“To make you suffer.” Satterfield practically spat the words. “Killing you isn’t enough. You have to suffer. I can’t make you suffer for thirty years, like I did—not unless I let you live. Maybe I should kill your family—slowly and painfully—but let you live. Cut off your hands and feet, put out your eyes, slice off your dick and make you eat it. That would be perfect. But what is it the business gurus say? ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’? Perfect revenge isn’t an option. But I think this’ll do. You know why?”
I didn’t want to hear it; everything that came out of his mouth was like poison spewing into the air, seeping into my soul, but I knew the only hope—for me, and Miranda, and the unsuspecting crowd above us—was to keep him talking. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years,” Satterfield said. “Who do you love, and what do you care about? Your family, sure. It goes without saying that they’ll be dying very soon, and very painfully. But who else do you love—and what else—as much as your family? More than your family?” He looked around the bone lab, his expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer. “That’s your dirty little secret, isn’t it, Brockton? You love this place—your precious job, your precious university, your precious reputation—even more than you love your family. And so your legacy—the thing you’ll go down in history for—will be wholesale destruction and mass fatalities. Twenty times the death toll of the World Trade Center. And your finger will be the one pushing the button, Dr. Brockton. Doctor of Death. The man who singlehandedly destroyed the University of Tennessee.”
“I won’t do it,” I said. “So just go ahead and kill me and be done with it.”
“Oh, I will kill you. But only after you push the button. Only after you commit the massacre. On national television.”
I shook my head. “I won’t do it,” I repeated. “You can’t make me.”
“I think I can,” he said. He looked at Miranda, the gun still pressed against her head. Slowly he slid the barrel down her neck, her chest, her belly, her crotch. “I think I can find ways to motivate you. A knife, I think, might be a better motivational tool. Or a scalpel. There must be scalpels in here somewhere.” Miranda was trembling. I could see it, and I knew he could feel it, and the knowledge was bitter beyond all reckoning.
“You sick bastard,” I said. But I was the one who was on the verge of vomiting and fainting. Dizzy and breathing hard, I put more of my weight on the table behind me, steadying myself with both hands.
And that’s when I felt it: the shaft of a femur. The femur of a robust male Arikara Indian. The bone was twenty inches long, topped with a hard round knob—the femoral head—measuring a good two inches in diameter. The Holy Family, I thought, in a bizarre flashback to Peggy’s characterization of the Arikara man, woman, and child. Then—another bizarre flashback—I thought of Decker’s whispered, panicked prayer: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. My fingers curled reflexively around the bone, midshaft. The femur felt smooth and strong, solid in my grip, and it was the comforting familiarity of it—a shape I had clasped thousands of times over the decades—that slowly eased my distress and cleared my mind. I remembered my order, my plea, to Decker—“Stop praying and do something”—and I eased my fingers down the shaft toward the distal end, to a point just above the flare of the condyles, before tightening my grip. The bone felt awkwardly thick in my hand—I would rather have gripped it near the proximal end, where it was thinner—but as Satterfield himself had just said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The femur felt ergonomically imperfect but savagely good. Taking care not to scrape the bone on the table, or rattle it against other bones, I began to lift it with one hand, with agonizing slowness, holding the rest of my body motionless, using my torso as a screen, a shield, to conceal what I was doing.
“Showtime, kids,” said Satterfield, motioning toward the door with the hand that held the detonator. “Let’s go.” Any moment, he would don the helmet and become—to all outward appearances, at least—one of the good guys.
It’s now or never, Brockton, I thought, my arm tensing. But the gun was pressed against Miranda’s head once more, his right index finger curled around the trigger, his left index finger hovering above the button of the remote control. A flex of either finger would be catastrophic.
“Don’t make me tell you again,” Satterfield said. “Let’s go.” He gave the gun a push, jabbing it hard against Miranda’s skull.