"I'm the one who'll fetch her," Marrity said.
"Let him go," said the man on Marrity's left, "they can all see him. We're supposed to be watching the van, anyway."
"Okay." The other man began patting Marrity's shirt and pants, but his companion said, "They'll have frisked him. Come on."
As they stepped away behind him, Marrity began cautiously walking toward where Charlotte and the man carrying Daphne were about to meet, and he hoped the bulge on his ankle wasn't conspicuous. His hands were raised.
Charlotte stopped when she was facing the white-haired man, and Marrity heard him say, "Good to see you again, sweetie!" as he crouched and carefully set Daphne down in a sitting position on the dew-dark asphalt; and Daphne braced herself with her hands to stay upright, and looked around, blinking.
"I've got her, Charlotte," Marrity called, stepping forward more briskly, his hands still up. He hoped to get Charlotte as well as Daphne out of this, though he had no idea how to accomplish it.
Charlotte looked back over her shoulder in evident alarm. "Frank!" she said. "How the — oh God — be very careful." The man who had been carrying Daphne took Charlotte's arm and led her off to the north, to Marrity's left.
"Daddy?" said Daphne, raising her knees as if to get to her feet.
Marrity was just shuffling toward her around one of the olive trees on the strip of grass when, ten yards behind Daphne and to the right of her, a figure stepped forward out of the shadow of the trellis. Marrity recognized the twisted face — it was the old man he had thought was his father, and who turned out to be his own shameful self. Then Marrity saw that the old man was raising a gun, and that it was pointed at Daphne.
Marrity's left hand was snatching up his cuff even as he yanked his knee up, and his right hand pulled the gun from his sock as the old man's first shot exploded a patch of asphalt a foot away from Daphne's hand and rang away to Marrity's left in ricochet.
And then Marrity had put the front sight of his little automatic on the old man's torso and he was pulling the trigger over and over again as the gun thudded against his abraded palm and the spent shells spun away to the side, and he was killing his own cowardice as much as he was protecting Daphne, and at last in the ringing silence he was just standing there in the chilly breeze tugging at the unyielding trigger. The slide was locked back, the gun emptied.
Abruptly a hard impact to his left shoulder spun Marrity around, and in the moment before four more rapid-fire shots punched into his chest and abdomen and flung him back against the olive tree, he saw the white-haired man who had carried Daphne squinting at him over the barrel of a revolver. Another rending shot to the abdomen doubled Marrity over and he pitched to the grass, rolling onto his back and then lying still.
Canino had violently pushed Charlotte ahead when he turned to face Marrity, and with no eyes looking at her, she stumbled and went to her knees on the asphalt as, through Canino's eyes, she watched Frank Marrity hammered to the ground beyond the jumping barrel of the .45 revolver.
Even before Canino had fired all six shots, she had reached around to the back of her waistband and snatched out her .38 and cocked it. And she was aiming it toward where Canino stood, so that when he turned his gaze toward her she only had to move the revolver slightly to see right down the barrel of it, and then she pulled the trigger.
Canino's halved viewpoint showed a fast spin of sky and parked cars and then was gone.
The parking lot echoed now with screams and running footsteps, and the only steady viewpoint Charlotte could fix on showed Daphne sobbing and still trying to get to her feet out in the middle of the pavement. Charlotte could see herself crouched beyond the girl, and so she stood up and sprinted forward.
"The two Frank Marritys are dead," came Rascasse's oddly high-pitched shout from up high — he must be in the tower, Charlotte thought as she ran. "Get hold of Daphne," the shrill voice went on loudly, "hold her, don't let her get hurt!"
Charlotte grabbed Daphne under the arms and yanked her upright, and she was sure now that the helpful gaze that was letting her see what she was doing was Mishal's — he had moved off to the south side of the parking lot, and nobody else had gone that way.
By Mishal's field of vision, she began dragging Daphne back toward the two Mossad vans, and she tried to hold Daphne to the other side as they neared the strip of grass where Frank Marrity's blood-splashed body lay — but now Mishal was seeing her and Daphne over the lined-up back and front sights of a pistol.
The stubby front sight edged down and to the right and centered on Daphne's chest.
Charlotte spun to block it, and the gun barrel wavered, and then Daphne's brown-haired head was visible by Charlotte's waist, and the barrel dove that way. Charlotte grabbed Daphne in a bear hug, turning so that Mishal could see only Charlotte's back. You'll have to shoot her right through me, Charlotte thought dizzily.
And he evidently decided to; the front and back sights lined up again, centered this time on the small of Charlotte's back, when several more shots concussed the dawn air — and Charlotte was still standing, unhurt — and through Mishal's eyes she saw the gun barrel disappear, replaced by a rapidly expanding view of damp pavement.
Twenty-eight
Frank Marrity's vision had narrowed as if he were looking down a tunnel at the distant morning world. He was aware of his right hand, and he made its fingers pry up the blood-soaked edge of his pants pocket and slide in.
His whole torso was a glass wrapped in a napkin and then stomped — the pieces were still loosely held together, but broken beyond hope of repair. Blood bubbled from his lips and he couldn't move anything in his shattered chest to get air in or out. Dimly he realized that he was drowning in his own blood, and he could feel arterial blood surging out through the rips in his belly.
His hand came back out of his pocket, clutching the crumpled Einstein envelope and the chip from the Chaplin slab. He managed to raise his forearm straight up, and then topple it the other way, toward his face; and he licked the Einstein envelope and clutched the chip of cement in his wet fist, and he stared up at bright spatters of his blood on the trunk of the olive tree.
I'm all the way up there, he thought dimly, four or five feet off the ground, and I'm way down here too.
The fact of dying made it easy for him to step out of his body.
And though the physical contacts with Einstein and Chaplin didn't summon those ghosts again, the contacts did tug Marrity's disembodied self in the direction of those specific moments in the past, and amplified the effects of the bloodstains in freeing it from strictly sequential time.
He could see the parking lot at some distance, as if below, though there was no up and down in this non-space. His body was the end-point in a line that trailed out of one of the vans. In their entries and exits the cars and vans made a static tangle of intersecting metal tubes in the lot, looking more like an air-conditioning system on the roof of a big building than anything else, but it was all receding as his focus expanded.
Arcs like jet contrails spanned the blank nothingness out here, and he knew they were lifelines. He could see his own, which ended in an exploded-looking rope-end very nearby, and he could see two others, at the distance of a few seconds in the direction of the past, which also ended in ragged bursts. Something native to this non-space was clinging — had always clung — to those ragged lifeline ends, and Marrity's attention was overlapping the thing. It was in some sense alive, and Marrity hoped that his own extended viewpoint was not a result of his sharing in the alien thing's consumption of the two recently ended lives.