Grand Junction (48 page)

And from the neighboring Dodge, Djordjevic holds a gray book out to his friend.
“The Creation of Man
—Saint Gregory of Nyssa—
The Incarnation of the Word
by Saint Athanasius of Alexandria—
The Complete Works of Origen
. The complete collection!”

The Library has arrived in the Territory, thinks Yuri, though he cannot keep his gaze fixed on it, mesmerized as he is by Judith Sevigny’s face. It has arrived safe and sound. It is perfectly whole. The mission is accomplished 100 percent—or rather, 99, he corrects himself, thinking of the man he wasn’t able to save.

I could stay under the starfire for a hundred years to save ten thousand libraries like that. But I would do the same thing to save a single Judith Sevigny. The one, the only one that exists
.

Slade Vernier starts the first pickup and drives it slowly toward Djordjevic’s and the Professor’s trailer laboratory; one of the deputy sheriffs, a man called Erwin Slovak, gets into another Dodge to execute the same maneuver. Lecerf, the French sniper, smokes a marijuana cigarette as he waits for the last containers to be closed again by the soldier-monk before taking the wheel of a third vehicle. Then Yuri realizes that Link de Nova has already left with his mother, and that Campbell is standing
off to the side with Sheriff Langlois on the other side of the vast concrete esplanade. An animated discussion seems to be angering both men.

The head-on meeting of two icebergs. Something abnormal is happening. Something abnormal has
already
happened. Something abnormal is about to happen.

Campbell is a high-tension wire; he could summon the voltage necessary to power an entire city. The sheriff is the type who holds so tightly to the other end of the stick that he won’t let go unless you kill him.

And nobody kills Wilbur Langlois.

Judith Sevigny is so beautiful in the electric light that has just flooded the tarmac; night has fallen, and the first stars are appearing above them. So beautiful that he could fall to his knees, as if stricken by a hail of bullets in the midst of a battle in some unknown mountains.

It is unthinkable, almost unbearable, this beauty capable of bruising so deeply, of hurting so terribly. And he realizes what he has always known, especially while he was killing all those men under the cold fire of the stars in L’Amiante County: Beauty is a weapon. But not a weapon of mass destruction, at least not only that. If it can fight the Beast, it is first and foremost because it is a
weapon of singular destruction
. It destroys everything that is not
it
—that is, everything that remains subordinate to the Beast; in other words, the masses. Beauty alone knows how to ride, to domesticate, to use, to annihilate the Beast, if it must.

He will be twenty-three years old in a month and he has already killed ten men. He will be twenty-three years old in a month, and he loves Judith Sevigny more than anything else in the world. It is terrifyingly simple.

Campbell walks quickly toward him from the other side of the tarmac. His eyes are glittering and his face is red.

He won’t kill Wilbur Langlois. But he could, without the slightest qualm, annihilate the whole population of a city.

And Campbell wouldn’t do that without a very good reason.

Paralyzed by the comprehension that is violently invading him, even as his friend approaches, eyes filled with icy rage, Yuri has time for a single thought:
Oh no. NOT THAT
.

“There are worse things than voluntary betrayal—namely, stupidity. There used to be military traditions in which they hardly bothered to differentiate the two. The execution squad was guaranteed in any case.”

The night is black, thinks Yuri, and it will get blacker and blacker.

That is how Chrysler begins the conversation, his eyes filled with ice. That is his verbal slap, his entry into the game, his attack on the boy, who has instinctively drawn his head into his shoulders. That is how he makes the decision to reverse the course of events, at once, definitively.

He says: “You broke rule number one. You endangered an entire plan that had been in place for two years. You have brought a huge threat down on us all. I hope you realize what you’ve done.”

He says: “Excuses don’t matter. The damage is done. Now our operations are at risk of being suspended indefinitely, which means no more little machines to make music for you, and no chance of survival now for the others. I hope you realize that, too.”

He says: “You will do
exactly
what we tell you to do. You will do
everything
we tell you to do. And you will do it without
ever
raising the slightest objection.”

And he says: “I think they’re trying to trap us. But their trap is going to close on them.”

Then he adds, in conclusion: “You will act exactly as you planned with Pluto, exactly as you just told me. You will keep quiet about the fact that the Convoy is back; if he questions you on the subject, be evasive. Say it’s somewhere in the Notre Dame Mountains. I’m not even going to tell you what we’re doing. You will be as surprised as the others. And don’t take that as a punishment—it’s for your protection, just in case.”

Link de Nova stares at his feet, his face scarlet with embarrassment
and shame. Campbell will never forgive him for this mistake, obviously, but even though he knew he was breaking an ironclad rule set down by the man from Aircrash Circle, he had sincerely believed that by helping Pluto’s “clients” in their absence he was only continuing the mission. The war against the Thing.

“That’s the kind of feeling that a man like Pluto knows how to play on,” says Campbell. “He’s almost four times your age, and he’s from Junkville. You’re like a minnow and he, with his inoffensive front, is the crocodile. What I’d really like to know, actually, is who he’s working for. Has he told you about other possible clients besides the two young people from New Arizona and the guy from tonight?”

“He told me there was a request, yes. That we would do another operation the day after tomorrow.”

The iciness in Campbell’s eyes is approaching absolute zero. “He probably didn’t think we’d get back so fast.”

He turns to Yuri. “Let’s go back to Aircrash Circle. We have to get ready for tonight.”

Yuri can read the message in his gaze perfectly:
Let’s get some rest, because tonight we might have to kill some more men
.

They are back in the Territory, but, even more, the Territory is back in them.

“I can’t believe Link could do something so stupid,” remarks Yuri.

The night is clear. Out the Airbus windows of Chrysler’s cabin, he watches the furtive flight of a group of predatory birds searching for their nocturnal victims. They seem like extensions of the night itself, and of the terrible light it carries within it. Nature, even denatured, remains like the hidden model of the Territory.
We are the night birds of Grand Junction. We see by starlight, and we kill in the darkness as if it were broad daylight
.

Chrysler is carefully cleaning their guns; he kept silent all during the voyage home. His eyes are still cold, as if nothing can melt the ice in them. Nothing. Except the deaths of a few men, maybe, guilty if possible.

“Link’s twelve years old,” he replies. “He’s a smart boy, but he isn’t immune to simple trickery. It’s that fucking Pluto Saint-Clair who’s going to have a very bad time of it, believe me.”

“And his client?”

“His client? I’ll fuck him up more than you can possibly imagine.”

“But what are you going to do?” asks Yuri, slightly anxiously.

Campbell’s smile is the very smile of the Territory.

“That will depend on him. You know that as well as I do.”

Better to let the glacial silence of the Territory night back up this statement. There is nothing more to say, any more than there would be to a group of birds of prey.

“How does the sheriff know about it?”

“One of his deputies, Erwin Slovak, followed Link de Nova one night. He left HMV County and went to one of our usual meeting points, near Lake Champlain, where Pluto was waiting for him. That’s the night he healed the two boys from New Arizona. Langlois wanted to wait for our return to tell us, and do whatever is necessary about it. He did well to wait; we’ll deal with this business.”

“And what do we do about the two teenagers?”

“I’ll see tomorrow. According to his description I’d say they’re nomads, and if that’s the case they’ve already left the Territory. That would be lucky. Lucky for them, I mean.”

Yes, thinks Yuri, watching the smile—neither good nor evil—that crosses Chrysler’s face. Their only chance is to have left the Territory, or to do it fast, before Campbell can find them.

Their only chance is to put as much distance as possible between them and us.

We are the Camp Doctors
.

If we can’t induce amnesia, we might very well move on to euthanasia
.

Back to the ultraviolet sky and the artificial night of the binoculars; back to the hypernight of invisible rays. Campbell has perfectly established the strategy they will follow—one truly fit for nocturnal birds of prey, ending with them melting into the darkness below.

Whether the prey is mobile or stationary, they must contain it. Whether it is a dangerous carnivore or an inoffensive and fragile creature, they must dominate it with a single blow.

Whether it is running somewhere on a vast prairie, through the sands of a desert, or up the side of a mountain, the Territory will be laid bare—because from the sky, no place can be seen in any way other than as a flat surface for the hunter to examine.

The hunter begins in the prey’s territory. The hunter begins by making it his own. The hunter remains invisible because
he has become the prey’s territory
.

Okay, let’s go, ultraviolet sky, black night, starfire. Back to the artificial day, the dark noon of killers.

“Concentric circles. Starting at two opposite points. We’ll hide the car a kilometer to the west, far away from the main access road they will arrive by. I’ll bring the camouflage tarp. Then, on foot toward our departure zone. We’ll begin in the surrounding areas; two hundred, two hundred and fifty meters. You to the south, me to the north. We’ll go inward, in opposing directions, so that we’ll pass each other regularly, and so we can make sure nobody’s hiding anywhere. We’ll go over the whole area with a fine-toothed comb. Then we take our positions and we wait.”

The night will be black, very black. Ultrablack. It will be their night. The Camp Doctors are back. It will be a surgical operation. One worthy of the Territory.

It is often in the most dangerous situations that harmless details hit you in the face, more forcefully than an antipersonnel mine.

For the first time since their return to the Territory, Yuri notices the mingled presence of sand and snow in indistinct masses, scattered everywhere. He remembers seeing the same thing in the areas around Heavy Metal Valley and Aircrash Circle, but at the time he paid no attention to it. He also remembers that during their departure for the Gaspé he had noticed the simultaneous arrival of an Arctic blizzard and a sandstorm coming from the Midwest. The two opposing air masses can’t have collided directly above the Territory, or there would be more obvious damage. That must have happened farther east, toward New Hampshire. The storm they had encountered in the Estrie was probably born of the head-on smash between the two antinomic “supercells.”

But traces are visible just the same, including in the thick woods in this part of Champlain Banks, which means that the phenomenon happened again. Which means that it
will
happen again—and this time the Territory won’t be spared.

There is nothing out here. Forest. Brush. Rampant weeds and wild grasses, thistles, nettles, Canadian goldenrod, buckthorn, euphorbia, wild mustard,
Cornus canadensis
, poison sumac, and the spiny offshoots of chaparral. The mirrorlike surface of Lake Champlain a hundred meters away. Mounds of mixed snow and sand. The varied trees of the Territory: pines, lodgepoles, beeches, acacias, cedars, maples, and palms. He fights his way through the vegetal curtain using his long Gurkha knife as a machete.
He sees Campbell twenty meters away and gives him the thumbs-up; then he continues along his own path, his own circle.

He can see the slender shape of a Nordic python curled around the thick bough of a maple tree; its concentric central rings, swollen by the digestion in progress of some woodland mammal, are the only mobile part of it. Its red and yellow colors are unmistakable. Farther away, in the top branches of a red pine, he can see the virginal white of two albino macaws; the eyes of a
Strix Americanis
gleam through the foliage like two topaz disks. When he rounds an old beech tree, partially rotted where it stands, the trunk scored by ringworm and various amanitas, his movement provokes the sudden flight of a group of wood bats, who flee, shrieking with one voice, into the tops of the trees. He sees Campbell gesturing to him urgently, indicating that he should keep silent.

He is armed with his Sig Sauer and the Beretta assault rifle left to him by the soldier-monk. Campbell has opted for his U.S. Army pistol and his Winchester semiautomatic.

They circle their target, slowly, calmly, scrutinizing each square meter of terrain, searching for any suspicious trace or, more simply, for other men.

Neither Yuri nor Chrysler finds anything suspect, or any other men.

They quickly take up their posts to wait for the people they came for.

The night is blacker than ever. A perfect night for birds of prey.

Then everything is so simple, so quick, so clean.

As binary as an electric switch. On/off.

Before/after.

Certainty/doubt.

Trust/fear.

Life/death.

Standing. On your knees.

Talking, full of life, because hope is finally within your grasp. Obligated to shut up, the barrel of a gun pressed against your temple, knowing that all hope has just been destroyed.