The Traveler

20

Maya stripped off her blood-splattered clothes and stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag. The two dead bodies were only a few feet away and she tried not to think about what had happened. Stay in the present, she told herself. Concentrate on each action. Scholars and poets had written about the past-admired it, longed for it, regretted it-but Thorn had taught his daughter to avoid these distractions. The sword blade itself was the proper model as it flashed through the air.

Shepherd had left to meet someone named Prichett, but he could return at any moment. Although Maya wanted to stay and kill the traitor, her first objective was to track down Gabriel and Michael Corrigan. Perhaps they’ve already been captured, she thought. Or maybe they didn’t have the power to become Travelers. There was only one way to answer those questions: she had to find the brothers as quickly as possible.

Maya got some spare clothes out of her suitcase and pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, and a blue cotton sweater. She wrapped her hands with strips of plastic bags, sorted through Bobby Jay’s handguns, and picked out a small German-made automatic with an ankle holster. A combat shotgun with a pistol grip and a folding stock was in the long metal suitcase and she decided to take it along with her. When she was ready to go she tossed an old newspaper on the bloody floor and stood on it while she searched the brothers’ pockets. Tate was carrying forty dollars and three plastic vials filled with rock cocaine. Bobby Jay had more than nine hundred dollars in cash rolled up with a rubber band. Maya took the money and left the drugs beside Tate’s body.

Carrying the shotgun case and her other equipment, she left through the emergency door, walked a few blocks west, and tossed the bloody clothes into a dumpster. Now she was standing on Lincoln Boulevard, a four-lane street lined with furniture stores and fast-food restaurants. It was hot and she felt as if the splattered blood was still sticking to her skin.

Maya had only one backup contact. Several years ago, Linden had visited America to obtain false passports and credit cards. He had set up a mail drop with a man named Thomas who lived in Hermosa Beach.

She used a pay phone to call a taxi. The driver was an elderly Syrian man who barely spoke English. He opened a map book, examined it for a long time, and then said he could take her to the address.

Hermosa Beach was a small town south of the Los Angeles airport. There was a central tourist area with restaurants and bars, but most of the buildings were little one-story cottages a few blocks from the ocean. The taxi driver got lost twice. He stopped, flipped through his map book again, and finally managed to find the house on Sea Breeze Lane. Maya paid the driver and watched the cab disappear down the street. Perhaps the Tabula were already there, waiting inside the house.

She climbed onto the front porch and knocked on the door. No one answered, but she could hear music coming from the backyard. Maya opened a side gate and found herself in a passageway between the house and a concrete wall. In order to free her hands, she left all her bags near the gate. Bobby Jay’s automatic was in a breakaway holster strapped to her left ankle. The sword case hung from her shoulder. She took a deep breath, prepared herself for combat, and went forward.

A few pine trees grew near the wall, but the rest of the backyard was stripped of vegetation. Someone had dug a shallow pit in the sandy ground and covered it with a five-foot-high wicker dome of sticks lashed together with rope. While a portable radio played country and western music, a bare-chested man covered the dome with blackened squares of tanned cattle hide.

The man saw Maya and stopped working. He was Native American, with long black hair and a flabby stomach. When he smiled, he showed a gap in his back teeth. “It’s tomorrow,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I changed the date for the sweat lodge ceremony. All the regulars got an e-mail, but I guess you’re one of Richard’s friends.”

“I’m looking for someone named Thomas.”

The man leaned down and turned off the radio. “That’s me. I’m Thomas Walks the Ground. And who am I talking to?”

“Jane Stanley. I just flew in from England.”

“I went to London once to give a talk. Several people asked me why I didn’t wear feathers in my hair.” Thomas sat down on a wooden bench and began to pull on a T-shirt. “I said I was one of the Absaroka, the bird people. You whites call us the Crow tribe. I don’t need to pluck an eagle to be an Indian.”

“A friend told me that you know a great many things.”

“Maybe I do or maybe I don’t. That’s for you to decide.”

Maya kept looking around the yard; no one else was in the area. “And now you build sweat lodges?”

“That’s right. I usually have one going every weekend. For the last few years, I’ve organized sweat lodge weekends for divorced men and women. After two days of sweating and pounding a drum, people decide they don’t hate their ex-spouse anymore.” Thomas smiled and gestured with his hands. “It’s not a big thing, but it helps the world. All of us fight a battle every day, but we just don’t know it. Love tries to defeat hatred. Bravery destroys fear.”

“My friend said you could tell me how the Tabula got their name.”

Thomas glanced at a portable cooler and a folded-up sweatshirt on the dirt. That was where the weapon was hidden. Probably a handgun.

“The Tabula. Right. I might have heard something about that.” Thomas yawned and scratched his stomach as if she had just asked him about a group of Boy Scouts. “Tabula comes from the Latin phrase tabula rasa-which means ‘a blank slate.’ The Tabula think the human mind is a blank slate when you’re born. That means the men in power can fill up your brain with selected information. If you do this to large numbers of people you can control most of world’s population. The Tabula hate anyone who can show that there’s a different reality.”

“Like a Traveler?”

Once again, Thomas looked at his hidden weapon. He hesitated, and then seemed to decide that he couldn’t grab it in time to save himself.

“Listen, Jane-or whatever your name is-if you want to kill me, go ahead. I don’t give a damn. One of my uncles was a Traveler, but I don’t have the power to cross over. When my uncle came back to this world, he tried to organize the tribes so that we would turn away from alcohol and take control of our lives. The men in power didn’t like that. Land was involved. Oil leases. Six months after my uncle started preaching, someone ran him down on the road. You made it look like an accident, didn’t you? A hit-and-run driver and no witnesses.”

“Do you know what a Harlequin is?”

“Maybe…”

“You met a French Harlequin named Linden several years ago. He used your address to obtain fake passports. Right now, I’m in trouble. Linden said that you could help me.”

“I’m not fighting for the Harlequins. That’s not who I am.”

“I need a car or a truck, some kind of vehicle that can’t be tracked by the Vast Machine.”

Thomas Walks the Ground stared at her for a long time, and she felt the power in his eyes. “All right,” he said slowly. “I can do that.”