Then he had closed the sketchbook and left it behind.
The drawing troubled Anne. She studied it for a long time, wondering what it could mean. Finally she closed the folder, put it into the box where she kept all the other Change material, and went to make herself a Spanish omelet for breakfast. She chopped the peppers and tomatoes and onions with great attention to their size and consistency and she ate the food slowly. She then washed and dried the dishes and pans, retrieved her hiking boots from Rocinante, strapped on the new knee brace, put on her heavy jacket, and set off up the mountain.
For the first hour, Stan was hard put to keep up with her. She walked fast, leaning into the cold wind, taking little notice of her surroundings, aware only of the need to get out, away, free. For the past two weeks she had felt as if fifty radio stations had been blaring in competition inside her brain, a cacophony of sounds and conversations and images, none of them strong enough to override the others for more than a few seconds. The truncated plan for next quarter's class on New Religious Movements, arrangements to find homes for the puppies, anger at Glen, concern about Antony, the nag of her unwritten book dying away in the back of her mind, details from the thick dossier on the Change community catching at her, the damage she might do her knee by forcing it to act normally, reminding herself to remind Eliot to clean out the water tank and replace two of the window screens and keep an eye on that place in the roof that seemed to need patching, and resentment at Glen and worry about one of her more troubled students and a book that interlibrary loan had recalled and Anne couldn't find and—.
And then below that lay the anger, a wild irrationality that was the only sane repsonse to the idea of walking calmly into the camp of a mortal enemy and pretending to be his friend.
And below the anger and the confusion and the craziness, underlying it all, she could feel the disturbing roil of her old, tired guilt, as worn and dull as a river rock from all the long years of handling. She was asking it now to support and energize yet another hard slog through the most distressing times of her past, a past that she thought she had earned the right, not to forget, but perhaps not to dwell on quite so much. The dreams she had were no longer so utterly devastating, the flashbacks she experienced no longer galvanizing; the memories had become, at long last, a part of the vocabulary of her inner life.
She'd been spoiled by complacency and resented being forced to face herself again. Very well: she would be manipulated. But only so far. And not again.
In the cold spring wind and the brush of damp, fragrant branches against her jacket and her face, the cacophony of voices began to fade. The confusion and resentment receded somewhat, the opposing pulls made an effort to sort themselves out, and the fluttering thrill and dread she always felt on these last nights screwed themselves down into a semblance of calm anticipation. At the same time, walking among the trees and hills with only Stan and the wind for company, she came to the decision that this would be the last time. Never again would she submit to Glen McCarthy, become a part of the machinations of federal justice and the personal manipulations of the man himself. Dues paid endlessly became tribute to an extortionist, and with this last operation, Glen had revealed himself as perilously close to a blackmailer.
Clear-headed and satisfactorily aching, her bad knee only one sharper twinge among the pangs of middle- aged exertion, Anne walked back down the hill to her home. She showered and washed her thick hair with slow attention, put a pot of lentils and sausages on the stove, and went outside to split firewood until she heard the sound of Glen McCarthy's government car dragging its inadequate transmission up her hill. So much warning did it give her that she had all the wood neatly stacked before he arrived.
As his overheated car pulled up onto the flat before her house, Glen saw her, standing next to the woodpile with an ax in her hand. She watched him park and heard the engine die, and then she half turned to sink the ax, one-handed, deep into the chopping block before stooping to gather the kindling and carry it in through the kitchen door. Glen sat for a long moment looking at the door before he reluctantly set the brake and got out. It must have been a trick of the light, he told himself, the approaching dusk and the overhang of her roofed-over woodpile, but when she had so easily driven the hand ax into the stump, there had seemed to be a very odd expression on her face, a sort of grim pleasure, almost of malice.
Not Anne, he told himself, closing the car door. It was the light. He said hello to Stan, who sat on the porch as aloof as always despite all Glen's friendly overtures, and then went in to see what Anne had on the stove.
Anne was calm over dinner, Glen was relieved to see. Quiet perhaps, but without the jitters he had been faced with at previous times. She seemed watchful, however, and smiled to herself at odd times. She also drank more than he'd seen her drink before, glass after glass of the heavy red wine that seemed to have no effect on her, and as time went on her strangeness began to worry him and inflict him with a compensatory anxiety, until he almost felt as if he were the one about to set forth in the morning.
It seemed odd to Glen that he did not know Anne well enough to tell what her behavior meant. On one level, he knew her better than he knew anyone else in the world. He was intimate with her physical history, her psychological profile, her finances, training, and personal history, her family and friends, her strengths and her weaknesses. He knew what size shoe she wore and what kind of blouses she liked, her taste in cosmetics and where she bought her furniture. He knew in general what men she had relationships with, and could, if he wanted to, find out a great deal more about them. He even knew why she liked men of their particular physical type, big and strong and preferably hairy, since he had seen pictures of her husband.
On another level, though, Anne was as much of an enigma to him as she had been the first day he had sought her out fifteen years before. How could he know, really know, what essential shifts would be made when a mother saw her own beloved daughter laid out on the ground beside a row of other children? How could he even begin to guess at the dark areas she hid so efficiently inside her? Nothing truly bad had ever happened to him personally—hell, both his parents were even still alive. He understood how Anne worked well enough to make use of her, but he could not say that he knew her. He did not even think that he wanted to.
When the table was clear and the dishes stacked by the sink, Glen brought out his briefcase and gave Anne her identity. She studied the California driver's license with its address in a town where she had actually lived, if briefly, and many years before. The photograph on her passport was a different one, more recent than that on the license, with an issue date three years earlier and a smattering of European and Asian stamps on the pages—again, all countries she had at least visited in the past.
She now possessed a checking account, two credit cards, a telephone card, an assortment of memberships to video rental places she had never heard of, an REI sporting goods member number, and three library cards (two of which were expired) from far-flung towns. He also gave her half a dozen letters and communications from mythical relatives and an insurance company, bearing forwarding labels to 'general address' at a number of post offices up and down the West Coast. Ana Wakefield had kept an account with a mailbox service in Boise, Idaho, for the last four years, set up automatically when Anne had ceased being the last identity, Annette Watson. Glen had apparently thought it worth maintaining a new name for her even though she had made it clear at the time that she would not work for him again. Well, she had been wrong, and he had been right, and here was Ana Wakefield with a history ready to slip into. She pushed away the bundle of old letters, unable to face the new relatives and the paperwork from a minor accident Ana had had in Seattle. Glen drilled her on the methods of getting in touch, ranging from postcards addressed to her imaginary Uncle Abner to the extreme use of the panic alarm that was wired into Rocinante's chassis. Although they had been over this already, he decided that they had to review it again and check on the gun safe, so Anne turned on the floodlights and they went out to the barn.
She watched in silence while Glen fussed with the gun's compartment, which was indeed invisible and which did work perfectly, but when he stretched out on the floor and began to prod at the panel that hid the transmitter, she studied his legs for a minute and then withdrew to go back out to the woodpile. The crash of an armful of split logs dropping into the wire cage on the back of the bus, a device she had asked Eliot to weld on over the engine panel, brought Glen to investigate.
After a minute, he asked, 'Doesn't the wood get pretty wet out there?'
'Last time out, I woke up one morning to find a nest of baby black widow spiders hatching out from a log I had stored under the front seat. I don't bring wood inside any more.' She eased herself down to examine the welds, and then to look under the back fender at the exhaust pipe.
Staring down at the top of her head, the curve of her spine, and the jeans tight over her butt, Glen took a sudden step back and said abruptly, 'I'm engaged, Anne. I'm going to get married in the summer.'
'Good for you.' Her voice was so lacking in interest that for a moment he wondered if she had heard him.
'Her name is Lisa. She's a—'
