He found himself under the sedan without memory of having taken shelter there, his face turned toward the house. Ramos dropped into sight, part of his head gone, peering into Silverman’s refuge with rolled-back and sunken-away eyes entirely white and ghostly in their sockets, like the spirits of ancient primitives lingering in caves where they once lived in centuries past.
Although a part of the man whom he had been remained somewhere deep within him, Silverman did not join the firefight. His once-keen sense of honor no longer insisted that he act with moral authority, and his formerly acute awareness of where his loyalty should lie was now at best confused. He had seen himself in the hollow men guarding the ranch. Their hollowness was at first terrifying but then seemed darkly attractive, a spiritual abyss but also a relief from making choices and striving to do what was right. As the gunfire volleyed insanely and then diminished, he remained under the sedan. Within him, a still, small voice whispered that there was really only one thing he needed to do, that he needed only to deal with she who betrayed her country, betrayed the Bureau, betrayed him. No moral ambiguity. No complex reasoning required to assess the situation. Complete just one task, and then rest free of doubt, free of that lifelong fear that is called misgiving, free of remorse. One task. Kill her. Kill her. Kill her.
The soft drip-drip-drip and the smell of gasoline brought him out from under the sedan before a fire erupted. The silence in the bloody aftermath remained so complete that the ranch might have been a diorama mocked up and sealed in a glass box. If there had been a breeze, the crows had winged it away with them.
Then a sledgehammer of thunder walloped the day and broke the rain out of the clouds.
The driver of the front car slumped dead behind the wheel, as did the driver of the second. The two other Sacramento agents in the rear sedan had gotten out of the car alive and fast enough to take a toll on Shenneck’s security team even as they, too, were cut down. The hollow men whom Silverman had seen with a shotgun and an Uzi were now carrion waiting for the return of the birds, as was the one whom Ramos had shot. Of the six agents who arrived at Gee Zee Ranch, only Silverman survived.
The slaughter neither angered nor moved him, as once it would have. It was just a thing that happened. There could be no value in brooding about it.
He stood in the rain, waiting to know what to do next.
Fifty or sixty yards beyond the ranch gate, another security guard, on foot, hurried up the long driveway toward the main house, unaware that anyone lived in his wake. He carried what appeared to be another Uzi.
As Silverman watched the guard move out of sight into the silver sheets of rain, his phone rang. He took the call, listened, and said, “Yes, all right.”
24
* * *
A PORTION OF THE UPPER HALL was a gallery open to the living room and foyer below. Connecting the two levels, floating treads curved down with railings on both sides, allowing Dougal Trahern a clear line of sight on every approach to the stairs.
Behind the sideboard that blockaded the head of the staircase, Dougal had two pistols and one shotgun with a three-round magazine. He thought he was well positioned and well armed, but the gunfire that had clattered up from the direction of the gatehouse concerned him. Now the rush of rain built to a vehement sibilation, as of a crowd of thousands chanting in a stage whisper, which denied him the sounds that the rayshaws might make in their approach.
Even on a gloomy afternoon, adequate light had found its way into this many-windowed residence, and there had been no lamps lit on the ground floor, other than in the kitchen. Now the storm draped the world with layers of beaded curtains, and a lurid half light seeped through the open rooms, not only obscuring things but also distorting them. Below him, for just a moment, a bell-shaded floor lamp behind a chair in the living room appeared to be a helmeted man. As corners darkled, it was easy to believe that menacing forms crouched within them, waiting to charge the stairs in force.
In fact, the rayshaws didn’t need overwhelming numbers to mount an effective assault, because they were no more fearful than would have been a regiment of deathless machines incapable of feeling pain. He didn’t yet understand that they would sacrifice themselves in a kind of samurai suicide.
It began when sheet lightning traveled the brainlike folds of the curdled clouds and pulsed through the rooms below and also down through the skylight above the stairs. Out of those pale luminous throbbings, a rayshaw appeared in the foyer as though materializing in a pentagram, a tall man with a gun. He gazed up at Dougal, who rose above the sideboard only enough to monitor activity below. The gunman moved openly toward the foot of the stairs, as if inviting a bullet, a boldness that caused Dougal to hesitate, lest the purpose might be to encourage him to rise farther and make a better target of himself for a second gunman.
25
* * *
BERTOLD SHENNECK DERAILED from the path to power, switched to a siding, his utopia having hurtled away from him on diverging tracks, lives in a moment now when genius doesn’t matter, when neither money nor connections count for anything, when science cannot save him, when he can no longer afford pride. The gun is two feet from his head. Her finger is on the trigger. She has said that if she can’t ruin him and subject him to a public shaming and imprisonment, she will kill him in such a way as to maximize his suffering. He does not doubt her sincerity. This woman is beyond his experience, as unknowable to him as would be a creature from another galaxy, but one thing he fully gets about her is that she possesses the awful power of death and is ready to use it without hesitation.
The terror that fills him now is new to him, a fright that reduces him to the condition of an animal driven by one thing—the survival instinct. As she tells him what she expects him to retrieve from his project files and copy onto the flash drives that she has brought, when with dread he considers how much time this will take, time during which the gun will be aimed at his head, he dares not conceal from her that what she wants is already available on backup files copied to flash drives and stored in a home safe. At any moment, the rayshaws will arrive, and when she realizes they will prevent her from getting what she wants, she’ll surely kill Bertold.
“It’s my life’s work,” he explains in a voice that seems too thin and shaky to be his, “so I have backup files not just here but in other secure locations.”
As he makes this revelation, Inga tries to silence him from her corner-facing chair, calling him a fool and worse.
When Inga is incensed about anything, no one exists who can produce a greater torrent of words with more passion.
But her vitriolic insistence only annoys the widow Hawk, who says, “Shut up, bitch! I don’t need you like I need him. I’d as soon blow your brains out as listen to another word.”
On occasion, Bertold has wanted to issue a variation of that threat to his bride, though the possible consequences have deterred him. Even in his terror, he takes some satisfaction from the fact that although Inga remains as restive as a rattlesnake caught in a gaffling noose, she speaks not another word.
The widow Hawk asks about the ampules containing the various kinds of command mechanisms. If she has his project files, she might as well have samples of the finished product. He says, “They’re in one of the Sub-Zeros in the kitchen, top shelf.”
Concealed behind six-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the safe has a voice-recognition lock that responds to two commands. As sheet lightning pulses through the day and flutters quick shadows through the room, Bertold says, “?‘Things are as I think they are,’?” and the shelves swing open, revealing a stainless-steel panel, after which he says, “?‘and say they are on my blue guitar,’?” to make the panel whisk into the ceiling.
26
* * *