Three Days to Never (35 page)

Dad!
thought Marrity, squeezing the faintly felt hand in a convulsive grip.
Dad, I'm sorry! What did they do to you, why didn't you ever come back—

Frankie,
said the phantom of his father,
run, don't go to the tower in the desert. I had no birth, but you'll have no birth or death.

Then Marrity found himself blinking tears out of his eyes and staring only at Lepidopt, who was looking back at him bewilderedly.

Mishal had climbed down off the foot of the bed and stood up to dig cigarettes and a lighter out of his pocket, and Lepidopt freed his hand from Marrity's. He was lighting a cigarette too now. Apparently the séance was over.

“We need some
sayanim,
with a couple of vans or trucks,” Mishal was saying to Malk. “We need to get out to that tower, and we've got to bring our whole base; we can't afford to have this”—he gestured at the block and the boxes—“anywhere but with us.”

He smiled frostily and added, “And after this is all secure and rolling, make some calls, rent a house somewhere, get a
block of sidewalk pulled up and wrapped up tight, and have some unconnected
sayanim
take the sidewalk block to the rented house. Make it look as if all security measures are being taken with it, but use an open line and say a few key words like ‘Marrity' and ‘
katsa
.' Nothing real obvious like ‘Mossad' or ‘Einstein.' Right?”

“Right,” said Lepidopt, edging his way now between the block and the bed. “I trust we won't be putting these decoy
sayanim
in danger, guarding a chunk of sidewalk?”

Mishal waved again at the Chaplin slab and the boxes. “Israel needs this. And needs whatever it is that's in that tower too.”

“The El Mirador Hotel is still standing?” said Marrity.

Mishal squinted at him through exhaled smoke. “You had a little séance all your own, didn't you? No, I doubt it is. But its tower is still there.”

“Einstein was talking to you,” said Marrity. “He told you how his machine works?”

“Yes. He always meant to. We're Israel.” To Lepidopt he said, “Get a couple of pieces of glass, and some oil, and put your handprints on them. And some of your hair, you heard all that.
Right now.”
To Malk he said, “And likewise right now we need a couple of
sayanim
to take away the pieces of personalized glass, one up to the top of Mount Wilson and one out to Death Valley.” Looking again at Lepidopt, he said, “You're to be ready to make your jump as soon as possible, understood?”

“Understood,” said Lepidopt, though Marrity thought he didn't look happy about it.

D
aphne had fallen asleep in her chair in the black tent.

An hour ago Canino had walked around the tent, prodding the draped fabric with something that might have been a broom and calling, “Matt! Go away!” and “Scat, Matt!” Daphne had called out to ask what time it was, just to hear a human voice in reply, but Canino had simply trudged back to the cabin. At least the TV cartoon thing hadn't been on the speaker anymore.

But at some point the music had become louder, waking her up. It was an idiotically upbeat and repetitive melody now, like what a 1950s movie would have as the background theme while the lead couple mugged and clowned in a park.

Daphne stared through the plastic pipe at the city in the valley. There were fewer lights in the darkness now, and she wondered who the drivers were behind the few visible headlights, and what errands had them out at this hour.

Abruptly the whole world flared white, blinding after the
long period of darkness. The momentary glare had been silent, but so startling that it had seemed to crash in her ears.

And then she was in two places at once; her hands were still taped to the chair legs in the rebounding darkness, but she could feel one sheet of oily glass under all her fingertips, and she was sitting in the chair in the tent on the mountain, but she was also looking out through an airy arch of a tower at palm fronds waving in the night breeze.

She knew what had happened—she had caught a painfully bright beam of light from the city below her in the same instant that the lights mounted behind her chair had flashed. And it had apparently broken her mind in two.

The tower seemed to be falling—or else the truck's parking brake had broken, and the truck with the tent on it had rolled off the plateau's edge and was in midair—

Her wrists were taped to the chair, but without moving them she reached out through the tent fabric and across the expanse of gravelly dirt and grabbed the cabin, hard.

G
olze's wheelchair lurched when the cabin rocked on its concrete-block foundations, and in the same instant the windows imploded and jets of orange flame burst upward out of the stoves. Golze's free hand clutched the armrest and he yelled,
“Canino, trank her!
Get out there, she's doing this!” He couldn't catch his breath again, and he waved at Fred.

Canino yanked the front door open, hesitated in the sudden bright glare of leaping flames, then hurled himself outside. Old Frank Marrity had dropped his bottle and was struggling to his feet.

“Fred,” Golze managed to croak, and when the young man looked at him, Golze pointed to himself and then at the door.

Fred shook his head and dove out after Canino.

Already the cabin was full of red-lit smoke, and Golze didn't have the strength to cough, or even breathe. He began trying, with only one working arm, to lever himself out of
the wheelchair so that he could try to crawl to the door. He heard Marrity collide with the door frame as he lurched outside.

Golze could hardly see through the smoke and his steamed glasses, but he could tell that it was a tall woman who appeared out of the smoke at the back of the cabin. She strode behind him, and then he felt the shift of strong hands on the grips of the wheelchair.

He nodded—but the woman began running powerfully forward, pushing him so fast that he was rocked back against the seat, and he was whispering, “No!” The wheelchair was moving at twenty miles per hour when the wheels clanked against the threshold and then spun free in midair.

He flew a good five feet and landed facedown in the gravel with the weight of the wheelchair and Rascasse on top of him.

Rascasse rolled off, and Golze tried to get air into his lungs. His face stung with abrasions and he was sure that several of his ribs were broken, but all his attention was centered on his right hand, which with all his determination he was barely able to move; he forced it to burrow under himself and close on the grip of his Army .45.

He heard a voice that was still recognizably Rascasse's say, “The wheelchair—get it off him, Fred. Right now.”

The awkward bulk of the wheelchair was lifted away, and then a brusque hand took hold of his right shoulder and rolled him over on the flinty gravel.

Fred was facing the cabin, and by the orange fire glare Golze was able, even without his glasses, to see the blank expression on the young man's face. As much to change that as for every other reason, Golze tugged the gun free of his waistband, weakly lifted the barrel toward Fred, and pulled the trigger. The jarring explosion hammered his ears and the recoil sent a flash of pain from his wrist to his shoulder.

Fred's boots lifted from the ground and he sat down hard six feet behind where they'd been.

Footsteps scuffed in the dirt, and Golze could hear Canino's voice, though he couldn't make out words. “I told you guys,”
Golze gasped, though probably no one could hear him, “I told you she could do this.”

Then Canino had grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him upright, and the pain in his broken left shoulder drove the consciousness out of him.

O
ld Frank Marrity stood on the shadowed side of the tent on the truck; the heat of the burning cabin stung his face and hands if he stood anywhere else, and only out of its direct glare could he see what was going on. He had to concentrate to focus his eyes—he had been drinking rum in the cabin, and he was more drunk than he wanted to be.

The Fred fellow was lying on the ground, apparently dead; and Golze, being half-carried and half-dragged toward the truck now by Canino, seemed dead too. Marrity had heard a gunshot over the roar of the fire.

The person who had been Denis Rascasse was moving toward the truck too, behind Canino. The hair was still white and cropped short, but the body in the battered business suit was clearly a woman's now. She stared at the ground as she came through the smoke and orange light, and though her arms and legs swung back and forth, Marrity thought the gravel wasn't disturbed when her feet swept over it.

These are devils, he thought. I should hide up among the rocks, and then hike down to town tomorrow morning.

But I can't hike on this leg, he thought, staring angrily at the tent above him. They can negate Daphne. There's no “psychic link” to get in the way—Charlotte Sinclair made that up so that
she
could be negated instead.

Canino hoisted the limp body of Golze up into the truck cab, then walked back to the truck bed and hopped up onto it; and he saw Marrity crouching in the long shadow of the tent.

“We can fit four in the cab,” Canino told him with a grin—his face gleamed with sweat—“since one's a little girl, but you'll have to hang on back here.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out what proved to be a switchblade knife when the blade sprang out. He disappeared into
the tent, and a few moments later emerged again, carrying Daphne. She appeared to be dead too—her head rolled loosely in the crook of his elbow, and her free arm was swinging like a length of rope.

Marrity's breath caught in his throat. They killed her after all! he thought in confusion. That's good, isn't it? My younger self will be able to live without her—

But the sight of her lifeless body in a stranger's arms took him back nineteen years, to the remembered exertions of doing the Heimlich maneuver on a linoleum restaurant floor, finally watching through tears as one of the paramedics carried the body of his daughter away—

Canino laid her carefully on the far side of the truck bed, then hopped down and lifted her. “She's tranked,” he called to Marrity. “She'll be out for an hour.” He started toward the open passenger-side door, then paused and looked back over his shoulder. “Knock down the tent and toss all the stuff off onto the ground. And find a rope or a cleat or something you'll be able to hang on to—it's gonna be a bumpy ride.”

C
harlotte and Marrity were lying in darkness in the back of a roaring, rocking van, their ankles attached by cables and a padlock to a ring in the floor by the back doors. Malk was up front driving. The Chaplin slab and the boxed-up glass cylinder and gold wire from Grammar's shed were in another van with Mishal and Lepidopt, along with a bomb that Mishal assured them was powerful enough to completely destroy the entire Einstein machine, Chaplin slab and all.

Ten minutes earlier Charlotte had been sitting beside Frank Marrity on the Wigwam Motel bed, watching through Lepidopt's eyes as he and Malk draped blankets over the rectangular block of cement, looped canvas straps around it, and then taped two Styrofoam heads with toupees on them onto the top edge of it.

“When the vans get here,” Lepidopt had told Malk, “we can walk this out to them. Whatever it looks like we're up to,
it won't be smuggling a square from the Chinese Theater.”

Malk had nodded. “And if somebody shoots at us, they're as likely to hit those guys as us,” he said, nodding at the Styrofoam heads.

Lepidopt's glance had gone to the toupees, then resolutely away.

“You don't need a
lot
of yarmulkes,” Malk had said.

Then Marrity had leaped up from the bed with a smothered yell. “Daphne is falling!” he had said urgently. “No—it's like on Sunday when she watched that movie—wow, she grabbed some building, and it's burning, completely on fire—” His arm had twitched then, and he'd winced. “And now—I can't sense her at all, she's gone! My God, did they kill her?”

“Gave her a tranquilizer,” Mishal had said. “In the arm, from the way you jumped. Whatever the building is that she torched, they'll have to get out of there. They're moving. So are we.”

And within minutes the vans had arrived and they were moving.

Marrity had asked why he and Charlotte had to be tied to the floor, but Charlotte had answered him. “None of us are really allies.”

“What she said,” Malk had agreed, snapping the padlock closed, then slamming the back doors and walking around outside to get into the driver's seat.

The interior of the speeding van smelled of potting soil and flowers, and Marrity guessed it was a florist's van when not commandeered for Mossad use. At least someone had thrown a couple of blankets over the plywood floor. It proved more comfortable just to stretch out and lie down than to try to sit up against the walls with their feet moored to the ring.

For Charlotte's sake as much as his own, Marrity craned his neck to look toward the front; the windshield was just a patch of lighter darkness except when a rushing streetlight lit the arched dust streaks on it, and he could just see the top of Malk's head above the driver's-seat headrest. Marrity and Charlotte were effectively restrained—even if Marrity had
stretched, he wouldn't have been able to reach the back of the driver's seat.

In order to whisper, it was easiest to lie facing one another, with their arms around each other to keep from rolling back and forth. Marrity could feel the shape of a revolver against the small of Charlotte's back.

“I hope Daphne will be all right till we get there,” whispered Marrity. He realized that he had said this already a few times, and grinned apologetically, though it was too dark in the back of the van for her to see, even if she'd been able to see. “And I hope my breath's not too horrible.”

Charlotte kissed his lips lightly. “Your breath smells like Canadian Club,” she whispered. “I like it. Daphne's fine. It's you they want to kill, and we won't let them do that.” He felt her shiver in his arms. “Maybe they will trade me for her.”

“We'll rescue her. And the Mossad will do the time-travel errand you want done.”

“Right now they've got a bomb sitting next to that time machine. I'll have to decide when we get there whether or not I trust them to do what that Mishal guy promised. He sort of promised, didn't he?”

Marrity nodded in the rocking darkness. “Sort of,” he added.

“I'd have a totally different life. I'd never meet you, or Daphne, and that's sad. I'd probably still be in the air force right now. Well, it was the army, really—INSCOM, Intelligence and Security Command, working originally out of Fort Meade in Maryland, though I was a little kid then. And I won't have been blinded in 1978. And I won't have done—
she
won't, the girl I'll be, won't have any memory of…people I've betrayed. I'd kill myself, but all the things I've done would stay done.” She exhaled. Her breath smelled like whiskey too.

Marrity brushed her hair with his fingers, feeling the frames of her sunglasses.

She hugged him and pressed her forehead against his collarbone. “Or maybe,” she whispered into his shirt, “I'll decide the Mossad can't or won't fix it for me, and just let the Vespers negate me. I'd never have met you then either.”

He opened his mouth, but she put a finger on his lips. Pulling her head back and speaking loudly, she asked, “How much longer to Palm Springs?” Marrity could feel her heartbeat through the piece of damp paper against his stomach.

“Forty minutes,” said Malk.

Marrity's hand was still in her hair; when she lowered her head, he kissed her on the lips.

“An hour from now we might all be dead,” she whispered into his mouth, “or worse.” He felt her lips smile under his. “Your heart is going like crazy.”

They kissed again, and for a long time there was no more whispering in the back of the van that raced east down the dark 10 freeway.

L
epidopt was driving the other van, and Mishal was in the passenger seat. The taillights of Malk's van seemed motionless a hundred yards ahead in the freeway lane while the world rushed past, whistling in the wind wing by Lepidopt's left hand on the steering wheel.

The van belonged to a
sayan
who ordinarily lived in it, with a cat, and the interior smelled sourly of cat box.