An Unsettling Appearance
15
The next morning undid all the blissful feelings of the night before.
Willi and Bernie, arriving early for one last practice, got into a spittle-emitting argument when Bernie turned in his worst performance in months. Then Willi and Hartgrave topped that by about twenty decibels when Hartgrave recommended delaying their strike-force operation. In the interest of getting everyone back on the same page, Emily suggested that what they needed was a stirring speech—and Hartgrave’s response was so cutting, she couldn’t trust herself to speak to him for an hour.
What put an end to it all was the frightening sound of an SOS .
Everyone crowded around Hartgrave’s cell phone. Two dots— red dots—on what was clearly the part of town just outside campus.
Willi grabbed Hartgrave’s arm. “Schei?e!”
Bernie’s voice shook as he said, “How did they know?”—just as she asked what she thought was the far more critical question: “What can we do?”
“Quiet!” Hartgrave pulled his phone away. “Sit, all of you!”
She stumbled to the real bed, Bernie heading for the other. Willi, a wild look in his eyes, half-sat on the chair.
“It’s Crawford and Shaw,” Hartgrave said, pacing. “Now listen: This is what we’ll do. We’re going to eat lunch. We are ,” he added when Willi made to object. “We’re going to eat, wait for it to settle and then proceed with the plan.”
“But it’s only half-past five in Cornwall.” Bernie stole an anxious glance at her. “You’ll lose all the advantage of the time difference. Everyone in the house will still be awake.”
“I know,” Hartgrave snapped. “Believe me, I know. But they’ll assume you two are connected with me in some way and will be extra eager to follow wherever you go, which is something. Daggett, are you with me?”
“Yes,” she said, heart racing.
Their meal was preternaturally quiet. Bernie and Willi conjured chairs around the stone table and ate there, looking one more time at their separate lists of coordinates that appeared safe for magical travel. Hartgrave sat next to her on the bed, phone balanced on his thigh .
She chewed a sandwich Willi had brought, unable to taste it at all, and watched the red dots move up Main Street—the road running alongside a large part of campus. Where would Crawford and Shaw go first? Administration? The IT building?
But instead of crossing onto campus, the pair turned the other direction. Down Grand Avenue. And there, half a block in, they stopped.
Of all the epiphanies she’d ever had, this was by far the worst.
Her street. Her house, the one she’d rented for three months. They weren’t looking for Hartgrave—they were looking for her .
She clutched his arm, horror rendering her temporarily speechless. He got one look at her and turned back to the map, eyes wide.
“Your place,” he said, keeping his voice down. “That was your place, wasn’t it?”
“How—how could they have ... ?”
“I don’t know,” he said, despair shot through each clipped word.
She hadn’t appreciated just how much easier it was to be brave when you were facing evil anonymously and could fade back into the woodwork when done. That realization struck her now with all the force of a blow to the chest.
“What am I going to do?” Her whispered words were frantic. Her hands shook. She was trying to hold it together, and failing.
“I’ll think of something,” he said. He did not sound confident .
“Oh God—oh God, oh God ...”
“Don’t,” he said, voice sharp. “Daggett—”
“You knew I was being stupid all along.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “Oh yes, I’m so courageous, I can’t wait for an adventure, just give me a chance to prove what a hero I am.”
He moved her hands away from her face—by her sleeved elbows—and gave her a measuring look. “Do you still want to go through with it?”
“I don’t have much of a choice now!”
“There’s always a choice.”
She supposed he was right. She could abandon her job, flee the state, change her name. Not an appealing idea, but neither was death. She thought about a future a bit like Hartgrave’s past—in hiding, except with no plans for valiant action. She glanced at Willi and Bernie, oblivious to her crisis of faith, and turned back to Hartgrave, whose expression revealed nothing of what he wanted to hear.
“I’m not backing out,” she said. “I can run and hide just as well after as before. This is important. You need me.”
“I do.” The look he gave her suggested he wasn’t just talking about the mission. “And I have no intention of letting them get their hands on you.”
Willi, still at the table, said, “Is it time?”
“Time,” Hartgrave muttered, and dug into a pocket as he called out, “One more minute.”
He produced a delicate watch, its face an antique map. For her? Rather than simply giving it to her, he took her hand—gingerly—and put it on .
“Synchronized with mine,” he said.
“It’s beautiful,” she said hesitantly, “but won’t I just ruin it?”
“It’s not a quartz watch. No microchips.”
She gave him the closest approximation of a smile she could manage. “Brilliant.”
A flurry of final preparations followed. Everyone took a turn in the bathroom, like a warped version of a nursery-school field trip. Hartgrave checked Bernie and Willi’s cell phones—both set to the tracking program—and connected them in a three-way call. The men slipped on earpieces, testing that they could hear each other.
The next step was leaving. She wrapped her arms around her stomach, looking to Hartgrave for the signal.
“I have it on good authority,” he said, leaning against the door, “that I should give a rousing speech.”
Well, that was one way to restrain fear. Drown it in embarrassment.
“Remember that lives are at stake,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s rousing, but it’s to the point. Remember too that it won’t do the cause a bit of good to get ourselves killed, so the second you think you’re in over your head, you come back here. Understood?”
Bernie nodded. Willi simply crossed his arms, which tipped her back toward panic. Was he going to deviate from the plan?
Hartgrave, for his part, must have seen nothing alarming. He clasped Willi’s arm and said, “Viel Glück .”
And after all, it wasn’t Willi’s performance in this effort that offered the best reason for apprehension. She threw her arms around Bernie, who looked strange without one of his oddball hats pulled over his salt-and-pepper hair.
“Please be careful,” she whispered, avoiding his skin.
He gave her a pat on the back. “Likewise.”
Willi, on tap to go first, had his arms outstretched, preparing for the jump. Hartgrave put a hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”
He opened the door. With a shimmer, Willi disappeared.
Hartgrave yanked the heavy door back into its frame and the three of them crowded together, his screen still zeroed in on Grand Avenue while Bernie’s showed continental Europe.
Five seconds later—Emily counted it off in her head—a green dot appeared on Bernie’s map.
For a long, awful minute, nothing happened and no one spoke. Then Willi jumped in quick succession from France to Denmark to Sweden, where he paused as planned. Baiting the hook.
Five more minutes went by, each an age.
“Come on,” Hartgrave muttered at last, staring at the two red dots—still on Grand Avenue.
“Maybe I should jump now,” Bernie said. He wiped beads of sweat off his forehead with a trembling hand. “Maybe if there’s two of us—”
“No. We’ve got to give them time. Let them discuss it, let them check in with Kincaid.”
Another minute passed. Then another, and another. Their plan wasn’t working .
Hartgrave paced back and forth, eyes never leaving his screen. “Willi—start jumping again. This time, don’t stop.”
The green dot disappeared and reappeared in five-second increments. Switzerland. Germany. Italy. Greece.
Hartgrave flipped back and forth between Kincaid in Cornwall and the two women on Grand Avenue, none of them budging.
Emily glanced at him, heart in her throat, and saw nothing to reassure her. He looked to be in danger of bursting a blood vessel.
“Oh, if it’s me , you’ll drop everything and come blazing out,” he shouted at the two red dots on his phone, “but otherwise you’re perfectly happy faffing around an obviously empty house! Verdammte Schei?e, warum hauen die nicht endlich ab —”
As one, the red dots vanished from Grand Avenue.
“Willi!” he bellowed. “They’re coming! I think .”
She had no time to dread that Willi would react too slowly and be overtaken on the spot, for he was gone before Crawford and Shaw appeared there. Which only meant that now every five seconds would bring new reason for fear.
Just as she urgently needed to be calm.
She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing fingers into her ears for good measure when Hartgrave gave Bernie last-minute instructions. The creak of the door opening and the irrevocable thunk of it banging shut, however, were impossible to block out .
She leaned into Hartgrave, shivering, keeping her eyes closed despite the overwhelming urge to see that Bernie had made it to Melbourne as planned. Grim thoughts offered themselves up at a ferocious pace—what if Kincaid didn’t go, suspecting a trap? What if Kincaid did go and caught Bernie, as Hartgrave had so many times before? What if she wasted precious time failing to compose herself, dooming them all?
Desperate, she cast backwards for a nice memory—anything—and came up with the less-than-ideal one of Bernie quoting Shakespeare. Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.
Improbably, that worked.
She took a deep breath and felt her heartbeat slow. She took several more, her command of herself increasing, and when she grasped Hartgrave’s hand as a test, it hardly stung at all. She was ready, at least. She had no control over what Kincaid decided to do, but if by chance he took their bait—
“Ballantine!” Hartgrave’s voice was sharp with warning. “Now!”
Her eyes flew open involuntarily, just in time to see him turn the doorknob. Then it disappeared—along with everything else—as he pulled her into the jump.