Once they reached the house, Kells made each of them take a turn tooling around the yard behind the barn before letting them rest. Rebecca found the sled easy to operate, less like a motorcycle than a moped. Kells explored the barn, silo, and dairy stables while Rebecca took the first watch at the upstairs windows, too distracted to sleep. She understood why he liked the location of the farmhouse — the view from the front looked west over a mile of fields, as far as they could see through the falling snow — but Rebecca found it too inviting and open. She thought of all the questions she wanted to ask Kells, but when he came to relieve her she had been crying, and she hid her face and said nothing as she returned downstairs.
The scent of dog urine puffed out of the rocking chair cushion as Rebecca sat in the playroom, bundled in her coat and a pair of ski pants she discovered in the downstairs closet. She tried to stay warm as she listened to Kells’s boots on the creaky floor above. Mia sat unmoving on the small sofa, wrapped in a heavy sage-green quilt, her sad, vague gaze boring a hole of memory in the jelly-stained wall. Dr. Rosen sat in a corner scribbling on country club stationery, presumably a letter to his wife. Young Coe fought sleep like a little boy, embarrassed as he roused himself from dozing, only to blink and nod off again.
Rebecca found herself neither tired nor hungry. As she had learned in the days following the breakup of her marriage, the human body needs little to sustain itself when overstimulated emotionally. Fear piled up like the snowdrifts outside.
Later the footfalls changed overhead, as Tom Duggan relieved Kells. Boots came down the stairs, a refrigerator opened, glass clinked, light glowed in the kitchen. The refrigerator door light went out and a chair scraped linoleum. Coe jerked awake as Rebecca stood, but she waved him back to sleep.
The kitchen was dark-paneled and dim around a deeply scored central island. The red vinyl backs of the kitchen table chairs were cat-clawed and oozing cushion foam. Blood throbbed in her head as she watched the manslayer, Kells, drinking water and plucking sardines from an open tin, eating them one by one.
He saw her there and slid his meal toward her. “Protein,” he said.
She declined. He switched on a small, sticky television and they watched footage from the ADX Gilchrist video feed. The prisoners lay in the corridors and on cell beds, coughing without sound, their hands pulling at their throats.
The Cuban’s police radio was coiled in front of Kells like a snake, hissing occasionally. Kells popped another sardine in his mouth, swallowing it back like medicine, and she did not fear him. She sat down.
“Why haven’t you contacted anyone at Doomsday?” she asked him.
“Because it’s better if they don’t know I’m here. That way they can’t ask me to stop.”
“That agency is only about two years old, I think. What did you do before that?”
“I was with the Department of State.”
His precise wording was telltale. “The CIA,” she said.
Kells ate a sardine.
“In Cuba?” she said.
“For a brief time. Mainly in Central America.”
“How many years total?”
“Twenty-one.”
“That’s how you know about Inkman. You’re retired?”
“Doomsday is a second career.”
“What did you do for them in Central America?”
“Embassy work. Diplomatic cover. Cold recruiting, handling.”
“Embassy work?” she said, unbelieving. “You learned how to do what you did to those men’s faces in an diplomacy school?”
Kells took a long drink of water from a plastic Rugrats cup. “These Marielitos are a bad bunch. That’s why Trait kept seven alive for himself. He has four left, and he’ll have to work to keep them happy. The convict said the others’ deaths would be avenged. Disrespecting the corpse, that’s a cultural thing. We need to make these convicts crazy.”
“You have a plan,” she said. “I think you’ve had a plan the entire time.”
“Running straight at Trait will get us nowhere. You’ve researched him, you know that. Inkman — Hodgkins, as you knew him — he is the weak link.”
“The Cuban told you this?”
“No one told me this, I know it myself. Inkman is no hardened criminal like these others. He’s a bitter bastard who thought he had pulled off the crime of the century and now knows he’s in this thing way over his head. These aren’t his people. He’s used to liaising with corrupt generals over lemonade, running countries by remote control. Inkman is vulnerable here, and Trait is vulnerable through him. They’ve made the inn their headquarters.”
Rebecca was shocked. The inn.
“There and the police station,” Kells went on, “where most of the weapons are stockpiled. We’re up against about fifty men — thirty prisoners and roughly twenty ex-cons. They have the center of town all sealed up and the access roads barricaded.”
He pulled a brochure out of his back pocket, unfolding the town map from the inn. The town was almost a perfect diamond, rotated slightly clockwise. The prison was situated due north, the common and the inn just south of the diamond’s center. Kells tapped the east-northeast corner. “We’re out here,” he said. “We’ve got to degrade their defenses bit by bit, all the while moving closer to the center of town. Hit them hard and fast and keep moving.”
“And that doesn’t seem the least bit unrealistic to you? With the few people you have left?”
“Do we have a choice?” He folded the map and shoved it back into his pocket.
“What is ‘Tick Tock?’ ”
He selected another sardine. “The trademark of an infamous Central American CIA agent, code-named Clock. Clock was ‘old’ CIA. The invisible hand and all that, legends and ghosts. The breeze you only feel at night, the birdcall from an empty tree. Clock was sangfroid personified. Except for one thing.”
She waited. “What?”
“He never existed. He was a psywar chimera, a Killroy invented to intimidate the natives, but the legend took on a life of its own. The perfect agent: brutal yet principled, unwaveringly loyal, perfectly invisible and therefore blameless. Not plausibly deniable but absolutely deniable. Every unexplained disappearance or massacre, every unsolved atrocity on either side, was eventually attributed to him. The CIA reaped the upside with no downside whatsoever. Very few people at Langley knew the truth.”
“How did you?”
“I was attached to the American embassy in Guatemala, I had to know these things. Inkman spent a year in Central America, so he was definitely familiar with Clock. I’m working on Inkman’s fear. The CIA ruined him completely. Now he thinks he has the upper hand, and Clock being here is like the id of the CIA coming after him again. Much better than a handful of weekenders and an ex-spook doing cop work for nuclear physicists.”
“You’re so certain about Inkman.”
“As the vulnerable point? He’s the one with the terrorist know-how. He’s the one who put this thing together. He’s invaluable to Trait, and the albatross around his neck.”
“And the ricin? If they kill a town full of people in retaliation?”
“Why bother? We’ll still be here. They’ll have to deal with us sooner or later.”
His tone chilled her. Deal with us.
He finished off the water, setting down the cup with finality. “I’m going out to the north barricade before daylight. I want to exert some pressure on them from the inside.”