In the end, all is for naught.
We are tiny specks on a tiny speck in an immense, barren, lifeless universe. And if there is no God, then there is no heaven and no hope; there is only futility.
So live for today.
Go ahead and make the best of it. Eat, drink, and be merry and all of that, because, really, what’s the alternative?
Try to scrape out enough hope to make it through the day without screaming. Use denial. Tell yourself the comforting lie that your life has some sort of ultimate purpose, some degree of lasting significance. Bury yourself in busyness, distract yourself with pleasures, delude yourself with naive optimism, because the alternative is unthinkable.
Hoping that there is hope is the most necessary sedative of all. Without that, suicide is the only reasonable response. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, distraction is.
There.
How was that for a graduation speech?
Unless.
Unless there really was something more, unless eternity is a reality and the physical universe we see is only a shadow of another deeper entelechy breathing out love all around us.
Unless that.
Then, nothing.
But no, she didn’t dare mention any of that — God, heaven, eternity, ultimate meaning — because it was a public school speech and that was just not acceptable. In government schools freedom of speech — which is in the Constitution — must always bow to the almighty dictum of the separation of Church and state — which is not.
She glanced at her phone and saw a text from the school’s administration office — the number they used to reach the students in case there was a snow day, that sort of thing.
Okay, weird.
She tapped the screen and found out that she was supposed to meet with Assistant Principal Thacker right after sixth hour.
Oh, great.
He probably wanted to see how her speech was coming.
Well, if she told him about what she had so far, that would be interesting, to say the least.
She found her thoughts splitting off in two directions — a touch of concern about meeting with Thacker, and excitement about tonight, about prom with Aiden.
She texted back that she’d be there and promised herself this meeting with Thacker was not going to ruin her day.
Graham Webb watched the men unload the boxes from the belly of the cargo plane.
The rather unintimidating private security guard with the clipboard looked at him quizzically. “Mr. Graham? I didn’t expect you to be here. Not at this time of day.”
“It’s good to get out of the office once in a while.” He nodded toward the boxes. “That’s the shipment from Chennai?”
“Yeah. Got a lot of pills in those boxes.”
“Yes.”
“Lots of sick people out there.”
“Yes, there are.”
All Graham had to do was route the drugs into the pharmaceutical supply chain and they would be shipped to pharmacies and hospitals nationwide.
That was it.
Then his family would be safe.
He accepted the clipboard from the man.
All he had to do was sign these forms.
Once the drugs were in the system, unless someone checked the lot numbers of all the individual packages one at a time, they would be distributed to the public, starting this weekend.
And nobody did that. No pharmacies, no doctors, no hospitals would. It just wasn’t worth the time.
However, despite all the reassurances he tried giving himself, Graham knew that the man on the phone last night would not have threatened him and his family unless there was something outside of the law going on with these drugs.
He let the tip of his pen rest against the top form on the clipboard.
After the moment had stretched out uncomfortably long, the man beside him said, “I got a lot of work to do here, Mr. Graham. I wonder if you could—”
“One second.”
The security guard was quiet.
Graham thought of Abigail again, of that woman getting to her, of the man threatening to hurt his little girl and his ex-wife — hurt them in ways that, from what the man had said, they would very likely never recover from.
If they even let ’em live.
Graham signed his name, then flipped through the stack and scribbled his signature on every page that required authorization.
The security guard already had his hand out, waiting for the clipboard. “Thanks.” Once he had it, he immediately signaled for the workers to transfer the boxes onto the waiting semi.
Graham waited until they were done.
There.
He’d fulfilled his role in all this — whatever this was — and his daughter, his ex-wife, would be safe.
As long as the people who’d threatened him kept their word.
And there was no guarantee of that.
Telling himself that everything was going to work out alright, he went to his office to make sure all the details were in place for the shipment to arrive tonight at just after six o’clock at the distribution center in the nation’s capital.
One last flight, this time to DC.
Keith had never threatened a child before his phone call to Graham Webb last night. He would have preferred being the one with the dog, the one talking with the little girl on the beach, but Vanessa had thought that both the girl and her father would be less suspicious if it was a woman who was walking the dog, and honestly, Keith had had to agree.
After they’d left the beach, Vanessa had ordered him to slit the dog’s throat, but this time he’d finally refused her, and after a brief argument, she’d done it and left the carcass at the end of a dead-end road about a mile from Graham’s house.
Keith had watched silently.
He wanted this to be over.
Wanted so badly for this to be over.
They confirmed that Graham had kept his end of the bargain this morning, and then made it to the airport just in time for their flight to DC, where they would land at 10:33 a.m.
58
Ever since coming into my office I’d been trying to find out more about Corporal Tyree, but in the end, all I could locate was a photo that appeared in a regional newspaper in southwest Virginia of him returning from the Middle East. In the photo, he stood next to an unidentified, attractive red-haired woman who was apparently welcoming him to the States.
I contacted Cybercrime to have them run the photo through facial recognition, but nothing came up. She was more of a ghost than Tyree was.
Frustrated, I turned my attention to the two things right now that mattered most: (1) unraveling the relationship of Calydrole to the suicides of Corey Wellington and Natalie Germaine, and (2) stopping more of them from occurring.
Over the last couple days Valkyrie had been following the story of the apprehension of Richard Basque by Special Agent Patrick Bowers.
It brought to mind his own clash with Bowers in January.
According to the news, a week ago Basque had tried to kill Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang — another FBI agent Valkyrie had met in Wisconsin.
He remembered her well. She was a fighter. She had skills.
And she’d escaped from Basque.
Interesting.
In Wisconsin, while Valkyrie was still living out his life as Alexei Chekov, Bowers had vowed to catch him again.
And he was the kind of agent who seemed smart enough, tenacious enough, to stick with a case as long as necessary to see it through to the end.
The angel of death had an idea.