"Point taken. So he, uh, got rid of Dodge."
"And tried to get rid of me. He wanted me off the case before I could talk to anyone. The leak to the media was just an excuse. He had to get me out of the field office-and back in my motel room."
"Which was sabotaged."
"Yes. Although I suspect he did that earlier. He’d brought me to LA just to kill me. He didn’t need any additional incentives."
Larkin let out a puff of breath. "Let’s face it. He was the boss from hell."
"Maybe that’s where he is now."
He gave her a quizzical look. "You believe in that stuff?"
"It would be nice to think there’s some ultimate justice."
"He’s dead. Isn’t that justice enough?"
She thought of Paul, what he had been, what she had lost.
"No," she said. "Not nearly."
The mayor was waiting. Tess left Larkin in the room that had been Mobius’s inner sanctum and returned to the front of the house.
"Well, look who’s here. The hero of the hour."
The maddening nasal voice could belong to only one person.
She turned and saw the Nose detach himself from a crowd of agents.
"Hero of the next fifteen minutes, anyway," she said.
"Don’t be modest. Use it for all it’s worth."
"I intend to."
"You know, McCallum"-for once, Michaelson met her gaze-"I had to help get the brass and the politicos out of that room and through the air lock. But when I saw that you weren’t with us, I was going to come back for you."
She said nothing. He took her silence as skepticism.
"Really. I was. But then the goddamn bomb went off, and we had to shut the door and get to ground level because the gas was all over. We had no protective gear." He gave a little laugh. "And you think this is all a line of bullshit, don’t you?"
"Actually, I don’t. I believe you." She smiled. "I don’t think you respect me enough to lie to me."
"Oh, I respect you. I just don’t like you. No, on second thought, I guess I don’t respect you, either. But that’ll just be our secret."
He was about to walk away, but she decided to tell him something. "You know what, Dick?" He hated being called Dick. "For a few minutes, I was almost convinced you were Mobius."
"Were you?"
"A lot of things pointed to it. But, of course, I should’ve known I was wrong. I’d seen the artist’s sketches of Mobius in his various disguises. He was a man with bland, totally unmemorable features." She showed him a kindly smile. "And let’s face it, Dick-there are some features you just can’t hide."
The Nose blinked, then understood. His hand went unconsciously to his proboscis.
"You’d better hope we never work together again, McCallum," he growled.
"Believe me," she said, "I do."
She could have left then, but Levine and the rest of the reporters were still outside, and she felt suddenly too tired to fend them off. She retreated out a side door and leaned against a eucalyptus tree in the yard, screened from the media by a high fence overgrown with oleander.
The stars were fading. There was a glow in the east. A new day.
The side door eased open, and Larkin poked his head out.
"Tess? The mayor…"
"In a minute."
He left her alone. She thought about the story in the Tribune, the eight-year-old boy whose mother had gone crazy. She thought about the laboratory in Oregon under government contract to make chemical poison.
There seemed to be no connection between those two things, yet they had come together like the words and music of a song. An old song, as old as history. Insanity breeding insanity, the stockpiled weapons of war replaced by new and deadlier armaments, terror giving birth to new terror. An endless cycle, a loop circling from one generation to the next, returning always to the same point. A Mobius strip.
Sow the wind, harvest the whirlwind. And no one learned, ever.
Yet it was morning, and the sun was rising, and it was Easter.
That had to count for something.
Tess stood unmoving for a long time and watched the brightening sky.