“And IAD?”
I scanned down the list. “Dulles.”
“They’re flying to Rome tomorrow,” Tauber said. “From Dulles to the G8.”
“To kill hope,” Kate murmured, staring at the TV, where Singh was addressing a raucous crowd from a balcony in New Delhi.
“We seek a new world,” her voice echoed across the square. “In our lifetime, we have seen walls dissolve between East and West. Now it is time to continue that work, to push down the walls of fear between us, to keep pushing until no more walls are left. This is a long road but, as the philosopher says, every journey must begin with a first step.”
The crowd cheered.
“Them bastards have hope,” Max repeated quietly. “We’re going to need passports.”
Twelve
We left for New York around two in the morning. Kate had locked herself in her room for a couple of hours, the sound of her crying surfacing every once in a while, whenever she lifted her face out of the pillow. Max went out in the afternoon, saying he was ‘going hunting,’ whatever that meant-he returned twenty minutes later, talked to Tauber a minute and went right out again. When Kate finally emerged, eyes bloodshot and suspended between collapse and explosion, Tauber quietly said, “If we’re boardin’ an international flight with no suitcases, they’ll have us in the interrogation room in about half a second.” When Kate looked up, he waved a stack of fifties in her face-apparently Max had done another bank run.
She dragged us out shopping and spent the evening expertly packing suitcases in the living room, refusing to let any of us help. But when Max finally returned at 11 with Chinese and said we’d soon be ready to go, she boiled over.
“I’m totally unreliable. I’ll be a danger to you all. I don’t know what I’m doing till I’ve done it. And I won’t be any good in a fight. There are things I’m not willing to do, even to my enemies.”
“Breaking every bone in their bodies should get us through most situations,” Max answered drily and Kate surprised herself by breaking into laughter.
“That’s very reassuring,” she said.
Tauber returned from down the block with a very lived-in hearse.
“This won’t attract attention?”
“They’ll notice ya but nobody’s gonna stop ya,” he smirked.
“Here’s your passports,” Max announced, handing each of us a packet of several. “Use the American ones for now.”
“Keep no more’n one on ya at a time,” Tauber cautioned. “The rest go in yer suitcase. Invent a good backstory for yourself, a history. Nothin’ fancy, just simple so we can all remember.”
The little blue books looked very realistic-mine had several pages of dog-eared destination stamps.
“Are these for real?” Kate asked.
“The guy who made them is the CIA’s guy in Philadelphia,” Max explained. “He has the real machines.”
“So they’re real.”
“No. The serial numbers come from dead people whose passports haven’t expired and a couple of variations in the holograms make them forgeries. So they’re just wrong enough that the government can deny us.” He smiled. “Does that make me a patriot?”
“Will he remember making them once the suggestion runs out?”
“No suggestion,” Max said. “It would have worn off before the G8 ends, so not a good idea.” He held up the chain with the ID card and BMW key fob. “I told him it was L Corp business. They’re the fair-haired boys these days, so he’ll make sure he forgets.”
Halfway up the Jersey Turnpike, everybody had settled in. Tauber and Max were lights-out in the back seat, Tauber with his arms crossed over his chest like a mummy, Max rousing with tremors every few minutes, taking a drowsy look around and settling back to sleep.
Kate rocked slightly in the passenger seat, humming to herself but staring at me every once in a while. “What does he want?”
“Who?”
“Renn.” She was rolling around in the seat, giving me the girly eye. I’d taken a few peeks at her too, though the memory of her breaking the guy’s bones at the graveyard (and knowing she could read my thoughts) kept me respectful. She was pretty in a distracted tomboy sort of way, the girl who didn’t pay attention to her own looks. Which, in the real world, meant she was pretty enough not to have to-and knew it.
“I don’t know. It’s a big question,” I asked.
She ran her finger up the side window of the car-it had started to rain again; we’d been moving through showers the whole way. “Well, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? To know what you want.”
She reminded me of Tess all of a sudden, which didn’t make sense; they didn’t look at all alike. Maybe it was just the way we were talking, softly, the rain patting on the roof, like lovers after bed.
“I’ve seen how you pay attention-to everything,” she observed. “You’re a watcher. You have to know something about him.”
I was a little annoyed she wasn’t more interested in me. “I know who he is,” I said firmly and she sat up. “He’s a superhero who wants to be a person, but he’s not really cut out for either one.” She didn’t seem impressed, though I thought I was reasonably brilliant.
The overhead lights rolled across the windshield like the drum lights on a copy machine. The rain came in bursts and other cars hovered in ragged clusters every couple miles.
“What do you remember?” she asked after ten minutes of silence.
“What?”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it? Remembering?”
“It’s one of my problems.”
“So what do you remember?”
I wanted her to be interested in me but then I went all suspicious when she was. That’s what I got for the kind of company I was keeping. But the look on her face drew me in. She had power and she was the first one in this whole crew to ask me the slightest thing about myself. She cared-I could see it, just looking at her. Max kept telling me not to worry about how I knew things anyway, right? Just know what you know — I could hear him voice pounding that line into my head. I felt like I knew Kate-and I trusted her. She could probably find out more about me in three seconds than I knew myself-if she wanted to.
“What do I remember? Lots and nothing. I remember being a kid-riding a bike, stacking hay in a field and binding it. I remember the porch and the steps and the dark green screens over the window but I can’t remember where we lived, not even what state. I remember sitting in the kitchen with my mother, singing Doobie Brothers songs along with the radio. I remember she’d cut her hair short and I remember her dress-some bright orange thing with a big swirly pattern on it-but I can’t see her face. How can I not remember my mother’s face?” The images were there always, fragments, bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything bigger, any sort of whole. They were always there behind my eyes, behind every conscious thought. “I remember women-dates, my arm around some girl at a movie, parked in the high weeds in my car. I remember the dashboard light and the feel of some girl’s blouse, her perfume and the taste of her neck. And the crickets, so loud. But it’s flashes and feelings, nothing…complete. What do you remember?”
“Of my life?” she asked, confused.
“Of my life,” I said. “You’re the mindreader, right? You see any more than I do?”
“I’m not much of a mindreader,” she answered, “But-can I touch your forehead?”
I pulled away. “I don’t like anybody touching me,” I insisted though it wasn’t true. I was just instinctively afraid of her opening me up like Pandora’s Box. Of course, as soon as I thought it, she read it.
“I’m nothing to be scared of,” she said. “I backed into this thing.”
She smiled and it was a blushing, half-shy, real smile, not that gargoyle smile of Max’s. “I’ll look inside if you want-it’ll be as much of an adventure for me as for you.” Then she stopped and I could see her play back what she’d just said; she cackled a moment later. “I guess that does sound a bit scary,” she admitted but I was already over it.