The Blonde

driver’s license and credit-card info on file, so Kowalski was welcome to that. Then Vincent explained how he’d escorted the guy down here, because Eisley claimed to have panic attacks if he was left alone, which seemed like grade-A bullshit to him, but whatever. Not good business to upset a Sheraton customer, so he’d humored him. Brought the guy down to the lobby, had a colleague baby-sit him. Next thing, though, the guy bolted. Probably worried that his wife would find out about the blonde in his room. Like that would do any good. Sooner or later, the cops were going to want him.

“And like I said, we’ve got his stuff on file right here.”

“What do you have in the way of cameras out front? ”

Vincent’s eyes lighted up. “I’m ahead of you.”

After switching over to the backup recorder, Vincent pulled the current digital tape and popped it in the playback machine, then used a large plastic knob to rewind back to 3:00 A.M., right around when the cops arrived, he explained. The more he moved the knob to the right, the faster the tape rewound. A few minutes went by, Vincent eased up on the knob, and then yeah, sure enough, Jack Eisley had left the building.

“Looks like he was headed south on Eighteenth Street,” Vincent said. “Could be anywhere by now.”

Kowalski kept watching the screen. Not much was happening.

“Waiting to see if he’ll double back? Don’t know what good it will do you. I saw that scumbag you’re looking for a lot more than Eisley. We rode up in the elevator together. I’d be able to spot him in a second.”

“You would, huh?” Kowalski said. “Wait—there.”

A yellow blur on the screen. A cab, racing up Eighteenth Street. Kowalski twitched the knob slightly to the left and rewound the tape a few seconds. The cab sailed past again, and Kowalski returned the knob to dead center. The cab was frozen in the middle of the street.

“You can’t see who’s in there,” Vincent said. You can barely see the driver’s hands.”

“But I can see the medallion on the hood. What button can I use to bring up the focus on this?”

“You’re not going to be able to read those numbers.”

Kowalski ignored him, punched more buttons. “You know how the blonde is doing?”

“I heard she was being taken to Pennsylvania Hospital, but it doesn’t look good. Fucker probably pulled the same thing on her. Squeezed the air right out of her lungs, deprived her of oxygen too long. You should have seen it up there on five. Unless you already have.”

“I have,” Kowalski said, still working on the focus.

“Then you saw the blood on the carpet. How hard do you have to choke somebody before they start spurting blood? I mean, fuck. That’s hard. You say this guy was with Mossad?”

“They know no mercy. Hey, you got a pen and paper? I got those numbers.”

“Holy shit. You did? This something they teach you at Homeland Security?”

Not really. Prior to 9/11 and the creation of DHS (and CI-6), prior to active CIA status, prior to the military, prior to University of Houston, Kowalski was an AV geek for a short while. Manned the control booth for a handful of basketball games, screwing around with the studio gear for a couple of weeks, but that was it. Brother Harry begged him to come back, but he needed to move on. With high school activities, Kowalski was like a locust. He wanted to try it all, master none. No baggage, even in high school. If he were to head back to his high school reunion—and oh, how watching that John Cu-sack movie made him long to do just that—he wouldn’t be surprised to find that everybody sorta remembered him but nobody knew him.

“We learn a little of everything, brother,” Kowalski said, locking eyes with Vincent. “Look, I’m going to run this down. If I catch this bird, I’ll bring him back for the Philly boys.”

As he said this, he pressed the button that would erase the five minutes of digital tape on which the cab appeared.

4:22  a.m.

Philadelphia International Airport

Within three minutes of his plane landing at Gate A22, the Operator was walking through the ridiculously oversized international-arrivals hall, with its images depicting Philadelphia as America’s birthplace. Cute.

His seatmate on the plane hadn’t been so lucky. He was a pale Scot with some kind of strange rash on his hands. His eyebrows were so faint, you could hardly distinguish them from the pasty flesh of his forehead. It wasn’t that he talked so much as that he scratched … and scratched and scratched, for most of the flight down from Toronto. Must have caught some kind of deal over from Edinburgh. The Operator didn’t do connecting flights. If there wasn’t an available flight between the two points he wanted to travel, then he simply chartered a plane. Which he probably should have done in this case. Sitting next to Mr. Itchy for the one-and-a-half-hour flight… maddening. Then there was that problem of changing his destination from D.C. to Philly at virtually the last minute. So yeah, he was in a bad mood. And maybe he had acted a little harshly when he decided to take it out on the Scot by pulling a stewardess aside and showing her his Department of Defense badge and telling her about the Scot sitting next to him, who, he said, was talking about all of the Pakis he was going to blow up on his trip to America with nail bombs and … and that was all it took. It would be a long while before the itchy Scot and his rucksack would see the beautiful patriotic artwork inside the international-arrivals hall. If ever.

Escalator to hallway and directly to a cab outside. No bag to claim; whatever the Operator couldn’t carry with him at any given moment, he bought.

Interestingly enough, the cab had a Paki driver. “My friend the Scot would have loved you,” the Operator said.

“Sir?”

“Don’t mind me. I often get lost in my own fictions. Pennsylvania Hospital, please.”

He wondered about her. What two weeks of running would have done to her face, her body. He’d been used to seeing her every day in the lab. Would she look the same to him? He remembered a certain college girlfriend who’d dumped him; he’d been able to score revenge sex six months later, but it wasn’t the same. She looked different. Even tasted different. It was quite unsatisfying.

So would it be the same with her? With “Kelly White,” as she’d been calling herself?

See there. Even the name was different. That alone would have taken its toll on her features.

His contact within CI-6 had said she’d been “incapacitated.” The Operator hoped that she wasn’t too far gone to be brought back. They had unfinished business, the two of them. Maybe they could go to a secret prison in Thailand. Where it would be just the two of them, once again. Even for a few hours.

Zero  a.m.

Pennsylvania Hospital

She was awake but not awake, In this world but not of it. She could feel the sensations of movement, of hands, of needle sticks. Shed been this way since collapsing onto the carpet of the hotel hallway, and since then she had not been alone. If she had, the Mary Kates would have finished their job. She would be dead.

I should have thought of this days ago, she thought, and imagined herself laughing. And that was all she could do, because she was still paralyzed.

Which was going to make it difficult to get out of this one.

Oh, she was cracking herself up here tonight. This morning, tonight. Whenever. Wherever.

She stared at the insides of her eyelids and saw fields of stars and pulsars rushing past her She wished she could open her eyes at least. See where she was. It was a hospital; she could tell that much. She could hear the beeping and gushing of oxygen tanks and faraway voices on an intercom. She could smell the harsh disinfectant. But it would have been nice to know which hospital.

She had been born on Holies Street, the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin. Was there any kind of symmetry with this hospital? Maybe this was Americas National Maternity Hospital. National to National.