Devoted(104)

When it was done, he knelt on the floor with Kipp and held his companion, their faces cheek to cheek, fur to skin, for a long, sweet moment. The boy did not speak, and the dog could not speak, but they were both celebrating thousands of years of mutual dependence and love between their species. They were celebrating as well the maturation of that bond into something magnificent and miraculous that neither of them could have imagined two days earlier.

They were poised on the brink of a radical transformation of the world, which had begun before the earliest recorded history, when an alliance had first been made between one dog and one primitive human being on some hostile plain or in some forest filled with menace. Until then, the only shelter against bitter weather and the mortal dangers posed by nature’s many beasts was a cave and a carefully tended fire. But with that alliance, two predators—dog and man, working together over uncounted millennia—had made of themselves more than predators by virtue of the love that grew between them. This love was not just the instinct of one species to value its own, but a love that put dogs and human beings on a long road toward one destiny. Some might call it evolution, dogs slowly becoming more intelligent until they took a sudden quantum leap forward, and some might call it intelligent design, but whatever the agent of change, neither species was as much as it could be without the other. Dogs needed the hands and voices of human beings, and people needed—desperately needed—to receive unto themselves the innocence of dogs, to acquire their intolerance for deceit, and to seek to match their loyalty.



That it was a mute autistic boy who became the translator between the two species was an irony Woody could have appreciated even in his former condition. The responsibility humbled him now, and he said, “Come on, Kipp. I need to talk with Mom.”





113



In the Oxley house, the agents of Atropos were finished with poker and were preparing for their visit to the Bookmans.

They were armed with pistols, but they had no intention of blasting their way into the house. A simple knock on the door and a credible-looking badge would get them inside. The Bookmans might be expecting trouble, but not trouble that arrived in a vehicle like the FBI used in movies, not trouble that wore a dark suit and spoke respectfully and presented a superbly forged photo ID with the Bureau seal.



Their weapons of choice were Tasers and small spray bottles that fired streams of chloroform. When the targets were stunned with 50,000 volts and then rendered unconscious, they would be restrained with zip ties.

Thereafter, the interrogation could begin, to discover exactly all that Megan Bookman had learned about Dark Web murder-for-hire and the clients who paid for well-staged accidents, induced heart attacks, cerebral embolisms, suicides, and fake terrorist incidents.

They would inject the widow Bookman and possibly others with the barbiturate thiopental, often called “truth serum,” which did not guarantee she would tell them everything, only that she would experience an irresistible compulsion to answer their questions. When thiopental was administered with a cocktail of drugs developed by Russia’s chief intelligence directorate, however, lying became almost an impossibility, especially when the injections were with the threat of extreme pain.

“If we’re lucky,” Verbotski said, “she hasn’t yet shared what she’s learned with anyone outside that house. Then we only need to gather all her evidence, bring the four of them back here, kill them with as little mess as possible, take them back to Reno, and dispose of the bodies so they can never be found.”

Atropos & Company had an unblemished record of disposing of the dead in ways that no remains were ever recovered. The liquidation lab in their Reno facility was a marvel of cadaver processing.



“What about the dog?” Rodchenko asked. “That guy, whoever he is, showed up with a dog.”

“What about it?”

“Are we going to kill the dog?” Rodchenko wondered.

“If it gives us trouble.”

“I want to kill it whether it gives us trouble or not.”

“What’ve you got against dogs?”

“I don’t like the way they look at me.”

“How do they look at you?” Bradley Knacker wondered.

“The way a cop looks at you when his instinct is on fire. Dogs just creep me out. They always have. I’ve been bitten three times.”

Speer said, “So kill the dog.”

“Everyone okay with that?” Rodchenko asked.

Everyone was okay with it.





114



Woody led his mother from the kitchen to her studio, where she sat on her stool near the unfinished painting of him and the deer.

Beyond the tall windows, the yard trees were not tossing as violently as before. The wind seemed to be at last diminishing a little, though the overcast was growing darker.



He stood before his mom and took her hands in his. He saw that she was still surprised and moved by his willingness to touch rather than just assenting to be touched.

“Something really big is happening,” he told her.

“Something enormous already has, sweetie.”

“Bigger than just me.” Of course she knew about the Mysterium and the Wire. She knew that the dogs couldn’t read one another’s mind, that the Wire was essentially just a psychic telephone. Now he told her about Bella in Santa Rosa and about what Bella had done for him. “I’m still learning how to do what Bella does, how she speaks to all of them, gets through to all of them, whether they’re on the Wire at the moment or not. It’s cool. It’s like something out of Heinlein. But I’m going to need more hours of practice before maybe I can . . . take the next step.”