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But who were his partners?

Focus on what makes sense.

I know something. Or someone. That’s why they wanted to kill me. I have something that somebody wants. Or am something. I did something.

But the truth is, I’m not that important.

Wasn’t. Am now.

That new truth is calibrated in blood.

In his mind, Middleton heard random notes, not a symphony. He flashed on jazz. When asked how a musician could slip into a free form jam that he’d neither started nor would finish, legendary pianist Night Train Jones said: “You gotta play with both hands.”

Middleton put his cell phone inside his shirt pocket.

Stared at the cell phone he’d found spinning on the floor in a combat zone.

The phone had been turned on when Middleton grabbed it. If someone could locate a cell phone just because it was turned on, they were already rocketing toward him. Middleton found the “recent calls” screen. On the inside front cover of the paperback Camus novel, Middleton wrote the phone number that this cell phone had connected to for 3 minutes and 19 seconds. That same number sent this phone one text message:

122 S FREEMNT A BALMORE

Baltimore, thought Middleton. A 40-minute drive from this bar stool. A train ride from Union Station kitty-corner to the hotel. A few blocks north of the train station was a bus depot from which silver boxes roared up Interstate 95 to Charm City where Middleton spent a lot of time at the Peabody Conservatory of Music.

Middleton wrote the address inside the novel’s cover.

He went to the men’s room and, in the clammy locked stall, counted his remaining cash: $515 American, $122 in Euros. Credit cards, but the second he used one to buy a ticket, meal or motel, he would pop up on the grid. He checked the ammo magazine in his scavenged Beretta: eight bullets.

Can go a long way and nowhere at all on what I’ve got, thought Harold Middleton.

Back on the bar stool, he realized he reeked of frenzy. The bar mirror made him flinch. He looked terrible. Burned out and all but buried. Worse, he looked memorable.

Middleton left enough cash on the bar, walked toward the night.

He turned away from well-lit streets, still not ready to risk a phone call or a train or a bus or shelter for the night. Walked past empty office buildings.

Out of the darkness loomed a man brandishing a butcher knife. Middleton froze two paces from a blade that would’ve punctured his throat.

Butcher-knife man growled: “Give it up! Cash. Wallet. Hurry!”

So Middleton reached under his gray sports jacket and came out with Beretta steel.

“Go, baby!” yelled the robber to a waiting car. He dropped the knife.

“Freeze, baby,” Middleton shouted, “or I’ll blow his head off, then kill you too!”

Middleton kept the robber in his vision while turned toward the rusted car idling at the curb, its front passenger door gaping open like the maw of a shark.

Never heard it roll up behind me. Never saw it coming. Wake up!

The robber said: “We want a lawyer!”

Middleton jerked his head toward the open car door—but kept his gun locked on the robber. “Get in and you might get out of this alive.”

The hands-high scruffy man eased into the shotgun seat of the idling car. Middleton slid into the backseat behind him, told the boney young woman with blazing eyes behind the steering wheel, “Do what I say or I’ll blast a bullet in your spine.”

“Baby!” yelled her partner. “You were supposed to beat it outta trouble!”

Not anger, thought Middleton, that’s not the music. More a plea. And sorrow.

“Fool! He’d have lit you up! Word, Marcus: I ain’t never gonna leave you go.”

“‘Knew you weren’t meant for no thug life.” Notes of pride. Sorrow.

“Where?” the woman asked the dark silhouette in her rearview mirror.

“We’re going to Baltimore,” Middleton said. “Drive.”

4

S. J. ROZAN

S
wift and silent as a cheetah after an antelope, the dust cloud chased the approaching Jeep. Almost, you could imagine it putting on a burst of speed, catching the Jeep and devouring it. Squinting over the sun-baked soil, Leonora Tesla gave in to an ironic smile as she found herself rooting for the dust.

Since she’d come to Namibia she’d seen this contest often, the predator running the prey. Conscientiously, she told herself not to take sides—they were all God’s creatures, and they all had to eat—but her heart was always with the prey. And her heart was usually broken, because the predator usually won. Now she was on the other side, but—as usual, Leonora!—in a hopeless cause. The dust would lose this race, settling into defeat as the Jeep came to a stop in front of her hut.

At least this time, she wouldn’t have to worry about heartbreak: This would not be a life-and-death struggle, only an annoyance in her day.

“He’s a funder,” her program manager had said over the village’s single crackling telephone, calling from Windhoek, his voice equal amounts sympathy and command. “You will have to see him.”

Leonora Tesla had come to the bush so she wouldn’t have to see anyone, except the HIV-positive women she worked with. After The Hague, after the hunting—after the shock of being called together and told by Harold the Volunteers must disband—even the smaller African cities had been too much for her. So she’d gone to the bush, traveling from village to village, staying not long in any one place. Her mandate was to establish craft cooperatives, micro-financing women’s paths to independence. The work suited her. Her days were filled now with distracting minutiae—finding hinges in one village so another’s kiln door could be repaired; lending the equivalent of four American dollars so a group could buy paper on which to keep records of baskets sold. And with beauty: the color-block quilts, the Oombiga pots whose tradition had almost been lost. Beauty suited Tesla too. Visual beauty: the way the women weaved echoed the stark subtlety of the African landscape. And musical beauty: The only artifact of 21st century technology she’d brought into the bush was an iPod loaded with—among other things—Bach preludes, Shostakovich symphonies and Beethoven sonatas. Reluctantly, she removed it now, cutting off Chopin as the Jeep neared. She hoped this wouldn’t take long. She’d ferry him around, this funder from . . . She’d forgotten to ask. She’d show him the kiln, the looms, the workshop. She’d rattle off her statistics on life-span extension and self-sufficiency, give him her little speech about hope for the next generation. The women would present him with a quilt or a pot for which he could have no possible use and he’d be patronizingly pleased with them and inordinately proud of himself for making this all possible. Then maybe he’d go away and leave them in peace.

Oh, Leonora, at least try to smile.

The other Volunteers used to say that regularly, and precisely because their work gave them little to smile about, she’d try. She did it now, a polite smile for the angular blond man who stepped from the Jeep. He smiled back and slapped his hat against his thigh to shake off the dust. He took off his sunglasses: well trained in the art of courtesy, at least.

“Leonora Tesla? I’m Günter Schmidt.”

He spoke in English with a soft accent she couldn’t quite place. Not German, but no law said his German name meant he was brought up in that country. That’s what the permeability of European borders was about. It was supposed to be a good thing.

They shook hands. Schmidt’s was soft and fleshy, as befit someone who dispensed money from behind a desk. “You’ve had a long drive,” she said. “Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” She indicated a stool on the hard clay under the overhang, but he followed her into the house. He’d learn, she thought. In Africa the indoor, though shadowed and appealing, was never cooler than outside.

Still smiling, Schmidt dropped himself onto one of the rough-hewn chairs at her plank table. She handed him a bottle of BB orange soda. In a hut without electricity, of course she had no refrigerator, but she’d learned the African trick of burying bottles in a box in the hut’s clay floor, so the drink was relatively cool. “We’ll be more comfortable outside,” she suggested, resigned to try to be pleasant to this intruder.

“No,” he said, “I’d rather stay here. Leonora.”

She bristled at the odd way he said her name, but his expression was mild as he looked about her hut. So she shrugged, wiped her brow with her kerchief and sat beside him.

“You’ve lived here long?” Schmidt asked, taking a pull from his soda bottle.

“No. I don’t live anywhere long. My work takes me many places.”

“That would account for the . . . simplicity.”

“And yet my possessions, few as they are, are more numerous than those of the women in our programs. When you’re rested, I’ll take you to see the kiln. We’ll be covering a lot of ground today if you want to see the full scope of our work.” She stood to reach her own Jeep keys on the hook by the door.

“No, I think we’ll stay here. Leonora.”

She turned sharply. His smile and the mild expression in his eyes were still in place, but his hand held a pistol, pointed at her.

Calm, Leonora. Stay calm. “What do you want?”

“Where is Harold Middleton?”

Tesla’s heart, already pounding, gave a lurch. But she spoke calmly. “Harold? How would I possibly know?”

Schmidt didn’t answer her. The gun moved slightly, as though seeking a better angle.

“Isn’t he in America, in Washington? That’s where he lives.”

“If he were in Washington,” Schmidt asked reasonably, “would I be here?”

“Well, I haven’t heard from him in almost a year.”

“I don’t know whether that’s true, though eventually I’m sure I’ll find out. But it doesn’t matter. Whether you’ve heard from him or not, you know where he’d go. If, say, he were in trouble.”

In trouble? “No, I don’t.”

“When you worked together—”

“When we did, I might have been able to tell you. But I don’t know anything about his life now. He teaches music; I don’t even know where.”

Neither of them had moved since Tesla had seen the pistol. Neither of them moved now, in the stretching silence. A breeze rustled the leaves in the acacia behind the hut. Sweat trickled down Tesla’s spine.

“Who are you? What do you want with Harold?”

He laughed. “I suppose you had to ask that, but you know I won’t tell you. But it’s about your work, Leonora.”

“The Volunteers?”

His smile was bitter. “Your work. So. You really don’t know where Middleton is? Not even if I shoot you?”

A gunshot roar ricocheted off the tin roof and mud walls; Tesla stumbled, grasped the plank table for support as clay shards flew everywhere. She found herself staring into Schmidt’s mild eyes. Wheezing a few breaths, quieting her heart by an act of will, she answered him.

“Even if you shoot me. I don’t know.”

Schmidt nodded. “All right. You don’t know where he’d go if he were in trouble. I suppose then we’ll have to depend on what he’d do, if you were in trouble.” He stood. “Come.”

“What?”

“As you said: We’ll be covering a lot of ground.”

She walked ahead of the gun out onto the uneven baked earth. The glaring sunlight was unforgiving; she did not turn, but waited. There: a stutter in his step, a whisper of plastic on fabric. Behind her, Schmidt reached into his pocket for his sunglasses, she dropped down and rolled into him. He stumbled; she yanked his ankle forward, threw her weight sideways into his other knee. Dust boiled as he thudded to the ground. Another shot screamed, but out here in the endless bush it didn’t thunder, and she’d been prepared to hear it. The gun waved wildly, looking for her, but by the second shot she was in the hut and by the third she’d hurled a clay pot with the force and accuracy of Yaa Asantewa’s spear.

In the whirling dust, Schmidt—and more important, the gun—was still.

Forcing her breathing even, Tesla crouched by the door, waiting. When all had been motionless for a full minute, she crept to the table, reached down for one of the soda bottles and flung it at Schmidt’s head. On impact it smashed into glittering shards, but Schmidt didn’t move.

Slowly, she rose. She made her way to where Schmidt lay in the settling dust. His blood trickled into the dry soil amid the shards of a once-beautiful pot. There, you see, Leonora? This time you were on the side of the dust. And the predator always wins.

Her first steps back inside took her to the plastic water bucket in her makeshift sink. She scooped with her hands, splashed water over her face and head as though here, at the edge of the Namib, water was hers to waste.

Then she made her way swiftly about the room, collecting the few things she would take. When her canvas bag was packed she used a knife to slit the seam she’d sewed on the thin mattress as she had on each mattress in each hut she’d stayed in. She extracted the envelope of American dollars and the small, battered portfolio she’d had with her since The Hague. She slipped them both into the side pocket with the iPod, zipped and she was done.

Getting Schmidt into the Jeep was harder. She was strong but he was tall, and leverage was a problem. Eventually, his head wrapped in a towel to keep bloodstains from the seat, she’d maneuvered him into the back, fished the keys from his pocket and started the engine. Driving along the dust track the way Schmidt had come, she saw ahead the spot she’d been thinking of, where the edge of the road fell off steeply toward the wadi. She passed it and turned around so the Jeep was headed toward her hut. Then, on the curve, she yanked the wheel sharply, opened the door and jumped.

Anywhere in the wadi would have worked, but her luck was better than she’d had the nerve to hope, and the Jeep smacked head-on into an acacia tree. When she reached it—limping slightly, she’d banged her knee—cracks spider-webbed the windshield. Excellent. Then came more sweat, strain and maneuvering, and finally Schmidt was half-in, half-out of the driver’s seat. Though the crack in his skull was clearly not from this crash, he was unlikely to be found for a while—except by the hyenas that skulked along this dry streambed. Once they were through, no one would doubt what had killed Günter Schmidt.

Or whoever he was. And wherever he’d come from.

She walked back to the hut, hoping she could walk out the ache in her knee. Once there, she stripped and washed in the little water she’d left herself. She changed clothes, took what she’d been wearing and the bloody towel in a pillowcase. Slinging it and her bag into her own Jeep, Tesla paused. Though she’d lived in and left too many places to make a habit of goodbyes, she took a moment to stare at the hut, and then turned to salute the wide brown land. She’d thought this might be home, but now she doubted she’d be back.

The drive to Windhoek Airport took a little more than three hours. Once there, she used all four of her credit cards to withdraw as much cash as she could. With what she’d taken from the mattress, she’d be all right for a while. On one of the cards she bought a ticket on the connecting flight through Munich to Washington, D.C. Then she exited the terminal and boarded the long-distance bus to Cape Town.

She didn’t know if her credit cards were being monitored, but she had to take the possibility into account. In Cape Town, she’d buy a ticket in cash.

To New York.

Where you could catch a train to Washington, Harold had told her, a dozen times a day.

Hugging her bag to her, feeling the portfolio’s stiffness through the canvas, Leonora stared out the window at the dry land, the lonesome trees.

A dozen trains a day.

That ought to be enough.