"Now, although she didn't much let on, the thought of that made her more sad than she even would have expected, because she knew just who she was thinking about, a tribe she'd only heard rumors about, so she decided she never wanted them to be found, because the
possibility
of them being out there was a lot more important than the confirmation. The living mystery was more important than having it solved. And because if they were found, they wouldn't get to remain who they were anymore, it just never seems to happen that way. People who're found when they don't know they're lost seem to lose an awful lot in the finding. So maybe it'd be better for them, and for us, if they stayed lost."
Sarah paused to sip at a bottle of grapefruit juice. She was the only one moving, the other two poised and tuned in, waiting. She felt embarrassingly in control; she really had them.
"The people the anthropologist was thinking about, they were mountain people too, but way at the frontiers at the edge of the world, almost, in the mountains of the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Mountains and deserts … it wasn't until she was talking with her lover that the anthropologist came to truly appreciate the allure and the power of both places, because lies have a harder time living in them. So it seemed to her that this last lost tribe must have the best of both worlds where they were.
"The local Mongols called these people
almas
, and knew enough about them to describe them, and said they were short and stocky, and hairy, with broad features. Very crude clothes, made of animal skins, mostly. But not even the Mongols who'd lived around there nearly forever could talk with them, because their words were so different, and the
almas
were very shy people, too. But the Mongols did find the
almas
would trade with them, so they'd leave a parcel of skins or something on the ground, in the open, or on a big rock, where the
almas
could find it, and when they'd come back later it'd be gone, with something else in its place. Some other skins or tools or food that had been gathered … obviously things that the
almas
thought had enough value to represent them to the people they were too shy to meet, and whose words they could never understand."
Sarah took another drink of her juice, and teased her tiny audience with more silence.
"So word got out, even from a region as remote as the Gobi Desert, and everyone who made it a point to pay attention to such things wondered who and what the
almas
really were. Obviously they were there, and not imaginary. The Mongols didn't have any reason to be making anything up. Finally, what a lot of people decided the
almas
might be was a surviving tribe of Neanderthals … still alive in one of the wildest places on earth, where there wasn't even a rain forest to draw in outsiders just so it could be cut down. The kind of place that was valuable only to the people who lived there … even the ones supposed to have been gone for forty thousand years. So it made the anthropologist wonder something: Do the
almas
still know something the rest of us have forgotten?"
She heard Adrienne give a satisfied, throaty chuckle.
"And that's where the story ends, I guess," she said, with a soft and hopeful smile toward the highway, toward the east, toward the other side of the world. "As far as the anthropologist knows, the
almas
are still there, still trading with their neighbors, and no one can say for sure who they are. Which is the way it should stay. So the story ends with the mystery and the wonder intact … just the way all good tribal legends should end. Because shamans know that's the part of the story that teaches the lesson."
She listened to the hum of the highway beneath them, shut her eyes, and felt Adrienne's hand sliding tender across the seat to rub her knee. Listened until she heard Clay stir in the back, and speak up for more.
"And what's the lesson of this one, do you think?" he asked.
"That the
almas
found a place in the world where they could still live in peace, even if it was the only place on earth left for them. So the
almas
aren't really lost at all, not to anybody who bothers to understand. And if they can survive, in a time that's completely wrong for them … maybe so can a few others who feel as lost as the
almas
must appear to the rest of the world."
She smiled back at Clay, who briefly met her eyes before looking away. She waited for more questions but none came, and she thought, for a change, that this was probably for the best.
*
They reached Chapel Hill in mid-afternoon and found a motel. Toward dusk, Sarah phoned Kendra Madigan to let her know they were in town, and ask when she would prefer they come to her home.
"Let's make it no later than ten-thirty tomorrow morning, all right? We'll have a long, long day ahead of us. And you'll promise me something? That each of you, you'll get a good long night's sleep tonight?"
"Promise," Sarah said.
"Let me ask you something about this subject of yours," and Ms. Madigan's voice had dimmed, quieted. "Is he prone to violence when he learns things he might consider unpleasant?"
Sarah's hand wrapped harder around the phone. "If it's about himself … he'd more than likely turn his distress inward. What are you expecting?"
"I don't expect anything specific, Ms. McGuire. We'll just have to wait and see. And be ready. Because when someone's under a hypnosis this deep…? It really is impossible to expect what might come bubbling up from so far down."
Maximum efficiency depended on isolation; of this Valentine was convinced. The greatest movers among humanity — the Alexanders, the Saladins, the Stalins — might be the ones who commanded armies, but even they would remain forever vulnerable. The machinery of their power could grind to a halt by the designs of a single, well-placed individual. The mind, the will, that toiled in perfect isolation could never be betrayed by another.
Only by itself.
And so Patrick Valentine wondered if he might not soon find himself slipping. Opening his house to another this way, he was bound to feel the impact, his focus diluted. Come tomorrow, Daniel Ironwood would be here a week. The impact did not go unnoticed.
Even now, his bedroom was no refuge. Daniel's voice, from the first floor: "Patrick! Get down here!
Right now!
"
Scowling, he rose. He tossed aside the inventory lists he'd been scanning, supplied by Teddy this afternoon, a grocery list of the ordnance in a Maryland armory that soon would donate to the cause.
Downstairs he found Daniel on the floor, wound tight and coiled before the TV, an arm extended, bird-dog still. The face on the screen they knew well; they woke up with it every morning, and still he could never quite surmount that initial vertigo when seeing it worn by someone else.
Valentine watched, listened. The story was half-over, but the rest was not difficult to fill in. News from Texas: Lawyers for Mark Alan Nance had exhausted their final appeal, and no one was cutting him any slack for the Helverson's defense. Execution was on for the middle of next week. In the grimmest room in Huntsville, a table waited with straps and tubes, needles and plungers.
Valentine could picture that table as clearly as if it were waiting for him, too. Perhaps it someday would.
"They're really going to stick him this time. Aren't they?" Daniel spoke with rare reverence. Behind his thick amber lenses his eyes may have been awestruck.
"Turn that thing off." Valentine heard the pause before the click, Daniel assessing bullshit tolerance and deciding tonight there was none. He collapsed into his favored chair, frowned at Daniel; the remote control still dangled from the kid's hand. "Don't you ever read a newspaper?"
"What can I say?" Daniel shrugged. Those damned glasses; too hard to tell where his eyes were most of the time. "I like sound bites. It makes the news go down like a protein shake."
"Probably want your food prechewed before you get it, too."
"No, I lied," he said, backtracking. "I hate getting my hands all inky. Women like clean hands. Speaking of … when the hell am I going to get laid, here, Patrick?"
"In a few nights. The middle of this week."
"Why not tonight?"
"Because I say so."
It was a parent's answer, a peculiar thing to hear slipping from his own lips. But coupled with glowering eyes it was sufficient. There came no more argument.
He could have explained himself further but decided against it. The truth? It wasn't the proper time to start letting him pass his nights in the penthouse with Ellie. Everything was cold, hard function here — Valentine never lost sight of this, even if he spared his protégés the worst of it — and letting Daniel sleep in her bed would have served none. Yet.
Timing was everything. The world was a vast machine, and if one looked beneath the veneer of chaos that it wore as a disguise, one could see how so many components were geared to their own clockwork mechanisms.
Ellie Pratt, a single cog, kept track of her monthly cycles at his insistence. If she was accurate, she would be fertile again beginning the middle of this week. An ovum would once more slide down its fallopian conduit, and that egg was his, bought and paid for. If he chose to reserve it for the sperm of another, that was his right.
Only then would he allow Daniel Ironwood to lie with her, like a father giving his blessing to an incestuous union between two offspring separated at birth, whose hormones overruled social taboo. Only when she lay ripe would he turn Daniel free of his leash, and only then could nature take its course. The moment had to be optimal, equal halves lust and fertility.
This could have been the problem with Timothy Van der Leun — Valentine had miscalculated timing. Brought him in, let the two of them get acquainted, allowed Van der Leun free access from almost the moment his flight had touched down. They had first gone to bed days before her window of ovulation, which Valentine recognized as his own libertarian mistake. Familiarity breeds contempt, or in this case, impotence. Timothy Van der Leun had been useless.
Fortunately, he had also been replaceable.
They
were
interchangeable, for Valentine's purposes. And even Timothy hadn't been his first choice. That honor had befallen the one in Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old scavenger and sometimes grifter named Bryce. Valentine had already been in contact with Bryce for two years, had supplied him with more information on his anomaly than he ever would have received from orthodox science.
"I've got a job for you," Valentine had told him over the phone one night. He'd been blunter with his metaphorical offspring at the time, believing they might naturally defer to him because of his age, his experience, his success at survival. "I want you to impregnate a very special young woman."
While there was no indication yet that the Helverson's males had inherited their mutation from a parent, it wasn't known what characteristics they might pass along to their own children. Only Mark Alan Nance had conclusively sired a child, but it had been the kid's death that had led to Nance's genetic testing in the first place. The family had later refused to allow an exhumation; leave the baby dead and buried.
Imagine the possibilities: a child conceived by not one but two Helverson's carriers. Would two such genetic dominants distill Helverson's into an even more potent manifestation? Valentine had a need to know, and it might take conventional science years to come up with an answer.
He had ordered, he'd threatened, and still Bryce had refused to cooperate. Valentine's fury had been great:
What, after all I've done for you?
But it had been a valuable learning experience. He could not expect them all to share his thirst for knowledge, nor count on indiscriminate sex drives to ensure their cooperation, and above all he couldn't bully them. They had to be seduced, teased along.
So he'd written off Bryce, moved on to Timothy Van der Leun precisely because his will had seemed less formidable. Another abortive attempt, though he'd at least secured cooperation first.
He was working his way down the list, Valentine supposed, and it was looking as if number three might work out just fine.
As a physical specimen, Daniel Ironwood was splendid, trim and hard, and while he smoked much, he rarely coughed, even on rising in the morning. His perspective on whatever didn't directly concern him, however, seemed blithely indifferent. Last week it had taken him three days to ask the obvious question: Where had Ellie come from? How had Patrick Valentine managed to acquire a Helverson's female about whom the genetics databanks were unaware?
It had been a simple process, at least conceptually; far more time-consuming in the execution. More than two years ago he had tired of the slow pace with which Helverson's subjects were being uncovered. At that point the Cassandra Study was merely a proposal, though even if it had been implemented the next day it still wouldn't identify the subjects already out there. It found babies. He didn't want babies. He wanted adults, and thus far the adults were being found by accident, and all of them could be counted on a pair of six-fingered hands. So Valentine took matters into his own.