Chapter 28 #2
"But it's too late for that now, isn't it?
So, here we are. In your childhood home.
Using two women as insurance. And all we have left is war.
" He said the word without heat, like a season.
"You're here, Clint, so I can tell you—so you can tell all of them—that this idea you've hurt me?
That you have me on the run?" He smiled.
"You've helped me. Every move your family has made has helped me convince my superiors of exactly what I've been telling them.
That Dominion Hall is a threat. A private army, illegally funded, unaccountable, sitting on American soil.
And that it's time to dismantle it the old-fashioned way.
With the full, heavy hand of the federal government. "
"You're bluffing."
I said it level. My father's people had been clear, and their sources ran deep—Craine was the black sheep now. A man burning his last capital, running from his own building, power gone.
Craine laughed. Real, easy, delighted.
"Let me guess." He leaned back against the counter.
"Certain people in Washington have assured your father I'm washed up.
Corrupted. On my way out. A dead man walking the halls.
" He watched my face and found what he wanted in it.
"That is exactly what I paid to have them told.
Clint. You think your family has friends in Washington?
Friends." He said it like a word from a children's book.
"I have allies. Allies are better. Friends want you to be good.
Allies want you to win, because they've been promised a share.
And a share of what's under your father's floorboards buys allies at every altitude of that town.
Power is the only currency that spends there.
I've promised it, and they want it. So, now, I'm afraid, your family learns the hard way. "
He straightened off the counter and buttoned his jacket, one button.
"No hard feelings, incidentally. I mean that.
I've read your file—you're an honorable man, more than most in it.
You've simply been swept up into something much bigger than you, and for that, blame your father.
He started this. He and his—" a small, savoring pause, "—Project Trueborn.
You know, if the public ever heard those two words, they'd call it science fiction.
Bred soldiers. Engineered bloodlines. Nonsense from a paperback.
" He smiled wider. "And yet. This sort of thing has gone on for centuries, in every empire worth the name.
Private money moves through dark channels into projects that concentrate power for the few.
The only thing that ever changes is who the few are.
" He touched his own chest, light, two fingers.
"I'm one of the few now. It took a career, but here I am. "
He reached into his jacket pocket.
I froze. Weight to the balls of my feet, hands coming alive, nine feet collapsing to a number I liked—
Craine laughed.
"Relax." He drew his hand out slowly, showing me, and tossed something small and glinting through the air.
I caught it without looking away from him.
Handcuff keys.
I turned them once in my fingers and looked back up at him.
"For your mother," he said. "Don't worry.
The cuffs are loose. Padded, even. I told you—I'm not Victoria.
I have nothing against the woman." He checked his watch, then, a good one, gold catching the kitchen light.
Then, his eyes came back up to mine, and the smile on him now had a new thing in it, a bright, interested, terrible thing, a man arriving at the part of the evening he'd planned the whole evening around.
"I'm going to do you one last favor," he said.
"To prove I'm not a complete monster. There's a horse in the corral out there.
Big gray. Mean as sin—the caretaker's been trying to break him for weeks and the horse is winning.
He told me so himself. Now. If you can manhandle that animal, and ride him down the southfork trail—" he watched my face as he said it, and he knew, the file was that deep, he knew what that trail was, "—the same trail you used to run away on, I believe—and find your mother, and get her uncuffed from the little gift lying next to her, well.
" He spread his hands. "Then, that's that. "
"What about me?" Sasha said.
Her voice came out steady. I'd have known if it cost her, and it cost her, and it came out steady, anyway.
Craine looked at her like he'd only then remembered she made sound.
"You can go with him, or you can stay here. Entirely your choice." A shrug. "You'll be safer if you stay."
He looked at his watch again. He nodded along with something—the second hand, I understood, he was counting it down, savoring it, a man conducting his own orchestra. Then, his eyes came up one last time, bright and warm and void.
"And your ten minutes starts … now. Good luck, Clint."
He walked out the back door.
For one second—one whole second, the longest of my life—I stood pinned to my mother's kitchen floor.
Through the window, his back, crossing the yard, unhurried, wide open.
Nine seconds to run him down. Five to finish it.
My hands knew the whole sequence and were already warm.
And against it: the eyes on the rise. The rifle at the fence.
Sasha, three feet away, in the blast radius of anything I started.
My mother, cuffed to a gift at the end of a trail, with a clock running that I'd just spent a second of.
Fuck—
"Go."
Sasha. Her voice cut through like a hand on a bridle. She'd already moved—putting the counter at her back, her chin up, her eyes blazing and dead certain.
"I'll stay. Go."
I looked at her for a quarter of a heartbeat. I looked out the window at Craine's back going away across the yard.
Then, I bolted for the front door.