She pulled it out into the hall.
Then it was off to the kitchen, to grab some kiddie snacks. Crackers, carrot sticks, yogurts, cheese sticks, boxed fruit juices. The pantry safe, to yank out all the money and the envelope of bearer bonds. Her stash of passports. She thumbed through them, picked out her favorites, sealed the rest in the bag, and took them too. A tiptoeing pass through her bedroom to gather up emotional survival items; pink fuzzy blanket, curly-haired Sveti bear, battered blue binkie.
That son of a bitch. Her Rachel would never see her beloved Sveti again because of that meddling scum. She was alarmed to notice that tears were streaming down her face. She hadn’t known how much she valued what she had built here. Her comfortable house that felt almost safe. Her drop-dead beautiful view of the Pacific. Her beach access to a secluded cove that no one else could reach except by boat. The outrageous sunsets she could see from her kitchen, living room, studio and bedroom windows. Her fabulously equipped studio, the best she’d ever had. Her work, which she loved.
And her friends, too. No matter how much they irritated her, it hurt to let go of that sense of almost belonging. A group of people who knew her more or less for what she was and still accepted her—she wasn’t going to find that again, not in this lifetime. She mourned it even more for Rachel’s sake. All those aunts and uncles and cousins, lost.
Goddamn him. But she had no time for this. She knew when she’d been outmaneuvered. Poor little Rachel, who counted so heavily on habit for her emotional equilibrium. She had to give up her home, her name, her nanny, maybe even her language, depending on where they ended up. And dragging a three-year-old on a high-stress, illegal cross-continental adventure was not going to be fun.
But she had no one to blame but herself for complicating her life beyond all reason. Enough bitching.
She packed as many of her Deadly Beauty designs as would fit into the carrying case she’d taken to Shibumi. Not that she would be able to sell them again, not without announcing her location to her enemies with a trumpet fanfare. She had the time it would take to drive to the airport to think of a brilliant plan to dispose of them. She couldn’t risk trying to carry them onto an airplane, at least the ones with hidden blades. If she put them in a checked bag, they would go through X-rays too, and a possible inspection by some airline employee would be too dangerous.
She threw her own personal favorites into her travel carrying case, sorting out and discarding the ones with explosives. Bad mix, airports and explosives. Just soporifics, and a couple of poison needle and spray pieces, for her physical person. The amount of dangerous substances in their reservoirs were small enough to risk going through airport security with them. She’d designed them that way on purpose.
Traveling could be dangerous. A woman always needed options.
Then, the computer. Dried tear tracks tickled her cheeks as she pinned down the first e-tickets she could find. Seattle to Hawaii, Hawaii to Auckland. Fine for now. Nice and far. She and Rachel could play on a warm beach and try being Kiwis. She closed her laptop, packed it.
She packed everything into the fogeymobile, an antiquated, butt-ugly beige Ford Taurus that the McClouds’ computer geek buddy Miles had sold to her some time ago. Invisible cars came in handy sometimes.
And then the hard part. Waking Rachel, dragging her out of a warm bed, dressing her, wrestling her into the car at this ungodly hour of the night. It would be an insult to anyone, let alone a toddler.
Rachel was as unhappy about it as Tam had anticipated, but once she got the kid strapped into the car seat, the worst of it was over. There was nothing like earsplitting wails of rage to keep a woman awake and alert on the road—and incidentally, to distract her from any impulse to look nostalgically back over her shoulder, as the closest thing to home she’d had since she was fifteen receded into the distance.
Back to zero again. What a bore. And she couldn’t even vow revenge on that goat-fucking bastard.
Her stomach burned, her chest was tight, her throat ached. She’d considered herself detached, but she needed a pair of bolt cutters to detach from all this. Snip, snip. Watch her bleed.
After a half hour, Rachel had shrieked herself into an exhausted doze, leaving Tam in blessed silence. She had less than two hours to come up with a clever plan for stashing her jewelry, other than the trunk of the car, abandoned in the long-term parking lot. There were worse places. No time to do anything else with them and still make the flight.
Either she’d get back to them, or she wouldn’t. Let it go. It was only hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in pure gold, platinum, precious gems, and creative designs that she’d spent years of her life developing. No biggie. Snip, snip with the bolt cutters. Let it go.
Rachel was sleeping when they got to the airport. Tam tucked her into the stroller and watched her breath fog around her pale, tiny face as they waited for the shuttle. Long in coming at this desolate hour.
The lines weren’t bad once they got to the terminal. She willed Rachel to stay asleep until the security gate. Not a chance that the kid would sleep through getting pulled out of her stroller, having her shoes removed and going through the bomb-puffing portal, but if Tam could hear herself think up until that point, she would count herself lucky.
Things went smoothly at the e-ticket kiosk as she put Rachel’s ticket info through, but it choked on her own. Tam hissed through her teeth as the message on the screen told her to talk to a ticket agent. Now for an interminable fucking wait in a long, slow line. The back of her neck was crawling madly as it was.
She spent the time in line analyzing everyone she could see, including the airline personnel, identifying potential attackers. One never knew. She wished she could have disguised herself, but then again, why bother? Rachel was a dead giveaway. It wasn’t as if she could pass the kid off as a bag lady or a Hasidic banker.
When she got to the head of the line, Rachel was awake, and starting to fuss. The apple-cheeked woman at the counter looked over their passports, tapped into her computer, and frowned.
She tapped some more, blinked, and shot a furtive glance at Tam. The woman’s eyes slid quickly away. Tam’s stomach clenched.
This, too. Janos must have accessed her computer, intercepted the data somehow. He’d red-flagged her. Shit. Tens of thousands invested in travel documents for Rachel and herself squashed in one deft move, and now what the fuck was she going to do?
This meant that Janos and God knew who else knew exactly where she was right now. Her heart sped up. She looked over her shoulder and reassessed everyone she’d studied before.
“Um, ma’am? I’m sorry, but there’s a problem with your passport.” The woman blinked nervously, as if expecting Tam to sprout horns. “I’m afraid you’ll have to, um, talk to security.”
“Security?” Tam made her eyes innocently big, and pulled Rachel out of her stroller. The toddler wrapped her arms around Tam’s neck in her octopus hug. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s just a little glitch in the system,” the lady assured her. “But if you’d just step over there to the side and wait, I’ll have ’em come right on over and sort this out for ya right away, OK?”
Tam exchanged big, fake, golly-gee-aren’t-these-machines-a-pain-in-the-behind smiles with the woman and walked the way she’d been pointed. Leaving behind the survival suitcase full of medicines, toys, equipment. Leaving behind the stroller and the compromised passports. Keeping only the diaper bag, her purse, and Rachel. Snip, snip went the bolt
