She walked for an hour, trying to think herself into the person she needed to be and finding it inexplicably difficult. She had done it before. Four times, in fact, had she presented herself behind a new mask. In North Dakota, twelve years ago, she had been a lone woman needing to be taken in hand by the protective men of the survivalist community Glen was interested in. Three years later she went to Miami to inquire happily about Satanism, trying hard to make her amusement at their antics look like the pleasure of enlightenment. Then on the heels of that case… Utah. In Utah she had never really been able to construct a plausible persona, because the social dynamics of that community had already begun to turn inward, and whatever she did, she could only be an outsider, forever a source of distrust. It had proved disastrous, fatal for five adults, two children, and nearly her.
In Kansas, though, with Martin Cranmer, she had slipped easily into the household, a potentially useful female damaged and made prickly by the ills of a corrupt society, wanting only the right man—Cranmer—and the right message to make her a good woman once more.
This time it ought to be easy. Here she was, a New Age seeker faced with an exciting community and hints of an intriguing religious experience. She fit here far better than any of the other four places she had entered. The face she was about to present to Steven Change was close enough to her own to be comfortable, nearly natural.
Yet she was distracted. A bare ten days ago she had come into the compound not really caring if she succeeded or not—half wanting, if the truth be told, to fail and prove Glen wrong. Then she had met Dulcie, and her brother, and for some reason as she walked, attempting to picture the face she needed to be, she saw theirs instead. It was disconcerting at first, then annoying. Finally she just threw up her hands and decided the problem must be that she really was too close to being Ana Wakefield, that it was futile to work at constructing something that already existed.
She went to find Steven in his office just inside the entrance to the building that held the kitchen and dining hall. Thomas Mallory was there, too. Ana had consigned Steven's second in command to the category of Professional Shadow, one of those attracted to leadership but incapable of it. It showed a great deal of sense on Steven's part not to have given Mallory a permanent Change center of his own, as his temporary leadership in Los Angeles had demonstrated any place given to him would have fallen apart in a matter of months.
Instead, Mallory accompanied Steven, whenever the Change leader left the compound acting as secretary, calling himself bodyguard (for which role he dressed all in black, wore dark wrap-around sunglasses, and taught a class in karate in the evenings—wearing a black belt). Mallory delighted in stirring up discontent among the other potential shadows, his inferiors in the hierarchy. Ana had spoken to him twice, and thought that he would not recognize her in a lineup. He only glanced at her this time, too, before saying, "He's on the phone. It's an important call, and he may be a while."
She sat down. "I can wait."
It annoyed him, as she had known it would, although there was not much he could do about it. He hunched his muscular little body over his paperwork, lips pursed tight. She sat and waited.
She could hear the sound of Steven's voice, though not the words. He seemed to listen a great deal, and contribute only brief phrases, for a long time. Fifteen, twenty minutes crawled by, and though she was careful to show no impatience, she could feel Mallory's growing satisfaction in this small vengeance.
Eventually, Steven seemed to have outlasted the speaker on the other end of the line. His answers grew longer, his tones sharper, until one stretch of perhaps three minutes, when he spoke continuously. He stopped, listened, said a few words, went silent again, and finally launched into the truncated rhythm of farewells. Silence fell. After a minute the inner door opened and Steven came out, already speaking to his right-hand man.
"Jonas is getting all worked up about—" He saw Ana and caught himself. "Good morning, Ana."
"I wanted to have a word with you. I can come back later if this isn't a good time." But, damnation, how she wished he had finished that sentence first.
"This is fine," he said. "Thomas, remind me to give Jonas a ring before dinner, see what's happened during the day. Come on in. A cup of tea to warm you up after your morning walk?"
"Thank you, that would be nice." She took a chair in front of the open fire, placed the armful of heavy outerwear on the floor at her side, and planted her sandy hiking boots on the floor in front of her while Steven went over to a small sink-and-electric-kettle kitchen arrangement in the corner. He asked her two or three general questions while waiting for the water to boil, and she gave him general answers while studying the room.
This was a public room, intended for consultations not only with Change members but with outsiders as well. The bookshelves were impressive, their contents generic and little used, with many titles on psychology, educational theory, and the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. The art was a combination of Western landscapes and small sculptures from the East, with a nice bronze nataraj taking pride of place above the fireplace. She wondered briefly whether the statue depicting Shiva dancing amid the flames of the earth's destruction meant anything to him other than a decorative piece of tourist art.
"Milk?"
"Please," she said, and reached out for the mug. When she took a sip, she nearly choked: the tea was Earl Grey.
Fortunately, Steven had turned to lower himself into the chair across from her, for he could not have missed her look of shock as Antony Makepeace flitted through her mind and was gone again.
"I'm glad you came to talk with me, Ana. I always like to get to know new members. Teresa tells me you've been helping out in the school. What do you think of it?"
"It is impressive. The kids are impressive."
"Yes. Ironic, considering how grateful society is to get rid of them. We couldn't have a stronger bunch of kids if we had the entire school system to pick from, rather than a handful of castoffs."
"You're allowed some choice, then?"
"Well, in a sense. There are more kids than we could possibly absorb, so we only take those who we feel would most benefit by the structure of Change. I don't encourage them to send us hard-core drug users, for example. There're too many peripheral problems with druggies that we're not equipped to deal with. Have you ever taught special-need kids?"
"Not exclusively, but I worked for a while in a tough urban school where half the kids were nodding in their seats and the others were bouncing off the wall. I didn't last long, but I sure learned a lot."
"Why didn't you last long?"
"I was young. I took it all too personally, couldn't distance myself enough. The kids were far tougher than I was. I burned out."
"The kids had no choice but to stay; I imagine that was the primary difference between you and them. They burned out by retreating into drugs and violence. Like the ones presented to us, ninety percent of whom are brain dead by the age of fifteen."
"And you take the remaining ten percent?"
"I grab them for the valuable resource they are, kids who have been, as you yourself put it the other day, through the fires of hell—abuse, neglect, violence—and come out toughened. Purified, if you will."
"Transformed."
"Precisely."
"But not easy kids to handle."
"Give them a goal and a reason to reach for it and they handle themselves."