The pen started tapping again.
“But as I said, I have an update,” Leuchten said. “Good news, potentially.”
“I’ll be damned,” Green answered. “I think I’ve forgotten what good news sounds like. Do tell.”
“Representatives from the two sides have brokered a temporary peace—apparently there is a cultural system in place in theregion for resolving disputes. It’s called a council of biys. Elders from both sides convene in some hidden spot in the mountains and try to work it out. This particular council hasthirty-five people in total—seventeen from each side plus a neutral party acceptable to both who can vote to break a deadlock.If things go well with the process, then that’s that. The fighting stops and they all get on with their lives.”
“Huh,” the president said. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Nice enough that I can’t imagine it will ever happen. I’ll give you two-to-oneodds the old guys all kill one another and things get even worse.”
Leuchten nodded.
“Certainly possible, sir.”
“Should we step in before it gets out of hand? Maybe send some troops to make sure this truce sticks no matter what the biys decide?” Green said.
Leuchten shrugged.
“I don’t see how. I’ve spoken to the joint chiefs. Before Niger, maybe we could have done something, but now . . . We’re stretcheddamn thin.” Leuchten began ticking off items on his fingers. “Beyond Africa, there’s the Iran occupation, plus the peacekeepingforces in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Blackman says we’re on the edge of not being able to properly defend the country froman attack, and the rest of the Joint Chiefs agree.”
Leuchten lowered his hand.
“We just don’t have anyone to send.”
The president frowned, thinking. The pen started moving again, then froze before it reached the desk.
“That’s not true,” Green said. He looked at Leuchten and smiled. “I can send you.”
Chapter 38
Leigh was a desert.
Any movement would split her, broad cracks opening in her skin. Her eyes were full of grit—she wouldn’t, couldn’t open them,but she could feel the particles moving behind her eyelids, scratching against the lens. Her mouth was a gulch, parched anddead.
She was baked dry, and hyperaware: the weight of the sheet and the heavy hotel-bed blanket, pushed down to around her knees;her clothes from the night before still on her body; the air conditioner’s hiss; the sound of running water from the bathroom,tantalizing, soothing . . . but out of reach, as getting to it would require leaving the bed.
So, she lay there, eyes closed, still, waiting for her body to give her a signal that she could move without shattering, paincradling her skull like a mother’s hands around her newborn.
Flashes from the previous night ran through her mind. Staring at the prediction in Will’s notebook, trying to understand whatit meant. Pulling back onto the highway, driving in silence until they reached the outskirts of Toledo, exiting, pulling upat a Hampton Inn.
“I feel like this is my last stop,” she’d said. “Convince me I’m wrong.”
“How?” Will answered.
She’d seen the fear in his face and knew she wasn’t being fair, or kind. Will needed her desperately, and she was about touse that need to force him to tell her the things he’d been holding back. She wanted the story, and up to this point she’dbeen willing to be patient. No longer, apparently.
Leigh didn’t mind being involved in something huge—in many ways, that’s all she’d ever wanted—but she needed the narrative,so she could place herself within it. Helping the Oracle escape angry mobs out for his blood—that was one story, sure. Butthat prediction—A Man Reveals Himself . . . just those few words had made it clear that the story she’d been telling herself was tiny, just the smallest part ofwhat was actually happening.
“Tell me the rest. The pieces you’ve left out. Otherwise you’re on your own.”
This was a bluff. But Will didn’t know that, and so he started to talk.
He showed her the notebook, the lists, the color-coded calamities, the scribbled, scratched-out efforts to make sense of theSite’s slowly tightening grip on world events.
Will told her about the billions of dollars, money that he had come to feel was essentially a bribe from the Site, a prizefor being its agent in the world. He told her about fifteen thousand people dead in Uruguay, about the blackouts, about Niger,and how those things and everything else were locking together bit by bit, more each day. He told her about his last prediction—thenumbers 23–12–4.
He told her about the walk into traffic in Montevideo, and other attempts like it, things he had kept to himself. He calledthem tests of the Site’s control. That wasn’t what they were.
He gave her, at last, details about the Oracle safe house waiting in the west—a cabin hidden in the mountains, bought, prepared,and stocked by Hamza and Miko in anticipation of a day when Will’s identity might be blown. It wasn’t connected to any oftheir other accounts or identities, which meant that if he could just get there, he could put the pieces together—come tounderstand the Site’s plan from a place of blessed anonymity. Figure out his part in all the terrible things the Site haddone and decide what the Oracle could do about them. Will’s vaunted plan—the driving force for their trip west—at the end,it wasn’t some huge, complex machination that would magically turn everything around. He just wanted to feel safe.
The Oracle spoke for more than an hour, there in the parking lot of the Hampton Inn in Toledo, Ohio, as the sun set and thesky turned dark. Leigh just listened. When he stopped, she put her hand on his, letting it stay there for a moment.
Leigh started the car and left the parking lot, driving until she found a liquor store, where she purchased too much alcohol.Then back to the Hampton Inn, where a room was obtained for cash, and too much alcohol was consumed by both of them, and theykept talking.
She came to understand that Will hated that the Site had saved them at the Laundromat. It wasn’t benevolent—it was a signof the Site’s casual power over him, a message that
