“No. We’ve got to give them time. Let them discuss it, let them check in with Kincaid.”
Another minute passed. Then another, and another. Their plan wasn’t working.
Hartgrave paced back and forth, eyes never leaving his screen. “Willi—start jumping again. This time, don’t stop.”
The green dot disappeared and reappeared in five-second increments. Switzerland. Germany. Italy. Greece.
Hartgrave flipped back and forth between Kincaid in Cornwall and the two women on Grand Avenue, none of them budging.
Emily glanced at him, heart in her throat, and saw nothing to reassure her. He looked to be in danger of bursting a blood vessel.
“Oh, if it’sme, you’ll drop everything and come blazing out,” he shouted at the two red dots on his phone, “but otherwise you’re perfectly happy faffing around an obviously empty house!Verdammte Scheiße, warum hauen die nicht endlich ab—”
As one, the red dots vanished from Grand Avenue.
“Willi!” he bellowed. “They’re coming! Ithink.”
She had no time to dread that Willi would react too slowly and be overtaken on the spot, for he was gone before Crawford and Shaw appeared there. Which only meant that now every five seconds would bring new reason for fear.
Just as she urgently needed to be calm.
She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing fingers into her ears for good measure when Hartgrave gave Bernie last-minute instructions. The creak of the door opening and the irrevocablethunkof it banging shut, however, were impossible to block out.
She leaned into Hartgrave, shivering, keeping her eyes closed despite the overwhelming urge to see that Bernie had made it to Melbourne as planned. Grim thoughts offered themselves up at a ferocious pace—what if Kincaid didn’t go, suspecting a trap? What if Kincaiddidgo and caught Bernie, as Hartgrave had so many times before? What if she wasted precious time failing to compose herself, dooming them all?
Desperate, she cast backwards for a nice memory—anything—and came up with the less-than-ideal one of Bernie quoting Shakespeare.Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.
Improbably, that worked.
She took a deep breath and felt her heartbeat slow. She took several more, her command of herself increasing, and when she grasped Hartgrave’s hand as a test, it hardly stung at all. She was ready, at least. She had no control over what Kincaid decided to do, but if by chance he took their bait—
“Ballantine!” Hartgrave’s voice was sharp with warning. “Now!”
Her eyes flew open involuntarily, just in time to see him turn the doorknob. Then it disappeared—along with everything else—as he pulled her into the jump.
16
Breaking and Entering
The forest that burst into existence around them one moment and four thousand miles later was like none Emily had seen. Dark and overgrown, twisted with ivy, it was so bewitching that she blinked several times to make sure it was real.
“Bernie?” she whispered to Hartgrave as he slipped his cell phone into a pocket.
“Leading Kincaid on a merry chase. Let’s go.”
Hartgrave’s watch around her wrist showed it to be six o’clock exactly, the time in the part of the world where they now stood. They had fifteen minutes if they were especially fortunate, thirteen if Bernie managed his average. But possibly less.
They moved as quickly as they dared from the clearing where they’d materialized, through a dozen feet of woods and down to another, larger clearing. In it stooda substantial house, half-covered with the same ivy, deeply shadowed in the enveloping darkness and encircled by a wooden fence.
She had visions of gingerbread and wicked witches.
Hartgrave pulled himself onto the fence, one arm outstretched, face twisted in anxious concentration. “Count out five seconds.”
Afterward, they stared at his cell phone for a sign that his signal had been picked up. It hadn’t. Lips pressed into a tight line, he pounded a fist on his creation, then stood up on the fence and (she almost couldn’t bear to watch) stepped straight off—half a dozen feet above the lawn.
“Give me your hand,” he whispered, standing in midair.
They crept over the lawn, stopping once so he could repeat the procedure and extend the conjured path all the way to a window. She risked a glance at the dark grass below and had to spend the rest of the time looking straight at Hartgrave, resolutely not thinking about falling and setting off the motion detectors.
