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He came to with the sheets whipped into a frenzy around him, a whirlpool dragging him down. He struggled against them, but they clung to his bare flesh, damp with sweat. He lay there and watched his thoughts gather like storm clouds until they stopped drifting. Until they layered one on top of the other, blotting out the blue sky of his mind.
Fighting free of the sheets, he tumbled out of bed, feet slapping the cold marble tile. It felt as though something were coming for him, an inkling from the other side of himself.
It had been an arduous day. He’d intervened meaningfully in a lieutenant-governor race in Virginia, in the hostile takeover of a global telecoms corp out of Taiwan specializing in highly intrusive AI technology, and in a hacker group’s auction for access tocompromised Iranian security networks on a dark web forum. But none of that compared to his face-off with the Nowhere Man.
He was shivering, his teeth clattering.
Stare at it.
Pulling on a robe, he moved to the bar cart and drank down one scotch and then another. The warmth pulled the veil back on the dividing line between the two hims, and he caught a peek of the other half and it scorched his mind’s eye.
And follow it down.
He padded across his master bedroom, throwing open the French doors, his churning thoughts seeking escape, and his palms hit the wrought-iron railing, and he was assaulted by the roar of the waves and the mist in his nostrils and eyes and the smudged dot of the moon peering down like an eye and the clean reek of the seaside, decay and seaweed, salt and life, and he thought about the transgression that had been allowed here under his own roof, he anticipated the necessary horrors it would bring, and he felt the veins pulsing with blood in his neck, the words boiling up from his chest, sandpapering the inside of his throat, his roiling inner state reflected in the crashing waves beyond and the smudged eye of God above.
The dark firmament was too much, the endless night peering into him, blank and all-knowing, so he filled another glass and hurried to the elevator, riding it lower and lower.
The dry wine cellar smelled of redwood and the faintest hint of mildew. It calmed him being down here, twirling the aged bottles, the dusty labels of years gone by. Gave him a sense of scope, of patience, of the long game that was the only game worth playing. But tonight his hands shook too much for him to take joy in the bottles’ rustling turns. He felt weak and unmoored, swaying on sea legs, and then—
All the way down.
The floor was ice against his cheek, blocky dungeon stones. He was curled on his side embryonically, contorting. For so long his head had been moving fast, so fast, poked up above the clouds into heaven, but now he sensed the roots, too, that had anchoredhis rise. They were thin and spidery, but they stretched all the way down.
He could chase them down to his former self, but his brain wouldn’t allow the necessary stillness. A thousand thoughts running like hamsters on wheels inside his skull, a thousand things to desire and dread.
Not least of all the blood that would now have to be spilled.
50
Don’t Even Try
Evan drove to the Seabrooks’ house in the long-suffering Hertz Buick Regal he’d left in the free parking lot at Hanscom Field.
At the top of the walkway, he took a moment to admire the stolid Colonial. It looked like a house was supposed to look, a good safe place to grow a family.
Candy answered the door before he could ring. Her long blond hair was straightened and worn up in a twist skewered by a single black-lacquered chopstick. A bustier showed off her chest and a slice of bare stomach. The back dipped low at the hem, covering her scars. Glazed lipstick coated her plush lips, a shimmer of berry and bronze.
“OxiClean,” she said.
“What?”
“To get blood out of carpet.”
She breezed past him, smelling of sweetness and sunlight, and Evan wondered just how in hell she’d managed to put herselftogether like that within hours of disposing of a corpse. She was halfway to his car when he caught up.
“Still need me to keep an eye on the safe house?” She threw back the line over her shoulder.
“Just for a bit.”
“Where will you be?”
“Figuring out my next move.”
Evan unlocked the car and held the passenger door for her. She paused before getting in, their faces close. “Will it involve me?”
“Depends how violent it gets.”
She poured herself into the car, her lashes dipping slyly. She was a hard woman to read—the hardest—but Evan could have sworn she seemed flattered.
