Prototype

though the last she would admit to her face — was pity. Every mile driven, to Chapel Hill and to Boston, was just another step toward the altar of her obsolescence in the mystery of Helverson’s syndrome.

“Isn’t this more your field?” Adrienne spoke with an air of deference. If there was resentment she hid it well. “Tell us a story.”

Sarah blanked for a moment, all the tales she had absorbed over her lifetime dissipating into dust, forgotten like cultures buried by aeons. Then she found one, a new tale, perhaps the one to bridge all the gaps inside this car.

“Once upon a time, not very long ago at all,” Sarah said, and they grew as still as children, “there was a budding — and some would say exasperating — anthropologist. She’d just traveled from the desert land of her birth to the land of the mountain people, so she could be with someone she loved very much, who in turn was off trying to help a mountain man she cared a lot about. It wasn’t long before the anthropologist and her lover got into a teensy argument, and the lover said something about the anthropologist finding a lost tribe in the mountains. And the anthropologist said all the lost tribes were gone, just about, that the next time one was found, that’d probably be it, there wouldn’t be any more.

“Now, although she didn’t much let on, the thought of that made her more sad than she even would have expected, because she knew just who she was thinking about, a tribe she’d only heard rumors about, so she decided she never wanted them to be found, because the possibility of them being out there was a lot more important than the confirmation. The living mystery was more important than having it solved. And because if they were found, they wouldn’t get to remain who they were anymore, it just never seems to happen that way. People who’re found when they don’t know they’re lost seem to lose an awful lot in the finding. So maybe it’d be better for them, and for us, if they stayed lost.”

Sarah paused to sip at a bottle of grapefruit juice. She was the only one moving, the other two poised and tuned in, waiting. She felt embarrassingly in control; she really had them.

“The people the anthropologist was thinking about, they were mountain people too, but way at the frontiers at the edge of the world, almost, in the mountains of the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Mountains and deserts… it wasn’t until she was talking with her lover that the anthropologist came to truly appreciate the allure and the power of both places, because lies have a harder time living in them. So it seemed to her that this last lost tribe must have the best of both worlds where they were.

“The local Mongols called these people almas, and knew enough about them to describe them, and said they were short and stocky, and hairy, with broad features. Very crude clothes, made of animal skins, mostly. But not even the Mongols who’d lived around there nearly forever could talk with them, because their words were so different, and the almas were very shy people, too. But the Mongols did find the almas would trade with them, so they’d leave a parcel of skins or something on the ground, in the open, or on a big rock, where the almas could find it, and when they’d come back later it’d be gone, with something else in its place. Some other skins or tools or food that had been gathered… obviously things that the almas thought had enough value to represent them to the people they were too shy to meet, and whose words they could never understand.”

Sarah took another drink of her juice, and teased her tiny audience with more silence.

“So word got out, even from a region as remote as the Gobi Desert, and everyone who made it a point to pay attention to such things wondered who and what the almas really were. Obviously they were there, and not imaginary. The Mongols didn’t have any reason to be making anything up. Finally, what a lot of people decided the almas might be was a surviving tribe of Neanderthals… still alive in one of the wildest places on earth, where there wasn’t even a rain forest to draw in outsiders just so it could be cut down. The kind of place that was valuable only to the people who lived there… even the ones supposed to have been gone for forty thousand years. So it made the anthropologist wonder something: Do the almas still know something the rest of us have forgotten?”

She heard Adrienne give a satisfied, throaty chuckle.

“And that’s where the story ends, I guess,” she said, with a soft and hopeful smile toward the highway, toward the east, toward the other side of the world. “As far as the anthropologist knows, the almas are still there, still trading with their neighbors, and no one can say for sure who they are. Which is the way it should stay. So the story ends with the mystery and the wonder intact… just the way all good tribal legends should end. Because shamans know that’s the part of the story that teaches the lesson.”

She listened to the hum of the highway beneath them, shut her eyes, and felt Adrienne’s hand sliding tender across the seat to rub her knee. Listened until she heard Clay stir in the back, and speak up for more.

“And what’s the lesson of this one, do you think?” he asked.

“That the almas found a place in the world where they could still live in peace, even if it was the only place on earth left for them. So the almas aren’t really lost at all, not to anybody who bothers to understand. And if they can survive, in a time that’s completely wrong for them… maybe so can a few others who feel as lost as the almas must appear to the rest of the world.”

She smiled back at Clay, who briefly met her eyes before looking away. She waited for more questions but none came, and she thought, for a change, that this was probably for the best.

* * *

They reached Chapel Hill in mid-afternoon and found a motel. Toward dusk, Sarah phoned Kendra Madigan to let her know they were in town, and ask when she would prefer they come to her home.

“Let’s make it no later than ten-thirty tomorrow morning, all right? We’ll have a long, long day ahead of us. And you’ll promise me something? That each of you, you’ll get a good long night’s sleep tonight?”

“Promise,” Sarah said.

“Let me ask you something about this subject of yours,” and Ms. Madigan’s voice had dimmed, quieted. “Is he prone to violence when he learns things he might consider unpleasant?”

Sarah’s hand wrapped harder around the phone. “If it’s about himself… he’d more than likely turn his distress inward. What are you expecting?”

“I don’t expect anything specific, Ms. McGuire. We’ll just have to wait and see. And be ready. Because when someone’s under a hypnosis this deep…? It really is impossible to expect what might come bubbling up from so far down.”

Thirty-Two

Maximum efficiency depended on isolation; of this Valentine was convinced. The greatest movers among humanity — the Alexanders, the Saladins, the Stalins — might be the ones who commanded armies, but even they would remain forever vulnerable. The machinery of their power could grind to a halt by the designs of a single, well-placed individual. The mind, the will, that toiled in perfect isolation could never be betrayed by another.

Only by itself.

And so Patrick Valentine wondered if he might not soon find himself slipping. Opening his house to another this way, he was bound to feel the impact, his focus diluted. Come tomorrow, Daniel Ironwood would be here a week. The impact did not go unnoticed.

Even now, his bedroom was no refuge. Daniel’s voice, from the first floor: “Patrick! Get down here! Right now!”

Scowling, he rose. He tossed aside the inventory lists he’d been scanning, supplied by Teddy this afternoon, a grocery list of the ordnance in a Maryland armory that soon would donate to the cause.

Downstairs he found Daniel on the floor, wound tight and coiled before the TV, an arm extended, bird-dog still. The face on the screen they knew well; they woke up with it every morning, and still he could never quite surmount that initial vertigo when seeing it worn by someone else.

Valentine watched, listened. The story was half-over, but the rest was not difficult to fill in. News from Texas: Lawyers for Mark Alan Nance had exhausted their final appeal, and no one was cutting him any slack for the Helverson’s defense. Execution was on for the middle of next week. In the grimmest room in Huntsville, a table