Nearer stood Travis, utterly still, as if he thirsted for the sight of her and could not move until his thirst was slaked.
She saw in this precious boy not just her child, but the best of herself and the best of her beloved husband. She saw the most cherished part of her past, too, all the years of happiness with Nick, and her future in its entirety, for there could be no future worth having if Travis wasn’t in it. When they weren’t together, she thought of him as bigger than he was, perhaps because she had all of her heart and hope invested in this boy, and in spite of her dire situation, her hope was no little thing. Now he seemed so much smaller and more fragile than she remembered, vulnerable and as easily taken from her as Nick had been, as her mother had been.
She approached him and dropped to her knees, and he flew into her arms, clutching her with something like desperation.
The dogs whined, seemed to debate the proper protocol, and settled on the floor to comfort each other.
Just then, neither Jane nor Travis felt a need to speak. The substance of him, the warmth of him, the sweetness of his breath, the rabbit thump of his heart as he pressed against her were worth more than all the words in this vast library. She kissed the top of his head, kissed his brow, and when he put one small hand to her face, she kissed the fingers, the palm.
The words love you passed between them, the only words that seemed important enough to speak, though by speaking them, Travis lost his composure. Tears flooded his eyes, and he revealed that, even at his age, he held no illusions about the fate of his former guardians, the Washingtons, though he had concealed his certainty until now. “They’re gone. Aunt Jess and Uncle Gavin, we’re never gonna see them again. They woulda come back by now. They’re dead, aren’t they dead, Mommy?”
When they had gone on the run from their house in Virginia, he’d begun calling her Mom, as if aware that he needed to grow up faster than nature intended. Sunday night, when she took a call from him on her burner phone, he’d reverted to Mommy. Now again.
She had many reasons to hate the people aligned against her, these arrogant self-named Techno Arcadians, not least of all because they took her boy’s father from him, but also because they stole his innocence. They forced on him an awareness of the darkness of this world that he otherwise would have discovered slowly over the years, with his parents’ guidance, in a manner that would have made it easier for him to come to terms with the harder truths of life.
On Sunday, speaking with him on the phone, she’d thought Travis feared that Jessie and Gavin had been killed, but she had seen no compelling reason to confirm his fear. Not while he was feeling so vulnerable. Not while she was hundreds of miles away from him and could not take him in her arms.
He was in her arms now, and among the many things she owed him was the truth. She knew from hard experience that too little truth in any family led to enduring pain. If her mother had not concealed the serious marital problems between her and Jane’s father, if the great pianist Martin Duroc had known his daughter was aware of his affair and might testify to her mother’s distress, perhaps he would not have dared to kill one wife to get another.
“Yes, sweetie, Jessie and Gavin are gone. They were very brave. They were very brave all their lives. And they loved you as if you were their own child.”
His voice was thick, tremulous, choked with tears. “What can we do? What can we do?”
She held him tight and rocked with him there on the floor. “We can remember them always, sweetheart, never forget how brave they were, how wonderful and kind and giving and funny. We can love them always, and every night in our prayers we can say thanks for having had them in our lives.”
He spoke into her throat, which was wet with his tears. “It’s not enough. They won’t know.”
“But they will know, honey. They will know every night. They will hear you every night, and they will know you loved them as much as they loved you.”
Her grief was now doubled by his grief. She wondered how many heartbreaks a child so young could endure.
4
CORNELL STOOD by one of his favorite armchairs, in the warm golden light of his prettiest stained-glass floor lamp, surrounded by the consolation of his books, and he knew no comfort, only misery.
He could not bear the boy’s grief, the tears. He wanted to do something to soothe this child, comfort him, but there was nothing he could do. He dared not hug Travis as the mother did. A mere hug would plummet Cornell into an anxiety attack, and he would be no good to anyone, a big strange ugly man curled in the fetal position and shaking with fear, unable to stand, hardly able to speak, a burden to them, not a comfort.
He stood wringing his large hands, ceaselessly shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as if he needed to go someplace at once but didn’t know where. He had long been at peace with his limitations, at peace with the hard road that was his only route through life, but he was not at peace now. He did not remember ever having wept before, but he was weeping.
5
THE DESERT WAS NEW TO LUTHER TILLMAN, and he liked it about as much as he might like being forked onto a barbecue and broiled over charcoal. He had known hotter days than this, even in his home state of Minnesota, but there was something about the pale sky and the dry air and the dusty trees and the mostly barren earth that intensified the effect of the heat and, for him anyway, made ninety degrees significantly more oppressive here than it would have been in a different landscape.
He shrugged out of his black-denim jacket. He considered taking off his shoulder rig, but under the current circumstances, he would feel more naked without the pistol than if he stripped out of all his clothes.
The gear in the back of the Chevy Suburban included a forty-foot garden hose with a special nozzle and two identical one-quart bottle-like attachments, each filled with a custom-mixed solvent, that fed their contents into the water stream in a continuous measured flow.
He found the hose bib at the corner of the garage where Jane had been told it would be, tested the water pressure, and hooked up the hose.
The white paint was a special blend that Enrique de Soto had concocted and applied in Nogales. The solvent turned the paint to something like chalk, and the water washed it off, leaving the factory-applied black paint intact. There were also three large, white block letters on the roof of the vehicle, the same three repeated on the front doors—FBI—and these letters likewise were impervious to the solvent.
Come civilian, leave official. Once they had the boy, they didn’t want to risk being stopped by authorities between here and the motor home in the RV park. If a roadblock was encountered, an FBI vehicle could more likely be driven around it without being forced to stop.
Like some alchemist of ages long past, Luther washed the white Suburban to black while the sun, in a far less magical fashion, beat on his shaved head and glazed his face with sweat.
6
IN THE CORNER WHERE SHADOWS drift around and over you, there is no passage of time, for you know not time, but only the eternal now.
There is hunger in the now. Fear. Hatred. Hatred of all that is not you. Anything that is not you is a potential threat.
You are awake, eyes open, but dreaming. Dark dreams darkle down into ever deeper darkness.
In the now is desire, but only of the most primitive kind. For food. For prey. For violence that conquers threat and fills your mouth with the nourishing blood of the Other.
Within your head, whispers come, whispers go, words as meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass.
Emotions come, sent by Others. Their fear and hatred inspire greater fear and hatred of your own.