The Passage (32 page)

Wolgast swiveled in time to see Richards shoot the woman in the forehead. One shot, close range, muffled to a clap by the long bore of the suppressor. She rocked back in her chair, her eyes startled open, her wig askew on her head. A delicate frond of blood wet the floor behind her. Her arms lifted and then fell again, into stillness.

“Sorry,” Richards said, wincing a little. He stepped around the desk. The room was filled with the acrid odor of gunpowder smoke. Price and Kirk were frozen with fear where they stood, their jaws hanging open. Or perhaps it wasn’t fear they were feeling, but mute incomprehension. As if they’d stepped into a movie, a movie that made no sense.

“Hey,” Richards said, taking aim, “stand still. Just like that. Superduper.” And Richards shot them too.

No one moved. It had all happened with a curious, dreamlike slowness but was over in an instant. Wolgast looked at the woman, then at the two bodies on the floor, Kirk and Price. How surprising death was, how irrevocable and complete, how much itself. At the reception desk, Amy’s eyes were locked on the dead woman’s face. The girl had been sitting just a few feet away when Richards had shot her. Her mouth was open, as if she were about to speak; blood was running down her forehead, seeking out the deep creases of her face, fanning across it like a river delta. Clutched in Amy’s hand were the melting remains of her half-eaten ice cream sandwich; probably some of it was actually in her mouth at that moment, coating her tongue with its sweetness. A strange thing, but Wolgast thought it: for the rest of her life, the taste of ice cream would recall this image.

“What the fuck!” Doyle said. “You fucking shot them!”

Price had hit the floor face-down behind his desk. Richards knelt by his body and patted his pockets until he found the key to the handcuffs, which he tossed to Wolgast. He waved his gun listlessly at Doyle, who was eyeing the glass case of shotguns.

“I wouldn’t,” Richards cautioned, and Doyle sat down.

“You’re not going to shoot us,” Wolgast said, freeing his hands.

“Not just now,” Richards said.

Amy had begun to cry, her breath hiccuping in her chest. Wolgast gave the key to Doyle and picked her up and held her tightly to his chest. Her body went limp against his own. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” It was all he could think to say.

“This is very touching,” Richards said, handing Doyle the little backpack of Amy’s belongings, “but if we don’t leave now, I’m going to be shooting a lot more people, and I feel like I’ve had a very full morning already.”

Wolgast thought of the coffee shop. It was possible everybody there was dead too. Amy hiccuped against his chest; he could feel her tears soaking his shirt. “Goddamnit, she’s a
kid.”

Richards frowned. “Why does everybody keep saying that?” He motioned with his weapon toward the door. “Let’s go.”

The Tahoe was waiting outside in the morning light, parked beside Price’s cruiser. Richards told Doyle to drive and sat in the backseat with Amy. Wolgast felt completely helpless; after all he’d done, the hundreds of decisions he’d made, there was nothing left to do but obey. Richards directed them out of town, to an open field where an unmarked helicopter with a lean black body was waiting. At their approach its wide blades began to turn. Wolgast heard the wail of sirens in the distance, coming closer.

“Let’s be quick now,” Richards said, motioning with his weapon.

They climbed into the helicopter and were airborne almost instantly. Wolgast held Amy tight. He felt as if he were in a trance, a dream—a terrible, unspeakable dream in which everything he’d ever wanted in his life was being taken away from him, while all he could do was watch. He’d had this dream before; it was a dream in which he wanted to die but couldn’t. The copter banked steeply, opening a view of the sodden field and beyond, at its edge, a line of police cars, moving fast. Wolgast counted nine. In the cockpit Richards pointed out the windshield and said something to the pilot that made him bank the other way, then guide the chopper into a hovering position. The cruisers were coming closer now, within just a few hundred yards of the Tahoe. Richards motioned for Wolgast to pick up a headset.

“Watch this,” he told him.

Before Wolgast could answer there was blinding flash of light, like a gigantic camera going off; a concussive thump rocked the chopper. Wolgast gripped Amy by the waist and held on. When he looked out the window again, all that remained of the Tahoe was a smoking hole in the earth, big enough to fit a house in. He heard Richards laughing through the headset. Then the helicopter banked once more, the force of its acceleration pressing them into their seats, and took them all away.

TWELVE

That he was dead was a fact. Wolgast accepted it, as he accepted any fact of nature. When everything was over—in whatever manner this occurred—Richards would take him to a room somewhere, give him the same cool, final look he’d given Price and Kirk—like a man performing some simple test of accuracy, lining up a cue ball or tossing a piece of wadded paper into the trash—and that would be the end of it.

It was possible Richards would take him outside to do it. Wolgast hoped he would, someplace he could see trees and feel the touch of sunlight on his skin, before Richards put a bullet in his head. Maybe he’d even ask. Would you mind? he’d say. If it’s not too much trouble. I’d like to be looking at the trees.

He’d been at the compound for twenty-seven days. By his count it was the third week of April. He didn’t know where Amy was, or Doyle. They’d been separated the minute they landed, Amy hustled away by Richards and a group of armed soldiers, Wolgast and Doyle with a coterie of their own—but then they’d been split up, too. Nobody had debriefed him, which at first struck him as strange, but when enough time had passed, Wolgast understood the reason. None of it had officially happened. Nobody was going to debrief him because his story was just that, a story. The only remaining question for him to puzzle over was why Richards hadn’t just shot him in the first place.

The room they’d locked him in was like something in a cheap motel, though plainer: no carpet on the floor, no drapes on the lone window, heavy institutional furniture, bolted down. A tiny closet of a bathroom with a floor as cold as ice. A tangle of wires on the wall where a TV had once been. The door to the hall was thick and opened with a buzz from the outside. His only visitors were the men who brought him his meals: silent, hulking figures wearing unmarked brown jumpsuits who left his trays of food on the small table where Wolgast passed most of each day, sitting and waiting. Probably Doyle was doing the same thing, assuming Richards hadn’t shot him already.

The view wasn’t anything, just empty pine forest, but sometimes Wolgast would stand and look out there for hours, too. Spring was coming. The woods were sodden with melting snow, and from everywhere came the sound of running water—dripping from the roofs and branches, running down the gutters. If he stood on his toes, Wolgast could just make out a fence line through the trees, and figures moving along it. One night at the beginning of the fourth week of his imprisonment, a heavy rainstorm blew through. The force of it was practically biblical; thunder rocked over the mountains all night long, and in the morning he looked out his window and saw that winter was over, rinsed away by the rain.

For a while he’d tried to talk to the men who brought him his meals and, every other day, a clean set of surgical scrubs and slippers for him to wear, even just to ask them their names. But none had offered so much as one word in reply. They moved heavily, their movements clumsy and imprecise, their expressions benumbed and incurious, like the living dead in some old movie. Corpses gathering outside a farmhouse, moaning and tripping over their feet, wearing the tattered uniforms of their forgotten lives: he’d loved such films when he was a boy, not understanding how true they really were. What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?

It was possible, he understood, for a person’s life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more instance in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas and, for whatever reason, made them your own. That was the truth he’d learned on the carousel with Amy, though the thought had been building in him for a while, most of a year, in fact. Wolgast had more than enough time now to think this over. You couldn’t look into the eyes of a man like Anthony Carter and fail to see how this worked. It was as if, that night in Oklahoma, he’d had his first real idea in years. His first since Lila, since Eva. But Eva had died, three weeks short of her first birthday, and since that day he’d walked the earth like the living dead, or a man holding a ghost, the empty space in his arms where Eva had been. That’s why he’d been so good with Carter and the others: he was just like them.

He wondered where Amy was, what was happening to her. He hoped she wasn’t lonely and afraid. More than hoped: he held the idea with the fierceness of a prayer, trying to make it so with his mind. He wondered if he’d ever see her again, and the thought made him rise from his chair and go to the window, as if he might find her out there, in the shifting shadows of the trees. And more hours would somehow go by, the passage of time marked only by the changing light from the window and the comings and goings of the men with his meals, most of which he barely touched. All night long he slept a dreamless sleep that left him dazed in the morning, his arms and legs heavy as iron. He wondered how much longer he had.

Then, on the morning of the thirty-fourth day, someone came to see him. It was Sykes, but he was different. The man he’d met a year ago was all spit and polish. This man, though he was wearing the same uniform, looked like he’d slept under a highway overpass. His uniform was wrinkled and stained; his cheeks and chin were glazed with gray stubble; his eyes were as bloodshot as a boxer’s after a few rounds of a badly mismatched fight. He sat heavily at the table where Wolgast was. He folded his hands, cleared his throat, and spoke.

“I’m here to ask a favor.”

Wolgast hadn’t uttered a word in days. When he tried to answer, his windpipe felt half-closed, thickened from disuse; his voice emerged as a croak.

“I’m done with favors.”

Sykes drew in a long breath. A stale smell was rising off him, dried sweat and old polyester. For a moment he let his eyes drift around the tiny room.

“Probably this all seems a little … ungrateful. I admit that.”

“Fuck yourself.” It pleased Wolgast enormously to say this.

“I’m here about the girl, Agent.”

“Her name,” Wolgast said, “is Amy.”

“I know her name. I know a great deal about her.”

“She’s six. She likes pancakes and carnival rides. She has a toy rabbit named Peter. You’re a heartless prick, you know that, Sykes?”

Sykes withdrew an envelope from the pocket of his coat and placed it on the table. Inside were two photographs. One was a picture of Amy, taken, Wolgast guessed, at the convent. Probably it was the same one that had gone out with the Amber Alert. The second was a high school yearbook photo. The woman in the picture was obviously Amy’s mother. The same dark hair, the same delicate arrangement of the facial bones, the same deep-set, melancholy eyes, though suffused, at the instant that the shutter opened, with a warm, expectant light. Who was this girl? Did she have friends, family, a boyfriend? A favorite subject in school? A sport she loved and was good at? Did she have secrets, a story of herself that no one knew? What did she hope her life would become? She was positioned at a three-quarter angle to the camera, looking over her right shoulder, wearing what looked like a prom dress, pale blue; her shoulders were bare. At the bottom of the photo was a caption: “Mason Consolidated High School, Mason, IA.”

“Her mother was a prostitute. The night before she left Amy at the convent, she shot a trick on the front lawn of a frat house. For the record.”

Wolgast wanted to say,
So?
How was any of that Amy’s fault? But the image of the woman in the photograph—not even really a woman, just a girl herself—belayed his anger. Maybe Sykes wasn’t even telling the truth. He put the photo down. “What happened to her?”

Sykes lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “No one knows. Gone.”

“And the nuns?”

A shadow skittered across Sykes’s face. Wolgast could tell that he’d hit the mark without even meaning to. Jesus, he thought. The nuns, too? Had it been Richards or somebody else?

“I don’t know,” Skyes answered.

“Look at you,” Wolgast said. “Yes, you do.”

Sykes said nothing more about it, his silence telling Wolgast,
This line of conversation is over
. He rubbed his eyes and returned the photos to their envelope and put it away.

“Where is she?”

“Agent, the thing is—”

“Where’s Amy?”

Sykes cleared his throat again. “That’s the reason I’m here, you see,” he said. “The favor. We think Amy may be dying.”

Wolgast wasn’t allowed to ask any questions. He wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone, or look around, or step from Sykes’s line of vision. A detail of two soldiers led him across the compound, through the damp morning light. The air felt and smelled like spring. After almost five weeks in his room, Wolgast found himself taking deep, hungry breaths. The sun was painful to his eyes.