Cutting Edge

little angry. “No one wants a fatality tonight. We are optimistic that we can make the arrests without violence.”

“Cameron isn’t like the others-the other men my mother has been involved with. He’s, I don’t know. He doesn’t seem quite … right. That sounds dumb.”

Andy shook his head. “Not dumb. Our in-house shrinks suspect he’s borderline schizophrenic. Paranoid, distrustful of anyone in authority. He could just as easily be targeting abortion clinics as nuclear power plants. Whatever he wraps his sick mind around. Remember that-this isn’t about you, or even Lorraine, who is an enabler. This is about a violent, psychopathic criminal, and I will put him in prison. He’ll never hurt you, Nora.”

She believed Andy. He knew what he was doing; she could trust him.

“I think you should stay with Quin. We have his plan, and will-”

She shook her head. “I have to go. Cameron insisted. I don’t think he trusts me. Not this, but in general. He’s always watching me, it gives me the creeps.”

“Make an excuse. Get sick. Can you make yourself throw up? They won’t want someone with the stomach flu to slow them down.”

Nora feared that if she pretended to be sick, Cameron would kill her. She evaded Andy’s question and asked, “Is everything set for my emancipation and Quin?”

He nodded. “But we’re keeping it confidential.”

“She’s all I have.”

“That’s not true.”

Nora looked at him, hearing something different in his voice. Something like longing. But she had little experience with boys her own age, let alone men like Andy Keene.

He took her hand. Her stomach fluttered, her head felt light. “You have you. You’re a strong, smart young woman with great instincts and boundless compassion. Never doubt yourself, ever.” He looked nervous. “I-you have me, Nora. I’m not going to push you, I’m not going to crowd you. I know you’ll have a lot of things to settle after tonight. But I hope you’ll let me be part of your life, when you’re ready.”

She felt like Cinderella, being swept off her feet by a handsome prince as they battled her evil mother. But her life wasn’t a fairy tale. It had been hard, cold, unforgiving, and ruthless.

Yet she still had hope. Maybe she could have a future where she could make a real difference.

“I’d like that.” Her voice sounded foreign. Had she even spoken?

Then he kissed her. It was short and light, but it was clear he was kissing her, his lips on hers, his hand pressing gently on her back. Kind, hopeful, supportive. But this wasn’t friendship. Nora knew exactly what it meant.

I hope you’ll let me be part of your life.

“You’ll be safe, Nora,” he whispered. “I promise I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Nora jumped when Cameron slapped her thigh hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. Gone were the memories of Andy kissing her, the warm feeling of being safe even for a moment. She was back in the Jeep, facing a half-deranged man.

“Pay attention, Nora!”

They had parked at the base of a mountain. Behind her were trees towering high into the sky-or so she imagined from the dense blackness on this moonless night. In front of them was two thousand feet of open space. A meadow blanketed with wildflowers-she remembered them from their earlier reconnaissance, bright and breezy. Now the grassy plain looked like a bottomless pit in front of an industrial complex that lit up the coast.

Quin had fallen asleep in the backseat; now she stirred. “Mom?”

“Stay here,” Lorraine commanded.

“I want to go with you and Nora,” she whined, her voice quavering with unshed tears. “It’s dark.”

Cameron turned and glared at Quin with his dark eyes narrowed, and she didn’t say anything else, just pulled her blanket closer to her chest. Nora hated her mother then, for not protecting them. For bringing Quin into this.

“It’ll be okay,” Nora told her sister.

“I expect every detail to be handled with precision,” said Cameron. “You’ll have ten minutes to get out, then ten minutes to rendezvous back here after Ken and I set the charges. Ten minutes before the valves blow, releasing toxic radiation. If you don’t move quickly you will die. It will be painful. Understand?”

Nora nodded and Quin stared with wide eyes, shaking.

Nora reached over to console her, surprised at her steady hand. Maybe she’d gone on too many of these; she’d become jaded, complacent. The time her mother broke into a university research lab and released seventy rabbits, Nora had been lookout; she’d been nine like Quin was now. Or when Lorraine, pregnant with Quin, had staged a protest outside a slaughterhouse and gotten national news attention when she went into labor and gave birth in a nearby field. Nora had been the one to wrap her new sister in blankets and cut the umbilical cord because the ambulance hadn’t arrived. She’d been eight. Or two years ago, when Lorraine first met Cameron Lovitz during an anti-nuclear-weapon rally, and they’d broken into a military museum and spray-painted obscenities and slogans all over the walls. That they’d gotten away amazed Nora; she thought for sure they’d all be caught and thrown in prison. The vandalism was all over the TV news for weeks.

But they were never caught, and soon thereafter Lorraine moved them off the streets of San Francisco to an apartment in San Luis Obispo and Nora thought she might have a home.

She’d been wrong.

After Nora turned informant, the FBI came up with a plan and brought in Special Agent Andrew Keene undercover at Cal Poly to handle her involvement. And now, eight months of secrecy, deception, and fear was nearly over.

Nora focused on breathing, on getting through each too-long minute. “Be brave,” she told Quin. She handed Quin her small teddy bear, the one Nora had saved every time Lorraine uprooted them without warning. She mouthed I love you, and meant it. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for her sister.

The air was cold at one in the morning, the salt-tinged breeze urging Nora to pull her windbreaker tighter around her thin body. She wore only a T-shirt and threadbare sweater under the windbreaker; Cameron insisted they all travel light.

They picked this time because shift change had been at midnight; it would be quiet, everyone would have settled into their routines, and the earlier shift would have left.

She saw Cameron’s gun for the first time when they went through the weak link in the electric fence: a rarely used entrance. Why the powerplant didn’t have a guard at the gate, and hadn’t disabled the electronic code, she didn’t know. Maybe this was what Andy meant earlier, that the FBI was letting them get through the gate first so they’d be caught red-handed with pipe bombs. No question what their plans were. But they’d already crossed over land that was closed to the public. What more did the FBI want?

The code Kenny had provided would disable the warning alarm so an employee could enter without the alarms going off. The main office would still be alerted, but because it was close enough to shift time, Kenny said no one would be suspicious.

They just needed to cross another two hundred feet of open space, and then they’d have cover up against an office building. The plan was to walk around the building, emerging only forty feet from the entrance to the reactors. The codes from Kenny would also work to get inside the building.

She hung back with her mother for a moment and whispered, “Lorraine.” Her mother didn’t like being called Mom. Nora couldn’t remember calling her Mom, even as a child.

Lorraine turned to her, irritated. “Can it wait, Nora?”

“Cameron has a gun.”

“It’s okay.”

Lorraine hated guns. How many times had Nora been dragged to a gun-control rally? Holding up signs and proclaiming at the top of her lungs that guns killed? But now her mother sounded like it was totally normal to have a gun. When had that changed? Cameron. He had charisma and charm to woo people into believing his bizarre philosophy, but he was also violent and unpredictable. He had turned her mother from a sixties hippie who would never hurt an animal, person, or plant into a terrorist.