Blink of an Eye (21 page)

She bit her lip. She'd been a fool to leave all that money at Hillary's house. “How much?”

He shrugged. “Air travel isn't as easy as it once was. We'll have to find a charter and leave illegally. A couple hundred thousand maybe.”

“We?”

“Someone has to keep you out of trouble until Samir arrives.” Seth glanced at her with a twinkle in his eyes. “I'll think of something. What's a few hundred thousand dollars to a man who can see into the future?”

They traveled north, and with each passing minute, Seth seemed to regain his good nature. Perhaps she had misjudged his motives. He was wired and wide-eyed, despite the dark circles forming under his eyes. In thirty miles he didn't change course once—the threat fell behind them for the time being. Instead he spent the time explaining what he was seeing in their futures and how he was trying to manipulate those futures. He could see out six or seven minutes now, and he could only see futures directly related to either of them, but even those amounted to hundreds if not thousands.

He couldn't say what was happening anywhere else or what would happen beyond seven minutes, but he could see with stunning accuracy what might happen to them. If he saw two possible futures—one in which she took a drink from the water bottle and one in which she asked for a drink of his soda instead—he would attempt to manipulate her choice without being obvious, and then he would tell her what he'd done, grinning wide.

“Can you read my mind?” she asked.

“No. I can only see events. But I'm pretty sure I can tell what you're going to say. Speech is an event.”

“You can't be serious!”

“As a heart attack. Believe me, this thing is absolutely incredible.”

She had no clue what he meant by the heart attack, but she was too taken by his claim to ask. “Then what will I say now?”

“That depends on what I say, and on what I do, and on a bunch of other variables. But I know what you will say in each case. Including what you'll say now that I've told you. Isn't that wild?”

She hesitated. He was saying that he knew exactly what she would say next. How? Because he had seen her saying it. And what if she changed her mind and said something different? It didn't matter; he knew what she would say, not why.

“That's—”

“Very clever,” he finished with her, grinning.

She stared at him. This was disconcerting. “I do not believe you can influence what I say!”

“I'm afraid there's some truth to it.” He was still grinning.

“I don't see the humor,” she said.

“Sorry. It's a nervous smile.”

“If you can influence what I'm going to say, then make me say something,” she said, defiant.

He paused. “I think you're very beautiful.”

She hadn't expected that. He was manipulating her, of course. Somehow in his mind he saw that if he told her she was beautiful, he could draw a particular response from her. Probably a thank-you, or something like that. She decided to throw him. Something he could not possibly expect.

“Your eyes are like the . . .” She waited for him to finish.

“Blue waters of the Al-Hasa oasis,” he said.

It was precisely what she was going to say.

“And thank you,” he said. “But they can't be as beautiful as yours.”

“You know the Al-Hasa?”

“Never heard of it. Is it a nice place?”

“Of course. You have beautiful eyes. But then you already know I was going to say that. That's unfair.”

“I wasn't aware that we were playing a game. Besides, I'm your savior. How can I be unfair to you?”

She sat back and frowned. “If you can't read my mind, then maybe I should say things deliberately off base, so that you'll have no idea what I'm thinking.”

“You're right, you could say all kinds of things that don't match what you're actually thinking and I wouldn't be the wiser. I don't mind at all.”

“I've gone from having my face unveiled to my mind unveiled in a few short days. I feel positively naked.”

“I can't read your mind—”

“But you can trick me into saying things. You might as well know my mind.”

“No, I can only say or do things that will make you say one of the things you were going to say anyway.”

She shook her head. “Either way, it's positively maddening.”

“No, it's God's will, remember?”

She refused to dignify his jab. But then he would have known his comment would elicit silence. Was he trying to shut her up?

“You're trying to shut me up.”

“You're speaking, aren't you?”

True enough.

“I meant what I said,” Seth said. “You should know that.”

“You've said many things.”

“One of them was that you are very beautiful. I meant that.”

She looked away. So then she hadn't misread him. How could he be so bold? “And I meant what I said,” she replied. “I am in love with another man.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“But it is what I meant.” Was she really so beautiful?

Her low blow seemed to have no impact on him. He changed the subject and talked to her about Saudi Arabia, a subject he seemed to know nearly as well as she, despite never having been there. She considered apologizing, but withheld after realizing that if she was going to say anything, he would have seen it already. Better to keep him guessing. God knew she needed some advantage.

They rolled into Johannesburg as dusk settled on the small town. Seth checked them into separate rooms at a small U
-
shaped Super 8 Motel off a side street and parked the car in the rear lot. Miriam found her room decorated in orange, like a pumpkin. But the sink functioned well enough, and she was grateful for the chance to freshen up after a day and a half on the road. They would need to buy more clothes at the earliest possible opportunity, she decided. If she'd known they would be on the road overnight, she would have purchased several changes at the Wal-Mart.

She'd just finished brushing her teeth when Seth knocked on her door and suggested they get some dinner at the Denny's down the street.

“You're exhausted! Look at you, you can hardly walk straight.”

“My mind's too full to sleep,” he said.

She glanced down the empty street. “You're not concerned about being discovered here?”

“The last time we were spotted, we were in Los Angeles. We're way off the beaten path. Actually, sleep may be more dangerous than going down to the Denny's. Somehow I doubt I'll be able to see when I sleep.”

Miriam looked at his tired eyes. If the police were still on the prowl and Seth was fast asleep, they would be powerless to avoid any search. Maybe it would be best to keep him awake a few more hours.

“Can we go shopping?” she asked.

“Shopping?”

“You expect me to wear this shirt all the way to England? And why do you need to ask? Don't you know my response already?”

“I can't know a response unless there is one. And there can't be a response unless there's a question.”

She was beginning to understand.

“There's a large truck stop on the corner. It should have a few overpriced items of clothing. I could use some too.”

“Promise no tricks?”

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

She stepped past him. “Why do I find no comfort in that?”

chapter 19

t
his business about reporting every hour was about as sensible as hiring a chaperone for your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Clive thought, especially considering that chatter about the vanishing blue Sable had crossed every secure police channel in Southern California. But he dutifully kept the State Department updated. No need to get the Saudis all whacked out of shape. He understood as well as anyone that, despite the House of Saud's poor record on human rights, the alternatives to its leadership in the region could prove disastrous. A successful coup led by fundamentalists would be a nightmare. Hilal might be a snake, but he was a snake in the service of a government the United States knew how to handle.

Clive thought the man was probably after Miriam for personal reasons and was lucky enough to have information from the State Department to close in. Well, there was nothing to close in on now, was there? Seth had vanished.

Clive angled the Lincoln Continental into a Diamond Shamrock truck stop on the outskirts of San Bernardino and parked behind a row of purring rigs. A band of teenagers crossed the graveled lot, headed for the store. Gangbangers. Probably headed to some joint to fry their brains. The collective mind of America was headed down the toilet. At some point during the last twenty years, someone decided that intelligence wasn't such a hot commodity after all, and the rest of the country licked up that nonsense as though it were a melting vanilla cone on a hot summer day.

The mind he was after, though—there was an exception if ever one existed. He'd met with Seth four times over the past two years, and each time he walked away knowing that he couldn't give up his pursuit of this one. Seth possessed all the qualities for greatness in the world of intelligence. Brains were one thing, but genius plus a thirst for danger was exceedingly uncommon. He'd never imagined that his pursuit of Seth would take on a physical nature.

Without looking, Clive retrieved the round walnut from his coin tray. Over a period of years, he had rubbed the nutshell smooth by turning it slowly in his hand, as he did now. The mind was like this walnut, he often thought, smooth on the outside and wrinkled on the inside. His task was to figure out what was happening on the inside, where wrinkles made the task more difficult.

His arrangement with the NSA was unusual, but he had come to them with an unusual list of accomplishments that granted him unique negotiating power. He was a throwback to the old days, when trackers sniffed out criminals with keen noses rather than with fast-flying fingers on a keyboard. More like a bounty hunter in the Wild West than the agents churned out of today's high-tech schools. Not that he had any dislike for his peers who preferred the road of high science; they were an exceptional lot in their own right. He just preferred the hunt one-on-one, hand-to-hand, mind against mind. May the best man win, and may the loser hang until dead. Figuratively speaking.

Clive depressed the toggle on his radio. “Five into one, you have any new information?”

A short hiss and then the voice of Sergeant Lawhead, the clearinghouse for all the uniforms on this one, crackled. “Several blue Sables, but not the right one.”

Clive picked up a map he'd folded to frame the Los Angeles basin. He'd highlighted in yellow the five primary exits out of the region. Checkpoints stood along each one, far enough out that Seth couldn't have slipped by before they were set up. If the couple had passed through, they weren't driving a blue Sable.

He scanned the street to his right. A Ford Taurus drove by, followed by another, blue instead of yellow. Would Seth have traded cars?

Minds like his didn't overlook details; in fact, they tended to consume vast quantities of minutiae. One of those particulars was that in this computer age, the police could track down a car purchase in a matter of minutes. If Seth bought a used car in some remote lot under his own driver's license, he would trip the wire. And Seth hadn't come into this chase with a fake ID. For all Clive could ascertain, he'd stumbled into it without a clue.

Short of buying a car, Seth would have to steal if he wanted to swap vehicles. He'd done it once and he could do it again, and in fact twelve cars had been reported stolen in the last six hours. But none of them was Seth—too far out of the zone.

He looked at the map again. Of the five exits out of the city, one headed south to San Diego—out. Seth wouldn't head home for the simple reason that all stupid criminals headed home. He would suspect a ring of cruisers around his house already. Two exits headed north, the Pacific Coast Highway and I-5—both out. You don't head back into the pursuit unless you know exactly what you're doing, which Seth didn't. He was no seasoned criminal.

That left two exits east. One toward Palm Springs and one toward Las Vegas. Both passed through San Bernardino. Clive toggled the radio. “Any word from the Nevada authorities?”

“Checkpoints on all the state crossings, but nothing yet.” A pause. “How about south across the border?”

“No. Border's too tight. He's headed east—Arizona or Nevada.”

The radio remained silent. Clive set the receiver down and studied the map.
Where are you, my friend? Hmm? Where have you gone?

He ran his right index finger over the routes slowly, caressing the paper, tracing every road and judging for the hundredth time its viability as an escape route.

Which road does a twenty-six-year-old surfer-turned-Einstein in the
company of a Muslim woman take?