Kilgore stopped eating entirely when Dan related the details of the soon-to-bedeployed Xantaeus patches.
When Dan ran out of words, Kilgore looked at him in silence for several moments.
"You're sitting right on top of a drum of fuggy old nitroglycerin, aren't you?"
Gabriel nodded. "And I have to make a decision in the next seventy-two hours. There's a huge series of meetings at the General's-"
"He still calling it Castello Da Vinci?"
Gabriel nodded.
Kilgore frowned. "That's awfully pretentious."
"But it looks awfully good on a wine label."
"Whoopee-do. Everybody and their yard boy up there has their own wine label."
"Not on a bottle selling for five hundred dollars and up-if you're lucky enough to find one for sale."
"Still-"
"Yeah, I'm with you on all that wine porn crap." Gabriel paused to drain the last sips of his iced tea. When it was gone, he rattled the ice around in the glass before continuing.
"General Braxton's hosting a series of top-level meetings over the next three days. Some relate to the campaign, some are social and fundraising events. There's one that Braxton has been tight-lipped about, and I'm sure it's about Project Enduring Valor."
Kilgore nodded as he turned his concentration on chasing a chow mein noodle around his plate with his chopsticks. Finally, he gave up and raised his face to met Gabriel's eyes. "Lord, lord." Kilgore shook his head and rubbed at his chin. "My experience has been that the General is rarely wrong about military matters." "Therein lies the problem."
"On the other hand, I may have heard about this Stone fellow," Kilgore said. "You and I live in a pretty small world. We're talking ancient history, but it's easy enough to check out."
"Soon?"
"This afternoon." Kilgore took a bite of moo shoo pork and washed it down with iced tea. "You've never been this spooked before, old son. You've got to put on your operational hat or you're going to get hurt."
Gabriel nodded.
"Well, besides Stone, the ultimate hard choice we have to make on the usual incomplete information concerns the Xantaeus issue and Braxton's connection." Kilgore paused to study the ceiling. "Genies don't go back into their bottles." He shook his head. "Nukes came out and stayed. CBW. The chemical warrior ain't crawling back inside either. Braxton's right about making sure we win the wars."
Gabriel opened his mouth, but Kilgore held up his hand.
"On the other hand, if the effects are not completely reversible-even if a tenth of one percent never come out of it-we have a national disaster, a whole new class of highly capable killers who can't turn it off. Maybe a lot of them who look normal and act normal, but in the end what we could end up with are bunch of domestic My Lais."
Gabriel nodded.
"But you might be wrong. You could be contravening a decision when you don't have as much data as Braxton has. It's a command thing."
"Braxton's not in the military anymore and neither am I."
"Technically you're correct. But in reality, were in a war for the soul and security of this country. It's never been in greater danger. And brave, good people like this Stone fellow do get killed in a war, sometimes they have to be sacrificed. It's not right, but sometimes it's the only alternative.
"Now, mind you, I'm not yet convinced the General's right. However, if we play the odds, we both know his judgment has been vindicated so many times I can't think of the last time he was wrong."
"Bothers me too," Gabriel said.
"Good! Absolute certainty's killed more people than informed ambiguity, which means we have to take the ball the General has handed off and run with it until and unless we find we're headed toward the wrong goalposts."
"What if we don't realize it until it's too late?"
Kilgore gave him a broad smile. "You've been pushing a desk way too long, old buddy."
CHAPTER 61
Fog still shrouded the landscape like a gesso wash, robbing the world of depth and color and making close things seem far away. Jasmine and I drove through a few rare spots where the sun had burned completely through, but most everywhere else we looked, a bright, lethal glare left us frowning and squinting.
"Okay, if I remember correctly, we should find a little track leading through that line of trees up there." Jasmine chewed on a corner of her lower lip as she stared intently ahead, steering the pale silver SUV south along a serpentine gravel track paved with ruts and washboard corrugations.
A thin selvage of trees and tangled vines along the Tallahatchie River hurtled past on the left. Cotton in full bloom rushed by on the right.
For the best part of an hour, Jasmine had navigated the SUV along a backwoods odyssey of roads-paved, gravel, unpaved-and more than a few dirt and mud tracks that required the SUV's four-wheel drive. She kept us off the main roads and on a mostly northerly course.
Occasionally in the distance, we saw police-car light bars strobing in the haze. It didn't take much imagination to interpret those as roadblocks, although the radio made no mention of a manhunt or the shooting of a sheriff's deputy by a mysterious blond woman.
With nothing better to do, I tinkered periodically with the SUV's Global Positioning System navigation unit. According to the GPS, we were nowhere near anything. And that offered yet another metaphor for the Delta.
Abruptly, I pitched forward as Jasmine stabbed at the brakes.
"There." She pointed. I followed her finger and, right off the tip, saw a break in the trees materialize out of the glare. Slowing to a crawl, she turned the SUV cautiously left and stopped in front of the rusted superstructure of a condemned bridge barricaded with dire warnings. She stopped the SUV nose to nose with a red-and-white- striped barrier.
"Wait here."
She put the SUV in park and got out. To its credit, the GPS display showed us on the Tallahatchie's west bank, south of Ruby. Jasmine strode confidently around the barriers and out onto the bridge.
Then she faded to a shadowy cipher on the far side, and a shadow of loss fell across my heart. I turned from the image and tinkered with the GPS for distraction, looking for Tyrone Freedman's house, which, according to the latest technology, existed nowhere except in a native Deltan's head.
While I worried about dragging Tyrone further into this mess and second-guessed my own memories of how well we had connected back at the hospital, I'd called his cell not long after Jasmine had steered us away from John's pickup in the killer's SUV.
"You're lucky I'm in the imaging lab," he'd told me. "Whole hospital's crawling with Feds and some really creepy guys with dead eyes."
He volunteered shelter faster than I could ask. I talked him out of doing more.
Jasmine made her way out of the fog now and, with an easy, swift familiarity, moved the barriers blocking access to the bridge.
"I would have thought those barricades would be a lot more permanent," I said when she got back in.
"They were once, but the locals made some changes, otherwise they have to go down to Money or up to Minter City to cross."
She put the SUV in gear, eased past the barrier then stopped. Without being asked, I got out and dragged the barrier back in place behind us. As Jasmine drove, I tried not to look at the decrepit, weathered boards covering the bridge's roadway or the storm-roiled brown water below. I also tried to ignore how the bridge swayed and yawed and struggled to ignore the great pancake-sized scabs of rust flaking off the bridge's elderly, anemic girders.*****
In the swirling silver mist, a lean, lit, muscular man stood at the edge of the trees and brush and followed the pale silver SUV's taillights disappearing across the old Tallahatchie bridge. He pulled the baseball cap off his head and ran his other hand across the top of his head and nodded to himself.