Burn(37)

“What?” he said, genuinely surprised. “What the hell does that have to do with the price of fish?”

“It’s a spy satellite, Agent Dernovich.”

“Yes, of course it is, but again I say, so what?”

“In all the tension between the U.S. and Russia, we never considered that the dragons aren’t going to like being spied on, either.”

“So the dragons get the Believer Pope they’ve always ignored to suddenly send an assassin from Canada to a nothing town in Washington? Make a connection that works, Woolf, or quit wasting my time.”

“It’s going to launch from a remote station in Siberia.”

“Is there anything in Siberia that couldn’t be called remote?”

She ignored that. “Intel has gathered info from its sources in the country and have plotted possible first orbits of the satellite. Guess where almost all of them cross more or less first in the Continental U.S.?”

“Frome, Washington?”

She nodded.

“Why? What the hell’s there?”

“For the Soviets? Nothing. Just an entry point on its way to D.C. For the Believers, though.” She ran her finger over the dragon runes in her notebook again, looking somewhat uncertain for the first time. “As best as I can translate . . .”

“Yes?”

“They say it’s the tipping point.”

“So I’m lost either way?” Nelson said, looking surprisingly small on the motel room bed.

They’d had no choice. The roads were getting more and more impassable in the snow; they hadn’t enough fuel to stay in the truck without freezing to death; and there was no campground left open in the entire state, it seemed. They had taken the cheapest motel room possible and just had to hope the police wouldn’t find them in the storm.

“I can protect you,” Malcolm said, “if you come with me. But the police will be looking for your truck and for you.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I’ll tell them that. After my mission.” He did not add, If I survive.

Nelson put his head in his hands, running two anguished fists through his hair. “This is hell. This is actual hell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, that makes everything better.”

“Does it?”

Nelson looked up at him. “Who even are you?”

“I’m Malcolm.”

“Is that your real name?”

“I don’t have a real name. Malcolm is as real as it can be.”

“That makes no sense. They had to call you something.”

“The Mitera Thea never needed to. She always knew who I was.”

“Isn’t she, like, your Pope or something?”

“Mitera Thea? She is the source of it all.”

“All what?”

“Knowledge. Power. The future and the past. Hers were the first words I heard in the morning and the last at night. She’d leave me recordings when she had to travel. I still pray to her. And sometimes she comes to my aid. As, I hope, now.”

Nelson looked at him, his eyes red and sad. “You’re talking about someone sending a dragon, aren’t you?”

“If that’s what it needs to be.”

“Coming here?”

Malcolm was unsure of this, but he had been praying. Mitera Thea worked in mysterious ways. “Maybe,” he said.

“You actually expect a dragon to come here and help you?”

“Help us.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked.”

Nelson was incredulous. “And that’s enough, is it?”

Malcolm could barely stand the still-stinging sadness in Nelson’s eyes. “We believe they’re angels. Heaven on earth.” But even as he said it, he knew that didn’t quite cover it. Anyone could believe that without dedicating their life to the Belief, without living in a Cell, without offering up unquestioning commitment to a mission that would require man’s laws to be broken and for Malcolm’s own life to almost certainly end.

What could explain it? That he’d known nothing else? But that was like saying he’d known nothing else but life on earth. There was nothing else. He had been cared for. He had been nurtured and protected. Now, he would do the same in return. It was hardly even a sacrifice.

Believer was an ironic name. Like he’d said to Nelson, it was an unnecessary word when what you believed in moved among you. It merely distinguished them from all the unbelievers who had to take on a kind of bizarre anti-faith not to believe. He pitied the rest of the world.

He also pitied Nelson, but in a different way. There again was the sob threatening to break free. He had not expected this. Had not expected to feel so fast, so deeply.

“Will the dragon burn us?” Nelson asked, slumping down into himself. “Will it burn this all away?”

Nelson sounded like that was exactly what he wanted, and Malcolm’s heart broke afresh.

“We can’t possibly be this lucky,” Agent Dernovich said.

“Why not?” Agent Woolf said, as they idled the Oldsmobile in the motel parking lot.

Where they were blocking in the rusted brown truck they’d been seeking.

“Why not indeed?” Agent Dernovich said, taking out his gun.