Burn(36)

“Superintendent—”

“There are enormous issues at stake, Superintendent,” Woolf broke in.

“More than the death of my officer?” the superintendent fumed. “More than some crazy Believer assassin you tell me we’ve got running around?”

“I’m afraid so,” Woolf said, her calm catching the superintendent’s attention the same way it had so often caught Dernovich’s.

“Perhaps you’d care to share those issues with me, Agent,” the superintendent said, addressing only her.

“Above my pay grade, but I can tell you we are authorized to stop him with extreme prejudice.”

We are? Dernovich only just kept himself from saying out loud. Whether that was true or not—and boy, was he going to find out—it was working on the superintendent, who finally seemed to think he was getting some proper support.

“Plate came back to a family in Vancouver,” he told them.

“Long way from here,” Dernovich said, trying to add something to the conversation. The superintendent ignored him.

“Parents say their son”—and here he read from his notes—“Nelson Arriaga, seventeen, took it when he left home last week.”

“Why did he leave home?” Woolf asked.

The superintendent read again. “Parents say he was, quote, ‘an abomination against God.’”

Woolf’s eyebrows raised. She looked over at Dernovich, who asked, “What do they mean by that?”

“Fruitcake. Found him with another boy. Threw him out.” The superintendent looked at them seriously. “Do you think that might be something we can use?”

The superintendent clearly thought it was, so Dernovich said, “Yes, yes, we do,” before Woolf could beat him to it.

“Believers take a different view of what humans do together than most people,” Malcolm said.

“Obviously,” Nelson said, the bitterness apparent, even through the tears.

“I don’t mean that. We’re not killers.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I’m . . . on a mission.”

“One that involves killing policemen?”

Malcolm hesitated, then said, “If need be.”

Nelson looked back out his window at the snow and empty road. “Get out of my truck,” he said again, but the anger had gone.

“The world. . . . It’s on a knife edge, Nelson. Something’s coming that will send it one way or another, and if it’s not sent the right way . . . All of this, the snow, this truck, you, me. All of that vanishes. Ends. We all die.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Believe me, I wish it weren’t true.”

“How are you different from my parents, then? Huh? They said the world was ending, too.” His voice dropped. “They said I was part of it.”

“How am I different?” Malcolm put his hand gently on Nelson’s thigh, not as a prelude to anything physical, just as a comfort. “I would have thought that was clear.”

“You killed that man.”

“I wish I didn’t have to.”

“You didn’t—”

“Nelson—”

Nelson pushed his hand away. “You ruined it. For a minute there . . .” He looked miserably out the window again. “You ruined it.”

Malcolm didn’t reply. It seemed he had ruined it. The sob in his throat threatened again, and he swallowed it down, like he had been trained to. He would drive to Kalispell, and then he would leave Nelson to his truck, wishing him the best.

Though it was the truck the police were undoubtedly now looking for, he thought, and Nelson had no training to avoid being captured. Malcolm looked back over to the boy he’d so recently been close to, whose body he had explored and been explored in return. Now probably doomed, all because he’d helped Malcolm.

He really had ruined everything.

“What’s the name of the town again?” Dernovich asked as he drove. They’d left almost immediately, Woolf putting off the RCMP with mutterings about “top secret missions,” again in language Dernovich would have very much liked to use out loud himself.

“Kalispell,” Woolf said. “About sixty miles from here.”

“They’ve got half a day’s head start.”

“Yes, but in a snowstorm.”

“A snowstorm that affects us, too, Agent.”

She sighed, clearly impatient. When had the power shifted between them? When had she gone from his subordinate to someone who could sigh so contemptuously without fear of reprisal? Maybe it had always been like that and he was too stupid to have noticed.

“It matters not,” she said, actually using those words, like a Henry James novel, not that Agent Dernovich had ever read one. “We know where he’s going. The other boy will be useful if we can find him, but the road still ends at the same place.”

“Frome, Washington.”

“Frome, Washington,” she confirmed.

“And you’re sure about that?”

“It’s not just the prophecy,” she said, taking out that infernal notebook. “I had a hunch and got all the intel Cutler had on this satellite the Russians are launching. They’ve moved up the date. It could be tomorrow or the day after, at the latest.”