THE OVERTON WINDOW (35 page)

Kearns looked up at him. “So what do we do?”

The truck slowed briefly, made a turn onto what felt like a much smoother roadway, and then began to pick up speed again.

“I’ve got an idea,” Danny said, “but I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

He walked toward the tailgate, where the package they’d brought was strapped against the side of the compartment, and motioned for his partner to follow. When Kearns had sat and situated his injured leg, Danny crouched down and pulled off the tarp that was covering the device. He peeled off the keys that were taped near the arming panel and handed them to Kearns.

If one of these bombs was real, then it stood to reason that they both were real. And there was really only one way to find out.

“Here we go,” Kearns said.

He inserted the two keys into the control panel, twisted them a quarter-turn, and pressed the button labeled ARM. The line of yellow bulbs illuminated, winked to green one by one as the soft whine from the charging electronics ascended up the scale.

Once the device had gotten its bearings, it was simple enough to reset the final destination on the touchscreen of the GPS detonator. It wasn’t an address they selected, of course, just an empty point on the deserted road they were traveling, a little less than three miles ahead and counting down.

The older man lit up a cigarette, and he shook another one up from the pack and offered it across.

“Nah, I told you,” Danny said. “I quit five years ago.”

“Aw, come on. Special occasion.”

“I took an oath to an old friend, Stuart, and if you met this woman, you’d know why I can’t break it.”

“When you put it that way, I guess I see what you mean.” Kearns winced and straightened his leg, leaned his head back against the corrugated wall of the compartment, eyes closed.

“Hey,” Danny said, and he waited until his partner looked over. “The other night when you were telling me about your career with the FBI, you said that after all they’d put you through, you wondered sometimes why you stuck it out.”

“Yeah.”

“This is why, man. Tonight is why you stayed on. What was it they had you say, when you put your hand on the Bible and they swore you in?”

“It’s been so long, let’s see if I even remember …‘I do solemnly swear,’” Kearns said quietly, “ ‘that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.’”

“Damn right.”

“And how about you?”

“Me? Oh, this is the perfect way for me to go out, really. The more I think about it, the more I realize I must have outstayed my welcome in my own movement. I take that back; it’s not even mine anymore. If guys like these can agree with anything I say, then I’ve been saying something wrong. And you know what, Stuart? A long time ago I pledged my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to this country, and now I get to give all three of them at once.”

Kearns took a last drag and stubbed out his smoke on the metal floor. “Does it matter that nobody will ever know what we did out here?”

“Oh, somebody’ll figure it out. Somebody like me. Not that anybody else will ever believe them.”

The device next to them issued a loud tone. A bright red light illuminated on the panel, under the word
Proximity.

“Nice working with you, kid,” Kearns said.

He reached out a hand and Danny Bailey took it in a firm clasp of solidarity, and just a moment later, they were gone.

CHAPTER 44
 

We got you?” Molly shouted. “We got you? Are you really selfcentered enough to believe that any of this is about you?”

“It’s only about me because you keep putting me in the middle of it,” Noah said. “You people could have killed me, for God’s sake, so maybe you can forgive me for taking this personally.”

“Hollis stayed with you every minute until they came for you; he made sure you were okay. I’m so sorry you’ve got a headache now, but nobody tried to kill you.”

“That’s just great to hear. You know, you people are really incredible. My father told me this morning that something is going to happen that’s going to change everything, and I’m thinking, okay, a big stock market correction, or another war going hot in South Asia or the Middle East, or a couple of planes crashing into buildings like the last time everything changed forever. And your mother asked me to help you get away to somewhere safe”—he held up the paper in his hand—“and idiot that I am, I let you lead me right to the last place on earth we should go.”

“I’m here to stop this thing if I can.”

“Well, you can’t!” he shouted over her. “Open your eyes, for God’s
sake. They’ve got everything, and you’ve got nothing. All you’re going to do is get us both arrested or killed or put into an unmarked hole in the middle of the desert.”

“I have to try.”

“You don’t have to try.
I told you, we can both ride this thing out. I can’t believe I’m hearing myself say this, but I still want to help you, Molly. That cabin in the woods that you talked about, wherever you want to go until this blows over, I can still make that happen.”

“How
dare
you dangle that in front of me again! What do you think, that I don’t want it? That I don’t want you? Don’t you think I’m scared, and I dream some nights about getting away and never having another worry about the people like your father and what they’re trying to turn this world into?”

“As bad as it would be to let me take care of you, it’s better than dying for nothing, isn’t it?”

Molly’s expression changed. She took a deep breath and then spoke in a much more measured tone. “Before we got off the plane you told me that you got it; you said you finally understood what I was about.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t, Noah. You have no idea. You think knowing the truth is enough? A lot of people know the truth, and nothing changes. So today, after twenty-eight years of drifting through life and taking everything from this country and never giving anything back, today you tell me you’ve finally seen the light and that’s supposed to mean something to me?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Once you know the truth,” Molly said, “then you’ve got to live it. That’s all I’m trying to do.”

He saw her look up at the rearview mirror, and something froze in her.

Noah turned to look through the back window. The visibility must have stretched for miles and miles, and way back at the edge of what the eye could see, a tiny line of strobing police lights had appeared.

She was driving as hard and fast as she had before, but there was something in her face, in her eyes, that he hadn’t seen before. Molly was afraid. And he knew then that she wasn’t afraid of the police, or of going to prison; she wasn’t afraid of getting killed in her cause; she wasn’t even afraid of Arthur Gardner. She was afraid only that her fight was over.

There’d been turning points in his life that he’d seen coming months away, but this one appeared in an instant. He was safely on one side of it a second before, just being who he’d always thought he was, and then he blinked and he was on the other, waking up to realize who he was going to be.

Up ahead he could see that the road narrowed onto a short bridge over a shallow chasm, which ran across the terrain for several hundred yards.

You see the truth, and then you have to live it, she’d said. It was too late, maybe, and too little, but he knew what he needed to do.

“Slow down,” Noah said. “I’m getting out.”

“What?”

“Don’t stop, just let me out.” He cracked the door and the wind whipped inside, and she let her foot off the gas and braked until the car had slowed to the point where he might just survive if he stepped out onto the road whizzing by under them. There was no way to be sure if she understood what he was doing; no time to explain. Maybe he’d never know, but like she’d said, none of this was really about Noah Gardner.

He took a last look at Molly. There were tears in her eyes but she kept them firmly fixed on the way ahead.

“Good-bye,” Noah said.

She answered, but so quietly and privately that the words clearly weren’t intended to reach him. If they were never to see each other again, it seemed, this was just something that she must have wanted read into the record. Wishful thinking, maybe, but he felt he knew in his heart exactly what she’d said.

I love you, too.

He opened the door and dropped to the pavement, rolling and bouncing and banging along for what seemed like the length of a soccer field. At last he stopped, and he watched for a few seconds as the car he’d left picked up speed again and began to recede toward the horizon.

He tried to stand but the pain prevented it, so he crawled to the center line and knelt there in the middle of the narrow bridge, hands up and out so he’d be more visible, watching the line of cars with flashing lights fast approaching.

Maybe they’ll stop in time, and maybe they won’t, Noah thought, but either way he’d slow them down. Other than that, he knew only two things: Molly Ross was still fighting, and that despite what was bearing down on him ahead, he wasn’t afraid.

By the time the lead car had skidded to a stop he could feel the heat on his face from its headlights. Some of the vehicles behind were backing up and their drivers were trying to find a way around the bottleneck, but off the road the sand was too soft for traction and those who’d gone into the gully were stuck, their tires spinning uselessly.

He looked up and saw five uniformed men approaching, their guns drawn. They were all shouting orders he couldn’t really understand.

And then they disappeared, as did the rest of the world, in a silent split-second flash of bright white light from behind him. It was so bright that it crossed the senses. He could feel it on his back, he could hear the light and smell it. When his vision returned Noah saw the officers standing in the road where they’d been, some covering their eyes, but most looking past him, blank-faced, their hands hanging down at their sides.

He turned to look back over his shoulder, in the direction Molly had gone, and miles away he saw the rising mushroom cloud, a massive, roiling ball of fire ascending slowly into the evening sky. The expanding circle of a shock wave was tearing across the desert toward them, toward everything in all directions, and a few seconds later it arrived with a crack of thunder and the sudden gust of a hot summer wind.

CHAPTER 45
 

It could have been most of the night that they worked him over. It could have been days for all he knew. All sense of time had left him while he was still out there on the road.

The questioning had started in one place, and at some point they’d satisfied themselves that the worst they could do wasn’t going to be good enough. There’d been a dark ride in a car, and then a flight somewhere. At the new place they’d started in on him again.

They knew a lot already. They knew that calls had been made from Noah’s apartment to a long list of accomplices of a known agitator who’d conspired to destroy an American city or two. They knew that Noah helped one of the central figures in this conspiracy gain access to classified files and information. They knew that he’d helped her evade security and fly across the country to play her part in the failed attack. They knew that two nuclear weapons had fallen into the hands of these terrorists, and that one of them had detonated but the other was still unaccounted for.

This second group of interrogators was more organized and clinical in their methods, and far more creative. It wasn’t only pain they
inflicted, but terror; the most effective torture happens in the mind. After many hours and methods they’d eventually settled on using a reliable old standby that seemed to have the most immediate and positive effect for their purposes.

Strapped flat to a cold metal table, head immobilized and inclined to be lower than the feet, a wet cloth over the face to restrict his breathing— and then just a slight dripping of water, maybe half a glass, just enough to begin to run down the nostrils and into the throat. Some primitive part of the mind simply comes unhinged when it knows it’s drowning and knows it can’t get away. Try to be as strong as you want; it doesn’t matter. If he’d actually known anything at all that they wanted to learn, before ten seconds had passed he would have told them, and they would have known he was telling the truth.