Hummingbird Salamander(93)

“What if I’d swallowed the key?”

“The key? Oh—the clues? Good idea to bug both the cabin and the house, as it turns out. Once I knew the letter existed, I got the gist from your lovely stepmother. Just recently.”

Flare of anger.

“She’s not my stepmother. Did you kill her, too?”

“My, the things we worry about at the end of history. No. I didn’t have to—she was happy to tell me.”

To be expected. I felt more betrayed by Hellmouth Jack. That didn’t make sense, meant I’d relaxed too much into the banter of our conversations.

“I’ve always been more discreet than Langer anyway,” he added.

“Langer was the last one, wasn’t he?”

“Last what? Lone ranger? Anger management counselor? Inept courier?”

“Last member of Contila. Of any note.”

“True. Contila membership has become very elite in recent months. But there’s one left.”

“Who?”

“Silvina, of course. And she—or her ‘child,’ her pet project—is up here somewhere, isn’t she?”

I said nothing.

“Surely you, too, have looked askance at that hit-and-run report. Surely you, too, would like someone to find her ashes in the ocean and run a DNA test?”

I said nothing. Didn’t want to help him. Didn’t want to be complicit that way. I felt his gaze would warp the discovery. Irrational, but I’d just found where Silvina had existed in my life, the compass point. I wanted that kept pure.

“We could do this ‘the hard way,’ as they say. But I like you, Jill. I like especially how tough you are. Maybe I did shield you a bit, but you took chances. You made your own luck. And you have been a tremendous help to me. It’s not hard to guess now, anyhow: Silvina used the cover of the mining operation to complete her project up here. And we’re going to find it—the rebel angels.”

“This is what you were after all along,” I said. “Just chance it’s me, not Langer.”

“Three birds with one stone is better than one, better than two. Whatever Silvina planned, neither you nor Langer should be the ones to decide what to do with it.”

“‘It.’”

“A biological weapon, of course.”

But that could mean so many things. Weapon. Biological. It could mean a living mask that helped you breathe or it could mean a poison that wiped out a million people.

“What will you do with it?”

“Inform the agency. Contain it. Dismantle it.”

But his expression had a hunger to it that told me he was lying. If Hellmouth Jack still worked for an agency, the place would have been crawling with agents and military. Which meant he had nothing behind him. No one backing him up. Which meant he planned to use this moment for himself.

As the light got brighter and you could almost sense the sun, I could see the rumpled contours of his tattered gray suit. The left sleeve of the jacket had a tear. A fresh cut along the side of his face. His fancy shoes were caked in drying mud. A line of blood had dried on his white dress shirt.

“How many people have you killed?” I asked.

“Enough. Langer did some of it, at my urging, before he got wise. But I ran over Larry—botched that. I killed quite a few of Vilcapampa’s people. Never cared for Vilcapampa. I would’ve killed Allie if I’d had to, but, in the end, it was clear you hadn’t told her anything.”

“But you left my husband alone.”

He laughed. “Jill, it was clear you never confided in him. About much of anything. Now, get up. We’re going to find Silvina’s secret, you and me together. I owe you that much.”

I think he meant to murder me, in the end. After we’d found the promised land. I do believe that.

Starving, dehydrated, I got to my feet. Rough canvas with nothing much inside. I stumbled, caught my balance. Hellmouth Jack let me get my water out of my pack.

I threw the empty bottle at him and he ducked.

A big grin then.

“Don’t you want to know my real name?” he asked. As if it had been on his mind.

As if he’d seen this encounter in his daydreams a hundred times before.

I said nothing.

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter now.





[97]


We searched for three days. All along the gravel slope, the plateaus above that greeted us like strange moonscapes. We labored at our task with at first the serious formality of captive and captor. Then, as we found nothing, more like coequals. Because I had begun to become frantic, too. The site of the main mining excavation had been filled in. A brief elation at the discovery of a kind of silo dissolved when it became clear it was empty. Some sort of nascent septic system.

By the second day, I knew in my gut that we wouldn’t find it. If it had ever been there. Jack was surly, snapped often, smoked more. Urged me on as if I was the problem. As if he would have found it if I hadn’t been there. As if I put out some invisible field or aura obscuring the truth. When he accused me of knowing more than I’d told him, I shrugged. And he could see in the resignation that I had given up.

The weather got worse. We shared Jack’s tent on the wet gravel, me tied up, hands in front. He had a couple bottles of rum. He offered me a cup. I took it. I didn’t know rum from Adam, but it tasted good.