Shuttered Sky

. . '

“But she’s not,” Michael was happy to remind him.

“But if she was, that faith of hers would leave us with no question of what it is we’re meant to do. We’d have the conviction to carry it out and everybody around us would trust enough to let us.”

Winston was right. This is what had been missing all along—this was why everything they did misfired, blowing up in their faces. One element was missing. In this new light, there was no question in Dil­lon’s mind the direction their actions had to take. “Then we have to get Deanna back at all costs.”

“Yes,” the others agreed, “at all costs.”

So, if it meant bargaining with Okoya—if it meant deceiving him into cooperating—it had to be done. It wasn’t the right thing, but it was the necessary thing, and if their integrity had to be a casualty of this war, then so be it.

“What about Lourdes?” asked Tory.

“We’ll get to her, somehow,” Dillon said, finally finding a sense of self-determination that he hadn’t felt for a very long time. “I’ll make sure of it.” Now he didn’t care if Tessic was listening. No matter what Tessic heard, it would not change things now. “We have five days to get to Thira,” Dillon said decisively. “I’ll come up with a plan to get us there.”

“Better get cracking, Entropy Boy,” Michael said. “Open us a magic door, because we sure as hell can’t find our own way out of this fun house.”

* * *

Tessic was awake before dawn. He was a man who required little sleep, his mind so busy, even his dreams were productive. That night he dreamt himself at the right hand of God. The Almighty’s most beloved.

He had awoken from barely three hours of sleep feeling as invig­orated as a child. His office in his dacha was identical to his offices in his various other residences, down to the paperwork on the table. There was an assistant whose job it was to make sure that, wherever Tessic went, his desktop went with him. For a man who worked and traveled as much as he did, he deemed that if his office could be consistent, everything else could be transitory.

There was much work to be done this morning. Pages and pages of reports to pore over from the various teams. Polish police had pulled over several of the buses, but each bus had its own private slush fund for such unfortunate occurrences. Polish police were not entirely un­familiar with bribes, and even if it only kept them quiet for a day, the money will have served its purpose. By the time the serious questions would start being asked, they would be further along in this great revival and Tessic would have a dozen other smoke screens to throw at them, keeping the authorities as confused and divided as the Nazis had kept the Jews.

His four special guests needed at least one more day to recuperate. That was unfortunate. He would have to repace the operation. He could only hope their recovery time would be quicker with each suc­cessive reveille his four musicians played.

He was surprised to see Dillon at his office door, soon after sunrise. Tessic quietly motioned for him to come in. Dillon sat down across from him and Tessic showed him what he was looking at.

“These pictures are from our next endeavor,” Tessic said, fanning out the photos before Dillon. They were pictures of a road; an old one, no longer used. It had almost disappeared in the undergrowth and towering oaks. “A service road that leads to Treblinka,” Tessic explained. “Portions of it were built using the ashes of the dead.”

Dillon raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

“I have workers crushing the road into gravel for you,” Tessic told him.

Dillon put the pictures down and shook his head. “Pointless. I’ll end up pulling the road back together before I pull anyone out of it.”

Tessic took a moment to process what Dillon had said. “Yes, of course.” He was surprised. Not at what Dillon had said, but by the fact that he hadn’t recognized this himself. “I’ll have them stop the demolition at once.”

“It can wait, we have something more important to discuss.”

Tessic smiled. “More important than what you and I are doing here in Poland?”

“Something that’s important, because it’s crucial to our success.”

Tessic leaned back in his chair, feeling its springs comfortably buffer him. “I can’t wait to hear.”

Dillon put down the photos. “I know something that can maxi­mize our efficiency and increase our output.”

“Go on.”

“I know a way to turn the five thousand we revived today into fifty thousand tomorrow.”

“Go on.”

Dillon leaned back in his chair almost mirroring Tessic’s relaxed demeanor. “Her name is Lourdes,” he said. “Lourdes Hidalgo.”

Tessic found his balance failing and leaned forward putting both hands on the desk. “Hardly plausible at this moment in time.”

“But worth the effort?”

Tessic stood and moved to the window—fading back, hoping not to be read too quickly by Dillon on this matter.

“Something wrong?” Dillon asked. “Why would Lourdes make you uneasy?”

He turned back to Dillon, but kept his distance. “Yesterday, the Italian Navy sank a cruise ship just off of Sicily. The Blue Horizon.”

Dillon did not react as Tessic had expected. He greeted this news with a wicked grin. “I didn’t know Italy still had a navy.”

“She went down quickly. None of my sources talk of survivors.”

Still Dillon was unperturbed. “So you’ve known about Lourdes’s whereabouts all along?”

“I knew she was on a ship. I suspected it was the Blue Horizon. I sent three operatives to find it. None of them came back.”

Dillon picked a candy from the dish on his desk, and slowly un­wrapped it, popping it into his mouth. “She’s not dead,” he said.

“You’re so sure?”

“If she were dead, I would know. We all would. We’d feel as if part of ourselves had died with her.”

“Then I’ll send a team to find her.” Tessic was already eying the telephone. “A team professionally trained for—' But Dillon put his hand over the phone, keeping Tessic from lifting the receiver.

“No,” Dillon said. “You’ll send us. All four of us.”

“Out of the question.”

“This isn’t a negotiation,” Dillon said. “We’re asking you as a courtesy.”

As a man whose marching orders were rarely challenged, Tessic found his anger taking hold. “I released you from your security chair,” he said, “because I thought you had become reasonable. Perhaps, I was premature.”

And then Dillon did something.

Tessic wasn’t sure if it was in his gaze or in his voice. Maybe it was just in his focus; the lens of his spirit brought to a burning convergence on Tessic.

“It stems from your mother,” Dillon said.

And Tessic was transfixed.

“Everything about you—your will to succeed; your faith; your anger. Everything.”

“So Freud would say,” Tessic answered, with less deflective aplomb than he wanted.

Dillon shook his head. “This goes even deeper than that.” He cocked his head, taking in the pace of Tessic’s breath; the set of his jaw; the almost, but not quite, dominant position of his stance. “There was a child before you. Your mother’s child, but not yourfather’s. A child that died in a death camp years before you were born.”

“This you could have learned from many places,” Tessic snapped, but his voice was weak and wavering. He knew Dillon hadn’t learned it; he had divined it. Tessic had always thought he was somehow immune to Dillon’s invasive power. He was now well aware that that had been his own arrogance at work. In the end, he was an open