The Program

Chapter thirty-two

Leah had been too agitated to sleep. She'd risen with the sun and waited shivering outside Cottage Three. Finally the door banged open, and Stanley John exited briskly, adjusting his shirt, not even noting Leah's presence to the side of the front step. A few moments later Janie emerged, using her fingers to comb her hair back into place. "Hi, babe." She kissed Leah on the forehead. "Why up so early?"

"There's something I wanted to ask you."

"Sure thing."

Leah picked at one of the empty belt loops on her pants. "Has TD ever had any…problems with the law or anything?"

"All great leaders have been persecuted. Especially when they set forth a new doctrine. Think of Martin Luther King, Gandhi. Heck, think of Jesus."

"So that's a yes?" Leah had tried to keep her frustration out of her voice, but Janie's expression indicated she'd failed.

"Did your parents fill your head with this nonsense that time you went home? You were persecuted that night, remember? And now you're gonna buy into the lies your persecutors hurled at you." Janie shook her head. "Really, Leah, I thought you were beyond this."

A familiar sensation overtook her – that she was shrinking away, not in size but distance. She felt perspective-small, a dot on a horizon.

Janie combed her fingers through her tangled hair. "I'd just hate to think…"

"What?"

"Well, thoughts like that are really malignant. I'd focus on the Source Code before your negative energy manifests physiologically and turns carcinogenic."

Leah felt anxiety clench her stomach – Janie's response seemed straight from the secret file Tom had claimed to have found. But it also seemed right. The thoughts Tom had put into her head were diseased.

"Okay, Janie." Leah's voice was quiet, deadened. "I will."

The Pros sat in monklike silence, lined in neat rows before bowls of oatmeal. Tim cast a curious sideways glance at Leah, who'd been turning in her chair to look at the other tables.

She finished appraising the far corner of the cafeteria and leaned toward Tim. "Everyone's accounted for," she whispered, face flushed with relief and vindication. "There's no missing girl."

Stomachs grumbling, they awaited TD's arrival.

And here we have Tom Altman…" TD paced the lip of the stage, emceeing the festivities. "A big shot. Handsome, rich, successful."

To commemorate the retreat's last day, each initiate had to undergo a turn on Victim Row. Tim's stomach churned – he was up to bat. His legs cramped from hours of sitting. Sweat pasted his T-shirt to the chair back. If he heard 2001 one more time, he thought he might start beating his own head like Rain Man. Shanna waited calmly in the chair to his right; to his left, Wendy sat trembling.

Skate looked on from the door, his hands resting on the erect heads of the attendant dogs. Tim raised his eyes to Randall in the back and thought about both men in the rain, body heat wisping from their shoulders, prodding the doomed girl before them. The way she'd clutched the shovel. The joke Randall had cracked just before they'd vanished into the trees.

TD placed his hands on Tim's shoulders. The lights dimmed, and the drum resumed its slow rumble.

A winning smile directed at Tim from up close. "But it seems you have a little problem performing." A scattering of giggles. "A little performance anxiety, Tom? Afraid you can't measure up to expectations?"

Leah's face, blanched and upset, stood out from the crowd. Tim wished he could convey to her that his chagrin was feigned.

"I think it's more than that," TD continued. "I think you felt impotent when your little Jenny was taken and killed."

Tim felt a distinct rise in his temperature.

"You neglected her. Where were you that day when she was walking home from school? Seeing to business? Counting your money? Socking away more in the bank account so you and the missus could maintain your lifestyle? What killed her? A psychopath? Or her parents' hideously yuppie self-involvement? You made her a victim, just like yourself, didn't you? If you'd done something differently that day, that week, you could have saved her life. She could still be your daughter. She could be waiting for you at home right now."

Having unearthed Croatian mass graves, having beheld through 8x50 binocs the public stoning of a raped Afghan twelve-year-old, having used both hands and a knee to hold together the shrapnel-shredded skull of a platoonmate, Tim noted with alarm his rising discomfort. The one benefit of his distress was that the surfeit of emotion was easy to channel into his performance. His face burned; sweat ran into his eyes. Though he willed himself to sit, in his mind he leapt from the chair, palmed TD's skull and his beckoning chin, and twisted through the crackling resistance. He bombarded himself with violent fantasies, mostly to fight off the image of Ginny. But the heat, hunger, and fatigue loosened his control, and his daughter's face drifted into focus. The haze of freckles across her nose. Her awkward, second-grade grin. The gap between her front teeth. The wisp of hair he'd freed from the corner of her mouth as she lay cold and inert on the coroner's slab.

He held his eyes on Leah. A tear beaded on his lower lid; a blink pushed it into a downward trickle. Leah matched it. And his next.

"Once she was dead, you thought money would get you past it. Money turned into power. You took action. You decided the rules didn't apply to you. You decided you were above the law. And now you're afraid of your power. So afraid you've gone soft with fear. What did you use your power for that has you so cowed?"

The four murderous weeks of last February came back to Tim in a rush of faces – Jedediah Lane, Buzani Debuffier, Robert, Mitchell, Rayner.

Tim had completely left his body – he saw TD's mouth moving soundlessly, the spread of faces before him, gleeful and vehement.

When he refocused, TD was saying, "The only way to eliminate that fear is to face it again. Are you ready to face it?"

"Yes." Tim's voice held a note of pleading he didn't recognize. "Yes."

"You need to use your power again and use it right."

"How?"

"Someone's family has been prying into our business. There's a danger that threatens us all, living right here among us." TD halted before Tim, eyes picking over him. "We won't risk betrayal. We won't stand for impostors."

The shift to menace, in the midst of Tim's disorientation, froze him in a perfect, breathless moment of panic.

His gaze steady on Tim, TD snapped his fingers and held out his hand, a doctor awaiting a scalpel. Skate crossed to the stage and lifted his shirt, revealing a handgun pressed into the sweaty flesh of his gut.

Tim snapped into absolute clarity. His breathing evened out; his heartbeat pulsed at his temples clear and steady like a metronome.

Skate plucked the weapon free and slapped it into TD's hand. Holding the gun limply before him, TD turned and walked back to Tim, his footsteps clacking in the silent auditorium. A Sig Sauer P245. With its compact frame and big caliber, it was a street-smart relative of the Spec Ops-issue P226 in Tim's gun safe.

Had he really put his life in the hands of a nineteen-year-old? Tim risked a glance at Leah; she looked horrified. He'd worry later about whether she'd sold him out; for now his concern was seizing the gun from TD. Six rounds in the mag, one in the pipe meant he could take TD and both Protectors and still have three bullets left to fend off the mob. If the dogs attacked, he'd shoot upward into their open mouths or offer them a shirt-wrapped forearm to gnash, getting in tight enough to press muzzle to fur so the gun would discharge noxious gases into them along with the lead.

TD reached out. Tim tensed, ready to strike him at the wrist and elbow. He could picture the arm bending, the gun driving up, the muzzle snugging beneath TD's chin for the discharge.

But the barrel was facing away.

Tim slid the proffered weapon from TD's hand.

"Shanna's folks, you see, are pretty influential people. They're sending investigators after her, calling police departments. We can't afford that. And we certainly can't afford to let her leave here knowing all our secrets."

Shanna's mouth hung open, her lower jaw edged forward.

"Tom, prove that your devotion to The Program is absolute." He grasped Shanna by both shoulders and gazed down at her paternally. "Let's see if you can do a job yourself instead of paying someone else to do it for you."

A hush settled over the crowd.

The kettledrum started up, slowly matched by stomping feet.

TD wouldn't commit so flagrant a crime after all his subtle machinations to avoid illegality. Tim gauged the weapon in his hand. It felt light, as if the magazine were empty, though he wouldn't bet Shanna's life on it.

Shanna was wheezing. She fell off her chair onto her knees.

Tim debated running a press-check, pulling back the slide to expose the bullet, but it required both hands and would surely give away his facility with weapons. He cast his mind back to sticky-eyed gunplay near Jelalabad, where his platoon had forged through a wind-induced brownout into dark tunnels. They'd learned to check if their Sigs were fire-ready by fingering the extractor. The sliver-wide leaf spring, which pulled spent cartridges out of the barrel, protruded ever so slightly when there was a round in the chamber. Walking over to Shanna, Tim moved his trigger finger up and ran it along the chamber portion of the barrel, past the ejection port. The extractor sat flush.

Shanna cowered before him, pale-faced.

The room rocked and thumped and hummed.

Burning with delight, TD awaited Tom Altman's next move. Tim raised the gun, aimed directly at TD's forehead, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a faint click.

A shocked silence.

Tim blew imaginary smoke from the barrel and tossed the gun. It clattered on the stage. Tom Altman's exercise complete.

TD watched him, frozen in a moment of amazed respect. He began to clap, and the Pros erupted in applause.

Shanna collapsed on the floor.

"Brilliant," TD murmured, his voice barely audible over the roar of the audience. "Fucking brilliant."

The Pros stormed the stage, swept Tim up, and jumped with him. The scene resembled the cascading-confetti finale of a political convention. A path parted before TD. He snatched Tim into an embrace, his whisper cutting through the ruckus. "You're ready now, Tom. No more games."

As the celebration lingered, Tim and Leah headed out the Growth Hall's rear exit.

"The gun," she said. "How did you know?"

"I knew."

They passed behind the cafeteria, and Leah again instinctively turned away from her reflection in the walk-in freezer. Tim caught her, turning her toward the side of the freezer. She froze, her head tilted to the ground. He kept his hands on her shoulders, gentle but firm.

For nearly a full minute, they stayed perfectly still, Tim waiting patiently, Leah stubbornly avoiding her reflection.

Finally she lifted her eyes. Tentatively she raised her trembling fingertips, pressed them into her cheek. Tim stepped back, leaving her alone with her mirrored image.

She smiled. She fussed with her hair. She made a snarly face at herself.

A one-note gasp of a laugh seemed to catch her by surprise, a cautious peal of delight.

Honing his clockwise wiping technique, Tim worked beside Leah. Lorraine and Shanna were elbow deep in suds. Chad stacked the plates.

Stanley John burst through the swinging doors and said, "Chad, the Teacher wants to see you. Now."

Chad stopped, plates clutched between his hands. He set them down on the counter and walked from the room.

"What's going on?" Shanna asked.

"Wendy's not getting with The Program," Stanley John said. "TD wants to switch him out, put Janie on her."

Lorraine dried her hands, then cupped Shanna's cheeks. "I never have to worry about you being Off Program. You're the perfect Gro-Par."

Shanna blushed and covered her grin with a soapy hand.

"If you stay on track, you might even get asked to be one of TD's Lilies."

Shanna's grin faded. She bit her cheek and glanced away.

"Speaking of Lilies," Stanley John said quietly to Lorraine, "you'll never guess who showed up in the middle of the night. Nancy Kramer."

Leah stiffened.

Tim recognized the name from TD's file cabinets – the Active Link. She'd been successfully converted to a Dead Link last night.

Shanna and Lorraine stacked the final wet dishes before Tim and Leah and then left. Stanley John followed them out, drawing close to Lorraine, his voice barely audible. "Guess she passed the Darwin test at the tar pits."

Tim and Leah dried in silence for a while, Leah fighting back tears. "You don't have to gloat."

"She's dead, Leah. I don't want you to end up with her."

They worked in silence for a while. Leah finally reached TD's plate, sitting by itself on the counter. She produced two brand-new towels, using them like pot holders so her flesh wouldn't come in contact with it. She paused, staring at the blank white plate, tears running down her cheeks.

"Yes," she said. "I'll go with you."

She spit on the plate, polished it, and continued her work.