“Yes?”
“I know a gentleman is never supposed to ask, and a lady is never supposed to tell, but how old are you?”
“Seventy-eight, sir.” She answered promptly enough, and while maintaining eye contact, but this was a lie. Rosalind Dawson was actually eighty-one.
10
Quarter of twelve.
The Challenger aircraft with 940NF on the tail and MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the side droned north toward Maine at 39,000 feet. With a helping push from the jet stream, its speed was fluctuating gently between 520 and 550 miles an hour.
Their arrival at Alcolu and subsequent takeoff had gone without incident, mostly because Mrs. Sigsby had a VIP entry pass from the Regal Air FBO, and she had been more than willing to use it to open the gate. She smelled a chance—still slim, but there—of getting out of this alive. The Challenger stood in solitary splendor with its air-stairs down. Tim had raised the stairs himself, secured the door, and then hammered on the closed cockpit door with the butt of the dead deputy’s Glock.
“I think we’re all tight back here. If you’ve got a green board, let’s roll.”
There was no answer from the other side of the door, but the engines began to cycle up. Two minutes later they went airborne. Now they were somewhere over West Virginia, according to the monitor on the bulkhead, and DuPray was in the rearview. Tim hadn’t expected to leave so suddenly, and certainly not under such cataclysmic circumstances.
Evans was dozing, and Luke was dead to the world. Only Mrs. Sigsby was still awake, sitting upright, her gaze fixed on Tim’s face. There was something reptilian about those wide expressionless eyes. The last of Doc Roper’s pain pills might have put her out, but she had refused in spite of what must have been fairly bad pain. She had been spared a serious gunshot wound, but even a groove hurt plenty.
“You have law enforcement experience, I believe,” she said. “It’s in the way you carry yourself, and in the way you reacted—quickly and well.”
Tim said nothing, only looked at her. He had put the Glock beside him on the seat. Firing a gun at 39,000 feet would be a very bad idea, and really, why would he, even if they’d been at a much lower altitude? He was taking this bitch exactly where she wanted to go.
“I don’t understand why you’re going along with this plan.” She nodded at Luke, who—with his dirty face and bandaged ear—looked much younger than twelve. “We both know he wants to save his friends, and I think we both know the plan is silly. Idiotic, really. Yet you agreed. Why was that, Tim?”
Tim said nothing.
“Why you’d get involved in the first place is a mystery to me. Help me understand.”
He had no intention of doing that. One of the first things his mentor officer had taught him during the four months of his rookie probationary tour was you question perps. You never allow perps to question you.
Even if he had been disposed to talk, he didn’t know what he could say that would sound even marginally sane. Could he tell her that his presence on this state-of-the-art airplane, the sort of craft only rich men and women usually saw the inside of, was an accident? That once upon a time a man bound for New York City had suddenly stood up on a much more ordinary plane, agreeing to give up his seat for a cash payment and a hotel voucher? That everything—the hitchhike north, the traffic tie-up on I-95, the walk to DuPray, the night knocker job—had followed from that single impulsive act? Or could he say that it was fate? That he had been moved to DuPray by the hand of some cosmic chess player, to save the sleeping boy from the people who had kidnapped him and wanted to use his extraordinary mind until it was used up? And if that were the case, what did it make Sheriff John, Tag Faraday, George Burkett, Frank Potter, and Bill Wicklow? Just pawns to be sacrificed in the great game? And what piece was he? It would be nice to believe himself a knight, but more likely, he was just another pawn.
“Sure you don’t want that pill?” he asked.
“You don’t intend to answer my question, do you?”
“No, ma’am, I do not.” Tim turned his head and looked out at the leagues of darkness and the few lights down there, like fireflies at the bottom of a well.
11
Midnight.
The box phone gave its hoarse cry. Stackhouse answered. The voice on the other end belonged to one of the off-duty caretakers, a man named Ron Church. The requested van was in place at the airport, Church said. Denise Allgood, an off-duty tech (although they were all supposedly on duty now), had driven behind Church in an Institute sedan. The idea was that, after leaving the vehicle on the tarmac, Ron would ride back here with Denise. But those two had a thing going on, which Stackhouse knew about. It was his business to know things, after all. He felt sure that with the boy’s ride in place, Ron and Denise would be heading for anywhere that wasn’t here. That was okay. Although the multiple desertions were sad, maybe they were for the best. It was time to draw a line under this operation. Enough of his people would stay for the final act, which was all that mattered.
Luke and his friend Tim were going down, there was no question in his mind about that. Either it would be good enough for the lisping man on the other end of the Zero Phone or it wouldn’t. That was out of Stackhouse’s hands, and it was a relief. He supposed he had carried this streak of fatalism like a dormant virus since his days in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just hadn’t recognized it for what it was until now. He would do what he could, which was all any man or woman could do. The dogs barked and the caravan moved on.
There was a tap at the door and Rosalind looked in. She had done something with her hair, which was an improvement. He was less sure about the shoulder holster she was now wearing. It was a bit surreal, like a dog wearing a party hat.
“Gladys is here, Mr. Stackhouse.”
“Send her in.”
Gladys entered. There was an air mask dangling below her chin. Her eyes were red. Stackhouse doubted if she had been crying, so the irritation was probably from whatever bad medicine she’d been mixing up. “It’s ready. All I need to do is add the toilet bowl cleaner. You say the word, Mr. Stackhouse, and we’ll gas them.” She gave her head a quick, hard shake. “That hum is driving me crazy.”
From the look of you, you don’t have far to go, Stackhouse thought, but she was right about the hum. The thing was, you couldn’t get used to it. Just when you thought you might, it would rise in volume—not in your ears, exactly, but inside your head. Then, all at once, it would drop back to its former and slightly more bearable level.
“I was talking to Felicia,” Gladys said. “Dr. Richardson, I mean. She’s been watching them on her monitor. She says the hum gets stronger when they link up and drops when they let go of each other.”
Stackhouse had already figured that out for himself. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying went.
“Will it be soon, sir?”
He looked at his watch. “I think about three hours, give or take. The HVAC units are on the roof, correct?”
“Yes.”
“I may be able to call you when it’s time, Gladys, but I may not. Things will probably happen fast. If you hear shooting from the front of the admin building, start the chlorine gas whether you hear from me or not. Then come. Don’t go back inside, just run along the roof to the East Wing of Front Half. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!” She gave him a brilliant smile. It was the one all the kids hated.
12
Twelve-thirty.
Kalisha was watching the Ward A kids and thinking about the Ohio State Marching Band. Her dad loved Buckeyes football, and she had always watched with him—for the closeness—but the only part she really cared about was halftime show, when the band (“The Priiide of the Buckeyes!” the announcer always proclaimed) would take the field, simultaneously playing their instruments and making shapes that were only discernible from above—everything from the S on Superman’s chest to a fantastic Jurassic Park dinosaur that walked around nodding its saurian head.