Rather than respond to him at once, she finished a sentence she was writing, marked her place in the book, leaned back in her chair, and finally regarded him over the half lenses of her glasses. “Make of it? I came home from the college, found that mess. We’re living in strange times. That’s all I can make of it. I just want it out of here. The police asked if the creature was mine. I assured them that although I have countless ways of making a fool of myself, one of them isn’t keeping a chimpanzee and dressing it like some kind of Boy Scout.”

“You took a close enough look to see it wasn’t as simple a thing or as absurd as you make it sound.”

“Just for a moment, I thought it was a terribly hairy boy. But then I realized it was . . . whatever it is.”

“As I told you earlier, this is a matter of national security.”

“Please don’t insist that pathetic beast is an extraterrestrial or a Russian spy. I have an open mind but not an empty skull.”

Falkirk wanted to lean across the mahogany desk and slap her. He restrained himself because he knew a slap would be just the start of it. “What you saw here today and anything that I’ve discussed with you, even the fact that NSA agents were here—it’s never to be repeated to anyone. If you speak a word of it, you’ll be prosecuted under the National Secrets Act.”

She smiled and took off her glasses. “Are you really NSA agents or something else? And is there really something with a ridiculous and melodramatic name like the ‘National Secrets Act’?”

“Why would I say there was if there wasn’t?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” She put her glasses down. “From what I heard happened here, some of my neighbors must have seen . . . that thing.”

“As it turns out, no one did.”

“And who used my pistol to kill it?”

Falkirk had theories about that, but they were none of her business. He answered her question with an intimidating stare of the kind that he’d endured from her type throughout his school years.

Her eyes fixed on his for an infuriating length of time before she sighed and shook her head and said, “This defies belief. Clean up the mess in the second-floor hall and get out of my house.”

“We’ve taken the corpse. The mess is all yours. Don’t even think about hiring a service to do the job. There would be too many questions. Do it your own damn self. You’ll probably need a bucket to vomit into.”

The contempt with which she regarded him suggested that she might not do as she was told.

His suspicion was confirmed when she said, “Have you changed the name of the country? Are we not any longer living in America?”

He went to the nearest wall and swept fifteen or twenty books off a shelf, to the floor. Then he scattered a second shelf of them.

Certain that a woman like her would place an inordinately high value on books, he expected Constance Yardley to leap to her feet or curse him for his vandalism. However, she remained in her chair and watched him, her stare almost sharp enough to draw blood.

With greater violence, he threw more books on the floor while Elliot and Goulding watched with solemn approval. “You should wish we’re something as lame as NSA agents. We’re far worse, Connie. There’s more at stake here than your narrow grammarian’s brain can conceive, Connie. If you don’t do as you’ve been told, then I’ll come back here and throw all your damn books on the floor and set them on fire with you punched unconscious and sprawled on top of them. You got that, Connie?”

At last he had brought her to her feet. She stood as stiff and straight as a fence pale, her arms at her sides and her hands balled into fists. Her expression was one of self-righteous disgust, but he could see that she was afraid and struggling to repress her fear.

Elliot and Goulding had moved away from their posts, closer to the desk. They were chameleons, able to look like what the situation required. They could appear to be sober, highly disciplined agents one moment, and an instant later radiate the lust and brutality of amoral beasts; in this case, they were the latter. Constance Yardley stood alone in the room with three men, with two others also in the house, and she knew now that the law had no power over them nor any jurisdiction in this residence.

Spittle flew when John Falkirk again demanded of her, “You got that, CONNIE?”

Her pretense of courage did not deceive him, and her attempt to hold fast to her self-respect was amusing when she raised her chin and tweaked her shoulders back and said, “Yes.”

“So go ahead and make yourself seem brave by telling us again to get out of your house.”

She clearly knew that, with this goad, he had denied her the only assertion of dignity still available to her, that to say those words now would make her sound not indomitable, but meekly obedient. However, because she had no other choice but silence, which she might expect to enflame his anger, she said, “Get out.”

Falkirk saw that his mocking smile was a needle that deflated the English teacher. “Poor Connie,” he said, and he led his men out of the room, out of the house.

35

Mice saw well in the dark and tended to sleep in the afternoon, stirring toward the end of twilight, becoming more active as the magical night descended. In this world, they had no great, inspiring adventures like those of Despereaux in The Tale of Despereaux by Ms. Kate DiCamillo, nor even any to match the comical activities of the fabled Mickey, though perhaps in some other of the infinite worlds, they enjoyed vigorous swordfights with that meaner species, rats, and triumphed over wicked cats belonging to evil kings. Most nights, Snowball busied himself with gnawing blocks and his exercise wheels and climbing ropes and various toys that had been provided for him.

Shortly before the pizza was brown and crisp enough to be taken from the oven, suddenly worried that the terrible strains of the day had been too much for a mere mouse, Amity hurried to her room and turned on the lights to check on her tiny dependent.

As the April dusk shaded the late afternoon beyond the windows, Snowball sat on his haunches by his water dish, yawning hugely and grooming himself. He craned his neck and stared at her. His shiny black eyes were shinier than ever, as though this crazy day, fraught with danger and terror, had only invigorated him.

“How many litters does a mother mouse have in one year?” she asked Snowball.

He didn’t respond, but she answered for him, “Five or six. On average ten or more young to a litter.”

Snowball did not disagree.

“Do mouse families stay together long? Or do you drift apart from one another? Do you miss your mother?”

The litters had to be large because at least a third of the hairless, blind newborns did not survive. Of those who lived to grow coats and gain vision, many would become dinner for birds of prey and weasels and foxes and snakes and rats and, really, half the animals on the planet.

Mice lived hard lives. Amity didn’t like to dwell on that.

By comparison, Snowball led a pampered life as a domesticated mouse. As a consequence, unprepared for adversity, he should have been traumatized by the day’s events, but obviously he was not.

“Would you give up the comfort of your cage, jump on the key again, hop to another world in spite of the risks?”

As if in answer, as if the prospect of such exotic travel excited him, Snowball scurried to his exercise wheel and ran in place, ran fast, and then faster.

“You’d do it again,” Amity surmised. “My little Despereaux.”

In this world where rodents did not use sewing needles as swords or save princesses from imprisonment, where magic was not common, lessons still could be learned from a mere mouse.

At the door to the hall, she switched off the lights, leaving the mouse in the shadows that, when the twilight whispered away on the evening breeze, would have what magic this world allowed.

36

In the immediate search for that bastard Edwin Harkenbach and the one remaining key to everything, Falkirk had numerous vehicles under his command, including a specially outfitted forty-four-foot motor home with a satellite dish in a recessed well in its roof, which allowed the skilled hackers on his team to have high-speed access to the internet, from which they could backdoor every law-enforcement and national-security computer system in existence.

It was good to be working in an operation that had pockets deep enough to hold billions of dollars. But all the money in the world couldn’t guarantee success, which was a truth that accounted for Falkirk’s dark mood.

At 5:10 p.m., the motor home stood in a supermarket parking lot. The hackers currently on duty, Selena Malrose and Jason “Foot-Long” Frankfurt, were at their workstations in the forward part of the vehicle, eating submarine sandwiches and potato chips while they searched the video archives of the town’s many security and traffic cameras in an attempt to discover who might have fled Constance Yardley’s house after having shot the ape-boy Bestpet.

Falkirk sequestered himself in the chamber at the rear of the motor home, which would have been a bedroom in the standard street-model Fleetwood. It was a conference room in this vehicle, complete with a floor-anchored table, six comfortable chairs, and a bank of TV screens, all dark.