The previous night, Gilberto had enjoyed eight hours of sleep, unlike Jane, who had gotten four hours. But as he leaned back in his kitchen chair and massaged the nape of his neck with one hand, he looked as tired and world-weary as she felt. She had asked him to impersonate a chauffeur; she regretted that he’d been drawn so much deeper into this. Most of all, she was sorry that he’d been required to witness the enslavement of a fellow human being, even if one so lacking in humanity as this specimen.
At 8:45 P.M., and again at nine o’clock, Jane said to Hendrickson, “Play Manchurian with me,” which was the trigger sentence programmed into the earlier generations of control mechanisms, like the one with which he’d been injected. Twice, he sat in silence, head bowed, either lost in thought or in a cataleptic trance that might be the end destination of his psychological collapse.
The third time, at 9:20, he lifted his head and said, “All right,” and waited expectantly.
Of course, he’d known the trigger sentence and the proper reply before he’d been injected. He could be faking.
She had devised a test that involved a sterilized scalpel from the mortuary’s instrument collection and a command for Hendrickson to cut one thumb.
When the moment came, however, she knew too much about his past suffering to require of him a test of pain.
She said, “Are you tired, Booth?”
“Oh, yes.”
His ashen face, his bloodshot eyes, his pale lips were those of a man at the limit of his resources.
“Are you very tired?” she asked.
“Very. I’ve never been so tired.”
“While we were waiting for the control mechanism to implant, was everything you told me true?”
“Yes.”
“Entirely true? Even about…Tahoe?”
“Yes. True.”
“And now you’re very tired. So I’m going to order you to sleep and keep sleeping until I wake you by touching your right shoulder and saying your name. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Sleep,” she said.
He slumped in the chair, and his head lolled to one side, and he seemed to sleep.
26
Whether this was her second or third vodka-and-Coke in the past few hours, she didn’t know. She didn’t care. She wanted only to stop thinking about the crooked staircase, about the terrible task that lay ahead, and be able to get four or five hours of sleep.
In the low light of a silk-shaded lamp, she and Gilberto sat in living-room armchairs, facing each other. He had poured for himself a generous portion of Scotch weakened by a single ice cube.
Hendrickson remained asleep and tethered to the chair in the kitchen. They had left brighter lights on for him than they wanted for themselves.
Minutes earlier, after a call from Gilberto, his older brother, Hector, and Hector’s seventeen-year-old son, Manuel, had stopped by, and Gilberto had gone downstairs to give them a key so they could retrieve Jane’s SUV. They knew only that an unnamed friend had left it parked in the lot of a supermarket the previous day and needed it to be brought here.
Gilberto swirled the Scotch just enough to clink the dwindling ice cube against the glass. “I thought my war was over years ago.”
“It’s all one war,” she said, “and it’s never over. But you have a haven here. Still no reason to be afraid of the dead.”
“Only the living.” He took a drink. “Long way to Lake Tahoe.”
“If I catch some sleep, hit the road by four, I’ll be there by noon, maybe one o’clock if the weather sucks.”
“With him riding beside you.”
“I need him.”
“But can you really trust him?”
“Not to turn on me, yeah. But if his psychological collapse gets any worse than it is now, he might not be as useful as I hope.”
“They know you have him.”
“But you heard him—they don’t know I walked away from Napa with samples of the control mechanism.”
“He didn’t know. Maybe others do.”
“I’m betting they don’t. And given the need-to-know rule, they won’t notify the couple that maintains the Tahoe house when Anabel isn’t there. Hell, they’re just old people, plebs, plodders, rabble, two-legged cattle.”
Gilberto shuddered. “What he said about why they make some kill themselves and just enslave others…”
Hendrickson’s explanation was engraved in Jane’s memory. The ones who would turn society in the wrong direction, we hate them and believe they deserve to die. Some of those we enslave are just for our pleasure, like the girls of Aspasia. Others will run the world at our direction while we remain concealed behind them, and they are all ignorant fools who deserve to be enslaved.
After they took a moment of solace in their drinks, Gilberto said, “People in power…in my dad’s day, they weren’t full of contempt for the rest of us.”
“Power corrupts.”
“It’s something more than that. Power has always corrupted.”
“It’s all the damn experts,” she said. “We stopped governing ourselves, turned it over to experts.”
He frowned. “It’s a complex world. People running it have to know what they’re doing.”
“These experts don’t have any real-world experience worth shit. They’re elitists. They’re all theory but no real-world experience. Self-described intellectuals.”
“Well, I guess maybe I know the type. Just turn on the TV.”
“This British historian, Paul Johnson, he wrote a great book about them,” Jane said. “It’ll scare the piss out of you.”
“I’m already scared pretty much pissless.”
“They’re uberconformists, live in a bubble of the like-minded. Contemptuous of common sense and regular people.”
“Plebs, plodders, the great unwashed like us.”
“But people matter more than ideas. Nick mattered more than any idiot theory. My boy, your kids—they matter more.”
“You see it changing?”
That was a question she had asked herself. The honest answer wasn’t comforting. “It’s gotten worse for a couple centuries.”
“We gotta hope, though.”
“Hope,” she agreed. “And resist.”
27
Carter Jergen says, with delight, “Sometimes a charitable act is rewarded with a kick in the teeth.”
For weeks, in search of the hidden boy, agents had been tracking down every relative of Nick’s and Jane’s even to the ex-spouse of a second cousin. Every former Marine with whom Nick had served. The families of the victims of the serial killers Jane had caught or killed, with the expectation that she might have bonded with one of those families. Her old college friends. Anyone she might trust with her child. To no avail.
Because neither Nick nor Jane was a showboat, their support of organizations serving veterans didn’t come to the attention of the searchers until so many other, more likely avenues of inquiry had been exhausted. And suddenly, in the photo collections of the fundraising events of those organizations, there they were at this marathon, at that wheelchair-sports weekend, at this gala—often in the company of Gavin and Jessica Washington, smiling and happy and obviously with friends.
As Carter Jergen pilots the Range Rover between the colonnades of live oaks, he says, “No rest for the weary.”
“It’s the price of success,” Radley Dubose replies. “We kicked ass on the Shukla job, so they drop this on us a day later. Doesn’t bother me. I like being wanted. You ever think what’ll happen if we start screwing up?”
“No Christmas bonus?”
“It’ll be you and me getting needles in the arm like we did the Hindu writer kids.”
“Not in a million years,” says Jergen, surprised that even as stunted a specimen as Dubose is so cynical. “We don’t eat our own.”
That statement elicits a patronizing smile. “No cannibalism among the Brahmins? I went to an Ivy League school, remember. I saw what I saw. I know what I know.”
Oversized and self-satisfied, Dubose now reminds Jergen of yet another cartoon character—Popeye. I saw what I saw, I know what I know, I yam what I yam.