"You'll tell us all you know," said Mishal to Charlotte, confirming it.
"Yes," she said.
"Where is the singularity located?"
"I'll tell you as soon as I know. And I'll know as soon as I call them. Where they propose to do the exchange, that's where it is. They'll want to be ready to negate Daphne instantly if things go wrong."
"Fair enough," said Mishal, getting to his feet. "Right now we're going to take you both to a safe house. Or is it a safe tepee, Oren?"
"Tepee," said Lepidopt. "Well, wigwam."
Twenty-three
The twin-engine Bell helicopter had touched down at a shadowed plateau high in the rocky San Jacinto Mountains southwest of Palm Springs, and when its passengers had climbed or been carried out, it had taken off again, the late afternoon sun lighting up its blue fuselage as it climbed above the level of the peaks.
The plateau was a couple of hundred feet wide, crowded up to the mountain shoulder and slanting down to the northeast, and an old flatbed truck was parked next to a gray wooden cabin on the eastern edge. A new-looking black tent was set up on the truck's bed.
Three young men in olive green park ranger uniforms had wheeled two gurneys and a wheelchair across the dirt, and Golze sank shakily into the wheelchair while the young men lifted the bundle that was Daphne onto one gurney and Rascasse's unconscious blanketed body onto the other. Even at twenty-six thousand feet, the breeze was stiflingly hot, but the cabin at the east end of the plateau had a clattering air-conditioning unit on its shingle roof, and when they had all walked or been lifted up the wooden steps, the air in the big kitchen proved to be cool.
The tape was stripped off Daphne's canvas sack, and she kicked it away and hopped down off the gurney and brushed off her jeans as the other gurney, the one with the blanketed body on it, was wheeled to a corner by the front door. One of the uniformed young men, blond haired and with no expression in his pale blue eyes, bolted the door and then, with a kind of indifference that was scarier than rudeness would have been, marched Daphne across the room and handcuffed her to a rusty vertical water pipe against the east wall.
The cabin was mainly a kitchen, and the white refrigerators were at least as old as Grammar's and the wide stoves had ceramic knobs on them. None of the equipment seemed to be hooked up anymore, and the place smelled faintly of motor oil. A lot of rust-brown utensils hung on the wall over the stoves — bottle openers, spatulas, whisks — and Daphne tried to make out the labels on the dusty boxes and cans that were crowded on a shelf above them.
A door in the far wall opened, and a lean white-haired man in a red flannel shirt scuffed into the room, his hands in the pockets of his faded jeans. Behind him Daphne could see a smaller lamplit room, and she noticed that there were two more doors in that wall. She hoped one of them was a restroom.
"I don't see my favorite girl," the man drawled. His face was very tanned and wrinkled, and he had a bushy white mustache.
"She switched sides," rasped Golze from his wheelchair in the middle of the floor. "Took a car and ran off with the young Marrity, and now she's invisible to Rascasse — she couldn't have done that on her own, she must be dickering with the Mossad."
The white-haired newcomer widened his eyes and laughed, then crossed to where Daphne stood against the far wall, his boots knocking on the floor. "Then I've got to find a new favorite girl! What's your name, sugar pie?"
In the corner on the other side of the door from Rascasse, the old Frank Marrity shook his head and said, "I was told there was liquor here," then began laboriously lowering himself to a sitting position against the wall.
"Daphne Marrity," said Daphne.
"Well, Daphne, I'm Canino, like in canine. I'm the old dog around here. I'm guessing you could use a chair."
"I'd like to be driven to a town, Mr. Canino," said Daphne, "where I could call somebody to pick me up. I've got quarters."
Marrity had managed to sit down on the floor, his right leg extended straight out. "Dream on," he muttered.
Canino's eyes were bracketed with wrinkles that deepened when he squinted sideways at old Marrity. "You'll get your bottle as soon as I'm satisfied you can keep your mouth shut. Right now I've got my doubts." To Daphne he added, "If any of these sumbitches give you any sass, you tell me, hear?" He smiled and patted her on the shoulder. "We'll be turning you loose soon enough, child. But not right now. We need to find out who these people are that you're dad's hooked up with. We got no business with your dad or you, but these people will come after you, and we got to talk to them."
"Can I use the bathroom?"
"Good lord yes! I'm sorry. Fred, free her and take her to the bathroom. Wait outside the door."
The same expressionless young man who had handcuffed her now released her and led her by the elbow across the booming wooden floor to the middle door in the far wall. Daphne went in and closed the door behind her.
It was a narrow room, lit only by the early evening light filtering in through a small cobwebbed window high up in the wall.
The ancient toilet proved to be in working order, and the sink, almost invisible in the dimness, produced a trickle of water. As she dried her hands on her blouse, Daphne looked at the window wall.
Her father had said, I won't let them catch me, and I'll come get you soon. These people aren't planning to hurt you. He had also said, Don't do anything in the helicopter! — meaning, don't try to burn up the engines.
Then her father had kissed that woman Charlotte. Charlotte had told these people that they should not try to kill her father, and that they should "negate" her instead of Daphne.
Daphne hoped the woman wouldn't be killed, if negated meant killed. Sometimes at night, even these two years later, Daphne would be awakened by intrusive images of her mother, and a droning undercurrent of bewildered loss.
I'm not enough, loving him by myself, she thought. I need help.
She opened the door before the Fred man might start knocking on it. Fluorescent lights now glowed whitely below the ceiling in the big room.
The box with the portable phone in it began ringing, and old Canino picked it up from the floor and carried it to Golze. "Here you go, chief," he said, unsnapping the case and lifting the phone out.
Daphne jumped then, and even felt a twitch too in Fred's restraining hand on her upper arm, for a cluster of ancient whisks on the wall over the stove had begun buzzing and vibrating, throwing off a cloud of dust. Old Marrity's bad leg drummed on the floor planks as he made an abortive scramble toward the front door.
A voice came shaking out of the ringing whisks, with a baritone quality provided by the resonance of the wooden wall. "It's Charlotte. Go along with what she says."
Golze nodded irritably and switched the phone on. "Charlotte!" he said. "What's the good word?"
Charlotte's voice was scratchy under crackling static. "Oblivion, Paul," she said. "You know you want it too. Meet me at dawn somewhere and we'll do the switch. Daphne walks out first from your side, then I walk out from mine and you take me in exchange for her."
"Okay, that works for us," said Golze. "El Mirador Medical Plaza, at Tacheva Drive and Indian Canyon Drive. That's, uh, in Palm Springs."
"Duh. I'll be armed, and if anything goes funny, I promise you I'll be able to kill both myself and Daphne, as well as anybody else who might be standing nearby, and you'll be left with nothing. Right?"
"Well, not with nothing," said Golze. "We've got the directions on how to use the time machine. We've debriefed old Marrity thoroughly, and we'll kill him at the first sign of any trouble from your side. So don't let your new pals imagine they can just wipe us all out like the pope did at Carcassonne. You know they have no interest in this exchange."