She set the laptop down.
“You seem pretty safe, though. That’s why I decided to take this little ride with you. I have to hand you over to my clientin a little while, but I didn’t want to miss a chance to meet you in person. I’ve met some movers and shakers in my time,Will, but you’re right up there. Right up there.”
“Who’s your . . . client?” Will managed.
“You’ll find out,” she said and gave him a hearty, surreal wink.
“How did you find me?” Will said.
His voice was almost quaking with need. He hated it, hated saying anything at all to this woman, but he had to know.
The Coach gave a slow nod, acknowledging the question.
“There’s always a way, Will. I’ve been in this business for forty years. I’ve taken a lot of tricky jobs, and I’ll tell you—Inever take a job if I don’t see a way I can get it done. That doesn’t mean the clients always have the gumption to see itthrough. They might not want to expend the resources, or they don’t have the will. But there’s always a path to the finishline.
“You were tough, though,” she said, pointing a delicate, bony finger at Will. “I did some jobs for Mossad, finding Nazis,and those were hard—those Krauts knew how to cover their tracks. You were in their league, for sure.”
Did she just call me a Nazi? Will thought. And then: How did she find me?
The answer to this question had become the one thing Will wanted to know most in all the world.
“Computers, son,” the Coach said, her tone apologetic. “These days, you want to find someone, it’s almost always computers.It’s no fun anymore, you ask me. Used to be you’d break into someone’s office and dig through their files at four in the morning,or send a girl in to loosen a man’s lips after a little romance. Sometimes, I even was that girl, hard as it might be to believe.”
At this, the Coach tilted her head at Will, waggling her eyebrows lewdly.
“Those were good times,” she went on. “Adventures. It seemed fairer, somehow. But now, you hire some pencil-neck to sit inan office and type for a few days, and you’ve got your answer. It’s not the same.”
Will closed his eyes. He thought of the Florida Ladies and wondered if the Coach had paid them a visit as well.
“But like I said,” the woman went on, “you weren’t easy. The head of my technical team—now there’s a strange duck, believeme! He had to jump through some hoops to find you. But it’s like Archimedes said: give me a lever long enough and I’ll movethe world.
“My guy had his lever, he just didn’t want to use it. He was scared of his own creation. And maybe he was right to be—it blackedout half the world, didn’t it?”
The Coach kept talking, rambling, but Will had stopped listening. Headlines ran through his head—with lights out, detroit ravaged by looting; alitalia flight 579 crashes on approach to darkened milan runway; ukrainian nuclear plant vents cloud of radioactive steam when safeguards fail . . .
He screwed his eyes shut. Little flashes of white light flared on the inside of his eyelids.
All those people . . . all of them . . . they were on him too. His fault.
He felt himself recede, until he was drifting in an interior space, floating on a black sea of guilt and uncertainty and helplessness.Floating—no, he was drowning.
“. . . from my perspective,” the Coach was saying, “I have to say that I admire what you’ve been able to accomplish. I don’tknow if I would have used those predictions the way you did, but I can’t argue . . .”
“Enough,” Will said and opened his eyes.
The woman stopped in midsentence. She looked a little surprised at the interruption, and irritated, and not much like a librariananymore—more like a pissed-off old Viking queen.
The ambulance was slowing.
“Why?” he said. “Why didn’t you just leave me alone?”
“Well, maybe I would have, Will, if you hadn’t made yourself so damned interesting,” the Coach said.
The ambulance came to a stop.
“In fact,” she went on, a smile returning to her face, “I’d say you’re probably the most interesting man in the world.”
The rear doors of the ambulance opened. The paramedics reappeared, pulling Will’s gurney from the back of the ambulance andextending the wheeled legs beneath it. They undid the straps and helped Will sit up. His head swam, and he almost fell backoff the gurney. One of the paramedics caught him by the arm.
“Just relax. You should be completely fine in an hour or so,” the man said. “Don’t exert yourself too much before that.”
“Thanks for the concern,” Will said. He swung his legs over the side of the gurney and stood, feeling unsteady and slow.
He was outside, in the middle of a large, fenced-in area, standing on concrete in the center of a circle of cold-eyed menholding assault rifles and wearing sparse military uniforms, blank except for U.S. flag patches.
Past the cordon of soldiers stood an enormous corrugated steel building—an airplane hangar. Similar buildings stretched offto either side of it. In front of the open doors of the hangar, perched on three delicate wheels that seemed too small tohold its bulk, was a large, two-tone helicopter—white on top, navy-blue on its lower two-thirds. Painted on the white section,just below the rotors, was an American flag.
The helicopter’s ID tag was visible on the tail section—five numbers: 42132. Will stared at them, trying to understand why they seemed familiar to him.
A trim, middle-aged man, graying around the temples and wearing a dark suit, appeared from behind the helicopter and cametoward Will. He cut through the circle of marines and, unbelievably, put out his hand for Will to shake. Will ignored it.After a moment, the man dropped his hand. He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a slim black wallet, which
