“Candles,” Sanjay said. “A church can’t be without candles.”
They found two shelves of boxed candles: long tapers for the altar, others of various sizes. Crates of china and glassware that were evidently used at church dinners. They put a fat candle in each of three drinking tumblers.
“There ought to be some matches in the sacristy,” Sanjay said.
“And in the kitchen,” Tanuja suggested. “The kitchen is closer, and that’s where we’re going, anyway.”
Sanjay switched on the emergency flashlight and hooded the lens with one hand and led his sister along the hallway, past the church offices, to the kitchen, while she carried the three candleholders.
The two kitchen windows featured blinds. Sanjay drew them all the way down. With the flashlight, he searched the drawers for matches but found a butane lighter with a long flexible-metal neck.
Tanuja put the glasses on the kitchen table, and Sanjay lit the candles with the torchlike spout of butane flame. Then he switched off the flashlight. The amber glow that fluttered from the burning wicks was subdued and surely didn’t leak around the edges of the blinds enough to be noticed from outside.
They had not eaten dinner yet when Linc Crossley and his two associates had come calling, and the subsequent events of the evening had stropped a sharp edge on their hunger.
The first of two Sub-Zero refrigerators was mostly empty except for bottled water and Diet Pepsi. Among other items, the second fridge held sliced ham, baloney, various cheeses, tomatoes, mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, and a half-empty bag of sesame-seed rolls—the sandwich-makings for one or more church-office employees.
In one of the Sub-Zero’s vegetable drawers, a bottle of good champagne lay hidden beneath a package of romaine lettuce, as though its presence in the church kitchen must be an embarrassment. Or maybe it had been nestled there for a surprise birthday celebration, because in another drawer, under two packages of bean sprouts, were four champagne flutes.
Sanjay said, “Grab two glasses. I’ll open the bottle.”
“Should we?” Tanuja wondered.
“Why shouldn’t we?”
“We’re not out of the woods yet.”
“Think of it as a restorative.”
“We don’t even know whose woods we’re in.”
He took the bottle to the sink, in case it foamed upon being opened. “If I have to eat baloney, I’m washing it down with this.”
Tanuja said, “Maybe there’s not even a way out of these woods.”
“The woods metaphor has been exhausted,” Sanjay declared as he peeled the foil off the wire muzzle that caged the cork. “We’re Hansel and Gretel, and you know how that story goes. They find their way out of the woods, their pockets stuffed with pearls and jewels.”
Putting the champagne flutes on the table, Tanuja said, “We’re reversing roles again. I’m all noir, you’re Mr. Optimistic.”
Sanjay twisted the wire off the cork. “Whoever is after us, they’re not as bad as a wicked witch. They’re not supernatural.”
“They’re something,” she said. “They’re not just any standard-variety sociopath. They’ve got weird mojo.”
The cork squeaked against the glass. The hollow pop, in other circumstances festive, didn’t sound so festive now. The bottle spewed laces of foam that fizzed in the stainless-steel sink.
Sanjay poured the champagne. “We have some mojo of our own. We’ll trick them into the oven and roast them all.”
“Chotti bhai, the Hansel-and-Gretel metaphor has been way exhausted.”
“I’m your little brother only by two minutes, bhenji. Old enough to drink.” He put down the bottle and raised his glass. “To the indomitable Shukla twins. We are survivors.”
Her eyes were wide in the candlelight. “No joking, Sanjay. I’m scared.”
He was pained to hear those words, but it half broke his heart that, in truth, he could do nothing to reassure her. He could only clink his glass against hers and drink.
After a hesitation, she sipped her champagne, too. Then she proposed a second toast. “To dear Baap and Mai, always with us.”
He did not believe that their long-dead father and mother were always with them, but he never said otherwise to his beloved sister. “Always with us,” he agreed, and together they sipped the ice-cold and delicious champagne.
27
After a hesitation, the Shukla twins had walked north on the boulevard and continued to the far end of the long block. The high-definition video from the camera at the first intersection allows Carter Jergen to frame distant objects and enlarge them without a significant loss of clarity. On his laptop, he watches Sanjay and Tanuja turn right, east, and out of sight.
With Radley Dubose aboard again, hulking in the front passenger seat and glowering like an Orc displaced from Tolkien’s Mordor, Jergen drives to the next cross street and turns east at the corner as the twins had done. Again he parks illegally at a red curb.
When he has the name of this street and marries it with the boulevard, he is able to access the NSA-archived video from the four cameras that monitor the intersection.
“What we’ve got here,” Jergen says, “is the only bird horror that Hitchcock left out of the movie.”
Dubose groans. “Airborne diarrhea.”
“Plenty of it,” Jergen confirms.
Birds frequently perch on the cameras, and the earlier models don’t have spiked cowls to thwart them. If in the vicinity there are trees that produce berries, the droppings are so acidic that they etch the plastic bubble serving as a lens shield. Even after a heavy rain washes off the mess, the camera is peering through a cataract. Of the four traffic cams at this intersection, those aimed north and east provide only a milky blur of shadowy shapes.
“High-tech craps out,” Dubose says. “So much for government. You see a private-sector answer?”
“There’s sure to be one,” Jergen says.
The next intersection to the east involves secondary streets, where there won’t be traffic cams. Carter Jergen laments that a nation drowning in debt has its priorities so woefully wrong. It struggles to maintain five-thousand-acre wind farms and in-depth research on the pernicious effects of loud dance music on the early sexual maturation of preteen girls, but is unable to install quite as many millions of high-definition video cameras as are required to maintain surveillance and control of a large and restive population.
Street parking is not allowed in this block. Jergen cruises slowly along the curb, surveying enterprises on both sides, enduring the horns of impatient motorists.
“Assholes,” Dubose grumbles. “They have another lane, room to go around us, but they gotta make a statement. If only this heap had a sunroof.”
“Why a sunroof?”
“If I stood up and shot one of the noisy bastards, that would give the rest of them something to think about.”
“You like those old Warner Brothers cartoons?” Jergen asks.
Squinting through the windshield at the businesses ahead of them, Dubose says, “What shit are you talking about?”
“Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. I loved all that when I was a kid.”
“Never seen them. Being a kid never interested me. Didn’t have time for it.”
“There was this character, Yosemite Sam, he wore a big cowboy hat, always sure that shooting a problem would solve it.”
“Had his head on straight,” Dubose says. He leans forward in his seat, his Dudley Do-Right jaw thrust at the windshield, his brow furrowed, bird-dogging a prospect. “Here’s a nice little paranoid corner grocery.”
The last business on the south side of the block is less a grocery than a convenience store. Jergen pulls off the street and into a parking space. At the peak of the roof above the front doors, a cluster of security cameras maintains surveillance of approaches from the east and west as well as from the street directly in front of the premises. There will be an additional camera or two inside.
“Sure as shit,” Dubose says, “something’s wrong when QuickMart has the scene scoped better than the NSA and Homeland Security combined,” and Jergen has to agree.
28