Emily shook her head. “It belongs to a woman named Sally Vester.”
“Who is she?”
“Nobody,” Emily answered. “She isn’t real. She only exists on paper.”
Simon puzzled at the explanation for a moment. It was not a collection of facts which he could form into any cohesive problem to solve. Nor was it shielded by emotions which signaled that further probing might be painful. He’d sensed that earlier from Emily. There were parts of her, parts of her past, that she was guarding. Why, he did not know.
But the mere fact that he was taking note of such things gave him pause to even consider pressing her on the matter. He was a stranger in this new world, treading lightly still. It would take time until he understood and absorbed the limits of social interactions. This, though, did not seem to be a sensitive subject. Emily was sharing the information without hesitation.
“She’s a false identity,” Simon said.
Emily nodded. After she’d become Dana Perrin for her undercover assignment, and when she’d begun to believe that those who’d sent her down the rabbit hole were more concerned with nailing their target than upholding values that were supposed to be sacrosanct, she took certain actions. Skimming untraceable cash from the obscene caches belonging to the stateside cartel she’d infiltrated, she set aside enough to secure her own rabbit hole. A place she could disappear to if everything went to hell on all sides. A haven she’d visited only twice—on the day she purchased it using the identity she’d crafted, and once more to arrange for her neighbor to farm her fields in exchange for keeping the place from falling apart.
She’d imagined that she might not see the place again for years, if ever. Had her undercover assignment been completed successfully, she would have just let the place slip into disrepair, with taxes unpaid and the county left to auction it off. But her assignment hadn’t ended that way.
‘Kill him now!’
Emily stopped the Taurus, its headlights casting twin ovals on the wide barn doors just ahead. Daylight was waning, and she didn’t want to go into the night with memories bubbling to the surface. Those memories.
“Wait here,” Emily said.
Simon watched her step from the idling car and go to the barn. To the left of its doors she crouched at a rock and retrieved something from beneath. A key. She inserted it into a padlock which secured the building, unlocking the doors and sliding each aside.
“We’ll just get this out of sight,” she said as she returned to the Taurus and drove it into the barn, taking up one side of the smallish structure. Something bulging under a canvas tarp filled the other side.
That had been her other purchase at the same time she’d acquired the farm. A minivan. Nondescript transportation that would blend in, and which she could live in, if necessary. It might have been a sprinkle of paranoia fueling her very covert preparations for an event that never came. At least not in the way she had imagined.
“Come on,” Emily said. “Let’s go inside.”
* * *
She led him from the barn after closing the doors and locking them. A key to the house was hidden under a loose board at the edge of the porch. As night settled fully upon the piece of land almost dead center in the middle of the state, Emily LaGrange opened the front door and let Simon Lynch into what Kirby Gant might call her lair.
He walked into the living room as Emily locked the door. Breath jetted past their lips as they exhaled.
“I need to get a fire started,” Emily said.
She moved past him, switching on a lamp and slipping the pistol from her waistband, laying the weapon upon the bare mantle as she crouched at the hearth and slid the wire mesh screen that shielded the firebox open. The woodpile next to it that had been stocked on her last stop by the place was just as she’d left it, along with the small steel bucket of kindling and box of matches.
“Have a look around,” Emily said, glancing up to Simon. He met her gaze with uncertainty. “It’s all right. I promise. No one’s going to lock you in a room here.”
She turned her attention back to starting the fire. Simon watched her for a moment, errant thoughts about the balance necessary to properly serve the combustion triangle stalling him for a moment. In his old life he would have analyzed her actions and formed solutions as to how much more fuel she needed with the amount of airflow present. But this was not that life. This was his life now.
He left Emily and wandered through the lower level of the two-story house. Through the dining room with curtains drawn. He parted them slightly in the middle and peeked out, the flat, dim landscape stretching out beneath a tapestry of stars building in the dark heavens above. The simple sight was one he could take in for hours, but he moved on. Into the kitchen, an almost quaint space that reminded him of the one he’d known. The one at his house. His mother had made him hot chocolate th
ere.
“Three big slurps,” he said to himself. That was how he drank it. Then he’d let out a satisfied ‘ahhhh’.
Simon Lynch smiled at the memory. But only for a moment. Recalling the good meant remembering the bad. And the horrible.
His parents’ death at the hands of the red-haired man who’d wanted to take him was the worst moment of his life, and the event seemed even more so because he hadn’t been able to comprehend its gravity then. And he didn’t want to now.
He continued on, passing a door which he knew would lead to a cellar, just like at his old house. Then, coming almost full circle through the lower level, he reached the stairs. A glance into the living room told him that Emily had a small bundle of kindling ablaze and was stacking dry rounds of wood atop it. Then he looked to the steps again. Steps like those which had led up to his room in his old house.
His gaze rose to the dim space above and he climbed the stairs.
The second floor was bisected by a hallway, doors on either side and pictures hung on the walls covered by a faded floral pattern paper, its once vibrant colors muted by time and the ashen moonlight filtering in the window at the end of the hall. Simon walked slowly down the corridor, pausing past one door at a framed photo slightly askew on the wall, a rough skim of plaster revealed beneath it. He reached to the photo, a dated image of a depression-era woman kneading dough, and adjusted it, setting it level again and concealing the blemish it had been placed to hide.
Simon continued on, stopping at the next door. It was slightly ajar. He pushed it gently open and looked into the space, standing there for a moment, taking in the moonlit sight.
Home…
That was what he thought. That was what it reminded him of. A bed. A nightstand. There was no red rocking chair like the one his father had sat in to hold him and sing their special lullaby.
‘Wander boy, wander far, wander to the farthest star…’
There were more words to the soft song his father had sung to him, from his toddling days until his teenage years. Up until the very end. One verse, in particular, stood out right then to Simon.
Simon Sees Page 28