“Forget we met. Go back to Minnesota and just be with them.”
“That’s not the way I am.”
“They threatened to kill my little boy. And rape him first.”
“Did that make you back off?”
“I hid him away. Do it, Luther. Go home to Minnesota.”
“By doing that, what kind of world do I make for my girls?”
“At least it’ll be a world where they still have you.”
He surveyed the tavern. “Are any of these people tourists?”
“My guess is, they’re all locals.”
“Is something wrong with this town?”
“Judging by appearances, nothing.”
Watching the uncharacteristically taciturn bartender draw an on-tap beer, Luther said, “What the waitress said, Freya…What kind of fever kills all the dogs just like that?”
Jane set aside her half-empty wineglass. “One that knows dogs aren’t deceived by appearances.”
“What happened to the children? The school that doesn’t have a name…are those kids all locals?”
Jane said nothing.
Luther met her eyes again. “So tell me what nanotechnology has to do with this?”
“I’ll give you the five-minute version. Believe it or don’t. I won’t waste time trying to persuade you what I know is true.”
After she told him about the brain implants, he set aside his warm half-finished beer. “The terrorists in Philly and everywhere—”
“No. They’re just standard-issue ideological crazies. But they provide cover for what D. J. Michael and these other bastards are doing. With terrorism unchecked, who notices the strange increase in suicides or thinks there’s something unusual about someone like Cora going ballistic.”
“What is this town?”
“All over the country, under many conditions, they’ve been injecting people. There’s a high risk of being caught that way.”
She saw that he was chilled. “But pick a very small town and control everyone in it…”
She said, “A town with a resort to which the rich and powerful come, some of whom would never agree with the Arcadians…”
“The ones you can’t persuade,” he said, “you take by force, you program them for suicide or you just control them like puppets.”
“And you invite others who are or might become shapers of the culture, like Cora.”
“But these Arcadians, the Hamlet list…this is insanity.”
“Whole nations descend into insanity from time to time. Germany under Hitler. China under Mao. There’s a long list of examples.”
“This Larkin tricked you here with a lie. But why would he want to give this away?”
She scoped the other customers, who probably thought she and Luther were tourists. “He figured I’d ask too many questions. When one of these people suspects me, he’ll alert others. Then what are the chances I get out of town alive?”
His voice a whisper: “Damn. Why aren’t you gone already?”
“The kids on that estate, at that school. Why haven’t they already been injected?”
He had no answer.
“It’s not because the Arcadians have a soft spot for children,” she said. “It has to be, for some reason, they aren’t old enough for the brain implant to work. Doesn’t that have to be it?”
He studied her for a long moment. “And you’re not getting out of Dodge until you can take them with you.”
“Every damn one of them.”
“How many are there?”
“Not many. Judging by what I’ve seen.”
“When?”
“When do you think?”
“Not tonight?”
“Why not?”
“You have a plan?”
“Go in, get them, get out.”
“If the school’s really a prison, they’ll have security.”
“Some.” She looked around at the patrons of the tavern, at faces forlorn and seemingly shaped by some deep misery beyond what usually drove drinkers to their cups. “But how much fancy security do they think they need if every last person in this town is one of them? To imprison helpless children? Not much. I scoped the place. It’s no Alcatraz.”
14
* * *
At 7:30, Harley Higgins turned out the lights and sat in the dark by the window, with a view of the estate grounds, and took off his shoes and tucked them under his chair. He didn’t know for sure if there were cameras in his room, but if there were, he didn’t want to be seen leaving in his stocking feet.
He should have thought to instruct the other kids to take this same precaution, but it hadn’t occurred to him until now. He thought most of them would do as he had just done. But if only one were seen to leave his room shoeless, that might be enough to raise suspicion in whoever monitored the cameras, if anyone did.
The lake lay as black as if it were not water but instead a void. The woods along the lightless north shore were vaguely defined by a ragged dark line above which the cloud cover was a slightly lesser darkness.
He kept thinking about his mom and dad. He wanted to believe that whatever had been done to them could be undone, which was a heart wish that his brain rejected. Heart wishes were a good thing if maybe they could be made real, if you could work hard to make them real, but heart wishes could become heart breakers if you clung to them even when there was no hope they would come true. It was difficult to accept the likelihood that his parents were alive yet lost to him forever, so hard that he sat crying quietly in the dark. But to pretend otherwise would be to follow them into…into the community of others like them. He wanted his mom and dad, but he wouldn’t become like them in order to be with them.
The black lake lay beyond the window, moonless and deep, and a twin of the lake pooled within Harley, dark waters that could rise and chill and drown.
The time was 7:45.
15
* * *
In her Ford, Jane drove out of town and toward the resort, with Luther Tillman behind her in his rental car.
Dogless, child-free, awash in brewed-and-bottled pleasantness, as pristine as a dreamscape, its industrial past having melted away and its identity having been reforged into a vacationer’s utopia, Iron Furnace fired in Jane a kind of fever, a burning conviction that she had been misdirected here by Larkin because this was now the womb from which would be born the change that he and his corrupt associates would impose upon the world. In this place, the dread with which she’d been living for months flared into fright that she needed to manage to avoid panic.
This corner of Kentucky was an alien settlement, its people forever changed, enslaved. If they realized that she and Luther were aware of their condition, they might act with ruthless unanimity. These altered people could never be defeated by one rogue FBI agent and a single sheriff because, by comparison, they were legion. If she or Luther made one misstep, the citizens of Iron Furnace might turn upon them like a school of piranha drawn to the blooded warmth of a mammal wading into their domain of cool water.
She and Luther parked along the road, a hundred yards past the walled estate that was said to be a nameless school, and approached the place on foot. Lacking a moon and stars in this overcast night, the lake and everything along its shores lay in obscurity.
“I’m not sure it’ll work,” Luther said.
“Neither am I.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“Take the staff down hard.”
“If they’re not programmed after all, just innocent people—”
“Whatever they are, they’re not innocent.”
“But if they are—”
“Then I go to Hell instead of waiting for Hell to come to me in this world. And it’s coming faster every day.”
They left the road and tramped through wild grass and sedge, crushing underfoot something that gave off a faint licorice scent. Staying close to the estate wall, they walked past the house and toward the lake.
Behind the house, the
y found a place where ancient ivy climbed the farther side of the masonry, draped the crown, and wove almost to the ground outside the property limits, a woody variety firmly anchored in mortar joints. As Jane ascended that random lattice in the gloom, clawing for handholds and toeholds, dead leaves crumbled and green leaves tore in her hands, the entire construct rustling, creaking. She reached the top and dropped nine feet onto the estate grounds. No alarm sounded, nor did one announce Luther’s arrival after her.
Low-voltage mushroom-capped lamps poured lucent pools on the stone pathways, and LED spots nestled high in selected trees spilled their radiance through labyrinths of branches, patterning the grass with light and shadow, while in the distance an illumined gazebo appeared strange, compelling, as if it were a shrine.
No bright security lights were activated to complement the decorative lighting, and darkness remained predominant under the vault of night.
Jane moved toward the house, with Luther at her side.
16
* * *
In his stocking feet, Harley left his dark room and moved warily along the hallway in the north wing of the house. He followed the connecting hall to the south wing, and from there proceeded to the main staircase. At this hour, the front stairs were less risky than the back, which opened into a mud room. Adjacent to the mud room lay the kitchen, where dinner for the staff was being prepared and was about to be served.
The broad limestone treads curved gracefully down past an elaborate crystal chandelier to a foyer. Having descended halfway, Harley heard footsteps and froze.
He watched as one of the staff, Walter, came out of the living room and crossed the foyer, stepping on luminous prismatic shapes cast down by pendant crystals. Without glancing up, Walter quickly disappeared into the connecting hallway between the south and north wings.
This was Harley’s one and only chance to escape untrackable. If they discovered he had learned the secret of the shoes, the next GPS locater would be irremovable—maybe surgically implanted. Therefore, he hesitated only a moment before hurrying down the remaining steps and crossing the foyer to the library, which lay opposite the living-room archway.
He cautiously opened the door, saw no one, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him. He thought he was the first to arrive.
Nora Rhinehart rose from behind a wingback leather armchair three times her size and stage-whispered, “It’s Harley,” whereupon little Sally Ingram pressed aside a floor-length brocade drapery and stepped into sight.
The time was 7:54.
17
* * *
At a door on the west side of the house, Luther held Jane’s penlight, the beam focused on the escutcheon, in which the deadbolt cylinder was positioned a few inches above the knob. She had tried the door and found it locked. Before leaving her car, she’d tethered her LockAid lock-release gun securely to her belt. Now she inserted the automatic pick into the keyway and repeatedly triggered the device until the lock relented.
If she had made the right assumptions based on what she knew and on what Luther had revealed in the tavern, she had no need to worry about a security system. One might exist, and it might be set; but if she triggered it, the alarm would do nothing but bring staff to her, which would save her the time of finding them.
When she opened the door, no siren sounded. If this violation of the premises had been detected, the workers had been notified by some silent signifier, perhaps by flashing lights in key rooms.
She stepped inside and found a light switch and flipped it as Luther entered behind her and eased shut the door. They were in a combination bedroom and sitting room that perhaps housed one of the staff. Considering its direct entrance from outside, it had most likely been a maid’s quarters when the house was a residence rather than a prison. An open door revealed an adjoining bathroom.
The neatly made bed, the cleanliness, the absence of clutter—and a certain air of sterility felt more easily than described—made this studio apartment of a piece with every place that she had seen in Iron Furnace.
They moved toward an inner door beyond which might be a hallway. The door opened as they reached it.
A beefy, florid-faced man in a white uniform halted on the threshold. “Who are you?”
18
* * *
At one time, the library must have contained books. Now several hundred feet of walnut shelving were dust-free and polished, though bookless. No fragrance of aging paper scented the air, and neither newspapers nor magazines awaited reading on the marquetry table in the center of this grand space.
When the door opened, Harley stiffened with apprehension, but three more arrivals brought their number to six. Dulciana Moss and Jenny Boone entered first, and Bobby Acuff followed, closing the door with exaggerated care, as if the faintest click would bring a pack of hellhounds down on them.
During their first month or two in this joint, Jennifer Boone had been constantly in tears, homesick and anguished that her mother had consigned her to imprisonment with no explanation other than, “It’s for the best.” When she had no more tears, Jenny began to toughen herself as if preparing to fight her way free of this so-called school and through the town, to some place still sane. She had been soft and slow, but after long months of exercise, she’d grown hard-muscled and quick. Once pale, now tanned. Her previously brown hair was streaked with blond that even winter sun, taken in excess, granted her. Jenny’s sorrow had given way to anger and in time to a steely determination.
Dulciana Moss, eleven, chubby on arrival, loomed thin and pale-lipped and shallow-eyed. At first talkative and unconcerned about being shorn from her family, certain they would return for her in a few days, she gradually used up most of a lifetime’s allotment of words, until now she spoke succinctly and only when necessary. A daughter of atheists, these days Dulciana saved her words mostly for God, because though He never answered her, He hadn’t yet betrayed her as those who didn’t believe in Him had betrayed her.
Bobby Acuff, the same age as Harley, took refuge in expectation of more imminent horrors than the one awaiting them in two years. With every storm, he anticipated a catastrophic flood as well as lightning that would cleave him as it had once split an oak tree in his family’s yard. Every wind was a potential tornado that would spin them to oblivion, every spider bite and bee sting a lethal wound from which he was routinely amazed to recover. The day they had been brought here by their parents, Bobby had seen his four-year-old sister, Rimona, die at the front steps of the portico. Rimona screamed and wept and threw a tantrum, resisting abandonment, so that their frustrated father tried to shake some sense into her. Tried too hard. Maybe she suffered multiple concussions from the violent shaking, her brain rebounding from the concave surface of her skull. Maybe an artery burst. She went limp in their father’s hands, collapsed onto the pavement, nose issuing a rush of blood that quickly waned. Bobby’s mother and father were devastated. Briefly. Recovering as efficiently as only the changed people could recover, as if grief were a fine-milled dust that a faint breeze could disperse, they left Rimona dead upon the pavement and drove away. Staff buried her in at the north end of the estate, sans coffin, on a bed of powdered lime, blanketed in more lime.
Sometimes Harley wondered how many other kids resisted and were mortally—if accidentally—injured.
The time was 7:59.
19
* * *
In answer to the florid-faced man’s demand to know who they were, Jane said, “Play Manchurian with me,” as Cora Gundersun had written with obsessive repetition.
“All right,” he said, and with those words, all the tension went out of him. He stood in the doorway, regarding Jane with the patient curiosity of a weary dog waiting for his master to tell him whether the time had come to move from hearth to bed.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Seth Donner.”
“Come in, Seth, sit down.”
He went to the chair that she indicated and sat and cocked his bur
ly head as though concerned that he not miss hearing what might next be required of him. His eyes were like the glass orbs of some ventriloquist’s companion, as pellucid as one inch of fresh-drawn water.
Not by way of blasphemy but as though with the intention of succinct prayer, Luther whispered, “Jesus.”
“Seth,” Jane said, “how many others are on the staff?”
“Seven. Seven others on the staff.”
“Eight including you?”
“Yes.”
“Where are the seven?”
Seth seemed to listen to a voice they couldn’t hear, then said, “They’re in the kitchen and dining room. It’s almost dinnertime.”
“Are the children there?”
“No. Staff only.”
“Where are the children?”
“In their rooms upstairs.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m aware of their locaters.”
“Locaters? What locaters?”
“The locaters in their shoes.”
“Aware of them how?”
He frowned. “I’m aware of their locaters at all times. Ever since the upgrade.”
“Upgrade? What do you mean—upgrade?”
“Last December.”
“What was upgraded?”
“Well, you know. Upgraded.”
Mystified, she let it go. “How many children are here?”
“Eight.”
“One of you for each child.”
“Yes.”
His arms were limp, hands in his lap, one upturned as if he’d been holding something so light that it floated off his palm and away.
Though grateful for the man’s pliancy, Jane was also distressed by it, half nauseated. Grilling a bad and dangerous man while he was bound to a chair and at her mercy didn’t make her feel unclean, but she felt soiled now, as if any interrogation that lacked struggle and resistance must also be without virtue.