The Program (46 page)

Her eyes never left Will. Tim prayed he'd keep his mouth shut; wisely, he did.

With a pinch of the frames, Bederman adjusted his spectacles. "I feel that way sometimes when I lecture."

"Really?"

"Absolutely."

Tim's mind wandered back to the night last February when Franklin Dumone had mysteriously shown up at his door, rainwater dripping across his solemn face, claiming to hold the answer to Tim's anguish over his lost daughter and the legal system that had set her killer free.

Tim rarely spoke about the Commission to anyone besides Dray; he had trouble getting the words out. "I know what it's like to get seduced by a group. It's like they're speaking your most private desires right at the moment you've almost given up on them. I fell in with a group like that after my daughter died, but they were working their own agenda behind my back the whole time."

Leah was rocking herself in her chair. "Sometimes I don't want to do what The Program says...."

Will made a soft noise in his throat. Tears were running down Reggie's face, though he remained perfectly still.

"...but TD says it's for my fulfillment," she continued.

With a cocked wrist, Reggie smeared tears off one cheek. "If it was for our own fulfillment, he wouldn't deprive us of sleep and food to control us. He wouldn't turn us against one another. He wouldn't..." His bitterness evaporated; his breathing turned shallow.

"Wouldn't what?" Leah said.

Reggie fought out the words. "Discard people like trash."

The sudden display of emotion caught even Bederman off guard. Leah alone responded without missing a beat, leaning over and rubbing Reggie's shoulder.

Reggie did not raise his head. "He made me feel like I was so feeble. Like without him I was just some useless piece of shit who didn't deserve to hold down a spot on the planet."

Leah stopped. She scrunched her eyes shut and started murmuring to herself.

Dray reached for her, but Bederman shook his head. The room's stuffiness grew oppressive. Tim fanned the front of his T-shirt, waiting for Leah to raise her head. It was a long wait. When at last she looked up, red streaks stained her face. Her nails worked her rash through her sweater in fussy, nervous strokes.

"If this is wrong," she said, "if I see this is wrong, then I have to admit everything else was wrong."

"The Program is set up to make you feel that way," Bederman said. "So you see a lack of options. So you feel trapped."

"But I turned my back on everything. I struggled so hard to be a Pro." Blood dotted her sweater beneath her collar where she continued her frantic scratching. "I've given everything up, burned every bridge, cut every tie."

"Not every tie," Will said.

Her frozen stare at first registered only alarm, but then her eyes moistened and her forehead started a downward crinkle into a sob.

Bederman said, "Where do you want to be five years from now, Leah? Ten years?"

Her short hair whipped her cheeks when she shook her head.

Tim started to say something, but Bederman cut him off with a sharp, excited gesture.

"I'd be a Webmaster, I guess. Maybe even a software designer." A wistful smile grew on her face. "I always wanted to live in San Francisco."

"You can still do those things," Bederman said. "All of them."

Her mouth narrowed. "But I'm naked without The Program."

"Honey," Dray said, "it won't feel that way forever."

"If I leave, I won't have anything left to give." She was really crying now. "I'll be broken. Damaged goods. Let's be honest -- no one will ever want to date me, be my friend. It's not like they were lining up before, and now I'll be some cult freak."

"Thanks." Wearing a wry smile, Reggie waved to an imaginary audience. "I'll be here all week."

She laughed through her tears. "You know what I'm saying. I mean, Beverly Cantrell's gonna be a fucking pediatrician. What am I?"

Will said, "Beverly Cantrell is a cryogenic Victorian priss who needs her adenoids removed."

Leah wiped her mouth on her sleeve like a little girl. "I always thought you liked Beverly."

"I hide in my office when Janice exhibits her at our house."

"I wish I knew. I would have hidden with you."

"I wish you had."

The sparkle in Leah's eyes dwindled. "What am I supposed to do, Will?"

"Come home, to start."

Leah's face crumpled again. She rose abruptly, pulling off her sweater. "I need some air."

Tim stood, a little too quickly. "I'll take you for a drive."

"I want to be alone." She charged out so quickly she left the door open behind her, letting in a revitalizing breeze.

"What if she calls the ranch?" Will asked just as Tim said, "What if she heads back?"

Bederman said, "Let her go."

Will ground one hand into the other. "Maybe we should follow her."

"You can't follow her for the rest of her life," Dray said. "You'd do better not to start."

Tim's phone rang, and he flipped it open. "Hello?"

Freed said, "Your last Dead Link's a ghost."

"Wayne Topping?"

"Yeah. Doesn't exist. Nothing came back. Just wanted to let you know."

When Tim hung up, Will was staring at him. "You did say 'Wayne Topping'?"

"The name ring a bell?"

"Yes. That's the alias that Danny Katanga used. Our PI who went missing."

Tim blew out a breath. "TD's got a file on him. The kind of file that means he's probably dead. I'm sorry."

"So am I."

The stagnant heat leaked from the room, the door swaying with the April breeze. The patch of sunlight thrown through the window stretched and turned gold against the worn carpet. Reggie laced his hands and stretched. At the hour mark, Will took to pacing. Only Dray was calm.

Tim had finally come to grips with Leah's being lost when a faint cough announced her presence. She stood like a waif in the doorway.

"I accept it. I accept they used mind control on me."

Will let out a muffled noise of relief.

"But I have to go back. They'll make hell for Tom if he goes up without me."

"How do you know I'm going back up?"

"I saw how excited you got about the mail thing. I'm not an idiot. Trust me, if you go back alone, they'll know something's wrong."

"I'll say your parents kidnapped you."

"They'll suspect you. And they'll find out."

"You can't be reexposed to that environment," Bederman said. "There are too many triggers there. You're fragile."

"I'll risk it."

"I think you've taken enough risks," Tim said.

"So have you."

Will rose and walked to the door. When Leah didn't move, he waited by her side. Tim could see that it was killing him to act patient, but he did.

Finally Leah said, "Maybe you're right." She crossed and hugged Reggie. "Thank you."

Reggie held her for an extra beat, his eyes shut.

She moved to embrace Bederman, but he leaned back and took her hands instead, squeezing them warmly. She hugged Dray next, then stopped in the center of the circle, facing Tim. "I...um, I don't know what to say."

"Me neither."

They looked at each other a moment longer, and then she followed Will out.

Chapter
forty

Pants loosed around her hips, Dray lay sprawled on the bed, arms stretched to the headboard, shoulders propped on a bank of pillows. Tim's face pressed into the warmth of her bare stomach, her C-section scar a smooth ridge against his cheek. He closed his eyes, and he listened.

"I was thinking we should turn the study into a nursery," Dray said.

The skin of her belly was impossibly soft.

"When you get back this time, maybe we really settle. I mean, no more life and death, no more secret missions and undercover ops. We'll be a nice, dull-as-hell family in Moorpark with a nursery painted blue and yellow. And we'll talk about diapers and how we wish we were rich enough to afford a nanny, and we'll shut it out, the whole world. It'll just be us three, and everything will be safe. A made-for-TV life."

He kissed her stomach, then laid his cheek on it again.

He thought he heard a heartbeat. Was it possible to hear a heartbeat already? It must have been Dray's. Or his own.

She took a deep breath. "Sometimes I wonder if I've got enough left to make another run at a blue-and-yellow nursery."

"You do."

"Oh," she said. "Are you still here?"

He knew she could feel his smile against her skin -- he felt her stomach tense on the verge of laughter. "Don't," he said.

That sent her over the edge, her laughter bouncing his head. He made pained groans and objections, as if the abdominal tumult were inflicting great abuse on him. Finally she quieted, sniffling a few times.

Dray was never big on tissues.

She watched him curiously as he stood and pulled on his shoes, but she didn't ask where he was going. He paused by the door. "Ginny's bottom lip disappeared when she smiled."

Dray made a soft hum, a noise of pleasure and longing mixed together.

He said, "Remember her laugh when she really got going?"

"The hiccupping one?"

"And when she colored the bottoms of her feet with Magic Marker and ran around on the new carpet? That expression she'd get when we'd ground her -- the slanted eyebrows? Furrowed brow?"

"The demon-spawn scowl."

They looked at each other, smiling.

"Yeah," Dray said. "I remember."

Tim's hands sweated, as they always did when he approached the front walk. The bordering lawn, uniformly green, rose to the precise level of the concrete. Like Tim's lawn used to. He stood in the night chill, the parked Blazer at his back, and gathered his courage.

After hitting a snarl of traffic -- L.A.'s eternal antidote to sanity -- he'd found himself in Pasadena, then at the house.

It struck him that The Program's regression drills didn't depend on implanted memories alone. Most people had pain that could be accessed and exploited, exposed nerves to pluck like harp strings. TD sniffed out the hollows in which trauma was buried; he cracked people wide, and they welcomed him like a conquering god.

Tim stepped up on the porch and rang the doorbell. A snowball plant rose from a terra-cotta pot, the perfect bulb of the crown picked clean of dead foliage. A single brown leaf lay on the soil.

The even cadence of footsteps. A darkness at the peephole, then his father opened the door, blocking the narrow gap with his body. "Timmy." His eyes flicked over Tim's shoulder at Dray's Blazer. "You brought the truck for your mother's desk?"

Tim had been steeling himself, but he felt a sudden calm. "Why do you always want to bring me down a peg?"

Easing out on the porch, his father plucked up the solitary dead leaf and folded it into a handkerchief he produced from his pocket. He returned to his post at the door. "It's nothing personal. I make it my business to oppose self-righteousness."

"So you started on me when I was five."

"That's right."

"That's bullshit. It was personal. Why me?"

His father looked away, and in that instant Tim saw him with detachment -- a man in his fifties standing in the doorway of another suburban house. His father kept his eyes on the street, his face pale. "Because you thought you were better than me."

A car turned onto the street, its headlights bleaching the house.

He cleared his throat, fixed his gaze on Tim. "Why don't we haul that desk out for you so you can get on your way?"

"I don't want the desk."

If he was disappointed, he didn't show it. He nodded definitively, a single dip of the chin. "Where's your music, Timmy?" He crossed his arms, a union-boss show of opposition. "This is your big scene, isn't it? You sat at home, dreamed it up, dreamed up how you could take a big stand against your old man, and here you are, your moment in the sun. You deserve a musical score, don't you think?"

A beep sounded -- an annoying rendition of some classical motif. Tim followed his father's gaze down to the electronic monitoring bracelet at his ankle.

The parole officer's beckon.

Tim's father glanced back up, a ripple of chagrin disrupting the inscrutable mask.

The halting melody followed Tim back down the walk.

As Tim folded clothes neatly into his overnight bag, Dray watched him morosely over the top of the paperback she was pretending to read. He'd already touched up his disguise, trimming his goatee, plucking his false hairline, giving his hair a touch-up rinse.

He finished packing and joined Dray beneath the sheets.

In less than eight hours, he'd be sitting in the passenger seat of Randall's van. He rehearsed his story in his head, trying to make Leah's desertion plausible.