“For Christ’s sake,” Quentin said. “You realize we’re nowhere near ready!”
“Then get ready. We’re out of time. You guys are professionals, right?”
The answer to that was a rousing chorus of silence.
“Look, just do your jobs.”
He disappeared, leaving behind a limo full of shocked silence. Plum turned to Quentin.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “We could walk away.”
Giving up now would be hard. He’d be set back months, and that would hurt. But this was more risk than he’d signed on for.
“Oh come on,” Betsy said. “It’s just a job.”
“That’s my point. No way is this worth getting killed over.”
“Just breaking the bond alone, I’m putting us at about a fifty-fifty shot,” Plum said. “Let’s think about that for a second.”
“Let’s think about this.” Betsy leaned across from the seat opposite. She smiled as if she were confiding a wonderful, intimate secret. “If you leave now? I will hunt you down and kill you. I will never stop till I find you. I’ve given up too much, and I am too close. Do you understand?”
She stared at Quentin, not blinking.
“Not even remotely.” Quentin didn’t blink either. He didn’t like being bullied. “Why do you care? What are you close to? It’s only money.”
“Do you know what’s in the case?”
“No. Not even the bird knows what’s in the case.”
“I know what’s in the case,” Betsy said. “And I’ll give you a fucking hint: this isn’t about money.”
“Maybe you could be a little more specific.”
“You want to know what’s in the case? Freedom.” She held his eyes for another long second, then sat back against the banquette. Quentin looked over at Plum, then at Stoppard, who’d gone back to picking at the insides of the watch. The prospect of starting over again at the beginning, finding some new way in, was not appealing. If they could just get it right and get it over with he could move on with his life.
And there was the Chatwin connection, he couldn’t let that go. And there was Alice. Who was he trying to fool? He wasn’t going to walk away. He was in this much too deep already. He opened his eyes. Betsy was still watching him.
“You’d better believe,” he said, “that if this starts getting ugly, I’m going to be the first one to bolt. Then maybe I’ll hunt you down. Think about that.” Quentin put a hand on Stoppard’s shoulder, who looked up at him as if he were waking from a dream. “Better give me that back for now. You can look at it later.”
Stoppard nodded and closed up the watch and mutely handed it over, though his eyes followed it until Quentin tucked it back into his jacket.
They climbed out of the limo. It was late March, around four in the afternoon, and the temperature hovered around freezing. They were on a back road, really just a gravel track, somewhere in rural Connecticut, with a row of trees running along one side and dead-looking blackberry bushes on the other. Hayfields were all around them. There were no houses in sight.
Plum stayed behind in the car to change, and when she got out they were all in matching black. Quentin wore his overcoat instead of a parka, because it looked more magicianly, and it was black anyway, and he had no idea when if ever he’d see the limo again. He had the page from the Neitherlands folded in an inside pocket, along with the watch.
“Well,” Plum said. “This doesn’t look suspicious.”
The breeze was icy, and even though they weren’t supposed to use magic Quentin quietly added a couple of charms to keep himself warm. Off in one of the meadows Pushkar was waving at them, and they struck out toward him through the dry, unmown grass. Lionel stood behind him, looking as big as a haystack, and the blackbird came winging over from the darkening trees to settle on his shoulder. It looked much more like a wild animal out here in the country. Quentin wondered what the other birds made of it.
Pushkar had an enormous rectangular oriental carpet unrolled on the grass, a gorgeous thing with a knotted floral pattern on it in cream and pale blue and lion-gold. Pushkar was studying it and nodding slowly, sometimes bending down and smoothing out folds and making small adjustments to the fringes and to the pattern itself—it looked woven into the material, but it altered at his touch.
A flying carpet. He’d never actually seen one. Pushkar wore a multicolored, utterly tasteless game-day sweater under his parka.
“Nice rug,” Quentin said, since it was.
“Guess how much it cost?” He didn’t wait for Quentin to guess. “Seventy thousand dollars. The bird paid cash, I saw it.”
They stood around the edges. The gathering looked like a cold, formal, badly planned picnic. The bird addressed them from the top of Lionel’s head.
“We found the Couple a week ago. They are in a house two miles northwest of here. A large estate, with nothing else near it. We have been watching it, learning their routines. This morning something agitated them. We are concerned that they are preparing for something—maybe they are going to leave, maybe they will upgrade security, we don’t know. But there is no more time. We will make our attempt tonight. Questions?”
Quentin couldn’t think of any. Plum sniffled in the cold. Stoppard picked up his cases.
“Is it OK if I—?”
“Sure.” Pushkar nodded, and Stoppard stepped gingerly onto the carpet, as if he were worried it would scoot out from under him, or roll up with him in it.
He kneeled down and opened both suitcases; one was full of tools, the other one, the heavy one, contained a stumpy, silvery steel cylinder about a foot in diameter and two feet long. That’s what he’d been working on in his room, apparently—Quentin had seen it in pieces, but never put together. It had a white enamel clock face on one end and a cluster of small wheels and dials on the other. Stoppard unfolded a spindly stand and placed the cylinder on it, then opened the steel case and started fiddling.
Lionel wandered off; he was wearing only a black sweatshirt, the same one he’d been wearing that night in the bookstore, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold. At least they had a big bastard on their side. Betsy began a stretching routine.
“I feel like we should be doing something,” Plum said.
“I wish I smoked. Do you want to go through the spells again?”
“Not really. You?”
“I would but I think my head would fall off.”
So they sat down cross-legged on the carpet in the cold and waited. Quentin could feel Mayakovsky’s coins in his pants pocket. They felt good. They felt like confidence. Stoppard took out a small metal crank, fitted one end into a socket on the back of the machine, and began furiously turning it.
“Mainspring,” he said happily, over the ratcheting sound. His breath puffed out white. “White alloy. Constant even source of kinetic energy. Tough to mess with magically.”
“What does this thing do?”
“Security mostly. It puts a bubble around us, makes us very hard to see or hear or detect magically. It should also keep us warm, which I personally can’t wait for.”
Quentin realized Stoppard didn’t know even basic personal warmth spells, so he cast a few on him as he cranked the mainspring. The bird watched it all. If it was anxious or impatient, there was no way to tell.
Once the machine had been ticking for a few minutes Stoppard detached the handle and stowed it away. He made a couple of adjustments, and there was a soft whirring sound, a hummingbird’s wings against a window, and the hands on the dials began to move. It chimed twice, clearly and musically, and light flashed deep in its gleaming innards like lightning inside a thundercloud.
The wind died around them. There were no other perceptible effects, but Stoppard looked satisfied. He shut the case. Lionel wandered over, frowned, and nodded.
“Good,” Lionel said. “Everybody on. Pushkar, take us up.”
At a word from Pushkar the carpet stiffened under them and smoothed itself out, as if the squashy grass it was resting on had been replaced by a smooth ballroom floor. They all instinctively clustered in the middle, as far as possible from the edges, and the carpet rose rapidly and silently up into the sky: fifty, a hundred, two hundred feet, high enough to clear the tallest trees. It was a restful, dreamlike feeling—less like flying than like being in a glass elevator with no building around it. Now Quentin could see that they were in a sparsely populated area, lightly wooded, the houses large and far apart, some of them dark, some glowing with friendly yellow light.
No one spoke. The carpet stopped rising, paused, and began to swim gently forward, smoothly, like a raft drifting on a calm river. The rug’s tassels hung down limp in the still air. As they got less afraid of the edges they gradually spread out. From this height they could appreciate the meticulous work of whoever had been the last person to mow these fields: they’d left a neat, even, looping pattern of darker and lighter stripes.
After five minutes the bird said:
“There.”
Lionel pointed for him.
It was a big gray-roofed mansion about a mile away. Not ostentatious, just a very big fieldstone house with white trim, in the Georgian style, though on a mega-Georgian scale.
“Tasteful,” Betsy said.
“Lotta money out here,” Lionel said. “Bankers. I hear Judge Judy’s house is here somewhere.”
It was hard to imagine a universe in which Lionel watched Judge Judy.
The shadows of the trees on the edges of the meadows stretched longer and longer, melting and running as the sun drifted downward. When they were half a mile from the house Pushkar stopped the carpet, and there was a rapid conversation between him and Stoppard and the bird as they dismantled some kind of invisible but ticklish outer security perimeter, which required a lot of careful massaging of Stoppard’s machine. The speed and pitch of the whirring spiked and then slackened again once they were through.
Meanwhile Betsy removed a three-foot length of brass wire from Lionel’s bag. She scored it every few inches with the blade of a Leatherman, then bent the ends with the pliers and hooked them together to form a rough hoop a couple of feet across. When she sang a couple of keywords—her voice was incongruously high and sweet—the area inside the hoop lit up with an artificially bright view of the landscape through it.
Holding it up, she turned in a slow circle, all the way around the horizon. She stopped facing east.
“Look,” she said. “Lionel. Big portal over there. Five, six miles. Weird one.”
Lionel squinted at it too. He frowned.
“Somebody else’s party,” he decided. “Let’s worry about ours.”
Betsy turned back to the house. The grounds were so neatly laid out they looked like they’d been sketched directly onto the gray-green grass by an architect working with compass and ruler. In the twilight it looked motionless, but seen through the hoop six or seven guards stood out against it, phosphorescent.
“This must be what a Predator drone feels like,” Quentin said.
“Hold this steady.” Betsy handed him the hoop. “Plum, you ready? Like we talked about.”
“You can do it from here?”
“I can do it from here. Whenever you’re ready.”
Betsy didn’t seem the slightest bit worried; if anything her tone had become gentler and more relaxed than Quentin had ever heard it before. This must be her element. The carpet’s flight path angled lower.
“OK. Do that one first.” Plum indicated the nearest guard, farthest out from the house, who was standing alone at a gate in the wall.
Betsy made a fist, placed it over the image of the guard in the hoop, and blew through it softly. The man slumped to the ground; it was as if she’d blown his pilot light out.
“Is he asleep?” Quentin asked.
“Sleep, coma. You say potato.”
Plum was concentrating, whispering in some Arabic language.
“Faster,” Lionel snapped. “Come on.”
She picked up the pace. A few seconds later a guard, or the shadow of one, appeared to draw itself up out of the ground and take its place where the man had stood. It didn’t glow in the hoop the way the man had, but otherwise it resembled him exactly. Plum let out a deep breath.
“OK?” she said.
Lionel studied it, then pursed his lips but nodded grudgingly.
“What did you make it out of?”
“Leaves. That’s all there was. He’ll look fine from a distance.”
“OK. Do it faster next time.”
The carpet drifted silently forward in its invisible bubble, now just fifty feet up, passing over the outer wall of the estate, then an outer lawn, a clay tennis court, a swimming pool, drained and covered for the winter. It was hard to believe no one could see them—Quentin didn’t feel invisible—but there were no shouts and no alarms. They cast no shadow. When they spoke it was in whispers, even though Stoppard insisted that they could have had a rock concert inside this thing and nobody would hear it.
Betsy and Plum dropped and then re-created four, five, six guards. Plum’s doppelgängers were convincing, at least from this distance. They were made from whatever she could grab from the immediate area—grass clippings, mulch, clay from the tennis court, just nearby shadows—but they wore the same clothes as their victims, and though they didn’t walk, they could shift their weight and turn their heads alertly the way a real guard would have, like minor enemies in a video game.
“There,” Lionel said. “It’s that window. The wing on the right, top floor, middle window.”