EIGHT

In the bathroom, he shed his shirt and began to wipe himself down. The only tattoo he ever had was an equation known as the Hodge conjecture and was in neat black characters over his left breast, backward so he could see it in the mirror every day.

The Hodge Conjecture was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. Presented to the International Congress of Mathematics in 1950 by William Vallance Douglas Hodge, the equation became one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems and came with a million-dollar award for anyone who could prove or disprove the conjecture. The Hodge conjecture had been the subject of his own master’s thesis, and it was his lifelong goal to solve it. He could still hear his freshman professor introducing the concept of topical space and interdimensional holes: “Cohomology is an invariant of a topological space, formally ‘dual’ to homology, and so it detects holes in a space. Cohomology has more algebraic structure than homology, making it into a graded ring, whereas homology is just a graded abelian group invariant of a space.”

Seeing it now, he realized that for the last few days, it had been the furthest thing from his mind. Instead of pure math, he’d been so focused on the reality of a ten-thousand-year cover-up.

An older man entered the bathroom, glanced at him, then relieved himself in a urinal.

Ethan bent over and, after soaping his hands, vigorously lathered his face. Facts about giants and equations equally lathered his thoughts. He was so into cleaning himself and thinking about everything giants that he almost didn’t register the sharp steel blade against the base of his spine.

“I could paralyze you with a flick of my wrist,” came a voice like New Jersey gravel.

Ethan cleared the soap from around his eyes and stared into the mirror.

The old man stood behind him. Wearing a plaid shirt tucked into plaid pants and wearing black socks with sandals, he looked anything but a killer. But the knife in his hand and the roughness of his voice said something else.

“I saw you walking toward the bathroom and couldn’t believe my luck. Your face is all over the network.”

Ethan searched for something to say and could only come up with: “What network?”

The old man smiled, revealing a gold-capped tooth. “Us old-timers may be out of the business, but it doesn’t mean we still don’t have our uses. Let’s just say that there are some of us who can be relied on when a BOLO goes out. That means be on the lookout, chum, and I’m always on the lookout.”

“Who—who are you?” Ethan said, still bent over.

“I’m just a retired longshoreman heading to Yuma to spend a few months with an old girlfriend in her RV. I hadn’t planned on you falling into my lap, but now that you are here, I can add to my retirement.”

“Can I straighten up, please?”

“Sure, just do it slowly. The wanted says dead or alive. You sure must have done something to piss someone off.”

Just then the door opened and a Hispanic man in his early thirties wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers shirt came in. When he saw what was going on he stopped cold and shot Ethan a worried glance.

“Get out of here,” said the old man. “Police business.”

The man backed slowly out the door.

When the door closed, the guy with the knife asked, “We need to hurry and finish this.”

“How much are they paying you?”

“Ten grand for you. Twenty-five if I can get that pretty girl you’re supposed to be traveling with, as well. I’ll tell you what. You tell me which car is yours and I won’t kill you two. You don’t tell me, I’ll kill you right here and then go looking for her. It shouldn’t be too hard.”

The door opened again, but this time it was Shanny, and she wasn’t happy.

“Who are you calling a pretty girl?” she said.

“Looks like you made it easy for this old man.”

“Only thing that’s going to be easy is kicking your ass.” She eyed the knife. “Is that all you have?” She pulled her hand out from behind her back, revealing the dual-purpose long-handled hatchet with a climbing pick on the other side of the thick stainless steel blade.

The old guy chuckled.

“What’s a young girl like you going to do with a thing like that?”

She took three quick steps and buried the spike in his chest. “That,” she said flatly.

She took the knife from the man’s hands, his grip gone loose from the blow. She tossed it into one of the toilets, then grabbed the man and sat him down on the other. She closed the door behind her and grabbed Ethan, who’d been completely frozen in place.

Two minutes later he was in the back seat that she’d reconfigured when he’d been in the bathroom, and she was driving, the Denali making distance from the rest stop fast.

It wasn’t until five minutes later that he asked, “Did you kill him?”

Her jaw was clenched when she said, “I don’t know.”

He waited, then said, “You moved so fast. So sure. You saved my life, Shanny.”

She nodded, then pulled off the next exit. She drove down a couple of side streets until she found a park.

“Here, help me unload everything,” she said. “I’m going to get us a new vehicle.”

“We don’t to,” he said, putting on a clean shirt. “He didn’t know what we were driving. He just saw me and made his move.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then she did break down. She cried silently, both hands on the wheel, her head between her arms.

Ethan got out, then got into the passenger seat. He put his hand on her back and rubbed and repeated over and over, “You saved me. It’s okay. You saved me.”

After a minute or two, she stopped crying. She found a napkin from a fast-food restaurant in the door pocket, and used it to wipe her eyes and blow her nose.

When she straightened, Ethan took his hand away.

“You know, I’ve been through army combatives training. I’m a certified instructor. I’ve taken classes in Filipino knife fighting. I’ve been shot at. I’ve even been blown up once. I spent thirteen total months in combat and never ever had to punch, or knife, or shoot at anyone.”

“This was your first time?”

She nodded, eyes closed.

“You seemed so sure of yourself. I don’t think that man even thought you were going to do what you did. One moment you were standing there, the next he had a pike in his chest.”

She turned to him, her eyes wide. “I thought he was going to kill you. I—I couldn’t let that happen. I—I—”

“Thank you,” he said, brushing a stray hair out of her face. He kissed her gently. “Why is it that we parted ways?” he asked.

“I needed time to see if my feelings were real. I had a commitment to the army and figured I’d see whether I still loved you after a year or two.”

“And I didn’t want you to go. I wanted you to stay by me.”

She nodded, then shook her head. “I needed to make sure that I knew who I was—that I had an identity that wasn’t just your partner.”

“Captain Witherspoon,” he said.

She nodded, grinning slightly.

“What size ships can you steer? Battleships? Destroyers?” he asked.

“Those are navy captains. We don’t have ships in the—” She saw the grin on his face and punched him ever so lightly in the shoulder.

In the end, they did change cars. They unloaded all their gear next to a table in the park. She left Ethan and in thirty minutes came back with a red Dodge Magnum station wagon with heavily tinted windows. They loaded their stuff back inside, this time completely filling the space in the back, and headed back toward the interstate.

She’d found the most sketchy used-car dealership she could, then left the much more expensive Denali as collateral for her test drive. They’d soon find out that it wasn’t a test drive. It was a trade.