The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(2)

Then who am I?

You’re the man Dash and I love.

Which dissolved him into another spasm of sobbing.

Evie hadn’t said anything more. She stood, turned off the light, and pulled Manus to the bed. Manus hadn’t understood why—they never turned the lights all the way off. They liked to see each other, and besides, without any light they couldn’t sign and he couldn’t read her lips. But then he realized that was the point, they were done with words. Words didn’t matter.

They made love in the dark, Evie on her back underneath him, and when it was done, he cried again and she held him. They fell asleep in each other’s arms and afterward never spoke of what he’d told her.

After that, there was nothing more important to Manus than being worthy of the way Evie trusted him. Wanted him.

Loved him.

And Dash even more. Both of them had been deaf from childhood—Dash, from meningitis; Manus, from a beating at the hands of his father. But the feeling between them was more than that. The boy’s father had never learned sign. Even before the divorce, Evie had told Manus, the relationship had been strained. Dash needed a father. And Manus . . .

He didn’t know what he needed. Not a son, exactly. But someone . . . someone he could teach the good things he knew. The three of them were living together now, in a modern saltbox Manus had built on land they’d bought near Emmitsburg, in Maryland just south of the Pennsylvania border. Evie was done with NSA. The new director had offered her an early pension, the implicit quid pro quo being that she would forget what she knew about his predecessor’s rogue spying and assassination programs, the former of which had built on Evie’s video surveillance and facial recognition work, and the latter of which had involved Manus. And Evie had taken it, both to signal her agreement to their terms and to discourage them from seeking some other means of obtaining her silence.

Dash had helped build the house—on weekends, holidays, and all during the summer vacation before eighth grade. Manus was proud of how fast Dash had caught on, and how well they’d worked together. And grateful that Evie had entrusted him with making sure Dash knew how to use Manus’s tools safely. Once, when Dash was running a length of plywood through the table saw, Manus had caught Evie looking on, her arms folded across her chest, her expression worried. He had signed, He’s okay. And she had nodded and signed, I know.

In the end, maybe it didn’t matter what the bond was built on. What mattered was . . . Dash believed in him, in what he wanted to believe about himself. All he knew was that the way Dash looked at him . . . he needed to be what Dash saw.

So he didn’t have a choice. He would do what they wanted. The problem was, once they learned they could get him to do this, they would make him do other things, too.

Which meant that taking care of this woman would only buy him time. For what, he wasn’t sure. An opportunity. An opening. Something.

He reached the apex of the structure and looked down at the maze of concrete. They’d told him it had to look natural, or at least reasonably natural. Well, it wouldn’t be hard for someone running through here to fall. The pavement was wet, the stairs slick in places. The fall itself might be enough. If he had to do more, he would.

But he hoped he wouldn’t.





ONE WEEK EARLIER





chapter

one





HOBBS


All right,” the president said, coming to his feet. “See you all next week.”

As though a switch had been flipped, the attendees all rose, and the hushed room was suddenly filled with the simultaneous creak of dozens of leather chairs and a collective murmur of “Thank you, Mr. President.” To Hobbs, who had visited numerous black congregations when he’d been considering a run for Congress in South Carolina’s first district, the refrain always sounded like some weird cousin of call and response. Well, certainly there was enough ambient reverence in the White House Cabinet Room to make you feel you might be in church.

There was a moment of silence—another unconscious echo of religious devotion—as the president headed briskly toward his private exit at the south end of the room, his footfalls noiseless on the plush carpet. On those infrequent occasions when the president lingered, everyone else did, too, vying for a scrap of his attention. But the instant he was gone, all the august personalities who served at his pleasure would devolve into gossiping, backbiting courtiers, and as he closed the mahogany door behind him and the heavy brass latch clacked into place, the room erupted into a dozen scheming conversations. Power was like a magnet, keeping everything rigid and straight and proper. But without the magnet, it all collapsed into disorganized scrap.

The secretary of the interior saw his opportunity and zeroed in on the vice president, whose traditional position was directly opposite the president’s and on whose left it was Hobbs’s place as attorney general to sit. Hobbs caught the vice president’s wince at the Interior guy’s approach, probably in preparation for turning down a golf outing or some other invitation. Most of the time, the vice president would stick around after a meeting to enjoy the attention he received in the president’s absence, but if he left now it would be bad. It would elevate Hobbs himself as a beacon for the cabinet’s various lesser barons, and while ordinarily Hobbs was indifferent to their attention, today it would be a hindrance.