“You look nothing like her, but you’re armored, too.”

Disturbed by what she now realized was Ferrante’s reverence, she said, “I am nothing like her. God talked to Joan of Arc, or she thought He did. He’s never talked to me. I got into this for selfish reasons, to restore my husband’s good name, to save my son’s life. If it’s grown into something larger than that, it’s not anything I ever wanted. I’m not made to carry that kind of weight. I can’t save an entire freaking nation. I could be dead tomorrow. Chances are I will be dead. I’m tired and lonely and scared, and I’m under no illusion that God or some guardian angel will spare me from a bullet in the head if the bastard who pulls the trigger knows how to aim.”

Ferrante’s hands pressed over his heart looked melodramatic and foolish, but the esteem in which he held her was genuine, not at all diminished by her refusal to be what he imagined her to be. He said, “If I had been there in the fifteenth century, at the coronation of Charles the Seventh, I would have asked her for what I’m asking of you, the only thing I want from you.”

“Ferrante, listen, I can’t play something I’m not. I’m no saint in the making. The things I’ve done. Damn it, listen, I’m no good at make-believe. I’ve got both feet in the mud of reality. I slog from here to there. I don’t fly. I screw up. Both feet in mud and blood.”

He would not be deterred. “All I want is your blessing. Touch my head and bless my life.”

If she did as he asked, just as a kindness, with no illusion that her blessing had any power, Ferrante would nonetheless receive it as a sanctification of his heart, as a hallowing of his life. Knowing what false value he would place on it, if she still did as he wanted, she would to some degree be a fraud. She should do it anyway, do it for Travis, to avoid risking this man’s displeasure. After all, she would kill for Travis, lie for him, commit any sin to save him. So she should be able, just for a moment, to pretend to be a conduit for divine grace. Yet she couldn’t move toward him or bring herself to speak a benediction. She didn’t understand her reluctance, nor was she able to put a name to the particular fault in herself that brought her to this impasse.

She looked beyond Ferrante to the four grotesque paintings, and she thought about what Enrique had said. He’s a weird duck.… He’s got this blood obsession. You meet him, you’ll see.

Yes, but it turned out not to be the blood of violence and vengeance and hatred that enthralled Ferrante Escobar, but instead the blood of sacrifice, the concept of redemption through suffering. To some extent, that was an obsession that Jane, with both feet in the mud of life, could understand.

Her gaze traveled from the paintings to the acrylic plinth on the desk, on which rested the bristling sculpture that had seemed strange and abstract when she’d first noticed it. She realized it was intricately braided brambles fashioned into a crown of thorns.

If for whatever reason she could not bring herself to give him what he wanted, she could give him an alternative that might not leave him alienated. She stepped to the desk and, not with her gun hand but with her left, firmly gripped the sculpture and lifted it from the display pedestal, clutched it. She clenched her teeth to bite off any expression of pain and met his eyes for a moment before returning the sculpture to the acrylic.

The thorns had dimpled her flesh in a dozen places, but blood bloomed only in tiny blossoms from three points on two fingers and from four punctures in her palm.

Ferrante Escobar stared at her hand for a long moment, his face solemn, his dark eyes unreadable. Without another word, he picked up the box containing the pistol, went to the door, led her down the hallway to the client lounge, and left her there with the new gun.

An adjacent restroom served the lounge. She cranked on the water and pumped soap from the dispenser and washed her hands. After she dried off, she clenched her left fist around a wad of paper towels, applying pressure to stop the thorn pricks from bleeding.

She wondered if Ferrante would blot the drops of blood from the floors of his office and the hallway—and what he might do with the rag that absorbed them. She decided that she would rather not know.

In the client lounge once more, she sat on a sofa. She looked at the box containing the pistol. She raised her head and stared at the frosted windows, which were set as high as those in Ferrante’s office, and she thought about how strange her life had become and about how many moments of it were resonant with cryptic meaning that would remain forever beyond her powers of interpretation.

7

A WARM BREEZE, BLADE SHADOWS scalping the barren earth, the ceaseless slish-slish-slish of carved air, perhaps one of the two windmills pumping water from a well in addition to cleaving energy from the breath of Nature …

As Jergen and Dubose step out of their truck and approach the Corrigan house, the front door opens, and an Arcadian named Damon Ainsley descends two steps to a concrete pad that serves as a stoop. He is a robust man with a rosy complexion that has, in this case, paled from ear to ear and gone a little gray around the eyes.

“We’ve got a situation,” Ainsley says. A thin and bitter laugh escapes him. “Situation. Hell’s bells, I’ve become a jackass, more bureaucrat than lawman, politically correct and full of newspeak. The situation, gentlemen, is a shitstorm.”

According to Dubose, Dr. Bertold Shenneck, cuckolded husband of the fabulous Inga, had foreseen two types of sudden psychological collapse that might rarely ensue following the activation of a brain implant, the least dramatic being the disintegration of the ego and the id upon the recognition of being possessed and enslaved. In this case, the subject’s sense of self dissolves. He loses all identity, all memory. He ceases to understand the environment around him and has no capacity for ordered thought. His mind becomes a shrieking bedlam. This is the more benign of the two possibilities.

In the worse scenario, the ego disintegrates but not the id, leaving the latter in charge. What remains in this case is a sense of self, a kind of situational and pattern-recognition memory rather than recollection of personal experience, and a capacity for ordered but primitive thought. However, the id is the aspect of the mind that seeks pleasure at any cost. Without the moderating influence of the ego, which mediates between the primal desires of the id and the social environment in which we live, there is no Dr. Jekyll anymore, nor even Mr. Hyde—but only a pleasure-seeking thing.

Damon Ainsley heads toward one of the Jeep Cherokees. “Got to smoke some weed to float away the nausea. Better prepare yourselves before you go in there.”

“I was born prepared,” Dubose says.

As Carter Jergen learned during his years at Harvard, there are two explanations for what is called the reptile consciousness within the human id, supposing that it exists. A scientist might say human beings are not evolved from apes so much as from all the species that constitute the history of life on Earth’s land masses, which means that the first lizard to venture from sea to shore has left its genetic trace in us. On the other hand, a priest might say our reptilian impulses are the curse bestowed by the father of serpents in the Garden of Eden. In either case, the reptile consciousness has no capacity for love, compassion, mercy, or any other virtues prized by civil societies. It is driven solely by its hunger for pleasure, and one of those pleasures is the thrill of violence.

As Dubose opens the door of the Corrigan house, he pauses and pretends to be profound, a pose he finds appealing now and then. “This is a moment to remember, my friend. Dr. Shenneck thought there was a one-in-ten-thousand chance of a psychological collapse. More than sixteen thousand have been adjusted with implants, and this is the first instance of what he predicted. For you and me, it’s like being there when Edison tested the first successful light bulb.”

Such grandiose declarations, coming from the hillbilly sage, grate on Jergen. “How the hell is it like Edison’s light bulb?”

“It’s an historic moment.”

“Damon Ainsley just called it a shitstorm. A shitstorm isn’t my idea of an historic moment.”

The big man favors Jergen with an expression like that of a patient adult speaking to an amusing but clueless child. “History isn’t just an endless series of triumphs, Carter. History is about the ups and downs. It was an historic moment when the Titanic sank.”

They step into the house.

8