Chapter 34
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She went under deep, the way she had the night before, dropping all at once into the sleep of somebody who'd carried more than a person should. I waited until her breathing went long and even, then eased out from under her, tucked the blanket where I'd been, and slipped out without a sound.
Tommy's door was next.
He was up. Sitting by the window with a glass of something he wasn't drinking, and he looked up when I came in like he'd been waiting on me.
"The airport," I said.
"Handled. As handled as a thing like that gets.
" He set the glass down. "It'll stay a mess a while.
Cameras, witnesses, a dead civilian, a hurt officer—there's no making that vanish, only managing how it sits.
We're managing it." He met my eyes. "I'm not laying blame on you.
There isn't any. Just facts, and we deal with the facts. "
I nodded. Fairer than I deserved.
"I need to talk to Dad."
Something crossed his face—not surprise. More like relief that the thing he'd dreaded had finally come so he could quit dreading it. He stood.
"Yeah," he said. "Come on."
He led me a long way. Down the corridor, down a back stair, through a wing that went quieter the deeper we went, ‘til we'd crossed nearly the whole footprint of that vast place to a set of rooms in the farthest corner of the estate.
I clocked it the way I clock everything.
The man at the center of all this, kept at the edge of it.
Couldn't tell if that was Byron hiding or Byron hidden, and I filed the question.
Tommy knocked once and opened the door.
My father rose from a small table by a lamp when we came in.
This was the first time I got to actually look. And I stood in the doorway and looked at Byron Dane for the first time in many years.
Older. Gray almost all the way through, lines cut deep. But the same man under it—big through the shoulders the way all his sons are big, the same jaw I shave every morning, the same hands. Time hadn't bent him.
What threw me was his face.
I'd come in braced for hardness. For years, I'd carried the picture of the relentless, exacting man who drove us like green horses, who was right and never easy, though he loved us.
I'd expected to find him older and meaner for whatever he'd done in the dark.
Instead, what looked back at me was soft.
Not weak—nothing in Byron Dane was ever weak.
Worn down to something gentler than I'd ever known him to be.
What came off him, plain as heat off a stove, was grief.
He looked at me like a man looking at a thing he'd loved and lost and not quite gotten back.
It knocked me sideways worse than hardness would have.
"Sit, please." That voice. "There's a lot. I'll give it to you as fast as I can."
We sat. Three men at a little table in the corner of a mansion, and my father started to talk.
"Dominion Hall was built on stolen money," he said.
"I'll start there, because you'll hear it eventually and I'd sooner you heard it from me.
Billions. I took it off an outfit called Department 77—government, black as they come, started for good reasons and gone rotten the way those things do.
By the end they were a cancer. So, I gutted them.
Turned everything they had against them and built this out of the wreck.
" He held my eyes. "I won't tell you it was clean.
I'll tell you it was right. I did it to protect what was mine.
Every dollar in these walls is blood money put to better use than the bastards who bled for it ever meant. "
A lot, and only the start. "All right," I said. "Keep going."
He drew a breath, and I watched him brace for the next part the way you brace to set a broken bone. His hand, flat on the table, wasn't quite steady. I'd never in my life seen that hand anything but steady.
"You and your brothers in Valentine," he said. "The seven of you. You grew up thinking that was the whole of it. My sons, your mother's sons, the Danes of one ranch in one Texas town." A pause. "It wasn't the whole of it. Not by a long way."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning there's more of you." Plain, no cushion on it.
"More sons. Mine. Raised just like you—in a home, by a mother, my name on them, me drifting in and out of their lives same as I drifted in and out of yours.
Then gone, same as I went gone on you." His jaw worked on that last part.
"Seven in Charleston. Seven in Montana. Your seven in Valentine.
Three houses. Twenty-one boys, every one a Dane by blood and by name, and not one of you knew the others walked the earth until this past while. "
The room tilted half an inch.
Seven and seven and seven. All Danes. All his. Fourteen of them out there I've never laid eyes on.
I caught myself counting the exits. Two—the door we'd come in, a second behind a curtain that probably gave onto a balcony.
Pure reflex, mapping a room in my own father's quarters while he told me I had fourteen brothers I'd never met.
I couldn't switch it off. I've never been able to switch it off.
"That's—" I started, and didn't find the end of it.
"Brothers," my father said. "Half by the strict word. Whole by every word that's worth a damn. Fourteen of them, son, and they're as much yours as Tommy in that chair."
I looked at Tommy. He wore the rueful almost-smile of a man who'd had this exact chair pulled out from under him once and lived through it.
"It's true," he said quiet. "I didn't believe it either. I do now."
I sat back and tried to make the pieces hold a shape and they wouldn't. A father who ran three families across three states. Twenty-one sons by one man, all carrying his name into separate places that never touched. Each of us a boy on a porch, waiting on a truck that, one day, quit coming.
"Why?" I asked. Rough. "Three families. Why like that? What kind of a man—"
"The kind that volunteered for a thing he didn't fully understand.
" No defense in it. Just the flat weight of a man owning what he'd done.
"There was a program. Before any of you drew breath.
Top secret, government-run, the kind that leaves no record behind.
Project Trueborn." He let the name sit. "The notion was better soldiers.
Not trained better—made better. Bred for it, off people with the right stuff in them.
Your mothers and I volunteered. Whether it was the right call, I'll carry to my grave.
But you boys—all twenty-one—are what came of it.
You're Trueborn. That's the blood you share, every branch of you, no matter which home raised you. "
Somewhere, a clock ticked, loud in the quiet.
I'd walked in stone blind, and now the answers came faster than I could stack them.
The one instinct that's kept me breathing—don't guess, don't pretend you've got the shape of a thing you don't—was about all that held me in the chair.
So, I quit trying to hold the whole of it.
I took one piece at a time, the way you take a wall: one stone.
"Craine," I said. "Where's he fit?"
My father's face went grim. "Craine took over from a woman.
Victoria. Trueborn herself, one of the early ones, thrown out of the program a long while back for good and sound reasons—she'd gone bad.
Gone hungry for what it could give her. Ran an outfit aimed at this family for a time.
She's dead now." A pause. "What I only recently put together, is Craine came up under her.
Took her information, her grudge, her aims when she went in the ground.
Now, he's using a federal badge to do what she never could.
He wants Trueborn. The science, the files, the methods.
And the men." He shook his head slow. "What he means to do once he's got it, I don't know.
The not-knowing is the part that scares me. "
I turned it over. "Then give it to him. The files. Whatever's in a vault somewhere. Let him choke on it. Burn the program to ash and let him pick the cinders. It's done, isn't it? Old history. Why's anybody bleeding over a thing that already happened?"
My father and Tommy traded a look. Quick, and I didn't like one piece of it. The look of two men carrying a weight they hadn't set on the table yet.
"Because it's not old," Byron said. "And it's not a program.
Trueborn isn't paper in a safe, son. It's people.
It's your brothers—the six you grew up beside and the fourteen you haven't met.
Hand Craine the program and you're not handing him files.
You're handing him them. Every man it ever made.
Where they are, what they are, how to find them and use them or end them.
" His voice dropped. "Twenty-one men and the mothers who raised them and a mess of good people who never asked to be born in the middle of this.
That's what he's really asking you to deliver. Not files. Kin."
And the true size of it came down on me, at last.
Twenty-one of us. Three homes. One name. The whole of it stitched together by the man across the table—and every thread something Craine would own the moment the program changed hands.
"How many have you brought in?" I asked.
"One at a time. Careful, as it's safe, as the world allows.
Charleston came together first. Montana after.
Valentine's the newest of it—and you're the one I'm sitting across from tonight.
" Something moved in his face. "There's a reason for the slow of it.
The fewer who hold the whole picture at once, the safer every man stands.
It's protection. For them, and for you, because what you don't carry can't be cut out of you.
You'll meet them all. I swear it. Just not in one night. "