Levi wondered whether somebody beat Abram to the punch. He wanted nothing more than to turn around and return to Reuben. Despite what lurked in their basement in Brooklin, he felt safely hidden away in that house.
He drove no more than the speed limit. Debra had told him he would not be stopped by police so long as he didn’t exceed the speed limit by more than ten miles an hour. Using miles per hour rather than kilometers added to his paranoia. Another oddity was the concept of paying a toll to travel a road. Israel had only once such road and the toll was automated. Here, he had to stop at a tollbooth.
Levi collected his ticket from the machine at the booth when he entered the Maine Turnpike, not quite sure what he was supposed to do with it. He did not see any way of paying any money when he got onto the highway, so he took the ticket, tossed it into the back seat and drove on.
When he reached the toll plaza at the southern terminus of the Maine Turnpike, shortly before the New Hampshire border, Levi stopped and handed a twenty-dollar bill to the collector, assuming that would cover whatever he owed. Instead, the man asked for his ticket, then, seeing Levi’s confused expression, explained that he needed the ticket Levi received when he entered the highway. Levi rummaged in the back seat until he found it, as cars behind him honked their horns.
The toll collector took the ticket and the twenty-dollar bill and handed Levi his change, adding a “Welcome to America, you Canuck.” Levi had no idea what a Canuck was, but he assumed it was not a friendly greeting.
He told himself he’d have to do better at the next toll plaza, wherever that might be. It came sooner than he’d expected. Five miles after crossing from Maine into New Hampshire a large green signed warned Hampton Tolls Autos $2.00 One Mile. Seconds later the traffic came to an abrupt halt and stretched onward around a bend in the road.
Levi spent twenty minutes inching forward the final mile to the toll plaza. He was baffled by signs over some lanes declaring EZPass ONLY and changed lanes to avoid them, staying to the far right, edging forward between two large trucks in front and behind him. A white wooden lift gate swung down to block his exit from the booth.
Levi looked up at the toll collector, not noticing the white metal can with a glass front screwed to the wall above the collector’s head, pointed over the man’s shoulder toward the open driver’s window of cars entering the tollbooth.
He handed the man two one-dollar bills. The man thanked him and turned to look at the truck behind Levi.
The gate remained down. The toll collector stepped on the gate button with his right foot to lift it. It stayed down.
“Dang,” the elderly man said. “That’s never happened before. Sorry about this.”
“No problem,” Levi said, waiting patiently, somewhat pleased that even in America machines malfunctioned. Levi leaned forward to adjust the radio. He’d lost the Portland, Maine, station he’d been listening to and didn’t know whether he was close enough to Boston to receive a station from there, but he enjoyed the country music he’d been listening to as an alternative to the news.
Sitting twenty yards away were FBI agents in SUVs. Earlier in the week, agents hooked up surveillance cameras into each tollbooth. Every face passing through to pay a toll was run through a computer with facial recognition software. Levi’s photo had been scanned into the computer.
Just as Levi raised his head from the radio to see whether the gate had lifted, two black SUVs came dashing from both ends of the toll plaza, blocking his exit.
Levi reacted instinctively. He slid the gear selector into reverse and pressed the accelerator to the floor before he could turn to look back. His head slammed against the headrest as his rear bumper rammed into the front of the truck three feet behind him.
The doors in both SUVs flew open and men streamed from the vehicles, each with a handgun out, leaving the doors wide open, running to surround Levi’s car.
“Put both hands out the window,” one man barked at Levi, pointing his gun straight in through the open driver’s window. Levi stared into the gun barrel and slowly took his hands from the steering wheel and held them outside the window. A pair of steel handcuffs snapped around his wrists.
“Now get out of the vehicle, slowly and carefully,” the man said, his gun never wavering from Levi’s face. “Where’s your driver’s license, buddy?”
“I must have left it home,” Levi said, using his best American accent. “I do that all the time.”
“Yeah, right,” the man said, calling out to another man who was looking into Levi’s car. “This guy says he left his license home.”
The agents searched Levi’s vehicle car.
Another agent walked up to Levi and removed a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. He gazed at the paper for a moment, then stared at Levi’s face.
“What do you think?” he asked one of the other agents. “I can’t tell shit, but the computer sure shouted at us. I think it’s him, I really do. Same eyes, nose. Yeah, I’d put money on it being a match.”
“One way to find out,” the other agent said, turning to Levi. “Hey, buddy, your name Chaim?” He pronounced it like “tame,” but with a ch sound. “Chaim Levi, right?”
They know my name. Levi was stunned. But only for a moment. He shook his head.
“What kind of name is that?” he asked. “Never heard of that guy, whoever he is.”
“Then what’s your name?” the man asked dubiously.
Levi pondered for no more than two seconds. A name, quick, he thought. Okay. He and Reuben had spent hour after hour watching television.
“My name,” he said, “is Homer, Homer Simpson.”
“Yeah, right, asshole,” the questioner replied. “Don’t you move an eyebrow. Just stand there.”
Another SUV replaced the truck behind Levi’s car, blocking it from leaving the tollbooth in that direction. A man leaped from the passenger seat carrying a metal box, a small object that looked like a microphone attached to it by a thick cable.
The man waved the object around inside Levi’s trunk, watching a dial on the metal box. He did the same under the car’s hood and shook his head.
The man then opened the rear passenger door and leaned into the car, again moving the object over the car’s interior. He quickly pulled back.
“Holy shit,” he shouted. “I got a hell of a hot reading on something in there.”
“Try again,” Levi’s questioner said. “I don’t want any mistakes.”
The man hesitated.
“I don’t know, boss,” he said. “Something in there is damn radioactive. I don’t know if I should be in there without protective gear.”
“No time for that,” the man in charge said. He looked around the tollbooth and focused on a broom with a long wooden handle. He tossed the broom to the man with the box. “Here, use this. Whatever it is, poke it out with this thing.”
The man with the box turned the broom around, holding it by the end with the straw, pointing the wooden handle into the car’s rear seat like a sword.
“Open the other rear door,” he said. “Do it.”
The man pointing his gun at Levi lowered it for the first time and walked to the rear driver’s-side door, flinging the door open and leaping back. The man with the broom poked it inside the back seat, moving the wooden handle from side to side like a hockey stick.
“Got it,” he shouted.
Two bright-orange rubber gloves fell from the car’s rear seat and landed on the pavement with a flop. Levi groaned, remembering that he’d used those gloves to handle the bomb.