He’d just picked up when Mia’s voice came at him. “Drain cleaner in water bottles? What were you thinking?”
Evan exhaled quietly.
“Look, I know you were joking. He told me it was a joke. But if he repeats that to a teacher? It would be considered a terroristic threat. You don’t understand how insane schools are these days.”
Evan rolled his lips over his teeth. Bit down. Told the muscles of his neck to relax. “You’re right.”
“You know what? This isn’t your fault. It’s my fault. I should’ve … I don’t know—”
“I get it,” Evan said.
“Okay.” A brief pause. “Um. Good-bye, then.”
“Good-bye.”
Well, that was that. Good. No complications. No distractions. He’d made a brief, uncharacteristic foray into a sticky domestic situation, and now he could retreat into dealing with his work and the considerable danger facing him and Katrin.
The bitch is next. Then you.
In the morning he’d regroup with Katrin. He’d run down the people behind the murder of her father. And he’d eliminate them before they could pose a further threat.
Forgoing his meditation, he walked down the hall, the concrete cool beneath his bare feet. He took a hot shower, the steam burning his lungs, then toweled off. The floating platform that held his mattress wobbled ever so slightly as he slipped into bed. He cleared a space inside his mind, a park of his own, and populated it with the oak trees of his childhood, the ones visible from the window of his dormer room in Jack’s house. He’d always envisioned bounding across the burnt orange canopy, forty feet off the ground. He counted down slowly from ten, part of a self-hypnotic technique for falling asleep.
He’d just hit zero and drifted off when the perimeter alarm sounded. A staccato series of beeps — external intruder, windows or balconies.
He flipped off the bed, landing in a four-point feet-and-hands sprawl on the floor. Two shoulder rolls took him through the door into the bathroom. He gripped the hot-water lever, shoving through into the Vault.
His eyes swept the monitors. Nothing, nothing—there. Bumping against his bedroom window, a foreign object.
He exhaled with annoyance when he realized what it was.
After silencing the alarm, he walked back into his room and raised the armored sunscreen. Floating outside his window, a balloon.
With the logo of a children’s shoe store on it.
Each upper-story window of Castle Heights tilted open only two feet at the top before a locked hinge stopped it for safety. Evan had disabled the hinge on his bedroom in case he needed to exit the building quickly in the event of a frontal assault on the penthouse. Letting the pane yawn wide now, he tugged the balloon inside. Knotted around the mouth was a kite string that tailed down the side of the building to — he assumed — the twelfth floor. A folded note was Scotch-taped on the balloon’s side. Evan raised the flap of paper and read.
“I’m sorry I told Mom yor joke. Do you fergive me? Chek Yes or No. Your frend, Peter.”
Taped beside the note on the balloon, a stubby pencil and a sewing needle.
The grinding of Evan’s teeth vibrated his skull. He had a team of professional assassins tracking him and the woman he’d sworn to protect. Her father, murdered. Two Commandments and counting already out the window. The last thing he needed was an eight-year-old kid invading his condo and his sleep with schoolroom notes.
Evan closed the window hard on the kite string and went back to his bed. He pulled the sheets up and floated there in the darkness on his levitating mattress, detached from the world. He counted down from ten, but sleep didn’t come. He kept his eyes closed, focused on his body, the weight of his bones, his own quiet breathing. From time to time, he could hear the balloon squeaking faintly against the ceiling.
Exasperated, he threw back the sheets and crossed to the balloon. He pulled off the pencil, made an X in the “Yes” box, and popped the balloon with the conveniently supplied needle. He opened the window and threw the deflated sack to the wind. He started to cinch the window closed again, then hesitated. He stuck his head out in time to see the white string being taken up through a window nine stories below by two tiny hands.
23
Reading the Chessboard
“What are you doing?” Katrin asked. She’d risen from the desk chair to face him imploringly across the drab motel room. More precisely, to face his back.
Evan kept moving, focused not on her but on the room — in fact, on all three adjoining rooms, 9 through 11. They shared an identical layout: blocky furniture, front door, one big window in the front and one in the rear. He’d laid wide the adjoining doors so that standing in Katrin’s room — Room 10—gave him decent sight lines through the space. Now he wanted to obscure those sight lines to his advantage.
“They found us before,” he said. “We don’t know how. Which means we don’t know when they will again.” He adjusted the angle of the connecting door to the east so he could see between the hinges to the neighboring rear window. The sheer curtains granted a shadowy view of the industrial trash barrels in the alley beyond and the thin, bobbing branches of a dying white birch. He’d left his businessman-gray Ford Taurus slotted neatly between other sedans in an apartment carport off the alley. After the shooting in Chinatown, he’d kicked his usual precautions into overdrive, retrieving the stashed car from a long-term parking lot adjacent to the Burbank Airport.
Closing one eye for perspective, he swung the door a half inch farther, then another half inch. There.
“Every time one of us leaves this room,” he said, “it increases the risk that they’ll find us. Every time we’re together, it increases the risk that they’ll find us.”
“Can’t we just go on the run?” Katrin asked. “I have my passport in my purse. I’ve kept it on me ever since this started, and some cash. It’s not a lot, but—”
“You can’t run from a problem like this,” Evan said, brushing past her. He played with the adjoining door to Room 11 on the other side until it gave him a similar angle through that space as well. Taking the chair Katrin had just vacated, he situated it precisely in the middle of Room 10 so when he sat there he’d maximize the slender vantages he’d created through the hinges of the doors on either side.
“Why not?” she asked.
“It’ll catch up to you.” Moving swiftly, he rolled one of the circular nightstands over to the front window. Retrieving his briefcase from the bed, he set it on the nightstand, input the code, and lifted the lid so its inset pinhole lens faced the sliver of a break in the front curtains. “This team is very good at what they do. We need to bed down, figure out a counterattack, not get drawn out.” On his RoamZone cell, he called up the video feed from the lens and repositioned the briefcase until his phone screen showed a full capture of the parking lot in front.
Then he sat in the chair with his back to the briefcase and propped his RoamZone against the TV in front of him, establishing a more-or-less 360-degree view through the three adjoining rooms and the outside space around them. For the first time since arriving, he looked fully at her.
Her petiteness struck him. She had the finely made build of a dancer — slender arms that still held muscle, delicate wrists, shoulders-back posture. She wore a scarf headband under which her short bangs stuck out jaggedly. Her lashes held mascara — heavy and yet not overdone, and her eyes looked weary, edged with pink. A flush still showed at her throat and the rim of her nose, the tinge pronounced given her milk-white skin. Clearly there’d been a lot of crying and very little sleep, though she’d held it together since he’d arrived.