“Knockin’ at your back door, baby,” he answered. “When I showed up at the hospital as requested, a nurse tipped me off to where you’d gone. What’s up, girl?”
“You’re on cellular, aren’t you? Then I’ll wait and fill you in when you get here. Hurry, Lenny! This is the big one!”
“Hurryin’, baby,” Lenny promised, and rang off.
45
JESS WENT IN ALONE because he was afraid of what could happen if he didn’t. The memory of the botched raid at Waco was too fresh in his mind. And this time his backups were not federal agents, but a bunch of state troopers he didn’t know. In Jess’s mind that made for a pack of wild cards in a game nobody could afford for him to lose.
At his direction the chopper and the squad of cop cars converged just out of sight of the farmhouse, using as cover a fence, a herd of cows, and a thick copse of trees.
There was no way of knowing if the stop code had worked until after nine A.M. to be absolutely one hundred percent safe, he had to stop Talmadge from trying to detonate the bombs at all.
Just another day in the life of a federal agent. Jess was reminded all over again of why he had quit the Bureau. Laying his life on the line made him nervous.
So here he was already, doing it again. Only this time without health benefits or a pension plan.
Jess waited as long as he dared to see if Ben and his crew might make it in time, but they didn’t. By 8:51 he would have welcomed even the ATF’s archrivals, the FBI. Advised of Jess’s destination en route, those guys were on their way.
On their way did Jess no good at all. At 8:52 he could wait no longer. As he ran across the long field that separated the farm where Talmadge was possibly holed up from its neighbor, Jess tried to think of a plausible reason to come knocking on the door. After all, his suspicion was still unverified; Louis could have been paying a visit to a maiden aunt.
Subtlety wasn’t going to work, Jess realized. Even if he could convince everybody else that he was Goldilocks, Louis would recognize him at once.
Having already hit upon the brilliant notion of having the farmhouse’s electricity shut off—no electricity, no accessing the Internet—Jess had learned that the place had its own generator.
His mission, and he’d had no choice but to accept it, was to knock out that generator.
How hard could that be?
Courtesy of the state boys he was armed with a pistol, a two-way radio, a pair of insulated gloves, and an industrial-strength wire cutter.
All he had to do was find the generator, cut the wire running from it to the house, and summon his posse to mop up.
Easy.
The generator was simple to locate. He heard it chugging away before he saw it. Rounding a corner of the house—a two-story white clapboard with a picturesque front porch—he spotted his target instantly. It was out in the open, its unadorned metal casing gleaming in the morning sunshine.
Nobody was around. Taking a deep breath, Jess pulled the gloves on, grabbed hold of the wire cutters, and went for it.
A glance at Louis’s watch told him that it was 8:57 A.M.
Seconds later something slammed with blinding force into the back of his head.
46
WHEN JESS OPENED HIS EYES he was watching CNN. This was so surreal that for a moment he blinked at the TV screen as if blinking would make it disappear.
He was, he discovered when he tried to move, tied to a ladder-back kitchen chair. His hands were bound behind it, and loops of rope wrapped tightly around his waist secured him to it. A strip of cloth was wound around his lower face, gagging him.
His mission had obviously not been a success. Maybe he should have tried playing Goldilocks after all.
Jess glanced around. From all appearances he was in a bedroom of the farmhouse. A nearby window was curtained, but the filmy panels didn’t quite meet in the middle. From the glimpse he got outside he could tell he was on the second floor. The walls were white, the floor covered with a mauve area rug, and there were no furnishings as such. Except for the TV and his kitchen chair, which he was willing to bet was an extremely recent addition to the decor.
And a long, utilitarian, conference-style table.
A glowing computer served as the table’s centerpiece.
As he spotted it Jess thought, uh-oh.
A group of men in flowing white robes entered the room. The man in the lead was fifty-two, six foot four, 220 pounds, with regular features and a leonine head of silver hair.
Robert Talmadge. Though he had seen only a picture to go with the statistics he had researched in connection with Waco, Jess would have recognized him anywhere.
Without sparing so much as a glance for Jess, Talmadge moved to stand in front of the computer.
Somewhere in the house a clock began to chime the hour. Jess mentally counted along: six, seven, eight, nine.
“It’s time, my children,” Talmadge said.
“But Yahweh said—” An unhappy voice protested, and Jess recognized Louis under one of those white robes. Talmadge silenced him with a stern look and an upraised hand.
“It’s time,” he said again and began to type.
Though Jess knew it was ridiculous—either the country was going to blow up or the stop code had worked and it wasn’t—he braced himself.
“Love heals,” the group chanted. On the screen Jess caught just a glimpse of e-mail postcards, one after the other, winging away into the infinite universe of the Internet.
“Yahweh’s name we praise,” Robert Talmadge said. The group echoed him, then turned as one to stare at CNN.
They wanted to watch, Jess realized. They wanted to watch the effects of their handiwork. Here in Utah they would probably survive the nuclear blasts and perish later by poison gas or chemicals or pestilence or whatever was released in the second wave.
Jess wouldn’t have chosen that fate for himself. Being decimated instantly by a cataclysmic explosion seemed kind in comparison.
On CNN an unidentified reporter was standing in front of the Washington Monument babbling about Whitewater.
And the Washington Monument was still standing.
Jess felt a wave of relief so intense his muscles sagged. The stop code had worked!
The realization that something had gone wrong appeared to occur to Talmadge at about that time.
He turned to stare at Jess. The group turned too. Even Louis, Jess discovered, could look positively diabolical in a white robe with religion in his eye.
“I hope you’ve been a good boy, Mr. Feldman,” Talmadge said quite gently and turned back to the computer. The others turned with him. The tension in the way they stood gave Jess an inkling of what was afoot.
Talmadge began to type.
Jess’s adrenaline kicked in. He got his feet beneath him, stood up, took a running leap, and threw himself out the second-floor window, chair and all, just as the farmhouse blew up.
He hit the ground hard and blacked out.
When he came to, lying on his side, still tied to the chair, fire trucks and police cars surrounded the house, sirens wailing. Firemen wielded a gigantic hose off to his left. Policemen ran around yelling into walkie-talkies. An ambulance jolted into the yard. Smoke and the acrid odor of something burning made his eyes water.
Lynn stood over him, a microphone in her hand, talking into a camera as a man focused it on her. She gestured first at Jess as the paramedics bent over him, then at the burning house behind him.
Only when the camera was shut off did she crouch down beside him. He was just being loaded onto a stretcher.
“Well, hi there, hero,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Reporting,” she said. “It’s what I do. And, believe me, the end of the world makes a heck of a story.”
47
LATER THAT DAY in the hospital in Salt Lake City, Theresa was rocking Elijah, who sat in her lap. His IV had been removed only an hour before. Except for a bad case of
diaper rash, which was healing, Elijah had been pronounced well on the road to recovery.
The doctor said he could go home the next day.
The thought made Theresa’s lower lip quiver. They had no home to go to.
A family of nine had been reduced to two: herself and Elijah.
She knew she would never let him go. But she didn’t know how she was going to take care of him.
Babies needed things. Like food. And shelter. And diapers.
Things she could not provide. All she had to give him was love.
She was scared, so scared.
Elijah let out a piercing baby squeal and wrapped a hand in her hair. Theresa smiled down at him even as tears welled in her eyes.
“Theresa Stewart?” A uniformed policeman stood in the doorway looking at her.
Theresa nodded warily, her hold on Elijah tightening. A terrible fear crystallized into words in her mind: Had they come to take Elijah away?
If she could not provide for him, would they give him to someone who could?
“Could you come with me, please?”
She had been raised all her life to obey authority; she didn’t want to now. But the way the policeman looked at her seemed to give her little choice. She stood up, clutching Elijah to her breast, and followed the policeman down the hall.
The nurses at the nursing station, who had been so kind to her, looked at her strangely as she passed them.
Her throat tightened, and she held Elijah closer still. The baby kicked and bobbed his head against her neck.
At the elevators she almost balked.
“Where are you taking us?” she asked the cop before she would get in.
“Just down to the second floor,” he said, and smiled. It was a kindly smile, and it reassured her a little. “It’s okay.”
Theresa got in.
Once on the second floor he ushered her down a hallway and stopped outside a room. Opening the door for her, he gestured for her to go inside.
A young man in a long white coat was leaning over a patient, who was lying in bed.
The man looked up as she entered.
“I’m Dr. Silva,” he said. “I think you may know this woman.”
Only then did Theresa look down at the patient.
“Mother!” she gasped, almost dropping Elijah. The room seemed to spin. Her heart pounded. Her knees shook.
“Mother?” she whispered again, walking to the bedside on unsteady legs. Eyes closed, face turned away, Sally Stewart did not respond. But there was no doubt it was she.
“Is she alive?” Theresa could scarcely bear to hope, even now. It seemed impossible. It was impossible.
“Very much so.” The doctor, who’d been writing something on the chart he held, smiled at her. “She ingested a large amount of a very strong sedative. And she’s suffering a little from exposure. But she’ll be fine.”
“But I thought she was dead!” Theresa burst out, looking from the doctor to the policeman, who had entered the room behind her. She had never actually seen her mother dead. She had just assumed.… “I thought … I thought they had murdered her!”
The policeman glanced at the doctor, then cleared his throat. His eyes were compassionate as they met hers. “When we reached the mining-camp site we found numerous people laid out on the ground. The majority of the victims were arranged around a single central victim, who I understand was your father and who was—ahem!—in a different position. All the victims on the ground had been heavily sedated. Five had had their throats slit, and were dead. We suspect the plan was to murder the others too, but something interrupted the perpetrators before they could finish the job. However it happened, this lady and five of her children survived. Two more were listed as missing. I believe you and the baby here may be those two.”
Theresa simply stared at him for a long moment without speaking. His words percolated slowly through the shock that had insulated her from her emotions since the nightmare began. When at last she realized the truth of what he said, she broke down and cried bitterly, sinking into a chair they pushed out for her.
She clutched Elijah and cried, her tears soaking the baby’s golden head.
“Theresa?” It was a weak whisper, so weak Theresa could scarcely hear it. Something touched her head.
Theresa looked up. Her mother’s eyes were open and she was looking at her. The touch she had felt on her head was her mother’s hand.
“Mother.” Theresa almost choked on her tears. “Oh, Mother, I thought you were dead!”
Her mother smiled. “I see you took care of Elijah for me,” she said, her hand moving to caress the baby’s cheek.
“Yes, Mother, I did.”
“Don’t cry. Everything’s going to be all right.” With that Sally closed her eyes.
Theresa looked up at the doctor in alarm.
“She’s going to be all right,” he said. “It’ll just take a little time.”
Theresa closed her eyes and thanked God, who she was now sure existed by whatever name.
Because He had given her a miracle. Though He had taken her father, He had given the rest of her family back.
48
August 1, 1996
LYNN WAS JUST FINISHING the last story of the day when she saw him. She continued to smile and talk into the camera, even though her heart was racing.
She was seated at the anchor desk at WMAQ in Chicago. Behind the lights and camera, Jess watched her.
When they’d parted after their vacation fling—those five days they’d had together after he was released from the hospital—she had told herself it was over.
That was the trouble with vacation flings, she kept reminding herself. They ended with the vacation.
Only her longing for him hadn’t. If anything it had increased. Lynn hadn’t realized quite how much she wanted to see him again until now.
And she realized something else too, as she smiled through the closing credits while trying not to shoot little sideways glances at Jess: Somewhere, in the course of their vacation fling, she had fallen in love with her rhinestone cowboy.
When the cameras stopped rolling she stood up, unhooking her mike from her elegant navy blue blazer. Her coanchor, Mike Knox, said something to her, to which she must have replied with a modicum of sense, because he nodded.
Then she walked over to Jess.
He was leaning against the wall, wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and cowboy boots. His tawny hair was a little shorter than it had been when she’d last seen it, but it still brushed his shoulders. His eyes gleamed at her as she approached, sliding down her body and over her legs before moving back up.
When those to-die-for baby blues met hers, he grinned. Lynn knew he was remembering the first time he had stared at her legs like that, when she had done her best to slay him with a look.
This time she smiled at him.
“Hi, hero,” she said as he straightened away from the wall.
“I could have done without that.” He grimaced wryly.
Thanks to Lynn’s reporting, Jess had found his fifteen minutes of fame in the aftermath of the farmhouse explosion. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience, she knew.
Since in the end only a few people had died and only one house was blown up by a very small bomb, the story hadn’t stayed in the news for long—though it had been long enough to win Lynn a very lucrative job offer from CNN. She had even been approached with an offer to write a book about her experience, though the amount of money mentioned had been minuscule.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, curling her hand around Jess’s arm and leading him away from the interested eyes of her colleagues.
“I came to take you out to dinner,” he said. “If you’re free.”
“You came all the way from Utah just to take me out to dinner?” She wrinkled her nose at him.
“Among other things.”
“ ’Night, Lynn!”
“See you tomorrow, Lynn!”
Two of her coworkers walked past,
heading out the door. Lynn answered them absently, not even registering who they were. She had eyes for no one but Jess.
“Like what kind of other things?”
He shrugged. “Oh, this and that. You coming to dinner with me or not?”
“All right. Let me wash my hands.”
At Lynn’s suggestion they headed for da Vinci’s, a little out-of-the-way Italian place with the best fettuccine Lynn had ever eaten. They never made it.
They ended up in Jess’s hotel room instead.
Later, Jess flipped on the lamp and looked down at Lynn. She lay with her head on his chest, threading her fingers through the crisp brown curls that grew there. The wound in his shoulder, she saw, was mending nicely. It had healed until it was no more than a puckered red scar.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you too.” She slanted a quick smile up at him and tweaked a curl on his chest. They were stretched out side by side, naked, with her leg thrown over his and his arm around her shoulders as he idly stroked the skin of her throat. The bedclothes had been kicked to the floor, and Lynn, at least, was too lazy to retrieve them.
Besides, with Jess’s arms around her she certainly wasn’t cold.
“Did you? How much?”
There was something about his tone that made her look up again. She was trying to avoid meeting his eyes, because she was afraid of what he might read in hers.
“More than I miss cigarettes.” Having managed not to smoke for the duration of their adventure, Lynn had vowed to quit. It was one of the hardest things she had ever done. If she ever took those publishers up on their offer, maybe she’d turn her experience into kind of a self-help tome. She could just picutre the title: How to Stop Smoking and Save the World.
“Is that a lot or a little?”
Lynn laughed. “Only a lifelong nonsmoker would ask that.”
“A lot, huh?”
“Don’t get cocky.”
“In that case, how do you feel about commuter relationships?”
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