Blink of an Eye (24 page)

“I saw you coming just like I can see now exactly how I'm going to leave you in this alley. Like a lost puppy.”

The man's face twisted to a grin and he waved his gun at Seth. “You may be smart, but I think you're confusing intelligence with science fiction. I'm gonna have to take you in, son.”

“You ever hear of precognition? Well, it seems that I've been graced with it as of late. I see the future, my friend, and I see it in all of its possibilities. Or at least in bunches of them. Only a ways out, I'm afraid, but I see every possible outcome ahead of me. That makes me pretty hard to stop. That's why I'm outrunning a thousand cops. Not because I'm a crook. Make sense, Clive?”

Clive quit smiling. “Okay, Seth. You're going off the deep end here. You're not even armed.”

“I don't need a gun to leave you panting, Clive. I have precognition. And you should know that gunning down a police officer isn't only stupid, it's not my style. That wasn't me on the roof. You make sure they know that.”

“I'm sorry, but I don't believe in precognition—”

“You will. I'm not the gambling kind unless I know the lay of the cards, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to discuss it with you. We've got fifty seconds before a uniformed officer comes running around that corner. I have to leave before he does. There are hundreds of things I could do in an attempt to escape you, and I've seen them all. All of them but two fail miserably. I could shout at you; I could walk up and punch you; I could run to the right, to the left, or straight past you. But I've seen all those possibilities among a hundred others, and I know exactly what you would do in each case. Unfortunately for you, I'm going to pick one of the two in which you make the wrong move. You can't stop me.”

“You're rambling. The girl's a fugitive. You're coming with me and you're taking me to her. End of story.”

“You take her and I'm pretty sure she'll end up in the wrong hands. The world isn't ready for that. And frankly neither is she. Gotta go, Clive.”

The man's face twitched. “Lift your hands slowly—”

“Step out, Miriam,” Seth said.

Step out?
Miriam hesitated.

“Now, Miriam!”

She stepped out. Clive's eyes jerked to her, and Seth sidestepped to Miriam. Clive swung his gun to cover her.

“You won't shoot her, Clive, at least not in the next few minutes,”

Seth said. “I've already seen that it's not one of the possible futures.”

He grabbed Miriam by the waist and pulled her behind the wall. No shot was fired.

Another man's voice echoed up the alley. “Sir?” The officer Seth had predicted.

“Hurry!” Seth whispered. “Run for the end of the building!” She ran.

She could hear Clive's feet running in the alley. A thump. She spun to see that Seth had tipped over a barrel. He sprinted after her.

“Run!”

She ran, then heard a hollow crash, followed by a grunt and a curse. A shot went off, booming around her ears.

Miriam tore around the far corner of the abandoned building. Seth ran past, grabbing her elbow. “Follow me!”

He chose the most unlikely path, she thought—right under a blazing streetlight, out into the middle of the street. To their left, colored lights turned lazily in the night. Six or seven vehicles flashed red and blue. She couldn't bear to look. They would be seen!

But they wouldn't, would they? Seth knew.

Seth vaulted a hedge and disappeared. She leaped blindly after him.

Miriam dropped to her knees and slammed into him.

“
Sh!
They're coming!” He didn't move.

Clive roared around the corner of the garage across the street and pulled up. She could hear him panting.

“Over here!” Clive yelled. “You head up the street. I'm cutting back.”

The sound of running shoes followed. Then silence.

Seth pulled at her arm. “Come on.”

They ran around a house, passed through a back gate, and wove through the neighborhood, away from the hotel.

chapter 21

t
he sun cast a glow over the eastern sky, waking the sleeping valley to another day. Two patrol cars remained at the hotel, one in the front with a forensics team just now finishing up their work in the parking lot, and one in the back next to the abandoned Sable. A tow truck waited with amber lights flashing, preparing to impound the evidence.

Clive leaned against the door of the Sable, studying the hotel roof. He rolled the walnut between his fingers and squeezed it tight. The crime scene read like a book. Seth and Miriam had slept in different rooms—the manager and the couple's abandoned belongings vouched for that. At some point in the night, presumably after the police arrived, Seth had somehow managed to get into the linen closet, work his way up to the ducts, tear loose a piece of duct tape—a move that could have been made only from the outside of the duct—wiggle into Miriam's room, and return with her. They exited via the closet and made the alley unnoticed.

Signs of an unplanned journey littered the car: Dr Pepper bottles, empty chip bags, and half a dozen fashion magazines and cheap corner-store paperbacks. Toiletries. Crest. Johnson & Johnson dental floss. What kind of man picked up dental floss on the run? A man with a woman.

Clive had reviewed the sequence of events in the alley a hundred times, retracing each step by aggravating step. They scoured the streets and alleys surrounding the motel. Nothing. The search extended to the limits of Johannesburg. Still nothing. Seth and Miriam had simply vanished.

Clive had perfected the art of chasing down criminals by adhering to a simple principle: Follow the path of least resistance. Almost without exception, criminals took this path. They were not the most brilliant lot. If common sense dictated that they should duck behind a building instead of running out into the open with flailing hands, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that's where they could be found: behind the building.

Standing in the middle of the alley, waiting for the adversary as Seth had done, was not a move brimming with common sense. It was, in fact, downright idiotic. But Seth wasn't an idiot.

“AK-47,” a voice said.

Whitlow, the LAPD detective in charge of the physical search, approached from Clive's left. The officer held a small, clear evidence bag containing one of the shell casings from the roof between his thumb and forefinger.

The detective was a city chump used to back-alley chops and drug deals. Not a bad man, just a bit far from home in Clive's judgment. Whitlow removed a Dodgers baseball cap and scratched his head. “Common enough rifle around here. No telling where he got it.”

“He wasn't the shooter,” Clive said. “We have another interested party.”

Whitlow forced a grin, replaced his cap, and put his hands on his hips. “So says the detective from the NSA.”

“So says common sense,” Clive said. “You find a weapon? No. And he didn't have one. Someone else took that weapon.”

Whitlow studied him for a moment. He looked at the roof. “How exactly did this guy get away from you? He was unarmed—or so you say—and with a girl.” He glanced at Clive without turning his head. “Seems kinda odd.”

Odd? Clive hardly believed it himself. Only one explanation made any sense at all: Seth's explanation. He knew what was going to happen before it happened. He knew exactly which course of events would allow him to escape, exactly when to tip the barrel, exactly where to run to avoid detection.

“Let's just say that our man is pretty clever, Detective. You know who he is?”

“Seth Border. Some student from Berkeley.”

Clive smiled. “A student from Berkeley with an IQ of 193.”

Whitlow whistled.

“The man we're after just happens to be one of the most intelligent human beings on this planet, my friend.”

Whitlow nodded, smirking slightly. “He's still flesh and blood, right? As long as he bleeds, we'll get him.”

Clive considered the man's statement. They had managed to approach the hotel with Seth inside, hadn't they? While Seth slept. Every man had his weakness, and if Seth had by some strange act of God been doused with precognition, then sleep might very well be his Achilles' heel. He couldn't know the future while he slept. Even if he could, he couldn't run.

They had to exhaust Seth. A man couldn't stay awake much longer than two days, maybe three, without help from doctors. According to the hotel office, Seth's light hadn't gone off until after two. He might be wide awake now, pushed by adrenaline, but what goes up must come down.

“And how would you get him?” Clive asked Whitlow.

“They can't be far. We're setting up a perimeter now—there aren't a heck of a lot of choices out here. The highway south is sealed off. That leaves twelve possible roads out. Shouldn't be impossible to find a yellow Ford Pinto on one of twelve roads.” Whitlow grinned at Clive's surprise. “The car was reported stolen a few minutes ago. Like I said, we'll get him.”

Clive knew it all except for the report of the stolen Pinto. He'd ordered the checkpoint plan himself. A
yellow
Pinto. Like renting a neon sign that read Come and Get Me. Didn't make sense. Nothing made sense.

“If someone else doesn't get him first,” Clive said. He shoved the walnut into his pocket and straightened to leave. “I want the entire grid blanketed, not just the roads. He may try to hole up, and we can't let him do that. Any sign of them and I want to be informed. We go in quiet. You got that? I want this guy smothered.”

“You got it. Where you going?”

“To talk to our Saudi friends.” Clive stepped away. “Don't forget about the other shooter.”

“We look like a giant lemon,” Miriam said. “They'll spot us from Saudi Arabia.”

“Hold on.”

The Pinto's tires ground over a dirt road ten miles north of the hotel. Seth turned into a deserted driveway, rumbled over a knoll, and angled for a rickety barn that looked as if it had been abandoned for a century. Two large doors hung cockeyed off rusted hinges and baling wire. He threw the car into park, managed to pull open the left door, and plopping down behind the wheel again, drove the car into the barn. He turned off the ignition.

“We had to get off the road,” he said. “They're clamping down pretty hard.”

She looked around at the dim interior. Dilapidated bales of hay leaned against what had once been a stall. An old tractor sat rusting, cocooned in cobwebs. Smells of mildew and oil laced the air.

Seth's door banged, and she turned to see that he'd gone to close the barn. She climbed out. It wasn't so different from a stable at home, she thought, at least in the smell, which was enough to momentarily pull her mind back to Saudi Arabia. Straw covered the floor. At one time someone had kept animals in this place. Horses and cows. No camels.

She turned to Seth, who sagged by the car. “So we're safe here?”

“For a while.” He walked over to the stall and wiped his hand along the rotting wood.

“How far are you seeing?”

“I'm not sure. Longer. Half hour maybe.”

They'd stolen through the sleeping town, cutting this way and that, sometimes hiding in the shadows for a few minutes before darting across streets. The yellow car came from a house on the edge of town, and Seth had taken it for the simple reason that it was unlocked with keys in the ignition. Rust had nearly consumed the right rear fender, and the tailpipe hung precariously low, but none of this seemed to bother him.

They'd passed the first hour doubling back and driving virtual circles in the deathtrap. She'd seen a new side of Seth, a brooding brought on by the death of the police officers. It was tragic to be sure, but she'd seen much worse. He evidently had not. Americans were not as accustomed to death, she thought. This was a good thing—one of the reasons she had come here.

With the dawning of the sun, exhaustion overtook Seth's brooding. He'd slept less than an hour, he'd said. This was not good.

She had no idea where they were now, and she doubted he knew either. He was simply playing cat and mouse, driving where he knew they wouldn't be.

A shaft of light cut through two loose planks on the wall, illuminating a fog of floating dust particles. Seth looked at her with his pretty green eyes, now darkened with sadness and fatigue, and for a moment she felt sorry for him. She had led him into this. Apart from the next half hour's myriad futures, he was as lost as she. An enigma, to be sure. A stunning creature with that mind of his—American to the bone and yet so different from any man she'd ever met. The only man other than Samir who had kissed her. She was no longer sure if she wanted to slap him or thank him.

Seth lifted his eyes to the rafters, but she kept her gaze on him. He was still shirtless. She let herself look at his chest and belly. He was as strong as Samir, she thought. Taller and perhaps broader in the shoulders.