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“You don’t know a goddamned thing about where I’ve been or where I need to go.” Devine’s expression stayed calm, but there was menace lurking behind his words. He jabbed a finger at the Faraday cage. “You think I can’t read you as surely as that software does when people pop up on the screen? It’s written all over your face. That you lost your internal life before you had one. That you were too sensitive to handle the pain of existing in reality, so you receded into something else, an archetype. That you can’t tolerate ordinary life, so you go to greater and greater extremes just to feelsomething. That you’ve spent a lifetime building that tolerance, trying to convince yourself that you’re not really subject to human emotions and frailties like everyone else. When the truth is you’re too weak to contain them. Without your missions, the haplessvictims you compulsively rescue, who are you? Nothing. The Nowhere Man. A scared little boy wearing a lifetime of armor, living in a state of arrested development with your guns and your kung fu. You haven’t even learned to age yet. How to let yourself grow older. How can anyone respect a man-child like that?”
The words came sharp and hard like pellets. The room seemed filled with them.
Evan breathed and then breathed some more. “Did you say ‘kung fu’?”
But Devine didn’t bite.
“The thing is,” Evan said, “I’m immune to this kind of mind-fuckery. Know why?” He rose. “Because I don’t fear being misunderstood.”
“But it’s obvious what youdofear,” Devine said. “Losing control.”
Evan pondered a moment. “No,” he said. “If I lose control?I’mnot the one who should be scared.”
Devine found his feet. He was unintimidating physically, but that ramrod posture—as if he were hammered from steel—and the words packed inside him waiting to be ignited imbued him with an energy of restrained viciousness. “Do your worst.”
Evan tipped his head in a respectful nod and left him in the room.
Tenpenny was nowhere to be seen, but Rathsberger was waiting for Evan at the base of the sweeping stairs. In the grim, stark light of the foyer, his face was hard to look at. A few workers tidied up at the periphery of the enormous room, sweeping and mopping and gathering glassware. The cavernous space smelled of cleaning solutions and spilled champagne.
Rath stepped back as Evan neared and walked him out, holding five feet off Evan’s shoulder like a fighter-jet escort.
There were no guards in evidence anymore. Tugging the enormous door open, Evan was hit with a waft of cool, wet air smelling of salt and the stench of low tide.
Rath halted, keeping well away from Evan. “Guess we’ll be seeing you again.”
Evan looked back. “That’s a promise.”
“We’ll be ready. You’ll never get through this door. You’ll never make it inside Tartarus again. Not on our watch.”
“We’ll see.”
Two-thirds of Rath’s face grinned. “You know how this ends, don’t you?”
Evan said, “You don’t want a catchphrase.”
The grin intensified, the sworl of hard red scar tissue at Rath’s chin tugging his right lip down until the line of his lower gums showed, gleaming wetly. “Why not?”
“Because of what happens to guys with catchphrases.”
Evan stepped out into the night. The minivan waited on the quartz rocks with the key fob placed on the front right tire. At his back the door shut with bank-vault heft. Standing in the soft rain, he heard nothing through the thick wood but silence. No scuff of feet, no clang of trays or plates, no sounds of life at all.
He listened for a time longer, but there was only the pitter-patter of rain working its way through his clothes. It was as though he’d passed out of one world into another and the portal had sealed behind him. But he knew now what he had to do out here before he returned.
He would honor the First Commandment.
Find the answers he required.
And see the mission through no matter the cost.
48
A Glimpse of Freedom
Evan cleaned everywhere he’d touched in the Hampton Bays house, readying himself to take leave of his temporary residence. He removed twenty thousand dollars in bundled hundreds from his rucksack and left the cash on the kitchen counter. The minivan he’d take care of later, restoring the original plates and returning it to the airport parking lot, the tank refilled halfway as he’d found it.
Devine’s words were still at him, wriggling beneath his skin, winding around the base of his brain and squeezing, making his thoughts bulge this way and that. He thought about the people Devine held himself above, the ones striving for something better within themselves, searching for a hidden path that might pull them one more rung up out of chaos toward order.
He didn’t have disdain for them.
