“If you did what they wanted.”
She nodded.
“And you believed them.”
She looked at me. “What choice?”
The question hung between us, a riddle without an answer, maddening in its simplicity. We sat there in the darkness for what felt like eons, and I looked out at the road in front of us. It was absolutely silent. When I turned to face her again, I realized that she’d never stopped looking at me.
“How did you get out of that helicopter, anyway?”
“I jumped.”
“You jumped.”
“Yes.”
“Out of a helicopter.”
An edge of impatience now: “I am the one with the brain damage, Perry. Are you an idiot?”
“What, like with a parachute?”
Sigh. “After liftoff I went for the gun. Was not so difficult in enclosed space.” She shrugged. “Pilot took a bullet in the head. Paula and her father and me… all grabbed parachutes. They got away before I could kill them.”
“Or they could kill you.”
She smiled wryly. “They still thought that I will work for them as an assassin, if they get me to a surgeon and take care of this.” She touched her head. “But I will stay with Kaya’s offer.”
“You can’t trust Kaya either.”
“Perry, you must promise me.”
“What?”
“Because of what is in my head, I sometimes… lose myself. Become confused. I know this is true. Erich told me that when you and I were in Switzerland-”
“Forget about it.”
“If that ever happens, and I–I put you in harm’s way, you must promise you will end it cleanly.”
“What,” I said. “You mean, break up with you?”
“Shut up.” She punched me. “I am serious.”
“Ouch! Shit!”
“Your family was very kind to me when I was in America, Perry. They gave me a home, a safe place to stay so that I could finish what I had to do.” She looked at me slowly and I realized that she had already made up her mind. “Do you want them back?”
“My family? You know I do.”
“We cannot go to police.” She opened her coat and I saw the gun that she’d taken from Paula on the helicopter, a nine-millimeter Glock semi-automatic. “Not now.”
“No,” I said.
“What would you be willing to do?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“Do you remember how it was for us in New York that night?”
I nodded.
“And you are ready to go to war again?”
“If we have to.”
Gobi took out the sheet of paper, unfolded it, and told me what she had in mind. When she finished talking, the silence came back, filling the car again, and this time the quiet felt right and easy between us and I knew it was there to stay. I took in a breath and let it out, and eased my foot back on the gas, following the road through the forest of the night.
39. “I Am the Highway” — Audioslave
“You are ready?”
It was just after dawn. We were somewhere in France, gassing up the Peugeot at a BP station, steam rising off the cups of espresso that Gobi had brought out a few minutes earlier along with a loaf of bread. On the opposite side of the road, two cows were gazing at us with unblinking bovine indifference. If American cows looked bored, French cows had elevated it to an art form.
I started the engine, pulling away from the service station while Gobi tore a chunk of bread off, smeared it with cheese, and handed it to me. I wasn’t hungry, but after driving through the night, I was starting to get the shakes. All around us, the countryside spilled out in wet brown fields that looked like the Cezanne paintings I’d seen in one of my mother’s coffee table books. None of it looked like it had changed much in the last hundred years except for the occasional satellite dish.
My phone started to buzz. The one that Gobi had planted on me. I looked over at her.
“Who else has this number?”
“No one.”
I hit TALK. “Hello?”
“Hey, kid.”
That voice, like broken gravel being shoveled in my ear. “Agent Nolan,” I said, feeling Gobi react beside me as I glanced over my shoulder at the empty roadway behind us.
“Listen, about last night, no hard feelings, huh?” Nolan coughed, not bothering to cover his mouth. “I didn’t want you to think I was mad about that or anything.”
“That’s a load off,” I said.
“You have to admit, it was kind of stupid, though, right?” This time the cough sounded more like a humorless chuckle, and it was easy to imagine him sitting in a safe house somewhere back in Switzerland, stirring Nescafe and checking his e-mail. “You don’t have many friends in Europe now.”
“I’ve got one.”
“I wanted to let you know that we checked on your family. Nothing yet.”
“Thanks, and good luck tracing this phone. I’m ditching it.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
“Goodbye, Nolan.”
“See you, Perry.”
As soon as he hung up, Gobi looked at me. “What did he say?”
“He said I don’t have many friends in Europe.”
“Is he right?”
I looked at the sign up ahead. PARIS-262 KM.
“We’ll see.”
40. “The Metro” — Berlin
By early afternoon we’d reached the outskirts of Paris and abandoned the Peugeot in a commuter lot at Joinville le-Pont. I bought us two twenty-four-hour rail passes while Gobi wiped the car down, getting our prints off the wheel and the door handles. When the RER pulled up to the platform, we got onboard and took two seats in the very back.
Gobi leaned her head on my shoulder and dozed. People got on and off the train without noticing us. Outside it was raining again, big fat metal-colored droplets streaking the glass as we rocked past industrial parkways, warehouses, and factories outside the city. Power lines swooped and dipped like sine waves outside the window. A half-hour later, we changed from the commuter rail to the Metro, and I saw oil-slick puddles and landfills along the tracks, abandoned furniture, tangles of graffiti along the trestles, getting thicker and more elaborate, American words and hip-hop slang mixed in with French phrases and local iconography. If this wasn’t Paris, we were definitely headed into New Jersey.
“Look.” She pointed out the window. “Eiffel Tower.”
I stared at it rising above the brown and white rooftops. Until that moment it hadn’t really registered where we were. For a while the buildings of Paris could have been the same anonymous tenements of any other city, apartments and drugstores with rain sluicing off the canopies, but as the train rose up on an elevated track, I saw the cathedrals and the river, and then we were in the middle of all of it.
“It’s like nine hundred feet high,” I said, remembering what I’d heard from my French teacher sophomore year. “I think there’s a restaurant up there.”
She sounded lost and alone. “I have always wanted to go. First the 40/4 °Club, now the Eiffel Tower.” The joke came off weak, even to me. “You’re not exactly a cheap date, you know that?”
“I want to die there.”
I looked at her, startled. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Not today.”
She didn’t say anything. I didn’t either, for a while. Gobi tucked her chin and closed her eyes. As she leaned back against my shoulder, her coat slipped open and I caught a glimpse of the Glock, hanging out for the whole world to see.
“Jeez, Gobi-” I reached over to push the gun back out of view and pull her coat shut, but when my hand brushed the harness, she snapped violently awake, shoved me back, and grabbed the gun, then held it out, pointing it right at me.
“Gobi.” I tried to make my voice calm. “What are you doing? Put that down.”
She didn’t move. Her face was absolutely blank, an alabaster mask with real eyes twitching around inside it. A thin trickle of blood had started running from her left nostril. I couldn’t tell how many of the other passengers had noticed what was going on, but the woman across from us in a business suit-a middle-aged Parisian executive who looked like she was on her way out to a power lunch-was staring straight at Gobi and the Glock.