Santa Barbara was two hours north of Los Angeles. It had once been a sleepy retirement town with strict construction codes that mandated red tile roofs for every downtown building. These days, the community was an odd mixture of wealth and beach style; it was the sort of place where the women shopping in expensive boutiques wore torn jeans and T-shirts.
North of downtown, the city planners had allowed strip malls and tract developments of flimsy-looking ranch houses with stucco walls. Boone had once lived in one of those houses, but that was a different life, a different reality. He felt like he was driving slowly into his past.
Ruth’s office was in a two-story office building near the freeway. After their separation, she started working for an insurance agency and was now a licensed broker. Boone entered a waiting room where a young woman answered the phone while destroying space monsters on her computer.
“May I help you?”
“Tell Ruth that Mr. Boone is here.”
“Oh.” The receptionist stared at him as she picked up the phone.
Footsteps on the staircase, then Ruth appeared, a practical-looking woman wearing a blue pants suit and black-framed glasses. “This is a surprise,” she said cautiously.
“I guess it’s been awhile.”
“Almost eight years.”
“Can we talk?”
Ruth hesitated and then nodded slightly. “I don’t have a lot of time, but we can have some coffee.”
Boone followed his wife out the door to a nearby coffee shop where the counter girl had sea shells braided into her hair. They took their paper cups and went outside to a patio next to the parking lot.
“So why are you here, Nathan? Do you finally want a divorce?”
“No. Unless you want one. I was in Los Angeles and thought I’d drive up the coast and see you.”
“There’s only one thing I know about you. One indisputable fact. You don’t do anything without a reason.”
Should I tell her about Michael Corrigan? Boone thought. He wasn’t sure. The problem with talking to other people was that they rarely followed the script that was in your mind. “So how are you, Ruth? What’s new in your life?”
“My income went up last year. I got a speeding ticket eight months ago. But, of course, you probably know all that.”
Boone didn’t object to her statement. After he joined the Brethren, he arranged to receive monthly reports on Ruth’s phone calls. The call sheet was cross-referenced with detailed information about whoever she spoke to more than three times in a six-day period. In addition, the Norm-All program constantly evaluated Ruth’s credit card activity and compared her liquor and prescription drug purchases with the regional norm.
“I’m not talking about the facts of our life. I just wanted to know how you are.”
Ruth stared at him and Boone felt like he was being interrogated. “I’m fine, Nathan. I have friends. I’ve gotten into bird watching. I’m trying to lead a productive life.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“What happened to us and the other parents was like a plane crash or a car accident. I still keep in touch with some of the people from the support group. Most of us have moved on with our lives, but we were all injured in a profound way. We wake up every morning, go to work, come home and make dinner-but we’ll never be completely healed.”
“I wasn’t injured,” Boone said. “The incident changed me. It made me see the world for what it is.”
“You have to accept the past and move on.”
“I have moved on,” Boone said. “I’m going to make sure that that kind of incident will never occur again.”
Ruth touched Boone’s hand, but let go when he flinched. “I don’t know what you’re doing with the Evergreen Foundation, but it’s not going to give you what you want.”
“And what’s that?”
“You know…”
“No, I don’t!” Boone realized that he was shouting. A young man glanced at them before he entered the coffee shop.
“You want Jennifer back. She was our angel. Our precious little girl.”
Boone stood up, took a deep breath, and regained his self control. “It’s been nice seeing you again. Incidentally, my insurance policy still has you down as a beneficiary. Everything is in your name.”
Ruth fumbled with her purse, pulled out a wad of tissue, and blew her nose. “I don’t want your money.”
“Then give it away,” Boone said, and marched back to his car.
***
When he was in his twenties, he had gone through a six-week army reconnaissance course on an island off the coast of South Carolina. At the end of the training period, you had to catch a wild boar with a snare, stab the squealing animal with your commando knife and butcher it on the spot. That was just a test, one more way to show that you could deal with any problem. Thirty years later, nothing had changed. He was compelled to take one last step to prove his strength and invulnerability.
Boone punched in the address on his GPS, but it wasn’t necessary. The moment he turned off La Cumbre Road, he remembered the way. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon when he arrived at his destination. School had been out for several hours; only a handful of cars were in the parking lot.
Valley Elementary School was over forty years old, but it still looked cheaply made and unsubstantial. Each of the six grades had their own brick building with an asphalt roof. Covered walkways connected the buildings. Everywhere you looked there were planters filled with ivy and the spiky orange flowers called Birds of Paradise.
Boone strolled past a classroom with drawings of rainbows taped to the windows. Some of the rainbows were scrawled across the construction paper while others displayed the different colors in distinct bands.
Jennifer drew rainbows and everything else with wild loops and curves. Her cows were red. Her horses were blue. When she drew her father, Boone became an assemblage of lines and circles with crooked eyeglasses and an up-turned grin.
The children ate lunch in a central quadrangle surrounded by the class buildings. A lost sweatshirt was on the ground and a thermos bottle with a unicorn had been left, sad and lonely, in the middle of a picnic table. This was where she sat. This was where she and others had died. There was no plaque or memorial statue to acknowledge what had happened here.
Boone was ready to test his toughness and his bravery, but his body betrayed him. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. It felt as if his head had exploded and a scream of sadness and pain had finally been released.
38
Maya and Gabriel stood in the auditorium of Playa Vista Elementary School and watched a class of eight year olds receive their Guardian Angel.
A medical area had been set up on the auditorium stage. Folding screens blocked a direct view, so Maya went to the front of the room and stood against the wall. First, a nurse injected each child with a local anesthetic in their right forearm. When the children lost sensitivity, a second nurse led them over to a doctor wielding a silver device that resembled a dentist’s drill. A spurt of compressed gas injected the RFID chip between the skin and the muscle, and then a bandage was placed on the wound.
Each child received a button that said: I got an Angel watching me! A handful of parents sat quietly as a teacher’s aide led the students back to their friends. Maya wondered what the mothers had told their children. Some of the eight year olds looked frightened, and one little boy was crying. All they knew was that they were being forced to walk up some steps and receive a quick jab of pain. The true lesson was implicit in the matter-of-fact behavior of the adults. We know best. Everyone is doing it. You don’t have a choice.
Maya rejoined Gabriel in the rear of the auditorium.” Seen enough?” she asked.
“Yes. They’re well organized. Josetta said the plan for the injections was announced three days after Michael made his speech.”
Maya nodded. “The Evergreen Foundation was already using the Protective Link tracking device with their employees. The Guardian
Angel is just the same chip with a different name.”
They left the school auditorium and walked back out to the street. Josetta Fraser, Vicki’s mother, was waiting for them in a car decorated with Isaac T. Jones bumper stickers. Josetta was a heavy-set woman with a broad face who hadn’t smiled since picking them up at the Los Angeles Airport. “You see them doing it?” she asked when they got back in the car.
“They’re processing a child every two minutes.”
“And that’s just one elementary school.” Josetta turned the car back onto the street. “They’re doing it at clinics and at some churches, too.”
“But not at your church?” Maya asked.
“Reverend Morganfield preached against it. He said Isaac Jones warned us about the Mark of the Beast. But it’s up to the parents, and most of them are going along with the plan. People get angry if they don’t see a bandage on your child’s arm. It‘s like: ‘What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you a good mother? Don’t you want to stop this killer?’” Josetta sighed loudly. “You could argue with them, but there’s no point to that. The Prophet wrote: ‘Don’t waste time singing songs to the deaf.””
They were traveling north, passing through an area where massive cinderblock walls had been placed on both sides of the freeway. Maya guessed that the walls were there to block the sound from the traffic, but the design made her feel like she was trapped in a corridor with surveillance cameras attached to every road sign.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I’m taking you to the safest place I know,” Josetta said. “There aren’t any cameras in the area, and nobody is going to check your ID. You can spend the night there. Tomorrow morning, I’ll bring you a car with a clean registration.”
“What about a handgun or shotgun?”
“The Prophet wrote that the Righteous should not touch the Machinery of Death and-”
Maya interrupted her. “Gabriel is a Traveler and the Tabula are trying to kill him. A Harlequin died trying to protect your prophet. I thought that some of you believed in ‘Debt Not Paid.’”
“The debt was paid, and my daughter paid it. Everybody in the church knows about her sacrifice.” Josetta’s face showed pain and anger as she touched one of the heart-shaped lockets hanging from her neck. “I’m helping you because Mr. Corrigan was kind enough to call me up and tell me that my daughter died.”
At the north end of the San Fernando Valley, they turned off the freeway and drove into low foothills dotted with coastal oak trees. The two-lane road followed a serpentine route up a canyon as signs began to appear: Rancho Vista -A Planned Community.
“I’m a loan officer,” Josetta explained. “Pacific Vista was going to be a new subdivision, but the builder lost his financing. Now my bank owns the property, and I’m in charge until the lawyers stop yelling at each other.”
Josetta pulled up to a gate house where a young security guard sat listening to a baseball game on a radio. He recognized her face, raised a gate, and the car turned onto a private road.
“Does the guard know that we’re staying here?” Maya asked.
“He doesn’t need to know anything. He’s off in twenty minutes. When I drive back down the hill, a church deacon will be on the night shift.”
Rancho Vista was supposed to occupy a series of terraces cut into the foothills, but only one building had been finished completely. It was a ranch-style house with a three-car garage and welcome signs posted on the front lawn. Farther up the street were two houses with no lawns, and then the wooden frames of a half-dozen abandoned structures. Past that point, Jimson weed and manzanita bushes had reclaimed the hillside.
“This is the model house,” Josetta said as they pulled into the driveway. “The builder set this up so that people could see themselves living up here in the hills.”
She got out of the car, opened up the trunk, and removed a nylon sack and a grocery bag filled with food. Then she led them up the brick walkway and unlocked the front door. Maya thought the model home would be empty, but it was filled with dust-covered furniture. Cocktail glasses and liquor bottles were on a sideboard, and a big bouquet of tulips was in the middle of a coffee table. It took Maya a few seconds to realize that the bottles were empty and the flowers were colored silk and twisted strands of wire.
“There’s no electricity,” Josetta said. “But they’ve left the water on.”
They followed her into the kitchen. It had a central serving island with a granite countertop and expensive-looking appliances. Wax apples and pears filled a copper bowl; a plastic cake was on a serving plate in the middle of the breakfast table.
Josetta dropped the nylon sack on the floor and set the groceries on the counter. She ignored Maya and directed all of her comments to Gabriel. “I bought you some sandwiches for dinner and blueberry muffins for breakfast. A flashlight and two sleeping bags are in the sack. It gets cold up here at night.”
“Thank you,” Gabriel said. “We really appreciate this.”
“When my daughter called me from New York, she always spoke very highly of you, Mr. Corrigan.”
“Vicki was a wonderful person,” Gabriel said. “She had a pure heart.”
Josetta grimaced as if someone had jabbed her with a knife and began to cry. “I knew she was special even before she was born. That’s why I named her Victory Over Sin Fraser. I just wrote a little pamphlet about her with the help of Reverend Morganfield. People want to read about her. Victory is not just my daughter anymore. She’s one of the angels.”
The Traveler nodded sympathetically. Maya wondered if they were going to have to sit around the breakfast table and watch Josetta cry. But Vicki’s mother was stronger than that; she picked up her purse and headed for the door.
“I’ll come back around eight in the morning. Be ready to go.”
They stood in the living room and watched Josetta drive back down the hill to the gate house. “They’re turning Vicki into a saint,” Maya said.
“It sounds like that might happen.”
“But she was just a person, Gabriel. She wasn’t a face in a stained-glass window. Remember the night she sang at the karaoke bar? Remember when Hollis taught her how to dance?”
“A saint is just an extraordinary person plus a few hundred years.”
They sat at the kitchen table and watched the sun drift down to the foothills like an orange balloon leaking helium. Gabriel decided to take a shower. Maya heard him sputtering beneath the cold water as she switched on her computer and sent a coded message to Linden.
Josetta was right-the bankrupt housing development was a safe place to spend the night-but certain aspects of the model home made her uncomfortable. Someone had placed framed photographs in each room of a married couple and their two children. In one photograph, the family was standing on a dock, and the little boy held up a trout. In another, the little girl wore ballet shoes and a snowflake costume.
Gabriel returned to the kitchen with wet hair. He took the sandwiches out of the grocery bag and placed them on the kitchen table. “When I was growing up, I fantasized about a house like this. New furniture. A backyard. Parents who gave parties and invited lots of friends”
“I wanted something like this, too. A brick house in Hampstead and a father who didn’t travel around the world killing people.”
***
The king-sized bed in the master bedroom turned out to be a plywood platform concealed with a comforter. When it got dark, they placed their sleeping bags on the platform. Gabriel lay next to Maya with his arm beneath her head. At that moment she felt as if they were old married couple that had known each other for a lifetime. She had always thought of love as passion and sacrifice, but it was also like this-a moment of quiet closeness that felt like it will last forever.
Gabriel smiled. “Is it against the Harlequin ‘rules’ to say that you’re beautiful?”
“I think we’ve already broken most of the rules.”
“Good. Because you are beautiful and I’m
happy to be here tonight.”
He kissed her one last time, lay on his side and went sleep. Maya sat up and tried to anticipate what might happen. The next few days were going to be dangerous, but at least her leg wound had almost healed. Although she was sick to her stomach in the morning, she still didn’t look pregnant. Gabriel hadn’t noticed the vitamin pills and the snacks Maya carried in her shoulder bag. She decided to wake up early and nibble a few crackers before starting the day.
A night wind blew out of the canyons and cut around the edges of the house. Gabriel shifted over to his left side and she gazed down at the Traveler. There was a three-quarter moon outside and a band of moonlight touched his body. Cold light. That’s what her father had always called the moon.
Maya heard a muffled noise in the distance-the sound of a car coming up the street. Barefoot, she walked across the cold tile floor to the living room and peered through a gap in the curtains. A two-door hatchback had parked in front of the house, its headlights pointing up the hill. The shadow driver turned off the engine and got out of the car. He had something in his right hand. When he stepped onto the sidewalk, she saw the stubby silhouette and curved ammunition clip of an assault rifle.
She ran back to the bedroom and shook Gabriel awake. “Hurry up and get dressed. We need to get out of here.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Someone’s outside the house.”
Still half-asleep, Gabriel pulled on his pants and shirt. “It’s probably just Josetta’s friend.”
“I don’t think a church deacon would carry an assault rifle.”
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