Their original topic, though, enlivened her: “Braids have a history. Archeologists found figurines and statues that’re more than twenty-five thousand years old. Africa and France. Asia too. I do a different one every few days. They could be this.”
It was a single strand.
“Or a fishtail, a five-stranded rope, a French, a waterfall. Some I make up as I go. In some cults — even today — women are required to wear them. Their husbands insist. A sign of subservience. I like the irony.”
“You can also pin it up quickly if you need to fight.”
Her expression said that she had done just that.
The strands ended in a blue ribbon.
She rolled toward him. Her breasts, compact, pressed into a crease. He mirrored her pose and his hand went to her shoulder, near the bullet ink. The muscle was solid, which he knew not from this touch, but from their fierce joining. Legs too. He supposed she ran. Was it an attempt to bleed away some tension, some concern, some fire within her? She presented calm, to the edge of blasé. He didn’t believe it.
He had examined her scars. Now she looked at his. With the trigger-calloused index finger she touched the raised skin over a bullet wound. Then a longer one. It had been created some years ago when an IED meant to kill him had not, though it had turned a Coca-Cola can into an improbable but efficient piece of shrapnel.
Touching the braid again.
He had not been with a woman in this way — without paying — for several years. He found it consuming. And for Charles Hale to be consumed was a rare thing. It could be dangerous.
She seemed aware suddenly of the ticking of a clock, a Royal Bonn porcelain, which sat nearby on a shelf. Her eyes were on it and swung slowly to him. “I’ve followed you. When Brad told me he’d gotten your message, I told him I wanted the job. I wanted to work with you.”
He made a gesture toward his face, his scalp. “Wasn’t exactly who you were expecting, though, was I?”
Her face tightened and she scoffed, meaning she had no interest in what he looked like. He recalled their first meeting, at the coffeehouse, she’d glanced at his face quickly, out of curiosity at the surgery, and then focused for the rest of their time together on his eyes.
“I’ve wondered. Why clocks?”
“When you build watches, boredom is not a possibility.”
“Ah, boredom.” A very faint tightening of her lips. She understood.
He told her what he rarely thought of any longer: his childhood, in the Arizona desert, absent parents. Long hours to fill. “Time dragged. I was drawn to what marked the passage. Studying watches, collecting watches, making watches. It made those hours bearable.
“But then timepieces... they weren’t enough. I needed to put the theory behind them into something bigger. Just as complicated, just as elegant. But more intense.
“I got the answer when a friend’s life was destroyed. A drunk driver. He ended up in a wheelchair.”
“Like Lincoln Rhyme.”
“Hm. The driver? No remorse. None. I decided to kill him. But I realized I’d need to plot it out as carefully as a watchmaker plans his timepiece. It’s not hard to kill someone. You—”
“Hit them over the head with a pipe.”
He paused. His very words, with the exception that the weapon in his illustration would be a brick.
He said, “No elegance.”
“And then there’s escape.”
Hale offered, “It worked. He died. I got away. The line was crossed and I knew I’d never go back.”
“What’s next for you?” she asked.
“Underground. For a while, at least. With Lincoln’s death, there’ll be people after me.”
She said, “Always happens with a public target.”
“You?”
“A kill. College town. No one connected to the school. An OC informant. But I’ll use the faculty as a cover. I’ll be a poet.”
Hale couldn’t fathom how the wheels and springs of that plot would work.
Simone eased onto her back and tugged the sheet up to her armpits. Not from modesty, but because the trailer was drafty. “You must have hundreds of clocks and watches. Is there a favorite?”
“Always the next one, the one I’m working on at the moment.”
She nodded; she understood this too.
“But of those I’ve made in the past? A clock made out of meteoric iron.”
She said, “Kamacite and taenite. Alloys of nickel and iron. For one job, I had to be a geologist.”
“The only naturally found metallic form of iron on earth. Meteorites.”
She was considering something, eyes on the ceiling. “But... springs? Iron wouldn’t have elasticity.”
“No springs. I used a weight escarpment. I carved a small chain out of the iron. Another favorite? Not one I made. I acquired it. Made out of bone. It does have some metal. But I think you could make a tension device from bone that could power it.”
“Human bone?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it could be tested. Maybe there’s some DNA left.”
“Who made it?”
“A prisoner in Russia. Political prisoner. He was on a work detail and they let him have tools. It took him a year. He made it as a bribe for one of the guards to let him escape. It could be sold for thousands. In dollars. You couldn’t carry enough rubles to buy it.”
“Did it work?”
“The clock worked fine. His plans didn’t. The guard took it and shot him.”
“How do you know the story?”
“The horology world is small.”
“All the clocks you’re talking about are analog. Wheels, springs, weights, chains. No interest in digital ones?”
“I respect them but, no, not really. Other than one. The atomic clock.”
“I’ve heard of it. It sets universal time, right?”
He nodded.
“Even when working perfectly, mechanical and electric and electronic clocks’re affected by temperature, solar flares, magnetic fields, altitude changes. The highest level — nearly faultless — are ones that measure time according to the resonant frequency of atoms. In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses cesium atoms cooled to near absolute zero.”
“Nearly faultless?”
“They lose or gain one second every three hundred million years.”
“Does life need to be that accurate?”
“Business meetings, luncheon dates, theater curtains, weddings, no. Airline scheduling, trains, timing of radiation bursts in cancer treatments, yes. Outer space? A timing error of a billionth of a second can mean nearly a twelve-inch positioning error on reentry. And your spaceship disintegrates. Atomic clocks are being replaced by optical. Even more accurate. Do you collect anything? Poetry, I suppose.”
“And miniature steam engines. They run on alcohol.”
“Don’t know that I’ve ever seen one.”
“I find them hypnotic. The blue flame, the smell of the fire.”
“What do they do?”
“Turn wheels and belts, spin governors. There are a few that’re practical. One can run a generator in a safe house I have that’s off the grid. Steam can do just about anything electrons can. Charles Babbage had a design for a steam-powered computer, the Analytical Engine, he called it — 1834. It was never finished, but I’ve always thought I might like to get the plans and do it myself. Were there ever any steam-powered clocks?”
“One, also the eighteen hundreds, Birmingham, England. It was essentially a promotion piece for the values of steam. Here and there nowadays, some tourist attractions.”