Reflex (40 page)

So, confined to quarters, is it?

Abney stuck his head in ten minutes later and recited the offerings for breakfast.

Davy chose the cereal with fruit and nuts, coffee, and "none of Ms. Pope's supplements."

Abney said, "Yes, sir." When he came back with the tray, he said,
"Exactly
as ordered, sir." When Davy searched Abney's face, Abney added, "Ms. Pope was called out of town very early this morning."

"Ah. Am I confined to my room until she returns?"

"I was told to provide meals in your room—until further notice."

Davy felt a surge of anger and he was surprised.
You've been in their hands far too long.
"Thank you, Abney."

"You're welcome, sir."

He had no appetite but he made himself chew methodically. When he'd finished, he slid the tray out into the hall and withdrew to the bathroom.
Time for a shower.

He still had the end pages from
The Count of Monte Cristo
hidden between the toilet tank and the wall. Shielded by the shower curtain, he pointed the showerhead straight down at the drain, before he took the pencil and stared at the blank page.

As long as they'd been married, they'd never written letters to each other. No matter how far afield Davy roamed, he could be back to Millie in the wink of an eye. The closest they'd come to letters were notes like "gone to the store" and "don't forget to buy milk."

What did he write? He didn't want to tell her where he was. She'd come to him and they'd get her. He didn't want her to tell the NSA. They seemed to be Simons's puppets.

Finally he wrote:

IMPORTANT YOU REMAIN FREE. AVOID NSA. GO INTO HIDING. THEY'VE IMPLANTED A DEVICE THAT PUNISHED ME IF I TRAVEL AWAY FROM SPECIFIC LOCATIONS BUT I THINK I CAN DELIVER THIS NOTE.

He visualized the condo—specifically the counter by the refrigerator—and extended his arm, holding the note between thumb and forefinger. He jumped, releasing the note, and flinched back to the bathroom, but the note was still with him, fluttering toward the bottom of the tub. He snatched it out of the air before it landed in the water.

He tried three more times, finally achieving success by perching the note on his fingertips and pushing it away from him as he jumped. When he stood, gagging, back in the bathtub with
no
note, he relaxed and stood for a moment, under the hot water, rubbing his ears.

Stillwater was a thousand feet above Martha's Vineyard. His ears ached from repeated equalizing, the cycling between decompression and recompression.

So pick someplace also at sea level.

He thought about a beach he'd visited on the Queensland coast, one hundred kilometers from the nearest town, deserted even during the day and, as it was on the other side of the planet, in darkness now.

It came easier this time. He did the mirroring thing again at both ends of the bathtub. When he switched to Queensland he kept his eyes closed to avoid the sensory overload, concentrating more on maintaining the two different places, but he still felt the sand under his feet, alternating with the wet enameled tub. He extended his awareness to the cooler, but not unpleasantly cold, air. The wind was from the land and there was no surf, just a slight sloshing at the water's edge. Finally he opened his eyes and took in a swath of moonlit water stretching across to a gibbous moon.

Water was splattering the dry sand before him but the sky was clear.
The shower.
The same shower he felt on his back and shoulders was falling on this beach half the planet away. The breeze swirled around his legs and stirred the shower curtain.

He wiggled his feet and felt them sink ankle deep into wet sand.
Wet from the water in the tub.
A slurry of wet sand oozed between his toes and slurped as he shifted his feet.

He stooped, carefully, and put his hands down. For a moment, his fingertips touched the enamel tub but then his hand closed on a handful of fine coral sand. He stood again and his head swam. He dropped back to the bottom of the tub, grabbing for the spout to steady himself, no longer in two places.

A mound of sand at least ankle deep formed an island in the middle of the tub, eroding slowly from the flow of the shower. Lovely, fine coral sand, totally unlike the coarse quartz sand at the beach in Martha's Vineyard. While the steam still fogged the room, he transferred the majority of the sand to the toilet and, under the guise of normal bodily functions, flushed it away. The remainder he risked in the tub's drain, praying it wouldn't clog.

When he left the bathroom he wasn't as exhausted as the first time, though he did sit down in the recliner and close his eyes for a while.

But he was far from asleep.

Millie rented a bicycle in Edgartown and rode it past the hotel and west, toward Edgartown Great Pond. Temperatures were in the fifties and the sky was dotted with fleecy cumulus clouds. She had to fight the wind on the bike path south from Edgartown harbor but, by the time she passed the hotel, she was screened from the offshore wind by the dunes and brush. The turnoff for Great Pond Lane was only a few minutes farther along the road but a closed steel gate blocked the entrance and its guardhouse was occupied. She noted two pedestal-mounted cameras and kept pedaling.

It was only another ten minutes to where the road ended on the shore of the estuary. She skirted the reeds for a few minutes on foot and considered.

From what she'd been able to see, the gated community consisted of half a dozen homes of varying sizes. She'd only been able to see the nearest houses clearly but a three-story brick mansion at the farthest end of the lane had been visible in the distance. That was her chief candidate for Driftwood Hall, but it could really be any of them.

At the edge of the water she was no longer shielded from the wind, and the sweat on her skin quickly chilled. She returned to the bike. On her way back she passed a car headed toward Edgartown Great Pond. It had a police-style light bar on top but the lettering on the side said Island Security. She waved and the driver lifted his hand briefly from the wheel before passing on.

Checking on me?

Again, she didn't pause as she passed the gate. Once around the corner, and out of line of sight, she rolled off between two trees and selected a jump site in the brush. She thought about just jumping back to the hotel but the weather was beautiful and she liked the strain she was feeling in her thighs from the unaccustomed exercise.

Besides, the patrol car might return, to check on her again. She got back on the bike and kept going.

She regretted the exercise later, after dark. She dressed in ninja chic, took her night goggles and her binoculars, and appeared in the spot she'd selected on the bike ride. Her thighs burned and she was hard put not to groan as she moved quietly through the brush. She worked her way west, parallel to the road and screened from it by the scrub. When she was across from the gate to Great Pond Lane she lay down and wormed her way between bushes until she could see the guardhouse.

Like the other night on the beach, the cameras glowed slightly, their temperature just high enough that the night vision goggles picked up their IR signature against the cool night. Though the lighting was low in the guardhouse, it blazed in the goggles. She avoided looking at it after counting the two guards within.

She retraced her path to the east and, when she could no longer see any cameras, crossed the road. There wasn't a fence around the community. The brush was thick and it was a job to work her way through it. When it thinned again at the edge of winter-brown lawns, she picked out the cameras pointed out toward the brush line.

Through the goggles most of the houses were cold and dark, shut down for the winter, but three were occupied. Two of the houses glowed with IR warm spots and the big house on the end, which was well beyond the brush, blazed, with or without the goggles, since spotlights lit its grounds.

She switched to the binoculars and studied the cold houses. Most of them were thoroughly winterized, temporary or permanent shutters completely covering the windows, but there was one without shutters. It was midway down the block on the near side of the street.

She studied a second-floor balcony on the back side, then switched to the cameras. None of them pointed
toward
the houses. She understood that. These people had all this security to protect their privacy. It wasn't private if the security also watched them.

She jumped to her chosen balcony and crouched against the sliding glass doors. After listening for a slow count of thirty, she switched back to the night goggles and looked through the glass into the house. The curtains were drawn over the first door but only halfway across the second and, with the goggles, she could see a stretch of empty carpet, a chair leg, a low couch. She concentrated and, an instant later, she stood inside.

Alarm time.
She looked around the room, especially the upper corners, but there weren't any little boxes with blinking LEDs. Maybe there were motion detectors in the downstairs rooms but a quick survey revealed none on this floor. There were dust covers over most of the furniture and when she tried the tap in an upstairs bathroom, nothing happened. The air was an odd combination of dust and stale damp.

Excellent.
Doubtless the house would come alive some time before Memorial Day but, for now, nobody home. Nobody expected home.

She moved from window to window, studying the neighborhood. There was a single-floor house near the guard shack that was occupied. When she switched to her binoculars she saw that the car parked in its driveway was the Island Security patrol car she'd passed earlier, or its twin.

A two-story house diagonally across the street from her vantage point was also occupied, five cars parked on the wide apron in front of the triple garage and three more on the street. While she watched, three men and two women walked up the street from the spotlighted mansion. Three of them went in the front door of the two-story house and two more, a man and a woman, got into separate cars and drove off, the steel gate at the end of the street opening as they approached.

Staff?
The cars were older, not particularly fancy, but on the Vineyard that didn't mean anything. The rich drove rusty heaps and it was gauche to dress up. Still, she thought they would've parked closer if they weren't the help.

She turned her attention to the mansion at the end of the cul-de-sac.
Are you in there, Davy?

She counted six exterior cameras on this side alone.
Something is in there.

The mansion's many-gabled roof offered possibilities. None of the cameras she could see covered the roof, but the floodlights on the grounds cast it into deep shadow. She used the night vision goggles but they auto-adjusted to the floodlights' glare and she couldn't get any detail in the shadows of the roof. The places she
could
study in sufficient detail were covered by cameras.

I need to see it in daylight.

She went back to the Aerie to put away the binoculars, the night vision goggles, and her dark clothes. She was still low on underwear. She thought about the condo and jumped there, holding her breath.

Though the doors were still taped and there was the faintest scent of the anesthetic, it was clear it hadn't been replenished. She grabbed her entire underwear drawer and dumped it into a clothes basket in the living room. She was looking around, wondering if she should take anything else, when she saw the note.

Davy had terrible handwriting—it was totally distinctive and instantly recognizable. She snatched it and jumped back to the Aerie.

She stared at the paper, trying to read the words, her head cocked to one side. There was a ringing in her ears and her lips were dry and she wet them with her tongue. She took a plastic cup and held it under the cistern spigot but she didn't realize it had filled until water ran across her fingers and splashed on the floor. She closed the valve.

He's alive.

The glass dropped from Millie's fingers, spraying water across the floor and bouncing with an echoing clatter. She dropped to her knees and burst into tears.

He's alive.

She'd never really thought about the alternative but it was obvious that a part of her had seriously considered it. The sobs were titanic, a flooding of grief released because it no longer had to be held back.

He's alive.

It was several minutes before she could stop and actually consider the information contained in the note.

IMPORTANT THAT YOU REMAIN FREE.

Well, yes.

AVOID NSA. GO INTO HIDING.

Davy had never trusted the NSA, but did he know something more now, as she did? And did he really expect her to just sit on her ass and do nothing?

THEY'VE IMPLANTED A DEVICE THAT PUNISHES ME IF I TRAVEL AWAY FROM SPECIFIC LOCATIONS BUT I THINK I CAN DELIVER THIS NOTE.

Just like Padgett. Well, maybe not
just
like Padgett. That device seemed more about keeping Padgett from talking. But she bet it was still a vagal nerve stimulator. And apparently he
could
deliver the note.
At what cost?

She remembered Padgett vomiting into the fire and shuddered. They were conditioning Davy, she thought. So they could use him.

To do what?

For the first time since Davy's disappearance she fell asleep without effort and, when she awoke, she lay there for a moment and actually smiled. When she left, she put a large cardboard sign on the counter in the condo, right before the spot Davy had left his note.

I'M SAFE. I CAN JUMP. ARE YOU IN HIDING IN THE BIG HOUSE ON MARTHA'S VINEYARD? I'LL BE RIGHT HERE AT 6 PM CENTRAL EVERY DAY. I LOVE YOU.

There was a guard on the gate of the Stillwater National Guard Armory but the building itself was locked up tight and unoccupied.