Runner

meter is too high and so he'll kill a patient. But maybe Hawenneyu has made sure the patient is the one who would have grown up to kill whole countries. Each move has a countermove, and only the twins know which is which.'

'That example is pretty far-fetched.'

'Is it?' he said.

'Why are you here?'

Harry looked around at the old cemetery with exaggerated interest. 'Somebody belongs here more than me? Somebody deader than I am?'

'You know what I mean. Why tonight?'

'I'm here to warn you, Janie,' he said. 'You've been living a quiet life for a long time. You don't get to know why you were allowed to do that. Hawenneyu raises his right hand to strike, but Hanegoategeh raises his left to grasp his wrist, just like a mirror image. Maybe he blocked the blow, but maybe Hawenneyu was just keeping him from moving.'

'Meaning what?'

'It's over. They're moving. You're out again.'

'I know that.'

'But do you know which twin is doing it—day or night? Creator or Destroyer? The good twin or the bad one?'

'You just reminded me that I don't get to know.'

'There are always results. Somebody lives. Or dies. Think about the woman.'

'What about her? She's just a kid.'

'Woman. There are a lot of questions you never asked. You accepted her because she said Sharon sent her, but you never talked to Sharon.'

'There were men with guns waiting in the parking lot. They persuaded me.'

'What were they going to do with the guns—kill her? Kill you?'

'It doesn't much matter. I couldn't let them do either. I couldn't let them take her. I couldn't ignore the fact that they set off a bomb to get to her.'

'You couldn't. You couldn't. Somebody put you in a position where you couldn't make any choices. Or maybe they were just making the right choices unthinkable. Who was it?'

'I don't know.'

'Make sure you're doing what you think you're doing.'

'I think I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm keeping my word.'

Harry shrugged. 'I can't hang around here all night. You hid the woman. Now you're going to see her only living connection, the only person who seems to give a shit if she lives or dies. The boyfriend must know about him, right? Would you send somebody else there?' He gave her a compassionate look, then reached out and touched her cheek.

The hand was cold, with a texture like wax. She shuddered and jerked her head back involuntarily, and awoke. She lay in the bed staring up at the cottage-cheese ceiling above her. There seemed to be light behind the curtain, so she sat up. The clock said it was five A.M., but she didn't want to go back to sleep. She was afraid that she would see Harry in her dreams again. She showered and dressed, then packed, checked out of the hotel, and drove to Lompoc for an early breakfast.

JANE HATED JAILS. Twice she had gone in because that was the only way to get to a woman and talk to her privately before she was released into danger again. Two other times she had allowed herself to be arrested because the alternative would have been to injure a police officer. Every surface in a jail seemed to her to have its own special cruelty—the bars, which were mostly symbolic in women's jails, but also the beds, the toilets, the showers, all of them rough, cheap, nasty versions of things that existed on the outside, as though someone wanted every instant of life to be a reminder that the prisoner was in a different world where everything was bad.

She drove around the perimeter of the parking lot as though she were undecided about where she was supposed to park, and looked at the cars, trying to detect a watcher. The cars all appeared to be empty. As she parked the car and began to walk toward the main building of the complex, she felt an instinctive urge to run, but she steadied herself and walked on.

About half the prisoners at Lompoc were assigned to the federal prison, the United States Penitentiary, a high-security section that had all the usual architectural reminders that the government had no intention of letting any of these men decide to leave—fences, towers, bars. The other half were in the Federal Correction Institution, the low-security section. She had checked in advance on her computer, and learned that Robert Monahan was one of these inmates.

She went to the front lobby and saw that things were less ugly than she had expected. The place reminded her of a military base. But she knew what she was seeing was a gloved fist. It might seem smooth and not terribly threatening, but inside was still a fist. Jane told the first person in a uniform, a young man, that she had an appointment, and he told her to show her ID to a woman called the Front Entrance Officer, who checked her off the visitor list.

The man held a metal detector and moved it up and down her body, and the woman patted her down. Jane had brought only the plastic see-through change purse to hold her driver's license and sunglasses and money, but the male officer opened it and searched it anyway. Then she was directed to a waiting room consisting of bare painted walls and rows of chairs, where another officer handed her a copy of the rules that she had already read. One rule was that a violation of the rules could result in a sentence of twenty years for the visitor.

Jane sat on a chair in the nearly bare waiting room for an hour and a half, watching the other visitors. Most of them were women, some with babies or toddlers, others apparently mothers whose babies had grown up and gotten convicted of federal crimes. At nine, and then at ten, a man announced that he was the Visitation Duty Officer, then called names from a list on a clipboard and let the visitors into the visiting room. When the man called the name Jane was listening for, she stood up and followed the Duty Officer into the room, where the Visiting Room Officer showed her to a seat at a long counter.

Across from Jane was a man in his fifties with graying hair cut short and a khaki uniform. On his feet were a pair of white socks and plastic sandals. When he saw Jane he stared at her in shock and disappointment. His mouth gaped open.

Jane stepped quickly to him, her arms extended. 'Bobby, give me a hug.' She glared at him. 'I've missed you so much.'

'You're—'

'Really glad to see you. Christine wishes she could come, but today it has to be just me.'

The man allowed her to throw her arms around him. She held him tightly in that awkward position with the counter between them and whispered, 'Christine asked me to do this.' She sensed that the guard was moving in their direction, so she released him and sat down across from him. The guard moved off.

Jane said, 'I'm sorry to be so insensitive to your feelings. I pretended to be Delia because it was the only name besides Christine's I knew you would have put on your list of visitors at intake.'

'And you knew that nobody here would ever have seen her,' said Monahan.

'I guessed, after what Christine told me about her,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

'Where is she?'

'Christine is in a situation now that won't allow her to be here and visit you. We both felt that we had to get word to you somehow that she still loves you very much. She isn't dropping you or forgetting about you or feeling any different about you. She simply can't be near here, or come to visit.'

'How long will that be?'

Jane hesitated. 'I don't know. It might be for a few months, or it might be years.'

'Why?'

'I'm not sure how much you know already. She was in love with her boss, Richard Beale.'

'She's talked about him. You said 'was in love.' What happened?'

'I'm not sure of everything. She got pregnant. She decided not to tell him, just to leave.'

'What do you mean? Why wouldn't she tell him?'

'She hasn't told me every detail. But I get the impression he wasn't treating her well. She was afraid of him,