Extinction Machine

Chapter Forty-five

Turkey Point Lighthouse, Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 10:07 a.m.

The Black Hawk came in along the curve of a sheer bluff that rose above the headland of Chesapeake Bay. Elk Neck State Park was sprawled across twenty-one hundred acres of dense forests, hills, marshland, and sandy beaches. I’d hiked every one of the trails, roasted marshmallows and hotdogs over campfires, sung bad songs very loudly with other boys, done my first wilderness training and orienteering, and experienced some of my happiest moments here. I look back at the last summer we’d camped here as the last clean breath before my life became polluted by the urban trauma that scarred me and transformed me into the killer I’ve become. That summer was before Helen and I had been attacked by a group of teenage boys. Before they’d stomped me half to death and then assaulted her. It was the last time I was unmarred by life. The last time I was innocent.

Here in this forest.

I could feel my mouth wanting to smile at those memories, but that’s always tough for me, because I have to view them through the lens of what happened so soon after.

And yet …

We’d played here. Helen and me, when her family came camping with mine. My brother and me, the two of us hunting for Apaches and dinosaurs and savage tribesmen on those forgotten trails. Maybe one day, maybe when the war let me stop long enough to catch my breath, I’d come back here and find one of those old trails and walk it. With Ghost beside me and ghosts around me. Would I be able to hear the echo of old laughter here? Does the world ever grant a killer that much mercy?

It was a bad day to ask those kinds of questions.

The shadow of the Black Hawk flickered across a flat green lawn and flitted up the white tower of the Turkey Point Lighthouse. From a distance the lighthouse looked blunt and squat, but it was deceptive. A hundred feet high and as white as a gull’s breast.

I was surprised to see that there was a house adjoining the tower. Our scoutmaster had told us that the lightkeeper’s house had been torn down in 1972, years before I was born. But now there was a two-story Victorian cottage that had an improbable number of porches and cupolas and little towers sticking out in all directions. In contrast to the stark simplicity of the lighthouse, the cottage was on the charming side of untidy. Japanese black pines stood guard beside an inviting walkway, and an herb garden was embowered by beach plum, bayberry, and hydrangeas.

The pilot, Hector, set us down on the far side of the two-acre lawn.

“You want backup, Cap?” he asked. We’d left Baltimore with a crew of three: Hector at the stick; a former field agent with an artificial leg called Slick riding shotgun; and a red-haired woman nicknamed—creatively—Red along as crew chief. They were support staff, but they were also combat vets; each partially disabled but still tough as nails.

“Stay on station,” I told Hector. “I don’t know if this is a hello-goodbye waste of time or if we’re going to need to get this Flynn woman back to the shop. Cut the rotors but stay ready.”

“You got it.”

Red rolled back the door and once I hopped out she handed me a ruggedized laptop bag. A MindReader substation. She gave Ghost a wink as we got out. She said, “Don’t go chasing no ’possums.”

Ghost gave her a snooty look and followed me through the fading rotor wash. The turbines whined down to a whisper and then fell silent as I approached the garden path.

The day was cool and clean. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and despite the time of year the air was alive with the last of the season’s hummingbirds. They whipped and whizzed around us, dancing with swallowtail butterflies, and Ghost jumped and barked like a puppy. The scent of roses was infused by the rich salty air, and as the breeze shifted I could smell rosemary and sweet grass. As I approached the cottage I marveled at the variety of flowers, some of which were way out of season. Pansies, impatiens, and dianthus thrived alongside tulips, crocuses, and a dozen kinds of roses. And there was a row of hollyhocks with their paper-thin blooms fluttering in shades of pale pink, lemon yellow, and deep magenta, some of them towering nearly ten feet high.

I stopped and looked around, and despite everything—my errand, the video, the crisis—I smiled.

Then the door opened and Junie Flynn stepped into my life.

I know how that sounds. Absurd, dramatic, corny. But there are moments in life—precious and rare—when no matter what else is hanging fire or clawing at your attention, you have to simply pause and focus all your attention. You do so because something of great importance is happening and you are suddenly aware of it. Maybe not in a conscious away, but deep down, on the level where your instincts trump your thoughts. The voice of your essential self whispers to you: Behold. And you stop because you must. You know that to fumble the moment through inattention or to pollute it through triviality is to lose something of great value. Even if you cannot then—or ever—ascribe precise parameters to that value. You are acutely aware, though, that if you blunder through the moment without giving it its proper due you are one very dull fellow. This, you are sure, is an event in life so rare and significant that it can only be described as having a flavor of importance.

That is what I felt when the lighthouse door opened and Junie Flynn stepped from soft interior shadows into the golden sunlight of early afternoon. She wore a loose peasant skirt with a complex Mexican print, a white long-sleeved sweater unbuttoned over a coral t-shirt with a deep V, and no shoes. Her wavy blond hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. She wore no makeup, but there were silver rings on most of her fingers, a jangly ankle bracelet on her left leg, and at least a dozen bracelets on each wrist—layers of silver, white gold, red gold, and copper. An emerald pendant hung from a gold chain around her neck, half lost in the shadows between her sun-freckled breasts.

She walked up to me, smiling and asked, “Are you here to kill me?”