CHAPTER 51
As so often, I am the first to speak, and what I say is utterly stupid: “You’re dead.”
Colin Scott seems to give this problem serious consideration, stroking his bushy new beard. A car passes by outside the gate, but it might as well be on the other side of the world. The hand holding the gun remains very steady, aiming at a spot midway between Dana and myself.
“He doesn’t look very dead to me, Misha,” whispers Dana, pretending that she is not frightened out of her wits. But I find myself growing calmer by the second. Either we will die here or we will not die here. The Judge always emphasized free will; I hunt around for the opportunity to exercise some.
“Keep your hands very still,” says Colin Scott at last. My hands, like Dana’s, are well up toward the stratosphere. All four are trembling. “Use your foot to push the box over to me.”
I do it. He makes no move to pick it up.
“I knew you must have a helper, Professor.” He turns to Dana. “We have not been introduced.”
I realize he is serious. I say awkwardly, “Dana, this is, uh, Agent-that is, Colin Scott, also known as Jonathan Villard. Mr. Scott, this is Professor Dana Worth.”
He nods, no longer interested, then cocks his head, listening. He frowns. He has the gun, so we wait for him to speak.
“Is somebody else here with you? Please don’t waste my time lying.”
“No, it’s just the two of us,” I assure him. Dana and I glance at each other, passing telepathic messages, trying to coordinate a lie. If telepathy only existed, we might even get away with it.
“Do you know what is in the box?”
“I opened it. It isn’t locked. I saw a package inside, that’s all.”
“That’s all.” He crouches, the gun holding us in place, and slowly lifts the lid. In the movies, this would be the moment when I would spin around and kick the gun out of his hand while the bad guy stood still and let me do it, watching in amazement.
I can no longer restrain myself: “They said you drowned.”
“It wasn’t me,” he answers calmly. “A man drowned, but it wasn’t me. I told you I would have to do something about the Bureau. Being dead is an excellent way to forestall an investigation.”
“I saw the photograph-”
“Yes, from the license. Well, that was me. The photograph. But a body from the water? Even a few hours with the fish can change the countenance to the point where it is difficult to tell.”
I feel a leaden chill. A few hours with the fish can change the countenance. Is that where Dana and I are headed?
Dana’s turn: “But the body was identified-”
“No. No, it was not. This is a common misperception.” He tilts his head the other way and purses his thick lips as though measuring us for a casket. “No body is ever really identified. Certainly no body that has suffered any decomposition. The fingerprints are identified. The dental work is identified. We assume that, if we know the owner of the fingerprints, we know the identity of the body. But that assumption is only as good as the quality of the underlying records.”
Even though I am likely to be dead in about ninety seconds, the semiotician in me is impressed. All of forensic science is, in this sense, based on a classic misapprehension of cognition: the inability to distinguish between the signifier and the signified. Fingerprints are the signifiers. Dental records are the signifiers. They are the coded messages to which we assign significance. The identity of the body, the person we decide is dead, is the signified. We all act as though knowledge of the first necessarily implies knowledge of the second. But the implication is only a convention. It is not celestial mechanics. It is not the healing of an illness. It works because we decide that it works. We make that decision by accepting, without question, the accuracy of the records themselves.
“You fiddled with the records,” Dana murmurs, for she never has any trouble keeping up. “Or somebody did.”
Colin Scott says nothing. This is not the time for true confessions. His silence is itself a menace… and an opportunity. His look is pensive. Not all, evidently, has gone as he planned. He is trying to decide what to do.
“So, you have the box,” I point out, fighting for time. “You’re safe now.”
“The box was never for me, Professor. That much of what I told you was true. I was… engaged… to recover it for someone else.”
“Who?”
Another long silence, weighing what to tell. His face is drawn, reminding me that he was already middle-aged when kicked out of the Agency almost thirty years ago. At last he says: “I am not here to offer you explanations, Professor. But do not assume that I was the only one hoping you would find this box. I am simply the only one who was present when you found it.”
Dana’s turn: “But why couldn’t you find the box on your own?”
Colin Scott’s yellow eyes turn toward her, flash dismissively, and return to me. Yet, in speaking to me, he is answering her question. “Your father was a brilliant man. He wanted you to find the box, but he also knew there would be somebody in the way. Me or somebody like me. He couldn’t take any chances.”
“What?”
“We knew what the Excelsior was, that was child’s play. And we knew we had the wrong boyfriend for Angela, or he would have told us what we needed to find out. But the cemetery… that was clever, Professor. Very clever.”
A silence. I break it. “Okay, so what do we do now?”
His thin, scarred lips curl into a slight smile, but he does not bother to answer. Instead, he gestures with the gun, moving us further away from the gate and along the path into the cemetery. Where he can kill us more easily. He points toward Dana’s belt. With trembling fingers, she detaches her cell phone and hands it to him. He glances at it briefly, then drops it onto the gravel and, without seeming to aim, fires two quick bullets into it. Dana flinches at the muted sound. So do I.
“You don’t have to be afraid, Professor,” he declares. His eyes appear to be watching us, the path behind us, and, impossibly, the paths off to either side, without any movement of his head. “I have what I came for, and you will never see me again. So I am not going to kill you.”
“You’re not?” I ask with my usual incisiveness.
“I have no compunction against killing. Killing is a tool one must be prepared to use in my profession.” He lets this sink in. “But there are such things as orders, and, as I once had occasion to tell your father, there are rules for this kind of thing.”
“Rules? What rules?”
Colin Scott shrugs, without moving the gun a millimeter. “Let us simply say that your friend Jack Ziegler, scum of the earth though he may be, is a very vindictive man.”
Yet he does not lower the gun, and I begin to see his problem. He is concerned about the promise Jack Ziegler made-the one of which he spoke in the cemetery on the day we buried my father, the one of which Maxine reminded me on the Vineyard, the one Uncle Jack told me in Aspen he intended to keep. The promise to protect my family. And this little drama is the result: Uncle Jack gave his orders, and even this professional killer, who has every reason to hate Jack Ziegler and to fear what I can tell the police, dares not disobey.
“He can’t hurt us,” says Dana, the relief evident in her voice. Her hands come down.
Colin Scott’s baleful eyes move, and the gun, too, swivels, ever so slightly.
“My orders are not to harm Professor Garland or any of his family. But I am afraid, Professor Worth, that nobody said anything about his friends.”
Dana sounds suddenly very small. “You’re going to kill me?”
“It is necessary,” he sighs, and now the gun is pointed at the bridge of her nose. “And it has a certain… symmetry.”
“Wait,” say both Dana and myself at the same time, our brains working full-bore to come up with the right
