10:02 p.m.
Tessa finished her poem about Riker, the guy who’d told Lachlan to give her whatever she wanted. Then she closed up her notebook and pulled out a book of nineteenth-century French short stories that she’d been wanting to read.
But after only a few minutes, her eyes weighed themselves down, and Tessa found sweet sleep coming to her in a tumble of dreams of ravens and sharks and dark waves kissing the shore.
10:14 p.m.
General Biscayne’s military escort plane leveled off for its final approach to the North Shore Naval Base on Coronado Island.
He figured he would have just enough time to drive to his sister’s house in Carmel Valley, and still manage seven hours of sleep before returning for the Project Rukh Oversight Committee meeting at 0800 hours-the meeting during which he would terminate the DARPA contract with Drake Enterprises.
10:26 p.m.
Back in her hotel room, Lien-hua Jiang checked beneath the bandage on her neck. Thankfully, the wound didn’t look serious, and overall she felt remarkably good, despite how unnerving the night had been. Her leg was bothering her, however. She’d felt a stiff achiness stretching across her right thigh ever since the water from the shattered tank had knocked her down, but it wasn’t until she pulled off her jeans to change into sweatpants that she discovered the deep and wicked bruise on her thigh. One of the metal bars must have speared her as it fell to the ground, and with all of the adrenaline in her system she hadn’t noticed how serious the contusion was until now.
Ice. That’s what she needed. Ice down the leg before going to bed. She grabbed the ice bucket, opened the door, and almost ran over Pat Bowers, who was standing in her path, his hand poised in mid-knock.
“Hi,” he said, his hand still in the air.
“Hi,” she said with a smile. “Are you practicing tai chi?”
“Hm?”
“Your hand.”
“Oh. Right.” He dropped his hand. “Sorry, I um… I just wanted to check on you. Just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”
“Well, thank you. I’m on my way to get some ice for a bruise on my leg.” She stepped past him, expecting him to ask if he could walk with her.
“Hey, can I walk with you?”
Absolutely. “Sure.”
They walked side by side.
Her hair was draped across the gunshot wound on her neck, and it surprised her when he gently slid her hair to the side. “Is your neck going to be all right?” Then his hand fell away.
“I think so. The bullet just grazed me.” They reached the ice machine, and she placed the bucket onto the tray beneath the ice chute.
“Here, I’ll help you.” He punched the button.
“Wow. Thanks, Pat. I don’t think I could have managed that on my own.” “No problem.” He stood awkwardly beside her as the ice rattled and tumbled into the bucket.
It seemed to take forever.
Then, when the machine was cycling back to sleep and the bucket was finally full, Pat reached for it. “I can get that for you.”
She’d already reached for it, however, and his hand barely missed glancing across hers as she picked it up. “I know it looks heavy, Pat, but I think I can manage.” For a moment she thought that if this night were being made into a movie, their hands would have touched. Guaranteed. And in a way she wished they had, even though it was a cliche, cliche, cliche.
As she led the way back to the room, she found herself walking slower than she needed to.
“You were good out there tonight,” Pat said. “Really good. Talking with Hunter. Helping Cassandra. Keeping us focused on finding her…” She could tell he was fishing for the right words, and it was kind of cute. “And this afternoon too,” he continued. “At the briefing… Very thorough. Very… professional.”
“Well, thank you, Dr. Bowers. You were very professional today too.” They reached her door. “I could see you piecing things together, almost thinking like a profiler.”
He let a smile drift to the corner of his mouth. “Lien-hua, here I come to check on you, and you insult me.” His five-o’clock shadow lent a deep masculinity to his face. “What possible motive could you have for that?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in motives?”
“Oh, I believe in them. I just think sometimes we have more than one influencing us at a time.”
The question begged to be asked, and so, trying not to anticipate the answer, she threw it out there. “So, what ulterior motives did you have stopping by here tonight, Pat?”
In reply, he lifted his hand as if he were going to knock on the door. “You guessed it before. Tai chi.” He began to move slowly through a series of tai chi moves. “Health benefits. Gotta stay fit.”
“Well, I hope that works out for you,” she said. “And once again
…” She flattened her right hand, lifted her fingers to her chin, then lowered them slowly.
“That’s sign language, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it means ‘thank you.’”
He repeated the sign. “You’ll have to teach me more sometime.
I’d like to learn.”
“OK. Sometime.” She slid the key into the lock and pressed the door open. She wanted this conversation to go on. She wanted to invite him into her room, but instead, she simply said what she was supposed to say to a co-worker who’d showed appropriate concern for her well-being. “Good night, Pat. I’ll see you in the morning.
Really, I’m glad you stopped by to see how I was doing.”
He gave her a slight nod, tapped the door with his finger, and said, “OK, see you in the morning. Take care of that leg. Your neck too.”
She stepped into her room, eased the door shut, stood beside it for a moment, counted to five, then cracked it open to see if he’d left. When she saw that he had, she closed it again and went over to tend to her vase of dying flowers.
Nearly ten minutes had passed before she noticed that the ice was melting in the bucket and the bruise was still throbbing on her leg.
I’m an idiot.
That’s all there is to it.
A complete idiot.
Oh, you were very professional today, Lien-hua. I stopped by at this time of night to tell you how professional you were. Here, let me stand in the hallway with my fist stuck in the air like a bad mime for a few more minutes. Did I actually say, “Health benefits. Gotta stay fit”? Did I actually say that?
Just shoot me now.
Well, at least I didn’t say what I was really thinking when she mentioned that she needed to ice down her leg. At least I didn’t say,
“I could do that for you.” At least I didn’t say that.
I’d kinda been hoping she might invite me into her room just to debrief the day.
Yeah, right-debrief the day.
Just chill, Pat. Get some sleep.
I tapped on Tessa’s door, but she didn’t answer. I figured she was either asleep or listening to her iPod. Probably both. I pulled out my phone to see if she’d left me another text message and instead found a voice mail: “I’ll see you in the morning, Patrick. Just don’t be all, ‘Let’s get an early start on the day!’ or anything. It’s annoying.”
All right then, tomorrow we would catch up, and she could fill me in on how she’d spent the rest of her day.
Although, based on a couple of the phone calls I’d made earlier in the afternoon, I thought I already knew. And she hadn’t spent much of her time at that Internet cafe that served imported coffee, or walking around Balboa Park. Instead, she’d spent nearly five hours at one of the seedy tattoo studios over on Market Street.
Well, I could talk to her about that in the morning. For now, I needed some sleep.