Sometime during that week—before Hitch arrived, before events began to tumble out of control—Ashlee said, in the middle of a phone conversation, “You know the Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol?”
“What about it?”
“I was thinking about Kuin and the Chronoliths and all that. You know in Dickens where Scrooge goes into the future and sees his own funeral? And he says to the ghost, ‘Are these the shades of things that must be, or things that may be?’ Or something like that?”
“Right,” I said.
“So the Chronoliths, Scott, are they must be or may be?”
I told her no one was certain about that. But if I understood Sue correctly, the events marked by the already existing Chronoliths were must-bes in one form or
another. There was no bright alternative future in which we stopped Kuin before his conquests and made the Chronoliths into harmless free-floating paradoxes. Kuin would conquer Chumphon, Thailand, Vietnam, Southeast Asia; time might be fluid, but the monuments themselves were immutable and fundamental.
Then why not despair? I suppose Sue’s answer would be that the battle wasn’t finished. Much of the civilized world was still free of Chronoliths, which suggested that Kuin’s conquests were a steplike process with gains and reversals. There had not yet been a Chronolith on North American soil. Maybe there never would be, if we did the right thing. Whatever the right thing was.
Sue had broached to me the idea of “negative feedback.” If what Kuin was doing with the Chronoliths represented a kind of positive feedback—a signal reinforced and amplified through time and human expectation—then the solution might be the opposite. A Chronolith that appeared and was subsequently destroyed would cast doubt on the process; the cancerous impression of Kuin’s invincibility would be, if not shattered, at least weakened.
He might take half the Earth, but not our half.
That was Sue Chopra’s faith. I hoped she was right. I was prepared to act on that assumption.
In all honesty, however, I cannot say that I believed it.
Well, then, here was Hitch Paley, stepping out of a battered Sony compact (which by all rights should have been a motorbike) into the motel parking lot. We had agreed to meet at nine this morning. He was fifteen minutes late. In a sense, ten years late.
He hadn’t changed much. I recognized him immediately, even from a dozen yards away under the shade of the coffee shop awning. I was delighted and I was afraid.
He wore a full beard and a dung-green leather jacket. He had put on a little weight, which only served to emphasize his broad nose, his high cheekbones, the Neanderthal slope of his skull. He
spotted me, walked bandy-legged across the sunny space between us, and put out his huge right hand.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You got that package I asked you to pick up?”
I muttered something about the package; he grinned and slapped me on the back and said, “I’m just shitting you, Scotty; we’ll talk about that later.” We went into the coffee shop and occupied a booth.
Of course Sue Chopra had known about Hitch. All my efforts on his behalf—to avoid implicating him during the polygraph interview, for instance—had been obvious and futile. Hitch was one of Sue’s so-called primary observers, and he must have figured in her connect-the-dots project from the very beginning. Hitch had been deep into the tau turbulence, certainly as deep as I had been.
I had assumed Hitch would also be unfindable, but he had probably hung around Chumphon a little longer than he might have had he understood just how closely witnesses were being scrutinized—long enough for the FBI to target his internet signature or even plant a locator on him. In any case, they had found him.
They had found him, and Sue had offered him the alternative of prompt arrest or a job. Hitch had made the wise choice.
“It’s not exactly an office job,” he said. “Good pay, travel, no strings. Supposedly a clean criminal record at the end of it, though the end is nowhere in sight. First thing they did was send me around the Pacific Rim hunting rumors about Kuin, not that anything substantial came of it. But I been busy, Scotty. Scouting touchdown sites in, you know, Ankara, Istanbul, doing little unofficial things here and there, talking to Kuinists—lately, talking to the homegrown kind. Copperheads and hajists.”
“You’re a spy?”
He gave me a sour look. “Right, I’m a spy. I drink martinis and play a lot of baccarat.”
“But you know about the haj thing.”
“I know more about the ‘haj thing’ than most people. I’ve been inside it. And I will do whatever I can to help you find Kait.”
I sat back in the booth, wondering if this was what I wanted. If this was wise.
“You know,” Hitch said, “when I think of Kaitlin, I still think of her at Chumphon. The way she’d run down the tide line in that pink one-piece Janice liked to dress her in, leaving these footprints in the sand like little bitty bird footprints, heel-and-toe. We should have taken better care of her, Scotty.”
He said “we” to be friendly. He was talking about me.
Hitch did not reminisce much, nor did he waste time. He had already gotten the details of the situation from Ramone Dudley, and I added what little I had personally learned while we stared at the coffee shop menus.
He said, “Mexico is a good bet. But we have to know more than we do before we come to any conclusions.”
He suggested another talk with Whit Delahunt. I agreed, on the condition that we not alarm Janice unduly. “And we should talk to Ashlee Mills, too. If she’s home, we could pick her up on the way to see Whit.”
“Not good,” Hitch said, “to get too many people involved here.”
“Ashlee’s as involved as I am. She’s been more helpful than the police, actually.”
“You vouch for her, Scotty?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He looked at me critically. “You haven’t been eating or sleeping much, it looks like.”
“It shows?”
“Maybe you ought to try the steak and eggs.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Steak and eggs, Scotty. For Kait’s sake, let’s say.”
I didn’t want the food, but it looked good when the waitress delivered it. I had surprisingly little trouble emptying the plate.
“Feel better?” Hitch asked.
“What I feel is the hardening of my arteries.”
“Bullshit. You need the protein. We have some work ahead of us, and not just today.”
I heard myself say, “Can we really get her back?”
“We’ll get her back. Count on it.”
Ashlee did a double take when she saw Hitch Paley for the first time, then shot me a look: You have friends like this?
Which was fair enough. Hitch still looked like a small-time criminal—he could have passed for a drug dealer à la Cheever Cox, or maybe the kind of bulky individual who collects on bad debts. I sketched out some of our past and repeated some of what Hitch had told me. Ashlee nodded but clearly continued to suspect that Hitch was something more than Sue Chopra’s ears on the underworld.
She took me aside and said, “Can he help us find Kait and Adam? That’s all I really need to know.”
“I think he can.”
“Then let’s go see this Whitman Delahunt.”
I drove. The afternoon air was gently breezy, the sky raked with high cloud. Hitch was silent in the car. Ashlee hummed a tune I recognized as an old Lux Ebone song, something sad. Something from the time when songs still mattered, when everyone knew the same songs. This year’s popular songs all sounded like marching music to me: drums and cymbals and trumpet notes drowning in their own echoes. But I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.
Hitch had spotted the nicotine stains on Ashlee’s fingers. “You can go ahead and smoke,” he said, “I don’t give a fuck.”
The house where Whit and Janice lived had not aged especially gracefully, nor had the neighborhood it inhabited, but both were still well above the national average. People here could afford to have their trash hauled away, even during the collectors’ strike. The lawns were green. Here and there, rust-speckled landscape robots crawled among the hedges like sluggish armadillos. If you squinted a little, it looked like the last ten years hadn’t happened.
Whitmam answered the door and recoiled when he saw me. He didn’t like the looks of Hitch or Ashlee, either. His expression turned blank and he said, “Janice is upstairs, Scott. Do you want me to call her?”
“We just want to ask you a couple of questions,” I said. “Janice doesn’t need to be involved.”
He clearly didn’t want to invite us in, but he may also have been reluctant to discuss his Copperhead politics in front of any passing neighbors. We stepped into the cool shade of the house. I introduced Hitch and Ashlee without being specific about why I had brought them. When we were away from the door, Hitch took the initiative. He said, “Scotty told me about the club you belong to, Mr. Delahunt. What we need now is a list of the other adult members.”
“I already gave that to the police.”
“Yeah, but we need it too.”
“You have no right to make such a demand.”
“No,” Hitch said, “and you’re not obliged to give it to us, but it will help us find Kaitlin.”
“I doubt that.” Whit turned to me. “I could have talked to the police about you, Scott. I wish I had.”
“It’s okay,” I said, “I talked to them myself.”
“You’ll be talking to them again if you persist in—”
“In what,” Hitch interrupted, “trying to save your daughter from this mess she got herself into?”
Whit looked like he wanted to stamp his foot. “I don’t even know you! What do you have to do with Kaitlin?”
Hitch smiled faintly. “She used to have a scar under her left knee where she fell on a broken bottle outside the Haat Thai. Does she still have that scar, Mr. Delahunt?”
Whit opened his mouth to answer, but he was interrupted:
“Yes.”
Janice’s voice. It came from the stairway. She had been listening. She came the rest of the way down, regal in her grief. “It’s still there. But it’s mostly faded. Hi, Hitch.”
This time Hitch’s smile was genuine. “Janice,” he said.
“You’re helping Scott look for Kaitlin?”
He said he was.
“That’s good, then. Whit, would you give these people the information they want?”
“That’s absurd. They can’t come here and make this kind of demand.”
“It sounded more like a request. But they might help Kait, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”
Whit choked back a protest. There was a ferocity hidden in Janice’s voice, an old and potent anger. Maybe Hitch and Ashlee didn’t hear it, but I did. And so did Whit.
It took a while, but he gave us a mostly-legible handwritten list of names, addresses, terminal numbers.
“Just keep my name out of it,” he muttered.
Hitch gave Janice a big hug and Janice returned it. She had never much cared for Hitch Paley, probably for good reason, but the fact that he was here and searching for Kait must have redeemed him in her eyes. She took my hand as we were leaving and said, “Thank you, Scott. I mean it. I’m sorry about what I said a few days ago.”
“Don’t be.”
“The police are still telling us Kait’s in town. But she’s not, is she?”
“Probably not.”
“God, Scott, it’s just so—” She couldn’t find a word for it. She
put her hand to her mouth. “Be careful,” she said. “I mean, find her, but … you be careful.”
I promised her I would.
When we left the house Hitch said, “Does Janice know she’s married to an asshole?”
“She’s beginning to suspect,” I said.
We went to Ashlee’s for an evening meal and to plot strategy.
I helped Ash in the kitchen while Hitch used his pocket terminal to make a few calls. Ashlee put together a rice and chicken dish she called “poverty pilaf,” cubing the raw chicken neatly with a cheap steel cleaver. She asked me how long I’d been married to Janice.
“About five years,” I said. “We were both very young.”
“So you’ve been divorced a long time.”
“It doesn’t seem so long sometimes.”
“She strikes me as a very together person.”
“Together if not always very flexible. This has been hard on her.”
“She’s pretty lucky, living the life she does. She ought to appreciate that.”
“I don’t think she feels very lucky right now.”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“I understand, Ashlee.”
“Putting my fucking foot in it again.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes.
“Can I chop those carrots for you?”
She seasoned the pilaf, meticulously and sensibly. We rejoined Hitch while it baked.
Hitch had rested his big booted feet on Ashlee’s coffee table. “Here’s what we have,” he said. “This is from Whitman and a couple of other sources including the cop, Ramone Dudley. Whit’s bullshit Copperhead club has twenty-eight regular dues-paying members, and ten of them are upper management from the company he works at, so maybe he’s right about joining for career reasons. Twenty-eight
adults, of whom eighteen are single or childless couples. Ten members have kids of various ages but only nine actually introduced their offspring to the Youth Group. Including a pair of sibs, that’s ten kids plus six outsiders like Adam who applied independently. But there was a core group of eight who were deeply involved, including Kait and Adam. They’re the ones who disappeared.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So let’s assume they left town. They would have been too conspicuous on a plane or a bus, given that they’re traveling together. I doubt the suburban contingent would have agreed to hitchhike, considering the number of fucked-up adults already on the road. So that leaves private transportation. And probably something fairly big. You can stuff eight people into a landau, but not without attracting attention and making everybody grouchy.”
“This is pretty conjectural,” I said.
“Okay, but follow me for a minute. If they’re driving, what are they driving?”
Ashlee said, “Some of these kids must own cars.”
“Right. And Ramone Dudley looked into that. Four of the eight do have vehicles registered to their names, but the vehicles are all accounted for. None of the parents reported a stolen car, and in fact pretty much every auto theft in the city during the time these kids took off was either clearly professional or a joyride that ended with the vehicle trashed or burned. Stealing a car isn’t as easy as it used to be. Even if you get past the personalized locks, every car assembled or imported in the last ten years routinely broadcasts its serial number and GPS coordinates. Mostly people use it to find their car in a parking lot, but it also complicates auto theft considerably. A modern car thief is a technician with a lot of different cracking skills, not a kid out of high school.”
“So they didn’t use one of their own cars and they didn’t steal one,” Ashlee said. “Great. That leaves nothing. Maybe they are still in town.”
“That’s what Ramone Dudley thinks, but it doesn’t make any
sense. These kids are pretty obviously on a haj. So I asked Dudley to check the four cars they own, a second time. So he did.”
“Ah—he found something?”
“Nope. Nothing’s changed. Three of the vehicles are still exactly where they’ve been parked for the last week. Only one’s been moved at all, and only for round trips to the local grocery pickup, not more than twenty miles on the odometer since the disappearance. The kid left a set of keys with his mom.”
“So we’re no farther ahead.”
“Except for one thing. This mom who’s driving her kid’s car to the store. On Whit’s list she’s Eleanor Helvig, member in good standing of the Copperhead club along with her husband Jeffrey. Jeffrey is a junior VP at Clarion Pharmaceuticals, a couple of levels above Whit. Jeff’s making pretty good money these days and there are three vehicles registered to the family: his, his wife’s, and his kid’s. Nice cars, too. A couple of Daimlers and a secondhand Edison for Jeff Jr.”
“So?”
“So why is the wife driving the Edison for groceries, when her Daimler’s a big utility vehicle with lots of room in the back?”
Ashlee said, “Could be all kinds of reasons.”
“Could be … but I think we should ask her, don’t you?”
Dinner was excellent—I told Ashlee so—but we couldn’t stay to savor it. Ashlee elected to stay home while Hitch and I did the leg work, on the condition that we would call her as soon as we learned anything.
In the car I said, “About that package …”
“Right, the package. Forget about it, Scotty.”
“I’m not going to forget an old debt. You fronted me the cash to leave Thailand. All I owed you was a favor, and it didn’t happen.”
“Yeah, but you tried, right?”
“I went to the place you told me about.”
“Easy’s?” Hitch was grinning now, the kind of grin that used to make me deeply uncomfortable (and was having that effect again).
I said, “I went to Easy’s, but—”
“You mentioned my name to the guy there?”
“Yeah—”
“Old guy, gray-haired, kinda tall, coffee-colored?”
“Sounds like the man. But there was no package, Hitch.”
“What, he told you that?”
“Uh-huh.” “Did he tell you that in a gentle way?”
“Far from it.”
“Got a little irritated, did he?”
“Practically reached for a gun.”
Hitch was nodding. “Good … good.”
“Good? So the package was late, or what?”
“No. Scotty, there never was any package.”
“The one you told me to pick up for you—?”
“No such object. Sorry.”
I said, “But the money you gave me—”
“Mainly, no offense, but I thought you’d be safer back in Minneapolis. I mean, there you were, stuck on the beach, Janice and Kaitlin gone, and you were starting to drink pretty heavy, and Chumphon wasn’t a good place to be a drunk American, especially with all the press guys getting rolled on a regular basis. So I took pity on you. I gave you the money. I had it to spare: Business was good. But I didn’t think you’d take it as a gift and I didn’t want to call it a loan because I didn’t want you trying to find me and pay it back like a good scout. Which, admit it, you would have. So I made up this ‘package’ thing.”
“You made it up?”
“I’m sorry, Scotty, I guess you thought you were a drug mule or something, but that kinda appealed to my sense of humor, too.
Knowing your whole college-educated clean-cut image of yourself, I mean. I thought a little moral dilemma might put some variety into your life.”
“No,” I said, “this is bullshit. The guy at Easy’s recognized your name … and you just described him to me.”
I was driving into the sunset and the lights on the dash were just starting to brighten. The air coming in the window was cool and relatively sweet. Hitch took his time answering.
Then he said, “Let me tell you a little story, Scotty. When I was a kid I lived in Roxbury with my mom and my little sister. We were poor, but that was back when the relief money was enough to get you by if you were careful about things. It wasn’t especially bad for me, or at least I didn’t know any better than to be happy with what I had, plus maybe a little shoplifting on the side. But my mom was a lonely woman, and when I was sixteen she married this tough old piece of shit named Easy G. Tobin. Easy ran a mail pickup and sold coke and meth out the back door. I will say for Easy that he never actually hit her—or me or my sister, either. He wasn’t a monster. He kept his drug business away from the house, too. But he was mean. He talked mean. He was smart enough that he never had to raise his voice, he could cut you down with just a few words, because he had the talent for knowing what you hated about yourself. He did that to me and he did that to my sister, but we were the minor leagues. Mainly he did it to my mom, and by the time I was ready to leave home a couple years later I had seen more of her tears than I cared to. She wanted to get rid of him but she didn’t know how, and Easy had a couple of other ladies on the side. So me and a few of my friends, we followed Easy to one of his ladyfriends’ houses and we went in there and punished him a little bit. We didn’t, you know, beat him senseless, but we made him scared and we kicked him around some and we told him to get his ass out of my mom’s house or we’d do worse than that. He said that was okay with him, he was sick of me and my sister and he had used up my mom—his words—and he meant to leave anyhow, and I said that was fine
as long he did it, and I would be keeping my eye on him. He said, ‘I’ll forget your name in a week, you little shit,’ and I said he’d hear from me now and then and he’d better not forget my name because I wouldn’t forget his. Well, we left it at that. But I made it a point for some years to see that he did come across my name, at least now and then, every once in a while. A card, a phone call, like a negative Hallmark moment. Just to keep him on his toes. I guess he remembered me, huh, Scotty?”
I said, “He could have killed me.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think it was likely. Besides, that was a fair piece of change I gave you. I figured you understood it might entail a little bit of risk.”
“God damn,” I said faintly.
“And, see? This way, you don’t have to thank me.”
We were lucky enough to find Mrs. Jeffrey Helvig home alone.
She came to the door in casual clothes, wary as soon as she saw us in the porch light. We told her it was about her son, Jeff Jr. She told us she had already talked to the police and we certainly didn’t look like police to her, so who were we and what did we really want?
I showed her enough ID to establish that I was Kaitlin’s father. She knew Janice and Whit, though not very well, and had met Kait on more than one occasion. When I made it clear that I wanted to talk about Kaitlin she relented and asked us in, though she was clearly not happy about it.
The house was meticulously clean. Eleanor Helvig was fond of cork coasters and lace antimacassars. A dust precipitator hummed in one corner of the living room. She stood conspicuously next to the home security panel, where a touch of her finger would narrowcast an alarm and a camera view to the local police. We were probably already being recorded. She was not afraid of us, I thought, but she was deeply wary.
She said, “I know what you’re going through, Mr. Warden. I’m
going through it myself. You understand if I’m not anxious to talk about Jeff’s disappearance yet again.”
She was defending herself against some accusation not yet made. I thought about that. Her husband was a Copperhead—a true believer, according to Whit. She had accompanied him to most but not all of the meetings. She would probably echo his opinions but she might not be deeply or genuinely convinced of them. I hoped not.
I said, “Would it surprise you, Mrs. Helvig, if I told you it looks like your son and his friends are on a haj?”
She blinked. “It would offend me, certainly. Using that word in that way is an insult to the Muslim faith, not to mention a great many sincere young people.”
“Sincere young people like Jeff?”
“I hope Jeff is sincere, but I won’t accept a facile explanation of what’s happened to him. I should tell you honestly that I’m skeptical of absentee fathers who rediscover their children in times of crisis. But that’s the kind of society we live in, isn’t it? People who think of parenthood as a genetic merger, not a sacred bond.”
Hitch said, “You think Kuin will make that better?”
She stared back at him defiantly. “I believe he could hardly make it worse.”
“Do you know what a haj is, Mrs. Helvig?”
“I told you, I don’t like that word—”
“But a lot of people use it. Including a lot of idealistic children. I’ve seen a few. You’re right, it’s a rough world we live in, and it’s hard on the children in particular. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen haj kids butchered by the side of the road. Children, Mrs. Helvig, raped and killed. They’re young and they may be idealistic, but they’re also very naive about what it takes to survive outside of suburban Minneapolis.”
Eleanor Helvig blanched. (I believe I did, too.) She said to Hitch, “Who are you?”
“A friend of Kaitlin. Did you ever meet Kait, Mrs. Helvig?”
“She came by the house once or twice, I think …”
“I’m sure your Jeff is a strong young man, but what about Kaitlin? How do you think she’ll do out there, Mrs. Helvig?”
“I don’t—”
“Out there on the road, I mean, with all the homeless men and soldiers. Because if these kids did go off on a haj, they’d be safer in a car. Even Jeff.”
“Jeff can take care of himself,” Eleanor Helvig whispered.
“You wouldn’t want him hitchhiking, would you?”
“Of course not—”
“Where’s your husband’s car, Mrs. Helvig?”
“He took it to work. He’s not home yet, but—”
“And Jeff’s car?”
“In the garage.”
“And yours?”
She hesitated just long enough to confirm Hitch’s suspicions. “In for repairs.”
“At what garage, exactly?”
She didn’t answer.
“We don’t have to discuss this,” Hitch said, “with the police.”
“He’s safer in the car. You said so yourself.”
She was whispering now.
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“Jeff Jr. didn’t talk about the … pilgrimage, but when he asked for the car I guess I should have suspected. His father said we ought not to tell the police. It would only make Jeff a criminal. Or us, for abetting him. He’ll be back, though. I know he will.”
“You could help us—” Hitch began.
“You see how upside-down everything is? Can you blame the children?”
“Give us your license and the car’s GPS signature. We won’t bring the police into it.”
She reached absently for her purse, then hesitated. “If you do find them, will you be nice to Jeff?”
We promised we would.
Hitch talked to Morris Torrance, who traced the car to El Paso. The GPS package was sitting in a local recycler’s yard; the rest of the car was missing, probably sold or bartered for safe passage across the border. “They’re bound for Portillo,” Hitch said, “almost certainly.”
“So we go there,” I said.
He nodded. “Morris is arranging the flight. We need to leave as soon as possible.”
I thought about that. “It’s not just a rumor, is it? Portillo, I mean. The Chronolith.”
“No,” he said flatly. “It’s not just a rumor. We need to be there soon.”