Rise the Dark

59

The territory where Larry drove them was a rugged stretch along the southern face of the Bighorns, not far from the Cloud Peak range, not all that far from Medicine Wheel.

They’d climbed steadily on the rural roads outside of Greybull, and the prairies and plateaus of Lovell and Byron were forgotten-this was mountain country, and it hadn’t heard any rumors of spring yet. Splashes of scattered snow gradually turned into snowbanks lining the road. They were deep in the woods and the country was just as desolate as Larry had promised, but it was also not empty. They had seen countless tracks on their way in. ATVs, mostly. One set of truck tires.

Eventually, Larry left the road entirely, putting the truck in four-wheel drive and navigating a boulder-strewn path that had Mark’s back aching and his teeth clacking. They followed this for a mile that felt like fifty, and then Larry almost hung up the truck. He put it into four-low and the tires roared ruts into the snow, the truck leaning at a precarious angle before it finally found purchase and kicked them loose. From there, the ride was too rough for talking. The only words spoken came from Larry after they had clipped one snow-covered rock with enough force to bounce them both into the air: “Glad the fella we stole this from had a skid plate.”

Larry stopped when the boulder-strewn path turned to sheer slope and they saw the white Silverado in front of them.

“Well, now,” Larry said softly. “You got some special instincts, Markus.”

His gun was already in his hand.

They got out of the truck quickly and quietly, staying low as they advanced to the Silverado. It was empty, and when Mark touched the hood, it was cold against his palm. The woods were silent except for the soft sounds of a stream a hundred yards away. The steep slope ahead of them was laced with even more tracks.

“A lot of traffic going up there today,” Mark said.

Larry squinted at the summit. “Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or are those telephone poles?”

Mark shaded his eyes and stared for a few seconds before he said, “Those sure as hell look like poles.”

“If anybody up there has a scope…”

“Yeah. Let’s get into the trees in a hurry.”

There weren’t many trees to speak of. The closest was a cluster of three dead lodgepole pines that had lost their branches and pointed upslope like waiting missiles.

Mark returned to the truck for Larry’s rifle and then ran in a crouch into the trees, where Larry had already taken up position at the base of a towering fir. Mark sighted on the summit. The telephone poles came into stark relief immediately-they were outfitted with transformers and insulators, but no lines.

“This would be the place,” Mark said.

“Pass it here and let me look.”

Mark lowered the rifle and extended it to Larry reluctantly. Without the scope, he felt clueless as to what was going on up above, and exposed.

Here on the side of the slope, sheltered only by the fir and a small rise that had a higher snowbank than the surrounding ground, they would be easy targets for someone firing on them from above, and going in any direction required side-hilling, moving across the steep grade and over the snow. The change in altitude created a remarkable change in environment; the hot dusty road and glaring sun where Mark had traded fire with Garland Webb seemed as far away as Cassadaga now. The snow also meant that they’d be leaving obvious tracks.

It was quiet on the hillside, the sounds of the stream farther away, but everything seemed intensified somehow, from those soft water noises to the feel of the breeze and the smell of the snow. Mark’s hands were cold and numb, and even the tingle in his flesh felt stronger than it should have. All of his senses seemed unusually sensitive, sharp.

“We could work up that gulch,” he said, blowing on his hands. “Getting there, we’d be pretty exposed, but once we’re in it, we’ll have protection. Looks like it leads all the way up, almost.”

Larry had just returned his attention to the scope when a scream came from up above. It wasn’t loud; it was so faint, in fact, that both of them looked at each other with a question, as if needing confirmation. Then another came, and while it was still soft, there was no mistaking it.

“We’re either too late,” Larry said, “or just in time.”

He returned the rifle to his shoulder and lowered his eye to the scope. Mark ached for it, their only set of eyes here.

After a few seconds of silence, Larry said, “There’s a woman up there, and she’s running like hell.”

“Anyone behind her?”

“Not that I see, but the way she’s moving, she expects there is.”

“Which way is she headed?”

“Toward the gulch. Maybe two hundred yards away. Shit, she just fell.”

“I need to see her,” Mark said, crawling closer. “I need to see if I know her.”

Larry didn’t want to turn over their only pair of eyes any more than Mark had, but he gave up the rifle. Mark put his eye to the scope but couldn’t find the woman.

“Two hundred yards to our left?”

“About. There’s a swale in the trees. She’s trying to work her way down it.”

Mark found the swale and panned up and down it but saw nothing and was about to ask for more guidance when he caught a flash of motion. He moved the scope back toward it and caught the woman in the crosshairs.

It was Lynn Deschaine, and up on the summit, two men had emerged in pursuit of her.

60

Putting on the Faraday suit had once felt like putting on a knight’s armor. Now it felt like putting his head in a noose.

Jay had climbed towers more times than he could count. Even his worst nightmares about what could go wrong on them hadn’t involved a train pulling them down with live lines sparking the whole way, but now it was his job to make that happen.

“Have you ever considered how fascinating electricity’s desire is?” Pate asked as Jay dressed. “We force it up on those lines, but what does it want to do? What will it do if given an instant’s chance? Go to ground. Return to the land.”

Jay didn’t answer. He was fastening the grounding strap that connected his pants to his jacket to prevent any separation of the suit. Even something that small could be the difference between coming down alive or smoking.

Pate handed Jay a radio. “You’ll be operating on my frequency now.” Then he pulled a pair of canvas gloves from his hip pocket, put them on, and grabbed the free end of one of the spools of stainless-steel cable.

“Time to climb, Jay. Be safe up there. There’s a lot riding on it.”

With Pate paying out the cable behind him, Jay walked to the base of the massive steel tower.

One hundred and ten volts could kill a man if he made a mistake. The lines above Jay carried more than four thousand times that much electricity. He would never have free-climbed in a situation like this-there’d be a bucket truck, extra safety equipment, a full team. Sometimes there’d even be a helicopter. At the very least, there’d be a rope system.

Today, he free-climbed, pulling the aircraft cable behind him. He’d fastened the end of it to his hot stick and used a piece of hot rope to fashion a sort of sling so the hot stick rode against his back and allowed him to have both hands free. Almost immediately, not even ten feet off the ground, his legs began to shake and his pores opened, his skin slick with sweat against the Faraday suit.

At least it was steel. Tim had died on a pole, not a tower, and the tower felt more stable, certainly. The latticed steel towers were built in a way that made climbing both simple and dangerously inviting. Early in his career, he’d responded to a call-out on a steel tower. A kid had climbed up to the first arm to sit and drink beer. They’d found several empties resting peacefully, and the kid’s charred corpse blown eighty feet away. The prevailing theory was that he’d sat in safety for long enough that he grew comfortable and his bladder grew full, and then he’d gone to take a leak, unaware that he was near the flash zone. He’d been electrocuted with his own piss.

That was on a solid tower. As Jay climbed this one, dragging behind him the cable that was to be used as a snare wire for a train, he could see where the enormous bolts had been removed. Eli Pate was right-it was clean and classic technology, and it was also simple technology. Over the years, security experts had become increasingly concerned about possible cyber attacks on the grid. Jay was aware of high-dollar and high-tech efforts to enhance the computer security on every level.

He doubted that any of those security experts had ever looked at the towers, studied the individual bolts, and considered a child’s Erector set.

The idea that it would be such antiquated and simple thinking that brought down a system of ever increasing sophistication suited Pate’s cruel amusement perfectly. While the grid experts rushed to write new code and produce dazzling layers of encryption and firewalls, Eli Pate had picked up a wrench.

There was a horrifying genius to thinking small.

This explains his boots, Jay realized. Pate wore those battered but expensive boots that didn’t contain a trace of metal, and Jay hadn’t understood why before, but now he did-Pate had gone up on the towers at least far enough to weaken them, and he’d been cautious, as he was about everything. Pragmatic. He had worn the right gear and he had not gone up high enough to risk encountering the current.

For that, he’d selected Jay.

Initially, Jay tried to count the number of missing bolts and analyze their leverage points as he climbed. That soon increased his fear, though, so he stopped. Even under the circumstances, he still felt the stomach-clenching sense of awe that the towers provided. He’d always thought it was different in Montana, where the big sky was so damn vast that the transmission structures seemed almost laughable, the notion that they powered this territory nearly impossible to believe because they looked so flimsy, almost foolish, set against the Rocky Mountains. In cities where skyscrapers dominated the landscape, maybe a lineman could feel like he really ran the show. In the Rockies, though, Jay always had the sense that he was just part of the team that kept a long con game in play. Whenever nature wanted to bring things to a stop, she did so swiftly.

On the day he’d made his last climb, he’d stopped at seventy feet. Today, the first panic attack hit him at forty.

As his pulse accelerated and his lungs clenched, he made the worst choice possible and tried to hurry, as if speed were the answer to overcoming panic. The clumsy suit was not built for hurrying, and he missed the handhold he was reaching for by an inch, not even making contact, his body swinging toward open air.

He didn’t fall, didn’t even come close. Even though he was well balanced, the anticipation of solid contact that was met by nothing but the wind made the world reel, and he threw his arms around the angled upright brace and clung to it like a drunk slow-dancing.

He was facing east, and the late-day sun reflected off the steel and seemed to give the towers added depth, turning them from latticed interruptions of the horizon into a long, shimmering gray tunnel. He closed his eyes, hissing in short, fast breaths as the horizon swam around him. Certain that he was going to faint, he sat awkwardly on the crossbar-fell, really, landing on it with enough impact to jar his spine.

Memory overrode emotion. Enough experience was still trapped in his brain to shout instructions at him, and as the world whirled from gray toward black, he wrapped his legs around the crossbar and circled his elbow tight around the end of a bolt that Pate hadn’t removed. He was now as close to self-arrested as he could be without a rope or harness. Then he leaned forward, the way his grandfather had taught him, a lesson from the days when these towers had been going up and before the Faraday suit was in use. His grandfather always advised placing your forehead against the steel, convinced that having the cold stability of it so close to the brain made a difference. Today, Jay couldn’t feel it against his skin, but still it saved him. He was aware first of the solid metal against his head, then of the size of the bolt under his elbow, and then, slowly, the overall balance of it all. He was not falling, was not even sliding. He opened his eyes.

The first time Jay had experienced nerves on a tower, Tim had been with him. Jay thought he was faking his way along well enough, determined that nobody would smell his fear, when Tim said, “The tower holds you up, bud, not the other way around. Stop squeezing her so tight.”

He tried to remember that now. The tower holds you up, bud, not the other way around. Slowly, he relaxed his muscles. He forced himself to concentrate on nothing but the steel, to think of how strong it was, how sturdy, all the conditions it weathered easily and without fail.

To not think about all those missing bolts at the key leverage points.

When his breathing slowed, he willed himself to conjure an image to replace Tim’s face. He thought of Sabrina on the video, Sabrina with the cuff on her wrist. That was why he had to climb. It would be better to die here than not to climb.

Once you get in motion, stay in motion, he instructed himself. If you’re moving, you can’t lock up. The longer you stay still, the harder it becomes to get going again. He reached up, grasped the next bar of steel with his right hand, and took a step. His whole body shook, and he wondered if Pate could tell how he was struggling, if he understood yet that he’d picked the wrong man for the job.

Keep climbing.

Sixty feet, seventy, eighty, sure the whole time that he was going to faint and fall. Even continuing the climb offered little reassurance-the real danger waited not below but above, the corona effect crackling like laughter as the lines watched him climb.

Tim had no eyes, no face. Just those curled black ribbons of flesh, like charcoal shavings…

He climbed on. Inside the suit he was soaked with a thin cold sweat. Above him the lines hissed and spit with their distinct, menacing sound, the air alive with current that would sweep through his suit. The sensation was like a thousand ants crawling over his skin, a swarm of strange tingling. He gritted his teeth. The Faraday suit kept you alive in the current, but it didn’t make you comfortable. All that voltage crawled over your skin, a feeling that was both unpleasant and exhausting.

At the top of the arm, the insulators hung pointed toward the earth. They were made of a series of porcelain disks, each disk designed to support a designated voltage, the sum of the parts great enough to handle the massive voltage load of the transmission lines. He stopped fifteen feet below them, thought, I made it, and then made the mistake of looking up and out, following the path of the lines into the distance. The lines spread out over the landscape like fine black threads, every bit as intricate and delicate as a spiderweb, except that these threads were actually the veins of a nation.

And you’re about to pull them down.

This time he nearly did faint. The immovable mountains seemed to slide closer to him and then fall away, and he was aware of how radiantly blue the sky was as it spun over him and then swam into a gray haze as his muscles went liquid and he shut his eyes and regripped the steel, no longer believing it would hold him up.

Then the radio came to life.

“Is that high enough for our task, Jay?”

Jay opened his eyes, taking care to look only at his hands and not the open expanse around him. He held tight to the tower with his right hand while he removed the radio from his pocket with his left. The simple performance of a minor physical task made the dizziness dissipate.

“Any higher and you risk turning this cable into an energized conductor,” Jay said. “That would be worse for you than me.”

It would, in fact, kill Pate instantly. As appealing as that idea was, one of Jay’s priorities had to be keeping Pate alive. Whoever else was listening on this radio, waiting on his command, knew where Sabrina was and knew the arrangement-if the power died, she lived. To kill Pate would be to kill Sabrina.

“I appreciate your concern, but that would be very bad for your bride as well,” Pate said, confirming Jay’s thoughts. “I think our leverage point is fine. Secure the cable and come down for the next. You’ll need to start climbing faster.”

Jay pocketed the radio, swung the hot stick from over his shoulder, and wrapped the cable three times around the steel arm. He kept his focus tight on his hands, tried not to think about the sky or the mountains or the broad sweep of the lines across the land. Looking at the horizon was a mistake he couldn’t make again, and looking up at the crackling lines might be even worse.

The hot stick, which could telescope up to ten feet but was collapsed to five, was outfitted with a crimping head, one of the dozens of tools you could attach to it. Once the cable was looped around the steel, Jay twisted the free end around the line that led back down to the fir trees and used the crimper to bind them tight. The result was a taut, secured cable between the top of the tower on the north side of the tracks and the trees on the south side. It crossed the railroad tracks at chest-level. Even if the engineer saw the cables in the darkness, he wouldn’t be able to stop before he made contact with them. With that much power dragging them forward, the cables wouldn’t need to hold long either. They’d just need to tug. Mass and momentum would handle the rest.

“One line set,” Pate said. “Five to go.”

Five more climbs.

Jay closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and started back down.

Pate’s voice came over the radio again, but this time he wasn’t speaking to Jay. It was a message for the unknown parties who waited out in the mountains, chain saws in hand.

“Stand at the ready,” he said. “We are under way at ground zero.”

He’d never sounded happier.

61

Janell had the GPS coordinates programmed, and the Yukon that smelled of wet dog fur was purring down the highway, the cruise control locked in at three miles over the limit. Excruciatingly slow, but necessary. She couldn’t afford any more delays; the sequencing of time and miles was already too tight, but if she managed to keep it at this pace, she would beat the sunset.

That would be enough. To be there when the world went dark would be enough. Her head ached and the road swam in front of her eyes until she blinked hard and shook herself awake. She couldn’t remember when she’d last slept. It felt like the endless road had been all she’d known for weeks now. Cassadaga seemed as far away as Rotterdam.

It was such a large country, and nothing connected it on a drive this long but the ribbons of highway and the power lines. The land blended subtly, and you were well into new terrain when you realized just how astonishingly different it was from the place you’d last been. She’d started among orange trees and humid breezes, and now there was snow on mountains that looked so far removed from that place that it seemed to be another country entirely.

Once it had been.

Maybe it should have stayed that way.

She considered turning on the radio and listening to the news reports, curious about any theories that had surfaced regarding the sad fate of Deputy Terrell and whether they’d identified Doug’s corpse yet, but decided she didn’t want the distraction. Not now, when she was so close.

The GPS told her she was only thirty-three minutes out. The sun was harsh and slanted in the driver’s window, as if it didn’t want to give up the day without a fight, but it would soon be down, and when she reached Eli, she doubted there would be more than a pale pink glow left.

That seemed perfect.

There was a handheld radio resting on the console, turned on, waiting for his voice. When it came, the joy she felt made her move her foot to the brake pedal, as if she might not be able to drive and handle the euphoria simultaneously. She wanted to pick up the radio and speak back, to rejoice with him, but he was clearly giving instructions to someone. The returning voice was unknown to her, but it seemed he was the climber, and he was at work.

The radio fell silent for a few seconds, and then Eli’s voice came again.

“Stand at the ready. We are under way at ground zero.”

Alone in a dead man’s car, Janell began to laugh.

62

You changed the rules, little bitch. You’re going to wish you hadn’t.”

The voice was the first thing Sabrina was aware of. A man’s voice, but high and lilting, positively giddy. A stream of repetitive chatter.

“A silly mistake, little bitch. Garland had to play by the rules unless you changed them, and now you have. If you don’t listen to the rules, why should Garland? He shouldn’t!”

Sabrina kept her eyes squeezed shut. Maybe if she just stayed like this, eyes closed and body limp, he would grow tired and leave. Like playing dead during a grizzly bear mauling.

“Little bitch? Wake up, little bitch.”

It was hard to keep her body limp and her breathing shallow, though, because pain was an issue. Her head ached from his punch, but her shoulder joints held the worst pain, the tendons stretched and screaming. There was tension around her wrists too. He’d bound her against something that held her in the air. Gravity was her enemy, making the pain worse by the second, and she was desperate to lessen the pressure on her wrists and shoulders.

But then he’ll know. Just stay like you are, and he’ll get tired, and then-

When he slapped her, she gasped and opened her eyes despite herself. She saw him then, directly in front of her, his mouth twisted into a grin, his eyes hungry.

“Good morning, little bitch! I thought you were awake. You’ve been trying to hide from Garland, haven’t you?”

Sabrina gasped with pain and began to scramble with her heels, searching for any way to reduce the pressure in her shoulders. She finally found purchase, but it was soft and yielding, and it wasn’t until she’d pushed high enough to alleviate the pain that she looked down to see what her situation was.

He had overturned a bed, and it was resting on an angle against the wall and Sabrina’s arms were tied above it, ropes running from her wrists up to the exposed wall studs high above her. She was upstairs in the cabin, it seemed. There were lights and radios and electronics scattered all around, along with rows of cots, five or six at least. There was a window up here, and it wasn’t covered-daylight streamed in, and she could see down to the fence.

Garland Webb followed her gaze and shook his head.

“Don’t waste your hope on her. She is miles from help, and two men are right behind her. She will be back soon, and she will be punished too. Those are the rules. I’m only allowed to punish those who break them.”

He smiled.

“You broke them.”

He reached out and touched Sabrina’s chin with his index finger, laughed when she recoiled, and then traced a line down her throat and chest, between her breasts and down her stomach. She tried to kick him but missed and succeeded only in knocking the upended bed down farther so that she fell and the ropes sent waves of pain through her arms and shoulders. She screamed and Garland Webb laughed as he caught her legs easily, unbothered by her kicks, and stepped between them, his face almost level with her own.

“Fighters are good,” he said. “Fighters are better.”

She turned her head in disgust, and when she did she saw the staircase to her right, and saw Violet standing there, halfway up, hidden in the shadows. For an instant, they locked eyes, and then Violet looked away.

“No!” Sabrina shouted. “Help me!”

Violet didn’t look up, but Garland turned and saw her.

“Get out of here.”

Violet didn’t move. Her head was still down, and Sabrina could see that her lips were moving, but no words were coming. It was as if she were whispering to herself. No-chanting. Sabrina could hear the faint sounds now.

Garland Webb released Sabrina’s legs and stepped toward the stairs, saying, “I should have left you chained, you stupid slut.” He had taken only two steps when a radio in the room crackled to life.

“We have armed visitors at Wardenclyffe,” a male voice said.

Webb pulled up short, pivoted his head toward the window, and stared out. Sabrina managed to get her heels braced on the bed frame again, leaning her head back with relief when the screaming tension in her shoulders and wrists ebbed.

Webb crossed the room to a long table, picked up a radio, and walked to the window. He’d put the radio to his lips but hadn’t spoken when another voice came on, and this one Sabrina recognized-Eli Pate.

“Come again?”

“Two armed visitors at Wardenclyffe. Don’t look like police. But the woman is running toward them.”

“Where is Garland?”

Webb pressed a button on the side of the radio. “Right here. With the other one. Baldwin. She is secured.”

Violet’s head was bobbing gently, the soft chants still coming from her barely moving lips, her eyes closed. For a few seconds that was the only sound, and then Pate spoke again.

“Can you take the others out?”

The unknown male voice said, “Affirmative.”

“Then do so.”

“Ten-four.”

Garland Webb said, “I’m coming down,” and then clipped the radio to his belt. He turned from the window to face Sabrina. “I’ll be back, little bitch. We’ll have our time together.”

He moved across the room to the top of the stairs. Violet was still chanting, eyes still closed.

“Get out of my way,” Webb said, starting down the steps.

Violet opened her eyes, lifted a pistol, and pulled the trigger.

There was a soft pop, a hiss of air, and then a hideous blend of gasp and scream as Garland Webb reached for his throat and the dart that was embedded just below his Adam’s apple.

63

When he saw Lynn, Mark dropped the rifle and picked up the.38. His uncle watched with curiosity.

“You know her?”

“Yes. She’s the one I came here with, the one looking for Pate.”

Larry reached out and grabbed Mark’s arm as he turned to run. “Don’t set off like a damned fool again.”

“There are men right behind her!”

“Thank the good Lord for a scoped rifle, then,” Larry said.

“We aren’t shooting anybody unless we have to.”

“You didn’t have that problem earlier today.” Larry picked up the rifle and leaned forward, burrowing himself into the snow and assuming a sniper’s position on his belly. “Might as well back them off a touch, wouldn’t you say?”

Mark looked at him and then up the slope helplessly. He wasn’t going to cover the ground to Lynn uphill faster than those two would do it going downhill, but he didn’t want to start a firefight either. Not as exposed as they were here.

“Markus, they are closing on her fast,” Larry said.

“Back them off, then.”

Larry went silent and enough seconds passed that Mark thought he hadn’t heard the instruction. Then his uncle squeezed off four shots in succession, fluid as a firing machine, racking the bolt and squeezing the trigger, racking the bolt and squeezing the trigger, no change at all in his expression or posture.

“Well,” he said, “they didn’t care for that much.”

“You hit them?”

“Of course not; I wasn’t trying to hit them. They both dropped and went for cover. I can see one of them. The other one made it down in the rocks, out of sight.”

“Where is Lynn?”

“She stopped running too. She’s hiding in that gulch. I wish she’d been smart enough to keep running. This was buying her good lead time.”

“She probably thinks any shooting is hostile fire.” Mark looked at the gulch, two hundred yards away over open hillside. It was a ribbon of shadow in the gathering dusk. Once he got there, he’d feel safe enough.

But he had to get there.

“Shit,” Larry said. “They’ve got radios. That means they’ve got friends.”

“I’m going for her,” Mark said. “When I start running, put up some cover fire. Shoot to wound if you can. You don’t need a murder charge.”

Larry was feeding fresh cartridges into the rifle. “I’d say we’re past the point of worrying about our booking sheets.”

He was probably right.

Larry said, “When you get to her, head straight down the gulch instead of coming back across the hill. I can hold them off, and you’ll have better cover. You get to the bottom, where that stream is, just run like hell for the truck. I can keep them occupied long enough for you to make the truck.”

“How do you intend to get back across?”

“Creatively.” Larry didn’t look away from the scope. “If you’re going to move, now’s the time. They’re getting themselves collected up there.”

“All right.” Mark put one hand in the snow, bracing himself on the steep slope, and said, “I’ll run with your first shot.”

There was a two-second pause, and then Larry opened fire again, this time sending the bullets into the trees, blowing chunks of bark and branch loose.

Mark put his head down and ran.

The first bullet into the ground beside him barely registered. It was nothing more than a puff in the snow. The second passed close to his skull, and he ducked involuntarily and promptly lost his balance and slipped, landing hard and painfully on his right side, but fortuitously also, because more bullets stitched the air above him. Larry returned fire, shooting faster now, connecting with rocks near the summit, and when the bullets aimed at Mark ceased, he stumbled to his feet and charged on, crossing the last fifty yards without taking fire.

At the edge of the gulch he slowed, but just then a new bullet separated the branch of a fir tree from its trunk only a few feet above his head, and he jumped into the boulder-lined gulch without further hesitation.

The drop wasn’t much, ten feet at most, but he landed in the loose rocks and fell backward. In another few weeks the fall might have ended disastrously, because massive rocks waited to catch his head, but today there was still enough snow to cushion the impact. It hammered the breath from his lungs, but it didn’t crack his skull. For a moment he lay there and fought for air, listening to the popping barrage of the gunfire from the summit-an AR-15 or AK-47-and the responding booms from his uncle’s Winchester. He hadn’t asked Larry how many rounds he had. He’d told Larry not to shoot to kill, but if his supply went low, he’d have to start making the shots count.

Mark got to his feet and scrambled up the gulch, holding the.38 in his right hand and using his left for balance. He was prepared for gunfire, but none came. Above him, all had gone silent. He was alone in the gulch, scrambling through the shadows, the sun below the mountain, the evening sky lit pink. He’d gone about a hundred feet and was breathing hard, the altitude taking its toll, when the gulch made a sharp bend to the left that was partially blocked by the massive root ball of an overturned fir. He hurried around it, the gun held down along his leg, not in firing position, when he thought he heard a whisper of motion and slowed by a half step. As a result, the softball-size rock that Lynn Deschaine slammed at his face missed by inches.

Her momentum carried her past him, into the tree roots, as he raised the.38 and almost fired. He’d partially depressed the trigger before he registered her long dark hair, a stark splash against the snow where she’d fallen.

“Lynn!”

She slipped and fell as she tried to rise and turn and finally ended up on her back, facing him, stunned. She was breathing too hard to speak. Mark looked from her to the chunk of rock she’d swung at him when she’d sprung from her hiding spot. She would have neatly crushed his skull if she’d made contact.

“Let’s go,” he said, reaching to help her.

She kicked him in the throat.

He was unprepared for it, and it was a hell of a blow. His breath split into agonized trapped halves between brain and chest and he stumbled and fell to one knee as she rose and chopped at his wrist and knocked the.38 loose. It bounced into the rocks and he watched her go after it without attempting to stop her, frozen by pain and shock.

She was three feet from the gun when a shot rang out and fragments of rock exploded just inches from the revolver.

Larry.

“He won’t miss next time,” Mark rasped. The effort of speaking raised specks of light in his vision. He sat down and rubbed his throat. Lynn was motionless down in the rocks, torn between reaching for the gun and believing his words. She looked back at him warily, like a trapped animal.

“Are you with them? Did you know?” She was panting, fearful but fierce, and he knew that if she reached the gun she meant to use it. “You left the motel and they appeared. That’s a coincidence?”

He thought of his own outrage, standing in her motel room discovering the undisclosed connection to his family, finding the Homeland Security ID, and he realized for the first time that his own sense of betrayal had to be nothing compared to hers when she’d awoken to find him gone and attackers at the door.

“I don’t know that I even believe in that word anymore, but I didn’t set you up.”

She breathed hard, watching him and trying to decide. He knew that Larry was watching her with a finger on the trigger.

Mark said, “Go straight down to the bottom of the gulch, and you’ll find a truck. Take it and go. You’re in the crosshairs of a scope, but he’s a friendly shooter to you. For now.”

Her distrust began to waver. She stared into the trees. “Who are you here with?”

“My uncle.”

She turned back to him. “You’re telling the truth?”

“I’m telling the truth. I came to help you, and to kill Garland Webb. That’s all. I left the motel room because I was thinking about my wife. When I came back, you were gone. And I…and I found my way here.”

She rose unsteadily, her chest heaving. Strands of hair caught in her mouth, and she wiped them aside. “I’m not going without her.”

“Without who?”

“Sabrina Baldwin.”

Mark looked up at the summit. It was backlit with that beautiful sunset, but below, everything was giving way to the encroaching darkness. They were out of sight of the shooters above for now, but he expected the shooters were in motion and that they knew the terrain. Time was short. If they were going down, it had to be in a hurry.

But he remembered Jay Baldwin’s face. What would you do to get your wife back?

“She’s up there?” Mark asked.

“Yes.” Lynn took a deep breath, eyes on him, and added: “She’s with Garland Webb. And your mother.”

64

The dart, as Sabrina knew from experience, carried a fast-acting tranquilizer. She hadn’t even had time to ask Why? before the blackness overtook her. Garland Webb had time to say “You stupid bitch” before his legs went liquid beneath him and he tumbled down the stairs, but he was large and strong and he caught Violet by her hair as he fell. She vanished from sight with him.

Sabrina, still bound to the wall, screamed.

No one answered.

As the silence settled and she realized she was alone without either immediate threat or immediate rescue, she tried to figure out some means of escape. Nothing. With or without Garland Webb, she would remain here.

Something moved on the stairs. A thump and a drag. Sabrina twisted her head toward the steps and stared into the shadows. Thump, drag. Thump, drag.

Someone was climbing the stairs.

Coming back for her.

She was braced for the sight of Garland Webb when Violet appeared halfway up the steps.

“Help,” Sabrina said. “Please, help me.”

Violet came up the stairs slowly, still holding the pistol, dragging her left foot behind her. It hung awkwardly, the ankle or lower leg broken, but she kept approaching with patient steps. She looked at Sabrina’s knots quizzically before giving up and going to the woodstove across the room. There she set the pistol down and picked up a hatchet. She tested the blade’s edge with her thumb.

“That woman wasn’t lying about my son, was she?”

Sabrina didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure what would help more now-the truth, which was clearly a torment for Violet, or the lie that she wanted to hear.

“I know that she wasn’t lying,” Violet said before Sabrina got a word out. “And if Markus is here, he’s here for the truth. He’s special. In ways he doesn’t know. Which means that I…” She fell silent, and her eyes filled with tears. “Look at you. Oh my God, just look at you. What I’ve allowed. Embraced.”

“Help me, and we will leave together. I promise.”

Violet shook her head.

“I can’t leave. My fate has called me here. You were brought against your will, and there is no other way to look at that, is there? And yet I tried to find one. Because the goals are good, they’re critical. Someone has to speak for the earth. It’s past time for that. But all of this…” She shook her head again. “This isn’t the way Eli promised it would go. It’s nothing like he promised. I wanted to believe in him, but the morning council was wrong. He was false. I’ve always put my faith in the wrong places, but only while searching for the right one. No one would believe that.”

Outside there was gunfire, sharp, cracking shots. Sabrina jerked at the sound and almost lost her balance atop the precariously leaning bed frame.

“Please cut me down. Please!”

“I let him change her fate too,” she said. “Lauren’s. My own daughter-in-law. Think about that. I allowed it to happen to her.”

She pushed her thumb against the blade. A bright bead of blood appeared and Sabrina winced at the sight, but Violet seemed unmoved.

Another fusillade of shots echoed outside. Sharp, high pops interspersed with low, echoing booms. Violet moved the hatchet away from her thumb and stared at the blood as it dripped down her arm.

“I never heard what happened,” she said. “They never told me, but I didn’t try to find out either. I probably didn’t want to see. That’s the problem for me. I want the truth but I never see it.”

She sighed and lowered her hand, showering the floorboards with speckles of blood.

“I just hope she told him the things I’d asked her to tell him,” she said. “I’d hoped she would be the one to convince him to believe.”

There was a long silence, and then Violet lunged forward, swinging the hatchet high over her head and then whistling the blade down. It cleaved through the rope on Sabrina’s left side and drove into the wall, and she swung free, knocking the bed frame away. For an instant she was hanging only by her right side, but Violet wrenched the hatchet out of the wall and swung it once more, cutting the second rope. Sabrina fell to the floor, and Violet left the hatchet in the wall this time and reached down to help her up. Her left hand was hot with blood.

“Can you walk?” Violet said.

“I think so.” Sabrina was struggling to her feet when she saw the bloody hole in Violet’s stomach for the first time. It was a deep puncture, and the blood that filled it was bright red and flowing fast.

“My God…what happened?”

“Garland’s knife.” She said it simply but sadly. “Go on now, dear. And be careful.”

“Both of us.”

“No.”

“Violet…yes! When he wakes up, he is going to kill you.”

“Perhaps. But this is my fate, dear. I’ve been on a long, strange road to get here. I can’t leave. I think you can, though. I think you should.”

Sabrina didn’t pause to argue. Outside the gunfire had begun again, and she didn’t know how long Garland Webb would remain unconscious.

“Thank you,” she said.

Violet nodded and said, “Yes, dear,” for the last time as Sabrina went to the stairs. She stepped over Garland Webb’s inert form. He was facedown, the dart no longer in his throat but trapped in his massive fingers.

At the bottom of the steps she turned back, prepared to ask Violet to join her, but she was nowhere to be seen.

65

Jay had completed a second climb, secured another cable, and was on his way back up with a third when he heard the first creak from the steel.

It wasn’t a menacing sound, not like the corona discharge. Inside his hooded suit, it sounded muffled and almost friendly, a low moan with a high, whining finish, like the yawn of a sleeping dog.

Then the tower began to move.

At first, the sensation was so subtle that he almost didn’t believe it. Chalked it up to dizziness again; the world had been reeling around him plenty up here.

The dog’s yawn turned into a scream then, the shriek of torquing metal, and Jay had a tenth of a second to think, Oh shit, it’s real, before the angled upright closest to the tracks tried to pull apart from the rest of the tower.

It was the highest spot Pate had reached to remove bolts. Jay saw the brace shifting as he began to fall, watched it lean from sky to earth like a palm tree in gale-force winds, and then he lost his footing and plummeted down.

He hit the steel before the air, landing on his chest on the crossbar he’d been standing on an instant earlier, a feeling like catching a pull hitter’s bat at the end of his swing.

The pain saved him. Pain powered instinct that his brain hadn’t been able to conjure earlier, and he reached for his chest as his feet swung free. The steel crossbar was between his hand and his chest. He hooked it with his left arm and caught himself with a jarring impact, the crossbar pinned under his armpit. Beneath him he saw his booted feet kicking impotently at the air, searching for nonexistent purchase, and the distant ground below.

His aching arm was squeezed tight as a python around the steel, so tight that it pressed into the meat of his biceps like a dull knife.

Right arm, right arm, right arm! he thought frantically, but when he swung to grab with his right, it forced his left loose, and for a moment he was sliding again. Then his right hand clamped over the crosspiece and held.

Beneath him, the tower groaned again as the wind freshened and the loose brace, which had to weigh several thousand pounds, strained to adhere to gravity’s demands.

The overhead lines didn’t let it. They’d given all the slack they intended to give, and now the loose brace was held up by their strength.

Jay took three quick but deep breaths, then heaved himself upward, like a man trying to pull himself out of the water and over the stern of a boat. He got his chest onto the crossbar and then wrapped his arms around it and clasped his left wrist with his right hand.

The tower holds you up, bud, not the other way around. Stop squeezing her so tight.

He laid the side of his face against the steel and gasped in air, blinking sweat out of his eyes. His chest and arm ached and he felt a strange pressure along his spine and thought, I’ve broken my back, before he realized that it was the hot stick, still slung in place over his shoulder and still attached to the cable Pate had anchored below.

When the voice came over the radio, he thought the sound was from the tower again, and he tightened his grasp, ready for the inevitable fall. Even after he realized the source of the sound, it took him a few seconds to process the words.

“Don’t look like police. But the woman is running toward them.”

Jay lifted his head. The tower didn’t shift; the steel was solid again beneath him. Only seconds ago it had occupied his every emotion. Now the radio summoned them elsewhere.

The woman? Were they talking about Sabrina? But then the update came from a man named Garland: “Right here. With the other one. Baldwin. She is secured.”

A hundred feet below, Eli Pate lowered the radio and shouted to Jay in a calm, cold voice.

“You just heard the man! Sabrina is in capable hands! Time to get up, Jay! Back on your feet!”

Jay pushed up slowly but didn’t rise to his feet. He shifted into a sitting position astride the crossbar, his feet dangling free, and adjusted the hot stick. The ground cable was still secure, unbothered by the excitement. Jay wasn’t even sure if Pate had been aware of it or if he’d been distracted by the men on the radio. Did anyone have any idea how close it had been?

Doesn’t matter. You’re alive. Sabrina may not be for long. Get the hell up.

Baldwin, they’d said. She is secured.

Secured by this man Garland. Jay’s instinct said it was terrible, but the other woman, the unknown woman, was on the run between groups of armed men, and Pate had instructed his men to take out the others, the armed intruders. That meant that the woman who was not secured was in a lot more danger than the one who was.

Didn’t it?

He inched out on along the crossbar until he reached the upright. Then he got both hands around it and pulled cautiously to his feet. The tower didn’t shift, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. Jay’s weight was insignificant when dispersed amid all that steel. The loose brace had hopefully shifted as much as it could, or would, unless it had some powerful help.

As if in answer, a new sound joined the mix, far off but audible.

A train whistle.

There was the help. Hustling westward, unaware of the trap, and guaranteed to pull down the towers. Jay began to climb again, into the darkening sky. He was vaguely aware that on his next trip he would need a light. He was vaguely aware of the pain in his chest and arm. He was only vaguely aware of anything.

He’d just gotten high enough to swing the hot stick free, ready to crimp the second cable into place, when the radio came to life again, the same voice as before but sounding anything but composed now.

“We are taking heavy fire!”

Pate said, “Then return it,” cool and indifferent. Jay wondered if the men on the other end were Pate’s followers or if they were more like Jay, pulled in against their will.

“Garland, report, please,” Pate said.

The radio was silent. A few seconds passed. Pate said, “Garland?”

Again there was only silence from the radio, and, all around Jay, the humming chorus of five hundred thousand volts.

“Get to work, Jay!” Pate shouted, and for the first time his voice had lost its detached cool.

Jay looped the cable. He had the hot stick in hand, ready to crimp the cable, when his radio chirped.

“We have a runner. The second woman is out. Both women are out!”

A hundred feet in the air, Jay froze and stared down at Eli Pate, who held the radio to his lips but didn’t key the mike.

For once, something had silenced him.

66

Mark and Lynn were still in the gulch when Larry ran to join them. Mark’s tracks had disappeared as the sun descended, a fringe line of blackness that kept working higher up the mountain.

Larry gave no warning he was coming. Mark and Lynn heard the sound when he was almost on them. He made it across the steep pitch without a fall, better than Mark, and used a tree to aid his drop into the gulch, landing on his feet, rifle at waist-level, pointed at Lynn.

“That didn’t look like a real warm reunion you all had. How’s your throat?”

Mark said, “Mom’s up there. With Garland Webb.”

“Violet is up there?”

“Yes.”

Larry looked up the slope. He was quiet for a moment, then said, “We wait long, and we’ll be pinned down here.”

“How many left for the Winchester?” Mark said.

“Four.”

“Shit.”

“Yup.”

“Any more rounds in the truck?”

“No.”

“How many for the handgun?”

“Two handguns, two clips each.”

“Give one to her.”

Larry looked at Lynn and hesitated, but she extended her hand and made a gimme gesture, curling her fingers in toward her palm. He drew a Ruger semiautomatic from his pocket and gave it to her.

When she closed her hand around the gun, she looked at Mark. He turned his palms up. “Got enough trust yet? I’m the only one without a weapon. You want to kill me and figure out you were wrong later, there’s nothing stopping you.”

She knelt, picked up the.38, and passed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now tell me what I’m running into up there.”

“A high fence that may or may not be electrified at the moment. A cabin. I don’t know if they took her back there. I don’t even know if…if she’s alive. They got her as she was going over the fence. She shut it down long enough for me to get over, but they got her.”

“How many are there?”

“Four. Three men and your mother.”

Larry swore under his breath and spit into the snow, then scrambled to the high side of the gulch and peered up at the shrinking pool of sunlight where the telephone poles stood.

“You take her down to the truck. I’ll go see about your mother.”

I’ll go see about your mother. How many times had Mark heard that? In the past, it had meant that they were going to pull her out of some bar or flophouse or con’s bedroom. Now it meant that Larry intended to head up the gulch alone toward three armed men.

“Not happening, Uncle,” Mark said. He gestured to Lynn. “We’ve got to take her down.”

“You’re not taking her anywhere,” Lynn snapped. “Until I know what happened to Sabrina, I am not leaving.”

“That’s a stupid choice,” Mark said. “We need to leave and call for help.”

He was watching the ground shadows seep down the mountainside, deepening the darkness. Any chance of reaching the truck depended on moving now, while enough visibility remained to get down the gulch in relative quiet. They were outgunned above, and if their trek was pinpointed by clattering stumbles over rocks and snapped branches underfoot, they’d be shredded.

“She’ll die in that time,” Lynn said. “Once they know we’re gone, they’ll kill her.”

“I’ve got no interest in leaving my sister up there either,” Larry said. He turned back to them when he said it, so he was facing away from the woods when the shadowed slope gave birth to something bright and white. A man dressed in white camouflage like a 10th Mountain Division soldier spun around a tree not twenty feet from them and lifted his rifle.

Mark saw it all with strange clarity, a neat, clean line: Larry, the lip of the gulch, a downed tree, a shooter. The tableau was stamped into his memory instantly and forever.

The shot he fired, though, he would never remember.

He wasn’t aware of it until the man dropped, shooting as he fell, peppering a line of bullets into the sky, ripping apart pine boughs that fell with a peaceful whisper. Larry and Lynn both hit the ground, but Mark just stood there, the.38 still extended.

“Son of a bitch!” Larry scrambled up and stared at Mark. “You put him down?”

“Yes.”

“Lord, son, you must’ve fired faster than you saw him. Who taught you that?”

Mark looked at the gun as it if were unfamiliar. He had never been the best shot. Not the worst, but certainly not the best. Both of his uncles had been better. So had his wife.

“I guess it was Ronny,” he said.

Before his uncle could answer, they were interrupted by the crackle of a radio and a voice. It was coming from the dead man’s belt, but his body muffled the words.

Mark said, “Cover me, will you? I want to get a look at him.”

Larry snapped at him to stay down, but Mark climbed over the lip of the gulch. He glanced back once and saw Larry standing waist-deep in the gulch, braced against the earth, panning the gloaming forest with the scope.

“You see the other one?” Mark asked.

“No, but hurry up.”

Mark crawled to the dead man and saw a face he didn’t know. Not Garland Webb. That was a shame. Lord, was that a shame. If it had been Garland Webb, he could have gone on back down the gulch and out to the truck and driven out of here.

No, you couldn’t.

The voice made Mark jerk, because for an instant it seemed to come from the dead man himself. Just a trick of the mind. Adrenaline was cooking in Mark’s veins now, and if he wasn’t careful it would overrun him. You had to stay cool under fire, and he was doing anything but that. Not only his focus was slipping; his whole damn mind seemed to be.

He took the dead man’s rifle, then rolled him over. As he did so, he heard the voice again.

You’ll die here. All of you.

Again Mark jerked back.

“What the hell’s the matter?” Larry whispered behind him.

Mark didn’t know how to answer. Adrenaline, that was all. You felt crazy things in crazy moments, and this moment was about as crazy as they got.

He grabbed the dead man’s radio in a hurry, tugged it free, and then crawled back to the gulch with the radio and the rifle, heading right toward Larry, who was still scouring the trees through his scope, finger on the trigger. He wasn’t all the way back when the radio came to life in his hand, and this time he could hear it clearly:

“We have a runner! The second woman is out!”

Lynn jumped to her feet. “Sabrina!” she called. More of a shout than Mark would have liked, but even as she said it, she moved sideways and deeper into the gulch, wisely anticipating that she’d risked giving up their position. No shots came, but an answer did, a woman’s voice shouting without Lynn’s restraint. “Lynn! Lynn, where are you!”

Mark turned and started to tell Lynn not to answer, that shouts would get them killed, but Larry’s shot silenced them all. Lynn took a stumbling step back, Mark stopped crawling, and Sabrina Baldwin’s shouts ended. For a few seconds, the forest was absolutely still.

Then Larry lowered the rifle.

“Had to take it. She wasn’t even into the trees yet, and he’d stopped to fire. With that AR spitting bullets, he was going to kill her fast.”

Mark stared up at the pink-tinted peak where Larry had fired, and though he couldn’t see anything, he could hear something now. Someone was crashing clumsily through the woods. He scrambled to the base of a tree and lifted his revolver, but Larry didn’t move at all, just stood with the rifle lowered and waited on whoever was running out of the daylight and into the darkness.

A minute later, they saw her-a woman, slipping and stumbling down the slope, falling every few feet but bouncing up so fast it all seemed part of the plan.

“Sabrina!” Lynn climbed out of the gulch and ran toward the other woman and Mark made no move to stop her. Instead, he looked at his uncle.

“We’ve got two. Lynn said there were three men.”

“That’s all that have been shooting, at least. I’ve found four people with the scope since we got here. Two are here, and two are dead.”

Lynn Deschaine and Sabrina Baldwin met halfway up the slope. Sabrina fell into Lynn’s arms, and Lynn tugged her down immediately, pulling her to the ground and guiding her behind a fallen tree. Mark watched them and wondered what horrors they had shared and how they’d managed to get loose in a place like this.

“Nice shooting, Uncle,” he said.

“Shit, son, that was target practice. You were the one who went Wild Bill Hickok.”

It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. The bullet had punched through the other man’s heart before Mark knew what had happened.

For some reason, that bothered him.

He wiped sweat from his face and said, “Lynn? Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Lynn got to her feet and helped Sabrina Baldwin to hers and they came down the side of the mountain together, arm in arm, as if neither of them wanted to risk letting go again.

“You okay?” Mark asked the new woman. Sabrina Baldwin was shaking, but she nodded.

“We need to get out of here,” Mark said. “Is there anyone left to stop us?”

“I don’t think so,” Sabrina said. “Not if we hurry. He’ll be down for a while longer.”

“Who will be?”

“One of the men who works for Eli. Garland Webb.”

“Garland Webb,” Mark echoed. His voice had the same flat crack as Larry’s killing shot.

She looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re him,” she said. “You’re the one. Novak.”

“Yes.”

“Violet…I think she’s your mother? Violet shot him with a dart.”

Lynn said, “What? She did?” and she seemed stunned when Sabrina Baldwin nodded.

“She saved me,” Sabrina said.

“Where are all the ATV riders?” Larry asked. “We saw plenty of tracks coming in.”

“I don’t know. There was a large group this morning, but they left. If they come back, though…”

Lynn said, “She’s right-we need to get out of here fast. There are enough of them that we’ll be outnumbered, badly.”

Sabrina said, “My husband…do you know anything?”

“He was alive,” Mark said. “And I gave him his chance to play it the way he wanted. He didn’t want to risk doing anything that might threaten you.”

He thought about that and then looked at the radio in his hand and said, “You know, I just might be able to get a report on Jay.”

He put the dead man’s radio to his lips. Keyed the mike and heard static.

“Hello, gentlemen,” he said. His heart thundered but his voice was steady. “This is Markus Novak, reporting in from Wardenclyffe. I’ve come to see Garland Webb. We are long overdue.”

67

This is Markus Novak, reporting in from Wardenclyffe. I’ve come to see Garland Webb. We are long overdue.”

At the top of the tower, hot stick in hand, Jay heard Novak’s voice and thought: He made it. The crazy bastard actually made it to them.

Then he thought: He’d better not ruin it.

He reached for the radio and spoke before anyone else had responded.

“Novak, this is Jay Baldwin, where is my wife, have you seen my wife?”

Down below, Eli Pate screamed at Jay to shut up, but Novak’s voice returned on the radio immediately.

“Jay, she is safe and well. Repeat, she is safe and well.”

Jay sagged back against the transmission tower. He was not aware of the pulsing, swarming current, his own fatigue, the heights, or even his own tears.

She is safe and well.

Eli Pate’s voice came over the radio next. Calm, no trace of the shouting he’d done down below. “Mr. Novak. What a surprise. It will be good to meet you one of these days, but I’m going to suggest you leave the property immediately. It will not end well for you there. That is a promise.”

A long pause, then Novak: “I’m going to assume I’m hearing from the great Eli Pate himself?”

“The same,” Pate said. “You are no doubt proud of your achievements right now. Hold on to that feeling for as many minutes as you can. I assure you, they won’t be plentiful.”

Safe and well. Sabrina was safe and well. Jay looked at the radio as if he wanted to embrace it, and then he heard Pate come back with an addendum.

“All listening must understand that this changes nothing. The plan is in motion. Wardenclyffe has not been compromised. I am on scene right now, and we are nine minutes to shutdown.”

He had to be talking about the train. Jay had nine minutes to get off the tower before it came down and brought a half a million volts with it.

“Do you hear that, Novak?” Pate said over the radio. “Please don’t believe that you are a concern to me.”

As Pate talked, he walked. Up from the trees and onto the tracks, standing between the strung cables that would be invisible to the engineer until too late. Novak had stopped responding, and all of Pate’s attention was on this place, wherever it was.

None of it was on Jay.

Safe and well. Repeat, she is safe and well.

Jay looked down at Pate and thought: You have no more leverage, asshole. You have no more power.

Except for the gun. By the time Jay came down, that gun would matter. And if he didn’t come down to face the gun, he’d be perched up here when the train roared through. One way or another, he was coming down soon, and he’d rather take his chances with the pistol than the five hundred thousand volts. One was likely to kill him; the other was certain to.

It was then, watching Pate stand with the gun in his left hand and the radio in his right, demanding a response from Novak that did not come, that Jay allowed himself, for the first time, to look up at those killing lines overhead.

He was fifteen feet away from turning his cold steel cable into a live wire.

And Eli Pate, a hundred feet below, was standing on metal train tracks.

68

The GPS said that Janell was seven minutes out.

It seemed impossible that so much could go so wrong in seven minutes, but it was happening.

“This is Markus Novak, reporting in from Wardenclyffe.”

Hate for him rose through her like a fever, and her hands were so tight on the wheel that her wrists ached. She looked at the radio but did not reach for it. Eli was still in command, and she was only seven minutes away.

She’d join him, at least. No matter what else happened today, they would escape together. The way it had always been. Together, they would regroup and adjust. Together, they would set it all right.

69

The hot stick could be telescoped to ten feet. The flash zone, depending on conditions, could reach beyond that in the world of a half a million volts.

But it shouldn’t. Not today. The air was dry and the sun had baked it all afternoon. There was no rain or snow, no high humidity, none of the things that should extend that flash zone beyond ten feet. With the hot stick, Jay should be able to extend that cable high enough to make it live and kill Eli Pate in a literal flash.

What he had to figure out first was how to do it without killing himself too. The Faraday suit was not enough protection, not when he was standing on a steel pole. In an energized bucket or helicopter, he could do it, but not reaching out from the steel tower. Jay would turn into Tim’s corpse in a blink. Worse than Tim’s corpse, actually. With this voltage, he’d vaporize. There’d be nothing left of him but boots and smoke.

Just climb down. Take your chances with the gun.

But the memory of Sabrina in chains was back with him, and the image was wider now. It included the blinking lights Jay had watched from bed with his wife, that first warning that the madness of Eli Pate was coming his way; it included the phone in Pate’s hand as he sat in Jay’s kitchen, sipping his coffee and holding Jay’s world under his thumb.

I’m not a kind man, he had said.

No. He was not. And he’d held too much power over Jay for too long, and held it through the force of fear. What was left to fear now was no longer up to Pate. It was up to Jay.

Jay looked down, confirmed that Pate was still in the same position, on the tracks and between the cables, no more than a foot from the cable Jay currently had wrapped around the head of his hot stick, and then he took a few steps higher, edging toward the flash zone.

All it would take was contact. That was just how damn powerful the current up here was; the briefest touch between the world above and the world below would create an epic collision, sending a blast of current strong enough to power a city down that cable in the blink of an eye. Eli Pate had not been wrong about one thing: all that the electricity on these lines wanted to do was return to the earth.

To make it happen, Jay was going to have to let go of the tower completely. He’d need his left hand to free enough slack in the cable to throw the hot stick, and his right hand to toss it. He’d need to be strong with it too, because if he threw it short and the cable swung back into the tower…

Well, if that happened, at least he wouldn’t know it. Speed was the only blessing in a death on the high lines. You wouldn’t have time to recognize the mistake that killed you.

He held his hot stick in his right hand. Then, six months after he’d frozen seventy feet in the air and known that his climbing days were done, Jay Baldwin removed his left hand from the tower and stood hands-free one hundred and five feet above the ground.

You’re going to have to hurry, because if he sees you, he’ll understand. And you’re going to have to be strong. You’ll have to get the legs into it.

He’d have to, in short, make an upward lunge out and away from a tower that had already tried to buck him off like an angry horse and manage not to fall off it.

Just climb down.

No. No, that was not an option. Sabrina had seen to that. She had gotten away somehow, and that was all that had ever mattered. He thought of Novak’s voice on the radio and remembered the look in his eyes back when he could have removed all hope from Jay and chose not to. He’d given Jay time, and Sabrina had escaped on her own.

Eli Pate was not allowed to do the same.

Jay balanced the hot stick in his right hand like a javelin and pulled up slack cable with his left. He counted its length as he reeled it up-two feet, four, six, eight, ten. Ten would do it.

The train whistle rose loud and shrill from the east, and Jay glanced toward it and then down at Pate. Pate did just the same, looking first east, then up at Jay, as if remembering, finally, that he was still up there, the bird on a wire.

When he saw the way Jay was standing, he seemed to understand immediately. Eli must have realized that he’d committed the cardinal sin of high-voltage work: he’d allowed his mind to go elsewhere.

As Eli Pate tried to run off the tracks, he backed into one of his own cables, stumbled, and fell. Jay looked away and pivoted his body to the right, winding up for the toss. The hot stick’s awkward length nearly kept the momentum going, though, almost spun him right off the tower, but old instincts saved him, and he slid his foot as he turned, muscle memory protecting his balance up on the high steel. He reversed the turn then, whirling back to the left, and released the hot stick and its trailing cable. The cable rustled over his Faraday suit, and he thought, Dead, you are dead now, but then the cable pulled free, away from him and the tower as it followed the hot stick toward the power lines.

It never reached them. The throw was short by two feet.

That was still enough.

The electricity-filled air around the lines, crackling with corona discharge, smelled the first, faint chance to return to the earth, and leaped at it. A brilliant cobalt-blue arc flash ripped through the air, found the stainless-steel cable, and rode it home.

Jay heard the explosion below but never saw it. It was over that fast. The hot stick was falling then, out of the flash zone, already turned back into a dead tool carrying a dead line.

He wrapped both hands around the steel tower and looked down at the place where Eli Pate had last stood.

He couldn’t see anything but smoke.

70

When the last radio exchange was finished, Mark stood in the cold breeze and looked up through the dark trees to the place where the faintest traces of crimson light lingered at the summit. Then he turned back to Lynn.

“You know you’ve got to get her out of here,” he said. “That’s the first thing. Everything else is secondary. She’s innocent. You’ve got to get her to help.”

Lynn nodded but didn’t speak. She was staring at Mark with soft eyes. This was not the feral woman who’d tried to kill him in the gulch but the one whose face had hovered so close to his in the dark motel room in what seemed like another lifetime.

“Don’t go up there,” she said. “We’ll call the police. They’ll handle him.”

“When he wakes up,” Mark said, “I want mine to be the first face he sees.”

Lynn started to speak, stopped, and finally settled on “Don’t take chances that you don’t need to.”

“Right.”

“There will be other times to get him. Other places. Better places.”

Mark nodded. Lynn tugged Sabrina forward, and they were walking down the slope in the twilight when Mark and his uncle began to climb toward the last patch of daylight on a mountain summit drowning in darkness.

The sun was completely gone when they reached the top. They watched the headlights of the stolen truck Lynn was driving crawl over the rock-riddled path toward the road, toward safety.

Mark had no flashlight, but he’d found the body of the man Larry had shot and taken his rifle, an AR-15 with a flashlight mounted on the barrel. Mark panned the area inside the fence with light before he entered. He saw no movement. The gate stood ajar, and beyond it were a cabin and an outhouse and a bizarre collection of utility poles. Shadows everywhere. Everything still and silent.

“Stay here and cover me,” he said, and he took Larry’s silence as assent and stepped through the fence.

“Garland,” he called. “Where are you? I’ve come a long way. It’s time to talk.”

Silence.

He advanced through the strange compound and was closing on the cabin when a voice came from behind him.

“Markus.”

He whipped around, rifle elevated, finger on the trigger, and saw that he was aiming the gun at his mother.

She sat on the ground with her back against the fence, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt that was too large for her, making her look small inside of it. There was blood on her hand, and two streaks of it on her face, one beneath each eye, like war paint. Her eyes were wet and shimmering as she squinted into the glare.

Mark said, “Where is Garland Webb?”

“Inside. Unconscious.”

“Take me to him.”

“Markus…”

“Take me to him.”

She sighed. “He’s at the bottom of the steps.”

Mark turned from her and advanced toward the cabin, and there he saw Garland Webb collapsed at the base of the wooden stairs. Webb’s eyes were only partially closed, but he didn’t react to the light. He didn’t move at all.

Just shoot him, Mark thought, just put a line of bullets in him from head to toe, and then get the hell out of here.

But…no. It couldn’t go like that. Not without Webb being awake and understanding who had come for him.

And why.

Mark knelt and removed the paracord that was still in his back pocket, the remnants of his work on Salvador Cantu, and used it to tie Garland Webb’s hands around the bottom banister. Before he was done he heard footsteps and his uncle said, “Just me, stand down.”

Mark returned to his work securing Webb. Satisfied, he picked up the rifle and stepped back. He was still looking at Webb when he heard Larry whisper, “Good Lord, Violet, what happened to you?”

Mark turned and saw Larry kneeling beside her.

“Markus, she’s bleeding out.”

Only when Mark went closer did he see the dark wound in his mother’s stomach. She’d covered it with her hands before, but now Larry had pulled them aside and the damage was evident. Larry unbuttoned his shirt and folded it and pressed it gently to her belly, murmuring reassuringly. Her eyes were fixed on Mark.

“Markus,” she said, her voice filled with both wonder and sorrow. “Look at you.”

Mark couldn’t find any words.

She said, “I’m so sorry about Lauren. I didn’t know.” Her voice quavered and tears shone in her eyes. “They never told me. I didn’t know.”

“Violet, stop talking,” Larry said. “You’re going to need to be still.”

The blood had already soaked through his shirt. She tried to push him aside.

“I need to speak to my son.”

Larry rocked back on his heels and looked down at his bloody hands, then up at Mark. His eyes said all Mark needed to know about the wound.

“I’m so sorry,” his mother said. “I know she was lovely. In the-”

“Stop.”

“-letters she was always so kind, so generous, and-”

Mark said “Stop” again before her words registered. Then: “What did you just say? In what letters?”

“I wrote to her. I knew you wouldn’t answer. But there were things I needed to tell her. Things you wouldn’t be willing to hear.”

Mark knelt beside her, close enough that she reached for him but not quite close enough that she could make contact.

“She wrote the words rise the dark in a notebook. Did you tell her that?”

“Of course. I needed to warn you that the darkness was coming. Eli wouldn’t have allowed it, but…you’re my son. I had to warn my son. And tell her the things you don’t know. About your gifts.”

“Oh Lord…”

“You must have your father’s gifts, because they were in the blood, passed from generation to generation. That’s why I tried to encourage your contact with the spiritual world, took you to places like Medicine Wheel, because I knew-”

“Stop, please.”

“-that you had rare gifts. I didn’t know how to call them forward, what it would take. He wouldn’t explain that…he didn’t like to talk about it. He could sense death coming, though, he could and his father could and his grandfather and grandfathers even beyond him. I know that smoke is part of it. And voices. There will be smoke and there will be voices. Premonitions. That’s in you, so I hope you can-”

“Stop!”

Larry lifted a warning hand. “For God’s sake, son, she’s dying! She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

Her eyes flicked to Larry and back to Mark. “I do,” she said. “I know this. It is one of the few things I know for sure. I’ve always struggled with the truth.”

Mark gave a harsh bark of a laugh at that.

“Markus,” she said, “the things I did, things I told people, they weren’t all lies. You need to-” She choked and fresh blood poured from her stomach. Larry swore and reapplied pressure. She closed her hands over his. “It wasn’t all a lie. You’re special. Once I had you, I had traces of it. Glimpses. But not like what’s in you.”

“Rest,” Larry said. “Please, just rest.” His voice was ragged.

She ignored him, straining to speak, blood in her mouth now. “I had to write to Lauren because I wanted you to know…about your father. You’d fled from me before I was willing to share it. His name was Wagner. Isaac Wagner. He was from Maine. A town called Camden.”

She was struggling so hard to get the words out that Mark felt obligated to respond, even if this was just more of her madness.

“Camden,” he said. “Okay. Thank you.”

She seemed pleased to hear him say it, but when she tried to speak again, no words came. Just blood. Her eyes dulled, and when Larry gripped her shoulder she showed no reaction. She was still looking at Mark but couldn’t seem to see him.

He didn’t intend to reach for her. It was like the shot he’d made down in the gulch, an involuntary action, recognized only after it was done. But when he closed his hand around hers, her eyes brightened.

“I love you,” she whispered. “Always. You were the reason for all of it. I had to find ways to provide for you.”

There were so many terrible memories associated with his mother, but the terrible memory that came for him then wasn’t one of her. It was of Lauren, his last moments with her, his last words. Don’t embarrass me with this shit.

Mark said, “I love you too.”

Did you hear that, Lauren? You deserved those words. Deserved so much more than them, deserved so much more than me. You were the light. The only one I had. I’m sorry. But I’m learning. I will be a better man because of you. I promise.

When he squeezed his mother’s hand, she squeezed back, but her eyes were dull again.

Larry said, “Come back, Violet, come back.”

She wasn’t coming back. Mark felt her grip slacken, and he was about to withdraw his hand when she spoke.

“Don’t kill him,” she said.

He stared into her eyes, which looked absolutely lifeless. “I have to.”

“No, you don’t. Lauren doesn’t need that. And she doesn’t want that.”

“You have no idea what she wants,” Mark said.

“What the hell are you saying?” Larry asked.

“She doesn’t know. Nobody can,” Mark said to his uncle.

“Doesn’t know what?”

“You heard her. Telling me that Lauren wouldn’t want me to kill him.”

His uncle reached out and grabbed his shoulder and shook him. When he did it, Mark’s hand was pulled away from his mother’s, and there was a fragile static jolt and then stillness. Mark blinked and looked at her face-dead; she was unquestionably dead.

“She’s gone,” Larry said. “She’s been gone. What in the hell is the matter with you?”

Mark sat back on his heels. She was gone. He wiped at his eyes again, as if to clear something from them, and then turned to Garland Webb. He was motionless at the base of the steps.

Mark got slowly to his feet. He’d never felt less steady. Well, in Siesta Key, maybe. After the sheriff’s deputy gave him the news. Maybe then.

He said, “You need to get out of here, Larry.”

“I’m taking her.”

“No. She’ll slow you down.”

Larry’s voice was firm. “I’m not leaving her in this place. I’ll set her somewhere clean. Not here.”

Mark didn’t argue. Didn’t speak at all, in fact, while Larry gathered his mother’s body gently into his arms and stood. She looked so small.

“She’s my sister, son,” Larry said. “I’ve not left her behind yet.”

His uncle left without another word, carrying her body through the high fence and out to the world beyond. Then it was just Mark and Garland Webb.

71

Got him. The realization filled him with wonder rather than triumph. Pate had seemed untouchable since that first sighting in Jay’s house, his implacable calm evidence of something he’d understood from the start-he would survive. He would win.

The train whistle shrilled, low and mournful, and Jay looked east and saw the oncoming lights and then looked south to the silhouette of his truck, to the trees where Pate had anchored all the cables for the trap.

Jay wouldn’t have enough time to detach them from the towers. No chance. But he also didn’t need to. Not anymore, not with Pate and the gun gone. If Jay could cut the cables at their anchor point and haul them across the tracks and over to the north side, he could just watch the train roar by, the engineer oblivious to the near disaster.

There was enough time left for that. The train was coming fast, but Jay could climb down faster. The fear was gone now and the old faith was back. He knew the steel better than most men knew their front steps.

Sabrina was safe, Jay was alone, and Eli Pate was not going to win any part of this day.

72

Mark found an ancient kerosene lamp in the cabin that cast a faint, flickering circle of light where he sat waiting for Garland Webb to regain consciousness. Inside the circle, it felt as if the world had condensed-or collapsed-and this place was all there was to it. The massive western sky, blanketed with stars, hung so close it seemed to be within reach, but the mountains had vanished in the blackness and all that remained was the circle of lantern light that contained Markus Novak and Garland Webb.

There was nothing else.

And yet they were not alone.

Lauren was between them. Mark understood that. She was somewhere in that light between him and this other man, and his always-receding memories of her felt closer, fresher, sharper.

More painful.

His mother’s last words, the imagined words, the impossible words, would also not recede.

Lauren doesn’t need that. And she doesn’t want that.

He knew that it was true. Lauren had seen many horrors and studied countless more, yet her opposition to capital punishment had never wavered. Not for a second.

But still he could not leave.

He had to know how it had come to pass. How his wife and his mother, two people who had never met and who were separated by thousands of miles and many years, had come to die at the same man’s hand.

Mark wished he could believe in coincidence. He had never liked that notion before, but now he wanted to wrap it around himself to keep the other possibilities at bay.

He couldn’t, though. Not here in the mountains of his youth.

Garland Webb stirred a little and moaned. He was slumped over, held partially upright by the post Mark had tied him to, and Mark reached out and jabbed his belly with the muzzle of the rifle. Webb grunted and his eyes fluttered open. He looked directly at Mark, and then closed his eyes again. This happened several times before he registered Mark, and then he tried to rise. The knots caught him.

Mark said, “You know who I am?”

He was still foggy with the drugs, but he shook his head.

“Think about it,” Mark said.

Garland Webb blinked at him, wet his lips, then stared at the ground as comprehension returned. Mark could see a change in his face.

“Novak.” He slurred the name.

“Good. We were going to wait until you had it. I’m glad you’re finally there.”

Webb looked away from Mark, scanning in other directions.

“There’s nobody else,” Mark said. “You are alone.”

When Webb’s attention returned to Mark, there was hate in his eyes, and Mark was pleased by that.

“You told your cell mate that you murdered my wife. Bragged about it.” Mark had a tremor near his left eye, but his hand was steady on the rifle. “What we need to determine is whether you told that man the truth.”

Garland Webb smiled.

Mark’s hand moved toward the trigger of the AR-15 almost involuntarily. He considered things for a moment, then set the rifle aside entirely and took the revolver from his jacket pocket.

“This is a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. I think you’re familiar with them.”

Webb didn’t say anything. He kept smiling.

“Why don’t you tell me what you told the other man, Garland.”

Webb did not slur when he said, “Go ahead and use the gun.”

Mark shook his head. “I don’t intend to use the gun. I would like you to talk.”

“You think that will help you? Why? How would it help you?”

“I need to know if you killed her.”

“Yes.”

Holding off on the kill shot was incredibly hard. Mark gripped the.38 so tightly his hand ached.

“You’ve been told the truth all along,” Webb said. “You’re just missing one thing. Why she wanted to go to Cassadaga. You don’t understand that, do you?”

Mark cocked his head. The reason had been clear. Dixie Witte was the reason. The case had been bound for Mark’s desk when Lauren intercepted it and told Jeff London she’d take it because Mark wouldn’t believe the psychic was credible.

“Why was she in Cassadaga?”

“Looking for your family.”

Mark stared at him for a few seconds and then shook his head. “No. She wasn’t, and she wouldn’t have been. Try again.”

“She was,” Webb said simply. “You can deny it if you’d like, but I’ve never feared truth. I embrace it.”

“Not in the courtroom.”

“The courtroom is not my truth.”

“Lauren knew nothing about my family other than that I wanted no part of them,” Mark said. “And she sure as hell wouldn’t have consulted a psychic to find them.”

“Correct. She didn’t want a psychic. She wanted a town.”

Mark felt cold, remembering that house in Cassadaga, the fevered sickness of the place, its dark allure.

“Why would she want a town?”

“Because your mother had written her a letter about it.” Webb was enjoying himself now. Enjoying Mark’s face, whatever reactions he was seeing there. “Your mother is the reason any of us went to Cassadaga.” His laugh ended in a cough. “Maybe that’s not right. Maybe your father is the reason. He convinced her it was a special place. She convinced Eli. It suited him. He liked the energy there. For a while, that was going to be Wardenclyffe. Until your wife came, with the letter from your mother.”

“She came for a case. I know that. I was part of it.”

But he could see the possibility of truth here. A wider truth than what he’d known before. Fuller, like a sunrise revealing a world that was different than the one you’d imagined in the night.

Garland Webb spoke with mocking patience, as if talking to a dullard. “That case was the excuse. She really had questions about your family. Didn’t you wonder why she stayed in town after she was done with Dixie Witte?”

Everyone had wondered. The car being on Kicklighter Road never made sense. Unless she had a second goal in town. A secret goal.

“Are you ready to laugh?” Garland Webb said. “Here’s the best joke you’ll ever hear, Novak. Your mother told your wife that when the dark rose, you two should go to Cassadaga for protection. I took that letter. It was the only thing I took. Feel better now? All the answers-do they help?”

His laughter was rich and delighted. Mark slapped the side of his face with the gun barrel. As soon as he’d done it, he felt rage thundering in his blood and he wanted to swing again and again, until Webb’s face was nothing but a memory, the remains nothing but blood and bone fragments. He stilled himself with an effort. Webb grinned, forcing blood from his lacerated lips.

“It’s about trust. You and your wife kept so many secrets from each other.” He made a tsking sound. The blood bubbled on his lips when he did it. “No trust.”

Lauren had knocked on the wrong door, and she had given her name. Mark’s name. The one that she’d taken as her own, along with all that came with it. She had been killed for this. Because she had joined her name with his, and his past had infected her like a cancer.

Mark shook his head. “No. That is not why she died. That is not enough.”

“But it’s true.”

“Why kill her?” Mark said.

Webb’s indifference vanished and his face turned graveyard serious, almost innocent.

“Eli told me to.”

Garland had done what he’d been told. How would that play in court? What deals would he be offered for testimony about Pate?

“If you’re going to kill me,” Garland Webb said, “let’s move it along. I don’t fear it. I welcome it. Death for a cause isn’t death at all.”

“You’ll be a martyr, that’s what you think?”

“I’ll have died for a purpose. Not like your wife.”

Mark grazed the trigger. He could feel his heartbeat in his fingertip where it touched the metal. A pulse like thunder, telling him to just end it. Lauren’s memory urged him otherwise.

Evidence. Find the evidence that shows the truth. A bad detective builds a case, his wife would say, a good one finds the truth.

“How did you get her out of the car?” he said.

Webb seemed to consider not answering or perhaps telling a lie, but in the end he smiled again and said, “I called for help. I waved at her and shouted for help. She stopped right away. Got out of the car. Didn’t even close the door. And I pointed into the woods and I said, ‘She’s drowning.’ That’s all I said, just those two words. I just needed to get her away from the road, but she ran away from it.”

Lauren had stopped her car because of either trust or threat, the police had surmised, detectives torn between opposite theories. For the first time, Mark had heard an explanation that fit Lauren’s character: she had been trying to help.

His mouth was dry and his head ached. He could picture the pearl-white Infiniti on the side of the road, door standing open. Could picture the way Lauren would have run. Without hesitation, without questioning.

She’s drowning.

Yes, she would have run fast. She would have run right down that dark path.

His hands were shaking. Webb saw it and his smiled widened.

“Look at you,” he said. “Just look at you.”

Shoot him, Mark thought. Kneecaps first, then testicles. Then find a knife and cut the flesh from him in strips. Skin him alive and leave him for the wolves.

He worked saliva back into his mouth and said, “I will have to prove this, you understand? I don’t think this confession will hold up in court. Not under your current circumstances. I suspect a judge would consider this unfair duress.”

“You can’t prove it,” Webb said. “So you’ll have to use that gun.”

Mark shook his head. “Not an option.”

“You are a very weak man.”

“Maybe.”

“Weaker than your wife.”

“Absolutely. I always knew that.”

Webb laughed again. His face looked bright in the lantern light. The sound of his laugh traveled through Mark’s nerves like an electric charge. You’re making the wrong choice, he thought. It’s like you told Jeff-who’s to say what she thought in the last seconds of her life? Who’s to know that her heart didn’t change then?

“You don’t get to keep taking things from her,” Mark said. “Lauren was so much more than I deserved. And she wanted to keep me clean. She died trying to do that.” His voice had the sound of a wood rasp. “You don’t get to take that from her. This would be an execution, and she did not believe in execution. She believed in hope. Lived for it. You live for fear. You don’t get to beat her. You don’t get to win.”

“I’ve already won.”

“I don’t think so. You’re going to prison. And who knows, maybe Innocence Incorporated will take your case. But I’ll be working on the other side of it. You’re going to stay in prison this time, Garland. God help me, I will see to that.”

“She would have been ashamed of you. You’re nothing like her. She had the kind of fight I enjoy. I wish I’d had more time with her. It just wasn’t the right day for that. But when she saw the gun, her eyes, oh, they were wonderful.”

Mark’s finger slipped back onto the trigger. The gun shook in his hand.

“Most times, I see fear,” Garland Webb said. “But with your wife? She was angry. When she understood what was about to happen? She wasn’t afraid of me, she was angry with me, and she looked beautiful. You know the look I’m talking about. The two of you would have had fights, arguments. Then you made up, I’m sure. I bet that was fun. How could it not have been with her?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“You wanted talk! So I’m talking. And, yes, you know the look I’m describing. How the anger can actually be sexy. She radiated sex in that last moment.”

“Shut the-”

“No, it’s important for you to know the way she looked at the end! I want to complete the picture for you. All those hours you must have imagined it! What you’re probably missing is the anger, and the sex. You imagined fear, imagined terror, but you were wrong. Trust me, after she saw the gun, she was something beyond gorgeous. I had to shoot her in a hurry, because time was an issue. I think she felt my hands on her, though. Yes, I would say the last thing she ever felt was my hands on-”

The bullet split the center of his forehead. His eyes went wide and his jaw slackened and his tongue fell forward a half a second before his head did. Bright blood streamed from his skull.

Mark looked at his own hand and back at Webb, and for a moment he was truly and deeply confused. Then he heard footsteps and turned to see his uncle.

Larry walked up beside him and came to a stop. He was crying without making a sound. He looked at Webb and spit on him, and then opened the cylinder of the revolver in his hand, shook the used cartridge out, and offered it to Mark.

“I couldn’t let you listen to any more of that,” Larry said hoarsely. “I know what you were trying to do, and it was the right thing. But I couldn’t let it go on.”

Mark turned the bullet casing over in his fingers and watched Garland Webb’s blood soak into the earth.

Larry said, “I didn’t know your wife, Markus. I wish I had. But what you said, about how she died trying to keep you clean? I believe that. It’s far too late in this life for me to ever get clean, but I can still help her with you. I just did.”

Mark got slowly to his feet. He stepped over to Garland Webb’s body and used the toe of his boot to roll the dead man’s head to the side. The lifeless, empty eyes stared back. Mark spent a long time looking into them. Memorizing them. He knew that he would need the memory for many days to come.

For the rest of his life.

“She wouldn’t have wanted it,” he said. “But it should have been me who did it. It had to be me.”

“Nothing has to be,” Larry said.

“She wouldn’t have wanted it,” Mark said again.

“I’m sure I would’ve loved your wife. But I don’t think I would’ve agreed with her on some of the finer points.” Larry studied Garland Webb’s corpse. “There may come a day, I suppose, when we’ll know. If there’s a God, Markus, I’ll be curious what he thinks of this one.”

Mark watched Garland Webb bleed out and half of him wished he’d fired the shot and another half wished it hadn’t been fired at all. When he turned from the corpse and looked away from the circle of light, he was aware of the vastness of the night as if it were a new player in the scene. A cold wind was blowing out of the north, rustling the pines below them. Far off down the mountain, the blackness was broken by flashers.

Police en route.

“They’re coming,” Mark said.

“Yes.”

Mark knelt and untied Garland Webb’s hands, then slid the AR-15 over with his foot until the rifle and the body rested together. Larry watched in silence, understanding.

“Hell of a defensive shot I made,” Larry said.

“You saved me with it,” Mark said. “There’s no lie in that.”

Mark lingered with Webb’s corpse for a moment, looking into those eyes. Then he turned away.

“Where is Mom?”

“She has the view.” Larry pointed up the slope, to the high rocks above the plateau. It couldn’t have been an easy climb.

“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I forced things in that direction, just by coming here.”

Larry shook his head. “I’d rather have her there than here. That’s the truth. And I don’t think she was leaving this place on her own.”

They walked away together, through the high fence and down the rocky slope toward the distant flashing lights below.

73

The radio had been silent for the last five minutes of the drive, but when Janell pulled onto the narrow lane that ran parallel to the railroad tracks and the power lines she saw a truck parked off the road, in the trees, and knew that it had to be him.

The relief she felt then made her eyes sting, and she blinked back the approaching tears. He had no use for tears, and after so long a wait, she didn’t want to disappoint him when she finally arrived.

A train whistle shrilled to the east, and she realized, with a delirious joy, that she would be with him for the moment. When it all began, when the darkness rose, they would be together.

Just as it had always been planned and promised, in a place years and an ocean away from this spot in the mountains.

She drove as far as she could on the road and then left it, following the tracks in the grass that led to the truck, bouncing over the uneven terrain. The headlights captured a glint above the train tracks, and she braked hard and stared.

The cables were in place. Novak hadn’t disrupted anything.

She slammed the gearshift into park, opened the door, and took off running toward the truck. Her eyes were focused on the truck and the tracks, and she never saw the thing that tripped her. One minute she was running, the next she was down, landing hard, a jarring impact that stole her breath. She rolled over and looked back to see what had caught her feet.

It took her a few seconds to understand that the twisted, blackened thing in the grass had once been human.

“No,” she said, her voice clear and reasonable. It was not him. It absolutely could not be him. It was the climber, Jay, the last recruit, the one who’d be blamed for so much in short order, the man whose name the world would learn. The trusted worker who’d killed his wife and then turned on his country.

“Eli?” She sat up and looked into the darkness as she called for him. When he answered, all would be well.

It was silent until the mournful train whistle sounded again. The approaching train made the ground tremble.

She knew she should look at the terrible corpse again, look closely, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn.

Not him. No, no, no, it is not him.

The voice came from the outer dark north of the train tracks.

“He took my wife.”

She looked in the direction of the sound, but she couldn’t see the man. He spoke again.

“He thought I couldn’t do anything about it. He was wrong.”

The lights of the oncoming train appeared, and in the increasing glow she could finally see the man. He was climbing down the tower.

She forced herself to look back at the body. At Eli.

The tears started then. Silently. She had not wept since she was a little girl.

Approach from the south, he’d said. You’ll see me. We’ll watch the train go through, and then we’ll leave…Together.

The climber reached the base of the tower and came on, walking awkwardly, stiff as a spaceman in his strange suit. He took clumsy, stumbling steps toward the tracks. It was impossible that a man such as this could have killed Eli.

The climber said, “If you want to run, I’d start now. I’m coming over to cut those cables down, and I’ve got a gun.”

The vibrations in the earth were stronger, the light from the train harsher. The moment almost at hand.

She got to her feet, stepped carefully around Eli’s body, and ran to the stolen Yukon. Opened the tailgate and pulled out the shotgun and racked a shell into the chamber. Then she walked back toward the train tracks, the shotgun braced against her body.

When the man who’d come off the tower stopped on the north side of the tracks, she knew that he’d been lying. He had no gun.

“If you want to run,” she said, “I’d start now.”

He hesitated. She saw him turn and look to the north, to the place where distance and darkness would hide him if he ran.

Then he said, “It’s been too long of a day for that,” and started forward again.

She fired from the waist. The first blast of double-aught rattled into the gravel and sparked off the metal rails and he tripped and wavered but did not drop, stumbling on over the tracks as she levered another shell into the chamber and fired again.

This time he fell. His heavy boots caught the lip of the second rail and he didn’t even get his hands out in front of him. He fell onto the embankment and slid down it, one gloved hand outstretched toward the grove of fir trees on the other side of the tracks. The cold wind rose with the sound of the train whistle, and the trees shifted gently and the earth shuddered beneath Janell’s feet.

She wanted to go to him. Wanted to feel his pulse. She had the thought, brief and bold as a flash of lightning, that he would have a very strong pulse and that she would need that in days to come.

There was no time, though. The train was too close and there were more important tasks for her. The one thing she could not grant them was Eli’s body.

It was crucial that they wonder and rush for explanations. Rush right past the truth.

74

Jay could taste blood in his mouth and he thought that there should be pain, but he couldn’t feel it. Could feel nothing but the tremble of the earth, constant now, like a drumroll of the gods. He felt that and waited for the pain and when he could not find it he thought, Of course, the Faraday suit.

Saved again. The suit had kept the current at bay. Not at bay, exactly, that wasn’t right. The suit had energized him. He had become the current, safe within it.

But it wasn’t electricity. It was a gun.

Maybe. It seemed there had been a gun. Still, the suit made sense to him. You had to trust it, that was the first lesson. Because if you had no faith that you were protected, if you could not believe that there was a shield between you and the ground, you would make a mistake. Your last moment was promised then.

The earth trembled and rolled. He thought that he had forgotten something, failed to achieve something, but for the life of him he could not recall what it was. He’d been going somewhere, reaching out, a plan in mind, a goal. He was not supposed to be down on the ground.

Sabrina.

For a horrified moment, he was overwhelmed by the fear that Sabrina was not safe. But then voices whispered, hers blended with another’s, a man’s voice.

She is safe and well.

Yes, she was. Jay knew this. It was all that had mattered, up there on the steel.

I climbed, he wanted to tell her, in the end I climbed, and he knew that couldn’t be the truth because in the end he’d found himself here on the ground, but it was hard to remember how that had come to pass, and the climb was vivid; the climb was victory.

He thought it strange to end in darkness. He had been sure that it would end with light, had always understood that, and for six long months he had even seen it-this life would end with a flash. Seen and gone, spectacular for the last moment.

He had known this and yet somehow he was down here on the ground and in the dark and in his own blood.

Then out of the trembling earth came a light. Brightening rapidly, like a dimmer switch being dialed all the way up, the thrum of the earth intensifying in proportion to the light. The sound was just like an oncoming train, but his mind called up a memory to make sense of what he could no longer parse in his pain-addled mind, a memory drawn from so many nights in so many storms, a knowledge of exactly what that combination of power and light meant: the system was back online.

The job was done.

The spectacular flash, when it came, was all that he had known it would be.

75

Mark was in custody when he learned the transmission lines had gone down. A tower carrying a half a million volts that fed the West was pulled down by a train that had then derailed and wiped out a second tower, and a third.

The first interrogations took place in a dimly lit police station. They were running on backup generators, and the overhead fluorescents were more than the generators could handle.

The detectives who asked the first questions about Eli Pate asked them from out of the shadows.

The investigators lost interest in Garland Webb’s death quickly. Garland Webb they understood-or thought they understood. What they cared about was Wardenclyffe. How it had come to exist, who had been there, and who might still be alive. Garland Webb was not in that mix.

Neither was Jay Baldwin.

They’d found his body in the train wreckage. When they told Mark that, all he could see was Baldwin’s anguished face in the darkness outside of his home, imploring Mark for one chance, for just a little more time.

And if you had the chance to go back and save her? If you could have made a deal to keep from losing her? What would you have been willing to do?

Mark had been answering questions for hours by then, and the detectives seemed to accept his exhaustion when he lowered his forehead to the tabletop and closed his eyes.

76

The body count was high, but it did not include Eli Pate.

In official statements, law enforcement suggested that his corpse had been destroyed in the carnage of the train derailment. That was not the news a terrified American public wanted to hear. They wanted the body.

They wanted proof.

Nearly a million people in the West were without power. What Pate had succeeded in-wiping out a transmission line that fed areas from Montana all the way to the Pacific and taking down another 107 poles once the lines were dead-was an unprecedented act of domestic terrorism, and the only good news was that the law enforcement agencies who wanted to talk to Mark were not the kind who cared about a stolen pickup truck or an assault on a thug like Salvador Cantu.

Or even the bullet in Garland Webb’s forehead.

They wore assorted badges-FBI, Secret Service, military intelligence-and their questions often overlapped, but the focus was the same: How had Pate achieved it, and who from his group remained?

Mark couldn’t help much, and neither could his uncle, but the questions kept coming, and the new faces kept appearing. The only information Mark gleaned from the process was a sense of why his mother had mattered so much to Pate. She was a recruiter, assembling the followers who bought into Pate’s philosophy that the world needed a wake-up call.

This was the story the investigators understood and the story that meshed with what Mark had seen and heard firsthand.

It did not mesh with the public narrative. Already reports were coming in saying the attack had been engineered by a right-wing militia based out of Texas, though on social media, ISIS proudly and repeatedly claimed credit and promised that it was just the first strike.

“It’s tense out there,” one of the FBI agents admitted to Mark. “We’ve got to prove this shit fast, and the explanation needs to be ironclad.”

Mark had been through two full days of interviews-a generous word; the more accurate one was interrogations-before he was given the chance to meet with Sabrina Baldwin. Even then the environment was bad, a conference room in the courthouse in Billings, and one that he was certain was bugged.

She didn’t get many words out before the tears came. Mark held her hand, a hand that felt too hot, her heartbeat a steady throb against his palm, and he watched her cry and he thought: This is the other road.

Anything, he had told Jay, had told Jeff, had told whoever dared to ask and many who did not. That was what he would have done to keep Lauren from Cassadaga if he’d had the chance. Absolutely anything, including trading places with her. Of course he would have done that.

Now he watched Sabrina cry and felt her pulse beat against his hand and thought of the anger that could overtake him so often, a survivor’s anger, the loneliness of the lost, and he said, “Jay was not selfish.”

She lifted her head and stared at him with shimmering but outraged eyes.

“What are you talking about?” she said. “Not selfish? Of course he wasn’t. It’s not as if he had a choice.”

Mark could see him again in the shadowed yard in Red Lodge. Could hear him begging for the choice. He wondered how it had gone for Jay up there on the tower with the train coming on, what other choices he’d made and why he’d made them. But he only nodded, because that was the right thing to do.

“He was a hero,” Sabrina Baldwin said. “That’s the only word.”

“Yes,” Mark said. He touched Lauren’s dive permit briefly. “Yes, he was. And yes, it is.”

77

It wasn’t until the third day that Mark was allowed to see Lynn Deschaine. He’d been moved to a hotel in Billings that still had power. It was called the Northern, and it was a fine hotel if you didn’t mind the police watch outside your bedroom door. His uncle wasn’t as fortunate. Larry was still in a Wyoming jail, and by then it had become clear that the authorities intended to keep him there to ensure Mark’s full and continued cooperation.

Lynn came by in the evening, wearing her badge for the first time.

“Are you ready to get out of here?” she said.

He was struck by how good she looked, how confident. She didn’t have the shell-shocked expression of Sabrina. Only if she let her eyes linger on his could he see the imprint of Eli Pate and Garland Webb.

“You kidding? I didn’t want to show up in the first place. But I don’t think they’re quite done with me.”

“They’re not, but they’ll let you leave Montana, at least. You’ll even be allowed to travel with me, if you’re willing to try that again.”

He was sitting in a chair beside a window that looked out on the refineries and railroads of Billings, and she was leaning against the wall. Loose, confident. Until her eyes lingered on his.

“Where would we be headed?” he asked.

“Virginia.”

“There are some serious agencies headquartered in Virginia. The Pinkertons aren’t one of them.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was my cover story. It was all I had clearance to-”

“Of course. I’m sure I’ll hear plenty of explanations in Virginia as to why nobody from your agency ever bothered to consult with the homicide detectives on my wife’s case. But I’m not leaving without my uncle.”

“You’re going to have to.”

Mark shook his head. “After what he did for me, Lynn? I’ll sit in a cell if I need to, but he’s not taking the fall for anything that happened.”

“If you care so much about him, then you definitely want to go to Virginia. That’s the only way I can speed things along, Mark. Help me, and I can help him. I was able to negotiate you out of here, but they’ll spend a little longer with him, just because they don’t need him to move forward.”

“I don’t see the difference between Larry and me in all this.”

“He never met Janell Cole. That’s one difference.”

“She hasn’t surfaced yet?”

Lynn shook her head. “And we want her. Badly.”

“Badly enough to make a deal for my uncle?”

“They want the right fish, Mark. Not the other ones who got caught in the nets.”

He hoped she was right. The idea of sitting down with anyone in Langley or Quantico wasn’t appealing, but it was also the very least he owed Larry.

“What we need are people who can explain Eli Pate to us,” Lynn said. “Where this attack started and where it ends.”

“You seemed to know plenty about Eli, and Janell. Or was the story from Amsterdam all bullshit?”

“That was true,” she said. “It’s the first time he came on the international radar. He was in the Netherlands studying, and so was she, and he was arrested but she wasn’t. When he walked out of prison after years of bizarre and intensive research, he seemed to fall off the map, but he clearly found his way back to her.”

“Bizarre and intensive research?”

“He went into prison immersed in the work of Nikola Tesla. He emerged with several hundred pages of writings about the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, and Charles Manson. It seems he decided to reverse-engineer things-where Tesla wondered how the world might look with electricity, Pate became curious how it might look without it. The only constant presence in his life seems to be Janell Cole.”

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to help,” Mark said. “Despite what you might believe, you really did hear all I know about Janell.”

“All I’m asking for is your cooperation.”

“And I ask the same for my uncle.”

“You’ll get it. The faster we get to Virginia, the faster I can get him out of jail.”

He took a deep breath. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow at one,” she said. “Police escort to the airport, but we get to fly all by ourselves.”

“Hey, that’ll be fun.” He remembered the way she’d slept on his shoulder on the flight out. It felt like something from another life, the way Lauren did now. He looked away from her and out the window at the refineries. Her reflection was ghosted across the glass.

“I don’t know if it matters to you, but I’d asked for clearance to talk more honestly with you the night it all happened,” she said. “I trusted you by then.”

He let a few seconds pass, and when he spoke, he was still facing the window. “Clearance,” he said. “Sure.”

“You’re right to be angry with me. I lied to you. For whatever it’s worth, I also thought you might be lying to me. Especially after you were right there with me, and then gone in the middle of the night, and they came to the door.”

“I don’t blame you a bit. Let’s call it the cost of business, right? Neither of us trades much in trust.”

“I disagree.”

He looked back at her. Her confidence was wavering. Her posture hadn’t changed, but something in her face had.

“What you don’t know,” she said carefully, “is the way I actually felt that night. And sometime, I’d like to tell you. If you want to listen.”

He leaned forward, braced his elbows on his knees, and held her eyes. She didn’t look away. At length, he nodded and said, “Down the road, if it works out, we could go somewhere by the water and have a couple drinks. We could talk there, the way we did the first time. But a little differently.”

“I hope it works out,” she said softly. “Somewhere down the road, as you say.”

She seemed to want to say more, but didn’t.

Mark rose. “Hell, it was my fault, anyhow.”

“How’s that?”

“I should have known you were full of shit. You’re not a good enough detective to work with the Pinkertons. But for the government…that seems right.”

A ghost of a smile crossed her face. “I’m building my résumé for the Pinkertons.”

78

It had been five days on the road and she had slept only three hours per day. Speed was critical, because they had to travel a great distance, and as panic gripped the nation and rumors of new attacks spread, roadblocks went up in unpredictable locations.

Police were everywhere. Police, and the military. In Missouri, a militia group had taken control of a national forest campground, and a standoff with the FBI was building. In Kentucky, seven were killed in an attack on an army base. In New Hampshire, a husband and wife drove a van loaded with explosives into the statehouse and blew themselves up, wounding a dozen. For every incident there were a hundred threats; for every threat, a thousand rumors. Worldwide, terrorism alerts were raised to their highest levels, and police presence increased around the globe. More than twenty groups had claimed a role in the attack on the American electrical grid; a dozen more had been accused.

The fear virus was flowering, and if Eli had been alive to see it, he’d have reveled in the moment.

She avoided the interstates, sticking to back roads and using her map of the electrical grid as much as her GPS, because she knew the areas where they would be hearing the worst of the rumors. She was disappointed in the lack of action but held out hope. The seeds of fear had been planted and carefully tended and soon they would flourish.

In occasional breaks, she sent e-mails and posted on forums and social networks and then destroyed the devices, leaving a trail of shattered iPads and cell phones from west to east.

It was important that people heard from Eli. Important that they understood all the news they were being offered was a lie.

The only truth ever spoken had been between Eli and Janell.

Approach from the south. You’ll see me. We’ll watch the train go through, and then we’ll leave…Together.

And so they had.

While she drove, she talked, and took comfort in his presence. The smell of charred flesh, so repellent when she had gathered him into her arms in the sparking blue flashes and orange flames, had become tolerable by the time she reached the Mississippi, and it was almost comforting when she drove through New Hampshire.

On the morning of the sixth day she sat alone on the rocks, the mountains at her back, and watched the sun rise over the North Atlantic. Somewhere out across that water, over some three thousand miles of open sea, the harbor town of Rotterdam was already awake, the day well under way.

That was where she had met him. So long ago.

The memory brought tears to her eyes for the first time since she’d understood that the corpse at her feet was his, and she allowed them to flow. She cried into the rocks as the sea crashed and threw foam at her feet, and when the sun was fully risen and there was a golden glow across the water, she was done and she knew that she would not cry again.

Ever.

She looked at that shimmering golden line between sun and land, splashed over the sea like the careless paintbrush stroke of the gods, and she thought that it must lead back to the place where all of this had begun, to that crowded, sweaty pub with the cloying smell of fish, to a man whose eyes held all the secrets of the world.

Dead now. Burned alive.

This is Markus Novak…We are long overdue.

She supposed the man named Jay Baldwin was to blame, but by now she’d learned enough from the radio to tell her that Sabrina Baldwin had escaped before Jay found his courage, and while the media was giving Sabrina and the agent named Lynn Deschaine credit for their survival, Janell could not be so gracious. What she remembered was that first message on the radio, the first slip on what soon revealed itself as pure black ice.

Each time she tried to accept that this was the way of the world and not her responsibility, she remembered Novak standing above her behind his harsh beam of light, her knives just out of reach, and then she heard his voice over the radio.

We are long overdue.

Yes. Already, she could agree with that sentiment. Already, it had been too long for them.

And his mother. The news reported her death, and it was probably true, which meant only that Janell had lost another chance, because Violet Novak deserved to die at her hand. She had lost Eli because of a woman who could not be trusted. He’d stayed in the West with her because she could not be trusted, and he had died because of that.

The sun had warmed the rock beneath her by the time the tide was high enough to put the small boat in. She carried what was left of the greatest man she’d ever known, what was left of the only true love she would ever have in this life, as delicately as possible. He was wrapped in a blanket, but the smell was still heavy, even against the ocean wind.

She wanted to go slowly, to linger with him, but she knew the risks. If his body was found, the questioning of the truth would cease.

That could not be allowed.

She motored out into the sea, enjoying the strength of the slapping waves, knowing how he had always loved listening to the immensity of the sea, a sound that told of its astonishing depths and promised its unfathomable power. Dormant power now, but it would rise again. It always did. And the fools who didn’t listen to its promises would perish, and then they would settle back into their ways, only to be shocked when it rose once more. Year after year, civilization after civilization.

Always surprised by the power of the world.

She followed the golden light out, out, out. As far toward Rotterdam as was possible in such a small craft and with so much work yet to do.

She killed the engine and took a moment alone with the sounds of the sea.

Then she spoke.

“Your energy lives,” she said. “You know that, right? You can feel it? In all of this?”

The waves crested and fell, crested and fell.

“They can’t kill your energy,” she said. “Can’t trap it, can’t guide it. They’ve merely released it from its latest form. So it takes a new form, resurrected and refocused, but still in motion. Onward it goes. You know this.”

Spray soaked her, and the taste of the salt on her lips was perfect.

“And so I follow it still,” she said. “Lead on. Always.”

She gathered his blanketed remains gently, lifted him above the bow, and eased him into the water. The sea accepted him gratefully, and why not? Power understood power.

She watched as he sank slowly, watched until the blue-gray water had hidden any trace of him, and then she started the motor, turned the boat, and piloted it west, toward the rocky Maine coast, with the sun of the new day warming her back.

79

Mark and Lynn were at the airport by eleven in the morning for their flight to Virginia. Billings International-all four gates of it. The only restaurant in the airport was outside of the security gates. Once you were inside, there was a food counter that looked like it belonged in a bowling alley, but they served booze along with the hot dogs and nachos. The television was tuned to the news. A retired FBI agent was expressing his concern that so many groups were claiming the attack on the western electrical grid. A middle-aged couple was watching, and arguing. The husband thought it was ISIS, no matter what the government said. His wife didn’t believe the government would lie about it. What was to gain?

Panic, he said. If the United States admits they hit us right in the heart of the country, it will be panic, and the stock market will collapse. That’s all that really matters to anyone-the money.

She said she didn’t think it was ISIS. If it was anyone foreign, it was the Chinese.

Mark closed his eyes. He was sitting in a chair with his hand in his pocket, touching the dive permit the police had returned to him and wishing for the spent bullet casing that they had not, when Lynn appeared with two bottles in hand. Moose Drool.

Mark grinned and straightened in the chair. “Montana’s finest tempts you even this early in the day, eh?”

“Something that delicious? Obviously.” She handed him one of the bottles and sat down beside him. “Cheers to a flight out of here.”

They clinked bottles and drank and she made a sour face. “I have to admit I preferred the Rainier.”

“Never admit that.”

They finished the beers and then moved to their gate, pausing to check the flight-status monitors. Everything was on time. They were routing through Minneapolis. When Mark looked at the alphabetical destination list, his eye caught on one just below Minneapolis-Portland, ME-and his mother’s voice returned to him.

His name was Wagner. Isaac Wagner. He was from Maine.

It doesn’t matter, Mark thought. I didn’t have a father; I had a donor. His name and his history do not mean a thing. Not after all these years. He turned away from the monitors and took a seat at the gate, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Lynn sat beside him, close enough that they touched slightly. Just a graze. The contact felt good in the way he didn’t want it to, but it also felt comfortable. Hell, he felt comfortable. He’d slept no more than three hours at a stretch for at least six days now, and the weight of it was pressing on him. It was warm in the airport, and his eyelids were heavy. He felt himself beginning to doze, barely aware of the conversation around him and of the announcement that boarding for Detroit had begun, and he opened his eyes lazily, a sleeping cat’s blink, checking on the surroundings before checking back out, and one of the passengers boarding for Detroit turned and looked in his direction, and while Mark watched, the stranger’s eyes filled with whirls of smoke.

He sat bolt upright, moving so fast that Lynn gave a little shout. The stranger boarding for Detroit gave him a curious look too-from behind blue eyes. There was nothing abnormal about him at all. The smoke was gone. No, the smoke had never been there.

Obviously.

Of course it hadn’t.

Lynn put her hand on his leg. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I just started to…have a nightmare, I guess. I expect I’ll have a few of them from this place. A few more of them, that is.”

“Trust me, I know,” Lynn said. “I’ve woken up in cold sweats every night, feeling like the handcuff is still on my wrist.”

He nodded and leaned back in the chair, but she didn’t move her hand, and he was grateful for that.

My mother, he thought. What a gem. My last words with her, and they give me nightmares. Couldn’t have gone any other way with her, though. Whatever parting shot she offered, it was bound to mess with my head.

He closed his eyes again, tried to find sleep again, but it was harder now. His mind was too active, bouncing from image to image, memory to memory.

There will be smoke, she’d said. There will be smoke and there will be voices. Premonitions.

It wasn’t all a lie.

Even his uncle had heard that much. But for days now, Mark’s thoughts had returned, time and again, to the impossible words he’d thought he’d heard. First from the man he’d killed on his way up the mountain, then from his mother after she was dead. He wanted to dismiss them but they continued to surface, just as the last words of Ridley Barnes had taunted him for months. She doesn’t want you yet. Then came his mother’s words, unheard by his uncle but so clear to Mark, so real. She doesn’t want that.

Stress. It was stress and adrenaline and fatigue. The mind did funny things under great stress-this was well understood, researched, documented. It required no questioning.

Beside him, Lynn said, “Are you kidding me?”

He opened his eyes and followed her pointing finger to the monitor above their gate-the status had changed from ON TIME to DELAYED. The revised time was an hour later. Still enough leeway for their connection, but it would be tight.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Want another beer?”

“Might as well.”

Thirty minutes later, a crowd began to gather around the main status monitors. Nobody looked happy, and most of them were putting cell phones to their ears. Mark raised an eyebrow and Lynn frowned and they walked over to see what the situation was.

A third of the board had gone red with canceled flights. As they watched, several others went red. The screen looked more like a stock-market index than a flight-status monitor now, one city name after another ticking into the red.

“Unbelievable,” Lynn said. “Let’s go see what the deal is. Maybe we can reroute.”

Mark followed her, but he was a step behind. He was a little dizzy suddenly, and there was the faint popping sound in his head, the one that had been blissfully missing for the past few days. By the time he caught up to her, Lynn was in midsentence with the gate agent, asking what the options were.

“I’m afraid it’s unlikely you’ll make it there today. Anything on the East Coast is a mess.”

“Storms are that bad?”

“It’s not weather. It’s more outages.”

Lynn’s face drained of color.

“Ma’am? We can try to rebook you, I’m just saying that all connections are-”

Lynn turned from the gate agent before she could finish, stepping aside as the next flier pushed forward to ask the same question about rebooking. As the rest of the travelers at the gate began to rise from their seats and form into a disgruntled, muttering line and cell phones were put to ears all around them, everyone dialing the help numbers or travel agents who they believed could set this right, neither Mark nor Lynn spoke. They just looked at each other. They were alone amid the bustle, the only travelers not concerned only with scheduling.

He said, “It’s a small airport. They’re going to run out of rental cars fast.”

Lynn nodded. “Let’s get one.”

Mark shouldered his backpack and they walked away from the gate together as the loudspeaker came on and a voice filled the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please bear with us here-there seems to be some trouble on the Eastern Seaboard…”

Acknowledgments

First, foremost, and forever-thanks to Christine, who not only improves the books but somehow endures me while I write them.

I’ve had the enormous good fortune of patient and helpful early readers, and to the people who are willing to give of their own time and energy, I can’t offer enough gratitude. But I can name you here!

Tom Bernardo, Stewart O’Nan, and Bob Hammel have hung in there with me through many drafts on many books, and their guidance and encouragement are always critical. John Houghton also brought a wonderful eye and a lot of passion to these pages, for no apparent reason other than his abundance of kindness. And I really can’t say enough about the insight, questions, and patient discussions that Pete Yonkman provided. It’s a better book because of him, and I also had more fun with it than I would have. Deepest thanks, Pete.

A few professionals played a role too. Namely, Joshua Kendall, who is a remarkable and tireless editor. If he has a point of fatigue, I haven’t found it yet. It is a privilege to work with you, Josh.

Richard Pine’s guidance and enthusiasm steers the ship on good days and bad. In fact, Richard doesn’t really allow bad days. Much appreciated. Gideon Pine might not know yet how much he helps. Angela Cheng-Caplan better know how much she helps by now. Same for Lawrence Rose.

Amanda Craft and Lacy Nowling help me to exist in the social media world. I’m grateful for their enthusiasm and work.

The teams at Little, Brown and Company and Hachette Book Group are consistently fantastic: Michael Pietsch, Reagan Arthur, Sabrina Callahan, Nicole Dewey, Heather Fain, Craig Young, Terry Adams, Garrett McGrath, and so many more.

Tracy Roe’s copyedits save me time and again. Parse on, Tracy! Parse on.

Anything I got right about high-voltage work is thanks to Jim Staats and Jim Koryta. Anything I got wrong is my own fault.

The people of Cassadaga, Florida, couldn’t have been better to me, and the same goes once again for the people of Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana. Particular thanks to Doug and Cathy Pate, Bill and Carol Oriel, and Michael and Rita Hefron, as well as Troy “the Storechief” Wilson.

Most important, thanks to the booksellers, librarians, and all readers.