I took as much as I dared, and then stayed with him, drifting slowly through the aetheric. There was something unguarded about him this way, something pure and poignant. It was hard to turn away, leave him to his dreams and nightmares, but I had nightmares of my own to face.
Alone.
I made my way back to the FBI trailer and found Rostow deep in conversation with a man of average height, with roughly cut sandy hair and thick eyebrows, with skin that had seen too much sun and taken on a leathery, prematurely aged look. He had icy gray eyes, startling in that tanned face, and his hands were rough and scarred. He looked like a laborer, and dressed like one as well, in battered denim and canvas. His shoes had split under hard use and been patched with dull silver tape. There was dirt ingrained under his fingernails, and when he said, “This her?” I noticed that his teeth were uneven and discolored.
Rostow nodded. “Cassiel,” he said. “But we’d better get you a name that isn’t quite so memorable.” He tapped one of his computer operators on the shoulder. “Jen, get her a good set of creds, something with a minor record—theft, vandalism, something like that. Something easy to remember.”
Agent Jen nodded, bent to work at her keyboard, and then left the trailer. She returned a few moments later with an envelope, which came with a receipt I was asked to sign. I did so, and found in the envelope an Arizona identification card and bus pass in the name of Laura Rose Larkin. There was also a detailed sheet giving the past of Laura Larkin—parents’ names, addresses, and dates of birth, schools attended, residence history, close associates, and crimes. It seemed very credible. Rostow nodded toward the paper in my hand and said, “Memorize it. You’ve got the night, but you need to be completely up to speed before we drop you and Merle here tomorrow. Oh, and this is Merle, by the way. You’re in good hands. He’s our best.”
Merle didn’t smile. He didn’t seem to be much prone to it. I couldn’t detect much in the way of emotion from him at all; I supposed that if he was, as he seemed, a professional undercover agent, then he’d long ago learned how damaging emotions could be. “Better know that stuff backward and forward,” he said. “Word is, these guys test pretty thoroughly. You make mistakes, they’ll dump you quick.”
“I won’t make mistakes.”
“Well,” Merle said, looking at Rostow, “she’s confident. Give her that.”
“If she screws up, don’t go down with the ship,” his boss replied. “Cut her loose. You don’t know her; you just wound up standing in the same space. You, same thing. You don’t know him. You’ve got zero history.”
“Then we shouldn’t be building one now,” Merle said, and nodded to me. “See ya.” He left, slamming the door behind him, and I raised my eyebrows at Rostow.
“Learn your stuff,” he said. “Don’t expect Merle to cover your ass. You’re there to back him up, not vice versa. Understood? Good. Now go get some sleep. Jen will show you to the racks. We’ll get you up in a few hours and start moving you around. You’re going to get off a bus in Trenton. We’ll give you directions from there. You won’t see Merle again until you’re both met by the recruiters. Got it?”
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?”