“And yet, I live a good life,” I said. “Tell me. Why would you consider me insane, but the man who can’t hold a job, who cheats on his wife, who can’t keep his temper in check? You call him sane?”
“Well, perhaps not completely . . .”
“Plenty of ‘sane’ people can’t manage to keep it all under control. Their mental state—stress, anxiety, frustration—gets in the way of their ability to be happy. Compared to them, I think I’m downright stable. Though I do admit, it would be nice to be left alone. I don’t want to be anyone special.”
“And that’s where all of this came from, isn’t it?” Monica asked. “The hallucinations?”
“Oh, you’re a psychologist now? Did you read a book on it while we were flying? Where’s your new aspect, so I can shake hands with her?”
Monica didn’t rise to the bait. “You create these delusions so that you can foist things off on them. Your brilliance, which you find a burden. Your responsibility—they have to drag you along and make you help people. This lets you pretend, Mister Leeds. Pretend that you are normal. But that’s the real delusion.”
I found myself wishing the flight would hurry up and be finished.
“I’ve never heard that theory before,” Tobias said softly from behind. “Perhaps she has something, Stephen. We should mention it to Ivy—”
“No!” I snapped, turning on him. “She’s dug in my mind enough already.”
I turned back. Monica had that look in her eyes again, the look a “sane” person gets when they deal with me. It’s the look of a person forced to handle unstable dynamite while wearing oven mitts. That look . . . it hurts far more than the disease itself does.
“Tell me something,” I said to change the topic. “How’d you let Razon get away with this?”
“It isn’t like we didn’t take precautions,” Monica said dryly. “The camera was locked up tightly, but we couldn’t very well keep it completely out of the hands of the man we were paying to build it.”
“There’s more here,” I said. “No offense intended, Monica, but you’re a sneaky corporate type. Ivy and J.C. figured out ages ago that you’re not an engineer. You’re either a slimy executive tasked with handling undesirable elements, or you’re a slimy security forces leader who does the same.”
“What part of that am I not supposed to take offense at?” she asked coolly.
“How did Razon have access to all of the prototypes?” I continued. “Surely you copied the design without him knowing. Surely you fed versions of the camera to satellite studios, so they could break them apart and reverse engineer them. I find it quite a stretch to believe he somehow found and destroyed all of those.”
She tapped her armrest for a few minutes. “None of them work,” she finally admitted.
“You copied the designs exactly?”
“Yes, but we got nothing from it. We asked Razon, and he said that there were still bugs. He always had an excuse, and Razon did have trouble with his own prototypes, after all. This is an area of science nobody has breached before. We’re the pioneers. Things are bound to have bugs.”
“All true statements,” I said. “None of which you believe.”
“He was doing something to those cameras,” she said. “Something to make them stop functioning when he wasn’t around. He could make any of the prototypes work, given enough time to fiddle. If we swapped in one of our copies during the night, he could make it function. Then we’d swap it back, and it wouldn’t work for us.”
“Could other people use the cameras in his presence?”
She nodded. “They could even use them for a little while when he wasn’t there. Each camera would always stop working after a short time, and we’d have to bring him back in to fix it. You must understand, Mister Leeds. We only had a few months during which the cameras were working at all. For the majority of his career at Azari, he was considered a complete quack by most.”
“Not by you, I assume.”
She said nothing.
“Without him, without that camera, your career is nothing,” I said. “You funded him. You championed him. And then, when it finally started working . . .”
“He betrayed me,” she whispered.
The look in her eyes was far from pleasant. It occurred to me that if we did find Mr. Razon, I might want to let J.C. at him first. J.C. would probably want to shoot the guy, but Monica wanted to rip him clean apart.
“Well,” Ivy said, “it’s a good thing we picked an out-of-the-way city. If we had to find Razon in a large urban center—home to three major world religions, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world—this would be really tough.”
I smiled as we walked out of the airport. One of Monica’s two security goons went to track down the cars her company had ordered for us.
My smile didn’t do much more than crack the corner of my lips. I hadn’t gotten much study done on Arabic during the second half of the flight. I’d spent the time thinking about Sandra. That was never productive.
Ivy watched me from concerned eyes. She could be motherly sometimes. Kalyani strolled over to listen in on some people speaking in Hebrew nearby.
“Ah, Israel,” J.C. said, stepping up to us. “I’ve always wanted to come over here, just to see if I could slip through security. They have the best in the world, you know.”
He carried a black duffle on his back that I didn’t recognize. “What’s that?”
“M4A1 carbine,” J.C. said. “With attached advanced combat optical gunsight and M203 grenade launcher.”
“But—”
“I have contacts over here,” he said softly. “Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.”
The cars arrived, though the drivers seemed bemused at why four people insisted on two cars. As it was, they’d barely fit us all. I got into the second one, with Monica, Tobias, and Ivy—who sat between Monica and me in the back.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Ivy asked softly as she did up her seat belt.
“I don’t think we’ll find her, even with this,” I said. “Sandra is good at avoiding attention, and the trail is too cold.”
Monica looked at me, a question on her lips, obviously thinking I’d been talking to her. It died as she remembered whom she was accompanying.
“There might be a good reason why she left, you know,” Ivy said. “We don’t have the entire story.”
“A good reason? One that explains why, in ten years, she’s never contacted us?”
“It’s possible,” Ivy said.
I said nothing.
“You’re not going to start losing us, are you?” Ivy asked. “Aspects vanishing? Changing?”
Becoming nightmares. She didn’t need to add that last part.
“That won’t happen again,” I said. “I’m in control now.”
Ivy still missed Justin and Ignacio. Honestly, I did too.
“And . . . this hunt for Sandra,” Ivy said. “Is it only about your affection for her, or is it about something else?”
“What else could it be about?”
“She was the one who taught you to control your mind.” Ivy looked away. “Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered. Maybe she has more secrets. A . . . cure, perhaps.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “I like things how they are.”
Ivy didn’t reply, though I could see Tobias looking at me in the car’s rearview mirror. Studying me. Judging my sincerity.
Honestly, I was judging my own.
What followed was a long drive to the city—the airport is quite a ways from the city proper. That was followed by a hectic ride through the streets of an ancient—yet modern—city. It was uneventful, save for us almost running over a guy selling olives. At our destination, we piled out of the cars, entering a sea of chattering tourists and pious pilgrims.
Built like a box, the building in front of us had an ancient, simple façade with two large, arched windows on the wall above us. “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” Tobias said. “Held by tradition to be the site of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the structure also encloses one of the traditional locations of his burial. This marvelous structure was originally two buildings, constructed in the fourth century by order of Constantine the Great. It replaced a temple to Aphrodite that had occupied the same site for approximately two hundred years.”
“Thank you, Wikipedia,” J.C. grumbled, shouldering his assault rifle. He’d changed into combat fatigues.
“Whether tradition is correct,” Tobias continued calmly, hands clasped behind his back, “and whether this is the actual location of the historical events, is a subject of some dispute. Though tradition has many convenient explanations for anomalies—such as reasoning that the temple to Aphrodite was constructed here to suppress early Christian worship—it has been shown that this church follows the shape of the pagan one in key areas. In addition, the fact that the church lies within the city walls makes for an excellent disputation, as the tomb of Jesus would have been outside the city.”
“It doesn’t matter to us whether it is authentic or not,” I said, passing Tobias. “Razon would have come here. It’s one of the most obvious places—if not the most obvious place—to start looking. Monica, a word, please.”
She fell into step beside me, her goons going to check if we needed tickets to enter. The security here seemed very heavy—but, then, the church is in the West Bank, and there had been a couple of terrorist scares lately.
“What is it you want?” Monica asked me.
“Does the camera spit out pictures immediately?” I asked. “Does it give digital results?”
“No. It takes pictures on film only. Medium format, no digital back. Razon insisted it be that way.”
“Now a harder one. You do realize the problems with a camera that takes pictures of one’s very location, only farther back in time, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Merely this: we’re not in the same location now as we were two thousand years ago. The planet moves. One of the theoretical problems with time travel is that if you were to go back in time a hundred years to the exact point we’re standing now, you’d likely find yourself in outer space. Even if you were extremely lucky—and the planet were in the exact same place in its orbit—the Earth’s rotation would mean that you’d appear somewhere else on its surface. Or under its surface, or hundreds of feet in the air.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s science,” I said, looking up at the face of the church. What we’re doing here is ridiculous.
And yet . . .
“All I know,” she said, “is that Razon had to go to a place to take pictures of it.”
“All right,” I said. “One more. What’s he like? Personality?”