Owen held Marg's smoking gun in his hands and had it pointed square in the middle of Henry's forehead. Henry had his fistful of hypos stuck up to my brother's neck. If either of them moved...
"Careful, Owen," I whispered in the most even voice I could find.
Henry smiled, though I noticed his Adam's apple bob deep into his throat as he swallowed. "Well. It appears we're at cross-purposes. I'll put mine down if you'll put yours down first."
Owen laughed once without smiling. His hands shook badly, even with one gripping the other. "What did you say a few minutes back? You're sent from where?"
"From the Father Above," Henry repeated without wavering.
My brother's exhale was so sickened, I expected his last meal to follow. I'm sure he was picturing Mom and thinking about the concept of guys sent from the Father Above sending her on.
Owen's whole face was shaking now too, even his eyelids. But he said, "I got a great idea. Let's both go there ... and find out who stays."
The trigger made one little click. He would face off, in spite of his terror, I just knew it.
I think Henry got the idea he was serious. He didn't move, but tension rattled in his laugh. "I thought you were the nonviolent one."
"I am," Owen managed to say. "I don't have to like it. But I will split your head open and put your soul into orbit. We can see where it lands. Shall we?"
"You don't want to die this way," Henry said. "It's slow."
Owen's shaking was ridiculous, yet the butt end was an inch from Henry's forehead, and Owen looked ready to squeeze the trigger. "So? We'll be dead a long time. I'm ready. Are you?"
Owen, just shut up and pop him. It's just. Take a risk. The electric silence that followed could have killed the rest of us. Henry wasn't shaking—it could have proved fatal if he had been, what with a hand full of hypos—but I noticed his face was shiny wet. A line of sweat trailed in front of his ear. I got a flash thought that the only edge my brother had on this rocket scientist was that he'd had lots of time to think about this particular thing. My brother was born to think about stuff like death.
Rain's feet floated past me. I hadn't seen her come in. She stopped so her feet were beside theirs, square in the middle.
"What do you want, little Miss USIC?" Henry asked. "You come to watch your boyfriend sign off?"
"I just had an idea," Rain said. Her voice was really quivering. "Wouldn't you rather pick on me than him? Considering who my dad is?"
Her legs started to glisten. She was pissing herself. I almost dove for Henry, just because I couldn't stand it. But his voice rose.
"Frankly, I would. But I'm afraid to move," Henry said. "Do you have any persuasion with this man?"
Rain would not put herself in the death seat. I just knew it—not that she didn't have the nerve. She just didn't have the faith. I didn't either. Hence, what my brother was doing was so inconceivable that I could only watch.
"Oh. So you are afraid. What are you afraid of?" my brother yelled. I think Rain had confused him, had confused Henry, making them both panic, both more likely to screw this up. And she did about the stupidest thing you could do, only somehow it worked out. She shoved Henry's arm outward, and glistening threads shot into the air as he hit the plungers. My brother shot Henry square in the face, and he toppled to the ground. Owen's hand relaxed, and the gun dropped immediately.
"Don't move! Don't step!" I hollered, dropping to my knees and pulling Owen toward me, since most of the hypos had fallen to the side and behind him.
He collapsed onto his butt, and I shook him to clear out the stupor.
"Did any of that stuff hit you?" I demanded.
He never answered. A fist reached out of nowhere with yet another hypo. It wasn't a ghost. Kansi hadn't been completely dead. He drove the thing into my brother's back and hit the plunger. Another bang! resounded as Rain shot him with the gun Owen had dropped.
Owen gasped, went wide-eyed, and then came down like a ton of bricks into my lap.
FIFTY-TWO
SCOTT EBERMAN
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002
12:28 P.M.
BASEMENT
TYLER AND SHAHZAD had become shadows that now were jerking me to my feet.
"They didn't come alone!" Shahzad said. "Outside, they heard those shots!"
Hodji flew in from the porch and kicked the door shut with his foot. I thought a shot fired outside, but I was fixated on Owen. Uncharacteristically, my hands were trembling. I couldn't find a pulse.
"Basement," Hodji hollered. "Now!"
He moved into the dining room, gun in both hands, then kicked the door shut behind us as Tyler and I carried my brother downstairs. I yelled at Owen's lifeless form just because there was nothing better to do. Rain and I did CPR on him for three minutes straight. I did the mouth-to-mouth, having to fight her for it briefly, as we realized there was a chance he'd been injected with something that could poison the breather. I didn't want to think about it. Finally, a shaky hand reached for his neck, and then my chin, and Marg squatted beside me, looking half dead.
"Stop." She held up a hand and continued groggily, "He's breathing on his own."
We were in the little inner office. Only the computer screen lit the room. I'd been aware of the door opening and closing once. Now Shahzad said, "I found Miss Marg on the floor of the darkroom. They cut the window glass and created an ambush."
She rolled her neck around, grimacing. "...never saw it coming. I just felt it ... jab to the shoulder. My last thought was of my gun, which I'd left unlocked on the nightstand before running down here. Hoped one of you guys would—"
"On three," I said, and Tyler, Shahzad, Rain, and I lifted Owen onto the old servant's bed. Marg was shaking her head every few seconds, trying to bring herself out from under the spell of the knockout drug, but it would take a while. I found Owen's pulse, which was only about thirty beats a minute, but strong. I couldn't let myself think about what might be coursing through him.
I turned my attention to this roomful of people who were either barefoot or wearing only socks. "Did anyone step on one of those syringes while leaving the dining room?"
I flipped my eyelids shut, prayed, and opened them to see Cora holding her fist out. She had her fingers wrapped around all of them. "I was afraid for the squad..." She trailed off.
The small needles could have penetrated a shoe ... any agent could have carelessly picked one up, pricked a finger before stopping to think. I tried to say "nice going" but couldn't ignore how badly her hand was shaking.
"Just don't move." I tried to say it calmly and edged toward her, holding a hand out blindly toward Rain, who was behind me. "Gimme your sweat sock."
She put it in my hand, and I stretched it open and slid it up to the bottoms of the hypos sticking out of Cora's hand. I said, "Some will stick to your skin. Just open very slowly and let them drop off."
Her hand was less sweaty than I would have imagined, and only one stuck. Her trembling dislodged it after only a second. I put the sock gingerly in the drawer of the nightstand and started looking around to see who else was injured.
"I killed a guy." Rain's voice, having obviously flipped back out of serial-killer mode. "Oh my god."
"Hold on to it." I crawled over to Tyler, who sat with Shahzad against the wall opposite the bed. In the dim light of the screen, I could see the knot on Tyler's jawbone from where he took a flailing swat with nunchucks from a dying Ibrahim Kansi.
I felt around it, my heart bottoming out over him saying he was the Kid. "You ever pull a stunt like that again..."
He managed a smile and spoke without moving his jaw. "I'd love to say it was heroics. Truth is, when my mouth isn't running, I'm deadly uncomfortable. Just don't know why I didn't say I'm not him ... Roll of the dice?"
It was bullshit. Tyler had covered for his best friend, Cora had yelled at Henry and carried WMDs downstairs in her bare hands to keep the USIC agents from stepping on them. Rain and my brother had killed two guys. Hodji was st
ill upstairs with the madmen. I felt like a wuss for once. We'd have a lot to tell. But before anyone started announcing heroics, we had to get out of here. I hadn't heard any shots fired since we came down, but we were buffered.
"Broke your jaw," I said, pulling my fingers away. "Hope you're good with pain. You don't have much choice—"
"I thought two years ago I couldn't possibly get any uglier. Amazing, eh?"
"Relax. Don't talk," I said.
I moved to Shahzad. "Any injuries?"
"No." He looked at Cora. She was now sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, her forehead on them. He moved over to her and knelt, looking down at her neck until he put a hand on her hair and patted.
"Miss Cora, we have a belief in our village that you can absorb words the same way as you can absorb oxygen. Or food. You must not do that. You must not let the words of bad men enter your spirit. It is a gift from God."
She nodded without raising her head. He had said something in German upstairs to Henry in her defense. I asked him about it.
"Das ist Amerika, wo Sie sind willkommen, auch wenn Ihr Vater ist ein hippo? I had said, 'This is America, where all are welcome, even if one's father is a hippopotamus.'"
She laughed once into her knees, but when her head didn't go up, Tyler crawled over on the other side of her, ignoring my edict not to talk. "You wanna compare dad stories? I didn't know mine. I never did. But I know he slept with my mom, which makes him pukeworthy by default. You're not your dad, okay?" he said. "Am I my mom?"
In the dim light of the monitor I was able to see my brother's eyes flicker, then fly open. I went to him. He covered his face with his hands and let out a telltale groan.
"Your head?" I asked.
"Yeah. What happened?"
I didn't like the foreboding headache but heaved a huge sigh, deciding that Ibrahim must have injected him with the same stuff he'd injected Marg with.
"Forget about that. Just gimme a number," I said. "Richter scale."
"Uh ... six," he said. Six wasn't bad, but he could be lying. I was afraid to touch my brother, afraid not to. I put a hand on his forehead. He was burning. "Owen, man. You did a great thing. Take a look around at these people. Some of them are important to national security. Some are important to us because we love them and they're good people. They could be dead right now, but some of them may get to see their ninetieth birthdays because of you."
I didn't want him feeling guilty of murder or something else dumb. He shook his head like he might argue with me. He said, "Someday, every person in this room will be vital to national security ... or something even bigger." I don't believe in people being prophetic. I took it as just great babble, and I loved the look of victory that crossed his face.
Rain didn't. She gasped in some horror I didn't get and contradicted me. "Owen, don't even go there! You did not do anything that great!"
She climbed up on the bed, lay half on her stomach, half on him. She kissed the side of his face, and they started swapping spit like crazy, to the point where, when the nosebleed started, I couldn't tell at first whether it was hers or his.
FIFTY-THREE
CORA HOLMAN
WEDNESDAY, MAY 8, 2002
1:20 P.M.
BASEMENT
WITH TIME MOVING SO PAINFULLY SLOWLY while we waited for USIC, I knew Scott was losing his mind, going back and forth from holding his brother's hand to breathing like a pregnant woman in the ninth hour of labor.
It was almost an hour before we heard a voice.
"Scott? Rain?" Mr. Steckerman.
Scott stood and opened the door. Both Mr. Steckerman and Hodji were there.
"Everybody all right?" he asked.
"Tyler's got a broken jaw and my brother's bl—My brother has a nosebleed."
Mr. Steckerman looked over at Marg, who shook her head to imply, I think, "It's out of our hands."
"Anybody get shot?" Tyler asked through his clenched jaw.
"Two of their guys, none of ours. There's at least two more of them. We've got a SWAT team forming out there to clear out these woods. You have to stay put."
Marg asked to be released to get a shot of morphine for Owen, and Mr. Steckerman accompanied her upstairs. We could barely hear them crawling on the floor above us.
"We'll be right outside this door," he said when they returned, and he shut it.
Hardly anyone said anything. I drifted off, came to, came to again, and only one time in the next few hours did I think I heard a gunshot. They might have fallen back to Henry's cabin for all that it was so quiet. Then things got beyond quiet. There was a point, several hours into it, where everything froze. Time, the people around me ... I sensed it, and when I drew my head up from my legs, I saw them dozing, or praying, heads down, not moving. There was something reverent in the air, as if questions could radiate and answers could glow, if not be spoken aloud. I sensed a strong source of that glow to my right. Aleese was sitting and watching me, her arms around her legs, her chin on her knees, her back to the door two feet away from me.
She kept staring until I thought she was about to say something profound. She reached her hand up and ran her finger down my cheek. "Got blood on your face," she whispered.
I knew to hold the silence, to not expect answers to complicated questions, to not even ask. I can't say why. Maybe the dead speak a higher language with their higher thoughts, and we can only hear when they use the simplest of their terms. Perhaps, when it appears the spiritual realm is not answering us, the answer is over our heads, and we're the sluggish ones—not them.
I could see a bit of sense in why Aleese might have drawn me in to Henry while warning me so brazenly about Scott. It had nothing to do with her liking one man better than the other. It had to do with practicality, what would serve us all best in the long run. If Henry hadn't had a "lure" into the house, he might have ended up—someday, if not today—in a crossfire between USIC and ShadowStrike and would not have fallen into the hands of people whom he assumed he could toy with. He had drastically underestimated us. Oma used to say that adults can remember their childhoods better than their teenage years, when awkwardness is ruled out as acceptable behavior, yet continues to rule so much of life. Under the bad memories of so much intimidation, adults, she said, forget how sharp and fearless they actually were.
An unhappy child had become an unhappier teenager. Henry had forgotten a lot. Enough to get himself killed.
I still didn't understand why she seemed leery of my feelings for Scott. My eyes rose again to Aleese. She watched me and, after a moment, started shaking her head slowly back and forth.
I love him.
"Later," Aleese said. "I promise. But much later."
How much later is much later? Seven years?
I thought of telling her either to please leave or to tell me something bearable once in a while. But how could I do that—with all that came clear in last night's tears and tossing.
I could see that I would have been a simple pregnancy termination at the nearest hospital in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases. To have delivered me and sent me home to a woman desperate for ten children who weren't meant to be—that was the best that Aleese could do. That she went back out into the field to get nearly slaughtered in Mogadishu five years later was beyond commendable. That she had given me her own mother at the expense of ever visiting her childhood home was more so. That she might end up living with me, having to look at me every day, was surely not something she foresaw. She owed me nothing—less than nothing.
And yet here she sat. I was certain of it, regardless of how the memory fogged over later, regardless of how I tried to reinterpret it once my strong sedative wore off. I wanted Scott Eberman, and I wanted her to tell me it was all right. All I could get from her was, "later ... much later."
I felt a shadow fall over the room, a darkness with density. Aleese's eyes went sideways to Owen and came back again, troubled.
Don't take him, Aleese. You can't.
Her
eyes radiated sympathy. For me, I realized. She had no foreboding thought for Owen.
Please. Not on this day. Think of Scott. I know you don't like him, but—
Her eyebrows raised as her head lowered slightly, though her gaze never left my eyes.
"Rethink, Cora."
But I wasn't otherworldly. I still fought for the comforts of lower logic, which didn't include thoughts of life versus death, still so magnanimous that I covered my ears to keep out Owen's sniffing and focused on Scott. It took a while. But I focused on that soapy-alcohol smell of him wafting over my way until I could sort it out from everyone else's. It had always made me feel safe, and I felt safe enough to proceed.
Logic: If your mother likes the boy, your mother approves of the relationship. I had a mother who loved the boy yet resisted the relationship, and who wanted another man wiped off the face of the earth badly enough to thrust me to him. What kind of a mother would do that? I hunted my soul for some answer other than that I was turning into a paranoid schizophrenic given to strange imaginings. One answer seemed to be that I had a mother who didn't fear death and who understood the future ... a higher form of mother instead of the usual, the lower form. Maybe, for once, I was the most fortunate person in Trinity Falls.
Life had been a gift from her, a gift that most others would not have been willing to give. I couldn't conceive how to repay her. At the same time, it was my life, and I felt pushed, exhausted by the tug-of-war games I put myself through. Or she put me through.
You're not here. You're a figment of my imagination.
"That so?"
You're a sedative I accepted at the wrong time.
A hand gripped my wrist and pulled. "Are you all right, Miss Cora?" Shahzad's voice whispered from the other side of me.
"Yes. Why?"
"Your fingers are in your ears, and there is no sound. And you are mumbling to yourself."