“You seem pretty special to me,” he said.
“I’m going to screw it up,” she said as she entered a phone number on the keypad of the cellular phone. “I’m scared shitless that I’m not going to be strong enough to open that door and take us all through it.” She pushed the Send button.
“Show me the door, tell me where it goes, and I’ll help you,” he said, wishing she would stop speaking in metaphors and give him the hard facts. “Why is Nina so important to whatever’s happening? Where is she, Rose?”
Someone answered the cellular call, and Rose said, “It’s me. Move Nina. Move her now.”
Nina.
Rose listened for a moment but then said firmly, “No, now, move her right now, in the next five minutes, even sooner if you can. They linked Mahalia to me… yeah, and in spite of all the precautions we’d taken. It’s only a matter of time now—and not very much time—until they make the connection to you.”
Nina.
Joe turned off the Pacific Coast Highway onto the county road to Augora Hills, driving up through a rumpled bed of dark land from which the Santa Ana wind flung sheets of pale dust.
“Take her to Big Bear,” Rose told the person on the phone.
Big Bear. Since Joe had talked to Mercy Ealing in Colorado—could it be less than nine hours ago?—Nina had been back in the world, miraculously returned, but in some corner where he could not find her. Soon, however, she would be in the town of Big Bear on the shores of Big Bear Lake, a resort in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains, a place he knew well. Her return was more real to him now that she was in a place that he could name, the byways of which he had walked, and he was flooded with such sweet anticipation that he wanted to shout to relieve the pressure of it. He kept his silence, however, and he rolled the name between the fingers of his mind, rolled it over and over as if it were a shiny coin: Big Bear.
Rose spoke into the phone: “If I can… I’m going to be there in a couple of hours. I love you. Go. Go now.”
She terminated the call, put the phone on the seat between her legs, closed her eyes, and leaned against the door.
Joe realized that she was not making much use of her left hand. It was curled in her lap. Even in the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see that her hand was shaking uncontrollably.
“What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Give it a rest, Joe. It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but you’re getting to be a nag. I’ll be fine once we get to Nina.”
He was silent for half a mile. Then: “Tell me everything. I deserve to know.”
“You do, yes. It’s not a long story… but where do I begin?”
4
Great bristling balls of tumbleweed, robbed of their green by the merciless Western sun, cracked from their roots by the withering dryness of the California summer, torn from their homes in the earth by the shrieking Santa Ana wind, now bounded out of the steep canyons and across the narrow highway, silver-grey in the headlights, a curiously melancholy sight, families of thistled skeletons like starved and harried refugees fleeing worse torment.
Joe said, “Start with those people back there. What kind of cult are they?”
She spelled it for him: Infiniface.
“It’s a made word,” she said, “shorthand for ‘Interface with the Infinite.’ And they’re not a cult, not in any sense you mean it.”
“Then what are they?”
Instead of answering immediately, she shifted in her seat, trying to get more comfortable.
Checking her wristwatch, she said, “Can you drive faster?”
“Not on this road. In fact, better put on your safety belt.”
“Not with my left side feeling like it does.” Having adjusted her position, she said, “Do you know the name—Loren Pollack?”
“The software genius. The poor man’s Bill Gates.”
“That’s what the press sometimes calls him, yes. But I don’t think the word poor should be associated with someone who started from scratch and made seven billion dollars by the age of forty-two.”