Shaking her head, Jess sat. Anything would be better than these crutches, but having Giovanni see her like this, exposing her disability—it felt like an invasion of privacy. She closed her eyes. Upon opening them, Ernesto appeared, holding a surprisingly modern-looking prosthetic.
“Barone Ruspoli called ahead, gave me your size,” Ernesto explained. “Do you want to try?” He handed it to her and backed away.
Giovanni pulled up a chair by the wall.
Jess inspected the leg. Not the same as the one stolen from her, and not custom-fitted, but still, it was decent. Leaning forward, she unclipped the safety pin on her slacks below her stump and hiked the fabric up, but winced in pain. In the fight at the apartment, she must have bruised a rib. Spending the night in a stable and walking around on crutches had made it worse.
She leaned back, grunting.
“You want some help?” Ernesto hovered over Jess.
“No, please.” Jess shooed him away.
Ernesto glanced at Giovanni. Jess tried to lean forward again, but groaned in pain and slumped back in the chair, squeezing her eyes shut.
“Here, let me help.” Giovanni appeared in front of her, taking the prosthetic from her hands.
“No, don’t—” Jess protested, but it was too late.
He gently took hold of her left leg and gripped her exposed, scarred stump with his right hand. She flinched, but had no energy to lash out. He eased the leg onto her stump, pushing it firmly in place. “How’s that?”
Jess inched forward, took hold of the straps and pulled. This one didn’t have a suction valve to attach it. “Not bad, actually.”
His warm hands were still on her leg. She never let anyone touch her there, not even in the most intimate moments. Her face flushed again.
“You can attach it?” Giovanni asked.
Jess nodded. She could lean forward far enough to clip the straps. “Thank you.”
The drive back was quiet. After thanking Ernesto, they got in the car, pulled around the one-way street system of the hilltop medieval village, and drove down the valley. Halfway back, Jess asked for Giovanni’s cell phone.
“Can I try Darmstadt?” she asked after trying her father’s number again with no success.
“Dial the number for Paul Collins,” Giovanni told her. It was a man in the press corps at Darmstadt, a friend of a friend of Giovanni's. He was the one who had connected Jess to the receptionist at Darmstadt when they called before.
She dialed the number, spoke briefly to Collins, and was passed to the receptionist again.
This time, instead of being ignored, the person at reception blurted into the phone, “Ms. Rollins? This is Ms. Rollins?”
“Yes, I’m looking for my father, Dr. Benjamin Rollins, he’s supposed to be there,” Jess yelled into the phone, trying to make sure she was heard over the rushing wind in the convertible.
Giovanni put the brakes on and pulled the car to a stop under an olive tree on the side of the road.
“Please stay on the line,” said the receptionist.
Jess glanced at Giovanni. “They’re connecting me.”
“Ms. Rollins,” came a man’s voice over the telephone.
“Yes?”
“This is Dr. Müller of the Jet Propulsion Lab.”
Jess frowned. “Okay…”
“Have you been in contact with your father?” Dr. Müller asked.
“That’s why I’m calling you. Isn’t he there?”
Mumbling and yelling on the other end. “Ms. Rollins, where is your father?”
24
BASEL, SWITZERLAND
“WHERE ARE WE?” Roger asked. He’d been staring into his laptop screen for the last half hour.
Ben pointed to the right side of the rental car’s windshield, at the wall of a ten-story parking structure stenciled with huge red block letters: BASEL. “That bridge back there? We just crossed the Rhine and entered Switzerland.”
They hadn’t turned on their cell phones yet for worry of being tracked, and Ben had stripped out their batteries despite Roger’s protesting it wasn’t necessary. Ben needed to be far enough away from ESOC that they couldn’t be turned back. He leaned forward to look up at the green traffic sign hanging over the three-lane highway: Basel-Sud, Luzerne, Zurich.
Directly in front of him, a huge multi-carriage tractor-trailer ground to a halt in the traffic. He checked the time on the car’s clock. Half-past seven in the morning. Rush hour.
Patience. Patience.
Ben tapped his finger against the steering wheel, glanced around the truck along the two-story high aluminum noise walls lining the road, a yellow stripe hugging the concrete pylons securing them to the ground. Looking past the truck, the green foothills of the Alps rose in the distance.
As soon as they passed Zurich, they could turn on the phones. That was his plan. To get out of Germany, be far enough from Darmstadt that Dr. Müller wouldn’t be able to use the local authorities to stop him.