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Simone said finally, “I’m not good at things like that. It ends. It always ends. For his sake, for mine.” After a moment: “The same for you, I’m thinking.”
“The same.”
She said, “I was married. Briefly. My idea. I was young. Not a good decision.”
He was thinking of her time in Africa.
Circumstances changed …
A shake of his head explained that he had never married.
She said, “There are lines we have to live within. People like us. This is awfully philosophical, isn’t it?”
He gave another smile. “But true.”
A siren sounded in the distance. It got closer. He wasn’t troubled and it was clear she wasn’t either. If anybody were to come for them, they wouldn’t announce it.
The police car or ambulance sound Dopplered into the lower, departing tone and eventually faded.
He looked at his watch.
He needed to move on to the next step.
Time, counting down.
Always, always …
He asked, “Do you know Prague?”
“We did a job there, my team. I would have liked to stay for a while. But we needed to evac.”
“In Old Town Square there’s a medieval astronomical clock. The Orloj. Tourists come to see it. Lots of tourists. Big crowds on the weekends. Hard for surveillance to see anything. I’ll be there next year. The first Saturday in May.”
She reached for his hand. The grip, fingers entwined, was far more intimate than a kiss.
In the rearview mirror, he believed he saw someone glancing at the SUV, the pose reminding him of the man he’d seen in the monitor at the mouth of Hamilton Court last night. He was carrying something, a suitcase, Hale believed.
He turned to look directly.
But the figure was gone.
Now that he was turned fully around, he lifted his backpack from the floor. He reached inside.
He extracted a white box, six by six by two inches. It was closed and fixed with a rubber band. He handed this to her. She frowned, then opened the lid.
And lifted out the bone clock, the one he’d told her about, the one the Russian political prisoner had made.
“Ah.” She studied it for a long moment. “I was going to bring something for you. A wheel, the kind I use in my steam engines. Our wheels are real wheels.”
“Not gears pretending to be something else.”
A glance into his eyes.
He showed her how to set the time and where the switch was that released the tiny weights. He moved it now.
She held the clock to her ear and seemed to find the ticking pleasant. As he always did.
She reboxed the gift, and slipped it into her own backpack, where he saw the grip of a large semiautomatic pistol. She climbedout of the car and bent down to speak to him through the open door. “You’re doing it now?”
