“Do it,” Mark snarled, and she wondered if she meant him, if he was begging for an end to his suffering.
Scagnelli’s hand made it into a side pocket and she saw the metal target guide of his pistol.
“Druh-drop it,” Alexis said, but she didn’t even convince herself.
Mark thrust an elbow into Scagnelli’s kidney, slowing the draw, but more of the gun slid into view. Then she saw the bulge of the barrel tilting up in his pants, and then came a muffled explosion.
Mark rolled away at the sound. The bullet had struck a tree three feet to the right of her, head high, and Scagnelli could shoot plenty more.
If she didn’t shoot first.
She wasn’t sure if she kept her eyes open or not, but she remembered Mark’s words-squeeze once for every shot-and before she stopped, her finger was numb.
Scagnelli lay on the ground, moaning, his limp fingers still dug into his pocket, although they’d gone slack around the gun’s grip. She didn’t know how many bullets he’d taken, but the one that mattered most was just below his heart, the stain on his green T-shirt growing larger with every weakening surge of his pulse.
“Finish him,” Mark wheezed, and now she could see the two wet blotches in his own abdominal cavity, creases of meat below his ribs.
“No,” she said. “That’s murder.”
“You can do it. Just like in the Monkey House.”
“I didn’t kill anybody in the Monkey House, goddamn it.” Her rage shifted from Scagnelli to her husband.
Even in his pale, depleted state, a vicious sneer twisted Mark’s lips. “Do you want Seethe or not? If he lives, then it’s Burchfield’s. Sooner or later, it’s Burchfield’s.”
Scagnelli’s eyelids fluttered, and he seemed to come around long enough to focus on her face. He smiled, and it was the arrogant benevolence of Sebastian Briggs, the populist solicitude of Senator Daniel Burchfield, the false piety of Wallace Forsyth.
All mirrors, all the things that she’d become.
Seethe had made her just like them.
Mark was right.
Not only could she kill Scagnelli, but she would love it.
The next best thing to suicide.
The only question was whether her husband should be next.
She staggered to Scagnelli and stood over him, his blood seeping down to feed the organisms in the soil. His arm gave one final spasm as he tried to make it operate the pistol, but he finally sagged in acceptance.
“Just doing my…job,” he wheezed, causing the wound in his chest to gurgle.
“Me, too,” she said, pointing at his head and squeezing the trigger four times in rapid succession.
Alexis heard Mark laughing behind her, and the triumphant sound mutated into a moist, ragged cough. She ignored him, bending to fish through Scagnelli’s pockets until she found the vial of pills.
Mark wouldn’t keep her from them this time.
She smiled.
Seethe is mine. As it was meant to be.
To do it right and make it look good, she’d need to use Scagnelli’s pistol to kill her husband. Someone was going to reconstruct the scene using advanced forensic techniques, and lying would only tell half the story.
Facts are troublesome things. But they’re the currency of knowledge.
And knowledge is the price we pay to ease the pain of ignorance.
“Lex!” Wendy said, stepping from the shadow of the forest, with Roland and a strange man standing beside her. Both were armed.
Alexis fought the rage that wanted to claim her face, that screamed at her to raise the AR-15 and empty the rest of the clip, that owned her deepest and most intimate core.
Instead, she smiled as if glad to see her old friend. “Wendy!”
Roland rushed to Mark’s side, while the strange man in the camouflage vest looked from Alexis to Scagnelli’s corpse, trying to connect the two. His pistol was pointed skyward, but at a crisp angle that suggested he could lower and fire in the blink of an eye. Alexis let the rifle drop and the man relaxed a little.
“Mark’s been shot,” Alexis said, giving Wendy a quick but desperate hug, already building the lie in her head.
As they gathered over her husband’s unconscious form, Alexis slipped the vial into her hip pocket.
Mine.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Gundy, where the hell are you?”
Harding’s voice sounded tinny coming from the Selecta’s tiny speaker, or perhaps it was the vast sky and towering trees that made the CIA field director seem diminished and far away.
Gundersson sat on a rock, peering down on the cabin, wondering how many rounds had stuck in the rounded pine logs. “Why didn’t you send choppers, Chief?”
Harding fell silent, and then cleared his throat. “You know that would draw attention. They have press, even out in hillbilly country. Send helicopters overhead and every phone in the county starts ringing.”
“You could have had agents here in twenty minutes.”
“We have protocol and chain of command, Gundy. We can’t just-”
“Chain of command. And who is pulling your end of the chain?”
“Just stay on the scene. Federal agents are less than an hour away, and we have a damage-control team in place, too. Don’t worry, this will get a creative cover story, and your career is well on its way. Couldn’t happen to a more qualified officer, if you ask me.”
Gundersson watched Alexis tending her husband’s wounds. Roland had volunteered his shirt for bandaging and was busy ripping it into cotton strips. Wendy knelt over Mark as well, applying a cool compress to his forehead.
“These agents who are coming,” Gundersson asked. “Are they ours?”
“Of course. You know the CIA doesn’t play well with others.”
“Neither do I.”
Gundersson terminated the call and limped to the creek, electric streaks of pain shooting from his wounds. The water rushed away in a thundering, constant volley, a sheer drop of thirty feet between two massive towers of granite worn slick with time. The pool at the bottom was skimmed with violent froth, and the water beneath it was black with the promise of sunken secrets.
He dropped the Selecta into it, and any sound it might have made was lost in the rush of a current hell-bent for the sea.
Joining the others, he said, “My SUV is a mile away. It’s parked on a logging road.”
“We’re parked on the driveway,” Alexis said, packing cotton swathes around Mark’s two abdominal wounds. The man was deathly white, and he occasionally groaned in pain.
“We can’t risk it,” Gundersson said. “We’ve got company coming.”
Roland gave a rough laugh. “If these were the good guys, I can hardly wait.”
“We need blankets, to keep him warm,” Gundersson said. “They’re flesh wounds, but if he goes into shock, he won’t last long.”
“How do we carry him a mile through this terrain?” Roland said. “Roll him up like a burrito and play ‘pack mule’?”
“Something like that. One thing’s for sure, you don’t want to wait for medivac. You guys got targets on your backs.”
“We’ll tell them everything,” Wendy said.
“Shut up!” Alexis’s outburst was brittle in the peaceful woods, silencing the birds.
Roland touched his wife’s hand, and Wendy looked at Gundersson. Our little secret.
“I’ll go to the cabin and get blankets,” Gundersson said, not giving anyone a chance to question his
