Nathan appeared in the doorway and looked at her, and she had never seen him more solemn, gray-faced and tight-lipped. “They’re all dead,” he told her. “The hollow men and all the agents with me. All dead. Are you all right?”
He had a pistol with a three-inch barrel, not a traditional duty gun, and he carried it at his side, aimed at the floor. He proceeded past her into the room. “Bertold Shenneck? Inga Shenneck?”
Turning in his office chair, the scientist made the mistake of lowering his hands from his face, and Nathan killed him with one shot.
Inga bolted to her feet, kicking aside the chair that penned her in the corner, and Nathan needed two rounds to put her down.
Regardless of the desperate nature of the situation, there was no Bureau protocol that allowed for the killing of unarmed suspects.
As Jane brought up her Heckler & Koch, Nathan turned with his pistol in a two-hand grip, and they stood face-to-face, less than six feet between them.
Seven years of respect and admiration, years of friendship, restrained her finger on the trigger, though the only one of them who had a chance of surviving was the one who fired first.
The rain rushed down the day, the house resonated with it, the seconds passed, then half a minute, until both the moment and the man became too strange for her to bear.
He said, “They were not needed anymore.”
She waited for him to explain.
After a shorter silence, he said, “There are others to carry on Shenneck’s work. Others less flamboyant, more reliable.”
No doubt that he was Nathan Silverman, her section chief, the genuine article, not a doppelganger. He was the husband of Rishona, the father of a son and two daughters, as well known to Jane as anyone else in the world. But she was pressed now to the conclusion that he had sold out, gone to the dark side…unless something worse had happened to him.
“How is Jareb?” she asked, inquiring after his son.
His face remained expressionless, and he did not reply.
“How’s Chaya? Does she still like landscape architecture? She has such a talent for it.”
His eyes were as dark as the muzzle of his pistol. They were locked on her eyes in something more than a staring match.
“Lisbeth?” Jane asked. “Have she and Paul set a wedding date yet?”
His mouth moved, tried to shape itself around his thoughts, but no sound came from him, as though he might have spoken if he hadn’t known that he had come to a place where words no longer could redeem the past or shape the future. And still he searched her eyes as if he had lost something that he might find in her.
“My boy…Nick’s boy and mine, our boy is five,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady, failing in the struggle. “You remember Travis. He wants a pony. My little cowboy.”
His gun tracked away from her. Separate from the crash of the shot, she heard the whisper-whine of the bullet inches from her left ear, the crack of dry wall punctured, and she almost shot him then, restraining herself only because the miss was clearly intentional. He fired again, still inches off target and slightly higher, but then the muzzle tracked down and toward her, until that single eye, ready with the wink of death, regarded her.
Whatever he’d become, his control mechanism was of a different kind from the one that had commanded Nick to kill himself. That way out was denied to Nathan Silverman. At last his rigid face collapsed in an expression, clenched in anguish, his eyes but pools of misery, and he found a word to speak, the word a name, the name Rishona.
Something tore within Jane when she did what needed to be done, what he was asking her to do that he could not accomplish. If such a hateful thing could be an act of love, it was an act of love on her part, that she should release him from the hell of slavery, from being used to do the vicious work of men not fit to speak his name. In the instant between the motion and the act, she saw in his face the realization and relief that she would grant him what he wanted. At a terrible cost to herself, she shot him twice, and when he fell to the floor, she shot him a third time, to be certain beyond all doubt that the web spanning his brain and the weaver who crawled the web could not rule him even one moment longer.
Over her raw sounds of grief, she heard the helicopter coming.
30
* * *
AT THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS, behind the bullet-chopped sideboard, Dougal Trahern lay bleeding and unconscious, his pulse too quick and too weak, but still alive.
Jane shoved the sideboard out of the way and raced down the stairs, between the buckshot-ravaged dead, not allowing herself to consider upon what she was treading in her frantic descent.
She unlocked the front door, threw it open, and stepped outside as the helicopter cruised in low from the southwest, its rotary wing whisking the rain, wipers flinging fans of water off the advanced glass cockpit. The twin-engine medium-size craft could have carried nine passengers if the configuration of its interior had not been customized for the air-ambulance service that Valley Air contracted out to several area hospitals.
If the rain had been accompanied by stiff wind, the helo might have been grounded, although Ronnie Fuentes himself was piloting it and determined to do whatever his father’s favorite sergeant needed. If neither Jane nor Dougal had been badly wounded in the raid, the helicopter would never have been called to the ranch. Now it landed not just with Ronnie aboard but also with his older sister, Nora, a pilot herself and a former Army medic, who was a partner in Valley Air.
Dougal was a big guy. Stabilizing him and getting him out of the house, into the helo, required Jane to assist Nora and Ronnie. If the carnage in the residence shocked the Fuentes siblings, neither gave any indication of it, maneuvering around the dead men as if around misplaced furniture.
When Dougal had been loaded aboard, as Nora tended to him, she looked out through the open door at Jane standing in the rain. “Did it all go to shit?”
“No. We did what we came to do.”
“Maybe I don’t want to know what this is about.”
“You don’t.”
“Are you okay, girl?”
“I will be. I hope to God Dougal is.”
The twin engines fired up in sequence, and the rotary wing chugged into action, and Nora closed the door.
Jane backed away to watch the helicopter lift off.
They could not take Dougal to a hospital, where he would sooner or later be connected with the bloody melee at Gee Zee Ranch. That would be putting him at risk of murder charges. Worse, he would be brought to the attention of David James Michael, the billionaire who funded Shenneck and perhaps now funded others who embraced the same mission.
From Valley Air, Dougal would be spirited to Nora’s house, where she hoped to keep him stable until the nearest discreet and trustworthy doctor, Porter Walkins, arrived by car from Santa Rosa, nearly fifty miles away. Walkins, an Army doctor who had retired from the military to a private practice, had been given both Jane’s and Dougal’s blood types; on short notice, he could obtain, without attracting notice, enough blood for a significant transfusion.
Jane stood in the rain as the air ambulance churned off the lawn and skyward, wondering how it had happened that the world had slid so far into the present darkness. So far into it that there were people like Fuentes and Porter Walkins—once trusting in the law and still hopeful of its full restoration—who recognized this new and ominous reality and who would participate in a kind of underground resistance when called upon.
As the helicopter accelerated southwest, Jane hurried back into the house.
31
* * *