by Brad Parks
“What?” I asked.
“Think about that. A secret society that has deliberately avoided the spotlight for more than half a century attempting to emerge from the shadows to fight a regulatory war against every utility company in America and an army of lobbyists who make it their life’s work to wrap politicians tightly around their fingers? Especially when half those politicians see global warming as a sham to begin with? You don’t need Mr. DeGange’s gift to know that would never get off the ground. Hang on.”
He had gotten a text. As he pulled his phone out of his pocket to look at it, I stared at him, his bland face, his gray hair. It sounded strange to say, but I really felt like he didn’t have animosity toward me. Or Jenny. He was just very patiently, matter-of-factly explaining why it was she had to die by my hand.
To me, it was this equilibrium-shattering suggestion. To him it was the logical conclusion of years of careful study.
But not his study.
He was just the messenger.
“I want to meet Mr. DeGange,” I said. “There has to be something he’s missed here. I want to talk to him directly.”
Again, Rogers’ head was moving back and forth before I could finish. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not? I won’t hurt him. You can search me for weapons or tie me up or stick me behind bulletproof glass or whatever you have to do. But there’s no way I’m going to be able to kill my wife until I feel like I’ve exhausted every other conceivable possibility. And, no offense, I won’t get that from talking to you. The only way to do that is talk to Mr. DeGange.”
“You’re not the first to make that request. The Praesidium has developed rules over the years, rules that have been put in place for very good reasons. Even if I felt like breaking them, there would be dozens of other members who would stop me before I got more than two steps down that road. One of the rules is that Mr. DeGange never interacts with anyone who isn’t one of us.”
“Then how do I become one of you?”
Rogers fixed me with a steely look. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“First, you kill your wife.”
Now it was my turn to look down at the table.
“Every single member of the Praesidium has killed at least one person on Mr. DeGange’s orders,” Rogers continued. “Many of us have killed multiple times. Believe me, we don’t relish what we’ve done or enjoy the task. We’re not a consortium of psychopaths. We’re ordinary people who have been brought together by this man’s abilities, people who—like you—didn’t know if we were capable of taking a human life. But we have all proven to ourselves and to each other that we will do what it takes to help Mr. DeGange make the world a better place. Even at great personal cost. It’s ultimately what bonds us. Once we take the oath and are accepted, each one of us gets this. This is the mark of the Praesidium.”
He raised the sleeve of his shirt and showed me a brand identical to Buck McBride’s, with the P and the R inscribed in a square.
“That must have hurt,” I said.
“It hurts less than what we’ve done already by that point.”
I looked from his PR brand back to his eyes, and it occurred to me Rogers was no ordinary messenger. He may have looked like a high-end butler, but at some point in the past, his actions had belied that.
“Who did you kill?” I asked.
Rogers lowered his sleeve and looked down at his watch.
“We don’t have time for that story right now,” he said.
“Why not?”
He tapped his watch.
“Doesn’t your wife usually get home around this time?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“I’ll come by tomorrow morning,” he said. “We need to start getting certain things in place. Try to get some rest tonight. Tomorrow is going to be a big day.”
CHAPTER 26
JENNY
The late-afternoon sunshine seemed overbright as Jenny pushed through the glass revolving doors of CMR’s headquarters and out into the plaza beyond.
She was, more than anything, simply fatigued. By Albert Dickel’s noxious incursion. By that strange phone call from the hospital lawyer. By the visit from the police officer.
And especially by the niggling worry that it wasn’t even over yet—that there was another shoe, somewhere out there, still waiting to drop.
Squinting, she pointed herself toward the parking garage across the street, more or less on autopilot as she made the familiar walk, not really noticing her surroundings.
As such, she didn’t really see what was coming in fast, at a sharp angle, roughly from the northwest.
The woman with the orange hair. With a red T-shirt. And bright-white sneakers.
Jenny stopped short, her path to the parking lot having been blocked.
“Jenny Welker?” the woman said.
“Yes?” Jenny replied.
The woman was reaching into that grubby floral-patterned handbag of hers.
“I’m tired,” the woman said. “This has to end.”
With an unsteady hand, she brought up a pistol and held it level with Jenny’s nose.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said.
For some sliver of a second, Jenny didn’t react at all. It took her that long to register that, yes, this was a gun. And, yes, the gun was being pointed at her by this woman. And, furthermore, this woman was probably going to squeeze the gun’s trigger very soon.
Jenny was, for all intents and purposes, frozen in place. Her surprised brain simply couldn’t make the correct sequence of neurons fire to make her enervated body wince, recoil, duck, or produce any other reaction suitable to the situation.
She was still standing there, statue-like, when the sound of a gunshot echoed across the plaza.
But it didn’t come from in front of Jenny.
It came from behind. And above.
By the time Jenny registered the noise, a bullet had already pierced the top of the woman’s head and exited out the base of her skull. A spray of bone shards, blood, and soft tissue followed the projectile like a gory exhaust stream. A small portion of it spattered across Jenny’s white blouse and light-gray jacket.
The force of the impact knocked the woman backward and caused her to throw her hands in the air. She released her hold on the weapon—or, perhaps more accurately, was no longer capable of gripping it—sending the gun hurtling in a short arc through the air. It came to the ground, harmlessly, roughly twenty feet from the woman’s body.
Altogether too late, Jenny finally unfroze, screaming and diving to the ground, taking skin off her right knee and both palms. As soon as she skidded to a stop, she covered her head with both arms, as if that would help.
She was still prone, and still shrieking nonsensically, when she felt a hand on her back and a large shape looming over her.
“It’s over, it’s over. You’re all right, you’re all right.”
The voice belonged to Barry Khadem.
She looked up. CMR’s director of security and investigations had placed himself between Jenny and the dead woman and was using his bulk to spare Jenny any further view of the carnage.
“You okay?” Barry asked.
Jenny looked at her knee, which already had a trickle of blood coming from it, and her palms, which were lined with thin red scrape marks, punctuated by embedded pieces of sidewalk grit.
“I’m fine,” Jenny said.
She was a farm kid, no stranger to a skinned knee.
And it could have been much, much worse.
“What . . . what happened?” she asked.
“Code Orange showed back up this afternoon,” Barry said. “One of my guys noticed her around four o’clock, loitering near the entrance again. She kept sticking her hand in that bag of hers and at one point we were pretty sure we caught a glimpse of a gun. That’s when I called a former state police colleague of mine who also happens to have been the best man at my wedding. He now supervis
es the Tactical Operations Team for the Richmond area. His team didn’t have anything else going on, and we agreed if nothing else it was a hell of a live training drill. They had the whole plaza covered.”
He pointed to the top of the CMR building, where the shot had come from; then vaguely to his left; then to the parking garage across the street.
Jenny didn’t see anything in the first two spots. But there was no missing the man in green military-style clothing who was still standing five stories up on the garage’s top deck, his long rifle now in a resting position.
She looked down at her wounded hands, shaking from adrenaline, shock, and fear. She didn’t know if she was going to cry, laugh, or vomit.
Never had her life felt so fragile. Or come so close to ending.
If Barry Khadem’s people weren’t quite as vigilant . . . if Code Orange had realized she was being watched and disguised herself somehow . . . if she had used a rifle from a distance instead of a handgun up close.
There were too many ways this scenario could have ended with Jenny being the one whose brain matter was sprayed across the concrete.
Members of the Tactical Operations Team now seemed to be pouring in from all over. Jenny hadn’t noticed any of them.
And, more to the point, neither had the woman.
Barry remained in a spot where he was blocking Jenny’s view of her assailant. Jenny tried to look around him, wanting to get another glimpse of the person who had nearly ended her life.
“So who is she?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t know,” Barry said. “But we’re going to find out.”
CHAPTER 27
NATE
Rogers departed, leaving me and the girls alone to wait for Jenny’s imminent arrival.
Although apparently it wasn’t so imminent.
Around six thirty, Jenny sent a text saying she had been held up at work. She suggested I get the girls ready for bed, and she would try to be home in time to tuck them in.
I was actually grateful for the delay. It gave me more time to think through what had happened that afternoon.
Vanslow DeGange had, quite incredibly, predicted a tornado. I kept the television in the kitchen on as I fed the girls dinner, and every time CNN cut back to Enid, Oklahoma, there was more footage to serve as confirmation.
This was no hoax. The man’s abilities were real.
But that still didn’t mean I was going to kill my wife for him.
Whatever Rogers said my destiny was, there had to be some other way this could end.
There didn’t seem to be any reasoning with Rogers, Vanslow DeGange, or the rest of the Praesidium. Their minds were made up, and, if anything, what I had learned this afternoon had only reinforced that they would not negotiate.
I had to come up with another plan, one that didn’t involve the Praesidium; one that took Jenny, the kids, and me far out of Vanslow DeGange’s reach—and far out of harm’s way.
And there was only one thing, it now struck me, that could accomplish that. I would do exactly what Buck McBride had told me to do days ago.
Take the family.
And run.
I would have to find a way to slip past Rogers and his people, who would be watching us, probably following us. I could do a sweep of the car for a tracking device again. Better yet, we could just drive to a rental-car place.
Either way, we would elude them. Somehow.
Where would we go? And how, exactly, do you run from a man who can see the future—or sense the currents, or however Rogers described it? Was there any place on the planet that Vanslow DeGange wouldn’t be aware of us if he concentrated hard enough?
I had no idea. But Rogers had said DeGange wasn’t omniscient. There had to be a way.
The ripples. DeGange’s gift was tied to them, right? We just had to be careful we didn’t make any. We could run, get set up somewhere completely off the grid, where we didn’t have to interact with anyone. There, we could lie low, live quietly. And frugally. We had enough savings to last a long time. Especially if we sold the house.
If death and the lack of death were the things that DeGange sensed most easily, we’d simply have to stay alive.
Without Jenny, CMR would drop the CP&L lawsuit. We could let some time pass, to make sure it was good and gone. And maybe then it would be safe to resurface, because Vanslow DeGange would no longer perceive her as a threat, and the Praesidium would have moved on to preventing other cataclysms that had nothing to do with us.
This, of course, was assuming I could convince Jenny to come with me.
A daunting task. Think about the proposition from her perspective: your husband, who has already been acting squirrelly, is now proposing you hastily pack up your young family and run off in the dead of night with no plan of where you’re going and little thought of when you might return.
Yeah, no chance.
Could I drug her? Roofie my own wife and haul her off?
It was a short-term solution, at best. At least it would get her out of the house and away from the Praesidium’s immediate grasp.
Eventually, the drugs would wear off. I couldn’t keep her hostage forever.
At that point, I would have to somehow get her to buy in without explaining why. According to Rogers, merely the knowledge she was going to have this brainstorm might trigger the idea. Once that happened, she became the most dangerous person in history, and the Praesidium would stop at nothing to eliminate her.
Unless, of course, she shared the idea broadly? Once it was out in the world, ranging free, it would quickly gather its own momentum, and Jenny’s existence would become incidental. She would no longer be the choke point. The Praesidium would just have to find another way to avert this crisis.
I flirted with that course of action. It certainly solved my immediate problem.
But what would happen after that? What if the cascade of consequences set off by Jenny’s big idea truly was inevitable and unstoppable, as Vanslow DeGange had prophesied?
Morally, I couldn’t make my win come at the expense of more than a billion people’s loss.
Even being strictly selfish about it, I would be dooming myself—and, more importantly, my daughters—to live in a world past its boiling point, as members of a civilization in collapse.
No, I had to stop this here and now.
So. Run. And keep Jenny clueless.
It seemed to be the best among my very bad options.
That was about as far as my thoughts had made it by seven thirty. Having given the girls their bath and read them a book, I had just put Cate in her crib and was pulling the blankets up to Parker’s chin when I heard noise coming from downstairs.
Jenny was home.
But she hadn’t come alone.
There were two men standing in our kitchen, having been escorted inside by Jenny. One of them had a bushy white mustache. The other had a gray flattop.
Jenny introduced them, but I missed their names. I was still confused as to why they were even in our house.
Then Jenny explained how a few hours earlier, someone—she had no idea who or why—had tried to kill her, muttering about how something had to end, and about how sorry she was.
Jenny delivered this news without hysteria, in a low voice so the girls couldn’t hear it. It wasn’t difficult for me to summon all the shocked-husband sounds that should have accompanied this news, because I really was stunned by it.
Given how close this person had come to success—and that no one knew if the assailant was acting alone—CMR had hired two bodyguards, both ex-cops, to watch over her for the evening.
And, perhaps, longer.
One man would be stationed in front of the house. The other would be behind. Both had concealed carry permits and bulges in their jackets.
And I was of two minds about it. If I decided to let 9:47 p.m. Friday come and go without acting, having this detail assigned to us might—might—protect us from whatever attempts the Praesidium would make to eliminate the entire
family.
But having two bodyguards also made it harder to flee. Perhaps even impossible, if they were instructed to keep us in the city.
Was this my destiny, reminding me of its presence? Was this the reason future me was unable to take the family and run?
Unaware of my inner turmoil, and having briefed me on everything she knew at the moment, Jenny announced she was going upstairs to say good night to the girls.
I let her go. Frick and Frack—or whatever their names were—then took their leave, assuming their stations outside. And I was left to ponder: Who else wanted to kill my wife?
It couldn’t be the Praesidium. Rogers and his buddies were waiting on me to do the killing, weren’t they?
So was it actually CP&L? Jenny had said her would-be killer was a grandmotherly-looking woman with orange hair—not exactly the profile of a for-hire assassin.
I had made no further progress on this problem when, maybe fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on our front door. I went into the foyer to see Barry Khadem standing on the porch.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door for him. “Thanks for”—I faltered momentarily—“thanks for saving Jenny’s life today.”
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “You should be offering your thanks to the Virginia State Police.”
“I’ll think about that the next time I’m paying state income tax. Come on in.”
He followed me into the kitchen just as Jenny was descending the stairs. I invited him to sit on a stool at the kitchen peninsula and stood on the other side. From under his beefy arm, he produced a folder, which he placed on the counter.
“The police got an ID on the woman who tried to attack you and we did some background on her as well,” he said. “I volunteered to run it over to see if any of it was meaningful to you.”
“Okay,” Jenny said, pulling up a stool next to him.
He opened the folder, producing a blown-up driver’s license photo of a middle-age woman with shoulder-length brown hair.
“Meet Candice Carter Bresnahan,” Barry said. “Born January tenth, 1955. Her most recent driver’s license lists her address as a post office box in White Stone, Virginia. Does she look familiar?”