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An instinct told him to turn in the ticket. To go to another airline, and proceed south by another, less obvious route. He would fly to Nashville, then to Atlanta and on to New Orleans. It would take longer, but he would be harder to find.
He stopped at a phone booth long enough to send a telegram to himself at the St. Regis, to be held for him when he came, which of course he never would.
This was no fun to him. He had been followed before by policemen in various countries. He had been stalked once by an angry and malevolent young man. He had even been attacked a few times in barroom arguments, when his world had carried him down into the dregs of some slum or port. Once he'd been arrested by the police in Paris, but it had all been straightened out.
Those things he could handle.
What was this happening to him now?
There was a terrible feeling inside him, a mixture of distrust and anger, a feeling of betrayal and loss. He had to talk to Aaron. But there was no time to call him. Besides, how could he burden Aaron with this now? He wanted to go to Aaron, be of assistance, not confuse him with some mad story of being followed in an airport, of a voice on the phone from London which he did not know.
For one second he was tempted to blow the lid, to call back, demand to speak to Anton, ask what was happening, and who was this woman who was tailing him at the airport?
But then he felt no spirit for it, no trust that it would work.
That was the awful part. No trust at all that it would do any good. Something had happened. Something had changed.
The flight was leaving. He looked around, and he did not see her. But that didn't mean anything. Then he went to board the plane.
In Nashville, he found a desk with a fax machine, and he wrote out a long letter to the Elders directly, to the Amsterdam number, telling them all that had taken place. "I will contact you again. I am loyal. I am trustworthy. I do not understand what has happened. You must give me some explanation, personally, of why you told me not to talk to Aaron Lightner, of who this woman in London was, of why I am being followed. I do not mean to throw my life out a window. I am worried about Aaron. We are human beings. What do you expect me to do?"
He read it over. Very like him, very melodramatic, the manner that often prompted from them a little humor or a pat on the head. He felt sick suddenly.
He gave the letter to the clerk with a twenty. He said, "Send it three hours from now, not before." The man promised. By that time Yuri would have already left Atlanta.
He saw the woman again, the very same woman in the wool coat, with the cigarette on her lip, standing by the desk, and staring at him coldly as he boarded the Atlanta plane.
Twelve
HAVE I DONE this to myself? Is this how it ends for me, because of my own selfishness, my own vanity? She closed her eyes again on the vast empty cube of a room. Sterile, white, it flashed against her eyelids. She thought, Michael. She said his name in the darkness, "Michael," and tried to picture him, to bring him up like an image on the computer of her mind. Michael, the archangel.
She lay still, trying not to fight, to struggle, to tense, to scream. Just lie as if it were her choice to be on the filthy bed, her hands chained with loops of plastic tape to the ends of the headboard. She had given up all deliberate efforts to break the tape, either with her own physical strength or with the power of her mind--a power she knew could work fatal results upon the soft tissue inside the human frame.
But late last night, she had managed to free her left ankle. She wasn't sure why. She'd managed to slip it loose from the encircling tape, which had become a thick ill-fitted cuff. And with that foot free she had, over the long hours of the night, managed to shift her position several times, and to slowly drag loose the top sheet of the bed, stiff with urine and vomit, and force it down and away.
Of course the sheets beneath were filthy too. Had she lain here three days or four? She didn't know and this was maddening her. If she even thought about the taste of water she would go mad.
This very well might have been the fourth day.
She was trying to remember how long a human being could survive without food and water. She ought to know that. Every neurosurgeon ought to know something as simple as that. But since most of us do not tie people to beds and leave them captive for days on end, we don't have need of that specific information.
She was casting back through her memory--of the heroic stories she'd read, wondrous tales of those who had not starved when others had starved around them, those who had walked miles through heavy snow when others would have died. She had will. That was true. But something else was very wrong with her. She'd been sick when he'd tied her here. She had been sick off and on since they'd left New Orleans together. Nausea, dizziness--even lying flat she sometimes felt she was falling--and an ache in her bones.
She turned, twisting, and then moved her arms the little bit that she could, up and down, up and down, and worked her free leg, and twisted the other one in the strap of tape. Would she be able to stand up when he returned?
And then the obvious thought came. What if he does not return? What if he chooses not to return; or what if something prevents him? He was blundering out there like a mad creature, intoxicated with everything he saw, and no doubt making his characteristic ludicrous errors in judgment. Well, there really wasn't much to think about if he didn't come back. She'd die.
Nobody would ever find her here.
This was a perfectly isolated place. A high empty office tower, crowded among hundreds of others--an unrented and undeveloped "medical building" which she had chosen herself for their hiding place, deep in the middle of this sprawling ugly southern metropolis--a city chock-full of hospitals and clinics and medical libraries, where they'd be hidden as they did their experiments, like two leaves on a tree.
She'd arranged the utilities for the entire building herself, and all of its fifty floors were probably still lighted as she had left them. This room was dark. He'd snapped off the lights. And that had proved a mercy as the days passed.
When darkness fell, she could see the dense, charmless sky-scrapers through the broad windows. Sometimes the dying sun made the silvery glass buildings glow as if they were burning, and beyond against the ruby-red sky rose the high dense ever-rolling white clouds.
The light, that was the thing you could always watch, the light. But at full dark when the lights came on, silently, all around her, she felt a little better. People were near, whether they knew she was there or not. Someone might come. Someone...Someone might stand at an office window with a pair of binoculars, but why?
She began to dream again, thank God, to feel the bottom of the cycle again--"I don't care"--and imagine that she and Michael were together and walking through the field at Donnelaith and she was explaining everything to him, her favorite fancy, the one into which she could sink when she wanted to suffer, to measure, to deny all at the same time.
"It was one wrong judgment call after another. I had only certain choices. But the mistake was pride, to think I could do this thing, to think I could handle it. It's always been pride. The History of the Mayfair Witches was pride. But this came to me wrapped in the mysteries of science. We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless. And I knew this, I knew but I forgot. That was my mistake."
She pictured the grass; conjured the ruins; saw the tall fragile gray arches of the Cathedral rising from the glen, and it seemed she was really there and free.
A sound jolted her.
It was the key in the lock.
She grew still and quiet. Yes, the key turning. The outer door was closed loudly and fearlessly, and then she heard his tread on the tile floor.
She heard him whistling, humming.
Oh, God, thank you, God.
Another key. Another lock, and that fragrance, the soft good fragrance of him as he drew close to the bed.
She tried to feel hate, to grow rigid with it, to resist the compassionate expression on his face, his large glistening eyes, so very beautiful as only eyes can be, and filled with sorrow as he looked at her. His beard and mustache were now very black and thick and like those of saints in pictures. His forehead was exquisitely shaped where the hair grew back from it, parted in the center with the smallest widow's peak.
Yes, a beautiful being, undeniably beautiful. Maybe he wasn't there. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe it was all imagined that he had finally come back.
"No, my darling dear, I love you," he whispered. Or did he?
As he drew closer, she realized she was looking at his mouth. There had been a subtle change to his mouth. It was more a man's mouth, perhaps, pink and decisively molded. A mouth had to be that way to hold its own beneath the dark glossy mustache, above the curling close-cut locks of the beard.
She turned away as he bent down. His warm fingers wound around her upper arms, and his lips grazed her cheek. He touched her breasts with his large hand, rubbing the nipples, and the unwelcome sensation ran through her. No dream. His hands. She could have lost consciousness to shut it out. But she was there, helpless, and she couldn't stop it or get away.
It was as degrading as anything else to feel this sudden utter joy that he was here, to kindle beneath his fingers as if he were a lover, not a jailer, to rise out of her isolation towards any kindness or gentleness proffered by the captor in a swoon.
"My darling, my darling." He rested his head on her belly, nuzzled his face into the skin, oblivious to the filth of the bed, humming, whispering, and then he gave off a loud cry, and drawing up began to dance, round and round, a jig with one leg lifted, singing and clapping his hands. He seemed to be in ecstasy! Oh, how many times had she seen him do it, but never with such gusto. And what a curious spectacle it was. So delicate were his long arms, his straight shoulders; his wrists seemed double the length of those of a normal man.
