Jones’s eye spooked a little. He looked afraid again, held her gaze as if she was what was holding him to the world. And then the pupil of his eye ballooned until the grey iris was the width of a fingernail paring, and he was looking at nobody.
Bree was still there on her knees beside him, stroking his sticky hair and bawling, when the ambulance showed up twenty minutes later and with nobody to save.
Chapter 22
Alex went with Bree and Jones’s body to the emergency room.
Retrieving the main section of Sherman – as the two paramedics discovered when they tried to lift the snooker table – was going to be a separate project. They called for backup while the lights of the ambulance revolved noiselessly on the main street, red spilling through the gap in the fencing and over the bare pocked earth.
While Jones had been dying Alex had passed out. The last thing he heard was a clattering sound somewhere nearby – the landfall, like giant pick-up-sticks, of a baker’s dozen snooker cues and rests of different lengths. His system was lousy with whiskey and adrenalin. Alex’s mind had had enough.
‘Alive,’ Bree had said to the paramedics, still with Jones, waving at where Alex was lying. ‘That one’s alive. Bring him.’
And they had – hauling the boy’s unresisting frame into the back of the ambulance between two of them, letting him lie on the floor at Bree’s feet, beside the gurney on which Jones, having given up smoking for good, made his journey to the hospital.
While they were loading the bodies, Bree called Red Queen. She just said: ‘We’ve found him. The other side was there. Jones is gone.’
‘Jones is gone?’ Red Queen said. ‘Where gone?’
‘Gone. Dead. We’re in an ambulance on the way to the medical centre.’
‘Wait there,’ said Red Queen. Bree was exhausted. She wondered whether Red Queen would be thinking that Jones dead solved a problem. She didn’t know Red Queen well enough to make the call, and didn’t have the energy for anger. Alex came round in the ambulance, tried to sit up, lay back down again. Bree took charge of him.
When they got to the emergency room they took Jones away and made Bree sign a form. Jones had no identification on him. She realised she didn’t know his first name, so she wrote on the form just ‘Jones’ and circled ‘Mr’. You could also be ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’ and ‘Ms’. If you were dead in this hospital, it seemed, they were still interested in whether or not you might be single.
She said that she was his next of kin, and didn’t have the presence of mind to give any but her real name. Under ‘relationship to the deceased’, she wrote: ‘Friend’. Her hands were still shaking.
Afterwards Bree was asked to wait. She was hustled through the emergency room, and into a public waiting area. The walls were sea green and grainy in the strip light. Alex was already there, and Bree went and sat beside him on a metal seat with fixed armrests. The seats were bolted to the walls. It had the feel of a budget airport departure lounge, except that the room’s hard acoustics rang with the wails of the suffering and the mad.
Doctors appeared through double doors, looked anxious, and vanished again. A drunk with some sort of wound in his leg lay across two seats on the facing wall. His dark grey jogging bottoms were streaked down one leg with a wet black stain, and there were smears of blood and dirt on his hands and face. He was muttering something that sounded like ‘ong, ong, ong’ and every few minutes he would shriek out ‘They’re here! They’re here! They’re here!’ and bang his open hand on the metal chair, some ring or bangle he wore making a piercing clangour as he struck.
An old man with matted hair and several days of stubble sat, in the far corner, topless and dirty, with a twist of webbing slung around his bare chest. His head jerked, sporadically, towards his shoulder but his gaze was fixed on Bree. She broke eye contact and looked at Alex.
Alex sat, still wrapped in the foil blanket they had given him in the ambulance, hunched and looking away. His face was a waxen yellow, his deep-set eyes dark with sleeplessness and shock. He focused on nothing.
‘The thing, then,’ said Bree, quietly. ‘Tell me about it. Where did you hide it?’
Alex took a long time before answering.
‘Who are you?’ he said, still not looking at her.
‘A friend?’
‘Really.’ His voice was dead flat. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. You tell me?’
‘No,’ said Bree. ‘Not really.’ Alex paused, and zoned out again. Bree’s question went ignored. Then, as if remembering something from a dream, he said: ‘You were at the supermarket, weren’t you?’
‘The supermarket?’ Bree tried to think. She picked at a hangnail. Adrenalin, washing back out of her system, had numbed her. Everything felt unreal.
‘The supermarket. Where the man chased me. The dead man.’
‘Yes,’ said Bree. She didn’t know what to say after that. The dead man. The other dead man. The other other dead man.
‘Why did he chase me?’
‘He thinks you have the machine.’
‘I told him,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’
‘No?’ Bree looked at him appraisingly. If he was lying he was a good liar. She continued. ‘Something has gone missing. Something that we think – the agency I work for, that is – and the man who had the gun on you thought – the people he worked for, anyway… you have. We’ve been trying to find you. You and your connection in the city.’
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Alex insisted. ‘I came here to see my girlfriend.’
Bree thought about it for a moment. The calls they’d picked up once they’d got hold of his phone records: the calls to a cell on a San Francisco network; then the phone showing up in Las Vegas. The contact: how could it be otherwise?
‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree wondered whether she was going to regret the initiative she had taken while Alex had been unconscious in the ambulance. If Jones had died – if Jones had died for this, she had wanted to make sure it had been for something. She wasn’t going to let it away.
‘Ex-girlfriend, probably. We had – something went wrong that can’t be put right.’
Bree exhaled. She knew all about things that went wrong that couldn’t be put right. She felt a hundred years old.
‘This is bigger than that,’ she said.
‘Oh yes?’ said Alex. Not sounding convinced.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Bree. ‘People are trying to kill you. That man was trying to kill you. It has to have been the machine that saved you. The coincidence engine.’
‘What?’
‘It affects probability. It might be a weapon. Everybody thinks you have it.’
‘I haven’t got anything. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Well, if you haven’t got it, who has?’
‘If I’ve never heard of it it’s not very likely I’m going to know that, is it?’
Bree fell silent again. She looked down at her hands. Her right palm was slightly tacky with Jones’s blood.
‘You need to stay here with us,’ she said. ‘My boss needs to speak to you.’
‘Oh no. No, no,’ Alex croaked. ‘I’ve got rights. I’m not saying anything. I don’t know who you are.’
‘I work for the government.’
‘A government that puts people in black planes and tortures them? I don’t think so.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Bree. ‘But the other guys will come back. You know that, don’t you? You were lucky this time. Lucky. If you can’t decide who to trust, you’re going to end up dead, my friend. People are already dying because of this thing. My colleague there.’