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Martha Christiana, watching the terrible inertia of what was left of her mother, said, “Is this how it ends?”
“For some.” Don Fernando stood close beside her. “For the broken.”
“She wasn’t always broken.”
“Yes,” he said, “she was.” When she turned to look at him, he smiled encouragingly. “She was born with a defect in her brain, something that wasn’t working correctly. In those days, it wasn’t something that could be diagnosed, but even today, there’s not much that can be done.”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs would have turned the young woman she used to be into a zombie. Would that have been better?”
Martha’s mother moved uncomfortably, made a mewing sound, and Martha went to her, helped her over to the bathroom. She was inside with her for several minutes. Don Fernando crossed to the dresser, picked up the two photos, and one by one, studied them. Or rather he studied the young girl Martha Christiana had been. He had the unusual ability of being able to glean people’s psychological quirks from “reading” old photos of them.
The door opened behind him, and, putting down the pictures, he helped Martha bring her mother over to the bed, where they sat her down. The old woman seemed exhausted or, perhaps, not there at all, as if she were already asleep.
The nurse came in then, but Martha waved her away. By silent mutual consent, she and Don Fernando got the old woman into bed. As she laid her head on the pillow and Martha arranged her hair around her emaciated face, a tiny spark appeared in her eyes as she looked up at her daughter, and it was possible to believe for just that instant that she recognized Martha. But the ghost of a smile evaporated so quickly that it might never have existed.
Martha sat on the edge of the bed while her mother closed her eyes, drifted deeper into the impenetrable jungle of her mind. “We’ll all end up here, in the end.”
“Or we’ll die young.” Don Fernando’s mouth twisted. “Except me, of course.” He nodded. “‘No one here gets out alive.’”
“‘Five to One.’” Martha recognized the line written by Jim Morrison.
He smiled. “It isn’t only Bach and Jacques Brel I’m partial to.”
Martha turned back. “How can I leave her here?”
“You left her before.” She turned on him, but before she could say anything, he said, “That’s not a criticism, Martha, simply a statement of fact.” He approached her. “And the fact is, she’s best off here. She needs care, and these people are caring.”
She turned, looked down at her mother’s sleeping face. Something had happened. She no longer saw herself there.
At length, Peter slept, dreaming of the Cobalt ru
Firing up his laptop, he Googled recursive, which referred him back to the noun recursion, whose main definition in the postmodern world was “the process of defining a function or calculating a number by the repeated application of an algorithm.” That told him nothing, but when he looked up the origin, he discovered that the Latin recursiomeant “ru
That led him to consider that there might be a recursive withinthe Recursive. The trouble there was that he had checked everything within the boat and had found nothing. But what about the area around Recursive?
He showered and dressed in record time, drove back to the marina, where he arrived at slip 31 and jumped onto the Cobalt. It looked just the same as it had yesterday. He moved methodically around the boat, peering over the side. There was nothing on the port side, bow, or stern, and it seemed the same for the starboard side, until he reached down under the second bumper and found a rope tied to the underside.
With mounting excitement, he hauled up the rope, hand over hand, until he had retrieved what was on the end of it: an immense rubberized watertight satchel. With some difficulty, owing to the weight, he set it on one of the aft cushions. Sure enough, the satchel was locked. When he inserted the key and turned it to the right, the lock popped open.
Removing it, the satchel’s top opened like an animal’s jaws. Inside, he found stacks of five-hundred- and thousand-dollar bills. All the breath went out of him. Instinctively, he looked around, peering through the bright morning sunlight to see if anyone was watching him. No one was. The few people he had passed earlier had taken their boats out. The marina was deserted.
He spent the next half hour counting the bills, adding up the sums of the stacks, which, he quickly discovered, each held the same number of bills. When he was finished, he couldn’t believe the figure he had come up with.
Good God, he thought. Thirty million dollars!
Bourne and Rebeka deplaned in Mexico City with the Babylonian on their backs.
“There’s no way out,” Rebeka said. “He has us trapped in here.”
“There’s still customs and immigration to consider.” Bourne was aware of the Babylonian, ambling five or six people behind them. He needed to stay there in order to keep them in sight.
“We should split up,” Rebeka said, passport out and open as they joined the first-class line to be processed into Mexico.
“That’s what he’ll expect us to do,” Bourne said. “I imagine he’ll welcome that, a man like him. Divide and conquer.”
They inched forward toward the white line painted on the concrete floor that marked the last staging area before handing over their passports.
“Do you have a better idea?” Rebeka asked.
“I will,” Bourne said, “in a minute.”
He looked around at all the faces—the men and women, the children of all ages, the families traveling with strollers and the paraphernalia endemic to babies and toddlers alike. Three teenage girls with teddy bear backpacks giggled and did a little dance, a woman drew up in an airline wheelchair, a three-year-old broke away from her mother and began wandering through a thicket of people who laughed and patted her on the head.
“What we have to do,” Bourne said, moving, “is make something happen.”
“What?” But she followed him as he stepped over to the longer line of economy-class passengers that snaked through the hall.
He came up beside the woman in the wheelchair. She was dressed in a chic pinkish Chanel suit, her thick black hair pulled severely back from her face in a complex bun. Bending over, he said, “You shouldn’t be waiting on a long line. Let me give you a hand.”
“You’re very kind,” she said.
“Tim Moore,” he said, giving the name on the passport he was using.
“Constanza.” She had a face in which the DNA of the Olmec and their Spanish conquerors mingled as it had in their centuries-old bloody battles. Her skin was the color of honey, her features hard, almost brutal in the unquestionable beauty that seemed timeless. “Honestly, I don’t know why they deposited me here. The attendant said to wait just a moment, but she hasn’t come back.”
“Don’t worry,” Bourne said. “My wife and I will have you through here in no time.”
With Rebeka following, he pushed the wheelchair off the long line and headed straight through to the head of the first-class line.
“Halevy is watching,” Rebeka whispered to Bourne.
“Let him,” he said. “There’s nothing he can do.”
Constanza cocked her head, her clever eyes questioning. “What’s that, Mr. Moore?”
“I’ll need your passport.”
“Of course.” She handed it over as they came up to the immigration cubicle.