“It would be fucking near suicidal,” Archer said, “to doubt it.”
“It’s a supposition—”
“It’s a fact, Tom. He was there. He was close by when I found you. Another five minutes, ten minutes, the street empties out, you turn down some alley, he would have had a clean shot at you.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Well, but, that’s the thing. I can.”
Tom looked blank, felt apprehensive.
“Simple,” Archer said. “This guy took out three temporal depots, each one stocked with machine bugs eager to defend it. He killed the cybernetics with an EM pulse weapon. His armor was hardened against the pulse and the machine bugs weren’t. Hardly any cybernetics survived—unless they were also protected by his armor.”
“How could that be?”
“They were in the air he was breathing. Little bitty ones the size of a virus—you know about those?”
“I know about those,” Tom allowed. “But if they’re inside him, how come they can’t stop him?”
“They’re like drones without a hive. They’re lost and they don’t have instructions. But they send out a little narrow-bandwidth data squirt, a sort of homing signal. I can pick up on that.”
“You can?”
Archer turned to display a plug in one ear, something like a miniaturized hearing aid. “Ben had his cybernetics whip this up for me. I can tell when he’s inside a radius of eight, nine hundred yards … reception permitting. You too, by the way.”
“They’re inside me?”
“Completely benign. Don’t get your shorts in a knot, Tom. Maybe they saved your life. I drove around Manhattan for three days, Battery Park to Washington Heights, on the off chance I’d come within range.” He cocked his head. “You sound kind of like a telephone. A dial tone. The marauder sounds more like a dentist’s drill.”
“You’re telling me he was there at Larry Millstein’s apartment building.”
“That’s why I was in such an all-fired hurry to leave.”
“He must have known I was coming.”
“I suppose so. But—”
“No,” Tom said. “Let me think about this.”
It was hard to think at all. If Archer was correct, he had been standing a few yards away from a man who wanted to murder him. Who had murdered Millstein. And if the marauder had been waiting for him, had known he was coming, then Millstein must have cooperated with the marauder.
They had hurried to the apartment because Millstein phoned Joyce at Mario’s.
The marauder knew about Mario’s. The marauder knew about Tom. Maybe the marauder knew his address. Certainly the marauder knew about Joyce.
Who had left with a cop. Who might be headed home by now. Where the marauder might be waiting. Tom spilled his coffee, standing up.
Archer tried to soothe him. “What they’ll likely do is question her as long as she’s willing to sit still. She’s probably giving a statement to some sleepy cop as we speak. Safe and sound.”
Tom hoped so. But how long would she be willing to answer questions?
She might have a few questions of her own.
He couldn’t erase his memory of the hallway outside Lawrence Millstein’s door. All that blood.
“Drive me home,” he told Archer. “We’ll meet her there.”
Archer raised his eyebrows at the word “home” but fumbled in his pocket for the keys.
They drove into the narrow streets of the Lower East Side. The city looked abandoned, Tom thought, pavements and storefronts glazed with rain and steam rising out of the sewers. “Here,” he said, and Archer pulled up at the curb outside the building.
The rain was loud on the roof of this old car.
Tom reached for the door handle; Archer put a hand on his wrist.
Tom said, “Is he near here?”
“I don’t think so. But he could be around a corner, half a block away. Listen, what if she’s not home?”
“Then we wait for her.”
“How long?” Tom shrugged. “And if she is here?”
“We take her with us.”
“What—back to Belltower?”
“She’ll be safe there … safer, anyhow.”
“Tom, I don’t know if that’s a real good idea.” He opened the door. “I don’t have a better one.”
He rang the buzzer.
Nobody answered. Then he climbed the stairs—these old, dirty boards complaining under his feet. It must be four a.m., Tom calculated. The light from the incandescent bulb over the landing was stale and fierce.
He opened the door and knew at once the apartment was empty.
He switched on the lights. Joyce wasn’t home and he guessed—prayed—she hadn’t been. Nothing had been disturbed since this morning. Two coffee cups stood on the kitchen table, brown puddles inside. He walked into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The rain beat against the window, a lonesome sound.
Yesterday’s paper lay open on the arm of the sofa, and Tom regarded it with a stab of longing: if he could step back even a day he could turn this around, keep Joyce safe, maybe even keep Lawrence Millstein alive—he would have a handle on what was happening.
But the thought was ludicrous. Hadn’t he proved that already? My God, here he was armed with nearly thirty years of foresight and he couldn’t even help himself. It had all been a dream. A dream about something called “the past,” a fiction; it didn’t exist. Nothing was predictable, nothing played the same way twice, every certainty dissolved at the touch.
History was a place where dramas were played out on a ghost stage, the way Joyce’s old boyfriend had imagined D-day. But that’s not true, Tom thought. This was history: an address, a locality, a place where people lived. History was this room. Not emblematic, merely specific; merely this vacant space, which he had come to love.
He thought about Barbara, who had never much cared about the past but had longed for the future … the uncreated future in which there were no certainties, only possibilities.
Everywhere the same, Tom thought. 1962 or 1862 or 2062. Every acre of the world littered with bones and hope. He was indescribably tired.
He stepped into the hallway and sealed the apartment, which had contained a fair portion of his happiness, but which was empty now. He would be better off waiting with Doug in the car.
He was leaving the building when a taxi pulled up at the curb.
He watched Joyce pay the driver and step out into the rain.
Her clothes were instantly wet and her hair matted against her forehead. Her eyes were obscure behind rain-fogged lenses.
It was raining when they met, Tom recalled, a couple of months ago in the park. She had looked different then. Less tired. Less frightened.
She regarded him warily, then crossed the pavement.
He touched her wet shoulders.
She hesitated, then came into his arms.
“He was dead, Tom,” she said. “He was just lying there dead.”
“I know.”
“Oh, God. I need to sleep. I need to sleep a long, long time.”
She moved toward the lobby; he restrained her with his hands. “Joyce, you can’t. It’s not safe in there.”
She pulled away. He felt a sudden tension in her body, as if she were bracing herself for some new horror. “What are you talking about?”
“The thing—the man who killed Lawrence—I believe he meant to kill me. He must know about this place by now.”
“I don’t understand this.” She balled her fists. “What are you saying, that you know who killed Lawrence?”
“Joyce, it’s too much to explain.”
“He wasn’t stabbed, Tom. He wasn’t shot. He was burned open. It’s indescribable. There was a big hole burned into him. Do you know about that?”
“We can talk when we’ve found a safe place.”
“There’s no end to this, is there? Oh, shit, Tom. I’ve seen way too much ugliness tonight. Don’t tell me this shit. You don’t have to go inside if you don’t want to. But I need to sleep.”