Sully raised the blade again, staring at it.
“They made me do it, Daniel.”
“I know.”
Sully tilted the blade to look at the bloodied tip. Then, his face blank again, he plunged the knife into his own throat.
“Sully!” Ruppert reached for him as he sank to his knees. Ruppert looked back to Wayne. “Are you going to help at all?”
Ruppert heard a thunderous, rumbling sound, and then Lucia and Nando bolted into view, followed by the other travelers and the young woman who’d been leading the group. All of them ran while looking back over their shoulders, panic on their faces. Ruppert tried to push himself to his feet, but he had no strength in his legs. He’d lost a lot of blood.
Light flooded the tunnel, as if the sun had risen in the underground world, shining down from little buzzing drones overhead. Rows of armed men in faded green uniforms marched after them, wielding machine guns.
“This is the United States Army,” an amplified voice announced. “Border Patrol. Get down flat on your faces. You move, we shoot.”
The travelers dropped to their knees, then lay prostrate on the floor. Lucia gripped Nando’s hand. A team of soldiers approached the alcove where Ruppert and Sully lay, each soaked in their own blood. They lowered their weapons.
“What the hell happened to you?” one of the soldiers asked Ruppert.
“I think I’m dying,” Ruppert said, and then the world turned black.
TWENTY-NINE
When Ruppert finally awoke, he lay on a mattress no thicker than a towel against a hard, flat surface. He had almost no strength, but leather cuffs bound his arms to cool metal rails. Everything in his abdomen ached.
He opened his eyes to see gray cinderblock walls. Clean white bandages bound up his torso. Plastic green curtains hung on either side of his narrow hospital bed. Machines monitored him, included a convex black lens for video surveillance. Fluids fed into his arm from a clear bag suspended overhead.
He lay for a long time, trying to piece together what had happened, wondering if Nando and Lucia were safe. He doubted it, but someone had gone to the trouble of giving Ruppert medical care, and that gave him a little hope. Beyond the curtains, he heard groans and a few snores. There were many others in the room with him.
“Where am I?” Ruppert asked aloud.
“The land of no return,” someone answered off to his left. Someone else forced a laugh.
“Are we in Canada?” Ruppert asked.
There was another, snorting laugh. Ruppert didn’t attempt further conversation, and neither did anybody else.
After more than an hour, a pair of crewcut young men, eighteen or nineteen years old, appeared in threadbare green US Army uniforms. They looked back and forth between Ruppert and a digital clipboard.
“That’s him,” one of the soldiers declared. An obese male orderly appeared with a wheelchair, and the soldiers helped him move Ruppert into it. They strapped Ruppert’s arms to the arms of the chair.
“What’s happening?” Ruppert asked.
“Time for your interrogation,” a soldier said. “Do yourself a favor. Cooperate. Don’t give them a bunch of trouble. Tell them whatever they want to hear.”
“Okay,” Ruppert said. “I'm familiar with the program.”
They rolled him down a long, crowded hallway lined with bed-ridden patients along both walls. The patients wore flimsy paper gowns, and most looked heavily sedated. The facility smelled of rot and disease. Streamers of dark mold grew in the upper corners of the hall.
They rode up in a freight elevator, and then the soldiers wheeled Ruppert down a long, white corridor to a black door. It slid aside, and they pushed Ruppert into a white cube of a room, where two black office chairs faced each other across a lozenge-shaped black desk. They moved aside one of the chairs and wheeled Ruppert into place. And they waited.
After about twenty minutes, a section of white wall at the far side of the room slid back, and a man in the black tie, shirt and suit of a Terror agent entered. He was probably in his sixties, but he was very lean and fit, his eyes like blue ice under close-cropped silver hair. He seemed familiar to Ruppert.
“That’s all right, boys,” he said to the soldiers. “You can go on. He’s no danger.”
The soldiers saluted him, then pivoted and marched out of the room, the orderly lumbering after them.
The Terror agent sat down across the desk from Ruppert. He touched the slick black surface, and a row of glowing white digital documents appeared beneath his fingertips, many with images of Ruppert alongside their text. He perused them at a leisurely pace, ignoring Ruppert. It was several minutes before he spoke.
“Accessing illegal foreign data,” the man said. “Reneging on an agreement with the Department of Terror. Assault on a high official of the Department of Child and Family Services, for the purpose of accessing classified data. Assault and murder of a military school instructor. Forced entry into said military school, where you kidnapped a ward of the state, detonated explosives, killed two guards and injured several more instructors-all of this while publicly chanting terrorist slogans over an intercom.
“Manufacturing and disseminating terrorist propaganda. Finally, attempting to exit the country illegally.” The man’s eyes burned into Ruppert, who thought the room had grown colder. Maybe it actually had, to intimidate him. “Even if we provided you a trial, you’d have no chance of surviving. You face a long, painful public execution. You are a terrorist, Daniel Ruppert.”
Ruppert said nothing. Now he recognized the man: he was the one who’d been in George Baldwin’s office at the GlobeNet studio, while Ruppert was hypnotized. The one Baldwin had made him forget, until Dr. Smith deprogrammed him.
“Dr. Reginald Crane,” Ruppert said. “That’s right, isn’t it? The 'doctor' for economics, not medicine.”
Crane sat back in his chair. “Correct.”
“They called you Duckers in school.”
Crane’s lips curled into a slight snarl.
'Short for 'Duck-fucker'?' Ruppert added.
The man leaned back in his chair, folded his hands, sighed. 'You've picked up a thing or two since we last met.' He looked Ruppert over carefully. “There is no need for secrets in this place. On my part or yours.”
“Okay,” Ruppert said.
The man sat very still, and then he asked, “What else do you know about me?”
“You’re Brother Zeb,” Ruppert asked. He made the connection even as he said it aloud. This was why the man had been so interested in him, why he’d come to Baldwin’s office at GlobeNet, why he was here now. 'Of the white supremacist national church, or whatever you called it.'
The man's smile was tight and cold. He unknotted his tie, then unfastened the top three buttons of his black silk shirt. He exposed his chest to Ruppert, revealing a faded tattoo of six Viking swords arranged in a swastika. “I had most of them removed with lasers, naturally, but this one I kept as a souvenir. Those were heady days.'
“You programmed Sully to kill me,” Ruppert said. “And himself.”
“Oh, no, that was a slight bureaucratic error,” Crane told him. “Once your little video emerged, standard protocols went into action.”
“That was standard protocol?”
“For a target as stubbornly on the run as yourself, one takes several precautions. But it wasn’t my group. We are highly compartmentalized, you understand.”
“Terror?”
“Above that.”
“PSYCOM?”
'I’ll admit now, we did lose you entirely on a few occasions. The woman you traveled with, Lucia, she is quite capable. I’m considering recruiting her for our side. What do you think?”
