Justin Cronin - The Passage

Richards turned from his screen to eyeball the monitors. All the children were snug in their beds. Babcock looked like he was jabbering away as usual, his throat bobbing like a toad’s; Richards flicked on the audio and listened for a minute to the clicks and grunts, wondering, as he always did, if it added up to something: “Let me out of here” or “I could go for some more rabbits right about now” or “Richards, the first thing I’m doing when I get out of here is coming for you, brother.” Richards himself spoke a dozen languages-the usual European ones, but also Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Russian, Tagalog, Hindi, even a little Swahili-and sometimes, listening to Babcock on the monitor, he got the distinct feeling that there were words in there somewhere, chopped up and scrambled, if only he could teach his ears to hear them. But listening now, all he heard was noise.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Richards turned to find Sykes standing in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee. He was wearing his uniform but his tie was undone and the flaps of his jacket hung open. He brushed his hand through his thinning hair and spun a chair around to straddle it, facing Richards.

“Right,” Sykes said. “Me neither.”

Richards thought to ask him about his dreams but decided against it: the question was moot. He could read the answer in Sykes’s face.

“I don’t sleep,” Richard said. “Not much, anyway.”

“Yeah, well.” Sykes shrugged. “Of course you don’t.” When Richards didn’t say anything, he tipped his head toward the monitors. “Everything quiet downstairs?”

Richards nodded.

“Anyone else going out for a walk in the moonlight?”

He meant Jack and Sam, the sweeps. It wasn’t Sykes’s style to be sarcastic, but he had a right to be steamed. Garbage bins, for Christsakes. The sentries were supposed to inspect everything coming in or out, but they were just kids, really, ordinary enlisted. They acted like they were still in high school because that’s pretty much all they knew. You had to keep riding them, and Richards had let things slide.

“I’ve spoken to the OD. It’s not a conversation he’s going to forget.”

“You wouldn’t by any chance want to tell me what happened to those guys?”

Richards had nothing to say about that. Sykes needed him, but there was no way he’d ever bring himself to like him or, for that matter, approve of him.

Sykes stood and stepped past Richards to the monitors. He adjusted the gain and zoomed in on the one showing Zero.

“They used to be friends, you know,” he said. “Lear and Fanning.”

Richards nodded. “So I’ve heard.”

“Yeah. Well.” Sykes took in a deep breath, his eyes still locked on Zero. “Hell of a way to treat your friends.”

Sykes turned to point his eyes at Richards, still sitting at his terminal. Sykes looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and his eyes, squinting in the fluorescent light, were cloudy. He appeared, for a moment, like a man who had forgotten where he was.

“What about us?” he asked Richards. “Are we friends?”

Now, that was a new one on Richards. Sykes’s dreams had to be worse than he’d thought. Friends! Who cared?

“Sure,” Richards said, and allowed himself a smile. “We’re friends.”

Sykes regarded him for another moment. “On second thought,” he said, “maybe that’s not such a hot idea.” He waved the idea away. “Thanks anyway.”

Richards knew what was bothering Sykes: the girl. Sykes had a couple kids of his own-two grown boys, both West Point like the old man, one at the Pentagon doing something with intelligence, another with a desert tank unit stationed in Saud-and Richards thought maybe there were grandkids somewhere in the mix, too; Sykes had probably mentioned this in passing, but it wasn’t the sort of thing they usually talked about. Either way, this thing with the girl wasn’t going to sit well with him. Truthfully, Richards didn’t really give a damn what Lear wanted, one way or the other.

“You really should get some shut-eye,” Richards said. “We’ve got intake in”-he checked his watch-“three hours.”

“Might as well just stay up.” Sykes moved to the door, where he turned and gave his weary gaze to Richards again. “Just between us, and if you don’t mind my asking, how’d you get him here so fast?”

“It wasn’t hard.” Richards shrugged. “I got him on a troop transport out of Waco. Bunch of reservists, but it counts as a federal corridor. They landed in Denver a little after midnight.”

Sykes furrowed his brow. “Federal corridor or not, it’s too quick. Any idea what the rush is all about?”

Richards couldn’t say for sure; the order had come from the liason at Special Weapons. But if he had to guess, he would have bet it had something to do with the sweaty cot and soup-encrusted hot plate and a year without sunshine or fresh air, with the bad dreams and the Red Roof and all the rest of it. Hell, if you looked at the situation carefully-something he’d long since stopped bothering to do-it probably all went back to the bookishly pretty Elizabeth Macomb Lear, long battle with cancer, et cetera, et cetera.

“I called in a favor and had the purge done from Langley. Systemwide, soup to nuts. From a big-box perspective, Carter is already nobody. He couldn’t buy a pack of gum.”

Sykes frowned. “Nobody’s nobody. There’s always someone who’s interested.”

“Maybe so. But this guy comes close.”

Sykes lingered another moment at the doorway, saying nothing, both of them knowing what the silence was about. “Well,” he concluded, “I still don’t like it. We have a protocol for a reason. Three prisons, thirty days, then we bring him in.”

“Is that an order?” A joke; Sykes couldn’t give him an order, not really. That he could was a pretense Richards only indulged.

“No, forget it,” Sykes said, and yawned into the back of his hand. “What would we do, return him?” He rapped the side of the door with his hand. “Call me when the van gets here. I’ll be upstairs, not sleeping.”

Funny thing: when Sykes was gone, Richards found himself wishing he’d hung around. Maybe they were friends, in a sense. Richards had been on bad jobs before; he knew there was a moment when the tone changed, like a quart of milk left out on the counter too long. You found yourself talking as if nothing mattered, like the whole thing was already over. That was when you got to actually liking people, which was a problem. Things fell apart fast after that.

Carter was nobody unusual, just another con with nothing but his life to trade away. But the girl: what could Lear want with a six-year-old girl?

Richards returned his attention to the monitors and picked up the earphones. Babcock was back in the corner, chattering away. It was funny: something about Babcock always gnawed at him. It was as if Richards was his , like Babcock owned a piece of him. He couldn’t shake the feeling. Richards could sit and listen to the guy for hours. Sometimes he’d fall asleep at the monitors, still wearing the earphones.

He checked his watch again, knowing that he shouldn’t but unable to stop himself. It was just past three. He wasn’t in the mood for another hand of cards, never mind that little bastard in Seattle, and the hours of waiting for the van to pull into the compound suddenly opened before him like a mouth that could swallow him whole.

There was no fighting it. He adjusted the volume and settled back to listen, wondering what the sounds he heard were trying to tell him.

Lacey awoke to the sound of rain, fanning into the leaves outside her window.

Amy.

Where was Amy?

She rose quickly, threw on her robe, and hurried down the stairs. But by the time she reached the bottom, her panic had eased; surely the child had simply gotten out of bed in search of breakfast, or to watch TV, or simply to have a look around. In the kitchen Lacey found the girl sitting at the table, still in her pajamas, forking bites of toaster waffle into her mouth. Sister Claire was sitting at the head of the broad table, dressed in sweats from her morning jog through Overton Park, holding a steaming mug of coffee and reading the Commercial Appeal . Sister Claire wasn’t actually a sister yet, just a novitiate. The shoulders of her sweatshirt were dappled with rain; her face was moist and flushed.