He didn’t tell them about the incident on the bluff above the sea or about the coyotes. Those things were his to keep until he proved that he could make the journey and complete the task.
Over dessert—lemon-cream pie—Josef offered to drive Tom to his destination after dinner. Tom gratefully declined six different ways. In spite of his failure to accept the favor of a ride, his hosts began to talk about the best route and estimated driving time—two hours—as though Josef and Tom would be leaving shortly.
When Tom expressed concern about Hannah being alone, the couple explained that the evening-shift clerk, Francisco, now manned the front desk downstairs. And in an emergency, Rebecca, their daughter, and her family lived only fifteen minutes away.
Tom found a seventh reason why he must politely decline, and he insisted that their offer was too generous, but at the conclusion of dessert, Hannah encouraged Josef to “say bentshen and hit the road.” Bentshen proved to be a benediction, a grace said following dinner, after which Josef went to the master bathroom to “say hello to Mother Nature,” and Tom used the guest bath. Hannah waited at the apartment door and hugged each of them, and Tom followed Josef down the stairs, through the motel office, outside to a thirty-year-old Mercedes sedan idling in front, where it had been brought by Francisco. The evening clerk also fetched Tom’s backpack from his room, put it in the trunk, provided four bottles of cold water in an insulated carrier in case they got thirsty during the trip, and stood waving at them as they drove out of the motel parking lot and north on the highway.
Tom had long been afraid of crossing the threshold of a new place for the first time, lest he have an encounter with the wrong person, one who profoundly affected him and forced in him a change. In his gray cardigan and bow tie, still wearing slippers because “they’re comfier than shoes to drive, and when you get to be my age, which is a number Methuselah would envy, comfy matters more than style,” Josef Yurashalmi was that wrong person, the embodiment of Tom Bigger’s fear.
Although Tom had long been all but humorless, the realization that the dreaded agent of Apocalypse turned out to be this sweet old man might have inspired a laugh under other circumstances. But he was no longer a ten-day walk from the task that he must perform; only two hours would bring him to it. He lived for decades as a coward, and now with an onerous confrontation rapidly approaching, he had no well of courage to tap.
Sixty-one
In the room, all day the people come and go, excitement high but voices often low.
The light is bright but not as bright as the light of their becoming. Still, the night would be nicer, the big full moon and all the shining stars.
Men and women come and go, and some return, and later yet return again, and always they appear and disappear through the same drapery, which falls shut behind them.
Directly opposite that entrance in the western wall is another entrance in the east. There the drapery is fixed, zippered shut, and no one comes and no one goes by that portal.
Some people stand close and stare, and accept an offered hand, while others sit in chairs to watch, record their notes or take them down by hand.
Sometimes they confer with one another, usually in murmurs and hushed voices. Now and then, they speak louder and with passionate intent, but it is always an angerless argument.
In their cage, Puzzle and Riddle listen with interest to the voices of their visitors, to the music of the voices, to the rhythm of the voices, voices, voices.
They have water, and food is given twice. All is well, and all will be well, as it has been well since their becoming.
This is a time of waiting, and the two wait well, for waiting is only an acceptance of the ways of time. Occasionally slow and on other occasions faster, yet in truth always at the same pace, time flows forward toward one shining moment or another, toward the place where they will fully belong then, as they fully belong in this place now.
In the room, the people come and go, and in time they only go, until dust motes float in the bright light, in the stilled air.
In the night beyond the drapery waits the one who admits all the others. His scent is a scent of weariness, loneliness, and yearning.
Quietly in the quietness, Puzzle works the zipper on the cover of the mattress, and the divider softly clicks as it makes the teeth unclench.
Inside the cover, under the mattress, her probing hand locates what earlier she had hidden. The blade is short, not sharp, rounded without a point.
When she saw it while standing on a chair and searching kitchen drawers for new treasures, her eyes were drawn not to the plain blade but to the pretty handle. It was shiny, full of color, and its contours pleasing.
She plucked it from among other items of interest at the moment that she was lifted from the chair and pressed into the dog crate.
When a thing is provided, the provision is for a reason. This she knows.
After their transferal to the large cage here in the room, as they explore their new quarters, the reason for the thing with the pretty handle becomes clear. The reason is not the handle, but the blade.
The ceiling and the floor of the cage are large pans. The bars of the cage are in framed panels. The panels are bolted to the walls of the floor pan and the ceiling pan. Each panel is held by two bolts at the top, two at the bottom.
Now Puzzle looks at Riddle, and Riddle looks at Puzzle, and by unspoken agreement, they choose a panel and begin.
Holding the tool, she reaches between the bars and bends her wrist severely, inserting the curved head of the blade into the slot in the round head of the bolt.
Between thumb and forefinger, Riddle pinches the square nut in which the bolt is seated, inside the pan of the cage. His small black hands are strong, and strong they need to be as Puzzle begins to turn the bolt.
The revolving bolt, the stable nut, the threads unthreading now and then produce a scraping, a brief squeak, but the soft sounds are only a whisper short of silence, and the man on guard outside will never hear.
After setting the blade aside, Puzzle turns the bolt the last few times with her fingers, the better to capture it when it comes loose, so that it will not fall and clatter against the platform on which the cage stands.
The nut releases the bolt, and freedom is a quarter won.
Hurriedly but without any concern, they engage the second bolt, which begins to turn. Puzzle’s calm—and Riddle’s—is a grace of their condition, their unique position. She relies—he relies—on the highest knowledge that precedes all learning, and they know that whatever will be will be for the best.
And now their freedom is half won.
Sixty-two
Shortly after seven o’clock, Grady and Cammy were reviewing the contents of the refrigerator and freezer, deciding what to have for dinner: salads and frozen pizza or salads and frozen fettuccine Alfredo, or salads and frozen homemade meatloaf, or just beer and chips.
Usually, Merlin would be at the refrigerator door, alert to the discussion, hoping to discern what kind of scraps he might be able to wheedle from them at the end of the meal. Instead, he prowled the room, sniffing here and there, and Grady had no doubt that the scents he ceaselessly reviewed were those left by Puzzle and Riddle.
As the dinner decision seemed to be sliding toward grilled-cheese sandwiches, cole slaw, and frozen waffle-cut french fries, a knock came at the door. For privacy from the Homeland horde, they had not raised the blinds at either the window or the French door, which Paul Jardine had lowered during the laser-polygraph sessions.
When he answered the knock, Grady expected to find someone with an agenda that would make him want to throw a punch, but the identity of the visitor surprised him. “Dr. Woolsey. Come in, come in. What brings you here?”
“The fate of the nation,” said Lamar Woolsey with a sly smile. He closed the door behind him, and nodded to Cammy. “Dr. Rivers, I have the advantage. I’m Lamar Woolsey, but please call me Lamar.”
Grady said, “He’s Marcus Pipp’s father.”
“Stepfather,” Lamar corrected. “Mr. Pipp died when Marcus was three. I married Estelle, his mother, when he was seven, raised him from then.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Lamar. Grady speaks so highly of your son.”
“He had a great heart,” Lamar said, “and a mind to match it. I don’t go a day without thinking of him.”
Abruptly tumbling to the truth, Grady said, “You’re part of the crisis team.”
“Now don’t hold that against me, son. Often, Homeland Security does good and necessary work. This just isn’t one of those times.”
Merlin came to stand before Lamar, gazing up at him solemnly before breaking into a grin and wagging his tail.
Pulling a chair from the table and sitting down, the better to rub the dog’s head, Lamar said, “This one could eat the hound of the Baskervilles in a single bite.”
Grady had met Lamar only once, eleven years before, between overseas tours of duty, when he had gone home with Marcus for a week while on leave.
