“Quest, Lucy,” he whispered. “You think of quest only.” And then the bastard kissed the top of her head and her trembling stopped. What right had he to quell her fear?
Casey’s mouth turned down as he surveyed the human refuse milling around the interview room through the one-way glass. The anonymous brightly lighted room was painted institutional green and served by its own elevator, just so “guests” such as these didn’t mingle with the government workers who occupied the rest of the high-rise. One woman just rocked obsessively and moaned. They were a colorful lot, from one guy’s red and white high-tops to the multicolored knit cap on that woman in the corner, ballooned out by her Afro. The only thing they had in common was a veneer of greasy dirt and dead eyes.
Damn that poncey little scientist, Steadman. He was nearly useless. But he had realized that a homeless person might have witnessed the Viking and the girl leaving the apartment building. Casey hated to admit he’d missed that angle. But you moved on.
Casey was checking the landlord’s background. He wanted to get some leverage on the guy before they tried to interview him again. Casey’s people were scouring marinas around the city with a picture of the girl and the artist’s rendering of the Viking. But the homeless riffraff on the other side of the glass still constituted at least a tenuous shot at finding the fugitives.
Casey grabbed a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and tapped one out as Evans led one of the interviewees out of a room. He flipped open his lighter and inhaled until the tip glowed, then snicked the lighter shut. He’d been exiled to supervise a stupid joint research project between a lab and the fuckup Italian government about a machine that still had gears, for Christ’s sake. God knew how the Italians convinced the NIATF to put money into the project in the first place. Even his superiors thought it was a bust. He was exiled to the fucking North Pole, and why? Because his assignments tended to be a little messy. He got what they wanted, didn’t he? That’s why they hired people like him, who could do things to people nobody else wanted to do. They wouldn’t have had that lawsuit if they’d let him clean up loose ends after the guys broke. And that last village was a totally expendable rat hole filled with bad narco-targets and a few basket weavers. But some jerk-off general got squeamish.
So they gave him a crappy assignment. But lightning strikes. He’d lucked onto a fucking time machine. They didn’t believe him yet. And that was fine. Now he’d have choices. He could go back and shove it in their faces and get whatever assignment he wanted.
Or he could use it for himself. Khrushchev. Now there’s a mo-fo who could have used killing. Castro? Toast. Economy in the tank? Go back and fix it. Nothing you can’t do with that machine. Save the goddamn, pathetic world. Or create a better one. In your own image. Visit the future, find the new Microsoft, and come back to invest in it today. Find your enemies and cut their fathers’ dicks off. He’d had months to think about the possibilities.
That machine can make you a god.
And it was broken. What a bitch. He needed the fucking diamond and the book. And then the world would be his oyster.
Pollington stuck his head out of the nearer room and beckoned to the glass.
Shit. Can he have something? Casey pushed himself off the desk and stubbed out his cancer stick in an almost empty Styrofoam cup. The end hissed in the sludge of old coffee at the bottom. He strode out to Pollington.
“Mr. uh, Smith here was in the right location, just across from the apartment building all night on Tuesday.” Pollington spoke in an undervoice.
Casey just pushed past the younger man and into the interview room. Mr. “Smith” was black, looked sixty, was probably forty-five. He wore layers and layers of shirts under one of those big sweaters from Tijuana. Gray fuzz covered his head and face, and his hand shook as he clutched a cup of that sludgy coffee. Great witness.
“Mr. Smith, I’m Colonel Casey. I’m in charge here.” He sat down opposite the man. The reek of unwashed bodies clung to the walls. They’d have to fumigate the place.
“Pleased, Colonel.” Smith probably once had a honeyed bass drawl, but now he was hoarse, his voice cracking. He cackled. “Only colonel I knowed before you made chicken.”
Casey smiled grimly. “You were on Filbert just off Van Ness Tuesday night?”
“That’s my regular place, yes sir. They’s a overhang on one a them buildings there, and a hedge blocks the wind. Pretty good place. Yes. Pretty good.”
Well, at least the guy was more coherent than the rocker. “You know the building just across from your digs?” The guy nodded. “Did you see anything there that night?”
Smith shrugged and shook his head. “Like what?”
Casey snapped his fingers and Pollington handed him the pictures. “Like maybe these two people coming out? It would have been—maybe four in the morning.”
Smith’s eyes opened wide. He began to nod. “Yeah. Yeah, I saw red hair. Just kind of a gleam in the streetlight. She was driving the car. Somebody big in the passenger seat.”
Casey tried not to get excited. “What kind of car was it?”
“Kinda old. Maybe a Chevy. GM anyway. Blue.”
Not bad. The guy was observant. “Was it parked at the curb? Did somebody bring it?”
“Naaah. It came outta the parking garage.”
Casey sat back, mind humming. That meant someone in the apartment building had failed to report a stolen car. Maybe someone had loaned it to them. Casey rose in one motion. Time for a little visit to the residents of 1632 Filbert.
Evans tapped on the door with a clipboard.
“So what’s the deal on the landlord?” Evans’s expression gave Casey a thrill.
“Jake Lowell,” Evans intoned. “Bought the apartment building for cash in ’77. Tenants say he got the limp in ’Nam. But there’s no service record for a Jake Lowell, or Jacob, or Jackson, or any of those as a middle name. No records at all, military or otherwise, before the purchase.” Evans cracked a smile. “Jake Lowell is not what he seems.”
“Excellent,” Casey muttered. “Just excellent. Let’s have a talk with Mr. Lowell, while you find out just where he got such a big payout, and for what services.”
“Could be mob money, drug money.”
“Maybe.” Casey doubted it. He was beginning to smell something much closer to home.
Chapter 13
“So, you ready for the car?”
Galen took a breath and let it out, remembering how fast the thing had gone when they rode in it before. He pulled the lever that opened the door and got in. “Ja. I will learn how to drive this cart as you do.” He set his jaw. “You will teach me, Lucy.”
“That’s a disaster waiting to happen,” she muttered as she slid behind the wheel. He didn’t understand those words. But he got her tone.
“You think I cannot do this?”
“Can we go on our quest first?” She was giving him that look of exasperation. He knew why. It was the kiss. It had unnerved her. He swallowed. It had unnerved him, too.
“Ja,” he answered. For a single instant, she had been so soft, so yielding. He had wanted nothing more than to protect her from her world. For an instant on the deck, she had revealed most clearly that she wanted him and that, even more important, she might let him protect her. When had that become important to him?
He cleared his throat and sat up, grasping the handle on the door to this car with the hand of his injured right shoulder. “We will now go fast.” He braced himself for that unnerving speed.
She reached around him and pulled a thick strap with an iron tongue on it across him and snapped it into a kind of a buckle on his left side as she had before. “Seat belts, everyone.”