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And Judy Stevens.
They were the only friends he had.
But they had not forgotten him. They were perhaps working on the outside to help him. These people who had come to visit him. Sean King and Michelle Maxwell. And the young woman, Megan Riley. His lawyer was dead. His secretary murdered. That was what they had said. Roy actually remembered everything they had said, everything they had worn, every body tic made, every pause, every bit of eye contact. The tall woman was skeptical. The short woman was nervous and naïve. The man seemed solid. Maybe they were there to help him. But he had long ago given up on trusting anyone completely.
His mind turned to that awful day. On a whim he’d stepped into the barn. Smells from his childhood had come bolting at him from all directions. He’d looked up at the old hayloft. And more memories had come back to him. He’d walked around the bottom level of the barn, running his hand along the old John Deere tractor parked in one corner, its tires rotted. The old tool bench, the oat bins, the rusty license plates he and his sister had collected and tacked to one wall.
When he’d come to the patch of earth alongside one wall of the barn he’d stopped. The hay here had been moved aside and the dirt was freshly turned over, though he didn’t know why. He’d knelt next to this section and picked up a clod of dirt, squeezed it, and let it drizzle out between his fingers. Good Virginia clay with its sweet, nauseating smell.
He’d noticed a shovel resting against one wall, picked it up, and shoved the digging end into the disturbed earth. He dug away until he stopped and dropped the shovel. Revealed in the dirt was something not even his mind would have predicted.
It was a human face. Or rather what was left of it.
He’d turned to run back to the house to call the police when he heard the sounds.
Sirens. Lots of them.
By the time he got to the door of the barn the police cruisers were skidding to a stop in front of the house. Men in uniforms with guns were leaping from their rides. They saw Edgar, pointed their guns, and ran toward him.
Roy had instinctively stepped back into the barn. It was a mistake to do so, of course, but he wasn’t thinking clearly.
The police had cornered him there.
“I didn’t do this,” he’d cried out, glancing sideways at what he now knew was a burial site.
The uniforms had followed his gaze to the disturbed dirt. They’d crept to the edge of it, and their jaws tightened when they saw what was down there. The rotted face looking back at them. Then they’d stared down at Roy’s dirty pants, the shovel lying on the ground. The clay on his hands. They’d drawn in closer.
One uniform had barked, “You’re under arrest.”
Another had spoken into his portable mic. “Tip paid off. We got him. Red-handed.”
As Roy had looked at the man and heard what he said, his perfect mind completely shut down.
After he’d been arrested and charged, the only thing Roy could possibly think of to do was withdraw into his mind. He did this when he was afraid, when the world stopped making sense for him. Now he was afraid, and the world had stopped making sense.
They had tried to get him to talk. An army of psychologists and psychiatrists had been employed to evaluate his condition and determine whether he was faking or not. Yet they had never encountered someone with a mind like his. Nothing they asked, no ploy they used against him, had worked. He could hear them, see them, but it was as though an invisible buffer had been placed between him and the outside world. It was like experiencing it all through a wall of water. The army of shrinks had finally given up.
After that, his next stop had been Cutter’s Rock.
Roy knew the exact parameters of his cell. He’d memorized the routines of all the guards. He knew when they ate their breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He knew the latitude and longitude of Cutter’s Rock. And he knew that Carla Dukes was Peter Bunting’s inside person. This was from two overheard pieces of conversation, innocuous to anyone who lacked stellar observational and analytical abilities. After all that time grappling with the Wall, Roy’s skills were honed razor sharp.
And he knew that Bunting would do anything in his power to get him back. So he could scale the Wall again and again. To help keep the country safe.
Edgar Roy had no problem helping to keep his country safe. But nothing was ever that simple. He knew there were sixteen American intelligence agencies. They employed well over one million people, of which a third were independent contractors. There were nearly two thousand companies that worked in the intelligence field. And officially over a hundred billion dollars was spent on intelligence matters, though the exact number was classified and was actually far larger. It was a huge universe, and Edgar Roy found himself at the very center of it. He was, literally, the man who made sense out of what otherwise would be a colossal mass of ever-growing, incomprehensible data. It was like ocean waves, relentless, pounding, but bristling with importance for those who could divine its depths. It sounded poetic, but what he did was actually immensely practical.
It was a lot riding on his slender shoulders. And if he stopped and thought too much about it, he would have been paralyzed. The conclusions that he drew, the pronouncements that he made, the analyses that he helped produce were used to make polices that had global impact. People lived and people died. Countries were invaded or not. Bombs dropped or not. Deals were struck or allies jettisoned. The world shook according to Edgar Roy.
To the average citizen it would have seemed totally far-fetched: one person basically telling American intelligence what to do. But the dirty secret of intelligence was that there was simply too much damn intelligence for anyone to make sense of. And it was so interconnected that unless one had all the pieces it was impossible to make informed comprehensive judgments. It was a gigantic global puzzle. But if you had only part of the puzzle you would be doomed to failure.
He had initially been fascinated by the Wall. It was a living, breathing organism to him, one that spoke a foreign language that he had to learn. After several months, though, that fascination and interest had somewhat faded. While the subject matter was complex and challenging even to him, once he had seen the results of his input, the reality of what he was doing had come crashing down on him like a bunker-busting bomb.
I’m not cut out to play God.
CHAPTER
33
THE NEXT MORNING Sean and Michelle and Megan had breakfast, not at Martha’s Inn but at a restaurant a quarter of a mile away. After they’d filled up on eggs and toast and coffee, Sean said, “We think Carla Dukes is a plant.”
