“Time to go, Herb,” she called and they climbed into a Winnebago parked outside the garage.
“Don’t stare-move!” Renn gasped, smacking me on the shoulder. “That way!” He pointed to a sidestreet a few yards away. I pulled out of the driveway. As we made the turn, I saw the Winnebago head off in the opposite direction.
Max laid way back in his seat now and talked me down the long hill, panting little breaths as though he’d just carried someone up a hillside and around a house. We went nowhere and took the most complicated route to get there-right here, left there, his eyes closed the same as when we’d found Tauber and Miriam Fine’s house. This time, he was finding a way for us to get lost and stay that way. We kept turning and doubling back on ourselves as we moved progressively through the vast development. More than once I saw a black SUV turning onto a street we’d just turned off of or going down a one-way street we’d just passed.
This cat-and-mouse took more than fifteen minutes but at the end, we were all the way to the other end of the project, having never gotten near a main street. When we finally did turn onto one, we were a hundred yards from the highway entrance.
“There!” he pointed but I didn’t need prompting. We were on the ramp before I could ask a single question, before he could fail to answer even one.
“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” I said after we’d driven about an hour.
He’d been sitting up properly for a while, his color-never very far from pale-returning. “Ruben who?”
“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania. That’s the next nearest. You would have asked eventually.”
He sat taking me in for a moment. “You’re taking ownership of it,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. And the words are coming back, aren’t they?”
It was what I’d been thinking. I certainly wasn’t what I’d been-the kid who thought he was going to be Peter Jennings was long gone-but more than words were coming back. I was seeing the story-I was beginning to pull the threads together, to see a bigger picture. It was more than a little creepy, knowing he was inside my head, but at least I believed it now-that uncertainty was gone. Whatever satisfaction I got from that knowledge lasted half a second.
“How the hell many guys are after us?!!” I yelled suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? There were at least six, seven guys following us out of her house, the two with the serious guns-you sure attract a whole lot of serious guns-by the rockpile and two or three more on the ridge where the houses were. How many fucking guys are after you? How did they get there so fast? Who are these people?”
“Good questions. Those are all good questions,” he acknowledged with a nod.
“Fuck you! Good questions! You’re the mindbender extraordinaire — why am I asking the good fucking questions?”
He smiled. He seemed to actually find this amusing, which did nothing for me except get me driving 90 instead of 85 miles an hour. Now that we were out of the situation, the fear and anger were all over me. It was amazing my shaking hands could drive straight.
“I don’t have answers-not yet,” he said. “They’re not powerful minds, but the first thing they’ve been taught is a good blocking scheme. And my stamina isn’t what it used to be. Throwing several hundred tons of rock down a hill doesn’t suit me anymore.” His eyes were miles away again, that look I’d seen a couple of other times on his face.
Was that not a phrase with him? Was he actually looking miles away? He started rifling through the glovebox. “We’ll need money, a map and to fill the car up,” he said. “Then we’ll figure out the next step.”
“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” I repeated.
“I’m not sure that’s it. What if Dave made the same mistake we did- I did-assuming the network was under attack? Clearly, at least one part of it-Miriam Fine-is on the other side. I’m not sure what that means. And by the way,” he stared at me, “it’s not how many fucking guys are after me. You’re the one with the list in your head.”
That stopped conversation for a while. The signs promised a rest stop thirty miles ahead.
“Throwing chunks of a hillside around-that’s mindreading?” I asked.
“No, that’s my hobby,” he laughed. “Electrons are electrons. Matter is bound together by vibration, by harmonic sympathy. So if you can manipulate the vibration, you can manipulate-rearrange-just about anything at the subatomic level. Now, it’s one thing to know about it-it’s another to do it. I’ve been playing with this for thirty years and all I’ve got are a couple of childish tricks. Nonetheless, they’re good for wreaking havoc.” He sighed-I probably looked like a fish, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “It’s exhausting too. If the rest stop has a decent cheeseburger, I want one.”
We filled up the Audi and parked it behind a couple of tractor-trailers, out of sight of the highway. On the way to the food court, we bought a map and all the newspapers they had.
“How come they can’t read our thoughts to follow us?” I asked as we sat down.
“I’m blocking us.”
“You could read the bearded guy-wasn’t he a mindbender?”
“Ha! That guy was useless. I broke right through.”
“So you can read anybody?”
“No. I couldn’t read Dave if he wanted to stop me. But these? Whoever hired these guys, they like people with minimal ability.” The waitress brought our food. I had a Caesar Salad; he dug into a cheeseburger with fries.
“That’s not good for you, you know,” I told him. “Bad for your cholesterol.”
“Cholesterol is a myth,” he answered like he’d checked it out on the subatomic level, stuffing a few extra fries in around the corners of his mouth. “After a morning of rock-arrangement, we real men want beef.”
I was wondering if his real name was Max Renn-or was the Max as phony as the Dulles? He could read minds and plant thoughts in your mind and play around with the vibrations that held the world together. The scary part was, I’d seen enough to actually have to take the idea seriously. Knowing he wasn’t making up such ridiculous stuff didn’t prove any more comforting than the alternative. Thinking about him seemed to lead inevitably to double negatives.
“What about those people? You made them give us their car? And go on vacation? Just like that?” Renn nodded, smiling his chilly smile. If he could read my mind, he knew what was coming, but he was waiting, humoring me, as I edged into my subject.
“They got away,” he answered. “So they won’t be able to give information about their car for at least a couple of days. And now, since they haven’t found us, the bad guys will have to track them, just in case we were hiding in the Winnebago.” He stared at the parking lot with a look I didn’t like. “We’ll have to ditch the car.”
“It’s a nice car,” I started. Way nicer than his, though I didn’t say so. Air conditioning, for one thing.
“Don’t get attached,” he warned. “Everything is temporary.”
I got back to my subject. “If you could make those people do what they did-are you making me go with you?”
He smiled the best he knew how, which wasn’t much. “No,” he answered and his eyes softened. “You’re here on your own. For which I’m grateful, by the way.”
“But you have a reason-for not forcing me,” I said. Like the names of the agents and the location of the box under the furnace in Dave’s store, it was just something I suddenly knew.
“Yes,” he smiled and now his eyes were burning. “That’s very good. Yes, there’s a reason why. Dave was a subtle man, unlike either of us. He left you a suggestion to tell me your password. And he left me a suggestion-I thought I wasn’t suggestible-to recognize it when you did. But I had no idea, when I first asked, what information was inside you. It might have been a person or a place or a concept or a plan or…who knows what? So the question that I ask you- what is the next nearest? — that didn’t come from Dave. It’s intentionally ambiguous because I really didn’t know what I was asking. So far, it’s gotten us some information and allowed us to meet this really interesting class of people,” he laughed. “But a better question might have got us a whole lot farther faster. So I’m hoping you’ll get stronger and take control of what he left you, of the information inside you. So, I can’t force you-to take this trip, or much else. I don’t want to get in the way of the work you’re doing…inside your own head.”