Utterly baffled, Joe said, “Nina? Why would they have been interested in her even then? She was just another passenger, wasn’t she? I thought they were after her later because… well, because she survived with you.”
Rose would not meet his eyes. “Get me the key to the women’s restroom, Joe. Will you, please? Let me have a minute here. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way to Big Bear.”
He went into the sales room and got the key from the cashier. By the time he returned to the Ford, Rose had gotten out. She was leaning against a front fender, back turned and shoulders hunched to the whistling Santa Ana wind. Her left arm was curled against her breast, and her hand was still shaking. With her right hand, she pulled the lapels of her blazer together, as though the warm August wind felt cold to her.
“Would you unlock the door for me?” she asked.
He went to the women’s room. By the time that he unlocked the door and switched on the light, Rose had arrived at his side.
“I’ll be quick,” she promised, and slipped past him.
He had a glimpse of her face in that brightness, just before the door fell shut. She didn’t look good.
Instead of returning to the car, Joe leaned against the wall of the building, beside the lavatory door, to wait for her.
According to nurses in asylums and psychiatric wards, a greater number of their most disturbed patients responded to the Santa Ana winds than ever reacted to the sight of a full moon beyond a barred window. It wasn’t simply the baleful sound, like the cries of an unearthly hunter and the unearthly beasts that it pursued, but also the subliminal alkaline scent of the desert and a queer electrical charge different from those that other—less dry—winds imparted to the air.
Joe could understand why Rose might have pulled her blazer shut and huddled into it. This night had both the moon and the Santa Ana wind to spark a voodoo current in the spine—and a parentless boy without a name, who lived in a coffin of steel and moved invisible through a world of potential victims oblivious to him.
Are we recording?
The boy had known about the cockpit voice recorder—and he’d left a cry for help on it.
One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom. One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock. They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.
Whatever else he was—sociopathic psychotic homicidal—he was also a child. A beast, an abomination, a terror, but also a child. He had not asked to be born, and if he was evil, they had made him so by failing to teach him any human values, by treating him as mere ordnance, by rewarding him for murder. Beast he was, but a pitiable beast, lost and alone, wandering in a maze of misery.
Pitiable but formidable. And still out there. Waiting to be told where he could find Rose Tucker. And Nina.
This is fun.
The boy enjoyed the killing. Joe supposed it was even possible that his handlers had never instructed him to destroy everyone aboard Nationwide Flight 353, that he had done it as an act of rebellion and because he enjoyed it.
Make them stop or when I get the chance… when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.
Recalling those words from the transcript, Joe sensed that the boy had not been referring merely to the passengers on the doomed airliner. By then he had already made the decision to kill them all. He was speaking of some act more apocalyptic than three hundred and twenty murders.
What could he accomplish if provided with photographs and the geographical coordinates of not merely a missile-tracking facility but a complex of nuclear-missile launch silos?
“Jesus,” Joe whispered.
Somewhere in the night, Nina waited. In the hands of a friend of Rose’s, but inadequately protected. Vulnerable.
Rose seemed to be taking a long time.
Rapping on the restroom door, Joe called her name, but she did not respond. He hesitated, knocked again, and when she weakly called “Joe,” he pushed the door open.