“No, honey,” Roland said. “Illusion is your lover. Reality is your husband.”
She turned, letting the brush splash acrylic on the rough pine planks. Roland looked at the Rorschach pattern on the porch and decided it was Sebastian Briggs kneeling between his wife’s naked thighs.
Then again, he read that image into everything.
What a bargain. Wendy gets lost in Halcyon while Seethe makes me obsess over every memory. God, if ever you feel the need to let me accept the things I cannot change…
Gundersson cleared his throat to break the tension in the air, but the clumsy guttural noise only heightened it. “Mr. Doyle, I doubt aiding the government inspires you, but you have my personal guarantee that you’ll come to no harm. I am under orders to protect you until this situation is all clear.”
“And just when would that be? It looks like the only way to clear it would be to find your precious drugs and then kill us both.”
“There are powerful elements-”
Roland swept the. 38 into his hand and banged its butt on the table. “I’m a powerful goddamned element. I can take care of us.”
“No offense, Mr. Doyle, but I saw you shoot at the fox yesterday. Four rounds at twenty paces and you didn’t come close.”
Roland’s gaze dropped to the gun. “It was beautiful. I couldn’t…”
“What makes you think your aim would be better if the fox is shooting back?”
“He’s no killer,” Wendy said, storming her painting, applying a second swollen breast. “A woman knows.”
Keep on loving the illusion, honey. That’s all you get of me anyway.
“One question,” Roland said to Gundersson. “If it wasn’t the CIA that sent the e-mails, then who did?”
“National Clandestine Service. One of those new federal agencies gone a little rogue. The great bait-and- switch was that they were created to monitor overseas threats, but we all know how that goes, right?”
“The enemy within,” Roland said. “That’s the one that gets you.”
He pulled Gundersson’s gun out of his waistband, where it had been digging into his skin. He slid it across the table. “Your move.”
Gundersson left the gun lying there between them. “Tell me what you know.”
Roland sighed. The truth-at least, the truth as Seethe remembered it-had haunted him like those shadowy figures in Wendy’s paintings. Maybe if he exorcised it, he could sleep at night without lying next to his wife and imagining squeezing her throat until the images went away.
“I’ll tell you both what I remember,” Roland said. “But I’m not sure I know anything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Wallace Forsyth entered the abandoned youth correctional facility an hour before dusk, using the gravel service road he’d scouted earlier in the day.
In better economic times, the center might have been renovated into a different type of institution. But Butner already housed two prisons, and the town’s population wasn’t big enough to support an extra school. Apparently the guards and nurses weren’t breeding fast enough to expand the tax base.
As it was, the center had taken on a seedy, neglected look despite only recently being mothballed. Forsyth welcomed the seclusion. Mark Morgan was removed from the influence of CRO’s bottomless pockets and deaf to whispers of money, and therefore he was unpredictable. Forsyth hadn’t survived so long in Washington by doing business with unpredictable people.
Scagnelli’s rental sedan was parked beside a holly hedge that a warden had once planted to imitate the landscaping of a real residence. The little house was of the same brick and small, white-framed windows as the main barracks, the kitchen, and the wing where young offenders likely sat through group therapy while plotting to smuggle in drugs or alcohol or sexually abuse their weaker peers. Forsyth was willing to bet that 90 percent of the hooligans had since graduated to the federal or state penitentiaries down the road.
Forsyth pulled his car beside Scagnelli’s. Despite having no official government employment at the moment, he was sure he could talk his way past any local cops that suspected trespassing. Given the small size of the town and its high inmate population, and the fact that inmates with nowhere to go often stayed where the jail doors had last opened to eject them, the police were probably understaffed and overworked, too busy to worry about decaying state property.
Forsyth had one call to make before he confronted Mark. He reached Burchfield on the third ring.
“They’re asking about you at the arts gala,” Burchfield said, with a string quartet and laughter in the background. “Apparently you’re considered a great friend of the Winston-Salem Community Arts Project.”
“They’ve been hitting the moonshine jug, then,” Forsyth said. “But since you ain’t announced your running mate yet, the media doesn’t give a pig whistle about my whereabouts.”
“You wouldn’t believe what I’m doing right now.”
“Drinking lemonade and grinning like a turtle eating saw briars?”
“I have my hand up a puppet’s ass, and I’m making it dance.”
“Good practice for handling your secretary of state.”
“I can only hold this grin and this puppet for so long before this lovely lady at the podium demands a speech.”
“Give ’em the old ‘Arts are the foundation of a good community’ line. They might conveniently forget to look at your voting record.”
“I have maybe ten seconds before I seem rude.”
“Furrow your eyebrows, Daniel. This call will seem critical to national security.”
“This is critical. Where are we on this thing?”
“We’re about to hog-tie it and make some bacon.”
“I’ll assume that’s good news.”
“That’s the only kind you’ll hear.”
“Good. Thanks for that ‘community’ line. All politics is local.”
So is sin. Forsyth hit END, slipped the phone into his jacket pocket, and walked across the unkempt lawn. The sky was low and the gray was gathering, promising a coming storm.
And a storm shall come to pass.
Unlike the Doomsday opportunists who sought to cash in on predictions of the Lord’s return, Forsyth had never believed there was a single firm date for the end. The way he saw it, “End Times” were plural and might be well underway already. He felt no apocalyptic zeal, however, nor any particular urgency. All he could do was today’s service and hope it would be enough.
The door was unlocked, just as he’d instructed Scagnelli. He entered, instinctively trying the light switch before realizing the power had been turned off long ago. Sunlight leaked through the partially drawn blinds, casting a serrated yellow path across the living room.
“You here?” Forsyth called into the gloom.
“In the back,” Scagnelli said in a monotone.
Forsyth locked the door and headed for the narrow hallway. The small house couldn’t have held more than two bedrooms, and Scagnelli’s voice had come from the room on the right. Forsyth found a closed door as he entered the hallway.
He braced himself to confront Mark Morgan again. The man was a sinner, but his worst offense had been abandoning CRO, Burchfield, and the opportunity to serve a higher purpose by delivering Seethe and Halcyon. Satan walked the world not in a supernatural shape but in the troubled hearts of the selfish and the morally weak.
Forsyth entered the room, startled by its darkness. He’d been right to be suspicious of Scagnelli, who’d already proven he’d betray anyone at the first light knock of opportunity. Forsyth had ordered Scagnelli to have Morgan ready for interrogation, not to play hide-and-seek. But he suppressed his anger as he called out. “Where is he?”
“Right here,” Mark said. “Right where you want me to be.”
