“Yeah, go ahead and laugh, asshole.”
He made an effort to stop, found that he just couldn’t.
“Enjoy yourself,” she said. “Don’t mind me.”
“Sorry.” He finally managed to lock it down. “Sorry. You look great.”
“Ha-ha.”
“No, really. Where can I get one of those?”
“Keep on like that, you’re gonna find out.”
He stepped in, took her head in his hands, and kissed her. They took their time, a dance of tongues and lips. When they finally broke it, he said, “Hi.”
“Hi.”
He glanced down. “Does it hurt?”
“Not with the pain pills. And according to Epstein’s doc, two weeks wearing the monstrosity, two weeks of physio, I’m good as new. Not bad for a snapped femur.”
“Yaa. Hearing ‘snapped’ and ‘femur’ in the same sentence sends shivers down my spine.”
“Pretty heroic, huh?” She gestured him in. “You know, I survived a spectacular midair collision to save the world.”
“Well, officially, I saved it. It says so on all the channels.”
“Jesus.” Shannon hobbled to the couch and lowered herself down. “You were already cocky. Now you’re going to be insufferable. Beer?”
“Sure.”
She winked. “In the fridge. Grab me one too.”
The kitchen was tiny. There was nothing in the refrigerator but hot sauce, mustard, and beer. It looked a lot like his own. “Should you have this with the pain pills?”
“Definitely.” She accepted it, took a long swallow. Cooper glanced around the apartment, cataloging the gun cleaning kit on the counter, the muted tri-d, the books propped facedown—she’d once told him that when she liked a book she snapped the spine so it could lie flat while she ate—the Murphy bed folded into the wall, the desk in the corner, stacks of junk spread out beneath the leaves of a plastic plant. A place for an un-life, a half-life. A way station for a life lived elsewhere. He smiled. “Remember when we were driving here? Before everything. Our fake passports had us married.”
“Tom and Allison Cappello.”
“Right. We were making up the backstory, how we’d worked together at some desk job. I asked if you’d ever actually had a desk, being a smartass, and you hit it back, said something like, ‘Yeah, it does a good job holding my fake plant.’”
“True story,” she said. “That desk is a team player.”
“You didn’t mention all the random crap on it.”
“It’s not random. I know where everything is. How’d your call with the prez go?”
“Kind of amazingly.” He filled her in.
“Wow,” she said. “Are you going to take the job?”
“I don’t know yet. I told her I needed a vacation first.”
“Oh? Where are you going?”
“We. Where are we going.” Cooper sat beside her on the couch. “We never got that date. How about we do it somewhere warm? I’m thinking rum drinks and coconut oil and palm trees. No guns. No plots.”
“No one trying to kill us?”
“For a week or two. Of course—” He glanced down at her cast, said, “I was also picturing you in a bikini.”
She laughed, that good deep one he’d always liked. “As soon as I can move my leg, I’m going to kick your ass.”
“I look forward to it, gimpy. In the meantime, there’s something else we should do.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Fold that bed out of the wall and carry you to it.”
“Is that right? Got a thing for the handicapped, Cooper?” Her smile was slow and wicked. “I don’t even know how we’d manage it.”
“Nick,” he said. “You call me Nick. And I bet we can figure it out.”
They did.
EPILOGUE
For the third night in a row he’d gone to bed shivering, his mind on rails, racing on paths he didn’t choose at speeds he didn’t care for. There were sweats and a cough, too, but it wasn’t the cold that was getting him.
When he woke, it was nearly noon, the sun pouring through the window. Some scout of his consciousness, ranging ahead of his waking self, warned him that he was about to feel awful again. He took a breath and lay still.
Nothing. He felt fine.
Hawk rolled out of the cot. The lodge was a two-room log cabin with lacquered walls and the smell of smoke from the woodstove. He staggered to the bathroom and took the longest leak in history. The toothbrush was someone else’s but better than nothing, even though 532 of the bristles bent out in tired waves.
He was halfway through his bottom teeth when he realized that he knew how many bristles were bent. Without any effort or thought, he’d known it as certainly as he knew that if he dropped the toothbrush it would falclass="underline" 532 bristles, which represented 21.28 percent of the total number. He smiled. Finished brushing. Spat.
The night of the battle, after the militia had passed, he’d forced himself off the kitchen floor and into the garage. It took twenty minutes of alternately stalling out and grinding gears to get the hang of the Jeep, but by the time the gunfire started, he was out of town, riding west. Around midnight he’d let himself into the hunting cabin with a rock, intending to hit the road first thing. But he’d woken with his brain on fire, and everything since had been a blurry fugue.
In the kitchen he ate canned corn while the coffee dripped. When the machine hissed, he reached for a mug, but wasn’t paying attention, and it slipped off the counter and tipped end over end.
It was beautiful.
Hawk didn’t have the mathematics to describe it, but he could see the formula clearly, the way gravity and air resistance and momentum were dancing, and he found it so fascinating that he took a few seconds to watch, just made it spin slower and slower until he could examine every detaiclass="underline" the inside stained in distinct rings, a faint fingerprint on the handle, the way dust swirled around it and sunlight gleamed off the rim as the mug drifted slowly to the floor.
When it hit, it burst into fragments that vectored predictably, and he could hear the sound of each piece as it clicked against the tile, and for some reason they made him think of John.
In the maintenance tunnel, lecturing on the importance of contingencies, John had been paying only a small fraction of attention to the boy behind him. But then he’d stopped and stared full focus. “I need to tell you something, Hawk. Something important. There’s a very good chance I won’t make it out of this. If that happens, just remember that you’re the future.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will,” John had said, and then they had climbed up the ladder and a few minutes later he was dead.
He was right, Hawk thought. There wouldn’t have been any point in explaining then. But you understand now.
He understood other things, too. That John had been using him, that when he’d referred to turning a pawn into a queen, this was what he’d meant. It was okay. He’d still cared about Hawk, had treated him like a man, given him a name and a purpose and his heart’s desire. The reasons might matter, but not as much as the facts.
Hawk took a new mug and poured a cup of coffee, drank it slowly, thinking. Then he went outside and climbed into the Jeep. As he reached for his seat belt, a fit of coughing racked him, and he leaned against the steering wheel until it passed. When he could breathe again, he took a tissue from his pocket.
Then stopped.
Wadded up the tissue.
Wiped his nose with his hands, and rubbed them together.
The gas tank was three-quarters full. Figure it held sixteen gallons, with a fuel efficiency of roughly twenty-two miles per, call it three hundred and fifty miles per full tank. With the money he’d found in the safe house, he could fill the Jeep eight, maybe ten times. He’d need food too, and cash for contingencies—thank you, John—so assume twenty-five hundred miles.