The strange thing was, Manus did believe him.
His cellphone was too risky to even turn on, let alone use, and Dox had given him the credentials to a secure site. After landing and clearing security at Dulles Airport, he’d borrowed a phone from a sympathetic barista—I’m deaf, I lost my speech-to-text device, could I use your phone to access my account—and had found a message. Evie and Dash were safe. They were with Rain, the man Dox had sent to protect them. They were in a room at the Winchester Hilton. Rain would be waiting in the hotel restaurant. Manus should use the same bona fides he had given Rain to use with Evie and Dash.
As worried as Manus still was, and as eager as he was to get to them, it would have been a mistake to have the driver take him to his actual destination. So he’d asked the man to drop him off at the university instead, and was now walking the half mile to the hotel, navigating with a paper map he’d bought at the airport. Route 50 was already thick with early rush-hour traffic, and he doubted another cab would even have saved time.
He reached the grounds of the hotel in a little over ten minutes and circled the parking lot. He didn’t see any problems and went in through the restaurant entrance, head swiveling, alert to danger.
A young woman was standing by the door. She picked up a menu and said something, but Manus didn’t catch it—he was too intent on the room. About half the tables were filled, mostly by solitary people absorbed in their electronic devices, obviously business travelers. In a corner table, back to the wall, sat an Asian man, a coffee mug before him but no electronic device. Manus’s gaze almost skipped over the man because there was something so still about his presence. To someone else, the man might have seemed lost in thought. But Manus sensed something else: a person exceptionally attuned to his surroundings, his transmission dial set to bland, the reception dial wide open. A long-ago instructor had told Manus of a Zen concept called mushin—literally meaning “no-mind,” but in fact a description of a relaxed mind, a mind open to everything and therefore able to instantly react to anything. He hadn’t thought of the concept in years, but something about the man made him remember it now.
He glanced at the receptionist. She said, “Just one?”
Manus shook his head and looked at the Asian man again. “Meeting someone.”
He walked forward, keeping his hands where the man could see them. The man kept his hands in plain sight, too, his fingertips resting on the table.
Manus stopped a couple of feet before he reached the man’s position and stood off to the side. They’d been reassuring each other so far, and this was another way of doing so—not blocking the man’s view of the room, leaving him space to maneuver. “The Orioles should never have traded Machado to Los Angeles,” Manus said.
The man laughed. Manus was confused by the reaction. Then he saw why—a woman at the adjacent table had overheard, and had looked up at the incongruous greeting.
“I’ve been saying that forever,” the man said. “Do we have time for a coffee? Or should we get going?”
“We should get going.”
The man nodded. “Good enough.” He finished what was in his mug, stood, and left some bills on the table.
Back out in the parking lot and around the corner of the restaurant, they stopped. The man said, “Manus?”
Manus nodded and checked their flanks. “Rain?”
“Yes.”
“Are they okay?”
“They’re fine. We had a problem, but they’re fine.”
Manus’s heart was suddenly pounding. “A problem?”
“Earlier this morning. But really, they’re fine. They’re in a room inside, waiting for you.”
For a moment, Manus had to focus on the word fine, which was being drowned out in his mind by the word problem.