The Dark River

There was another moment of silence and he listened to her breathing. Gabriel reminded himself that Maya had lied about his father. Were there other secrets? What else did he need to know? The Harlequin moved a few inches away from Gabriel so they weren’t so close. Maya’s body tensed and he heard her take a deep breath, as if she were about to do something dangerous.

“I’ve also been thinking about the argument we had last night.”

“You should have told me about my father,” Gabriel said.

“I was trying to protect you. Don’t you believe that?”

“I’m still not satisfied.” Gabriel leaned toward her. “Okay-so my father sent a letter to the people at New Harmony. Are you sure you don’t know where the letter came from?”

“I told you about Carnivore. The government is constantly monitoring e-mail. Martin would never have sent crucial information through the Internet.”

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“You’re a Traveler, Gabriel. You can look at my face and see that I’m not lying.”

“I didn’t think I needed to do that. Not with you.” Gabriel got up from the couch and walked back to his cot. He lay down, but it was difficult to sleep. Gabriel knew Maya cared about him, but she didn’t seem to understand how much he wanted to find his father. Only his father could tell him what he was supposed to do now that he was a Traveler. He knew that he was changing, becoming a different person, but he didn’t know why.

Closing his eyes, he dreamed of his father walking down a dark street in New York City. Gabriel shouted and ran after him, but his father was too far away to hear. Matthew Corrigan turned a corner, and when Gabriel reached it his father had disappeared.

Within the dream, Gabriel stood beneath a streetlight on pavement dark and glistening from the rain. He glanced around him and saw a surveillance camera mounted on the roof of a building. There was another camera on the lamppost and a half dozen others at various points on the empty street. That was when he knew that Michael was also searching, but his brother had the cameras and the scanners and all the other devices of the Vast Machine. It was like a race-a terrible competition between them-and there was no way he could win.

5

Although Harlequins sometimes saw themselves as the last defenders of history, their historical knowledge was based more on tradition than on the facts found in textbooks. Growing up in London, Maya had memorized the location of the traditional execution sites scattered around the city. Her father had shown her each place during their daily lessons on weapons and street fighting. Tyburn was for felons, the Tower of London was for traitors, the shriveled bodies of dead pirates hung for years from the Execution Dock at Wapping. At various times, the authorities had killed Jews, Catholics, and a long list of dissenters who worshipped a different god or preached a different vision of the world. A certain spot in West Smithfield was used for the execution of heretics, witches, and women who had killed their husbands-as well as the anonymous Harlequins who had died protecting Travelers.

Maya felt the same sense of accumulated misery the moment she entered the Criminal Court building in lower Manhattan. Standing just inside the main entrance, she gazed upward at the clock that hung from the two-story ceiling. The building’s white marble walls, the Art Deco lighting fixtures, and the ornate railing on the stairways suggested the grand sensibility of an earlier era. Then she lowered her eyes and studied the world that surrounded her: the police and the criminals, the bailiffs and lawyers, the victims and witnesses-everyone shuffling across the dirty floor to the gateway metal detector that awaited them.

Dimitri Aronov was a plump older man with three strands of greasy black hair plastered across the top of his bald head. Carrying a battered leather briefcase, the Russian émigré approached the metal detector. When he entered the gateway, he stopped for a second and glanced over his shoulder at Maya.

“What’s the problem?” the guard asked. “Keep moving…”

“Of course, Officer. Of course.”

Aronov stepped through the gateway, then sighed and rolled his eyes as if he just remembered that he left an important file in his car. He passed back through the checkpoint and followed Maya out the revolving door. For a moment, they stood at the top of the broad stairway and looked out at the skyline of lower Manhattan. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Thick gray clouds hung over the city, and the sun was a blurred patch of light on the western horizon.

“So? What do you think, Miss Strand?”

“I don’t think anything-yet.”

“You saw it yourself. No alarm. No arrest.”

“Let’s take a look at your product.”