Reflex (22 page)

Davy couldn't help saying, "How very reassuring."

Conley added, "Perhaps it would be safest if you didn't test it."

They reached another dune on the other side of the marsh. Davy could see the sea, now, and the wind was dead offshore, in their teeth. His hair, longer than it had been in years, whipped about in the breeze. He looked left and right. There were other houses in the distance but none closer than half a mile.

"How did you know?" Davy asked Conley. "About the nausea and the throat?"

Conley scratched his chest and looked at Davy. "Did you think we'd risk untested technology on you?"

"Ah—so there were trials. FDA-approved, no doubt."

Conley turned his head away without answering and Davy, left to his imagination, shuddered. He felt sure the trials had been more aimed at effectiveness than at safety. And if Simons and his people had been interested in figuring the upper limits of punishment, he supposed at least one person to have died.

They passed the last dune and descended a flight of shallow stairs to the beach proper. The tide seemed out and the surf was heavy. Large dark rocks rose from the wet sands and deflected pounding waves high into the air. The water's edge was at least another hundred and fifty feet but the wind carried spray to Davy's face. The beach was deserted as far as Davy could see.

"See those flags, there?" Conley pointed at a pair of sticks with fluttering fluorescent orange bits of plastic fastened to their tops. They were stuck in the sand, near the dune, to their left, perhaps sixty feet away. "Line them up and they define the eastern border." He pointed at another pair to their right, roughly the same distance. "The west. You can go right down to the water's edge without a problem. Don't go in, though. The water is sure to degrade the signal."

Davy shivered, this time from the wind and spray. "I should think hypothermia would be of greater concern."

"It's not always so cold or windy. Lots of people swim during the height of the summer."

I don't plan to be here then.
"Can we go back now?"

"Certainly. In fact, why don't we teleport?"

Davy looked at him. "Is that the experiment you had in mind?"

"Yes. Thought it might yield some insights."

Davy nodded. "Okay. Watch out for a brightly lit tunnel. If you see it, stay
away
from the light."

"Oh, very funny," said Conley, but he looked a bit unsure.

"We can walk back, you know." Davy gave him the choice.

"No, I want to experience this. What do I—"

Davy jumped behind him, lifted him slightly, and jumped back to the "box" in the room.

"—do." Davy released him and Conley staggered, dropping to one knee and catching himself with an outstretched arm on the foot of the bed.

Davy sat in the desk chair and spun it around to watch Conley stand back up, an abstracted look upon his face. "Did you see any light?" Davy asked.

Conley looked up, an irritated look on his face. "I wanted to use a stopwatch."

"Surely you've timed my jumps with the video."

"Not over that distance. Besides, a watch being teleported might show some discrepancies."

"Time dilation?" Davy shook his head. "I wear a watch normally. No matter how often or how far I jump, it keeps the same time as the U.S. Naval Observatory, more or less."

"Ah," said Conley. He looked at the mirror on the wall and raised his voice. "We're done with the beach for now." He turned back to Davy. "Well, must go make some notes. This room and the bathroom are currently safe for you, but anywhere else in the house and the governor will kick in. Abney will be bringing your supper up."

He started to leave, but turned back at the door. "One last thing—about the governor." The look on his face was an odd one—almost compassionate. "You should know that it has anti-tamper features. It's booby-trapped. You try to remove it—to cut it out—it'll kill you."

At one end of the Aerie, framed, as most things were in the dwelling, by overloaded bookshelves, stood an entertainment center with a ten-year-old Sony TV, a standard VCR, a DVD player, and a specialty player for 8mm videotapes. Davy and Millie watched the occasional rented movie there, but its main purpose was as a repository of Davy's jump sites.

Early in his jumping career, he'd discovered that, unless he used a site on a regular basis, he couldn't recall enough detail to return there without some sort of memory aid. The result was several racks of thirty-minute 8mm videotapes with labels such as
NYC: Central Park West by Museum of Natural History, Western Australia: Kalgoorlie-Boulder Train Station, San Francisco: Metreon,
and
Moscow: Tabula Rasa Night Club, 28 Bereshkovskaya Naereshnaya.

She was busy working her way through the places she had been, especially those in New England—those that might help her in the search for Davy. There was never more than a few minutes at the start of each tape—Davy didn't want to search through an entire tape when he wanted to recall a jump site and thirty minutes was the smallest commonly available tape size.

The image on the tape showed a classic Greek revival building in white stone with four Doric columns. Large golden letters adorned the frieze: QUINCY MARKET. The plaza before the building consisted of alternating ten-foot sections of flagstones and old brick. Bright blue market umbrellas stretched down one side of the building and people walked around in shorts. On the audio Davy's voice said, "Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The overriding impression is baking bread and other restaurant smells with a whiff of traffic exhaust."

This was enough to recall her last visit, an evening walk, idly browsing the stores. Davy had eaten a cookie from Kivert and Forbes and she'd bought a beeswax taper at Yankee Candle. It was last September and they'd been comfortably cool there when it was suffocating back in Stillwater.

She stopped the tape and jumped, appearing behind the column in the teeth of a cold wind that whipped around the corner of the building. The market umbrellas were gone for the season. She shivered and hurried inside the colonnade where she bought a calzone from North End Bakery.

This was the pattern. Watch a tape. Once she recalled a place well enough, she took the jump, then sat in that place—sampled it—until it was firmly fixed. This often involved food, perhaps a regional specialty: Italian in Boston, a street vendor hot dog in New York, a pretzel in Philadelphia, a polish sausage in Pittsburgh.

I'm going to get fat.
But in truth, she merely tasted a few bites before it would cloy in the mouth. There was nothing wrong with the food but, ever since Davy went missing, she had had no appetite.

After acquiring several sites, she jumped to the Manhattan Kinko's, where she checked her e-mail. Anders had sent a message requesting a call. "And don't use your cell." He left a number. She jumped to Union Station in D.C. and used a pay phone.

"The second ambulance was found abandoned in Tiverton, Rhode Island, a small town across the Sakonnet River from Portsmouth. It sat for two days in the parking lot of the local hospital. Those who remember seeing it, thought it was there for a transfer, in or out. Finally a State Trooper put the FBI's bulletin and the ambulance's Vehicle Identification Number together and phoned it in."

"Northeast, again," Millie observed.

"Yes. The FBI went over it. There were no unexpected prints and several smudges made by fingers wearing rubber gloves, but, since latex gloves are routinely worn by emergency response personnel, this isn't conclusive. No one saw who had left the ambulance. They're widening inquiries, to see if the ambulance was spotted anywhere else in the state, but nothing, so far."

Millie replied thoughtfully. "But it was northeast, again, like the ambulance found at Logan, and it's not unreasonable to assume that it indicated at least a general direction."

Anders agreed. "But that's not the main reason I called."

"No?"

"I'm being watched—within the agency. And someone way above me is clamping down on the search for Davy. They've reassigned resources and discouraged continued monitoring of Bochstettler and Associates."

"Are you being monitored now? Are they listening?"

"No. This is a prepaid cell phone I acquired with cash and fake stats months ago when I was working a different case. It was a contingency phone that never got used. They've got your phone, though. You put the number on all those flyers so they'll have the ESN from your service provider. That's why I told you not to use it."

"Don't knock the flyers. They got me Ms. Johnson. They sucked in Padgett and Hyacinth Pope."

"I'll grant you Ms. Johnson. We can't be sure that Padgett and Pope weren't pulled in by other means. Whoever knew Davy was meeting Brian Cox probably knew we'd moved my surveillance of you from Oklahoma to D.C."

"More leaks from the NSA." She did not make it a question.

Anders didn't hesitate. "It might not even be leaks. The way this is going down, it might even be another part of the agency."

"The NSA kidnapped Davy?"

Anders was silent for a bit. "If not them, then someone with so much pull, they can influence the agency."

Millie returned to Boston—this time the unmarked circle of cobblestones to the east of the Old State House. She didn't need a videotape. It was her imagination that recalled the spot—not so much its actual appearance—a vivid visualization of the event it marked: the Boston Massacre. She'd read a biography of Crispus Attucks as a child and visiting the spot with Davy had fixed it forever in her mind.

She appeared in the midst of a tour. Several tourists gasped and one stumbled. She said, "Excuse me," and walked on.

She heard a voice behind her say, "Where did
she
come fr—" before it faded into the traffic noise.

She took a cab to the Boston South Station and caught a MBTA commuter train to Providence. She didn't think it was necessary to travel to Tiverton. She thought, like Anders, that it was just a place to dump the ambulance. But she didn't have a jump site in Rhode Island. Davy did, but she'd never been there so his tape was useless.

The train she took stopped seven times before pulling into Providence, but only took an hour and three minutes, total. She could've flown much quicker or rented a car, but these things required identifying herself, and she didn't want to be plugged into the system. The very thought of it made her feel as if electronic fingers were running through her hair and tugging at her clothing.

She shuddered.

In Providence she took a cab to the harborfront and drank coffee while walking briefly through the old buildings of the east side. She found an alleyway with a unique view of the waterfront and chose it as a site. She tried it a few times, jumping back and forth to the Aerie, then dispirited, found a bench overlooking the water.

It was perhaps fifty degrees but the sun was out and there was very little breeze. She settled in Davy's old leather jacket and scowled at the seagulls that settled expectantly before her.

What am I doing?
Would any of this running around really help?

Well, it keeps me from going crazy.

She dropped the coffee cup in a trash barrel and walked west along the waterfront, toward the Radisson. A man turned the corner and ran toward her and she flinched before realizing it was just a jogger.

For a moment she'd thought—
Well, I don't know what I thought. Maybe that they'd recognized me, even if this isn't where they supposed me to be.
If she kept working the areas where Davy was likely to be found, someone, the NSA or BAd Boys or FBI, would recognize her.

Have to do something about that.

She went back to the Aerie and pawed through the tapes until she found a jump site in London. It was four P.M. there, but she found a hairdresser in Kensington High Street who was available and would do what she wanted
and
for U.S. currency.

She left, two hours later, her shoulder-length, straight brown hair gone, replaced by ash blond hair cut mannishly short. The stylist, a young woman with blue hair and several piercings, asked for Millie's phone number but was told, gently, "Tourist. Going back to the States today."

She then made it true by jumping to Albuquerque and visiting an optician on Eubank and Comanche. She knew the place because of time spent with cousins who'd lived in the adjoining subdivision—not because it was one of Davy's haunts—but she recalled it well enough to jump. She took the precaution of jumping first to the Aerie, to equalize her ears, before jumping to Albuquerque, a mile above sea level.

It was well she'd come west to the mountain time zone. She had to wait a hour for the optician to see her without an appointment and, as the woman insisted on dilating Millie's eyes, she had to sit in the waiting room with her eyes covered before her pupils recovered enough to try the contacts.

They had obviously improved the technology in recent years. The last time she'd tried contacts, in her teens, she'd been unable to insert them without epic struggles, or endure them, once they were in. She'd given up in disgust.

Now, a few blinks, and it was as if they weren't there. She agreed to the doctor's suggestion, continuous-wear disposables, designed to be worn for two weeks, day and night, then thrown away. They were green-tinted and when she looked in the mirror, she didn't recognize herself.

When did I lose so much weight?
The past weeks had taken their toll. She'd noticed the loosening of clothing but, with her long brown hair framing and partially concealing her face, the extent of the change had gone unnoticed. Now, with cheekbones more pronounced and chin sharpened slightly, as well as the changes to hair length, hair and eye color, she looked like someone who
might
be related to Millie Harrison-Rice... but not closely.

Which is both good and bad.

One more level of change, she decided, was needed. Ala Moana shopping center in Honolulu was her next step. She looked up at the sun, shining down through the palm trees, still quite high above the horizon.
I am in a perpetual afternoon.
She shook her head and yawned. She was tired, her internal clock was still set six hours to the east, and though it was four o'clock in Honolulu, it was ten at night in D.C.