“Omigod.”
“Yeah. Omigod.”
Silence. Engine noise, baby crying on the other end of the plane, headphone whoosh on the other side of me.
Max, taking deep breath: “So when I worry about us deceiving ourselves, there’s a reason. I failed my apprenticeship as a spy. I’ve spent twenty years running from anyone who would use my skills. I’ve never been put to the test. I have no reason to trust my own judgment.”
“Well, you figured out what was happening with…Elena. You did something bad but you didn’t deceive yourself about it.”
“Ah! No, I can’t take credit for that.” Pause. “Someone else figured that out.”
“What? How?”
“He was right. There was no doubt. I knew it as soon as I was told.”
“But how did he know?” A short pause and then a different tone of voice, a more matter-of-fact tone. “Another mindbender.”
“Yes. He knew her better than me, I suppose. Her lover before me. I took her from him, I suppose, not that I ever thought of it that way. I wasn’t thinking of…I just wasn’t thinking.”
“A friend?”
“A rival. Pietr Volkov, actually. He saw what I couldn’t see. He told me off and rightly, not that it did anyone any good.” Many sighs now, hard exhales. I was wide-awake. “It’s…it’s all history,” Max stammered. “It’s got nothing to do with now. There’s more at stake here.”
“Mmm,” Kate murmured. “But the lines do get blurry, don’t they?”
Thirteen
Rome.
As the plane skimmed down through the clouds, the squat red and tan hills came into sight and I started smiling. The Umbrian hills are umber-the culture is so old, they named the color of the land after themselves. I found myself misting up. Not only was it a lovely scene, it was one I actually remembered, a little piece of my life come back to me. Just a hint of a remembered past was enough to fill me with a strange gratitude.
We were on a low-budget carrier connecting from Dublin, the long route that, presumably, Volkov wouldn’t be watching. The low-budget airline did without the telescoping offramp the big boys use; we descended a shiny metal staircase like the Beatles at Idlewild and boarded a shuttle bus to the terminal. Guards ringed the perimeter of the building, rifles at the ready. Nonetheless, this was Rome-even the low-rent terminal was clad in mottled dark marble gleaming in the sharp sunlight.
The line for Customs was ridiculous. “We should have used EU passports,” Max said. There were two lines for EU citizens versus one (much longer) line for the rest of the world-and our scrutiny was far more exacting. “Could’ve told you,” Tauber grumbled without explaining why he didn’t.
I guess I heard the voice behind me say “Greg?” but I didn’t even think to look. After all the months I’d spent unable to remember a single soul, a single memory, the thought of someone remembering me was from Mars. But Max was staring so I turned and there was Bill Szymzck towering over me and if I could remember how to spell his name, how could I not be sure who he was? He threw his arms around me and I melted-my brain didn’t register but my arms knew this overgrown bear of a man. It was miraculous to know someone, even if all I knew was that I knew him.
“Great to see you!” he shouted like he really meant it. He was huffing like he’d been running laps. Alongside him, a photographer in full battle gear-three cameras round his neck, flak jacket stuffed with lenses, batteries and memory cards-waited impatiently, legs twitching. “Are you covering this show?” Bill demanded. “Back in the game?”
“Yeah-sure,” I stammered and Billy thrust a card into my hand.
“My number’s there,” he said. “Call me-have to run.” He waved a finger at the photographer and they both took off, part of an army of ink-stained wretches pouring down the tunnel in the opposite direction.
I stuck the card in my pocket and shrugged at Max and the others. “I–I know him,” I smirked though it was all still a blank.
As soon as we stepped outside, the crowd noise swallowed us. The courtyard was packed, crowds swarming against barricades manned by lines of carabinieri in their silly black hats. A few buses and scooters puttered through the middle of the crowd like coffee through a spout. Signs bobbed in the thick air, French, German, English and some Cyrillic lettering joining the Italian. As we squeezed into the crowd, heads began to swivel upward, tracking an Air India jet making its approach. Murmurs and applause filtered in from all angles, until they filled the square.
“Singh,” Max said and his face went dark. He swept the crowd and then retraced the scan. “This way!” he said and the urgency in his voice was obvious. We pushed through the crowd, clearing people roughly out of our way, pushing hard for the center of the square. Max’s head was swiveling, searching, tracking something ahead of us. And then I saw him start, as though a shock had passed through him.
A moment later, a face appeared in the sky-no, in my head, it was in my head, but the way it looked was like it was floating translucent in the air above the courtyard. I could see through it or past it, but when I looked right at it, it had texture and shadows and substance. A youngish man, moving through the crowd, moving swiftly, purposefully, away from us. I knew this without knowing how I knew it. A moment later, I realized it had to be Max’s vision-the thought came to me before the image had ceased to be startling.
Next, in a progression I could barely understand, everything amplified and deepened. I jumped, all at once, inside the young man-feeling what he was feeling; rapid heartbeat and shallow rabbit’s breath, desperation and fear, fear of failure and fear of success. I could feel him now, somewhere just across the traffic island, moving through the crush, arms folded in front of his chest, sheltering the package there, the wires and plastic leading off the detonator on his chest. Suddenly I was pushing hard at the crowd, clearing them away rudely, sharply, yelling louder and moving faster. Kate and Tauber branched out behind me, apparently reacting to the same vision.
Max was ahead of us, moving fast-of course, people just got out of his way. He plunged into traffic, tipping his hand at a black-suited officer, who waved him on. The same cop jumped to stop us when we arrived three seconds later. “Max!” I shouted. I saw him turn, just a glance over his shoulder; the officer straightened like a ramrod and got the hell out of the way.
“Over there!” Max yelled, pointing toward the terminal exits. “Spread out!” The bomber was moving across the grain of the crowd and I kept riding his feelings. It was like a late-night drive, trying to hold onto a staticky distant radio broadcast that kept fading in and out-you held onto the fragments that made sense and tried to assemble the rest from context and guesswork. He wasn’t aware of us, the bomber wasn’t. He kept repeating the same frantic thoughts in succession. Get there. Not too soon. Get there. Not too soon. I kept waiting for something about the mission-the bomb, Singh, something — the kind of compulsion that could drive a person to suicide. But the connection ebbed instantly when I did, so I cleared my mind and returned to simply receiving what he was sending and following it. Necklaces and rings in the air rotated through his head in rotation with Get there. Not too soon.
A second later, I glimpsed a close-cropped haircut jerking through the crowd ahead and knew immediately this was him, this was the bomber, in plain sight, moving across the edges of the crowd where it was thinner and he could move faster. Tauber crossed over, moving to an angle where he could cut him off. I changed my angle to catch up behind them and threw myself through the crush. I could feel the boy’s desperation mounting, the sweat pouring down his face and chest, his hands twitching. Too soon, too soon. She’ll be here soon. His desperation matched my own. We’d come all this way and barely made it in time- if we were in time. Minutes to go-seconds? He still wasn’t aware of us-he wasn’t aware of anything now but her, the imminence of her. The plane had surely taxied in by now-she’d be at the gate anytime.