Chapter 11

The next few days were a blur. I wasn't confident enough to fly out; they'd be watching like hawks at the airports, and the rail station too, and anyhow that was downtown where I'd risk somebody I knew spotting me. Even a bus didn't seem like a good idea.

But rental car companies rent one-way, and some of them will even come get you. One did for me the next morning, and by 9:30 I was on my way around the D.C. Beltway and down I-95.

To Charleston, South Carolina.

I'd picked it more or less out of a hat. I had to get out of the D.C. area, and I preferred mild winters to cold ones so that dictated south. I didn't want a big city but not the country, either; I'd never visited Charleston so they had no reason to look for me there especially; and what I'd read of the town said it was charming. So Charleston it would be, for now anyway.

It was a long, mostly boring drive. I wanted to do the whole thing in one day, but I needed to keep fairly close to the speed limit. Well, to the speed of traffic, speed limits these days are a joke on most roads and especially Interstates.

A few miles short of Richmond I stopped at a shopping mall and picked up a new phone. My cell was the last thing linking me to John Joseph Heyward, and I needed to dump it. Thanks to Spook, Jackson Edward Carstairs had spotless credit and they were happy to open a new account for him. I also got one of those remote earpieces so I could use it hands-free in the car.

Not to talk to Lisa, though; background road noise would tell the government eavesdroppers too much. I did call her to reassure her again that I was still OK, but from a roadside rest stop. Spook routed the call to show the number of the old phone. That one I snapped at the hinge—they're not that sturdy—and deposited half in a trash can there; the rest went in the garbage of another fast-food place with the remains of my lunch. The conscientious environmentalist in me felt bad because I wasn't recycling, but the need to shed the phone made that not a realistic option right now. Even if somebody dug it out of the trash it would be anonymous, just two pieces of electronic waste.

Most of the trip I spent talking to Spook, who at my urging had shed his inflectionless monotone for a more expressive speaking style. He had a seemingly endless stream of questions. Not about facts and events, for which he had access to more data bases than even Google could find; his interest lay in human feelings and behaviors, the whole gestalt of the human condition. What is love? Why do people fight each other? How is religion important? What makes art? And on and on.

I took each one seriously and answered as best I could. It wasn't easy; I'd never really thought much about most of these things, just kind of taking them for granted, and I knew I was fumbling some. But I tried, and I learned a lot myself as our talk went on.