Page 26 of 56 Days
“And Istillhaven’t met someone who knows there are six.”
Her tone is somewhere between challenge and condescension, and it throws him. If sheisa journalist, shouldn’t she be doing her best to butter him up? Isn’t insulting him the last thing she would do if her goal was to get him to talk?
Or is this a double bluff, an attempt to throw him off her scent?
“Six?”
She starts naming them.
But notjustnaming them. She also tells him where each one ended up. She has dates. She even includes theEnterprise. She calls it anorbiter. And she says all this to the footpath, which goes to strengthen his suspicions that she’s prepared this in advance and is now reciting it from memory.
But...
It also gives him a chance to see her lanyard up close. Thepassport-stylephoto on it is definitely her, just with longer hair and standing in an unflattering,bleached-outlight. The text says her name is Ciara W. and that she is something called a Tech CS Concierge.
It looks legit.
It swings him back to unsure.
Maybe sheisn’ta journalist. Maybe she really does work for the tech company around the corner and likes space shuttles enough to carry around a bag with one on it and where he’s seen her before this week ishere, on this street, because she works nearby.
But that doesn’t account for why, five days in a row, she’s been here at the same time he has when he’s been here at a slightly different time each day. Not by much, granted—he always leaves within the same twenty- orthirty-minutetime frame—butstill.
This fact is a stone in his shoe: something small, but incredibly bothersome.
He needs to find out more, to know enough to get rid of it.
“I was going to go get a coffee,” he says to her. “Can I buy you one too?”
He leads her to the branch of Insomnia a little farther up the street, because he knows that, being a chain, the counter will be laid out a certain way. He’s not sure he has enough cash on him to pay for the drinks, and he won’t take his debit card out in front of her. If she is what he suspects she is, she could know his mother’s maiden name, and seeing it printed on something official after his first name would be confirmation for her that she’s found her man.
She says she’ll have a cappuccino so he orders two, and suggests they get them to go so they can drink them outside, maybe by the canal if they can get a spot. She seems eager to accept this invitation and inordinately pleased that he has offered.
He swings back to suspicious.
But then she goes to wait at the end of the counter while he stays by the till to pay. It doesn’t matter anyway because he finds aten-euronote in his pocket, but if shewastrying to confirm his identity, wouldn’t she have stayed close and tried to get a glimpse inside his wallet?
Back to unsure.
This is so bloody exhausting.
The weather has been changing its mind all day, but when they go back outside, the sun is shining. They find an empty spot on the low wall by the service station that offers them a view of the canal, and once they’ve settled down he asks her to tell him about Kennedy Space Center.
He has never been, but he has seen things about it online and on TV. They never went anywhere but France on holiday when he was young and now, travel to the United States is out.
Have you ever been arrested or convicted for a crime that resulted in serious damage to property, or serious harm to another person?
Ciara doesn’t seem fazed by the question. If anything, she seems eager to talk about the place. She tells him about a bus tour that takes you around the launch pads, the “VAB—the Vehicle Assembly Building,” and the famous blue countdown clock. About the IMAX cinema and the Rocket Garden, which seems to be exactly what it sounds like. The “ride” that simulates a space shuttle launch and which, she says, makes your neck hurt. The Apollo Center where you get to see a Saturn V rocket and the shuttleAtlantison display.
“It’s revealed to you,” she says. “Unexpectedly. A surprise. You’re herded into this big, dark room to watch a video about the shuttle program, and then, at the end, the screen slides up and reveals the shuttle just... justthere, in all its glory, right in front of you. With the cargo bay doors open and at an angle so it actually looks like it’s flying through space. It’s amazing. People actually gasped. After I’d walked around it and taken all my pictures and read all the exhibits and stuff, I went back to where I’d come in and I waited for the screen to go up so I could watchotherpeople’s faces, so I could see their reactions, and it was...”
She is really laying this on thick, if it is an act.Toothick.
His face must be saying as much because she looks at him then and seems to realize the same thing.
“It’s just that I wanted to go for so long,” she says quickly. “Since I was a child, really. So it was a bit like, I don’t know... walking around in a dream.”
He says, “Ireallywant to go.”
