“What’s all this?” he said.
“I’ve got a major Chaos breach on my hands here,” I said. “And my brother Michael’s been caught up in it.”
The blond eyebrows over the perfect blue eyes shot up in surprise. When I finished telling him about my brother’s disappearance through the portal, he thought about my recital for so long that I began to have trouble holding the trance state.
“I do have an idea,” he said at last. “From what I know about your family, your brother’s bound to have some sort of wild talent. Have you considered parallel worlds? What you describe could be a gate of some sort. Michael may have the ability to sense gates and lock into their energies.”
“I know about parallel world theory, sure, but a gate? Are those real?”
“Theoretically, thus possibly so. Our database is inconclusive on that point. Unreliable, even.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Now, I’ll admit that Michael being a world-walker sounds far-fetched, but it does fit what few facts you have about this thing in the park. Look, I’ll consult with a couple of our people and get back to you on that.”
“A world-walker? There’s a name for it?”
“Oh, yes. They show up every now and then, or I should say, they claim to.”
“Suppose that he is in a parallel or deviant level of the multiverse. Do you think he’ll ever find his way back?”
“I really don’t know. I need to research the whole subject.”
“Okay. I’m worried sick.”
“I assumed that. I’ll treat this as a top priority fact search.”
Y disappeared without another thought.
I woke myself up, stretched, and got out of the backseat. I was yawning as I slid back into the front seat next to Nathan.
“I’m tired, I guess,” I said.
“You haven’t had a proper meal all day. We’re going out to dinner.”
We went to the pizzeria near the apartment, where I could get a salad while he ate the heavy stuff. Thanks to the Shield Persona, I began to feel drunk. My normal senses, the standard issue five, worked perfectly well. The others had dulled down and almost vanished, leaving me feeling half-alive, confused, wobbly, all the things that alcohol in excess does to you.
We returned to the apartment just as the night was rolling in with the fog. Before I opened the front door, I dropped the SP and went into Search Mode to scan the apartment—as safe as I’d left it. I raised the SP again immediately. Nathan insisted on going in first. I followed him and stood by my computer desk while he looked around. Streetlights and shop lights cast odd patches of glare and shadow across the furniture and the floor.
“We left the drapes open,” he said. “I’ll just close them.”
I started to make some trivial remark. Nathan lunged, grabbed me, and dragged me to the floor just as the bay window shattered. Glass sprayed. The bullet slammed into the opposite wall. Another followed through the break in the window. I could hear screaming from the street outside, a staccato of shots, and the crash of more breaking glass. A car alarm began honking in a hysterical sob. Nathan rolled away from me, slithered across the floor and around to the side of the couch, then stood up, gun in hand, and peered out the side window.
“Stay down,” he said. “I think he’s gone, but that sodding sign keeps blinking, and it’s hard to see the roof behind it.”
“Is that where he was?” I found it hard to speak.
“Only place he could have been.”
A pair of sirens, coming from opposite directions, cut through the yelling and the honking car horns on the street. Footsteps pounded up the stairs outside my apartment. Someone hammered on the door. “Police! Open up!”
“Yes, officer!” Nathan called out. “I’m on my way.”
As he strode across the room, he put the gun back into the shoulder holster, then zipped up his jacket. I decided that greeting the cops while lying sprawled on the carpet was too déclassé for words and sat up, but I made sure that the bulk of the couch stayed between me and the window. Nathan opened the door first a bare crack, then wide enough for a uniformed officer to push his way in.
“Lady, get back!” The cop shouted at Mrs. Zukovski, who was dithering behind him in a floor-length flowered bathrobe, then looked at Nathan. “Is everyone all right in here?”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “Fortunately, we were rolling around on the floor at the time.”
If he hadn’t just saved my life, I would have thrown something at him, preferably something sharp and heavy. The cop sputtered, then arranged a straight face. Nathan switched on the overhead light. Mrs. Zukovski dithered herself through the door. A hairnet covered her purple hair.
“Oh, my gawd!” She stared at the broken window. “Look at all that glass! It’s going to cost me a bundle to fix that bay.”
“Lady,” the cop said, “your tenant could have been killed. This sniper is a real nutcase. It’s just a damned good thing her boyfriend was here, or you’d have a real mess to clean up.”
Mrs. Z pulled a crumpled tissue from a bathrobe pocket and snuffled into it.
“I heard more shots,” Nathan said.
“That was him,” the cop said, “taking potshots at a couple of pedestrians, but he missed them, thank God for that.”
“Good.” Nathan reached inside his jacket and took out his Interpol ID. The cop’s eyes widened. For a moment he looked like a small boy meeting a famous football player.
“Thanks, Inspector,” he said. “I remember hearing about you. You’re here on official business, aren’t you?”
“Yes, related to the Romero murder.”
“I’ve called in a SWAT team. I need to get a forensics team up here to dig those bullets out of the wall.”
“Very good. Carry on.”
The cop pulled out a cell phone to call for his backup personnel. Nathan unzipped his jacket and stowed the ID. When she caught sight of the shoulder holster, Mrs. Z came out with another, “Oh, my gawd!”
“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s a police officer, too.”
“Oh, oh, well, I suppose, oh ...” She let the last “oh” turn into a sigh. “I’ll have to call George. I don’t know where he’s going to get some plywood or something this time of night.”
George was the minimally skilled handyman she hired for odd jobs.
“Well, I can’t use the apartment with no window,” I said.
“Oh, oh well, I suppose not, oh ...”
I let it drop. I had worse things to worry about than street noise and cold drafts. I could hear bullhorns outside as the SWAT team cleared the street. Sirens came and went. I found myself remembering Uncle Jim’s complaint about all the waiting involved in disasters. Finally, after about ten minutes, more police came pounding up the stairs to join us.
The forensics people took photographs of the wall and the window, close-ups of the bullets in the wall, and then of the bullets once they dug them out, leaving a pile of plaster and paint chips on the floor. Mrs. Z collapsed onto a kitchen chair and sniveled into her tissue while she watched that part of the operation. I figured that she was doing a cost analysis on the repair.
The forensics expert, wearing plastic gloves, showed the bullets to Nathan before he sealed them into a manila paper envelope.
“They appear to match the others,” Nathan said. “The two murders in Israel, that is, but I can’t be sure without putting them under the microscope.”
“Any idea of what kind of gun?” Forensics said.
“Yes, as far as we could tell, he was using a Dragunov SVD.”
Forensics blinked at him.
“It was originally a Soviet sniper’s rifle,” Nathan went on. “They show up all over the Middle East thanks to Soviet arms sales, but the Iranian DIO still manufactures them.”
“No shit?” Forensics turned to an assistant, who had a pad of paper and a pen. “You writing this down?”
“Of course,” she said. “What’s the DIO?”
“Domestic Industries Organization,” Nathan said. “Do you want the name in Farsi?”
“No, no, I don’t know how to spell those Arabic names.”
Nathan winced. “Farsi isn’t Arabic. It’s not even related to Arabic. Never make that mistake if you ever go to the Middle East. That kind of ignorance is what marks an American as a possible victim.”
The forensics tech cringed, but she kept writing.
While Forensics worked, the original cop on the scene interviewed all three of us, though all he really wanted from Mrs. Z was the time when she heard the glass break. Since she could remember the commercial she’d been viewing at that moment, he could confirm the time later with the TV station. During Nathan’s part of the interview he admitted that we hadn’t been rolling around on the floor, which seemed to relieve Mrs. Z’s feelings to some extent.
“I was looking out the window at the moment,” Nathan said. “I saw movement on the roof, and then what appeared to be someone lifting a rifle, and I reacted. Knocked her out of the way. Army training, you know. We have to worry about snipers and the like back home.”
The cop nodded.
“I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be someone on the roof with a broom.” Nathan looked my way. “I hope you’re not bruised.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Not a problem.”
The SWAT team called in at that point. Johnson had gotten clean away. He was good at what he did.
When the police team left, Mrs. Zukovski followed, mumbling down the stairs behind them. I shut the door and switched off the overhead glare. The blinking purple light from the restaurant sign filled the room and glittered on the broken glass lying all over the couch.
“Is it going to be safe to stay here tonight?” I said.
“Of course not,” Nathan snapped. “Nola, he knows where you live. Think!”
“I’m trying. For some reason I feel oddly scattered.”
“Go pack a suitcase. We’re leaving.”
“Where are we going to go?”
“I’m not going to tell you.” He smiled in a tight-lipped kind of way. “If I tell you, Johnson might pull the information out of the air or your mind or whatever that is.”
“Unfortunately, that could happen.”
“So I thought. But you’re going to have to trust my driving.”
“I think I’d rather trust Johnson. The end result will be the same, but the bullet will be quicker.”
“Look, I promise you that I’ll try to slow down and all that, since you want me to drive like a sodding—oh, never mind. I’ll try.”
I threw together some clothing and necessities, then retrieved Pat’s journals from the hamper. Nathan took some of his luggage as well, including the sample case that, theoretically, held prayer shawls. Before we left, I started to put up the Shield Persona, then damned the danger and took it down. I needed all of my wits about me, even the weird ones. If the police couldn’t keep Johnson too busy to worry about me, I figured, then why were we paying taxes?
As we hurried downstairs, we met George coming up, wrestling an enormous sheet of plywood. Mrs. Z followed and gabbled instructions while she carried his tool box.
“Will you be back in the morning?” she said to me.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “If not, I’ll call.”
Ambiguity, I thought. That’s what I need to project. As we drove off, I let my mind run through a hundred possibilities for our destination, our direction, and every other factor I could think of. If nothing else, it kept my mind off Nathan’s driving.
On our way to the cemetery in Colma, Nathan had noticed a franchise-type hotel on the frontage road beside the freeway. A tan stucco building with a Spanish Baroque false front, it took up most of a block, the better to confuse a stalker. The young man working the desk seemed indifferent to who we were and whether we had reservations just so long as Nathan had a credit card. The Interpol ID, however, woke him up fast.
“If anyone comes in and wants the room number,” Nathan said, “or phones and wants to be connected, do not do it without checking with me first. Do you understand? That’s very important.”
“Yes sir,” the clerk said. “Understood. I’ll leave a note for the day shift, too.”
I wandered away and stared at a blank spot on the wall while they finished the transaction. I wanted to avoid knowing the room number. When we went upstairs with the luggage, I also avoided looking at the door. I filled my mind with thoughts of a hotel in Lake Tahoe where I’d stayed some years before and visualized the view of the lake at night from its windows. If Johnson was working a Mind Penetration or scan on me, he’d end up thoroughly confused.
The window of the room that I actually stood in looked downhill to the street in back of the hotel. Since the queen sized bed sat near the window, Nathan pulled the drapes shut as soon as we got in. The room as a whole, decorated mostly in golds and browns, contained a sofa as well as the bed, but it looked much too short for Nathan to stretch out on.
“In the morning, we should be able to see the local police station from here,” Nathan said. “Down the hill and over a little.”
“That should give Johnson something interesting to think about.”
“So I thought, yes.”
I was having interesting thoughts of my own. Suppose Johnson had made his shot, I asked myself. In those last few seconds you would have had the conventional regrets about never seeing your family again and dying young, but be honest, O’Grady, one of those regrets would have been that you turned Nathan down.
Johnson, of course, had missed.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched Nathan, who had taken off his jacket and the shoulder holster, while he stowed the luggage out of the way at one end of the narrow room. He put the sample case near the window, then reached inside it. I heard a click as he turned on some device, the interference generator, I assumed. I liked the way he moved, no theatrics, no fuss, just the quiet self-control of a man who knew he was a man. He turned around and gave me a look of the sort that’s usually described as smoldering. I could feel the Qi rising, swirling around us both like a thrown net.