The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(68)

Rain stood by the door while the boy and the woman were getting in, and Maya had seen he was holding his pistol. Delilah reached across and opened Rain’s door, and was pulling away the second he was in. Maya was no gunfighter, but she’d done the training at the Farm and knew the smell of gun smoke, and as soon as all the doors were closed, she recognized it. Rain had shot someone. The boy and the woman, who Maya could tell was his mother, started signing furiously. The boy must have been deaf. “What happened?” Delilah said, and Rain told her there had been two men waiting, and they were both dead now. And Maya had turned to the window.

They kept driving. Eventually they’d get somewhere. And maybe some of this would start to make sense.

“Hey,” she heard Rain say. “We’ve got them all. Everyone’s fine.”

She looked over at him. He had placed a satellite hotspot on the dashboard, and was talking on a cellphone. Probably to Tom. She listened as he retold what had happened at the school. She turned away and stared out the window again.

“Yes,” Rain said. “She’s right here. Hold on.” There was a pause, and he said, “Maya.” She turned, and he held out the phone to her.

She didn’t want to talk to Tom. Or anyone. She wanted to go to sleep. Or to wake up. Whatever it took for none of this to have happened.

But she took the phone. “Hello.”

“You okay?” It was Tom, as she’d thought.

“Yeah.”

“They’re good people. They’ll take care of you. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“I don’t care.” It sounded childish as she said it. But she felt like a child. Her eyes welled up. Frodo started licking the tears.

“Listen,” he said. “I think I have a way to solve this. But I need your help. I’m sorry to ask you again, because your helping me is what put you in danger. And got Ali killed.”

Maya’s face scrunched up and a tiny whimper escaped her throat. Then the tears were coming and for a moment, she couldn’t speak. She closed her eyes and sat there, silently shaking in a car full of strangers.

When she opened her eyes, the boy was holding a tissue, extended to her. She shook her head, embarrassed. She was such a wreck that a kid was trying to comfort her. “It’s okay,” he said, a little too loudly. “It’s clean.” And his expression was so earnest that Maya couldn’t help but laugh, that he thought she didn’t want the tissue because she was afraid it was used.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I have more if you need them. I have allergies.”

“Okay. Thanks again.”

He glanced at Frodo. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Frodo.”

“Like in The Lord of the Rings?”

“Yes.”

Frodo barked, and the boy must have realized it because he laughed. “I’m Dash.”

“Maya.”

“Can I hold him?”

She nodded and handed him Frodo, who immediately began licking his face. He laughed again, obviously delighted.

Tom said, “Are you there?”

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Took a deep breath and let it out.

Then she said to Tom, “Tell me what you need.”





chapter

fifty-one





DEVEREAUX


Devereaux had given the contractors strict instructions to check in every thirty minutes. It had now been over an hour, and the only explanation was that something had gone wrong.

He took a swig of Mylanta straight from the bottle, grimacing at the powdery taste. His stomach was killing him, and he’d barely slept since this thing had begun. He’d always known there would be a price to pay for what he’d done, hadn’t he? For the . . . temptation he’d succumbed to. He just hadn’t imagined it would be this.

He leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk, and covered his face with his hands. There had to be a way to turn this around. There had to be.

He sat like that for a few minutes. His office, the mighty command center of America’s entire intelligence community, had always seemed so secure to him. So stalwart. But now it felt flimsy. As though its walls were paper, about to be shredded, leaving him helpless and exposed, to be pulled down and torn apart from all sides.

When he opened his eyes, he saw activity on the police channel he was monitoring. Reports of a shooting. Montgomery County police officers dispatched to the deaf school. Two bodies, both white males.

He laughed, more sickened than shocked. Because of course. A woman and her teenaged deaf son. Against two ex-military contractors. They must have had help. But who? Manus, back from the West Coast?

But that was a question for later. What mattered now was that the leverage he had hoped to gain over Manus had just evaporated. He needed another move. A new plan.

Well, Plan A had been to prevent the videos from ever even seeing the light of day. Even after the texts he and Hobbs had received on the Mall, he’d still believed they could stop the release.

But now, he had to be realistic. He had to mitigate. Just in case.

Okay. He had half a dozen reporters who would print virtually anything he told them on background. Rispel had probably been playing him with her talk about the Russians and Chinese. He’d been so distraught at the time that he’d bought it. But it didn’t matter if it was bullshit. The truth was, it was a good idea. There was no reason he shouldn’t use it . . . and every reason he should.