The Boy from the Woods(101)

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

“Probably at the hospital. Rola took him.”

“So Rola knows about this?”

Wilde chose not to reply.

“You get why we did this,” Saul said. “You see the danger, right?”

“It took me a while to remove the blinders of self-interest,” Gavin said. “You become so enmeshed in a charismatic leader, seduced by all that he can give you, that you can’t see past his bullshit. Then Saul started pleading his case to me.”

“You didn’t need much persuasion,” Saul said. “You were already starting to see.”

“Maybe I was—the pill popping, the erratic behavior, the ease with which he could manipulate. I liked his idea of tearing down the social order to rebuild, but as I spent more time with him, it became clear that Rusty doesn’t want to rebuild. Rusty wants to destroy this country. He wants to pull us apart by the seams.”

“We two old men don’t agree on much,” Saul said. “I’m on one side of the political aisle. Gavin is on the other. But we are both Americans.”

“Our views, opposite as they might seem, are in the realm of normalcy.”

“That’s not what Rusty wants. Rusty wants to make everyone choose a side, turn everyone into an extremist.”

“Seems it worked,” Wilde said, still holding the gun on them.

“What do you mean?”

“You two kidnapped a child. You cut off his finger. If that’s not being an extremist…”

Their faces fell. Both of them.

Gavin said, “You think we wanted to do that?”

“Doesn’t matter what you wanted.”

“You tell me,” Saul Strauss said. “Would Dash Maynard have given up the tape any other way?”

“Again: Doesn’t matter. You made the choice.” Wilde said it slowly and with emphasis: “You. Cut. Off. A. Boy’s. Finger.”

Gavin Chambers lowered his head. Saul Strauss tried to hold his high, but his mouth was quaking.

“Crash was drugged up when we did that, unconscious,” Saul said. “We kept the pain and trauma to a minimum.”

“You disfigured him. Then you threatened to cut off his arm. Suppose the Maynards didn’t send the tape. Would you have gone through with that? Would you have sent them his arm?”

Gavin Chambers finally looked up. “How far would you go to save millions of lives, Wilde?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“We’re all soldiers here, so it damn well is,” Gavin said. “This battlefield might not be as obvious, but lives are at stake. Millions. So if disfiguring or killing one person, even an innocent kid, could save millions of lives, would you do it?”

“That’s a pretty slippery slope you’re standing on, Colonel.”

“The frontline troops are always standing on a slippery slope. You know that. Would we have rather cut off our own fingers to save those lives? Of course. But that wasn’t the choice. Life isn’t lived in the black and white, Wilde. People like to think so nowadays. All the online outrage, things are either all good or all bad. But life is lived in the gray. Life is lived in the nuances.”

“Even now,” Saul added, “you standing there holding a gun on us. Gavin and I are willing to pay the price for what we did. We felt we had no choice. But we’ve now saved Raymond—”

“Righting a tremendous wrong,” Gavin added. “Nothing hypothetical about that.”

“—and on a much larger scale, we maybe saved this country. That tape we just sent out could change the course of history.”

The two men waited now for Wilde to say something.

After a few moments passed, Gavin put his hand on Saul Strauss’s arm. “Oh man.”

“What?” Saul said.

“Wilde gets it.”

Strauss frowned. “What do you mean?”

Gavin met Wilde’s eye. “I mean Wilde has been hiding in this garage since before you arrived.”

“So?”

“So he waited, Saul. He waited for you to get here. He waited until we sent out the tape.”

Silence.

Strauss saw it now. He turned to face Wilde too. “You could have stopped us. You could have popped out with that gun two minutes earlier.”

“And the tape would never have seen the light of day,” Gavin added.

“But you didn’t do that, Wilde.” Both men were nodding along now. “You came out with us on that slippery slope.”

Wilde said nothing.

“In the end,” Gavin said, “we’re just three soldiers.”

“One last mission. You let us complete it.”

“In my case,” Gavin said, taking a step in front of Saul, “a suicide mission.”

Wilde finally spoke. “Wait, what?”

“I’ll be okay in prison,” Saul said. “I’ll still be able to speak out. I can still be a voice.”

“But I’m an old man and I don’t want to face that,” Gavin said. He stood and reached out his hand. “Let me have my gun back, Wilde. Warrior to warrior. Let me end this on my terms.”

Suicide.

“No,” Wilde said.