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“Good. I’m glad. I think it best if I not go home, though. I think the risk has now become too great. I’ll buy whatever I need. I will pick up some phones, as you suggest, and call you.”
“Good. Please be careful.”
“I will. Thanks, Alex, for leveling with me.”
“Jax always says that it’s best to tell the truth.”
He chuckled. “I’ll call you later today. I’ll also make arrangements so we can meet and take care of everything.”
“Mirrors,” Jax said.
“Oh yes. I know this sounds crazy, but you need to stay away from mirrors. If you stay someplace with a mirror, cover it immediately.”
“I haven’t had any mirrors in my office or house for years.”
Alex and Jax again shared a look.
“In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve been near a mirror that I’m not even sure what I look like anymore.”
“Do you have a rearview mirror in your car?”
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s a mirror. You need to break the rearview mirror off the windshield and break out or remove the outside mirrors. If you break the glass out, make certain that every speck of mirror is gone.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“I found out the hard way that it is. You may not be as lucky as we were. Take the mirrors out of your car.”
“I’ve always been so careful with mirrors, and all this time I never thought about the rearview mirrors in my car. This explains some things. I’m glad you’re so thorough. I will remove them before I start the car.”
“I think we’re going to have a lot to talk about when we get together.”
“More than you know, Mr. Rahl.”
“Alex.”
“Right. I will call you later, Alex. And I especially look forward to meeting you, Jax.”
“Stay safe,” she said. “And be careful.”
“I understand. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” Alex and Jax said together.
He closed the cover and then dropped the phone in a plastic cup full of water.
“Well, what do you make of that?” he asked as he slipped the other new phone, the one he hadn’t used yet, into the pocket of his jeans.
“It’s obvious he knows something.”
“I wonder how,” Alex said. “I guess that the sooner we get there the sooner we’ll find out. We’d better get going.”
“How are we going to get there?”
“I don’t see that we have any choice. We’ll have to drive. If we flew we could be in Boston in a day. But by the time we can get on a flight it’s liable to be two days, maybe even longer on such short notice. Driving will take close to three days, but if we drive, Cain’s people won’t know where we are or when we’ll show up. I want to keep them in the dark as much as possible.”
“Me, too.”
“Just as well, anyway,” he said as he put his jacket on to cover his gun. “I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of giving up our weapons in order to fly. Airports have metal detectors, like at Mother of Roses. They won’t let you take a weapon of any kind onto a plane—not even a small pocketknife.
“We’d have to pack our weapons in the luggage. If anything happened they would be useless to us locked away in the baggage compartment, the same as they were useless to us when they were locked away in the truck. Besides, the luggage could be lost, or stolen, especially if Cain’s people are watching, trying to catch us flying. They would probably snatch our bags to make sure we were unarmed.”
Jax pulled the silver-handled knife from behind her back. She twirled the blade through her fingers and caught it by the tip. She held it up, the handle before him. It was then that he noticed, for the first time, that the ornate scrollwork formed the letter R.
“There is no way I’m giving up this knife just so that they will let me go up in the sky.”
Alex’s gaze moved from the knife to her eyes. “Why is there an R on the handle?”
“It stands for the House of Rahl. It’s an ancient weapon, an exceedingly rare weapon, a weapon carried by only a very few people now.”
“Why do you have it?”
“For the same reason I volunteered to come to this world. Because I believe you are the one to stop this madness. Because I believe in you, Alexander Rahl.
“This is the knife I was sharpening when I made the test cuts on that tree in the painting you made. You painted those test cuts in your painting, those test cuts made with this knife as I was sharpening it in preparation for coming here. You are connected to this blade in more ways than one, just as you are connected to everything else.”
“Are you positive, Jax?”
She smiled. “I’m as positive of it as you are, and you’re dead certain of it.”
Alex smiled back. “It’s scary how well you know me.”
He pulled the phone out of the glass of water, then opened it and broke it in half. He handed the broken pieces to Jax. “Here. There’s a dumpster across the lot. I’ll put our things in the truck. You throw this away.”
“Gladly.”
46.
THEY HAD JUST FINISHED filling the Jeep with gas and grabbing a quick bite to eat at the Amana Colonies along Interstate 80 in Iowa when Alex’s phone rang. He didn’t have to guess who it could be.
“Hi, Mike,” he said, looking back over his left shoulder at the traffic coming up behind him as he merged onto Interstate 80.
“You still all right, Alex?”
“Fine. We’re on the road, headed your way. I have you on speaker.”
“I’ve followed all of your instructions to the letter.”
“And you didn’t use the phone you’re on now to call anyone?”
“No. This is the only call I’ve made with it since I unwrapped it.”
Alex was relieved that the man was taking everything so seriously. He did wonder why, though—what kind of encounters he could have had that would make him go along so willingly.
“Good. Thanks.”
The other thing that concerned Alex was that it seemed certain that Cain had to know about the land. Why else would they have taken Walter Buckman to the ninth floor of Mother of Roses, where he would be under the thumb of Dr. Hoffmann? One way or another they would have gotten all the information out of Mike Fenton’s partner—and God only knew who else.
If Cain’s people were watching airports and bus stations
to see if they could catch Alex and Jax, then they surely would also be waiting and watching the land up in Maine. After all, they had to know right where it was. They had to know that sooner or later Alex would end up there. Everything was funneling them right to that one place.
Of course, if Cain’s men could snatch them in an airport, he and Jax would be unarmed, which would make it a lot easier for them. That was probably what they were hoping. They wanted to capture Alex, but they surely would kill Jax on sight.
At least if they ran into Cain’s people up in Maine, he and Jax would be armed and expecting trouble.
“I’m not sure how long it will take us to get there,” Alex said when Mike asked. “I think it must be about thirteen hundred miles to Boston. We got a late start today, so I imagine we’ll be there by day after tomorrow—late in the day.”
“Since I suspect that my office was being watched, I feel uncomfortable having you come to Boston for us to meet. I think it would be best if we met closer to where the land is located, and to where some of the others are.”
“You have a place in mind?”
“Yes. I’ve made reservations, if it’s all right with you and Jax. If not, I can change the location. It’s farther up beyond Boston, but it’s on the way to where you’re headed, so it would be convenient and it wouldn’t lose you any time.”
“Well, I guess we are most interested in getting to the land.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So, where do you want us to meet you?”
“In Bangor, Maine. I’m at a motel just outside Boston right now. I’m going to be heading up to Bangor in a day or two, after I finish taking care of some legal details. I already made reservations for you as well in the name of Hank Croft.”
“How’d you pick the name?”
“Stuck my finger in a phone book. It seemed like an easy name to remember. I’ll be staying at the same place.”
“Hank Croft. Got it. But when you check into a motel they usually want to see a driver’s license or some kind of ID.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m still in Boston. I’ve been taking care of that. You would be surprised how easy it is to get those kinds of documents. It’s easier than going to the DMV. As long as I was at it, I picked up an ID for Mrs. Jenna Croft—they gave me a quantity discount. It will all be on your bill. I had the IDs say you were married. I figured that, just in case, it would make it easier.”
