She hesitated to administer the first ampule. She shuddered violently, as though an icy and invisible presence had for a moment occupied the same space in which she stood before moving through her on its way into some nameless void.
The human heart was deceitful above all things, hers no less than any other. In this perilous mission in which she found herself, the days were hard and the nights were lonely, and only two motors drove her onward: first, her love for her child and for her lost husband; second, the conviction that in the perpetual struggle of good and evil, the latter must be resisted without fail. But there was a temptation to use the weapons of evil against it, and in so using them to risk becoming the very thing that she was sworn to resist. She couldn’t say without doubt that her heart yearned more for justice than for vengeance, and it was in the self-deception regarding motive that the long descent of the soul began. In the end, she could only depend on her belief—and her heart’s faith—that her love for Travis and Nick was greater than her hatred for Hendrickson and his allies, because love and only love inoculated her against evil’s infection.
In memory she heard Mr. Droog on the telephone that day in January: Sheerly for the fun of it, we could pack the little bugger off to some Third World snake pit, turn him over to a group like ISIS or Boko Haram, where they have no slightest qualms about keeping sex slaves. Some of those badasses…are terribly fond of little boys as much as they are of little girls….You’re more to my taste than your son, but I wouldn’t hesitate to pack you off with him and let those Boko boys who swing both ways have a twofer. Tend to your own business instead of ours, and all will be well.
Now she met Hendrickson’s pale-green eyes again and said, “Come Hell or not, you are my business.”
It was no small thing to deprive a man of his free will, even if he believed that denying others autonomy over their minds and bodies was his right as well as the road to Utopia.
She served the first course of the three-ampule infusion and then the second.
Because a scream would no longer avail him of any hope of rescue and because she sensed that it was her obligation to regard his face complete, even to receive his bitter curses, as she reduced him from a man to a marionette, she stripped the duct tape from his mouth and allowed him to expel the sodden wad of gauze.
He didn’t curse her, after all, didn’t speak or even weep.
When she opened the valve to feed the third dose into the cannula, she met her captive’s eyes once more. He appeared to be horrified, stricken. But then a subtle change came over him, and it seemed that in his eyes welled something like awe, as if he were gazing up not at a motherless widow desperate to save the life of her child at any cost, but as if she were some fierce aboriginal goddess, embodiment of ultimate power, figure of mystery and wonder. And there was about him an air of deliverance, as though his lust for power, which would now never be fulfilled, could as well be satisfied by giving himself to power, as though his burning desire to have every knee bend before him was but the mirror image of his heart’s other and equal desire to live on his knees and kiss the ruler’s ring.
A fresh chill gripped Jane, but instead of shivering her as had the previous one, it coiled in her bones to stay awhile.
1
Gavin and Travis, facing each other from opposite ends of the blanket, each with his back against a tree, finished the brownies and sat listening to the canyon wrens issuing a long series of clear whistles that cascaded through the cottonwood shade. Man and boy were comfortable with each other in conversation and in silence.
In less than three months, Gavin had come to feel not just protective of Travis but also fatherly toward him. And Jessica was as smitten with him as if she had conceived him and brought him into the world. Any wound that Travis suffered would be their wound. If anything happened to him in their care, the years that remained for them would be years of grief aging into settled sorrow, and even the bright moments of life would be shot through with shadows.
The boy said, “I’m kind of gettin’ sleepy here.”
“Take a nap, kiddo. We’re not in a hurry to be anywhere.”
“You sleepy?”
“Nope. The only way I can sleep is hanging by my toes from an attic rafter.”
“Batman,” Travis said, for now and then they played a little game in which Gavin said something ridiculous about himself and the boy had to guess what secret identity he was claiming.
“That one was too easy. While you nap, I’ll work up one that’ll stump you.”
Travis curled on his side, on the blanket, and let out a long sigh of weary contentment.
From time to time, Gavin heard the buzzing of a drone, mostly in the distance. Though the aircraft surely had nothing to do with him and Travis, he didn’t want to ride out of the cottonwoods until he hadn’t heard one of them for at least twenty minutes or half an hour.
He suspected that the boy knew as much and was feigning sleep, so that Gavin didn’t have to keep making excuses for why they were not starting the return trip home. Travis had inherited his parents’ good looks; he would be a heartbreaker when he grew up, but he would never break any, because he’d inherited their intelligence as well, and for a kid so young, he understood the concept of consequences, that one person’s wrong action produced another person’s pain. He had already been cured in the brine of grief, and a consequence of that was a regard for the feelings of others that few children had at his age and that some people never acquired. He’d make a hell of a Marine if he ever followed in his father’s footsteps.
Gavin Washington had been an Army man. He and Jessica had met Nick and Jane at a fundraiser for the Wounded Warrior Project in Virginia, fifteen months earlier. Their friendship formed quickly, effortlessly, for they recognized in one another shared attitudes and convictions without the need to explain themselves.
Sometimes it seemed to Gavin that they were brought together by providence, in preparation for all the crap that was coming fast in Jane’s life. Because both Gavin and Nick were spec ops guys, they shared an ingrained preference for discretion, for maintaining a low profile. Neither the Hawks nor the Washingtons were much interested in social media; there were no Facebook postings to link them, no Instagram or Snapchat accounts. They corresponded a little by snail mail, which left no indelible digital trail, and they spoke on the phone, but not often. Their friendship flourished face-to-face at weekend-long events for veterans’ causes in which Jessie had become an activist following the end of her own Army career. When Jane needed somewhere to hide her boy, family and friends with obvious connections could not provide her with a safe, secret redoubt. There had been only Gavin and Jessica, a continent away, but willing.
The thing that most troubled Gavin about the drones was the length of time they cruised the area. Maximum flight duration for one of that size was probably fifteen minutes, half an hour with a backup battery. He’d first heard these craft an hour earlier, and still the buzzing came and went. Of course if there was a tournament involving a club of enthusiasts, they would have brought numerous replacement batteries.
The wrens of both varieties were tireless in their singing. The rasping, scraping screech of a red-tailed hawk in triumph from time to time confirmed a good day’s hunting.
By contrast, in a silence came a large swarm of butterflies, Sara Orangetips, white with black and fiery-orange markings on their wingtips, harbingers of spring, lilting through the air like notes of a song translated from music into the hush of Lepidoptera. Their phosphorescent whiteness made ghosts of them in the shadows, but their true beauty flared as they danced through shafts of sunlight.