“What now?” Hope asked. She carried a small bundle of intimates and clothing cradled in her arms. “You want me to wash yours as well, you’re going to have to get out of them.”
“No thanks.”
“You could use it.”
“This is all I’ve got,” Larson informed her.
“That’s my point,” she said.
He’d risked a quick stop at Target to buy them both some clothes. She was laundering what she’d changed out of.
The condominium they occupied overlooked construction on a new baseball park for the Cardinals, and, beyond it, the tiny moving lights from Highway 40. From the corner of the living room, they had a view of a gambling casino on the Mississippi, an eyesore in Larson’s opinion.
Larson took a minute to don the sweatpants and sweatshirt. Their clothes joined in the washer. He thought this oddly significant. Wondered if this was but the first of such nights together.
He heard her setting the timer. She seemed more settled.
She returned to the kitchen, searched the refrigerator and the cabinets, but of course no food. “We’re going to have to order in.”
He wondered if this ease of hers had come with the shower or the attack on her. Or had she simply resigned herself to the fact that he now represented her daughter’s only real chance? Or, like him, did it run deeper than that?
She slid down into an IKEA chair and placed her elbows on the table. “Let’s say they never call me back,” she proposed from a distance. “How do we go about finding her?”
Larson took a chair facing her. “It’s a two-step process. Our best shot, our most likely prospect, remains Markowitz.”
On the way to the condo, he’d told her all he knew about Markowitz. Hope already had a better grasp of the computer and technology aspects of the case than he did.
“So you’re saying the Romeros got to Markowitz.”
“Or they didn’t have to because it could have been his idea in the first place. No one is saying Leopold Markowitz walks on water. He could be bent. He could be broke. He could have approached the Romeros for protection while he went about stealing the list. We won’t know until we get there.”
“Are you saying if we find Markowitz, we find Penny?”
“It’s a possibility, yes. If the Romeros are behind this-and I’m convinced they are-then finding Markowitz gives us the Romeros, and we’re that much closer to Penny.”
“And how do we find him?”
“WITSEC is convinced he’ll need a supercomputer to accomplish the decryption.”
“If it’s one-twenty-eight-bit or higher, then, yes,” she said, interrupting. “It would be painfully slow, even on the fastest PC.”
“And with such computers in short supply,” he continued, “that makes them a good lead. We have guys spread out from accelerators at Stanford to cyclotrons at U of M, Indiana, and Duke.” He saw a sparkle in her eyes. “What is it?” he asked.
“By now, knowing you guys, you’ve confirmed where he last was seen?”
“Stanford- Palo Alto, yes. Just before that, Wash U. And he was in any number of places before Palo Alto. We’re still chasing his travel, his finances, and the like. It’s a job even tougher because Justice is not eager to let anyone know he’s missing.”
“But that’s stupid!”
“Government work,” he said, as frustrated by it as she was.
“What department at Wash U.?”
“Planetary Sciences, I think it was,” he answered.
“Makes sense. Weather prediction. That would be a Silicon Graphics or even a Cray. Those machines create processor reports, ways to determine a machine’s activity, even if they’re not showing Markowitz himself as having been logged on.”
He welcomed her excitement, her computer expertise surfacing. “I’m assuming we’ve checked all that,” he told her.
“I can’t just sit here,” she said. “Can you?”
“No.” For one thing, he’d fall asleep.
A look of defiance overcoming her, she said, “Good. Then let’s check for ourselves. I’ll need access to the processor reports. We can start at Wash U. ”
“I can’t take you out in public.”
“I thought the best place to hide a person like me was out in the open.”
He felt himself losing ground. She had the will of seven. He felt a heat hanging between them, wondering if she felt it, too.
“Trust me,” she said, “I’ve become something of an expert in the art of disguise.”
He told her if she slept for a few hours, he’d consider it.
She nodded her assent.
Larson double-checked his BlackBerry. No messages. Rotem would understand his going AWOL, would contact him when he was certain FATF was safe again, the internal threat contained. Fatigue was getting the best of him, he realized.
Hope brought him out of it. “The point being that if they aren’t going to bring Penny to me, then we’re going to find her without them. I haven’t spent a single night without Penny since she was born. Not one, single night.” Her lower lip trembled despite her efforts to keep it steady. “This is my first.” She looked up at him then, her eyes carrying anger, frustration, and a mother’s pain.
Her hands were right there on the table, and seeing them Larson felt compelled to reach out and surround them with his, which he did. Of all he’d done that day, he considered this his biggest act of bravery. Hope did not pull her hands away. Instead, just as the awkwardness of the moment required him to let go of her, she looked up and they met eyes, and his hands stayed where they were.
“Thank you,” she said.