The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

He pulled a brochure out of his back pocket, unfolding the town map from the inn. The town was almost a perfect diamond, rotated slightly clockwise. The prison was situated due north, the common and the inn just south of the diamond’s center. Kells tapped the east-northeast corner. “We’re out here,” he said. “We’ve got to degrade their defenses bit by bit, all the while moving closer to the center of town. Hit them hard and fast and keep moving.”

“And that doesn’t seem the least bit unrealistic to you? With the few people you have left?”

“Do we have a choice?” He folded the map and shoved it back into his pocket.

“What is ‘Tick Tock?’ ”

He selected another sardine. “The trademark of an infamous Central American CIA agent, code-named Clock. Clock was ‘old’ CIA. The invisible hand and all that, legends and ghosts. The breeze you only feel at night, the birdcall from an empty tree. Clock was sangfroid personified. Except for one thing.”

She waited. “What?”

“He never existed. He was a psywar chimera, a Killroy invented to intimidate the natives, but the legend took on a life of its own. The perfect agent: brutal yet principled, unwaveringly loyal, perfectly invisible and therefore blameless. Not plausibly deniable but absolutely deniable. Every unexplained disappearance or massacre, every unsolved atrocity on either side, was eventually attributed to him. The CIA reaped the upside with no downside whatsoever. Very few people at Langley knew the truth.”

“How did you?”

“I was attached to the American embassy in Guatemala, I had to know these things. Inkman spent a year in Central America, so he was definitely familiar with Clock. I’m working on Inkman’s fear. The CIA ruined him completely. Now he thinks he has the upper hand, and Clock being here is like the id of the CIA coming after him again. Much better than a handful of weekenders and an ex-spook doing cop work for nuclear physicists.”

“You’re so certain about Inkman.”

“As the vulnerable point? He’s the one with the terrorist know-how. He’s the one who put this thing together. He’s invaluable to Trait, and the albatross around his neck.”

“And the ricin? If they kill a town full of people in retaliation?”

“Why bother? We’ll still be here. They’ll have to deal with us sooner or later.”

His tone chilled her. Deal with us .

He finished off the water, setting down the cup with finality. “I’m going out to the north barricade before daylight. I want to exert some pressure on them from the inside.”

She didn’t like the thought of him leaving. “Alone?”

“With the kid. He should know a shortcut to get us back here after sunup.”

“Coe?” Rebecca thought of Fern, and felt someone should stand in her place. “He’s only seventeen.”

“All he has to do is lead me out there.”

“The undertaker knows the town.”

“I considered that. But that would leave you alone.”

“Alone? Dr. Rosen, Marshall Polk—”

“The old man is a fighter all right, but not too agile. The good doctor is still in denial. And the girl — Mia? That would leave you and Coe.”

“Then how can you expect to beat these prisoners?”

“We have a lot on our side. I don’t need more than two or three warm bodies who can fight.”

“You’re saying that Tom Duggan is a fighter?” He reminded her about the undertaker’s dead mother. “That’s how it was in Guatemala. Indigenous people robbed of their land, their lives stripped away, having no choice but to fight. Not brave men, but desperate men. Men forced to become something they did not think they could be.”

“But Coe,” she said. “He’s just a small-town kid.” Kells pulled out the pager he had scavenged off Terry and copied the phone number onto a piece of napkin. “If you need to move, page me and we’ll rendezvous. But I wouldn’t travel too far on those sleds. The engine noise is like chum in a shark tank.”

They took two sleds, Coe in the lead and Kells behind him with one of the prisoner’s rifles. Rebecca watched from the family room as they faded into the dark cloud of night snow. Barely visible mountains loomed like an electrified prison fence. On the other side was freedom, normality, home.

There was too much time to think, too much time to contemplate the danger awaiting them. She wandered the rooms of the ground floor. The farmhouse rambled, the contents of one room spilling over into the next, playroom to kitchen to family room to den, a swirl of country domesticity, of children and animals turned loose. She felt like a detective investigating a family disappearance, and took care not to disturb or even right the overturned toys. She looked down at an action figure stripped naked, devoid of gender, and thought about being thirty-seven years old and alone.

The telephone cord stretched across the hall floor from the kitchen into the dining room. She turned away, not wanting to hear Dr. Rosen lying to his wife.

She stopped inside the playroom. Mia sat on the threadbare sofa next to an untouched glass of water. “Drink,” said Rebecca, hoping to rouse the girl. Mia looked at her blankly, her short hair flat and defeated. Rebecca touched her quilt-covered shoulder and sat there for a while. A long road of grief lay ahead of Mia with nothing to forestall it.

Dawn came gloomily to the windows. Shoes descended the staircase. Tom Duggan paused in the playroom doorway, tall and dour, looking like a country lawyer in his rumpled undertaker’s suit, then withdrew to the kitchen.

Rebecca patted Mia’s shoulder. She found Tom Duggan standing with his arms crossed, turning as she entered.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Not at all. I wasn’t very good company for her.”

“May I ask...?”

She noted the inconsistency of his face, pale cheeks chipped with acne scars beneath a pink and smooth forehead.

“The young man you loaded into the freezer. He was her husband.”

“Terrible,” he said, though his regret was professional and passed quickly. He sized her up as only a box maker can. “I was looking forward to your reading at the library.”

“Oh.” She was surprised he knew who she was. “I was at your dedication two days ago.”

He nodded. It was obviously an unpleasant memory.

A silence passed without any awkwardness. Rebecca asked, “What happened back there, at the country club?”

His face became even more serious as he recalled it. “I’m still not sure. I was taking care of the others in the freezer when he was talking to the prisoner. In Spanish — I don’t speak the language. He arranged the others by the time I was done. Why he cut them, I can’t imagine.”

She told him everything she knew about Kells.

“Do you trust him?” asked Tom Duggan.

“I don’t have a choice right now. None of us do. You saw him. He killed two prisoners and tortured information out of a third.” A small, brittle laugh escaped. “Who’s going to top that?”

“His hands shook a little after you took the rest away.” Tom Duggan seemed reassured by that. “But he seems serious about fighting to take back Gilchrist.” Tom Duggan’s expression darkened.

Marshall Polk entered just then from the opposite doorway, suspenders supporting his waistband below his considerable gut. He had just awoken and he shuffled from side-to-side like an old man doing an impression of a toddler. “Take back?” he said. “It’s all gone. Who’s the crazy one now?”

Tom Duggan said dryly, “I didn’t spend the last six years living over an asbestos mine without a toilet.”

The old man smiled, his wispy hair ridiculous with static as he turned to Rebecca. “This is an old argument, Miss...”