Denton’s breath misted in front of his eyes, causing the image of the Mossad agent to take on a foggy quality. He aimed his gun.
In a Western, shooting a man in the back was dishonorable. Denton, however, knew he was by far the underdog in this match and had to take his shots where he found them. He also knew he didn’t have the skill to wound the man or, like they did in movies, dislodge the gun from his hand with a single shot, leaving him with burning fingers but no permanent damage.
No. That was not real life. The reality was that he was incompetent with a gun and probably should have been dead already. Denton aimed as best he could at the center of Smith’s back and fired.
When they landed in Washington, Dr. Talcott was quiet. She had talked herself out, whispering mysteries in his ear like some Lilith for the past several hours. And he had not acknowledged any of them.
As they got off the plane, she looked discouraged and tired. Farris kept tight hold of her arm, pulling her through the terminal and outside. He got them a taxi to his apartment. He’d remembered many things by now, and he was able to give the address to the taxi driver. He even sounded normal when he said it.
When they got there, when they were standing right outside his door, he suddenly couldn’t bear to have her see this. He didn’t know how he was going to react to what was inside, but he had to do it alone. He thought about tying her up or stashing her somewhere, but he just… the truth was, he didn’t want to fuck with it. He told her to wait down the hall.
He had to break in, having lost his keys long ago. Inside, he did a quick reconnaissance, but the place was empty. He closed the blinds, locked the door, shoved a chair against it, and turned on the light. He spent a while searching the place for bugs and cameras, but it was halfhearted, satisfying a vague paranoia.
There were no bugs. The doors and windows locked tight. For a moment he marveled at the privacy these things implied. In here as in the streets and airports, Calder Farris was invisible.
The apartment was chilly, sparsely furnished. It was familiar but seemed detached from himself. It stirred nothing inside him.
At length, a box attracted his attention. It was white cardboard and he knew it held the past. He opened it and found pictures—mostly colored, some black-and-white. They were images of Calder Farris, of childhood, his father, high school, a few from Desert Storm and other military experiences. There were not many of them, considering the span of such a life. Farris had not liked being photographed. He stood alone in almost all of them and he always looked the same, staring at the camera with glasses disguising his eyes.
In a muddy, unruly flood, the whole of his previous life came back to him, washing away the bits and pieces of recollection and becoming a solid knowing. He saw it all, not objectively—he was far from objective—but with the rawness of someone who’d had tremendous hope for a thing… and was terribly disappointed.
All the way here from Poland he had hoped and had not even known he was hoping—for something warm in this life, for something he could not even define. Maybe he had hoped that for Calder Farris there would be… what? A woman, a mate, friends at least—some shelter, some meaning, some bright end to all the pain, a haven, a home. And there was nothing.
Dr. Talcott had tried to explain to him about the gateway and how it chose where they went. He had pretended not to believe. But he’d always known that somehow, in Centalia, he had entered the darkest part of his own mind, that Centalia was a nightmare only he could dream. And maybe that had been part of the madness.
This empty apartment was Calder Farris also. His life had been dedicated to his job and only that, to the government, the United States military. He had believed in it with an angry, brutal faith.
The state rewards service. Long live the state.
“It was a false alarm, sir.”
Calder Farris sat at a conference table across from Gen. Franklin Deall. Also in the meeting was Dr. Alan Rickman, the director of the DSO. The two of them were looking at him with incredulity and anger.
“A false alarm?” General Deall managed to berate him with that single phrase. “You call an XL3, spend a fortune in Seattle, drag a team of men to Poland to chase down this Dr. Talcott, then disappear from all contact for nine days, and now you say it was a false alarm? You’d better explain yourself, Lieutenant. And I mean now.”
Dr. Rickman was allowing General Deall to run the show, but he was watching with tight-lipped enjoyment. Farris recalled that Rickman had always been a little afraid of him. Rickman had never liked the seedier part of weapon procurement.
“The explosion on the University of Washington campus was due to a faulty furnace,” Calder said.
“We know that. We have the ever-loving report! And at that point Dr. Rickman tried to pull you back and you insisted this was something major.”
“That was my judgment call at the time, sir. I was just starting to interrogate Dr. Talcott when she escaped from the hospital. Her escape looked highly suspicious. I thought it was prudent to go after her.”
“I have yet to be convinced that anything about this was prudent,” Deall commented with disgust.
“What happened in Poland?” Dr. Rickman leaned in, his elbows on the table. “The other agents said you were ahead of them in the woods, chasing Dr. Talcott and the others. But they lost them—and you.”
“I got ahead of my men without realizing it. I was trying not to lose the quarry. When I reached them they had doubled back toward the concentration camp and a dirt road. They were about to take off in a jeep. I jumped onto the back of it in order to stick with them. That’s when I lost my men.”
General Deall flipped through the report in front of him. “The other agents made no mention of a vehicle. They said the pursuit took place in deep woods.”
“Part of it, yes, but the woods edged the grounds of Auschwitz. I was close enough to the quarry that I managed to stay with them when they doubled back. The other agents must have missed it.”
“Why didn’t you radio them?”
“I tried at one point, but I was running too fast. And once I was on the jeep I couldn’t get to my radio.”
“There’s always time for radio contact, Farris. My god!”
“Yes, sir.”
“There was a bright light, according to your men,” Rickman interrupted. “An enormous flash. What was that?”
Farris shook his head slowly, face bewildered. “No… the suspects had flashlights. Or maybe they saw the headlights on the jeep.”
Deall and Rickman exchanged a look.
“Well? What happened once you were on the jeep?”
“It had a hard-shell top and I didn’t think they’d seen me. I stood on the back bumper, hanging on to the sides. It took both hands and I couldn’t get to my radio. My plan was to wait until we’d reached our destination, then arrest them. I had my gun and I didn’t think they were armed. But we drove for miles. It was freezing. My hands grew numb and I was thrown off the jeep on a sharp curve. I struck my head.”
Farris recited this stiffly and to the point. He raised his hand to a bandage on his head, where a months-old scar had been carefully reopened that morning.
“I don’t remember a lot after that. I walked in the woods for a long time. I finally managed to find a town.”
Deall and Rickman were both observing him with suspicion.
“Why didn’t you use your radio after you were thrown from the jeep?” Deall demanded.
“I don’t know. I don’t even think I had it on me. It must have been lost when I was thrown.”
“Why didn’t you call when you reached a phone?” Rickman asked.