I forced myself to sit back down.
“You knew she went to the train station,” Monica continued. “And at what time. You didn’t know which train she got on. We started taking pictures until we found her.”
“There must have been a dozen women in that train station with blonde hair and the right look,” I said.
Nobody really knew who she was. Not even me.
Monica took out a sheaf of pictures, a good twenty of them. Each was of a woman. “We thought the one wearing sunglasses indoors was the most likely choice, but we took a shot of every woman near the right age in the train station that day. Just in case.”
Ivy rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Calmly, Stephen,” Tobias said. “A strong rudder steers the ship even in a storm.”
I breathed in and out.
“Can I shoot her?” J.C. asked.
Ivy rolled her eyes. “Remind me why we keep him around.”
“Rugged good looks,” J.C. said.
“Listen,” Ivy continued to me. “Monica undermined her own story. She claims to have only come to you because the camera was stolen—yet how did she get pictures of Sandra without the camera?”
I nodded, clearing my head—with difficulty—and made the accusation to Monica.
Monica smiled slyly. “We had you in mind for another project. We thought these would be . . . handy to have.”
“Darn,” Ivy said, standing right up in Monica’s face, focusing on her irises. “I think she might be telling the truth on that one.”
I stared at the picture. Sandra. It had been almost ten years now. It still hurt to think about how she’d left me. Left me, after showing me how to harness my mind’s abilities. I ran my fingers across the picture.
“We’ve got to do it,” J.C. said. “We’ve got to look into this, skinny.”
“If there’s a chance . . .” Tobias said, nodding.
“The camera was probably stolen by someone on the inside,” Ivy guessed. “Jobs like this one often are.”
“One of your own people took it, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Yes,” Monica said. “But we don’t have any idea where they went. We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars over the last four days trying to track them. I always suggested you. Other . . . factions within our company were against bringing in someone they consider volatile.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“Excellent. Shall I bring you to our labs?”
“No,” I said. “Take me to the thief’s house.”
“Mister Balubal Razon,” Tobias read from the sheet of facts as we climbed the stairs. I’d scanned that sheet on the drive over, but had been too deep in thought to give it much specific attention. “He’s ethnically Filipino, but second-generation American. Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maine. No honors. Lives alone.”
We reached the seventh floor of the apartment building. Monica was puffing. She kept walking too close to J.C., which made him scowl.
“I should add,” Tobias said, lowering the sheet of facts, “Stan informs me that the rain has cleared up before reaching us. We have only sunny weather to look forward to now.”
“Thank goodness,” I said, turning to the door, where two men in black suits stood on guard. “Yours?” I asked Monica, nodding to them.
“Yeah,” she said. She’d spent the ride over on the phone with some of her superiors.
Monica took out a key to the flat and turned it in the lock. The room inside was a complete disaster. Chinese takeout cartons stood on the windowsill in a row, as if planters intended to grow next year’s crop of General Tso’s. Books lay in piles everywhere, and the walls were hung with photographs. Not the time-traveling kind, just the ordinary photos a photography buff would take.
We had to shuffle around to get through the door and past the stacks of books. Inside, it was cramped quarters with all of us.
“Wait outside, if you will, Monica,” I said. “It’s kind of tight in here.”
“Tight?” she asked, frowning.
“You keep walking through the middle of J.C.,” I said. “It’s very disturbing for him; he hates being reminded he’s a hallucination.”
“I’m not a hallucination,” J.C. snapped. “I have state-of-the-art stealthing equipment.”
Monica regarded me for a moment, then walked to the doorway, standing between the two guards, hands on hips as she regarded us.
“All right, folks,” I said. “Have at it.”
“Nice locks,” J.C. said, flipping one of the chains on the door. “Thick wood, three deadbolts. Unless I miss my guess . . .” He poked at what appeared to be a letter box mounted on the wall by the door.
I opened it. There was a pristine handgun inside.
“Ruger Bisley, custom converted to large caliber,” J.C. said with a grunt. I opened the spinning thing that held the bullets and took one out. “Chambered in .500 Linebaugh,” J.C. continued. “This is a weapon for a man who knows what he’s doing.”
“He left it behind, though,” Ivy said. “Was he in too much of a hurry?”
“No,” J.C. said. “This was his door gun. He had a different regular sidearm.”
“Door gun,” Ivy said. “Is that really a thing for you people?”
“You need something with good penetration,” J.C. said, “that can shoot through the wood when people are trying to force your door. But the recoil of this weapon will do a number on your hand after not too many shots. He would have carried something with a smaller caliber on his person.”
J.C. inspected the gun. “Never been fired, though. Hmm . . . There’s a chance someone gave this to him. Perhaps he went to a friend, asked them how to protect himself? A true soldier knows each weapon he owns through repeated firing. No gun fires perfectly straight. Each has a personality.”
“He’s a scholar,” Tobias said, kneeling beside the rows of books. “Historian.”
“You sound surprised,” I said. “He does have a Ph.D. I’d expect him to be smart.”
“He has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, Stephen,” Tobias said. “But these are some very obscure historical and theological books. Deep reading. It’s difficult to be a widely read scholar in more than one area. No wonder he leads a solitary life.”
“Rosaries,” Ivy said; she picked one up from the top of a stack of books, inspecting it. “Worn, frequently counted. Open one of those books.”
I picked a book up off the floor.
“No, that one. The God Delusion.”
“Richard Dawkins?” I said, flipping through it.
“A leading atheist,” Ivy said, looking over my shoulder. “Annotated with counterarguments.”
“A devout Catholic among a sea of secular scientists,” Tobias said. “Yes . . . many of these works are religious or have religious connotations. Thomas Aquinas, Daniel W. Hardy, Francis Schaeffer, Pietro Alagona . . .”
“There’s his badge from work,” Ivy said, nodding to something hanging on the wall. It proclaimed, in large letters, Azari Laboratories, Inc. Monica’s company.
“Call for Monica,” Ivy said. “Repeat what I tell you.”
“Oh Monica,” I said.
“Am I allowed in now?”
“Depends,” I said, repeating the words Ivy whispered to me. “Are you going to tell me the truth?”
“About what?”
“About Razon having invented the camera on his own, bringing Azari in only after he had a working prototype.”
Monica narrowed her eyes at me.
“Badge is too new,” I said. “Not worn or scratched at all from being used or in his pocket. The picture on it can’t be more than two months old, judging by the beard he’s growing in the badge photo but not in the picture of him at Mount Vernon on his mantle.
“Furthermore, this is not the apartment of a high-paid engineer. With a broken elevator? In the northeast quarter of town? Not only is this a rough area, it’s too far from your offices. He didn’t steal your camera, Monica—though I’m tempted to guess that you’re trying to steal it from him. Is that why he ran?”
“He didn’t come to us with a prototype,” Monica said. “Not a working one, at least. He had one photo—the one of Washington—and a lot of promises. He needed money to get a stable machine working; apparently, the one he’d built had worked for a few days, then stopped.
“We funded him for eighteen months on a limited access pass to the labs. He received an official badge when he finally got the damn camera working. And he did steal it from us. The contract he signed required all equipment to remain at our laboratories. He used us as a convenient source of cash, then jumped with the prize—wiping all of his data and destroying all other prototypes—as soon as he could get away with it.”
“Truth?” I asked Ivy.
“Can’t tell,” she said. “Sorry. If I could hear a heartbeat . . . maybe you could put your ear to her chest.”
“I’m sure she’d love that,” I said.
J.C. smiled. “I’m pretty sure I’d love that.”
“Oh please,” Ivy said. “You’d only do it to peek inside her jacket and find out what kind of gun she’s carrying.”
“Beretta M9,” J.C. said. “Already peeked.”
Ivy gave me a glare.
“What?” I said, trying to act innocent. “He’s the one who said it.”
“Skinny,” J.C. put in, “the M9 is boring, but effective. The way she carries herself says she knows her way around a gun. That puffing she did when climbing the steps? An act. She’s far more fit than that. She’s trying to pretend she’s some kind of manager or paper-pusher at the labs, but she’s obviously security of some sort.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
“You,” Monica said, “are a very strange man.”
I focused on her. She’d heard only my parts of the exchange, of course. “I thought you read my interviews.”
“I did. They don’t do you justice. I imagined you as a brilliant mode-shifter, slipping in and out of personalities.”
“That’s dissociative identity disorder,” I said. “It’s different.”
“Very good!” Ivy piped in. She’d been schooling me on psychological disorders.
“Regardless,” Monica said. “I guess I’m just surprised to find out what you really are.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“A middle manager,” she said, looking troubled. “Anyway, the question remains. Where is Razon?”
“Depends,” I said. “Does he need to be any place specific to use the camera? Meaning, did he have to go to Mount Vernon to take a picture of the past in that location, or can he somehow set the camera to take pictures there?”
“He has to go to the location,” Monica said. “The camera looks back through time at the exact place you are.”