End of the Century (35 page)

Stillman heard something on the line, then held up his finger. “Hughes?” He listened for a moment, then reached down and flipped a switch on the phone's sturdy base, and faint static hissed out of the speaker grill set on the side. “Hughes, can you hear me?” Stillman said, his voice raised, leaning in towards the receiver, gently resting the handset down beside it.

“Who
is
this?” buzzed the voice from the speaker. It sounded American, and male.

“Remember that time in Majorca, Hughes? You owe me.”

There was silence for a long moment. “Shit. Waters, what the hell do
you
want?”

“Where's Aria, Hughes? I need to talk to her.”

“Aria who?”

“Don't play the fool with me, Hughes.” Stillman still smiled, but there was steel beneath his words. “Where's Aria Fox?”

Silence again, faintly peppered with static. “You know I can't tell you that, Waters. Client confidentiality, all of that jazz.”

“Mmm mmm,” Stillman hummed, nodding. “And I'm sure the Policía
Nacional in Madrid would be interested to hear all about the events of that January day, don't you? What do you suppose they'd say about confidentiality, mmm?”

Static hissed from the speaker.

“Fine. Okay? Fine. I…I can't tell you exactly. I've got a reputation to protect here, don't I? But…Okay, I
can
tell you that Aria was very, very pissed that her most recent…assignment meant she had to miss David Bowie's concert at the Roseland Ballroom in New York the other day.”

“What?”

“Well, she had tickets for the eighteenth, last Saturday, but Bowie cancelled due to laryngitis, and she would have gone to the fan club show the next night, but she'd already booked the flight.” Static. “She's a
huge
Bowie fan.”

Stillman shifted on the couch, becoming increasingly annoyed. “Look, Hughes. I believe I've been more than fair with you over the years. Now, if you don't tell me what I want to know and stop messing me about with this trivia, I'm going to get quite cross.”

“Sorry, Waters, that's all I can tell you. Don't call again.”

Then there was a click, and the line went dead. Then a noise started from the speaker, which it took Alice a moment to recognize as an off-hook tone.

“Cheeky bastard,” Stillman said, and reached over to redial. But this time, the phone on the other end just rang, and rang, and rang.

Stillman slammed the handset down on the receiver, lip curled in anger.

“Wait a minute,” Alice said, trying to tease a specific memory out of the confusion of the past day. “Bowie's supposed to be playing some festival this weekend for the first time in thirty years.”

Stillman looked up at her, a smile creeping across his face.

“In someplace called…Glastonbury?” Alice nodded. “Yeah, that's right.” She tilted her head to one side and took in Stillman's big grin. “Does that help?”

“Alice, love,” Stillman said. “How would you feel about taking a little road trip, mmm?”

There was always one kid, in every grade-school class, who called the teacher “Mom.” It seemed an inescapable fact of life. And that they would then be known as the “kid who called the teacher Mom” for the rest of the school year.

Alice hadn't been that kid, but she'd sat next to him once, and had joined in with the others in teasing him mercilessly.

She hadn't thought of that kid in years. But when she opened her mouth and almost, but not quite, called Stillman “Dad,” she couldn't help but remember him.

“What's that, love?” Stillman was fixing them breakfast. To get a proper start before they hit the road, he said.

Alice had just been about to ask him something about their plans, but every memory of what's she'd been about to say was driven from her memory as soon as she uttered the “Da-” syllable. She thought about playing it off, calling him “Daddio” like some hipster doofus from fifty years before, like Marty McFly in
Back to the Future
, but didn't have the heart to try.

“Nothing,” Alice said, shaking her head.

This all felt very homey. Waking up to find an older man in the kitchen, making eggs, toast, and bacon. Stillman was about the age her dad would have been, had he lived, had she not fallen down the stairs.

It was strange, how quickly she'd come to trust this complete stranger. Had he done a bit of hypnosis on her, after all? Or was it just that she'd seen his face in her visions since she was a little girl, making him seem comfortable and safe to be around?

Stillman set a plate in front of her, the bacon nice and crunchy, just like she liked, so she tried not to worry about it one way or another.

She was toweling her hair off, just out of the shower, while Stillman was dressed and ready, waiting for her on the sofa, watching the morning news. He already had his shoulder holster on, Alice noted, though the fletchette pistol wasn't yet snugged in place.

The newscaster—news
reader
, they called them over here—was talking about an ongoing court case that had started up just weeks before. Two Libyans stood accused of carrying out the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, twelve years before that had killed 270 people. It was a Scottish court, but was confusingly built in an old US Air Force base in the Netherlands.

“I'll never get used to that,” Alice said, shaking her head. “Planes blowing up over here, stuff like that.”

Stillman gave her a strange look. “I think you'll find, love, that the rest of the world has unfortunately been used to ‘stuff like that' for quite some time. It's only in America that you're quite so insulated from knowing about it.” The corners of his mouth tugged down. “‘Over here,' as you call it, we're more than familiar, I'm sorry to say.”

“What, like not having trash cans and all that? The IRA, you mean?”

Stillman gave her a sad smile. “That, and before. Barrage balloons and Anderson shelters and long hot nights in Underground stations. Yes, we've quite a history of things blowing up around us, more's the pity.”

Alice plopped down on the end of the couch and started pulling on her socks, lacing up her Docs. “Sorry. Didn't mean to be insensitive or anything.” She turned her head to one side, looking over at him. “We're just…safe, in the United States, know what I mean? So we don't think about it as much. I mean, I know that a car blew up at the World Trade Center when I was in the fourth grade, and then that guy blew up that building in Oklahoma when I was in middle school, but it's still pretty rare.”

Stillman's sad smile lingered. “Well, I hope you're right.”

The way he said it, Alice was sure he knew she was wrong.

Alice thought she spotted the man Stillman called the Huntsman as the Corvette pulled out of the garage, but he assured her she was probably mistaken.

“He's like me, love,” he said with a smile. “Tends only to come out at night.”

Alice couldn't get over how small all of the cars on the highway were. Of course, if Stillman was to be believed, here it was called a
motorway
. Whatever. Either way, the cars were all damned tiny. Even the trucks were small compared to those at home.

Austin was a pretty liberal sort of town, well educated with lots of bookstores, and an alarming number of waiters had doctorates—it seemed a master's degree only got you a job in the kitchen—but even so, it was Texas, and so Alice had grown up surrounded by trucks. Big trucks. Really big trucks, and lots of them. Her mother drove an old Toyota Corolla, and her grandmother had driven an ancient Volkswagen Rabbit. If Alice had a license, she supposed that she'd have inherited the Rabbit, now that Naomi didn't need it anymore. But then she ran away. So much for that idea.

Texas highways were always choked with pickups and SUVs and eighteen wheelers. Whenever Alice had ridden with her mother in the Corolla or her grandmother in the Rabbit, she'd felt like she would be blown off the road at any time.

Nancy had driven a Renault Alliance. Nancy had been held back twice, so that by the time she was a freshman in high school she already had a driver's license. That was the start of the trouble, really, the temptation of jumping in the car with Nancy and skipping a few classes, or skipping school entirely. It was no fun to do it on foot, since you couldn't get far. But if you had a car? Well, there was no telling where you might get, or what you might get up to.

The last time Alice had seen the Renault, it had been wrapped around the concrete and steel base of a highway light post, completely totaled, the front windshield smashed to hell and gone. Alice had worn her seatbelt, and so had suffered only a sprained neck, a few cuts and nicks, and severe bruises across her shoulder and chest where the shoulder belt bit into her flesh. Nancy, on the other hand?

Anyway. Alice went back to thinking about the smallness of the cars on the motorway. When Stillman looked over and saw the strange expression on
her face, the glistening in her eye, he started to ask her what was wrong, but she just turned the stereo up louder and lost herself in the sound.