“Is this on?” Maureen said. “The little light’s on, so I guess it is. I hope so, because I don’t think I have the strength to do this twice.” Her face left the screen of the laptop computer the officers were watching. Tim found that something of a relief. The extreme closeup was like looking at a woman trapped inside a fishbowl.

Her voice faded a bit, but was still audible. “But if I have to, I will.” She sat down in the chair and adjusted the hem of her floral skirt over her knees. She wore a red blouse above it. Luke, who had never seen her out of her uniform, thought it was a pretty combination, but bright colors couldn’t conceal how thin her face was, or how haggard.

“Max the audio,” Frank Potter said. “She should have been wearing a lav mike.”

Meanwhile, she was talking. Tag reversed the video, turned up the sound, and hit play again. Maureen once more returned to the wingback chair and once more adjusted the hem of her skirt. Then she looked directly into the camera’s lens.

“Luke?”

He was so startled by his name out of her mouth that he almost answered, but she went on before he could, and what she said next put a dagger of ice into his heart. Although he had known, hadn’t he? Just as he hadn’t needed the Star Tribune to give him the news about his parents.

“If you’re looking at this, then you’re out and I’m dead.”

The deputy named Potter said something to the one named Faraday, but Luke paid no attention. He was completely focused on the woman who’d been his only grownup friend in the Institute.

“I’m not going to tell you my life story,” the dead woman in the wingback chair said. “There’s no time for that, and I’m glad, because I’m ashamed of a lot of it. Not of my boy, though. I’m proud of the way he turned out. He’s going to college. He’ll never know I’m the one who gave him the money, but that’s all right. That’s good, the way it should be, because I gave him up. And Luke, without you to help me, I might have lost that money and that chance to do right by him. I only hope I did right by you.”

She paused, seeming to gather herself.

“I will tell one part of my story, because it’s important. I was in Iraq during the second Gulf war, and I was in Afghanistan, and I was involved in what was called enhanced interrogation.”

To Luke, her calm fluency—no uhs, no you-knows, no kinda or sorta—was a revelation. It made him feel embarrassment as well as grief. She sounded so much more intelligent than she had during their whispered conversations near the ice machine. Because she had been playing dumb? Maybe, but maybe—probably—he had seen a woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform and just assumed she didn’t have a lot going on upstairs.

Not like me, in other words, Luke thought, and realized embarrassment didn’t accurately describe what he was feeling. The right word for that was shame.

“I saw waterboarding, and I saw men—women, too, a couple—standing in basins of water with electrodes on their fingers or up their rectums. I saw toenails pulled out with pliers. I saw a man shot in the kneecap when he spit in an interrogator’s face. I was shocked at first, but after awhile I wasn’t. Sometimes, when it was men who’d planted IEDs on our boys or sent suicide bombers into crowded markets, I was glad. Mostly I got . . . I know the word . . .”

“Desensitized,” Tim said.

“Desensitized,” Maureen said.

“Christ, like she heard you,” Deputy Burkett said.

“Hush,” Wendy said, and something about that word made Luke shiver. It was as if someone else had said it just before her. He turned his attention back to the video.

“—never took part after the first two or three, because they gave me another job. When they wouldn’t talk, I was the kindly noncom who came in and gave them a drink or snuck them something to eat out of my pocket, a Quest Bar or a couple of Oreos. I told them the interrogators had all gone off on a break or to eat a meal, and the microphones were turned off. I said I felt sorry for them and wanted to help them. I said that if they didn’t talk, they would be killed, even though it was against the rules. I never said against the Geneva Convention, because most of them didn’t know what that was. I said if they didn’t talk, their families would be killed, and I really didn’t want that. Usually it didn’t work—they suspected—but sometimes when the interrogators came back, the prisoners told them what they wanted to hear, either because they believed me or wanted to. Sometimes they said things to me, because they were confused . . . disoriented . . . and because they trusted me. God help me, I had a very trustworthy face.”

I know why she’s telling me this, Luke thought.

“How I wound up at the Institute . . . that story’s too long for a tired, sick woman to go into. Someone came to see me, leave it at that. Not Mrs. Sigsby, Luke, and not Mr. Stackhouse. Not a government man, either. He was old. He said he was a recruiter. He asked me if I wanted a job when my tour was over. Easy work, he said, but only for a person who could keep her lip buttoned. I’d been thinking about re-upping, but this sounded better. Because the man said I’d be helping my country a lot more than I ever could in sandland. So I took the job, and when they put me in housekeeping, I was okay with that. I knew what they were doing, but at first I was okay with that, too, because I knew why. Good for me, because the Institute is like what they say about the mafia—once you’re in, you can’t get out. When I came up short on money to pay my husband’s bills, and when I started to be afraid the vultures would take the money I’d saved for my boy, I asked for the job I’d been doing downrange, and Mrs. Sigsby and Mr. Stackhouse let me try.”

“Tattling,” Luke murmured.

“It was easy, like slipping on an old pair of shoes. I was there for twelve years, but only snitched the last sixteen months or so, and by the end I was starting to feel bad about what I was doing, and I’m not just talking about the snitching part. I got desensitized in what we called the black houses, and I stayed desensitized in the Institute, but eventually that started to wear off, the way a wax shine will wear off a car if you don’t put on a fresh coat every now and then. They’re just kids, you know, and kids want to trust a grownup who’s kind and sympathetic. It wasn’t as if they had ever blown anybody up. They were the ones who got blown up, them and their families. But maybe I would have kept on with it, anyway. If I’m going to be honest—and it’s too late to be anything else—I guess I probably would have. But then I got sick, and I met you, Luke. You helped me, but that’s not why I helped you. Not the only reason, anyway, and not the main reason. I saw how smart you were, way beyond any of the other kids, way beyond the people who stole you away. I knew they didn’t care about your fine mind, or your little sense of humor, or how you were willing to help an old sick bag like me, even though you knew it might get you in trouble. To them you were just another cog in the machine, to be used until it wore out. In the end you would have gone the way of all the others. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands, going all the way back to the beginning.”

“Is she crazy?” George Burkett asked.

“Shut up!” Ashworth said. He was leaning forward over his belly, eyes fixed on the screen.

Maureen had stopped to take a drink of water and then to rub her eyes, which were sunk deep in their hollows of flesh. Sick eyes. Sad eyes. Dying eyes, Luke thought, staring eternity right in the face.

“It was still a hard decision, and not just because of what they might do to me or to you, Luke. It was hard because if you do get away, if they don’t catch you in the woods or in Dennison River Bend, and if you can find someone to believe you . . . if you get past all those ifs, you might be able to drag what’s been going on here for fifty or sixty years out into the open. Bring it all down on their heads.”

Like Samson in the temple, Luke thought.

She leaned forward, looking directly into the lens. Directly at him.

“And that might mean the end of the world.”

21

The westering sun turned the railroad tracks running close to State Route 92 into pinkish-red lines of fire, and seemed to spotlight the sign just ahead: WELCOME TO DuPRAY, S.C.

FAIRLEE COUNTY SEAT

POPULATION 1,369

A NICE PLACE TO VISIT & A NICER PLACE TO LIVE!

Denny Williams pulled the lead van onto the dirt shoulder. The others followed. He spoke to those in his own van—Mrs. Sigsby, Dr. Evans, Michelle Robertson—then went to the other two. “Radios off, earpieces out. We don’t know what frequencies the locals or the Staties might be listening to. Cell phones off. This is now a sealed operation and will remain so until we are back at the airfield.”

He returned to the lead van, got back behind the wheel, and turned to Mrs. Sigsby. “All good, ma’am?”

“All good.”

“I am here under protest,” Dr. Evans said again.

“Shut up,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Denny? Let’s go.”

They rolled into Fairlee County. There were barns and fields and stands of pine on one side of the road; railroad tracks and more trees on the other. The town itself was now just two miles away.

22