“We have layers of protection,” he says, tugging his shirt over his head. “And we aren’t hiding. We need to go out and take you shopping sooner or later, but more than anything right now, I need to think and so do you. That man at the hospital told you to look in front of you, to see what is there, but that message was for me.”
“Was he talking about you? Was he trying to turn me against you?”
Eric’s hands come down on his hips. “If he had been, why give you a message he knew I’d figure out? A message clearly meant for me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s something pinging the back on my mind. Let’s order food and start talking this through.”
Any opportunity to solve this puzzle and watch his mind work is welcomed. “Yes,” I approve. “Good. I’d like that.”
Thirty minutes later, we’re in the living room, on the couch, a bottle of wine between us, our glasses full and plates ready, waiting on our Chinese takeout to be delivered. We also have the two coded messages we’ve been given, and not one, not two, but three Rubik’s cubes in front us. I grab one of them and eye Eric. “I thought you didn’t need to solve these to focus anymore?”
“I don’t have to use them,” he explains. “I can focus without them, but I’ve trained my mind to turn off the outside noise the minute I pick one up.”
Remembering tidbits I’ve picked up before now, I ask, “That’s something you learned in the military?”
“Yes. When I went into the Navy, I was just another enlisted soldier to the government, but as they discovered my ‘gifts’ as they called them, they called in several specialists to work with me. One, a woman actually, named Karen Montgomery, a grumpy old lady is a more precise description, honed my thinking process. She was a bitch, but she was a good bitch. Good at heart. Good intentions. To her, being the bitch that she was to me, was about protecting me. She was saving my life and teaching me how to save other people’s lives.”
“Do you ever talk to her now?”
“She had a heart attack during one of our training sessions.”
I blanch. “What?”
He nods. “She smoked like a chimney and drank like the sailor she was. And she was no spring chicken.” He gives me a sad smile. “She grabbed my arm right before she died and made me recite a formula for her. Anyway, to her I wasn’t a freak. I really was gifted.”
The freak he sees himself as even now, to this day. And there it is. His self-hate. The hate I want to reach inside him and yank away, never to be seen again. “You are gifted, Eric.”
“I was in hell when my first cube was put in my hand,” he says, picking one of them up and looking at me. “There were times when the data that I had access to literally brought me to my knees. I couldn’t slow it down. That didn’t feel like a gift. It felt like a curse.”
“Look at your success. Look at your life. You have to see that your curse is a gift now.”
“I’m not like the rest of the world.”
I reach out and cover the cube in his hand. “I like you just how you are.”
His lashes lower, a shadow sliding over his face, and when I might press him to look at me, to talk to me, the doorbell rings, no doubt with our food order, and he immediately untangles our grip, sets the cube on the table and gets up. Shutting me out. Shutting me down. The doorbell was simply the vehicle he used to do it but I remind myself that every moment he dives into how he got to be the man he is now, requires him to remember who he was when he was younger, when he was living with his mother and then his father, after her death.
He’s not shutting me out. He’s protecting himself. There’s a difference.
My gaze lowers and lands on the two messages, and once I’m looking at them, I set aside my talk with Eric. They have my focus. I will them to mean something, but they just don’t. My cellphone buzzes on the coffee table and it’s my mother. I want to answer, but I don’t know what to say to her. I twist around to find Eric already walking back toward me, bags of food in his hand.
“That’s my mother calling,” I say. “What do we want her to know?” My phone stops ringing.
Eric sits down with me, placing our order on the table. “Your mother isn’t a part of this. She didn’t know my father was being attacked. She didn’t know why I was in Denver. I think the best thing we can do is to keep her out of this for as long as we can.”
“I am my mother’s daughter. In other words, that won’t work for long. Your father is fighting for his life. He’s her husband.”
“We’ll be as honest as we can be. She’s under protective custody until we locate this assassin.”
“How are we going to locate an assassin? Well, aside from the fact that said assassin may be coming for us.”
“I hope like hell he does come for us,” he says. “Then I don’t have to hunt the bastard down.”
“Because we’ll be dead?”
“You underestimate me, princess. Let’s hope he does, too.”