Okoya chuckled bitterly. “Are you worried I’ve acquired a human conscience?”
“Have you?”
Okoya’s voice grew cold again. “Your friends know the look of me when I’m well fed. They are more likely to trust me if I stay hungry. Otherwise I’d be here talking to your soulless shell.”
He said nothing more. And after Okoya was left at DFW curbside, Drew took the first highway west, flooring his accelerator to 95, openly daring any cop from Texas to California to pull him over. But none did.
DILLON’S SENSE OF HEARING was the first to return. A high-pitched hiss and a deep rumble in his ears resolved into the atonal groan of an engine. He was wrapped in a cocoon. No. Not a cocoon; a shell. It was a sensation familiar and unpleasant. Déjà vu washed through him, leaving him nauseated. He opened his eyes to a narrow swath of vision; a horizontal strip of light, and when he tried to turn his head to see more, he found his head would not move.
He was back in the chair.
After all he had endured, he was seated once again in the infernal device that had held him in check in the Hesperia plant. For a moment he felt he was back in that awful place, but in a moment he realized that this couldn’t be the same chair—it was a duplicate—and the slim image before him was not that of his cell. There were several plush leather chairs in his field of vision. One held Winston, another Tory. No doubt Michael was there as well, somewhere out of his limited range of sight. They were slouched, unconscious, their hands and ankles in shackles—bonds far less elaborate than Dillon’s chair, but then the others didn’t need the complex restraints that Dillon did. Beyond the chairs were several small oval windows in a curved wall. They were on a plane. A private jet.
Someone moved into his line of vision. A pair of familiar eyes peered in at him, heavy with sympathy, and Dillon looked away, not wanting to meet those eyes.
AS MADDY CROUCHED, LOOKING in on Dillon through the faceplate of the restraining chair, she was filled with a strange aggregate of emotions. He was once again helpless, a victim of circumstance, unable to effect his own destiny. But this time she was not his lifeline to the world, she was one of his captors. There was sorrow in this, and yet it was seasoned with a comfortable sense that things were as they needed to be. Things were best this way with her outside of his faceplate, looking in. He would need her now. Need her to explain, need her to calm his angers and fears. Dillon, she had decided, was at his best in chains.
“You’re awake,” she said. “Good. We were hoping your tranks would wear off first.”
She got down on her knees to stay in his line of vision, and when he closed his eyes, she took his hand, gently, lovingly massaging his fingers. She could feel him try to pull away, but his wrist was shackled to the chair.
“Listen to me, Dillon,” she said. “This is not what it looks like.”
“No? You’ve kidnapped us, and locked us up. That’s what it looks like. Is there something I’m missing?”
Maddy sighed, still holding his hand. “We had to. You were . . . you were out of control.”
“Out of whose control?”
Maddy found herself angry at his bitterness. “Don’t throw this back on me. You were the one who left without a word.” He had promised to be back, hadn’t he? Instead he left, abandoning both her and Tessic, forcing them to become allies in corralling him again. She looked to Tessic, who stood silently behind Dillon, out of his view. Yes, Dillon had brought this on himself by his own irresponsibility.
“Are you going to tell us why you left?” she asked. “What could you possibly have been thinking, going out there alone?”
“I wasn’t alone. And if I left, then I had reason to.”
“You have no idea how dangerous it is for you out there, do you? You have no idea how many people want to use you—the way Bussard did.”
“Don’t pretend I’m here for my own protection.”
Maddy wanted to argue with him—to tell him that, yes, he was here because he was incapable of taking care of himself—incapable of giving direction and purpose to his own powers.
“I’ll talk with him now,” Tessic said, making his presence behind him known.
Before leaving them, Maddy asked if there was anything she could do for him. To which Dillon answered, “You could scratch my nose.”
And so she did.
THE COCKPIT WAS THE only place she could go to get away from Dillon, and as much as she wanted to be with him, she wanted to be miles away. It was the strange nature of Dillon’s charm that it repelled almost as much as it attracted. Or maybe it was that she had no way to deflect his anger. Let Tessic talk him down and enlighten him as to why they were halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. It was, after all, his inspiration, not hers.
She closed the door, and although it shut out their voices, it didn’t close out the strength of the field that surrounded each of the shards. She was used to it by now—eventually she could tune it out like the background drone of the jet engine, but never, never when Dillon was close enough to touch.
“Come sit,” the pilot offered in an Israeli accent even stronger than his cologne. His name was Ari, and he had also piloted the helicopter that spirited her and Dillon from the graveyard a few weeks ago. From what Maddy knew, he was once the most decorated pilot in the Israeli air force. Now he served as Tessic’s own private aerial chauffeur. Only the best for Tessic.
“Come, the co-pilot takes a crap. Sit down, I teach you to fly.”
Maddy ignored the invitation. She looked through the windshield to see darkness. Flying east, the sun had plunged behind them quickly. Now there was nothing before them but night. “How much longer?”
“Four more hours.” He looked her over. “Teach you to fly some other time then? Just two of us? This I will enjoy.”
Maddy wasn’t sure if he was serious, or whether flirting was his only lexicon for communicating with American women. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?” she asked.
Ari shrugged. “The big man says ask no questions, I ask no questions, and I sleep at night. The ones who do ask—they don’t sleep so well.”
Maddy had to laugh. Ignorance was indeed bliss where Dillon was concerned. Still, she caught Ari pondering the hairs on his arm; the way they had grown denser since picking up their new passengers. Dillon’s effects might have been more pervasive, but they were subtler among the living; the straightening of teeth, and a sort of cellular detox—but you couldn’t miss what Winston did to those who hung around him too long. Ari caught her watching him. He brushed his hand across his arm. “I make a hairy man today,” he said, confident in his misspoken English. “Like a wolfwere. You like wolfwere men? Hair give you something to grab onto. This you will enjoy.”
Maddy laughed, and he laughed as well, feigning that he was only joking. “Do me a favor,” she told Ari. “Ask me no questions, and I won’t throw you the hell out of the plane.” To think only a few weeks ago, Maddy might actually have entertained such a panting proposition. Dillon had undone in her that need. But he hadn’t truly undone it, had he? He had merely redirected her wandering desires, focusing them all toward him. There was the cruelty in the kindness. But better not to consider that; momentous things were happening here. If she kept that at the center of her focus, perhaps she could find a bliss that was somewhat closer to ignorance.
“YOU’RE HERE BECAUSE YOU fell victim to your own folly,” Tessic told Dillon, back in the cabin of the plush jet. “Consider this an intervention.”
Dillon found Tessic uncomfortably close to his face mask. “Not exactly a divine intervention, is it?” Dillon said.
“No—that would be presumptuous. But time will tell.”
Dillon strained against the titanium exoskeleton, knowing it would not give. “You told me I could come and go as I pleased—that I was not a prisoner.”
Tessic leaned away and sighed. “You and I were not meant to travel the easy path,” he said. “God has a vision for you, Dillon. You must come to accept this. If it takes me l
ocking you down long enough for you to come to your senses, then that is what I must do.”
“I will not be used against my will.”
“It won’t be against your will. You’ll choose what’s right. I have faith in your choices.”
Dillon wondered what choices Tessic could possibly be referring to. His choice to leave Tessic’s protective bubble? His choice to listen to Okoya, and get a glimpse, however fragmentary, of why he and the others might be on this earth? No matter how far the aura of Dillon’s spirit extended out beyond the fuselage of the plane, how much choice in anything did he have when he couldn’t move as much as an inch?
“I could shatter you,” Dillon threatened. “It would only take me a moment to look inside you and find the words to destroy you.”
“But you won’t,” Tessic said, so unconcerned it infuriated Dillon. “You won’t because deep down you know I have a perspective that you lack. You, with all your power of life and death are blinded. You needed Maddy to help you escape from your cell. You need me to help you escape from yourself. Because I see a larger picture that you’ve yet to grasp.”
Dillon thought to the duplicitous Okoya. Okoya, too, had a larger picture. A picture so large, it was beyond Dillon’s scope of comprehension. But Okoya was self-serving to the last. Everything he told them might be nothing more than a well-conceived lie. If, in the end, his fate was to be used by someone, would he rather be used by Okoya, or Tessic?
“What do you want with me, Elon?”
Tessic offered him a joyless smile. “Have I been so good at hiding myself from you, Dillon? Or is it that you never wanted to see?” He knelt deeper until his eyes were level with Dillon’s. “Look at me now, Dillon. Tell me what you see in the patterns of my life. I’ve been keeping something from you. Holding it until it was ripe for you to know. I open for you now, my friend. See into me and you’ll know where we are going, and what is to be done.”
Dillon’s vision was filled with the aspect of his eyes; the care lines and crow’s feet. A world weariness beneath a muscular mind built by the wielding of heavy power. Dillon probed deeper, finding genuine intentions, sullied by the pain of something lost. Not something but someone. A person. People. Many people. On Tessic’s shoulders rested an unbearable weight, that levied itself upon him the moment Tessic became aware of Dillon’s existence. Because Dillon could undo unspeakable crimes. Now Tessic’s weight became Dillon’s, and he understood.
Tessic backed away. Perhaps he, too, had some level of clairvoyance and saw into Dillon’s mind as well. Dillon’s fury of being kidnapped left him. What remained was a spiritual vertigo, and a heady fear, like skydiving into a storm.
Tessic hit a button and the shell of the chair split open. Dillon didn’t move. Barely dared to breathe.
“I can’t do what you’re asking.”
Tessic laughed and clapped his hands together in sheer glee. “Of course you can. It’s why all of you are on this good earth. You must know this by now.”
Dillon closed his eyes. Although the chair no longer embraced him, he felt every bit as enslaved—not by Tessic, but by himself—because Tessic was right. Just as they had sifted Tory from the dust, they could do it again. It was simply a matter of scale.
Dillon shuddered.
If you could save a life, was it a crime to let that life end? If you could restore a murdered life, was it a crime to walk away? What if it were more than one life? What if it were millions?
“When the others awake, you will explain,” Tessic told him. “And they will come to understand, just as you have, this glorious thing you have all been called to do.”
Yes, thought Dillon. There was a glory in this, but there was also infamy. There was something right and holy, and yet something almost profane. The violation of a violation. He no longer knew what was right or wrong, all he knew was that somewhere out there the “vectors,” as Okoya had called them, were using Lourdes toward a disastrous end. He had to stop them, but how could he turn from this?
Dillon found no yardstick to measure his choices. Then he realized he didn’t have to; Tessic had mercifully left him with no choice. Because nothing short of the world’s end would stop them from soaring across the Atlantic, toward places whose names had become synonymous with death.
Treblinka . . . Buchenwald . . . Auschwitz. The death camps of Europe.
Part V
Reveille
* * *
THE OLD WOMAN OF MAJDANEK PULLED HER BROOM ACROSS THE weed-choked pavement of the square. Beyond the leaves and dust, there was never usually much to clean. Few of the candy wrappers or bottles that plagued other tourist spots littered the ground here. But then, the visitors here never came for their pleasure—either then, or now.
The snows were late this year. They would usually come in November, first dusting the concrete slabs of the square with a white quilt that would soon thicken into a pearlescent blanket, far too beautiful for a place such as this. A shroud of snow to hide a multitude of sins.
When the snows would come, the old woman would lay down her broom until the spring. There would be much to do then, for the square would be filled with the layers of fall leaves entombed in the drifts, now decayed into a sinewy mud that the rains would not wash away. For that she used a stiff whisk broom, spreading the mud out until it dried into a thin silt that she could sweep into the April winds. The dust and chaff would then be carried back to the town of Lublin and the forest beyond. She fancied herself an active participant in the cycle of life, and it was a comfort to her.
No one paid her for her labors in the square. She was not part of the grounds crew, and yet she predated anyone else who worked there. She was simply there, like the barracks and statues. Like the fences and the ashes, moving her broom across the square every morning her joints allowed.
Visitors would take notice of her on their way to view the memorial and the crematoria. They would snap pictures. She would neither pose for nor demur from their cameras. Occasionally people would approach her in the square to ask her why a woman of such advanced years would labor so to clean a vast concrete square. They would ask in many languages. Although she spoke only Polish, she understood the question in most languages now, and could answer in a few of them as well.
“You see that house there,” she would tell them, pointing to her small home just beyond the outer fence of the camp. “I lived there seventy years ago, watching from my backyard, and I did nothing. So now I sweep.”
A stroke of her broom for every time she closed her window to the stench of the smoke. For every time she pulled vegetables from her garden, and ignored the sounds from the death chambers. For every time she took Sunday communion, and went to bed in silence. For each of these things there was a stroke of her broom. And she could only hope that the millions who visited Majdanek would see the respect she now gave the dead . . . and perhaps they in turn might once again find the respect for her and her people that had also burned in the death camps of Poland.
The leaves of fall had gone through their spectrum of color, and now, brittle and brown in these early days of December, they longed for their grave of snow as they tumbled on the concrete, pulverizing as they cartwheeled in the wind. The sky was a cloud of gray, pulled from horizon to horizon like a faded linen. It was a snow-sky. But no matter. If it snowed, then it snowed. She would not leave her task this morning until the flurries multiplied into a true fall of snow. So she pushed her broom, churning up leaf fragments and bird droppings, pushing back the tide of disorder to the edges of the square. When the sun struck her cheek, she thought it was something imagined, until she looked to the southern sky.
A hole had opened in the clouds to the south.
An elliptical spot of blue opened before the sun, spreading wider. Her sight and hearing had peaked long ago, and it took a few minutes until she heard the heavy beating of blades against the air, and saw the approaching shapes that soon resolved themselves into three helicopters descending toward her. They were sh
iny and white—nothing like the military monstrosities she had seen before. They came down in the square, creating a downdraft that cleaned the square far better than her broom. But she held her ground, holding her kerchief on her head, watching in the center of the square, beside the stone monument to the Holocaust. In all her years of tending to the square, she had never seen activity such as this. Instinctively she knew that she was about to be a witness to something wonderful, or something horrible—she did not know which.
An hour later, she found herself on her knees in the church she had frequented all her life, bowed in dire supplication, her broom abandoned forever in the square.
30. MAJDANEK
* * *
AS THE SHARDS STEPPED DOWN FROM THE HELICOPTER IN Majdanek, Dillon could feel their influence settling upon the stark place of death. The evil of so many years ago still lingered here like an oil slick, permeating the rocks, coating the leaves, worming into the lungs with every breath. Yet Dillon could swear the evil receded with their presence, leaving the Earth prepared to give back what it had stolen.
“We should not be here,” Winston said. He had been repeating it like a mantra since he regained consciousness and learned their destination. “We should not be here at all.”
Back in the plane Dillon had stated the case quite simply. They were hijacked. They were captive, and that, if nothing else, made them obliged.
“Do you believe we should do this?” Tory had asked. “Instead of seeking out the vectors?”
Dillon found himself borrowing some of Tessic’s faith for his own. “If there’s a God,” Dillon said, “then I refuse to believe that Okoya is his messenger.”
Now, as they stood on the concrete square, a sense of foreboding took root. Up ahead stood a concrete dome that, for more than a generation, held a mound of ashes raked from the ovens when Majdanek was liberated. Now those ashes were being hosed down into a silty mortar for them.