Ana worked her way around the room to where Dulcie sat.
“Hey there, Sancho,” she said. “Why aren’t you out on the court?”
“Hi, Ana. They said I could stay up to watch my brother. Do you want to sit down?”
The woman at Dulcie’s side stared at Dulcie, stared harder at Ana, and turned to whisper to the woman next to her. Ana joined them and sat down.
“How is Rocinante, Ana?”
“My trusty steed? Ready to tilt at a hundred wind-mills, Dulcie. Hey, I forgot to tell you something. You know how I said that Don Quixote thought of himself as the perfect knight. Well, a knight has to have a lady to defend and to dedicate his victories to. And do you know what the name of Don Quixote’s lady was? Dulcinea. Dulcie.”
The child thought about it, and after a minute she ducked her head and said to Ana in a voice almost too low to hear, “My name isn’t really Dulcie.”
Ana answered in a near whisper out of the corner of her mouth, “That’s okay. Don Quixote wasn’t really a knight, either.”
Dulcie wriggled her body in a settling-in gesture and ended up leaning into Ana a bit more than she had been. After a minute, Ana placed her arm gingerly around the child’s shoulders and turned her attention to the players on the floor.
The game was a contest between the students wearing T-shirts in various shades of yellow and the men of the community in green. At first glance this division seemed unfair, since the men were taller and heavily muscled, and presumably the pick of adult players came from a larger pool than that of the teenagers.
The kids were good, though, and fast. Of the five on the starting team, two were as tall as the biggest adult, four were unusually muscular for teenagers, and all of them looked like they wanted to win.
The two teams assumed their positions in the center of the court, the referee tossed the ball up, and the lanky blond boy rose up and tapped it into the waiting hands of the shortest member of his team, who immediately shot it over to Dulcie’s brother. Jason pivoted and began moving down the court in an odd hunched-over stance that looked clumsy but moved him along faster than anyone else on the court. A guard in green swooped up in front of him and without a break Jason switched hands, ducked under the man’s outstretched arms, and accelerated for the basket. Up he went in a sweet, easy layup shot seven seconds into the game, and the cafeteria erupted. Everyone in the hall was on his feet shouting, Ana no exception. Even the foiled guard grinned and slapped Jason’s shoulder as they jogged back up the court.
Jason heard none of it. A glance at the man was his only acknowledgment of anyone outside his own skin, although he was quite obviously aware at any given moment just where his teammates and his opponents were on the court.
So it went for the whole game. Other players laughed, grimaced, raised a fist in a victory punch; Jason did his job, scored his points, and turned his focus onto what came next.
It was a high-school length game, four eight-minute quarters, and from the first play, Ana could not take her eyes off Jason.
He was a superb player, shambling along in that deceptive way like an elongated chimpanzee and then suddenly shifting gears to streak through the crush near the basket, fast and slippery and untouchable, rising up free of the guards to nudge the ball in with his fingertips. Time and again he did this, and the men in green seemed unable to come up with a strategy to counteract him.
He was no team player. He hunted up and down the back of the court like a lone wolf until he either saw an opportunity to snatch the ball from a green player or until one of his teammates could get free to pass to him, then he was off. Only once did he voluntarily relinquish possession of the ball, when he was trapped in the corner and time was running out before the half was called. The pass he made, a single bounce beneath the flailing arms of the tallest man, was successful, but the boy he passed it to, the lanky blond kid who had jumped at the game’s opening, took three steps and had it snatched in mid-dribble. The only emotion Ana saw him show the whole game was right then: A twist of irritation passed over Jason’s face, more at himself, Ana thought, than at his teammate, and then he was back to his normal unruffled, ruthlessly focused self.
After halftime a pattern began to develop out on the court, or perhaps Ana was only now beginning to see it. The blond kid, whose name was Tony, had apparently had enough of Jason’s successes and decided to start keeping the ball to himself. Four times in the third quarter he ignored obvious opportunities to pass to Jason for an easy score. Twice his strategy succeeded. The third time an opposing player snatched the ball from midair and barreled down the court to score. The fourth time, with Jason, two other players, and most of the audience screaming “Pass it!” Tony chose for a long shot, with the same result. Most of the audience was watching the middle-aged English teacher take off down the court for his two points, but Ana glanced over at Jason and saw the narrowed eyes of a pure, cold rage, so instantly wiped away that she had to wonder if she had actually seen it.
It was fascinating, Ana reflected, how much a person could discover by watching boys play a game of basketball.
She leaned over to ask the woman on the other side of Dulcie the question that had been puzzling her all afternoon. “Do you by any chance know how old the boy Jason is?”
“Fourteen,” she said promptly.
“Fourteen? No.”
The woman shrugged and went back to her conversation with her neighbor. Dulcie took her eyes off the game long enough to tell Ana, “He had his birthday just before we came here.”
Good Lord.
Jason now had the ball and he was moving back and forth outside the key, watching and waiting for the opening he needed. He had taken the ball from Tony (whom Ana could easily imagine behind the wheels of a series of stolen cars, grinning in the pleasure of the joy-ride) and was waiting for the stocky kid to delay one of the guards and open the key. (That boy, on the other hand, had a mean streak, and used his elbows when the ref wasn’t watching. He would be the perpetrator of harsher crimes, and on his way to being a career criminal.) Jason would be too serious to joyride, too cautious to commit the obvious crimes.
Perhaps, she speculated, it would be that brief, white-hot rage that was Jason’s downfall, a sudden and disastrous loss of control resulting in a vicious and no doubt very efficient act of violence, instantly over, constantly guarded against. Would he regret it? Perhaps, perhaps not, but certainly he feared it. Clearly, too, Carla and the other women were a little bit intimidated by him, Carla with her loud and uncomfortable laugh when Ana had suggested that Jason might be her son, the dryness in Dominique’s voice when she spoke of him. The only person Ana had met who did not seem slightly uncomfortable around the boy was Dulcie, and Dulcie, Ana felt sure, need never fear her brother’s anger.
Yes, a person could tell a lot about the players by watching a game.
Fourteen years old; the phrase kept running through Ana’s head as she left the impromptu gymnasium and walked through the cold night to her room. Fourteen years old, with the angular face of a man five or six years older and the ropy muscles of a laborer under his sweat-soaked yellow T-shirt, walking across the court with the wary self-confidence of a felon and the unconscious grace of a dancer. He moved through the community in a state of splendid isolation, shifting easily to avoid contact with others, always keeping a distance.
Except for Dulcie. Dulcie could touch him; for Dulcie he would bend his straight spine and dip his head to hear her childish rambles. For Dulcie he would walk through a hundred and more admirers, politely acknowledging their appreciative remarks after the game was won, until he was standing in front of Dulcie, looking down into her dancing, worshipful eyes with something very near a smile on his face.
God almighty, Ana mused. What the hell has that boy been through, to turn him into what he is now?
CHAPTER 12
You are all law enforcement professionals. You nave all been trained in what to do in a hostage situation. You talk, right? Sure, you?
??re also, finding out the shape of the building where the people are being held, who the hostages and their takers are, what weapons are involved, all that. However, you also have to know what the beef involves--if it’s terrorism, well, that’g something very different from a kidnapping for ransom gone bad, and still farther from a dispute over custody of the kids or a guy who lost his job, his wife, and his car all in the same week. And the only way of finding this out, while you’re also trying to let the situation come off the boil, is to let the people talk.
But what if you’re not speaking the same language? We’ve all heard the stories about cops who have pulled over an erratic driver who didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand the order to “Get out of the car, sir” and reached into the glove compartment and got shot. A terrible accident, maybe; the cop had no choice but to suspect the driver was going for a gun. Of course, the truth of the matter is, it probably never happened, it just makes a great story. [laughter]
But you see what I’m saying? Sure, there are times when the only response is the immediate one; but the great majority of times the situation can be resolved peacefully, if only you have enough time, and if only you can find the key to the situation.
A group of religious believers speaks a different language from the majority of citizens. It sounds like English, but you will be making a real mistake if you assume that it is. To take a fairly obvious example, when David Koresh talked about “the lamb”, he didn’t mean what he ate for dinner; he meant “Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.” What I want to do today is give you some suggestions for dealing with a so-called “cult” situation, in the early hours before the
Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the Northern California Sheriffs’ Association, January 16, 1992
It had become clear that nothing could be done, no decisions made concerning Ana’s presence until Steven returned. She could be given no permanent position, not even a room in the central compound, until he had approved her sincerity. She wanted to work in the school, had come prepared for it, and knew there was a need for the skills Ana Wakefield brought, but she had to settle for drudgery in the kitchen and around the barn and buildings.
Two days after the basketball game, on Ana’s fourth day at Change, she drove into Sedona to order the switch for Rocinante’s heater and to fill a shopping list of incidentals that Amelia gave her. “Just a few odd things” nearly filled the bus, and Ana could only be grateful she hadn’t been asked to do a week’s shopping.
She also mailed a packet of photocopied pages from her journal, sent a roll of film off to a mail order film developer that was actually a branch of the FBI, arranged at the post office to have general delivery mail forwarded to Change, and finally wrote a note to the mail service in Boise to give them her new address.
She had found it disconcertingly difficult to write in her journal about Jason, knowing the attention Glen and others would devote to it. She was very aware of how her unexpurgated reaction to the boy would sound: like some strange, distasteful, even bizarre infatuation of a middle-aged woman for a handsome young boy. Leaving him out entirely would have made for a suspicious gap, but writing about him naturally, about an interesting young male person the age of a grandson, was remarkably difficult.
In truth, though, Jason was interesting, even intriguing; the fact that she was a woman on the brink of menopause did not negate who he was. Still, she downplayed the intensity of her reaction to him, took care to include descriptions of the other boys as well, and trusted that neither Glen and his people nor any potential snoop sent by the Change community to look through her things would notice the difference.
She took dinner in Sedona, in a quiet restaurant with white linen on the tables, where she had red meat and red wine, and two cups of dark coffee with her dessert. Then she drove back down the long, narrow, unlighted road to the Change compound.
At the first hint of morning, Ana rose and set off for her red-rock viewing post.
It had rained the day before, and the morning felt soft against her face. Her footprints had been wiped clean from the sand, but she had been this way several times now and she knew the places where she needed to walk around rather than go straight and be forced to turn back, and she remembered the narrow break between the shrubs that seemed to go down but then turned and took a shortcut to the top.
The last part was a bit of a scramble, around the back of the flat boulder and pulling herself up to the top: It was there that she met Steven. She came up, puffing and grunting with the effort, to find a man sitting on the other side of the rock—seated in her place—in full lotus position, watching her appear bit by bit over the edge of the stone slab. She did not notice him at first, since her eyes were watching for handholds and sleepy reptiles, but she plunked herself down in triumph, kneaded her bad knee two or three times to encourage it, and then suddenly became aware of a presence behind her and whirled around, narrowly avoiding precipitating herself backward off the cliff she had just come up.
“Good heavens,” she said breathlessly. “You startled me.”
“I apologize,” he said in a voice as calm as his posture. “You’re just in time for the sun.”
It had been light for some time, but the high rocks to the east of the compound kept the sun at bay for twenty minutes or so after the shadows stretched long across the adjoining desert. Ana had discovered this her first morning, and had come to anticipate this second, private sunrise into the compound below. Slightly disappointed, but reassured that this man was not a threat, she took a seat at the other edge of the rock from the stranger and waited for the show.
The first thing to light up was the three-bladed wind-powered electrical generator on the ridge of hills west of the compound. The light traveled steadily down the metal struts of the tower until it hit the base and spread, flowing along the low hills and bringing to life the brilliant red rock and dark vegetation, and for a couple of minutes a bright spot of light reflecting a piece of discarded glass.
Now the compound itself was touched. The first part of Change to be illuminated was the peak of the glass dome that capped the hub building. Sunlight spilled gradually down it, round and full and red as the hills, and then the other buildings were lit, and the paths, and the darkness crept away, loosing its hold on the parking area, the square guest quarters, and finally retreating to the very foot of the hill below them. The sun was up. Ana let out a small sigh of satisfaction. The man seemed inclined to agree.
“‘Truly the light is sweet,’” he said in a voice that rolled the syllables, “‘and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.’”
Beginnings are crucial, first impressions far-reaching, and Ana was alive to the knowledge that her success or failure in the Change community began at this moment. A quotation from Ecclesiastes, that crusty Old Testament compiler of epigrams and wisdoms, was not what Ana would have expected, and she ransacked her memory for a worthy reply. She decided on Psalms, to be safe.
“‘Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.’”
“The righteous?” the man said in what she hoped was mock disapproval, and called on Luke, “‘There were certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.’”
“‘When one rules justly over men,’” she told him, “‘he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth upon a cloudless morning.’
“You’re Steven, aren’t you?” she added.
It was the man’s turn to sigh, and although his was a noise of faint regret, as if at a burden resumed, there was a smile at the corners of his eyes. His voice changed as he dropped the game of quotations, becoming lighter and more clearly American.
“I am. And you, I believe, are Ana Wakefield.”
“How did you get up here?” she asked curiously. “I didn’t see any footprints.”
“I levitated.”
Ana could not tell if he exp
ected her to believe this flat statement or if he was making some subtle joke. She smiled uncomfortably, but he seemed occupied with the process of unwrapping his limbs, stretching hard with his hands on his ankles and his face pulled down to touch his knees, and then rising. He stood for a moment, surveying his domain and allowing Ana to run her eyes over his tall, muscular body, and then turned his head to look at her.
“Shall we go down and see if they’ve kept any breakfast for us? You could probably use some after your excesses of last night.”
“What do you mean?” Ana demanded.
“Meat, alcohol, and strong coffee have a tendency to leave a person needing more the next day. Part of the cycle, of course,” he said with a smile, and turned to go.
The steep climb down left plenty of opportunity for Ana to assemble her thoughts. He was waiting for her at the bottom, and politely let her come up beside him before he set off for the road.
“I hadn’t realized that there was a Change member working in that restaurant,” she said.
“Which restaurant is that?”
“The French place on the road to Cottonwood.”
“La Rouge? As far as I know, none of us work there.”
“So how do you know what I had for dinner?”
He bent his head around and presented her with a grin of pure boyish mischief. “People like you always have a last meal of meat and booze before they confront the decision of whether or not to join us. A last fix of toxins before the threat of the purity regime.”
“People like me,” Ana repeated.
“Seeker Ana? Isn’t that how you think of your role here?”