There was nothing not to get, but I acknowledged with a slight nod. Agent Jen got up from her computer and walked me from the trailer down a path through the woods, which opened into a clearing where a small camouflage tent was pitched. A latrine tent was situated near the tree line.
“Rules,” she said, as she opened the flap of the main structure. “Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t touch anything that isn’t on your bunk. And if you snore, prepare to be smothered in your sleep. We don’t get much downtime. What we get, we value.”
I liked Agent Jen. She was forthright. She handed me a plate of fruit and sliced meats and bread, gave me a bottle of water, needlessly pointed out the latrine, and showed me to a narrow, neatly made bunk with a thin pillow and light blanket. I ate, then spent two hours reading over and over the material that I’d been given. When I was certain that it was as natural to me as any other thing in my unnatural life, I stretched out, wrapped myself in the thin blanket, and was asleep—unsnoring—by the time the next agent came to claim his bunk.
The next morning was a grim march. I was woken early, when the sky was still black, and hustled into a rusted pickup truck driven by a silent Hispanic man wearing a battered straw hat, who drove me two hours in the darkness to a deserted bus station. “Next bus,” he said, which was two more words than he’d exchanged with me thus far. He handed me some crushed folded bills, soft from use, and a handful of loose change. “Get off in Trenton. Look for a blond kid in a hoodie passed out on a bench and with a skateboard and a backpack. Wake him up. He’ll tell you where to go next.”
That was the extent of our friendship. He drove off almost before the truck door had slammed, leaving me feeling unexpectedly alone and exposed under the glare of a spotlight in front of the closed bus station. I waited, pacing to ward off the cold, until a lone bus arrived in a huff of air brakes. I climbed on board and paid the driver, then huddled—like the others—in a plush but battered seat. No one noticed me; as I looked around, I saw a bus full of people wrapped in their own personal struggles and tragedies, with no interest in mine.
It was perfect.
Dawn broke as we arrived in Trenton, and I found the sleeping skateboarder, who looked hardly old enough to be in the FBI. He glared at me through glazed eyes, and then muttered an address. I repeated it, and he rolled over and went back to sleep, apparently. The bus station had a map on the wall, and I used it to locate the address, which was more than a mile away. I walked, hands in my pockets, head down, as the city began to come alive around me. I looked needy, poor, and a little desperate, and I soon realized that these were things that served to isolate me as surely as if I had been walking the street alone.
I found the address, which was a dreary-looking coffee shop. I didn’t have instructions on what to do, so I ordered the smallest, cheapest drink I could with my remaining crumpled cash and sat in a corner, sipping slowly, practicing a dull, weary stare.
I was still practicing it when a woman came in dressed in an expensive business suit and ordered coffee. Once she had it, I expected her to hurry on, as most everyone had done, but she picked up her briefcase and walked over to me with sharp, confident steps. She sat, opened her briefcase, took out an envelope, and looked at me as she sipped her coffee. Bright brown eyes, and an even, regular face. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Laura,” I said. “Larkin. Hi.”
“You come far, Laura?”
I nodded. “From Arizona,” I said.
“Really?” She blew on the surface of her coffee lightly. “Whereabouts?”
“Tucson,” I said.
“Where’d you hear about us?”
This was gray area, and I shrugged. “Around.”
“Around where?”
“California,” I said. That was a safe bet, I thought; it was reasonably close to Arizona, and not unlikely that if I’d been struggling to find food and shelter, I’d have made my way there at some point. “Near San Diego, I think.”
She watched me for a few seconds, and I realized that this woman, whoever she was, had a shrewd sense about her—almost a Warden sense, perhaps. “You living rough?” she asked. “On the streets?”
“I get by.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I lost my last apartment,” I said. “My job went away. Not my fault.”
She sipped her coffee, and finally said, “There’s something about you, Laura. Something—special.”
I didn’t want, at this moment, to be special, not at all. I tried to think what I might have said or done that would create such an impression, but couldn’t. Instead of letting that agitation show, however, I forced myself to seem encouraged. People always wanted to feel special, apart from their fellows. It was something ingrained in human DNA, and my reaction seemed to please the woman, who smiled slightly in response. “Yes,” she said. “Very special. What skills do you have?”
“Um ... I cook,” I said. Laura Rose Larkin had been prepared with a specific set of things; I hoped no one would immediately ask me for proof. “And I’m good with the stuff nobody likes to do, washing, cleaning, that kind of thing.”
“Not afraid of work?”
“No, just haven’t had a lot of luck,” I said. “Like a lot of people.”
“Oh, I doubt you’re like a lot of other people,” she said. “Our job is to find the things that make you different, Laura. To bring out your gifts. Everyone has a gift. Pearl’s taught us that.”
Pearl’s teachings were convenient for her, to say the least; she preyed on the human desire to become something more, something special, and slowly but surely warped that desire out of true, into her own tool.
But I nodded. “I want to learn,” I said.
“And you’ve got nowhere else to go.” I looked away, turning my empty cup in my hands. The woman reached out and patted me on the shoulder. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “We get all kinds of people—people like me, who just aren’t happy with the life that’s supposed to be so great. We also get people who are lost and alone, even people who bring special skills because they believe in the cause. We’re all unique, and we’re all equal.”
She said that, but I could sense from her that she didn’t believe it, and never would; she believed that she was more important, and that sense of entitlement allowed her to speak to me as if I was a lost child that needed saving. No, I reminded myself. Laura Rose needs saving.
The part of me that was still stubbornly Cassiel didn’t like it.
“So,” she was saying, as she drained the last of her own coffee. “Here’s what you do. You write down your name and social security number on the outside of the envelope, and take what’s inside. We’ll be back in touch.”
She handed me a pen. I laboriously wrote Laura Rose Larkin and the number that I’d been given by the FBI, making sure that my handwriting was as bad as I could make it while still legible. She nodded, then took the pen back, and I shook out the contents of the envelope.
A cell phone, small and cheap. A small, bound number of bills. A blank business card with a number written on it in pen—not a phone number but a five-digit number.
“The cell won’t make outgoing calls,” the woman said. “It only receives calls. When you get a call, give them that number on the back of the card.”
I looked up as she snapped shut the latches on her briefcase. “What do I do now?”
“Whatever you want,” she said. “We’ll find you.”
She dumped her cup and walked out into the bright morning sunlight. I watched her from the window as she hailed a taxi and was gone in only a minute.
The phone, I was reasonably certain, functioned as a tracking device. I considered shorting it out, but that seemed unwise, given the circumstances. Instead, I put the money and phone in my pocket, along with the business card, and set out to walk the streets until I was called.