6

JACK THOUGHT IT INCONGRUOUS THAT, as the desert stretched out before them, he felt a chill. He knew the reason for it: the last time he was here, it was to fashion an end to one of the most defining episodes in his life—a span of weeks that wrought personal, vocational, and emotional change in violent fashion. Now they had come to undo an interment they’d thought permanent—if someone else hadn’t already accomplished that task.

When they’d chosen to remove the relics’ influence from the world, he and Espy had wanted to place them beyond even accidental discovery. So, despite their reluctance to once again venture into such a forbidding environment after having survived in the desert for several days with no shelter, no food, and little water, they chose to see the task through as best they could. Which was why this return trip saw them sitting in a Toyota Land Cruiser almost 150 miles from the nearest thing resembling a road, the ticking of the truck’s engine the only thing breaking the complete silence.

After the passing of so many years, Jack was worried they wouldn’t be able to find the spot, no matter the GPS coordinates he’d jotted down. The sameness of the landscape, the shattered rock and sand of the gibber plain, continued into a point on the horizon with only a few hardy plants and small rock formations to provide any sense of depth. Around them, the Great Victoria Desert spread out in every direction, the road they’d left hours ago—National Highway 1, running along Australia’s southern coast—well behind them. To the north was the Plumridge Lakes Nature Preserve, seen from their position as only a faint line marking a change in elevation.

Jack sent his eyes out over the terrain, trying to find the spot without reverting to the GPS, but he couldn’t see anything that made any one spot different from any other. He thought he possessed a decent mental picture of the place where they’d buried the bones, but now that he was there, he was discovering the image he’d carried with him could have been reproduced a hundred times within a single square mile of the place.

“Romero could have dug holes for a hundred years and never found the bones,” Espy remarked.

“Even with the GPS coordinates, I have my doubts we’re going to find them,” Jack said.

Espy’s lip curled as she reached for the door handle. Jack followed suit, and moments later they were standing beneath a sun heating the air around them to almost ninety degrees, with no cloud cover to offer respite. The GPS tracker in Jack’s hand told him he should have been almost on top of the burial site, within ten meters. So after exchanging a look with his wife, he stepped away from the truck and headed north.

Under his feet, the rock-covered ground appeared untouched, as if no human had ever set foot or wheel on it. It gave him hope that in spite of the wealth of resources someone like Quinn Chambers commanded, even he might have come away from his quest empty-handed.

As he crossed the forbidding landscape, he wondered again why he and Espy had not destroyed the bones. In the clear light cast by more than a decade of distance, the only real answer seemed to be that preserving the bones was a self-serving act. By not destroying them when he had a chance, he’d ensured that he could use them again in the future.

Except that he wasn’t certain that was the entirety of it. He wondered if there was another reason, a more primal one—one rooted in fear, in the power of stories told to children.

“It’s a serious thing to destroy something touched by the hand of God,” he said quietly, the desert wind seeming to carry the words away.

When they came to the spot—at least according to the GPS tracker—they found a nondescript plot of land that looked identical to every other like-sized plot of land around it. There were no obvious signs that anyone had been there in the intervening years, but after more than a decade, the weathering of desert forces would have removed any such traces.

“Does this look right to you?” Jack asked.

Espy frowned. “We buried them thirteen years ago, after running for our lives across three continents, seeing I don’t know how many people killed, and then spending almost a week in a foreign prison, and I’m supposed to remember which rocks might have been where?”

“Good point,” Jack said.

With the absence of any certainty beyond the GPS tracker, Jack returned to the Land Cruiser, opened the back, and took out a shovel. He returned to where Espy waited and began digging. The sun was hot on Jack’s back as he drove the shovel into ground harder than he remembered it being, and it wasn’t long before he was sweating. After a while he took a break, and Espy handed him a bottle of water. He drained half the bottle, then got back to work.

Jack remembered that he’d buried the relics deep, a good three to four feet down. So he worked for a long while, widening the hole, cutting down a few more inches, then widening the hole again. After an hour he had opened a crater some six feet in diameter and a little more than two feet deep. His shirt was soaked through. Breathing heavily, he tossed the shovel down and sat on the rim of the hole, where he drained a second bottle of water.

Espy, who had been watching in silence since her husband started, causing Jack to lament the fact that they’d brought just the one shovel, took a seat next to him.

“I’m beginning to think we’re not in the right spot,” he said.

She didn’t answer right away. Her eyes were focused on the landscape past the dig site. After a time, she reached over and put a hand on his knee. “We’re in the right place,” she said.

Jack looked over and saw that she was still looking off into the distance, as if she could see something he couldn’t.

“What happened to not remembering which rocks were where thirteen years ago?” he asked.

“I still don’t. But somehow I just know. Almost like I can feel them under our feet.” She chuckled and shook her head. “It’s ridiculous, I know.”

“Absolutely absurd,” he said.

Espy’s practice of the faith they both shared had always differed from his. Her faith was more intuitive; she felt God’s influence on a much more personal level than did he. Jack knew himself well enough to realize that his faith was a decidedly more empirical thing. Unless he could see it, touch it, and turn it into something he could understand on a logical or philosophical level, he had a hard time buying into it. It was a makeup that had kept him away from the religion of his parents for so long, that had kept him from giving God more than a passing thought. In fact, if he owed anything to the ordeal that had ended in this desert years ago, it was that its culmination gave him the chance to witness the very real power of God on a level too grand for him to deny.

Espy, on the other hand, would have still believed even if she’d never witnessed the bones raise someone from the dead.

Espy patted his leg and stood. Crossing to where he’d dropped the shovel, she retrieved it and, picking a spot within the crater, started to dig. And Jack unashamedly leaned back and let her.

Espy drove the shovel into the hard ground, using her foot to push the implement deeper. As she did, Jack began to wonder if the fact that the ground was so packed was proof this wasn’t the right place. Even after so long, and even if no one came after them to remove what they’d hidden, the ground under which the relics were buried shouldn’t have been as densely packed as the ground around it. It was a discouraging thought, and so Jack decided to ignore it for the time being, choosing instead to watch his wife dig with holy purpose.

Fifteen minutes passed and Espy had cut through another six inches, but her diameter was smaller, maybe two feet. Jack took another sip of water and then stood, ready to take over. He stretched his legs, giving extra attention to the bad knee, then started toward Espy. He’d almost reached her when the shovel came down again. Espy gasped.

By the time Jack reached her, she’d pulled the shovel away and her eyes were on the hole, on the piece of rotted fabric in which the bones of the prophet Elisha had been wrapped. The wrappings were old. While not the original burial cloth, Jack had once dated them to the ninth century. The portion he saw peeking up from beneath the earth looked every bit of those intervening centuries. He shared a celebratory grin with Espy before going to his knees and using his hand to brush away the dirt from around the cloth.

It took only a minute before he recognized that something was wrong. As he worked to expose more of the cloth, irritated that he didn’t have any of the tools he would have normally used in the field, the portion of fabric already exposed moved, although he hadn’t touched it. Rather, it moved as the dirt around it moved, as if the cloth he saw wasn’t anchored to anything below. It was worrisome enough to cause Jack to go against every archaeological instinct he had. With his finger and thumb he took the corner of the cloth and tugged. It came up too easily, a small portion of fabric about two inches by three inches. He stifled a curse, but the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach returned.

He looked at Espy and saw a mirror of his own thoughts. Then, casting protocol aside, he took the shovel back from Espy and started to dig. He drove the point of the shovel well beneath the spot that had yielded the scrap of fabric, and the first thing that struck him was that the dirt felt looser there, a telltale sign that someone or something had filled in a hole. Twenty frantic minutes later, Jack had removed another foot of dirt, widening the area where Espy was working until he found the edges, the place where the dirt was again packed solid. There was nothing there, yet he kept digging another few inches downward, until the shovel felt the same resistance from beneath. Only then did he straighten. The red dust of the place had caked his clothes. Lines of rust-colored sweat ran down his face and arms. Jack stood and looked down in the empty hole, feeling something like violation that the secrets they’d deposited there were once again loosed to the world.

Jack stood there for just a short while until, without a word, he turned and headed back to the truck, Espy at his side. They didn’t bother filling in the hole.

It was full dark as Jack guided the Land Cruiser toward the Adelaide airport. He’d never been to the city prior to touching down that morning, and in their rush to get to the desert, he’d had no chance to take in any of it. Coming back at night deprived him of any view beyond the city lights, which were impressive in their own right. Espy, though, was in no position to enjoy them. She’d been out most of the last two hours, the flat sameness of the desert lulling her to a sleep Jack knew she needed. She didn’t even stir when their steady speed slowed as they entered Adelaide’s evening traffic flow.

Alone with his thoughts, Jack considered the silver lining to Romero’s betrayal. As recompense, it was easy to talk him into floating them the money for their flights and expenses. Jack had no doubt he would have done so anyway, but there would have been a lot more grumbling—and less enjoyment for Jack.

In his previous life, Jack had been adept at traveling under the radar. After all, in addition to the important, well-connected people and organizations he’d ticked off over the years, there were a number of other people, spread across the globe, who wouldn’t have passed up the opportunity to do him harm. Most of those people, ironically enough, had developed those feelings over loans—advances he might have neglected to repay for one reason or another. He knew that Romero, who’d been with him when some of those loans were made, suspected he might join the ranks of Jack’s creditors, but in this instance, Jack doubted he would complain too strongly.

What Romero’s money had enabled him to do was to take advantage of the one thing that most countries had in common, the thing designed to keep people like Jack and Espy out: paperwork.

In this case, Romero used actual paper, in the form of a great deal of money, to facilitate the procurement of two clean passports. The deal was made possible because of the nature of Romero’s business, which while about as clean as an antiquities reseller could be, was nonetheless helped on occasion by the cultivation of friends with some influence in the area of foreign commerce. Sometimes it could be difficult to get a questionably procured artifact through customs.

Romero had gone local, finding new identities for them in the form of Venezuelan passports. With Espy, it had been a simple matter to find an existing Venezuelan passport featuring a woman with enough physical similarities to pass for her. Even finding a doppelganger for Jack hadn’t been that difficult, with the mix of ethnicities in Venezuela. In Jack’s opinion, the only thing that could trip them up was if he was forced into a lengthy conversation. While his Spanish was passable, there was no hope of him fooling someone into thinking he was a native. Fortunately, though, the duplicate passport in his possession listed him as one Julien Mendoza, Doctor of Psychiatry, which gave him an excuse to seem distant, even odd, as he passed through security checkpoints.

The fact that Romero went for Venezuelan passports instead of American ones was a stroke of genius, and one that Jack hoped would give them an edge on their adversaries. If Duckey was correct, if McKeller had only a small handful of people he could count on, then he wouldn’t be able to use any Company resources in either Venezuela or Australia. But if the man had the foresight to place a team in Venezuela early in the operation, they would almost certainly be watching for American-issue travel documents.

Jack pulled the Land Cruiser off the A13 and onto the A6, then onto Sir Richard Williams Avenue, the wide treelined road still busy with traffic despite the hour. Not long after that, he pulled into the parking lot of an Avis rental location. They had almost two hours before their flight departed, which would take them to Sydney for the first of three layovers before reaching Caracas.

Before booking the flight, he’d debated the merits of returning to Venezuela. With the dead end in the desert, the inactive Company phone in his pocket nearly begged for use, telling Jack that with his hope of procuring the bones now dashed, he had to barter with the only asset he had: himself.

While he trusted Duckey’s assessment of the boys’ safety, he couldn’t allow them to remain in government custody indefinitely—if for no other reason than because of how frightened he knew they had to be. And it wasn’t just his sons who concerned him; when he and Espy had discovered the bones missing, his wife’s demeanor had changed, almost as if someone had flipped a switch. She looked tired, defeated.

Still, there was some indefinable something that caused him to rebel against the idea of replacing the phone’s battery and SIM card. He knew what that something was. It was the part of him that refused to admit that some things were out of his control. Once he made the call, it would be tantamount to admitting defeat, and while he didn’t have a clear course of action, he couldn’t bring himself to take the phone out of his pocket.

Espy resisted his first attempts to wake her, but soon she was wiping sleep from her eyes and looking through the window at the lines of parked cars.

“I guess we’re here,” she said.

“Indeed we are, Ms. Muñoz.”

Espy, or Valentina Muñoz, according to her new passport, curled her lip in distaste at her new moniker and reached for the door handle. Minutes later, they were on the airport shuttle. In transit, Jack slipped one of the disposable phones from his pocket to see if either Romero or Duckey had called, only to find that the battery had died during the trip back from the Australian version of God’s country.

“They don’t make these things to last, do they?” he remarked before sliding the useless thing back in his pocket. Both Romero and Duckey had the numbers to the other phones, as well as the order of use for each, so if they felt an urgent need to reach Jack, they would have left messages on the next phone, which happened to be in the travel bag racked at the front of the shuttle.

Before long they reached the airport, where Jack and Espy grabbed their bags, exited the shuttle along with about a dozen other people, and followed the lines on the pavement meant to herd them into the terminal. Once inside, Jack stopped to get his bearings, looking for the e-ticket area. Once he located it, he used a preloaded American Express card to secure their boarding passes. That accomplished, he set his mind to what he considered the most pressing task of the last several hours: finding someplace to eat. The airport offered a wide range of eateries, and it wasn’t long before Jack and Espy were comfortably seated in one of the nicer establishments, scanning the menu.

Since it was running into the later hours, the restaurant was only half full, with most travelers having caught their outgoing flights already. Jack leaned back in his seat and did his best to lose himself to the experience, it suddenly occurring to him how much he’d missed this sort of thing. Since returning to Evanston almost eight years ago, he hadn’t done much traveling, save the occasional trip to Caracas to see Espy’s family. As a younger man, he seldom felt as alive as he did when hopping from country to country, even on those occasions when he was doing so under duress.

He glanced over at Espy, surprised to see what looked like a similar sentiment in her expression. At that moment, Jack was struck by how familiar all of it was. The place was different, but the players were the same, and the circumstances similar enough to others in which they’d been. Over the years, with Jack returning to Evanston and Espy leaving the University of Caracas to accept a position there, then becoming parents, and having to deal with Jim’s condition, much of what they’d experienced earlier in their relationship had become buried beneath the rest of it. But at its heart, Jack and Espy’s relationship had been forged through trial, through frantic flight, through working together to put enough pieces of a puzzle together so they could come out of a tricky situation alive.

He reached over and placed a hand atop his wife’s.

“I’ve missed this,” Espy said with a tired smile.

“You’ve missed false identities, people trying to kill us, and bullets flying?” he asked.

Esperanza pretended to consider that for a while, but the smile never left her face, and the answer she gave was devoid of any reminder that, as yet, no one had tried to kill them.

“Absolutely,” she said.

Jack chuckled and released her hand. He looked at his watch. Boarding was still more than an hour away.

They took a few minutes to study the menu and the waiter took their order.

“What now?” Espy asked when he left.

The question caught Jack off guard, butting up against the sense of relaxation he’d just manufactured. Then he remembered that in those lost days, Espy was most often the one resetting their compass.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Now that the bones are gone, probably back in the possession of their guardians, I’m becoming convinced that our only option is for me to turn myself in.”

Perhaps it was the setting, the foreign scenery and the sense of distance that allowed him to say something like that without feeling some kind of panic. Whatever the reason, he felt reasonably calm about the prospect.

Espy responded with a thoughtful nod. “What about this Quinn Chambers?”

“What about him?”

“Well, he’s in London and we’re going to Venezuela.” She paused as another traveler walked past, a man who took a seat at a nearby table. “If he’s the one who dug up the bones, why are we going in the opposite direction?”

“How about because, if I’m right, he’s a member of the organization formed to protect the bones? The ones who for some reason decided to let us live? Who know our address, our kids’ names, your shoe size, and the fact that I always properly toast my cigars before I smoke them?”

Jack didn’t know where all of it came from, but he knew every word of it was true. A brotherhood more than three thousand years old, that had watched the rise and fall of civilizations, that was old even when Christ was born and prophecy fulfilled, certainly knew the minutiae of the lives of the two people who’d stolen their charge and hidden it away.

Espy listened, sampled her sparkling water, then nodded. She didn’t say anything for a while after that, but Jack could see her thinking.

“Do you remember when Jim and Meredith were killed?” she asked.

It was a question she couldn’t have asked without eliciting a near visceral response from him. She knew the guilt he’d carried since the Winfields’ deaths.

When Jack was first hired to search for Elisha’s bones, Dr. Jim Winfield, his friend and mentor, and Jim’s wife, Meredith, had been murdered by rogue members of the organization charged with the care of the bones. He and Espy had barely escaped with their lives, and Jack had carried that guilt with him over the intervening years.

“Of course I do,” Jack said.

She nodded. She moved her hand to the water glass, but didn’t lift it. “Do you remember when we were sitting in the truck, wondering what we were going to do? Jim and Meredith were dead, you’d just killed two people, and their whole house was going up. I’m sitting next to you and I’m ready to lose it. Do you remember what you did?”

Jack did, yet he didn’t say anything.

“You drove us into town, got us clothes and food, and then turned us straight for the people who’d killed Jim and Meredith. Without a second thought, you just pointed the truck in that direction and took us to face the ones who’d chased us halfway across the globe.”

“And ended up getting us stranded in the desert,” he reminded her.

“Not the point,” she said. “What is the point is that you made a decision to confront the people who were after us. You didn’t wallow in Jim’s death; you acted.”

And those actions had consequences that were still making themselves manifest. But Jack understood what she was saying. “So you want to go to London and find the guy who had the nerve to dig up the bones we buried?”

“Precisely.”

“And if we show up at his doorstep, what then? Tell him that some rogue CIA agent is after us, and would he be so kind as to let us have the bones back so we can turn them over to the American government?” He was trying to keep his voice low, but the restaurant was quiet. He saw the man at the nearest table glance in his direction.

“I don’t know what we’d do,” Espy said. “The only thing I feel reasonably confident about is that going back to Caracas isn’t the right thing.”

“What about the boys?”

For that, she had no immediate answer. Jack saw a flash of pain mar her features.

“You don’t think I’m scared to death?” she asked. “Not a minute goes by when I don’t wonder what’s happening to them. But what do you think will happen if you call McKeller and don’t have anything to trade but your own skin?”

Jack didn’t have a rebuttal. Everything Espy had said made sense. The proper course of action was to confront the demons head on, to force their hand. The only issue he was running into was that the organization of which Quinn Chambers appeared to be a part did not have a hand that needed forcing. They’d accomplished what they’d set out to do: they’d recovered Elisha’s bones. The only other agenda item they might possibly have had an interest in was the elimination of anyone who knew their secrets. And since that group included him and Espy, he didn’t see their rushing off to pick a fight with them as wise. Still, Espy was right. If they returned to Venezuela, what good would that do?

“Let me call your brother and let him know we’re changing plans.” He retrieved the phone from his pocket, forgetting about the dead battery. Setting the phone on the table, he got his bag from the floor and fished around for a new phone, checking the number until he found the next one in line. When he looked up, he caught the eye of the man sitting near Espy. It wasn’t the fact that he was looking at Jack that piqued his interest; it was the way he quickly broke eye contact. Jack watched for a few seconds longer, but the man—wearing jeans and an Adelaide United football jersey—didn’t look up again. He was nursing a draft beer and looked content to continue nursing it. Even so, Jack kept an eye on him as he dialed Romero’s secondary number, the one he gave when he purchased the new disposable phone at the Caracas airport.

The phone didn’t get past the first ring before Romero answered.

“Where are you?” Romero asked, the abruptness and urgency of the question putting Jack on the defensive.

“We’re at the airport. Our flight leaves in about thirty minutes.”

“I tried to call you on the other phone. You need to get out of the airport.”

Even before he asked why, Jack was preparing himself to move. Although he hadn’t yet motioned for Espy to stand, she was already picking up on the fact that something was wrong.

“Valentina Muñoz was detained by airport security two hours ago,” Romero said. “Apparently she had a speaking engagement at Berkeley and they nabbed her for being in two places at the same time.”

Jack’s mind was going in a hundred different directions. If the computer caught the real Valentina Muñoz, then it wouldn’t take long for them to figure out where the fake one went. He looked at Espy, who was silently imploring him to tell her what was going on. He gave her a quick headshake and returned his attention to Romero. “Two hours ago?”

“I have a friend in the Ministry of Interior and Justice. He’s the one who gave me the passports. He said they took her from the airport in handcuffs.” Romero paused. “It was quite the spectacle.”

“I imagine it was,” Jack said, even as he wondered what it meant for him. The only certainty was that, with Espy’s fake passport flagged, there was no way she could board the plane. Beyond that, he wasn’t certain. Australia was a long way away from either the States or Venezuela—much too far for McKeller to send a team that stood any chance of finding Jack and Espy in the airport. He realized he was still operating under the assumption of an off-record mission, but it was all he had at the moment.

Jack’s eyes were drawn to the man sitting near them, the one who he now noticed had no luggage, not even a carryon. The man who seemed to be taking great pains to avoid looking in their direction.

“Thanks, Mom,” Jack said, a bit louder than the situation warranted. “I love you too.” He ended the call as Romero was still speaking, ignoring the question in Espy’s eyes. “We’re going to start boarding soon, sweetheart. We should probably get moving.”

Taking her cues from Jack, Espy rose and grabbed her bag. Jack tossed some money on the table, and then he and Espy started off. He avoided looking over his shoulder.

Their departure gate was B4, toward the end of the concourse. Jack put a hand to Espy’s back and guided her toward it, taking in their surroundings, cataloguing all of it. They passed a number of retail establishments, and he began looking for one they could duck into without drawing attention. He spotted a place to their left that was showing off cakes and chocolates in their storefront display and steered Espy toward it. Once they stepped inside, Jack glanced back the way they’d come. He saw the man immediately, the one from the restaurant. He was walking in the same direction, and as he reached the confection shop, he hesitated for just a second before proceeding. It was enough to let Jack know he was right.

“What’s going on?” Espy asked, but Jack didn’t have time to tell her. He looked around the shop. There was no way out other than the way they’d entered.

“We’re being watched. Just stay close and be ready.”

With Espy in tow, he left the shop. Instead of continuing toward their departure gate, he reversed course and headed toward an escalator. The big question, the one he couldn’t answer, was whether this guy was alone. If McKeller couldn’t have sent anyone to Australia so quickly, the man had to be a local mercenary. But was he the only one?

Jack set the pace, hurrying while trying to look as if he wasn’t hurrying. When they reached the escalator, he looked over his shoulder just in time to see their tail disappear behind a trio of travelers standing in front of a newsstand. Jack turned and smiled at Espy, just to let the guy know he wasn’t suspecting anything, then took her elbow and directed her onto the escalator. They gave the descending staircase a little help, walking the stairs as they were carried downward. Once they reached the bottom, Jack glanced back and saw him again. This time their eyes locked, and Jack knew the subterfuge was over.

“Let’s go,” he said, striding fast toward the exit. They passed the security checkpoint, where he scanned the terminal, looking for a potential partner for their pursuer. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that this guy had backup.

Jack saw the movement out of the corner of his eye, someone running out from behind the information booth. Jack had just enough time to push Espy out of the way before he was leveled. Breath was forced from his lungs in a rush and he crumpled beneath the mass of his attacker. He heard a scream and the only thing he registered was that it wasn’t Espy.

The man on top of him was using his weight to hold Jack to the floor while with his free hand he delivered punches to Jack’s side. Jack was at a bad angle, his face to the carpet, left arm pinned beneath him. Somehow he freed his arm and rolled onto his back, taking some of the assailant’s weight off him. Then he lashed out with his left hand, a clumsy blow that nonetheless caught the man under his eye. Jack heard a grunt, and the other man pulled back for a moment, giving Jack enough time to hit him again.

Then he saw the gun. It was in a shoulder holster, hidden beneath the attacker’s coat. Clamping a hand around Jack’s throat, the man reached for the weapon, his weight pressing down. Jack grabbed at his gun hand, but he had no leverage. The man’s hand tightened around Jack’s windpipe. A moment later the gun was free and swinging toward Jack.

The gun was almost to Jack’s head when he saw his attacker jerk upward, felt the hold on his neck loosen. Jack drew a quick breath, the air burning his lungs before the hand tightened again. But the man was jerked up a second time, and Jack heard an accompanying groan. He twisted his head against the tight grip just in time to see Espy’s booted foot come up. The third try did the job, sending the attacker rolling off, the gun tumbling to the floor.

Espy offered a hand and helped Jack to his feet. A wave of dizziness nearly took him down again, but he steadied himself, found his bag, and started off after his wife. Looking back, Jack saw their original tail just emerging from the escalator. That told him the fight couldn’t have lasted more than five seconds. It just seemed a lot longer.

As Jack and Espy made their escape, Jack saw dozens of heads turned in their direction. He ignored them and hurried toward the exit. There were two men after them now, and Jack doubted either one was saddled with a bad knee. By the time husband and wife hit the baggage claim area, their pursuers were almost on top of them again. As Jack did his best version of a sprint past a moving carousel, he grabbed a suitcase, came to a quick stop, and putting as much force behind it as he could, brought the suitcase into contact with the sternum of the man Espy had kicked in the kidney. The momentum of the suitcase stopped the man cold, sending him backward into his partner. The blow caused the suitcase to burst open, sending a shower of clothes everywhere.

But when Jack pivoted to swing the suitcase, his knee had buckled, nearly sending him to the floor on top of the man he’d felled. Only Espy’s hand kept him upright and they started off again, although Jack’s knee slowed him.

Jack kept expecting a shot to come from behind, but they made it through the baggage claim area unscathed. Only now, as they neared the exit, they were presented with another obstacle. Airport security had mobilized, and there were two uniforms posted at the exit. They hadn’t yet locked eyes on Jack and Espy but were scanning the crowd the way first responders do when assessing a situation. They knew they were supposed to be looking for something, though apparently they didn’t have enough of the details to narrow their focus.

Jack stopped, the move catching Espy off guard. He reached for her hand as she flew past, slowing her, pulling her close. She gave him a puzzled look and started to look over his shoulder. “Don’t,” he said through his teeth.

So far, the security personnel weren’t keeping people from walking in or out. So with his carryon slung over his shoulder, Jack walked toward the exit, ignoring the fact that two men with guns were quite possibly closing in from behind. They were less than ten feet from the exit when Jack saw the eyes of the security guys snap in his direction. He almost froze, but then Espy took the lead. She had his hand in hers and, wearing a smile, she kept going as if nothing was happening. Only then did Jack realize the guards were looking past him. Without turning around, he had a good mental picture of what the guards saw.

A few steps later saw them beneath the Adelaide night sky, and only then did Jack look back, just as the sliding doors shut behind them. The security guards had stepped away from the exit, advancing toward the two mercenaries. It was an interval Jack had to take advantage of.

The exit had deposited them in a high-traffic area, with a line of shuttle buses to the right and an area for individual pickups to the left. The setup reminded him that he and Espy had very little money, and now that Espy’s identity had been compromised, Jack had to assume that anyone traveling with her had also been flagged. It meant that he was no longer a psychiatrist. It also meant that once they got past the paltry sum in travelers checks they still had, there wasn’t much to fall back on. He thought he might have thirty American dollars in his wallet, which wouldn’t buy them much of anything.

But they’d lived to fight another day.

He started off toward the far side of the road, toward a line of cabs that were their quickest way to leave the airport behind. In years past, Jack had been forced to melt into a foreign city, to settle back and wait for an opportunity to move. He suspected that would be the case now, but he and Espy couldn’t initiate that assimilation until they were out of the fire.

They stepped out into the street, threading their way through two cars sitting in pickup spots. Jack was raising an arm to signal to one of the cabs when a shout came from behind him. He turned and saw a man in a suit emerging from around the corner of the terminal building. A third mercenary, his gun out, pointing in Jack’s direction, shouting for them to stop.

Jack grabbed Espy’s arm and propelled her toward the cab. He yanked open the back door and guided Espy in. Just before he slid in after her, he looked back, a hasty calculation telling him that they weren’t going to make it, that there was no way he could get the cab driver to get them out of there before the gunman stopped them. Still, he was committed and so he jumped in and slammed the door, yelling at the woman behind the wheel to take off.

The woman behind the wheel was sleeping. When the door slammed, she straightened, her body arching forward. She looked in the rearview mirror, eyes wide. “Where to?” she asked once she’d registered the presence of customers. But by then it was too late.

The man ran out from between the same cars Jack and Espy had walked between, his momentum taking him out into the through lanes. Jack didn’t know if the man was so focused on his quarry that he didn’t see it or if he thought he could outrun it, but the shuttle bus slammed into him with a screech of brakes. Espy, watching the scene play out, gasped. It was over in an instant, the man’s body landing somewhere beyond the field of vision of anyone in the cab.

The cab driver’s eyes were on the accident, and Jack couldn’t tell if she was going to get out of the car or drive off.

He leaned forward to get the driver’s attention. “We’re in kind of a hurry.”

The driver looked at him in the rearview. He couldn’t read the expression on her face, but after another moment of hesitation, she pulled away from the curb. Jack settled back in the seat just in time to see the other two men emerge from the terminal. Neither of them seemed to notice the cab. Instead they were focused on one of their own, who was lying motionless on the pavement, a crowd gathering.

Soon Jack and Espy were leaving the scene, pulling out onto Sir Richard Williams Avenue. Only then did Jack allow himself a sigh of relief, even as he considered the trouble they were in.

They were stuck in Australia.