intents and purposes, they already know I'm here."
After a half an hour at a breakneck pace we had to stop and rest. I was more tired than Nat. He was a little red in the face, but nothing more. I was short of breath and sweating like a pig. It was humid, too, which made it very uncomfortable. We sat down on the ground, leaning against tree trunks.
"Where you planning on going now?" Nat asked after a while.
"I don't know. Far from here. Far from anywhere." I was lying. I already had a good idea where I was heading, but I did not want to share it with Nat in case he was captured, too. Terry had seen him now, and I doubted that he bought my story about Nat being a friend from Boston. I felt compelled to warn him. I was still ashamed of not telling the cat burglar she might be watched, and was not about to be dishonest with Nat, too. "Listen, Nat, now they know about you. They might come here to these woods looking for me, but on the way find you."
He laughed. "No matter how good they are, they ain't as good as the VC. Those guys, they been living in the jungles darn near their whole life and still I'm one step ahead of 'em. Your guys may be sophisticated, but they just city boys, no offence. Database hacking ain't gonna help 'em none in the woods."
"But they are real, Nat. They can..." Then I stopped. I was not going to convince him. There was not much I could say to a man whose proof of competence was that he had survived for decades against an imaginary foe.
"They'll be watching the roads soon," he said after a while. "You their last target. They'll be bringing everything to bear. They'll be starting a manhunt in the area soon as they get enough people in here. That gives you a few hours to slip away, no more."
"What do you suggest?"
"Minus Two, he done gave you a false ID, didn't he? Use it. Go to the airport. Board a plane. Disappear."
"What if they forced the name on the ID out of him?"
Nat put an arm around my shoulder like a platoon leader gently scolding one of his men. "Minus Two may crack under torture, yes, but he ain't no idiot. He won't give 'em information they don't ask for. They don't know nothin' about a false ID, so they won't ask about it. Get it? Even if they do suspect there's a false ID, there ain't no way for 'em to verify that the name he gives 'em is correct. Your false ID is safe. Use it. Get on a plane now. Within the hour."
Nat continuously alternated between sound logic and delusion, and I never knew which of the two I was witnessing. I felt guilty about leaving him behind. "Come with me," I begged him. "At least until the heat dies down."
"I have me here a system of underground tunnels can put an ant colony to shame. I'm safer in these here woods than any other place on the globe. Focus on yourself and lay low."
We resumed the walk, albeit at a slower pace. Nat brought me to a dirt road. A few private homes and chalets were visible a half a mile down the hill from us. He pointed at them. "Down yonder past the houses you'll see a pancake place. Use their phone to call a taxi." He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and scribbled something on it with an old pencil and handed it to me. "Call these guys. A brother and a sister. Rude, not punctual, and they drive jalopies that don't look like they can even roll downhill. But they not in the Yellow Pages. If your guys decide to talk to all the taxi dispatchers in town see if anyone picked up someone answering to your description, they'll still have jack shit."
We shook hands. That was the closest Nat could come to saying goodbye. We knew we might never see each other again. I went down the dirt road and did what he had suggested. Sitting in the back seat of the rattling taxi, I remembered that I forgot to thank him, and that I forgot to ask Terry what K's name was. But maybe it did not matter, because Nat would have been embarrassed and Terry would not have told me anything.
XIII.
Never in my life have I felt as lonely as when I pushed open the door to my hotel room in a JFK Airport Holiday Inn in Queens. For the first time, no one knew where I was. I did not tell anyone where I was going and did not have a device on me that could be tracked. Before that evening, either Doc Minus Two or Nat or the whole world knew where I spent the night. I either lived in a properly registered address that every mailing catalog in the world knew about, or in hotel rooms that someone was aware of. I have never spent time in a place where no one could find me, no matter how hard they tried. It was a strange feeling, as if I was not part of the human race anymore. I had a sense of relief, adventure and insignificance all at the same time.
The flight from Knoxville to New York was uneventful. My heart missed a beat when security checked my papers at the gate, but they did not say a word. The passport was good, just as Doc Minus Two had promised. No one waited for me when I exited the gate in New York, either. I felt safe. At least for now, I was a non-person: lonely but secure in my anonymity.
The more I thought about them and the FBI's ability to find me and Doc Minus Two, the more unsettled I became. I managed to stay ahead of the game, but only just. Terry and K were lying through their teeth when they said they were close to solving this. Could it be that they were only raising a smoke screen for that organization, pretending to look for the guilty party but really using their resources to track me down? Were both Terry and K moles? Just one duping the other? Or were they completely innocent and a third person was running the show, with access to FBI databases? Maybe it was the driver of the FBI car who first picked me up. He never said one word. And maybe the informant was outside the department altogether and they were all duped in the same way that I was. But no, I could sense some nervousness in Terry. He was uncomfortable talking to me, especially about Peterson. If not the actual mole he must have at least been in the know.
I had a plan now and I knew where I was going next. Doc was not around to talk me out of it, and the trip from Knoxville gave me the confidence I needed. I now believed that a flight to Crete was in the cards for me. I had to see what they were hiding in there even at the cost of my own life, and maybe, with my new false ID, that sacrifice would not be necessary. But I had to buy some insurance just to be safe. Foolishly, I had already written K about the a-corridor. The mole — whoever he or she were — must have informed them about it. They would not know me by name when I land in Crete, but they would be guarding the cave. I needed to throw them a red herring. Turn their own informers against them.
I left the hotel and went to another one nearby and sat at a PC that stood in the lobby for the guests' convenience. If they should track me down through the internet connection, let them come to this hotel, not the one I lived in. Not that I allowed this to happen: I used a Web proxy just as Doc Minus Two had taught me. I checked my e-mail. K had sent me something.
TERRY TOLD ME ABOUT RUNNING INTO YOU. YOU ARE TAKING CHANCES YOU SHOULDN'T BE TAKING. BEST IF YOU STAY AWAY OR LET US GIVE YOU A NEW IDENTITY AND PUT YOU SOMEWHERE SAFE. IF YOU DON'T WANT THAT, AT LEAST STAY WELL CLEAR. LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR A WHILE. GO TO THAT LABYRINTH IF YOU LIKE. I DON'T THINK IT IS RELATED TO THE CASE AT ALL, JUST A COINCIDENCE, A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO KIDS. WON'T HURT FOR YOU TO GO THERE IF IT KEEPS YOU OUT OF TROUBLE, THOUGH.
This stunned me. Far from discouraging me, she was urging me to go to the cave. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If she was the informant, then she would want me to be where they could find me. If I go to Crete then they will finally know exactly where I was. But this time I was ready with a plan. I wrote her back that I had changed my mind since my last e-mail to her. That Doc Minus Two's disappearance shook me and that Crete was unimportant now. Instead, I said that I wanted to find Doc, that I had a hunch he was not too far from his home, and that I had decided to stick around and look for him in Tennessee. I even dropped her a clue. I said I was convinced he was being held in a warehouse in Knoxville; that I would not leave the area until I located him, and would let her know if and when I decided to go to Crete.
After this I ordered a ticket to Heraklion, Cr
ete and went back to my hotel room. Now I had just a few hours to kill until the flight was to depart. I decided to go to bed early. I watched some TV and then drifted off to sleep.
The phone rang and I woke up in panic. I looked at the silver and black device and realized that I was suffering from paralysis. No matter how much I wanted to, I could not bring myself to reach for it. The rings persisted. At last I managed to move by dropping my shoulder, and then my arm felt free and I grabbed the receiver.
"Lester?" a male voice asked.
"You got the wrong room." I put the receiver down but was too nervous to feel relief. After this I could not go back to sleep. I tried to watch TV again but it did not make me sleepy. Neither did reading a newspaper or the hotel guide. I realized I did not feel safe after all. What if they were calling room by room to see if I was in that hotel? What if someone recognized my voice? But then why weren’t they here already? Pernicious thoughts were ravaging my mind. I knew I had to get rid of them.
The smell of something burning drove the last nail into the coffin of my serenity. It may have come from next door or did not exist at all except in my imagination. When you are as tense as I was, even something as mild as a burned piece of toast could smell ominous. There was no point in