They were in the middle of an extended and rapidly evolving synchronicity, as he had predicted during his meeting with Artimis Selene the previous day. But he said nothing about this either, even as he marveled at what was unfolding.
He excused himself and retreated to the sleeping compartment. With a high-security phone, he conducted an encrypted conversation with the vice president of the United States. He spoke next to the director of Homeland Security, who would contact the other agencies that, in association with Blue Sky Partners, funded Project Olivaw. All assets were needed on the ground in Montana, beginning with a discreet containment perimeter.
When they landed in Helena, a black Suburban was waiting for them at the private-aircraft terminal. Ganesh would have preferred a white vehicle, for white was his preference in all conveyances, but in this case the make and color were not his to choose. His white luggage and Kenny’s more colorful bags were transferred from the plane to the Suburban. With Leigh Ann, they were off into the exotic capital city of the Treasure State.
From the offices of Patel Intel that overlooked Puget Sound, Ganesh’s assistant, Lulu, had earlier identified a clothing store catering to young women with a sense of style. She had negotiated a fee with the owner to open after hours for Leigh Ann’s benefit.
Ganesh stood to one side, watching as Leigh Ann checked out the merchandise, made selections, and reviewed herself thus attired in a full-length mirror. His estimation of her, which he developed during the flight from Seattle, was confirmed: that she had a healthy and balanced self-image; that she was decisive and never dithered; that she had a natural Holly Golightly charm of which she seemed unaware, but which drew others to her. Within the first ten minutes of her half-hour shopping spree, the store owner was in love with her, as was the shop’s female manager, as well.
The way Leigh Ann asked Kenny his opinion of jeans and blouses and sweaters and jackets, plus the way he responded to her, reminded Ganesh of a comfortably married couple, rather like his parents, who valued each other’s opinions even in such small things as wardrobe choices. He suspected that neither of them realized it yet, but they were going to be together for a long time.
They were survivor types who met just when Kenny was going to need a partner to escape the violent intentions of the Other; in extremis, they came to Ganesh, the man best positioned to understand what had happened and to believe their story. Synchronicity.
Kenny paid for the clothes with hundred-dollar bills taken from a half-gallon ice cream container. Neither the shop owner nor the manager seemed surprised by this, which confirmed for Ganesh that to some extent all state capitals were the same: awash in cash related to government corruption.
So that the long drive to Rustling Willows might be completed in the least time possible, the Deetle took the wheel. Kenny had no respect for speed limits, nor in this case did he need to have any, considering Ganesh’s connections. Ganesh rode in the front passenger seat, and Leigh Ann sat in back, using a small pair of scissors from her purse to clip the tags off her new clothes.
As Ganesh had discovered on other occasions when he’d spent time with the Deetle, conversation was invigorating, ranging from the latest superhero movie to the Hartle-Hawking “no boundary” model for the Big Bang that was the start of the universe, if in fact it was the start of the universe. Now he was delighted to find that Leigh Ann joined every discussion. Somehow they navigated from an eight-part crime drama currently streaming on Netflix to the twenty universal constants that make it possible for life to exist—from Planck minimums of space and time all the way to the gravitational fine-structure constant. And if life existed on Earth, perhaps it existed elsewhere. Ganesh found it strange that, so casually, they should find their way to this particular arcane subject on this particular night, but of course that was the nature of the world when you dared to see it clearly: a place of mystery in which extraordinary coincidences were more common than they seemed.
They drove into ever less populated territory, into darkness relieved only by the headlights and later by lightning, as the sky abruptly fell in torrents.
66
In pursuit of a memory, Joanna led Wyatt through the night, from the dock to the apple orchard, where the howling wind had scattered not-yet-ripe fruit on the ground.
The timeworn redwood bench stood where it had been in her childhood, where it had been as well in the dream of the previous night that so rocked, she’d had no choice other than to return to Rustling Willows. She and Jimmy had often sat on this bench. Here she had sometimes imagined herself to be a princess who’d been kidnapped from the palace by sinister forces and abandoned in this orchard, imagined also that Jimmy was her magical protector who would keep her safe, with the assistance of all the animals, until a knight, searching at the order of the king, would one day find her just when the kingdom needed a queen.