“Come in, Mr. Gamin,” a female voice said, as soft as Song’s had been hard, as far removed from the frantic screaming at Millbrook as it was from the revolution Timothy Leary said had taken her parents. Yet it was unmistakably her.
BC stepped all the way into the room and closed the door. The fact that Naz knew his alias told him that there was an in-house phone, confirming Jarrell’s report that the establishment was as wired as Langley. Not sure if he was being watched but taking no chances, he tried to seem as though he was merely admiring the decor as he scanned the room for the probable location of microphone or camera. Then Naz stood up and BC forgot about all that.
For a moment he thought he’d been mistaken. It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. This girl was so calm, so inviting. A pale violet dress rolled over the curves of her body from her neck to the tops of her knees, cinched in at the waist to accentuate the swell of hips and bosom. She offered him her profile for a moment, then turned slowly, giving him the rest of the view.
The last time he’d seen her face, it had been twisted in anguish, the hair wild, the skin flushed. Now it was serenely composed, a rich dark amber that sucked up the light and radiated it back with a coppery glow. A hint of green shadow framed her eyes, and her lips had been painted plum. In twenty-five years, BC had never seen a girl in anything other than red lipstick, or at any rate never noticed a girl in anything other than red lipstick. He found himself biting his own lips, wishing they were hers.
If she recognized him, she gave no sign.
“Good evening, Miss—”
“Nancy,” she said quickly, then walked to him, laid her arms delicately on his shoulders, turned her face to his. Her mouth was so close that BC could feel the heat coming off her lips. He was about to kiss her—for appearances’ sake, of course—when she spoke in a voice as cold as ice.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
BC pulled her closer, felt the tenseness of her muscles beneath the softness of her dress. “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of here.”
Naz ran her cheek softly against the side of his face. “You stupid boy,” she hissed into his ear. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Childress, TX
November 14, 1963
Thirty hours after he escaped from Melchior and Keller’s San Francisco lab, Chandler woke up in the stolen Imperial in the middle of the Utah Salt Flats. He had been out for eighteen hours—eighteen hours and twenty-two minutes—the knowledge of which was almost as disturbing as the time itself. But, just as on the morning he woke up in Cambridge after sleeping for five days, he felt refreshed rather than disoriented. Unsettled, sure, but not hungry or stiff. He didn’t even have to take a leak. His cheeks and chin were virtually as smooth as they were the last time he’d shaved—eighteen days ago. His hair hadn’t grown, his fingernails seemed freshly trimmed, even his damn underarms smelled dewily fresh. It was as if he’d stepped out of time itself.
A car went by then, slowing as it passed the shouldered Imperial before speeding away on the empty road. With a start, Chandler realized that if the CIA was looking for him, it would probably check the most direct routes between San Francisco and DC. He started the car and at the first opportunity veered south. He ditched the Imperial in Salt Lake City for a Nash, then swapped that for a battered 1950 Bel Air north of Flagstaff, where he finally worked up the courage to turn east. A white Chrysler followed him for the entire 250 miles between Holbrook, Arizona, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Chandler had to keep reminding himself that there was literally nowhere for the Chrysler to turn in the vast stretch of empty desert. Still, it took all his will not to veer south again. By that point he realized it wasn’t the CIA he was running from as much as it was himself—from this new version of himself, unchanged on the outside yet completely different under the skin. The only thing that kept him going east, that kept him from driving into Mexico, or into the Gulf of Mexico for that matter, was the thought of Naz. Whatever his ultimate fate, he had to see her one more time. Had to make sure she was safe. And the only way he was going to do that, he knew, was if he took stock of his new abilities. Found out exactly what he could do, and how best to use that power to get Naz away from Melchior.
The Bel Air was running on vapors by the time he pulled into a Phillips 66 in the middle of Texas pastureland. While the pump was ticking he washed the windshield and checked the oil and water, but as he worked he stared absently out at the empty horizon. Fallow fields surrounded the station on all four sides, green-brown grass covering the land from horizon to horizon like a planet-sized bedspread. The only interruption in the emptiness was the station and the two blacktop roads that crisscrossed in front of it, but there must’ve been a town nearby, because the east-west road sported a fairly steady trickle of traffic. This was as good a place as any, he told himself as he replaced the nozzle in the pump. He had to do it sometime.
He sauntered into the office, smiled at the gas jockey, a small Mexican-looking fellow. Chandler waited till the man was finished counting change for one of the other cars; then:
“Do you have any NoDoz? Or Vivarin?”
“Long drive ahead-a ya?” The gas jockey pulled out a half-empty box of caffeine pills and, when Chandler scooped up four packages, let out a sharp whistle. “Real long drive.”
“Gotta get there in a hurry,” Chandler said. “I’ve been dawdling.”
“Caffeine’ll speed
Chandler pulled a wrinkled single from his front pocket, and even as he flattened it on the counter he let his mind relax. Because it was like that now—not working to get into someone else’s mind, but relaxing, to lower the barriers that kept other people out. In the past four days he’d come to realize that the fundamental root of his power was present even when there was no drug in his system, that he could even conjure tiny illusions if all he was doing was augmenting an object that was already there. Like, say, the addition of a couple of zeroes to a one- dollar bill.
“Criminy, mister. Ain’t-cha got nothing smaller? You’re gonna clean me out.”
“Sorry.” Chandler didn’t meet the man’s eyes (he’d done that to a gas jockey in Utah and the man had had the disconcerting experience of seeing his own face on Chandler’s body). Little flashes flickered in and out of his mind: a fat boss with a greasy merkin of fake hair pasted to his bald pate, a pregnant wife with ankles swollen to the size of milk bottles, a couple of Spanish words:
