“What did you tell them?” Rebecca asked Tom Duggan, now that they were alone.
“Nothing, same as the rest,” he said. “What can they do?” He shrugged. Then he resumed looking her over. “I am worried about you.”
She didn’t know how much he knew. “Me?” she said, turning and looking at the sign, Duggan’s Funeral Home, riddled with bullet holes.
Tom Duggan nodded, contrite but not quite ashamed.
“So what now?” she asked.
“For me or for the town?”
Rebecca shrugged.
“First order of business is burying the dead,” he said. “I’ll take some of these men to the country club to get the others. I’ll go to my mother’s house alone.”
“And the town?”
He looked out at all the activity in the common. “Like a forest after a great fire. Either it comes back or it doesn’t. If it does come back, usually it comes back stronger. But if it doesn’t, then you have to move on, you don’t have a choice. Animals know it, I don’t know why people don’t. It pains me to say it, but the old fool was right. We’ve had a good fire here, long overdue. I’ll miss my mother terribly, but I’m free now, and there are other forests.” He nodded, still partly convincing himself. “What about you? Are you going to write about this?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I truly don’t.”
“Well,” he decided, “I’d buy a copy.”
She hugged him then, and in feeling some of his stiffness dissolving in her arms, she began to feel better herself. When they separated he was smiling, and with a modest wave he started away.
A voice called to her, loud, startling, familiar. “Bee!”
Jeb climbed out of an arriving army jeep and hurried toward her through the snow. He was wearing a soft orange ski parka, tan corduroys, and new snow boots, trailing a cashmere scarf.
He gripped her in a tight hug. Now it was Rebecca’s stiffness that needed dissolving.
“A miracle,” he exulted. “I don’t want to say I gave up hope, but—”
“Where did you come from?”
“Stowe — I’ve been waiting day and night for some word from you. Soon as the news broke, I had an agent friend of a friend get me in here. Look... at you.” His enthusiasm suffered as he took her in: She was scraped up, bruised, and exhausted. Perhaps he could tell that she had not merely survived the assault on Gilchrist, she had participated in it. And perhaps just as intuitively he put it straight out of his mind. “Let’s get you away from here. We’ll check you out, get you cleaned up. There is so much heat right now, so much buzz on this revolution thing, you would not—”
“Jeb.”
“Okay, I know, I know. But we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.” He gripped her shoulders. “I know this is a monster cliche, so forgive me in advance... but you truly don’t realize how much you miss someone until you think they’re gone. I mean, really, really gone.”
She reached for his hands, gently pulling them from her shoulders, holding them.
Jeb smiled. He nodded and calmed down.
She leaned forward and planted a kiss on his smooth, scented cheek, then withdrew before he could reciprocate.
“You’re fired,” Rebecca said.
Jeb’s smile lingered as the words took a few moments to register.
“I’m moving on,” she said. “The Last Words sequel isn’t working out. My heart isn’t in it.”
“Fired?” he said. “We have a legal agreement.”
“Sue me. Nothing’s guaranteed in life, nothing’s fixed. You’re the one who taught me that.”
Four men passed behind Jeb, two of them wearing black windbreakers with the acronym DTRA in bold white letters on the back. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
“I have to go now, Jeb,” she told him. And she left him standing there.
“Excuse me!” she called, hurrying after the men, following them around an army jeep.
While the pair in windbreakers were fairly young, the older two could have passed for nuclear physicists. All looked haggard, like men who had just dodged a bullet. The ricin had indeed fallen on the target towns — Trait’s Brotherhood had dropped the poison when news of the town invasion broke — but too late, just after the evacuations. Rebecca was glad the country had gotten a little taste of doomsday.
“Excuse me,” she said again, getting their attention that time. “Can you tell me where Alex Kells is?”
One of the younger ones glanced at the older pair. “We wouldn’t know.”
“I’ve been looking for him.”
The agent turned to continue on with the rest. “We have no idea where he is,” he said.
Rebecca was standing there, perplexed, until after a few steps one of the older men stopped and turned back. “You’re a friend of his?” he asked.
Strange to hear it put that way. “Yes.”
“We don’t know where Alex Kells is,” he explained, in apology for his associate’s short manner. “After the stunt he pulled in the New York City Transit System, he was placed on administrative leave. We’ve neither heard from nor seen him since.”
Rebecca smiled at first, as though she were being put on. Then a thick fog began to settle in her head.
“But how did you know about the ricin towns?” Rebecca asked him. “The zip codes?”
“We were contacted by the CIA.” He looked at her strangely. “You’d have to ask them.”
They continued on busily, leaving Rebecca alone on the edge of the common.
If Kells hadn’t been working for Doomsday, then who had he been working for? And if he was not being debriefed...
A female FBI agent hurried past in a heavy blue parka, reacting to a report on her radio. “Body in a tree farm, just outside the center of town.”
The agent turned at the police station and headed out across a baseball field scored with boot tracks. Rebecca followed her into the open pasture beyond and over a hump of snow marking a property line. There was a Christmas tree farm in the distance, and a group of men in windbreakers standing near the end of a tall row.
Rebecca was accustomed to moving through the snow now, and even in her exhaustion she overtook the agent before the farm. A male agent there tried to get in her way, but Rebecca sidestepped him. In their eyes, she was a victim. Victims needed to emote.
It was another of the Marielitos, lying on his back in the snow, empty holsters crisscrossed over his flak vest, eyes frozen open.
“Inkman,” she said. “Where is he?”
The agents looked at her strangely. But their unquestioning silence told her they knew something. She repeated the question, and one of the earphone-wearing agents glanced to the top of the nearby rise.
Rebecca walked to the barn. Her weariness was complete, her fatigued mind swimming as she trudged up the last snowy hill.
The doors were open at both ends. The cow stalls were empty and only a handful of men stood about. She smelled manure and cordite.
The body lay in the dirt at the far end of the barn, just inside the snow line. “Mr. Hodgkins” bore a slurred expression in death, his head tipped to one side, eyes glancing away as though forever in search of a better angle. She pitied Inkman then. She realized he never had a chance.
A single pair of footprints, deep and widely spaced, led out from the barn over meadows toward the tree line and the mountains in the distance.
Three men stood together outside the door. They were in their fifties, dressed conservatively in parkas and suit pants, engaged in close conversation. Rebecca absorbed their scrutiny without reflecting anything back at them.
“Clock,” she said.
Two of them looked over, as though uncertain she was speaking to them. One said, “Excuse me?”