“We find people of value,” she said, speaking like a teacher addressing a young child, “and we determine what story they need to hear. It’s the story that they’re already telling themselves, don’t you see? It’s the nightmare they believe in. Once you understand that nightmare, you join them in it. Their fear becomes your fear. It’s all a shared experience then. And once you have that, once they feel that is the truth, all the way down to their core, then your coping strategy becomes theirs. It’s a natural progression. This is the power of the shared narrative. Of the echo chamber. Do you follow that? Can you comprehend what I’m saying?”
He stared at her, his broad face showing all the intellect of a steer who has reached the end of the slaughterhouse chute without realizing where he’s been led.
“Infrastructure,” he said stupidly. “That’s all that needs to be hit. A man like the one in that house, he might have believed exactly what we believe. You don’t know. You didn’t bother to ask, you just cut his throat.”
She took a deep, patient breath. Said, “Let’s try this once more. Everything you have heard me say is a lie. Take your time. I’ll give you a few seconds to figure it out.”
“I don’t know what in the hell has gotten into you,” he said. “You’re out of your mind. You’re right-I don’t believe a word you’ve said. Not anymore. Pull over. I’d rather walk to prison than ride another mile with you.”
She remembered nine months ago, when they’d arrived in Cassadaga, how quickly she’d been able to convince him that he needed to stay away from television and computers. They were the most common tools of brainwashing, she’d explained, and then she’d given him a book about neurolinguistic programming. It had been, admittedly, a risky joke to play, because if he paid any attention to the book at all, he might have had some questions about her, but instead he’d swallowed the story whole. Why? Because it was what he had already suspected. Already feared.
Everyone wanted to believe he or she was the prophet of truth, and when that truth was rooted in fear, the desire was even stronger. Every human response was stronger when it came from a place of fear.
Now the source of Doug’s fear had shifted.
“Pull over,” he repeated.
They were driving through prairie country, flat and desolate and entirely empty. She slowed the Yukon and pulled off the road and bounced over the shoulder and onto the grass beyond. She was reaching for the gearshift when she saw the gun in his hand.
“On second thought,” he said, “you’ll do the walking.”
She looked at the gun, not his eyes, while she nodded. Then she moved the gearshift into park, let her foot off the brake, and said, “I’m taking the phones and radios. You clearly won’t have a need for them, and when you’re caught, I’m not letting you get caught with those.”
“You can have your phones. Just get out.”
“Such a waste of potential,” she said.
“Get out.”
She opened the door and stepped out onto the road. The sun put a haze over the asphalt, but the day wasn’t warm. Spring in the high plains, a climate of confusion.
As she walked toward the tailgate, Doug shifted awkwardly. He wanted to just slide from the passenger seat to the driver’s, but he was too big and clumsy for that. She had the tailgate up when he opened the passenger door and stepped out onto the crunching, brittle grass.
On top of the radio bags was the 12-gauge shotgun she’d stolen from Gregory Ardachu’s cabinet. It was loaded with double-aught shells. When she stepped back from the Yukon, he was blank-faced, the pistol at the side of his leg pointed to the ground.
She’d endured this for nine months. It ended in a tenth of a second.
The sound of the 12-gauge echoed across the plains, then faded into their vast spaces. Doug Oriel’s body fell in the dirt beside the Yukon, taking the bottom of his head down with it. The top had been separated from it, and now the remains settled in the grass in a red mist. A bad shot, too high.
But in the end, effective.
She walked to the body and looked down. Only one of his eyes remained, and it was staring into the dust, looking away from her. She sighed and shook her head. Eli had harbored high hopes for Doug and wanted to meet him in person. He’d be disappointed by this result, but he would understand. Doug had lost track of his narrative, and once that happened, he was not only of limited value but high risk.
As a dead man, though, he had renewed potential. She would see to it that he fulfilled his own prophecy.
It seemed he deserved at least that much for his service.
She put the shotgun back in the Yukon, closed first the tailgate and then the passenger door, and got behind the wheel, alone.
48
It took Mark and his uncle nearly an hour to reach Byron, and during the drive neither of them said much. Mark was thinking of the way Sal Cantu had smiled when he’d looked at Larry and said, You actually think your sister matters? It reminded him of the amusement Janell Cole had shown over the idea that Mark believed Lauren mattered. Yet Lauren had known the phrase rise the dark, which mattered to all of them, and certainly mattered to Lynn Deschaine and Homeland Security. How had Lauren heard of it? He was beginning to wish they’d gotten in a few more questions before Larry had knocked the man out.
“This would be the place,” Larry said, slowing. “The warehouse Cantu described. That’s it, right?”
Calling it a warehouse was lipstick on a pig-the place was just an oversize old prefabricated barn in a gravel parking lot surrounded by a high fence and a gate with a keypad. There were no vehicles in the lot, and the property looked beyond empty. Desolate.
Larry was pulling in when Mark felt the sensation that had come over him in Cassadaga-that soft, rubber-band sound, and suddenly he was tense, hand drifting toward his gun.
“Drive past.”
Larry obliged without comment, cruising down the lonely road for another mile, until the barn was out of sight and they were facing a sign for the Byron oil field, which loomed just to the north.
“Okay, chief,” Larry said, pulling onto the shoulder and turning off the car, “what’s the master plan?”
“We go back on foot. It’s so damned empty that they’re going to hear anybody in a truck, particularly this abomination of an exhaust system.”
Larry looked wounded. “I had Blue tuned up not five years ago!”
“There’s only so much a mortician can do to improve a situation, Uncle.”
“It was a mechanic.”
“Uh-huh. Regardless, I’d like to go in quietly. It’s not much of a walk.”
“It’s a damned empty one, though. A truck pulled up outside of that place looks like it belongs, maybe. Left here? It’s abandoned. It draws the eye. If anyone is in the place, they’ll see us coming ten minutes before we get there instead of thirty seconds. And if anything goes wrong, we’ve got a mile of empty highway to come back up, with nowhere to hide.”
He pointed at the surrounding countryside, bleak and barren, looking more like West Texas than Wyoming. There was no snow here; the earth was dry and fissured, like the palm of an old man’s hand. Until the Pryor Mountains rose up in the north, red-baked and uninspiring, there was no shelter. Fleeing on foot would mean covering a long stretch of open land dotted with scrub pines and brush. Larry was right-if it came to that, they’d wish the truck were a hell of a lot closer.
“All right,” Mark said. “Just make it fast. This wreck sounds like a steam locomotive.”
“Don’t you listen to him, Blue. Don’t you listen.” Larry started the engine. The exhaust fired like a cannon volley, and then they were in motion. Mark’s mouth was dry, and the strange, echoing pops were back in his skull. He was aware of a single bead of sweat trickling down his spine.