This particular Gurkha offered all the amenities of a luxury sedan, including a first-class music system. But Jane deferred to Trahern’s preference for brooding silence.
More than two hundred miles into what the GPS said would be a nearly five-hundred-mile trip, they left the interstate for a truck stop. With Trahern’s credit card, they filled up the nearly empty primary fuel tank. Jane bought four turkey-and-bacon sandwiches and two twenty-ounce bottles of Coke.
Trahern took the wheel, eating and driving at the same time. When they were finished, he pulled off the pavement, so that she could drive again. She thought he intended to nap in the passenger seat. Instead, he remained awake, staring at the highway, although his stare was fixed, like that of a man self-tranced.
Jane was weary. Aching back. Sore butt. In one interminable day, she’d driven from L.A. to San Diego and then from San Diego all this way, almost ten hours on the road since the morning. She wasn’t sleepy yet, but mental fatigue accompanied her physical weariness. Lively conversation would have helped her remain alert, but Trahern was not a raconteur with a trove of sparkling anecdotes.
Seventy miles north of the truck stop, the night loosed a hard rain. The torrents washing across the road tugged at the tires. Jane didn’t know if four-wheel drive would help if they hydroplaned, but she shifted into that mode on the fly.
In Trahern’s company, every mile of this journey had been strange. Now it became stranger, eerie. Gusts of conflicting winds shaped the falling water into pale-winged phantoms that billowed across the highway, and the world beyond this hurtling mass of armor seemed to melt away, until there was only the dark and nothing in it but a short length of pavement that might feather away into a void.
Trahern broke his long silence to say, “You probably think it was war that made me the way I am, but it wasn’t.”
She decided that if he needed to say something, he would more surely say it if she didn’t speak. He was less in conversation with her than in communion with himself, gazing at the windshield, where the wipers swept away the blur but could not sweep back into sight the washed-away world beyond the shoulders of the highway.
“In fact,” Trahern said, “the Army was the best thing ever happened to me. It made me feel I had value and could do something worthwhile. I’d felt useless for a long time.”
The taillights of an eighteen-wheeler loomed closer, and Jane followed the trucker’s lead by slowing from seventy to fifty.
Trahern said, “When I was ten years old, I had to listen to my sister being murdered.”
20
* * *
SEARCHING AHEAD for a room at the last minute, before he had flown out of Austin earlier in the day, Nathan Silverman had been given few choices. Most hotels around LAX and on the west side of Los Angeles were booked full. With only a few higher-end options to consider, he had splurged on a small suite—sitting room, bedroom, richly marbled bathroom—in a Beverly Hills establishment.
Now, after checking in and being shown to his suite at nine o’clock—midnight his time—the quiet and comfort and pampering touches, like a plate of fresh fruit, seemed worth every penny.
Although he had intended to be home in Virginia for the night, years in the Bureau had taught him to travel with toiletries and a change of clothes, just in case.
The room-service menu was large, and as always when traveling, he preferred a meal in his suite to dining alone in a restaurant.
By the time he showered, wrapped himself in the complimentary bathrobe, and opened a beer from the honor bar, his dinner arrived.
Evidently new to his job, the young waiter ineptly dressed the round game table for dinner with a white tablecloth, a small vase of flowers, flatware, and napkins. With some clumsiness, he transferred dinner from the room-service cart. He was polite and well-meaning, apologizing for his errors, and Silverman tipped him too generously, as a way of saying, Don’t worry, everyone’s a beginner at your age.
The filet mignon and side dishes were perfect. Strawberries and blueberries in cream. Excellent coffee in an insulated pot that kept it hot.
He had arisen at four o’clock that morning, and it had been a long, stressful day. As tired as he was, however, he doubted that he would sleep well. Too many worries. Too many unanswered questions.
After pouring a second cup from the insulated pot, but before taking a sip, he woke and realized he’d fallen asleep in the chair.
Silverman’s weariness was profound, bone-deep. Getting to his feet required a conscious effort. The floor tilted, as if the hotel were a ship at sea. The bedroom eluded him. But then he found it. And the bed. The expectation of insomnia proved unfounded.
He dreamed of an immense and silent Texas plain, flat to every distant horizon, the wild grass halfway to his knees and dead still except where he stirred it as he ran. The fierce sun was enthroned directly overhead, unmoving, so that he sprinted miles and miles, yet never cast a shadow. Although no pursuer was visible either at his heels or at the farthest limits of vision, he felt pursued. He feared the vastness of the cloudless sky and thought that something beyond all human experience would swoop down to seize, emasculate, and disembowel him. A door closed, an unmistakable sound. Silverman stopped, turned in place, 360 degrees, but no structure existed at any point on that eternal plain, no place with doors. A man spoke his name—Nathan? Can you hear me, Nathan?—but he remained alone, utterly alone. The sun. The sky. The grass. He ran.
21
* * *
RAIN RATTLED LIKE VOLLEYS of buckshot against the bullet-resistant windshield.
“Her name was Justine Carter,” Dougal Trahern said, “because her father was my mother’s first husband. Justine. My half sister. Four years old when I was born. I knew her all my life until…”
For a minute, he fell silent, as if he had decided not to share his torment, after all.
Jane suspected that he had not spoken of this for many years, perhaps not since it happened. A murdered sister was not part of what could be learned about him from the Internet, no doubt because his sister’s surname did not easily link her to him and because he was only ten when it happened, back in a day when children were rigorously protected by law from the curiosity of the media.
“Justine,” Trahern continued, “was brilliant and kind and so funny. In spite of the four-year age difference, we were close, always close from as early as I can remember. Twins couldn’t have been closer.”
A new quality had come into his voice. Gruffness had given way to tenderness, but a tenderness haunted by sorrow.
When Jane glanced at him, she saw that his face glowed as pale as the streak of white that blazed through his beard. Fine drops of sweat beaded his brow. His eyes remained fixed on the highway, which at the moment led him not to the future but far into the past.
“I was ten. She was fourteen. A Saturday. Our father…my father, her stepfather…away on business. Our mother was out, visiting a sick friend. Me and Justine at home. The doorbell rang. This normal-looking guy. I saw him through the sidelight, a man delivering flowers. Roses. A normal-looking guy with roses. We knew not to open the door for a stranger. We knew. I knew. I opened the door. He said, ‘Hey, kiddo, I got these here for some girl named Justine.’ He holds the roses out to me. I take them, and he punches past the roses, hits me in the face. He’s inside then. Pushes the door shut. I’m on the floor, roses scattered. He drops down, punches my face again. I don’t even have a chance to warn Justine. I’m out. For…for a while, I’m out.”