The Escape (John Puller, #3)(21)

His “quarters” was a motel room on the outskirts of Kansas City, Kansas. He had left Leavenworth behind for no other reason than—

I could.

It was a right-angle drive, hands twelve and three on the clock, meaning straight south and then straight east on I-70, the two perfectly equal legs of a right triangle, only awaiting the hypotenuse to complete it, which he might, taking an alternate but no less straight and direct route back to Leavenworth, if necessary. He had always framed things that way, with a reference to math or science or an adjunct of either one, placing them into a perspective that amused some, bewildered others, but was off-putting to most, he had found.

And which bothered him not at all.

There was a bed, a chair, a table, a bureau, and a TV on the bureau with lots of mostly useless channels. The bathroom was barely an afterthought, essentially a niche in the wall with a shower stall so claustrophobic it felt more like a straitjacket than a proper bathing area.

Again, after a prison cell, it bothered him not at all.

His duffel was on the floor and his laptop on the desk. He had purchased a disposable phone along the way, along with a mobile hotspot, set it all up, programmed in some interesting features, and was grinding his way through the military database he’d hacked into back at Starbucks.

It was a special database to which only authorized personnel should have been granted access. Computer security was only as good as the programmer. The one who had firewalled this database had been good—but not great.

Puller had also purchased a small wireless printer and some three-hole paper and three-ring and spiral notebooks along with pens. While his entire professional life had been mostly spent in the digital world, where the language of ones and zeroes dominated, he appreciated the importance of paper, pen, and deliberative thought that working with such old-school items seemed to inspire. And he thought better in cursive. The joined-up writing seemed to spur connective thinking.

He printed his papers, put them in the three-ring, exited the database, and took up his pen and spiral notebooks. He worked methodically for some hours. He didn’t stop to drink or eat or use the bathroom. He was oblivious to whatever else was going on in the world, or at least in Kansas. He was no longer, at least in his mind, the most wanted man in America. He was an analyst, a seer, a prognosticator going over his reams of data, moving their pieces, twisting them, testing them, discounting some, fleshing out others, slowly transforming disjointed intelligence into something that made sense.

After six hours of relentless concentration and the light of day having given over to dark, forcing him to take a moment to turn on a lamp, he put down his pen and sat back, folding his arms over his chest and resting his chin there as well. He closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and counted his heartbeats until they fell short of sixty a minute. He opened his eyes and ran his gaze down one of his tat sleeves, exposed now since he had discarded his jacket.

They were of his creation. They looked like typical tattoos, but if one looked closely enough the eagles and dragons and other creatures resting there were actually composed of tiny geometric images: squares, triangles, rectangles, and their more complex brethren, the dodecahedron for example, which when viewed flat—meaning as a solid—had twelve faces and was an integral part of his dragon’s scales.

Puller knew that other than him no one would notice. But that had been how much of his life had gone—his noticing, others not.

Except for his brother. And his father. They were curious. They observed. They remembered. They figured things out. His father had mastered leading enormous numbers of men, grand corps and divisions at a time, into battle on a scale and dimension that was as complex as anything ever seen on a chessboard, with the added pressure of human lives by the thousands being at stake. His brother tracked down wrongdoers with a sense of justice and an attention to detail that would put most others in the field to shame.

The Puller men, prodigies in their respective fields, but whose skills all shared that core attribute of—

Observing.

He turned to page sixty-six of the printed-out papers, because something had just occurred to him. He studied what was written there and compared it to information contained on page twenty-four. Interestingly enough, they did not tally. They did not tally at all. But they had to if the offered and official result was to make any sense.

This was not a smoking gun. But it was something. And something, as his brother often said, usually led to something else.

Brilliant in its elegant simplicity, and he knew exactly what his brother meant. He carried it out to its logical conclusion.

In fact, something always leads to something else.

He drew out a blank piece of paper and conjured the image of the man in his head. It was not easy, because it had been dark. But there had been a light source. The man’s own flashlight.

Puller put his pen to the paper and refocused, transferring the image in his head to the cotton fibers, letting the ink bleed into them, fill out what he was trying to achieve. This was not simply important; it was paramount. Because it was something.

And something always leads to something else.

He was an accomplished artist, a fact not many knew about him. He had taken it up years ago to relax from a job whose stakes and pressures were so enormous.

Hence the sketches, lines connecting and intersecting and bisecting other lines to form something that had not previously existed. It was math yet again, geometry transformed into art, a confluence that had made painters like Picasso icons forever enshrined in history. It was cubism building to masterpieces born of another realm of thought and experience.