Because it was what his script instructed him to say, Sanjay replied, “I will count to three.”
He counted in perfect cadence, precisely two seconds between the numbers, no hesitation because of doubt or confusion or emotion, for their actions must be perfectly simultaneous in this, which was their last moment on the stage.
His eyes on hers, her eyes on his, his pistol pressed to her head, hers to his, they—
—never heard the coeternal shots that ended their lives, though the sound of a single but double-loud blast carried through the open door and along the front walkway and into the cul-de-sac, drawing the attention of a neighbor who had just stepped out to walk his dog, then the police, then the news media, and then the world in all its ignorance.
23
In the green night, there were natural roads through the dense scrub, carved by the ways of water and wind. Navigable slopes of gravelstone. Barren ridgelines that could be followed for a while. Even in this inhospitable territory, in some canyons enough water lay beneath the surface to slake the thirst of eucalyptus and California buckeye. Some places there were immense live oaks, too, that sprawled into tortured architectures, shaped by acidic soil and heat and insect pests that didn’t allow more natural forms, never forests of them, but transfigured groves through which the Land Rover passed as if journeying across a postapocalyptic landscape.
Gavin knew some of this territory from years of riding horses here, although he could not possibly be familiar with all of the hundreds of square miles ahead. And in this peculiar citrine light, he was unable to recognize even some familiar landmarks. In addition to experience and instinct, however, he was relying on a battery-illumined large-faced compass that he had fixed to the console between him and Jessie.
Although he’d had no expectation of making good time in these conditions, he worried that they were not putting the miles behind them fast enough. More than eight years from his last battlefield, he began to feel a familiar itch between the shoulder blades, a queasiness in the gut, and a tightening of the scrotum that were his instinct warning of trouble ahead.
In the cargo area behind the backseat, the dogs had been lying down, as they mostly did when traveling in any vehicle other than the apple-green ’48 Ford pickup, wherein they liked to sit or even stand, leashed and anchored for their safety, to sightsee and let the wind blow through their fur.
Now, as the Rover was cruising through a meadow of low scraggly grass veined with taller coastal sage, Duke and Queenie scrambled to their feet and began to growl low in their throats.
From the backseat, Travis said, “They sure don’t like something on your side of the Rover, Uncle Gavin.”
Although traveling five miles an hour in respect of the sudden changes the terrain could undergo, Gavin slowed further to scan the night through his side window. At first he saw nothing. Then the pack raced into view.
“Coyotes,” he said.
Six of them, a large pack for a species that often hunted alone. They were lean and shadowy green shapes with bright green eyes; their serrated smiles were the palest green in this macabre vision.
“I can see them, sort of,” Travis said. “They’ve got fire in their eyes.”
Gavin slowed further to let the beasts race ahead, but the coyotes slowed as well and hung with the Rover.
“To them,” said Travis, “we’re like some kinda canned meat.”
Jessie laughed. “Delivered to their door, just like pizza.”
The dogs’ low growls were punctuated with thin keening sounds, almost whimpers. They were ready to fight. But at the same time, they acknowledged the greater ferocity of these wild creatures that, for all they might share with shepherds genetically, would go for the dogs’ throats as savagely as if Duke and Queenie were rabbits.
Like the dogs, Gavin saw nothing amusing about being stalked by six long-toothed prairie wolves. They might be safe in this can on wheels, but they couldn’t stay in the vehicle forever if it blew a tire.
24
On his way to becoming adjusted, Booth Hendrickson had fallen apart. When the nanoweb finished spinning itself, it would control a human form that looked like the once dreaded man from the DOJ, and it would be powered by the electrical currents of that functioning brain, but the man would not be who he once was, and the brain would be a repository for a mind in which long-tied psychological knots had come undone, and a profound unraveling had occurred.
As he told Jane and Gilberto about the Tahoe estate and the crooked staircase, he did so in a discursive monologue now and then bordering on incoherent. There was no way to keep him focused on the most salient facts by interrogating him, for he reacted to what she asked as if he were the ball in a pinball field, ricocheting off the question in unanticipated directions. The more questions that were put to him, the more fractured his narrative became, so that there was nothing to be done but let him talk, listen, and slowly make sense of all the puzzle pieces.
The story that he told of childhood abuse was so extreme, so unlike anything Jane had ever heard, that she expected him to become emotional, to weep with self-pity and shake with rage. Apparently, however, his capacity for emotion had been diminished for a long time. As an adolescent and adult, what he had been able to feel seemed to have been related to his conviction of superiority, to a deeply instilled sense of being one of a class above all others. He felt contempt for the masses in general and for most individuals in particular; disgust at what he imagined to be their universal ignorance; abhorrence at their pretensions to equality; hatred of them for their claims to such feelings as love, faith, compassion, and sympathy, all of which he knew to be fictions by which they hid from themselves the truth of the world. And he had known fear as well, fear of those billions who were beneath him and who, by their stupidity and ignorance and reckless behavior, might destroy the world not just for themselves but for him and those exalted people like him. Of nobler emotions, he seemed to have long been bereft. Now, in the telling of his experiences with the crooked staircase, even the ignoble emotions seemed inaccessible to him, leaving him only with fear, and in fact with just a single fear. He rambled through his story in a monotone, recalling the most hideous details with no more emotion than a mathematician reading off pages of the calculations he used to solve a problem. But from time to time he looked at Jane with sudden fright and said, “Tell me you won’t take the light away. Please, please, don’t take the light away.”
When his story wound to its tangled end, he sat in silence, hands in his lap, head bowed, form without substance, a hollow man, his headpiece stuffed with straw.
An hour earlier, Jane would have thought she could never pity this ruthless user of others. If she pitied him now, she did not go so far as to have sympathy with him, for that would be to confer upon him a dignity he didn’t deserve.
When he looked at her and pleaded for light, his expression was one of abject submission with a suggestion of veneration, as if he held her in exalted honor and didn’t fear her at all, but reserved his fright for the loss of light, for being left in darkness as he had been left within the place that he called the crooked staircase. His seeming adoration gave Jane the creeps. After so long seeking absolute power, he found himself utterly powerless—and was relieved to submit, perhaps as pleased to be the face beneath the boot as he would have been to be the boot, as long as he could remain in the presence of power.
She didn’t want his veneration.
And it wasn’t mercy that would prevent her from turning out the lights. Even in his diminished capacity, she simply didn’t want to be alone in the dark with him.
25