The Oracle Year(79)

Cool water spilled down his throat, pure joy across his chalk-dry tongue, and he drank three huge gulps before the straw was pulled away.

“Easy now,” a light, pleasant voice said from behind his head.

“Who’s there?” Will said, attempting to muster some authority in his tone, but finding it hard to rise above a whisper.

The woman from the hotel room came around to the side of Will’s gurney and sat down on a bench running the length of the rear compartment. She reached over and loosened the strap holding Will’s forehead.

“You can call me the Coach, son,” the woman said.

“Coach of what?” Will croaked.

“Why, of the team that figured out you’re the Oracle.”

With the strap loosened, Will was able to turn and take better stock of the woman than he’d had time to do back in the hotel—she was slim, with gray-white hair, dark eyebrows, and a sharp nose. She wore a pair of pressed khaki trousers, a blue blouse, and elegant glasses framing bright blue eyes, and she was smiling in a way that conveyed both good humor and concern for Will’s well-being. The Coach looked like she belonged in a library, expertly handling misshelved volumes and interbranch loan requests and late fees and rowdy children.

“How are you feeling, Will?” she said.

The lady seemed so sincere, so genuine, that Will found himself considering the possibility that this was all a mistake. That things had spiraled out of the Coach’s control, and now she just wanted to set everything right.

“Better, a little,” Will said.

The Coach patted him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry about the Taser,” she said. “But we didn’t know what you were capable of, and it seemed much easier to get you out of the hotel if you were down for the count.”

Will’s jaw clenched, all warmth he’d felt toward her evaporating.

“You probably feel like a grilled cheese sandwich right about now, but it will pass,” the Coach continued. “Your body just needs to work through all that hurt. No lasting damage, I promise.”

“Leigh,” Will said.

The Coach looked puzzled for a moment, then her face cleared.

“Oh, the young lady. She’s in the other ambulance. She’ll come along with us, for the time being.”

She moved an object into Will’s field of vision—the laptop Leigh had been using to take notes.

“Some very interesting material here, Will,” the Coach said. “If I’d known all this before I met you, we wouldn’t have had to toast your bacon at all.”

She chuckled.

“See, what I was worried about, my concern, was that if you could see the future, who knew what else you could do? Maybe you could set people on fire, or stop their hearts, or who knows what? I’ve seen those movies.”

She set the laptop down.

“You seem pretty safe, though. That’s why I decided to take this little ride with you. I have to hand you over to my client in a little while, but I didn’t want to miss a chance to meet you in person. I’ve met some movers and shakers in my time, Will, but you’re right up there. Right up there.”

“Who’s your . . . client?” Will managed.

“You’ll find out,” she said and gave him a hearty, surreal wink.

“How did you find me?” Will said.

His voice was almost quaking with need. He hated it, hated saying anything at all to this woman, but he had to know.

The Coach gave a slow nod, acknowledging the question.

“There’s always a way, Will. I’ve been in this business for forty years. I’ve taken a lot of tricky jobs, and I’ll tell you—I never take a job if I don’t see a way I can get it done. That doesn’t mean the clients always have the gumption to see it through. They might not want to expend the resources, or they don’t have the will. But there’s always a path to the finish line.

“You were tough, though,” she said, pointing a delicate, bony finger at Will. “I did some jobs for Mossad, finding Nazis, and those were hard—those Krauts knew how to cover their tracks. You were in their league, for sure.”

Did she just call me a Nazi? Will thought. And then: How did she find me?

The answer to this question had become the one thing Will wanted to know most in all the world.

“Computers, son,” the Coach said, her tone apologetic. “These days, you want to find someone, it’s almost always computers. It’s no fun anymore, you ask me. Used to be you’d break into someone’s office and dig through their files at four in the morning, or send a girl in to loosen a man’s lips after a little romance. Sometimes, I even was that girl, hard as it might be to believe.”

At this, the Coach tilted her head at Will, waggling her eyebrows lewdly.

“Those were good times,” she went on. “Adventures. It seemed fairer, somehow. But now, you hire some pencil-neck to sit in an office and type for a few days, and you’ve got your answer. It’s not the same.”

Will closed his eyes. He thought of the Florida Ladies and wondered if the Coach had paid them a visit as well.

“But like I said,” the woman went on, “you weren’t easy. The head of my technical team—now there’s a strange duck, believe me! He had to jump through some hoops to find you. But it’s like Archimedes said: give me a lever long enough and I’ll move the world.