face.
“You’re impressed?” Rourke asked, sipping at his drink.
“A greenhouse?” The younger man was staring at a small house of sheet plastic, humidity dripping from the windows, bright purple lights glowing from within.
“I wish I could use sunlight, but if I installed any sort of skylight, it would be visible from the air and that could blow the whole place. So, as long as the growlights hold out, we’ve got fresh vegetables, occasionally.” “I punched the off button on the microwave oven. You got everything here!”
“Not quite,” Rourke said, then walked back in the kitchen.
The men ate, Rourke in relative silence. Rubenstein unending in his comments on the retreat. After dinner— time really didn’t matter in any relative sense, Rourke realized—the two sat in the great room, drinking and talking. Rourke’s watch read four a.m. for the outside world.
Rubenstein became tired and Rourke pointed him toward one of the spare bedrooms. He left Rourke alone in the great room. Rourke, unable to sleep, was still considering the note his wife had left and wondering where to begin the search. He found a videotape to his liking and put it on the machine. There was one of Sarah and the children, but he couldn’t take seeing it, he told himself, so he watched a movie he’d recorded from commercial television two years earlier, he thought. It was a Western with the hero a gunfighting marshal up against a land baron. Rourke turned it off and found another tape, a science program on the big bang theory of the origins of the universe. He fixed another drink and watched the tape. Still wide awake when the tape ended, he found a movie more to his liking, a British secret agent after a top secret satellite. Rourke watched, fixed another drink, and wondered when the whiskey would run out.
Chapter 9
Natalia screamed again. Karamatsov pushed the bottle toward her. Inside herself, feelings of the guilt she held for betraying him by helping Rourke escape, the feelings for wanting to betray him and become Rourke’s lover, the half-conscious, half-subconscious desire to be punished for doing what she knew to be wrong—these fought with her rationality. And against the pain. She could feel the lip of the bottle. She screamed again, knowing that somehow Karamatsov had won against her. She lashed out with her right arm, the knife edge of her hand slashing across her husband’s Adam’s apple, the heel of her left hand soaring up. Her body was acting independently of her will now, she realized, as though once the decision to defend herself had been made, a floodgate of vengeance and brutality had washed open. The heel of her left hand caught the tip of Vladmir’s chin and hammered his head back.
Naked, she rolled to the floor, her husband fallen over the back of the couch.
He came at her, smiling, the belt in his hands, swinging it, but this time the side with the buckle.
She screamed at him, “Vladmir! Where are you?” And she realized the man she had virtually grown up with, married, loved, been faithful to except for one unconsummated indiscretion, was gone from her.
The brass belt buckle swung toward her and she dropped to the carpeted floor, sweeping her legs under his swing, against his legs, knocking him to the floor. The belt sailed from his hands as he fell. She threw herself on him, her knees hammering into his ribs and chest, her hand grasping for the tiny .38 Special revolver he carried, her right elbow jabbing into the side of his head as he fought to stop her.
She had the revolver. She cocked the hammer, the stubby muzzle less than an inch from his face, between his eyes. She didn’t recognize her own voice. “I’ll kill you if you move, bastard! Leave this house, leave me, leave us! I don’t know you anymore. So help me, I’ll shoot this thing between your eyes, and I’ll laugh!” Karamatsov stood up and she edged away from him. He threw up on the floor and stumbled toward the hall.
A long time after that, when he was gone, the door locked, she lowered her husband’s gun and dropped to her knees and cried.
Chapter 10
John Thomas Rourke sat up, staring at the videotape on the television set. He realized immediately what had happened. The great room was dark; he’d fallen asleep watching the movie. And when he had recorded it, he’d left the tape running too long.
U.S. Navy jet fighters were soaring through the bright blue sky in perfect formation, the “Star Spangled Banner” was playing loudly. There were faces, too. A black child, an Hispanic farm laborer, a businessman, an Oriental woman, a housewife. The faces of children, men, women—Americans. The flag—fifty stars on a field of blue with thirteen stripes of red and white—it waved across the faces of the children. An American Eagle soared through the sky, the signoff cutting to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and an aerial view of the Statue of Liberty.
He fell to his knees as the flag waved in the wind, then suddenly the tape went blank. And the great room, inside a cavern, in a granite mountain, a retreat, bomb-hardened from anything except a direct hit of a nuclear device . . . Sarah, Michael, Ann—faces, Americans. Rourke wept in the darkness. It was all gone and perhaps only they survived all of it—the faces in memory.
Chapter 11
Sarah Rourke had kept the children riding after darkness had fallen—something she rarely did but the man at the farm hardened against brigand attack had not only known Millie Jenkins’s Aunt Mary, but also known that brigand activity in the area was so intense that any stray traveler was likely to be killed—throat slit, possessions taken—forgotten, if anyone cared to forget. She kept the illegally modified AR-15 across her saddle horn—the safety on—but her trigger finger edged along the guard, ready.
Aunt Mary’s last name was Molliner and the mention of the name had struck a responsive cord in Millie. The farm was high in the mountains and far from the Interstate Highway that had before the night of the war teemed with commercial and private vehicles. Sarah knew these mountains, or mountains like them, she thought. She had camped several times with John, especially before the children had been born. He had liked the mountains, telling her that they were strong and peaceful—like him, she now realized, yet like the mountains, capable of erupting in
