These are devils, he thought. I should hide up among the rocks, and then hike down to town tomorrow morning.
But I can't hike on this leg, he thought, staring angrily at the tent above him. They can negate Daphne. There's no "psychic link" to get in the way — Charlotte Sinclair made that up so that she could be negated instead.
Canino hoisted the limp body of Golze up into the truck cab, then walked back to the truck bed and hopped up onto it; and he saw Marrity crouching in the long shadow of the tent.
"We can fit four in the cab," Canino told him with a grin — his face gleamed with sweat — "since one's a little girl, but you'll have to hang on back here." He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out what proved to be a switchblade knife when the blade sprang out. He disappeared into the tent, and a few moments later emerged again, carrying Daphne. She appeared to be dead too — her head rolled loosely in the crook of his elbow, and her free arm was swinging like a length of rope.
Marrity's breath caught in his throat. They killed her after all! he thought in confusion. That's good, isn't it? My younger self will be able to live without her—
But the sight of her lifeless body in a stranger's arms took him back nineteen years, to the remembered exertions of doing the Heimlich maneuver on a linoleum restaurant floor, finally watching through tears as one of the paramedics carried the body of his daughter away—
Canino laid her carefully on the far side of the truck bed, then hopped down and lifted her. "She's tranked," he called to Marrity. "She'll be out for an hour." He started toward the open passenger-side door, then paused and looked back over his shoulder. "Knock down the tent and toss all the stuff off onto the ground. And find a rope or a cleat or something you'll be able to hang on to — it's gonna be a bumpy ride."
Charlotte and Marrity were lying in darkness in the back of a roaring, rocking van, their ankles attached by cables and a padlock to a ring in the floor by the back doors. Malk was up front driving. The Chaplin slab and the boxed-up glass cylinder and gold wire from Grammar's shed were in another van with Mishal and Lepidopt, along with a bomb that Mishal assured them was powerful enough to completely destroy the entire Einstein machine, Chaplin slab and all.
Ten minutes earlier Charlotte had been sitting beside Frank Marrity on the Wigwam Motel bed, watching through Lepidopt's eyes as he and Malk draped blankets over the rectangular block of cement, looped canvas straps around it, and then taped two Styrofoam heads with toupees on them onto the top edge of it.
"When the vans get here," Lepidopt had told Malk, "we can walk this out to them. Whatever it looks like we're up to, it won't be smuggling a square from the Chinese Theater."
Malk had nodded. "And if somebody shoots at us, they're as likely to hit those guys as us," he said, nodding at the Styrofoam heads.
Lepidopt's glance had gone to the toupees, then resolutely away.
"You don't need a lot of yarmulkes," Malk had said.
Then Marrity had leaped up from the bed with a smothered yell. "Daphne is falling!" he had said urgently. "No — it's like on Sunday when she watched that movie — wow, she grabbed some building, and it's burning, completely on fire—" His arm had twitched then, and he'd winced. "And now — I can't sense her at all, she's gone! My God, did they kill her?"
"Gave her a tranquilizer," Mishal had said. "In the arm, from the way you jumped. Whatever the building is that she torched, they'll have to get out of there. They're moving. So are we."
And within minutes the vans had arrived and they were moving.
Marrity had asked why he and Charlotte had to be tied to the floor, but Charlotte had answered him. "None of us are really allies."
"What she said," Malk had agreed, snapping the padlock closed, then slamming the back doors and walking around outside to get into the driver's seat.
The interior of the speeding van smelled of potting soil and flowers, and Marrity guessed it was a florist's van when not commandeered for Mossad use. At least someone had thrown a couple of blankets over the plywood floor. It proved more comfortable just to stretch out and lie down than to try to sit up against the walls with their feet moored to the ring.
For Charlotte's sake as much as his own, Marrity craned his neck to look toward the front; the windshield was just a patch of lighter darkness except when a rushing streetlight lit the arched dust streaks on it, and he could just see the top of Malk's head above the driver's-seat headrest. Marrity and Charlotte were effectively restrained — even if Marrity had stretched, he wouldn't have been able to reach the back of the driver's seat.
In order to whisper, it was easiest to lie facing one another, with their arms around each other to keep from rolling back and forth. Marrity could feel the shape of a revolver against the small of Charlotte's back.
"I hope Daphne will be all right till we get there," whispered Marrity. He realized that he had said this already a few times, and grinned apologetically, though it was too dark in the back of the van for her to see, even if she'd been able to see. "And I hope my breath's not too horrible."
Charlotte kissed his lips lightly. "Your breath smells like Canadian Club," she whispered. "I like it. Daphne's fine. It's you they want to kill, and we won't let them do that." He felt her shiver in his arms. "Maybe they will trade me for her."
"We'll rescue her. And the Mossad will do the time-travel errand you want done."
"Right now they've got a bomb sitting next to that time machine. I'll have to decide when we get there whether or not I trust them to do what that Mishal guy promised. He sort of promised, didn't he?"
Marrity nodded in the rocking darkness. "Sort of," he added.
"I'd have a totally different life. I'd never meet you, or Daphne, and that's sad. I'd probably still be in the air force right now. Well, it was the army, really — INSCOM, Intelligence and Security Command, working originally out of Fort Meade in Maryland, though I was a little kid then. And I won't have been blinded in 1978. And I won't have done — she won't, the girl I'll be, won't have any memory of… people I've betrayed. I'd kill myself, but all the things I've done would stay done." She exhaled. Her breath smelled like whiskey too.
Marrity brushed her hair with his fingers, feeling the frames of her sunglasses.
She hugged him and pressed her forehead against his collarbone. "Or maybe," she whispered into his shirt, "I'll decide the Mossad can't or won't fix it for me, and just let the Vespers negate me. I'd never have met you then either."
He opened his mouth, but she put a finger on his lips. Pulling her head back and speaking loudly, she asked, "How much longer to Palm Springs?" Marrity could feel her heartbeat through the piece of damp paper against his stomach.
"Forty minutes," said Malk.
Marrity's hand was still in her hair; when she lowered her head, he kissed her on the lips.
"An hour from now we might all be dead," she whispered into his mouth, "or worse." He felt her lips smile under his. "Your heart is going like crazy."
They kissed again, and for a long time there was no more whispering in the back of the van that raced east down the dark 10 freeway.
Lepidopt was driving the other van, and Mishal was in the passenger seat. The taillights of Malk's van seemed motionless a hundred yards ahead in the freeway lane while the world rushed past, whistling in the wind wing by Lepidopt's left hand on the steering wheel.