The medical kit from the safe house is on the seat beside him. When he gets where he needs to be, he can pop the container open and find the bottle of caffeine tablets that will certainly be there. If the agency hasn’t changed its list of standard amenities included in such kits, there will also be a four-pack of five-milligram bennies, Benzedrine tablets. One of those little cross tops, held under his tongue to dissolve, will quickly give him four hours of heightened alertness.
The hills roll, and the road swoops, and the hills roll, and the road falls and climbs through the midnight darkness of Rancho Santa Fe, which is relieved only by widely separated clusters of soft lights, none of which reveal anything significant. Beyond the small town center, the community has no streetlamps or sidewalks. Hard to believe this rural outpost is routinely listed among the wealthiest communities in America.
Belatedly, he realizes that the red dot on the screen of his iPhone is not moving. He isn’t sure how long ago it stopped. Five minutes? Ten? He eases off the accelerator and snatches the phone from the cup holder. The Bentley is no more than half a mile ahead.
Letting his speed fall to thirty miles per hour, twenty, ten, Calaphas cruises over the brow of a hill and down a long slope, past white ranch fencing. The Bentley is somewhere to the left, off this road. On the small screen, it’s difficult to judge how far the sedan has gone from the state highway. Calaphas’s own vehicle is depicted as an unblinking blue dot, and when it draws even with the blinking red dot, he slows nearly to a stop. Immediately ahead, on the left, the white board fencing leads to pillars of stacked stone framing a tall pair of stately metal gates joined by an ornate medallion. A tree-lined driveway, subtly illuminated by low lamps, leads between palisades of what might be oak trees. Sixty or seventy yards away, darkness further relents to house lights. The Bentley is in the vicinity of that residence.
Not wanting to call attention to himself, Calaphas accelerates past the gate. Two to three hundred yards farther, he comes to the driveway of another residence. This place lacks a gate and sets half as far back from the road as the previous house. It is nonetheless a large home. Although most windows are dark, lights glow in rooms both on the first and second floor.
Until he has a better understanding of the situation, Calaphas isn’t keen about approaching the estate where the transponder in the Bentley’s cash hoard continues signaling. Michael Mace, the long-anticipated Singularity, is a formidable adversary on his own. With whom might he have joined forces? No better place exists to learn more than from a neighbor of whoever has given Mace shelter.
He drives ahead another hundred yards, until he arrives at a lay-by cupped in a semicircle of eucalyptuses. He parks off the pavement and kills the headlights.
Rummaging through the medical kit, he finds the bennies. He pops one out of the blister pack. If dissolved under the tongue, the Benzedrine will produce an effect slightly faster than if swallowed.
He doesn’t mind the bitter taste.
From the glove compartment, he withdraws a custom-threaded sound suppressor for his Springfield Armory .45 and fits it to the pistol. His shoulder holster accommodates the weapon with silencer. He works his hands into the soft, gray, cotton-and-spandex gloves that he wore when wiping down the surfaces in Carter Woodbine’s apartment, following the untimely death of the attorney and his associates.
He turns off the engine, gets out into the night, and locks the car. The air is redolent of eucalyptus oil. He inhales deeply a few times and stretches and rolls his head to work out a kink in his neck. Already, his weariness is sliding off him.
Without raincoat, dressed in his dark suit and white shirt and tie, he might be an itinerant Pentecostal messenger so indefatigable that he carries the truth of the Holy Gospel to doorstep after doorstep without regard to the weather or the hour.
AN ISSUE OF SOME IMPORTANCE
Nina and John sit side by side on stools at the kitchen island, bowls of gelato before them, working their spoons with pleasure. The cherry-chocolate-almond is delicious, perhaps the more so because little more than an hour earlier they escaped being murdered. The truth of that is almost impossible to process in any way that makes sense or that risks spoiling her appetite. She could eat an entire quart herself.
“Good,” the boy says.
“Very good.”
“What next?”
“Maybe there’s cake.”
“That would be good, too. But it’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant. Problem is, I have no idea what’s next, honey.”
“You always do.”
“Well, in this case, all I know is that Michael will know.”
“It’s not just the Vigs after us. Somebody’s after him, too.”
“Government,” she says. “They’re after him hard.”
“Because of what happened to him, what it made him into?”
“And because of what he can do.”
“He told you this while I was sleeping?”
“No. He told me the first day he came to me and said he owed this to Shelby. He’s been straight with me from the start.”
“Are we always going to be on the run?”
“No. We’ll be okay. I don’t know how or when. But Michael will know.”
Just then he enters the kitchen with a trash bag full of money, which he puts on the island. “Know what?”
“What’s next,” John says.
Nina says, “That’s your spoon there. Your bowl is on a shelf in the nearer fridge, so it wouldn’t melt too fast.”
Michael takes his serving from the Sub-Zero, stands with bowl in hand, attends to the treat for a few spoonfuls, and then says, “From here, day after tomorrow, we should get out of state. Get lost in a city, maybe Phoenix, for ten days or two weeks, until we can acquire new ID for you and use some of this money to buy legitimate wheels.”
“Can you make us invisible?” John asks.
“To an extent, yeah, but not like in the movies.”
“Are they going to find us?”
“The next week is tricky. After that, once we settle you in a new life, you’ll be safe.”
“Will you stay with us? In our new life?”
With the tone of her voice, Nina advises the boy that his question is inappropriate. “Enough, John.”
Glancing at Nina, Michael says, “I’ll always be on call for you. Always. No less than that. Whether we go one way or our own ways . . . that’s something we eventually have to work out together.”
“Let’s work it out right now,” the boy says.
“In time,” Nina says.
“Why not now?” John persists.
“At the moment, Mr. Mace has a lot on his mind.”
“We all do.”
“That’s for sure,” Michael agrees.
“If we work this out now,” John says, “it’s one less thing on our minds.”
That observation inspires a smile from Michael and a sigh of embarrassment from Nina. She almost tells John the issue doesn’t involve him; it’s between her and Michael. In one sense that is true, but it’s not the whole truth. In fact, whatever she and Michael decide they are—or could be—to each other, whether just friends or something more, will have an enormous, incalculable impact on the boy’s life.