THREE

Situated on four thousand acres of soggy East Texas piney woodland and short-grass prairie, looking more or less like a corporate office park or large public high school, the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a.k.a. Terrell, meant one thing: if you were a man convicted of capital murder in the state of Texas, this was where you came to die.

On that morning in March, Anthony Lloyd Carter, inmate number 999642, sentenced to death by lethal injection for the murder of a Houston mother of two named Rachel Wood whose lawn he had mowed every week for forty dollars and a glass of iced tea, had been a resident of the Administrative Segregation Block of Terrell Unit for one thousand three hundred and thirty-two days—less than many, more than some, not that in Carter’s sense of things this made a lick of difference. It wasn’t like you got a prize for being there the longest. He ate alone, exercised alone, showered alone, and a week was the same as a day or a month to him. The only different thing that was going to happen would come on the day the warden and the chaplain appeared at his cell and he’d take the ride to the room with the needle, and that day wasn’t so far off. He was allowed to read, but that wasn’t easy for him, it never had been, and he had long since stopped fussing with it. His cell was a concrete box six feet by ten with one window and a steel door with a slot wide enough to slip his hands through but that was all, and most of the time he just lay there on his cot, his mind so blank it was like a pail with nothing in it. Half the time he couldn’t have said for sure if he was awake or still sleeping.

That day began the same as every other, at 3:00 A.M., when they turned on the lights and shoved the breakfast trays through the slots. Usually it was cold cereal or powdered eggs or pancakes; the good breakfasts were when they put peanut butter on the pancakes, and this was one of the good ones. The fork was plastic and broke half the time, so Carter sat on his bunk and ate the pancakes folded up, like tacos. The other men on H-Wing complained about the food, how nasty it was, but Carter didn’t think it was so bad on the whole. He’d had worse, and there were days in his life when he’d had nothing at all, so pancakes with peanut butter were a welcome sight in the morning, even if it wasn’t morning in the sense of being light out.

There were visiting days, of course, but Carter hadn’t had a visitor in all the time he’d been in Terrell except for the once, when the woman’s husband had come and told him that he’d found Christ Jesus who was the Lord and that he’d prayed on what Carter had done, taking his beautiful wife away from him and his babies forever and ever; and that through the weeks and months of praying, he’d come to terms with this and decided to forgive him. The man did a lot of crying, sitting on the other side of the glass with the phone pressed to his head. Carter had been a Christian man himself from time to time and appreciated what the woman’s husband was saying to him; but the way he spoke the words made it seem like his forgiving Carter was something he’d chosen to do, to make himself feel better. He certainly didn’t say anything about putting a stop to what was going to happen to Carter. Carter couldn’t see how saying anything on the subject would improve the situation, so he thanked the man and said God bless you and I’m sorry, if I see Mrs. Wood in heaven I’ll tell her what you did here today, which made the man get up in a hurry and leave him there, holding the phone. That was the last time anybody had come to see Carter at Terrell, two years ago at least.

The thing was, the woman, Mrs. Wood, had always been nice to him, giving him an extra five or ten, and coming out with the iced tea on the hot days, always on a little tray, like folks did in restaurants, and the thing that had happened between them was confusing; Carter was sorry about it, sorry right down to his bones, but it still didn’t make sense in his head, no matter how he turned it around. He’d never said he hadn’t done it, but it didn’t seem right to him to die on account of something he didn’t understand, at least before he had the chance to figure it out. He went over it in his mind, but in four years it never had come any clearer to him. Maybe coming to terms, like Mr. Wood had done, was the thing Carter hadn’t been able to see his way to. If anything, the whole thing made less sense than ever; and with the days and weeks and months all mashed together in his brain the way they were, he wasn’t even sure he was remembering the thing right to begin with.

At 6:00 A.M., when the shift changed, the guards woke everybody up again, to call out names and numbers, then moved down the hallway with the laundry bags to swap out boxers and socks. This meant today was a Friday. Carter didn’t get a chance to shower but once a week or see the barber except every sixty days, so it was good to have clean clothes. The sticky feeling of his skin was worse in summer, when you sweated all day onto yourself even if you lay still as a stone, but from what his lawyer had told him in the letter he’d sent six months ago, he wouldn’t have to go through another Texas summer in his life. The second of June would be the end of it.

His thoughts were broken by two hard bangs on the door. “Carter. Anthony Carter.” The voice belonged to Pincher, head of the shift.

“Aw, come on, Pincher,” Anthony said from his bunk. “Who’d you think was in here?”

“Present for cuffs, Tone.”

“Ain’t time for rec. Ain’t my day for the shower neither.”

“You think I got all morning to stand here talking about it?”

Carter eased himself off the bunk, where he’d been looking at the ceiling and thinking about the woman, that glass of iced tea on the tray. His body felt achy and slow, and with effort he lowered himself onto his knees with his back facing the door. He’d done this a thousand times but still didn’t like it. Keeping your balance was the tricky part. Once he was kneeling, he pulled his shoulder blades inward, twisted his arms around, and guided his hands, palms up, through the slot that the food came through. He felt the cold bite of the metal as Pincher cuffed his wrists. Everybody called him Pincher on account of how tight he did the cuffs.

“Stand back now, Carter.”

Carter pushed one foot forward, his left knee making a grinding sound as he shifted his center of gravity, then rose carefully to his feet, simultaneously withdrawing his cuffed hands from the slot. From the far side of the door came the clanking of Pincher’s big ring of keys, and then the door opened to show him Pincher and the guard they called Dennis the Menace, on account of his hair, which looked like the kid’s in the cartoon, and the fact that he liked to menace you with the stick. He had a way of finding spots on your body that you never knew could hurt so bad with just a little poke of wood.

“Seems like somebody’s come to see you, Carter,” Pincher said. “And it isn’t your mother or your lawyer.” He didn’t smile or anything, but Dennis looked to be enjoying himself. He gave that stick of his a twirl like a majorette.

“My mom’s been with Jesus since I was ten years old,” Carter told him. “You know that, Pincher, I told you that about a hundred times. Who is it wants me?”

“Can’t say. Warden set it up. I’m just supposed to take you to the cages.”

Carter supposed this was no good. It’d been so long since the woman’s husband had come to visit; maybe he’d come to say goodbye, or else to tell him I changed my mind, I don’t forgive you after all, go straight to hell, Anthony Carter. Either way Carter didn’t have anything else to say to the man. He’d said sorry to everyone over and over and felt done with it.

“Come on with you then,” Pincher said.

They led him down the corridor, Pincher gripping him hard by an elbow to steer him like a kid through a crowd, or a girl he was dancing with. This was how they took you anywhere, even to the shower. Part of you got used to people’s hands being on you this way, and part of you didn’t. Dennis led the way, opening the door that sealed administrative segregation from the rest of H-Wing and then the outer, second door that took them down the hall through general population to the cages. It’d been almost two years since Carter had been off H-Wing—H for “hellhole,” H for “hit my black ass with that stick some more,” H for “Hey, Mama, I’m off to see Jesus any day now”—and walking with his eyes pointed at the ground, he still let himself peek around, if only to give his eyes something new to look at. But it was all still Terrell, a maze of concrete and steel and heavy doors, the air dank and sour with the smell of men.

At the visiting area they reported to the OD and entered an empty cage. The air inside was ten degrees warmer and smelled like bleach so strong it made Carter’s eyes sting. Pincher undid the cuffs; while Dennis held the point of his stick against the soft spot under Carter’s jaw, they shackled him in the front, legs too. There were signs all over the wall telling Carter what he could and couldn’t do, none of which he wanted to take the trouble to read or even look at. They shuffled him over to the chair and gave him the phone, which Carter could manage to hold in place against his ear only if he bent his legs halfway up his chest—more damp crunches from his knees—pulling the chain taut across his chest like a long zipper.

“Didn’t have to wear the shackles the last time,” Carter said.

Pincher barked a nasty laugh. “I’m sorry, did we forget to ask you nicely? Fuck you, Carter. You got ten minutes.”

Then they left, and Carter waited for the door on the other side to open and show him who it was had come to see him after all this time.

Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.

He hated the weather, which was hot as an oven one minute and freezing the next, the air so damp it felt like a wet towel over your head. He hated the look of the place, beginning with the trees, which were scrawny and pathetic, their limbs all gnarled up like something out of Dr. Seuss, and the flat, windblown nothingness of it. He hated the billboards and the freeways and faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly steaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belt buckles and the way people talked, y’all this and y’all that, as if they spent the day ropin’ and ridin’, not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.

Most of all, he hated it because his parents had made him live here, back in junior high. Wolgast was forty-four, still in decent shape but with the miscellaneous aches and thinning hair to show for it; sixth grade was long ago, nothing to regret, but still, driving with Doyle up Highway 59 north from Houston, springtime Texas spread all around, the wound felt fresh to him. Texas, state-sized porkchop of misery: one minute he’d been a perfectly happy kid in Oregon, fishing off the pier at the mouth of the Coos River and playing with his friends in the woods behind their house for endless, idle hours; the next he was stuck in the urban swamp of Houston, living in a crappy ranch house without a scrap of shade, walking to school in one-hundred-degree heat that felt like a big shoe coming down on his head. The end of the world, he’d thought. That’s where he was. The end of the world was Houston, Texas. On his first day of sixth grade, the teacher had made him stand up to recite the Texas Pledge of Allegiance, as if he’d signed up to live in a whole different country. Three miserable years; he’d never been so glad to leave a place, even the way it happened. His father was a mechanical engineer; his parents had met when his father had taken a job the year after college as a math teacher on the reservation in Grande Ronde, where his mother, who was half Chinook—her mother’s family name was Po-Bear—was working as a nurse’s aide. They’d gone to Texas for the money, but then his father was laid off when the oil bust hit in ’86; they tried to sell the house but couldn’t, and in the end, his father had simply dropped the keys off at the bank. They moved to Michigan, then Ohio, then upstate New York, chasing little bits of work, but his father had never righted himself after that. When he’d died of pancreatic cancer two months before Wolgast graduated from high school—his third in as many years—it was easy to think that Texas had somehow done it. His mother had moved back to Oregon, but now she was gone too.

Everyone was gone.

He’d gotten the first man, Babcock, from Nevada. Others came from Arizona and Louisiana and Kentucky and Wyoming and Florida and Indiana and Delaware. Wolgast didn’t care much for those places, either. But anything was better than Texas.

Wolgast and Doyle had flown into Houston from Denver the night before. They’d stayed the night at a Radisson near the airport (he’d considered a brief side trip into the city, maybe tracking down his old house, but then wondered what in hell he’d want to do a thing like that for), picked up the rental car in the morning, a Chrysler Victory so new it smelled like the ink on a dollar bill, and headed north. The day was clear with a high, blue sky the color of cornflowers; Wolgast drove while Doyle sipped his latte and read the file, a mass of paper resting on his lap.

“Meet Anthony Carter,” Doyle said, and held up the photo. “Subject Number Twelve.”

Wolgast didn’t want to look. He knew just what he’d see: one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely ever learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long. These men were black or white, fat or thin, old or young, but the eyes were always the same: empty, like drains that could suck the whole world down into them. It was easy to sympathize with them in the abstract, but only in the abstract.

“Don’t you want to know what he did?”

Wolgast shrugged. He was in no hurry, but now was as good a time as any.

Doyle slurped his latte and read: “Anthony Lloyd Carter. African American, five foot four, a hundred and twenty pounds.” Doyle looked up. “That explains the nickname. Take a guess.”

Already Wolgast felt tired. “You’ve got me. Little Anthony?”

“You’re showing your age, boss. It’s T-Tone. T for ‘Tiny,’ I’m thinking, though you never know. Mother deceased, no dad in the picture from day one, a series of foster homes care of the county. Bad beginnings all around. A list of priors but mostly petty stuff, panhandling, public nuisance, that kind of thing. So, the story. Our man Anthony cuts this lady’s lawn every week. Her name is Rachel Wood, she lives in River Oaks, two little girls, husband’s some big lawyer. All the charity balls, the benefits, the country clubs. Anthony Carter is her project. Starts cutting her lawn one day when she sees him standing under an overpass with a sign that says, HUNGRY, PLEASE HELP. Words along those lines. Anyway, she takes him home, makes him a sandwich, puts in some calls and finds him a place, some kind of group home she raises money for. Then she calls all her friends in River Oaks and says, Let’s help this guy, what do you need done around the place? All of a sudden she’s a regular Girl Scout, rallying the troops. So the guy starts cutting all their lawns, pruning the hedges, you know, all the things they need around the big houses. This goes on about two years. Everything’s hunky-dory until one day, our man Anthony comes over to cut the lawn, and one of the little girls is home sick from school. She’s five. Mom’s on the phone or doing something, the little girl goes out into the yard, sees Anthony. She knows who he is, she’s seen him plenty of times, but this time something goes wrong. He frightens her. There’s some stuff here about maybe he touched her, but the court psychiatrist is iffy on that. Anyway, the girl starts screaming, Mom comes tearing out of the house, she’s screaming, everybody’s screaming, all of a sudden it’s like a screaming contest, the goddamn screaming Olympics. One minute he’s the nice man who shows up on time to cut the lawn, next thing you know, he’s just a black guy with your kid, and all the Mother Teresa shit goes out the window. It gets physical. There’s a struggle. Mom somehow falls or gets pushed into the pool. Anthony goes in after her, maybe to help her, but she’s still screaming at him, fights him off. So now everybody’s wet and yelling and thrashing around.” Doyle looked at him quizzically. “Know how it ends?”

“He drowns her?”

“Bingo. Right there, right in front of the little girl. A neighbor heard it all and called the cops, so when they get there, he’s still sitting on the edge of the pool, the lady floating in it.” He shook his head. “Not a pretty picture.”

Sometimes it was troubling to Wolgast, how much energy Doyle put into these stories. “Any chance it was an accident?”

“As it happens, the victim was on the varsity swim team at SMU. Still did fifty laps every morning. The prosecution made a lot of hay with that little detail. That and the fact that Carter pretty much admitted to killing her.”

“What did he say when they arrested him?”

Doyle shrugged. “He only wanted her to stop screaming. Then he asked for a glass of iced tea.”

Wolgast shook his head. The stories were always bad, but it was the little details that got to him. A glass of iced tea. Sweet Jesus. “How old did you say he was?”

Doyle flipped back a couple of pages. “I didn’t. Thirty-two. Twenty-eight at the time he went into custody. And here’s the thing. No relatives at all. Last time anybody came to see him in Polunsky was the victim’s husband, a little over two years ago. His lawyer left the state, too, after the appeal was turned down. Carter’s been reassigned to somebody else in the Harris County PD office, but they haven’t even opened the paperwork. Ipso facto, nobody’s watching the store. Anthony Carter goes to the needle on June second for murder one with depraved indifference, and not one soul on earth is paying attention. The guy’s a ghost already.”

The drive to Livingston took ninety minutes, the last fifteen minutes on a farm-to-market road that carried them through the intermittent shade of piney woods and open fields of prairie grass spangled with blue-bonnets. It was just noon; with luck, Wolgast thought, they could be done by dinner, enough time to drive back to Houston and dump the rental and get on a plane to Colorado. It was better when these trips were quick like that; when he lingered too long, if the guy was hemming and hawing and drawing it out—never mind that they always took the deal eventually—he’d start to get a queasy feeling in his stomach about the whole thing. It always made him think of a play he’d read in high school, The Devil and Daniel Webster, and how he, Wolgast, was the devil in this deal. Doyle was different; he was younger, for starters, not even thirty, a cherry-cheeked farmboy from Indiana who was glad to play Robin to Wolgast’s Batman, calling him “chief” and “boss,” with a streak of old-fashioned midwestern patriotism so unalloyed that Wolgast had actually seen him tear up at the national anthem at the start of a Rockies game—a game on TV. Wolgast hadn’t known they still made people like Phil Doyle. And there was no question Doyle was smart, with a good future ahead of him. Fresh out of Purdue, his law school applications already in the works, Doyle had joined the Bureau right after the Mall of America Massacre—three hundred holiday shoppers gunned down by Iranian jihadists, all the horror captured by security cameras to be replayed in painstakingly gruesome detail on CNN; it seemed like half the country was ready to sign on to something, anything that day—and after finishing his training at Quantico, he had been posted to the Denver field office, assigned to counterterrorism. When the Army had come looking for two field agents, Doyle had been the first in line to volunteer. Wolgast couldn’t quite figure that; on paper, what they were calling “Project NOAH” had looked like a dead end, and Wolgast had taken the assignment for just that reason. His divorce had just come through—his marriage to Lila hadn’t ended so much as evaporated, so it had taken him by surprise, how blue the actual decree had made him—and a few months of travel seemed like just the thing to clear his mind. He’d gotten a small settlement in the divorce—his share of the equity in their house in Cherry Creek, plus a piece of Lila’s retirement account from the hospital—and he’d actually thought about quitting the Bureau entirely, going back to Oregon and using the money to open up a small business of some kind: hardware, maybe, or sporting goods, not that he knew anything about either one. Guys who quit the Bureau always ended up in security, but to Wolgast the idea of a small store, something simple and clean, the shelves stocked with baseball gloves or hammers, objects with a purpose you could identify just by looking at them, was far more appealing. And the NOAH thing had seemed like a cakewalk, not a bad way to spend his last year in the Bureau if it came to that.

Of course, it had turned out to be more than paperwork and babysitting, a lot more, and he wondered if Doyle had somehow known this.

At Polunsky they were ID’d and asked to check their weapons, then went to the warden’s office. Polunsky was a grim place, but they all were. While they waited, Wolgast used his handheld to check for evening flights out of Houston—there was one at 8:30, so if they hustled they could make it. Doyle said nothing, just flipped through a copy of Sports Illustrated, like he was waiting at the dentist. It was just after one when the secretary led them in.

The warden was a black man, about fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and the chest of a weight lifter compressed under his suit vest. He neither rose nor offered to shake their hands as they entered. Wolgast gave him the documents to look over.

He finished reading and looked up. “Agent, this is the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen. What in the hell would you want Anthony Carter for?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. We’re just here to make the transfer.”

The warden put the papers aside and folded his hands on his desk. “I see. And what if I said no?”

“Then I would give you a number to call, and the person on the other end of the line would do his best to explain that this is a matter of national security.”

“A number.”

“That’s correct.”

The warden sighed irritably, spun in his chair, and gestured out the wide windows behind him. “Gentlemen, do you know what that is out there?”

“I’m not following you.”

He turned to face them again. He didn’t seem angry, Wolgast thought. Just a man accustomed to having his way. “It’s Texas. Two hundred sixty seven thousand square miles of Texas, to be precise. And the last time I checked, Agent, that’s who I work for. Not for anybody in Washington, or Langley, or whoever the hell is on the other end of that number. Anthony Carter is an inmate in my care, and I’m charged by the citizens of this state to carry out his sentence. Short of a phone call from the governor, I’m going to do exactly that.”

Goddamn Texas, Wolgast thought. This was going to take all day. “That can be arranged, Warden.”

He held up the papers for Wolgast to take. “Well then, Agent. You better arrange it.”

At the visitors’ entrance they collected their weapons and returned to the car. Wolgast got on the phone to Denver, which patched him through to Colonel Sykes on an encrypted line. Wolgast told him what had happened; Sykes was irritated but said he’d make the arrangements. A day at the most, he said. Just hang around and wait for the call, then get Anthony Carter to sign the papers.

“Just so you know, there may be a change in protocol coming your way,” Sykes told him.

“What sort of change?”

Sykes hesitated. “I’ll let you know. Just get Carter to sign.”

They drove to Huntsville and checked into a motel. The warden’s stonewalling was nothing new—it had happened before. The delay was aggravating, but that was all it was. A few days from now, a week at most, Carter would be in the system, and all evidence that he’d ever existed would be wiped from the face of the earth. Even the warden would swear he’d never heard of the guy. Somebody would have to talk to the deceased’s husband, of course, the River Oaks lawyer with the two little girls he now had to raise himself, but that wasn’t Wolgast’s job. There would be a death certificate involved, and probably a story about a heart attack and a quick cremation, and how justice had, in the end, been served. It didn’t matter; the job would get done.

By five they hadn’t heard anything, so they changed out of their suits into jeans and walked up the street to find a place for dinner, choosing a steak joint on a commercial strip between a Costco and a Best Buy. It was part of a chain, which was good—they were supposed to travel lightly, to leave as little an impression on the world around them as possible. The delay had made Wolgast antsy, but Doyle seemed not to mind. A good meal and a little time off in a strange town, courtesy of the federal government—why complain? Doyle sawed his way through a huge porterhouse, thick as a two-by-four, while Wolgast picked at a plate of ribs, and when they’d paid the check—in cash, pulled off a wad of fresh bills Wolgast kept in his pocket—they took a pair of stools at the bar.

“Think he’ll sign?” Doyle asked.

Wolgast rattled the ice in his Scotch. “They always do.”

“I suppose it’s not much of a choice.” Doyle frowned into his glass. “The needle, or whatever’s behind curtain number two. But even so.”

Wolgast knew what Doyle was thinking: whatever was behind the curtain, it was nothing good. Why else would they need death row inmates, men with nothing to lose?

“Even so,” he agreed.

A basketball game was playing on the television above the bar, the Rockets and Golden State, and for a while they watched in silence. It was early in the game, and both teams seemed sluggish, moving the ball around without doing much of anything with it.

“You hear anything from Lila?” Doyle said.

“Actually, yeah.” Wolgast paused. “She’s getting married.”

Doyle’s eyes widened. “That guy? The doctor?”

Wolgast nodded.

“That was fast. Why didn’t you say something? Jesus, what’d she do, invite you to the wedding?”

“Not exactly. She sent me an email, thought I should know about it.”

“What did you say?”

Wolgast shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t say anything?”

There was more to it, but Wolgast didn’t want to go into it. Dear Brad, Lila had written, I thought you should know that David and I are expecting a child. We’re getting married next week. I hope you can be happy for us. He’d sat at the computer staring at the message on the screen for a good ten minutes.

“There was nothing to say. We’re divorced, she can do what she wants.” He drained his Scotch and peeled off more bills to pay. “You coming?”

Doyle passed his eyes over the room. When they’d first sat at the bar, the place was nearly empty, but more people had come in, including a group of young women who had pushed together three tall tables and were drinking pitchers of margaritas and talking loudly. There was a college nearby, Sam Houston State, and Wolgast supposed they were students, or else they worked together somewhere. The world could be going straight to hell in a handbasket, but happy hour was happy hour, and pretty girls would still fill the bars in Huntsville, Texas. They were wearing clingy shirts and low-cut jeans with fashionable tears at the knees, their faces and hair done for a night on the town, and they were drinking furiously. One of the girls, a little heavy, sitting with her back to them, wore her pants so low on her spine that Wolgast could see the little hearts on her underwear. He didn’t know if he wanted to get a closer look or throw a blanket over her.

“Maybe I’ll stay awhile,” Doyle said, and raised his glass in a little toast. “Watch the game.”

Wolgast nodded. Doyle wasn’t married, didn’t even have a steady girlfriend. They were supposed to keep their interactions to a minimum, but he didn’t see how it was any of his business how Doyle spent his evening. He felt a flicker of envy, then put the thought aside.

“Okay. Just remember—”

“Right,” Doyle said. “Like Smokey Bear says, take only pictures, leave only footprints. As of this moment, I’m a fiber-optic sales rep from Indianapolis.”

Behind them, the girls broke into laughter; Wolgast could hear the tequila in their voices.

“Nice town, Indianapolis,” Wolgast said. “Better than this one, anyway.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Doyle replied, and grinned mischieviously. “I think I’m going to like it here just fine.”

Wolgast left the restaurant and walked up the highway. He’d left his handheld behind at the motel, thinking they might get a call during dinner and have to leave; but when he checked it now, he found no messages. After the noise and activity of the restaurant, the quiet of the room was unsettling, and he began to wish he’d maybe stayed with Doyle, though he knew he wasn’t very good company these days. He removed his shoes and lay on his bed in his clothes to watch the rest of the game, not really caring one way or the other about it, but it gave his mind something to focus on. Finally, a little past midnight—eleven in Denver, a little too late, but what the hell—he did what he’d told himself he wouldn’t do and dialed Lila’s number. A man’s voice answered.

“David, it’s Brad.”

For a moment David didn’t say anything. “It’s late, Brad. What do you want?”

“Is Lila there?”

“She’s had a long day,” David said firmly. “She’s tired.”

I know she’s tired, Brad thought. I slept in the same bed with her for six years. “Just put her on, will you?”

David sighed and put the phone down with a thump. Wolgast heard the rustling of sheets and then David’s voice, saying to Lila, It’s Brad, for Pete’s sake, tell him to call at a decent hour next time.

“Brad?”

“I’m sorry to call so late. I didn’t realize what time it was.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m in Texas. A motel, actually. I can’t tell you where exactly.”

“Texas.” She paused. “You hate Texas. I don’t think you called to tell me you’re in Texas, did you?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have woken you. I don’t think David’s too happy.”

Lila sighed into the phone. “Oh, it’s all right. We’re still friends, right? David’s a big boy. He can handle it.”

“I got your email.”

“Well.” He heard her breathe. “I kind of figured. I supposed that was why you called. I thought I’d hear from you at some point.”

“Did you do it? Get married.”

“Yes. Last weekend, here at the house. Just a few friends. My parents. They asked for you, actually, wanted to know how you were doing. They always really liked you. You should call them, if you want. I think my dad misses you more than anyone.”

He let the remark pass—more than anyone? More than you, Lila? He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t, and the silence was taken up by a picture that formed in his mind, a picture that was actually a memory: Lila in bed, in an old T-shirt and the socks she always wore because her feet got cold no matter the time of year, a pillow wedged between her knees to straighten her spine because of the baby. Their baby. Eva.

“I just wanted to tell you I was.”

Lila’s voice was quiet. “Was what, Brad?”

“That I was … happy for you. Like you asked. I was thinking that you should, you know, quit your job this time. Take some time off, take better care of yourself. I always wondered, you know, if—”

“I will,” Lila cut in. “Don’t worry. Everything is fine, everything is normal.”

Normal. Normal, he thought, was what everything was not. “I just—”

“Please.” She took a deep breath. “You’re making me sad. I have to get up in the morning.”

“Lila—”

“I said I have to go.”

He knew she was crying. She didn’t make a sound to tell him so, but he knew. They were both thinking about Eva, and thinking about Eva would make her cry, which was why they weren’t together anymore, and couldn’t be. How many hours of his life had he held her as she cried? And that was the thing; he’d never known what to say when Lila cried. It was only later—too late—that he’d realized he wasn’t supposed to say anything at all.

“Damn it, Brad. I didn’t want to do this, not now.”

“I’m sorry, Lila. I was just … thinking about her.”

“I know you were. Goddamnit. Goddamnit. Don’t do this, don’t.”

He heard her sob, and then David’s voice came on the line. “Don’t call back, Brad. I mean it. Understand what I’m saying to you.”

“Fuck you,” Wolgast said.

“Whatever you say. Just don’t bother her anymore. Leave us alone.” And he hung up the phone.

Wolgast looked at his handheld once before hurling it across the room. It made a handsome arc, spinning like a Frisbee, before slapping the wall above the television with the crunch of breaking plastic. He instantly felt sorry. But when he knelt and picked it up, he found that all that had happened was the battery case had popped open, and the thing was perfectly fine.

Wolgast had been to the compound only once, the previous summer, to meet with Colonel Sykes. Not a job interview, exactly; it had been made clear to Wolgast that the NOAH assignment was his if he wanted it. A pair of soldiers drove him in a van with blacked-out windows, but Wolgast could tell they were taking him west from Denver, into the mountains. The drive took six hours, and by the time they pulled into the compound, he’d actually managed to fall asleep. He stepped from the van into the bright sunshine of a summer afternoon. He stretched and looked around. From the topography, he’d have guessed he was somewhere around Ouray. It could have been farther north. The air felt thin and clean in his lungs; he felt the dull throb of a high-altitude headache at the top of his skull.

He was met in the parking lot by a civilian, a compact man dressed in jeans and a khaki shirt rolled at the sleeves, a pair of old-fashioned aviators perched on his wide, faintly bulbous nose. This was Richards.

“Hope the ride wasn’t too bad,” Richards said as they shook hands. Up close Wolgast saw that Richards’s cheeks were pockmarked with old acne scars. “We’re pretty high up here. If you’re not used to it, you’ll want to take it easy.”

Richards escorted Wolgast across the parking area to a building he called the Chalet, which was exactly what it sounded like: a large Tudor structure, three stories tall, with the exposed timbers of an old-fashioned sportsmen’s lodge. The mountains had once been full of these places, Wolgast knew, hulking relics from an era before time-share condos and modern resorts. The building faced an open lawn and beyond, at a hundred yards or so, a cluster of more workaday structures: cinder-block barracks, a half dozen military inflatables, a low-slung building that resembled a roadside motel. Military vehicles, Humvees and smaller jeeps and five-ton trucks, were moving up and down the drive; in the center of the lawn, a group of men with broad chests and trim haircuts, naked to the waist, were sunning themselves on lawn chairs.

Stepping into the Chalet, Wolgast had the disorienting sensation of peeking behind a movie set; the place appeared to have been gutted to the studs, its original architecture replaced by the neutral textures of a modern office building: gray carpeting, institutional lighting, acoustic-tile drop ceilings. He might have been in a dentist’s office or the high-rise off the freeway where he met his accountant once a year to do his taxes. They stopped at the front desk, where Richards asked him to turn over his handheld and his weapon, which he passed to the guard, a kid in camos, who tagged them. There was an elevator, but Richards walked past it and led Wolgast down a narrow hallway to a heavy metal door that opened on a flight of stairs. They ascended to the second floor and made their way down another nondescript hallway to Sykes’s office.

Sykes rose from behind his desk as they entered: a tall, well-built man in uniform, his chest spangled with the various bars and little bits of color that Wolgast had never understood. His office was neat as a pin, its arrangement of objects, right down to the framed photos on his desk, giving the impression of having been placed for maximum efficiency. Resting in the center of the desk was a single manila folder, fat with paper. Wolgast knew it was almost certainly his personnel file, or some version of it.

They shook hands and Sykes offered him coffee, which Wolgast accepted. He wasn’t drowsy but the caffeine, he knew, would help the headache.

“Sorry about the bullshit with the van,” Sykes said, and waved him to a chair. “That’s just how we do things.”

A soldier brought in the coffee, a plastic carafe and two china cups on a tray. Richards remained standing behind Sykes’s desk, his back to the broad windows that looked out on the woodlands that ringed the compound. Sykes explained what he wanted Wolgast to do. It was all quite straightforward, he said, and by now Wolgast knew the basics. The Army needed between ten and twenty death row inmates to serve in the third-stage trials of an experimental drug therapy, code-named “Project NOAH.” In exchange for their consent, the inmates would have their sentences commuted to life without parole. It would be Wolgast’s job to obtain the signatures of these men, nothing more. Everything had been legally vetted, but because the project was a matter of national security, all of these men would be declared legally dead. Thereafter, they would spend the rest of their lives in the care of the federal penal system in a white-collar prison camp, under assumed identities. The men would be chosen based upon a number of factors, but all would be men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five with no living first-degree relatives. Wolgast would report directly to Sykes; he’d have no other contact, though he’d remain, technically, in the employment of the Bureau.

“Do I have to pick them?” Wolgast asked.

Sykes shook his head. “That’s our job. You’ll receive your orders from me. All you have to do is get their consent. Once they’re signed on, the Army will take it from there. They’ll be moved to the nearest federal lockup, then we’ll transport them here.”

Wolgast thought a moment. “Colonel, I have to ask—”

“What we’re doing?” He seemed, at that moment, to permit himself an almost human-looking smile.

Wolgast nodded. “I understand I can’t be very specific. But I’m going to be asking them to sign over their whole lives. I have to tell them something.”

Sykes exchanged a look with Richards, who shrugged. “I’ll leave you now,” Richards said, and nodded at Wolgast. “Agent.”

When Richards had left, Sykes leaned back in his chair. “I’m not a biochemist, Agent. You’ll have to be satisfied with the layman’s version. Here’s the background, at least the part I can tell you. About ten years ago, the CDC got a call from a doctor in La Paz. He had four patients, all Americans, who had come down with what looked like hantavirus—high fever, vomiting, muscle pain, headache, hypoxemia. The four of them had been part of an ecotour, deep in the jungle. They claimed that they were part of a group of fourteen but had gotten separated from the others and had been wandering in the jungle for weeks. It was sheer luck that they’d stumbled onto a remote trading post run by a bunch of Franciscan friars, who’d arranged their transport to La Paz. Now, hanta isn’t the common cold, but it’s not exactly rare, either, so none of this would have been more than a blip on the CDC’s radar if not for one thing: all of them were terminal cancer patients. The tour was organized by an outfit called Last Wish. You’ve heard of them?”

Wolgast nodded. “I thought they just took people skydiving, things like that.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But apparently not. Of the four, one had an inoperable brain tumor, two had acute lymphocytic leukemia, and the fourth had ovarian cancer. And every single one of them became well. Not just the hanta, or whatever it was. No cancer. Not a trace.”

Wolgast felt lost. “I don’t get it.”

Sykes sipped his coffee. “Well, neither did anyone at the CDC. But something had happened, some interaction between their immune systems and something, most likely viral, that they’d been exposed to in the jungle. Something they ate? The water they drank? No one could figure it out. They couldn’t even say exactly where they’d been.” He leaned forward over his desk. “Do you know what the thymus gland is?”

Wolgast shook his head.

Sykes pointed at his chest, just above the breastbone. “Little thing in here, between the sternum and the trachea, about the size of an acorn. In most people, it’s atrophied completely by puberty, and you could go your whole life not knowing you had one, unless it was diseased. Nobody really knows what it does, or at least they didn’t, until they ran scans on these four patients. The thymus had somehow turned itself back on. More than back on: it had enlarged to three times its usual size. It looked like a malignancy but it wasn’t. And their immune systems had gone into overdrive. A hugely accelerated rate of cellular regeneration. And there were other benefits. Remember these were cancer patients, all over fifty. It was like they were teenagers again: smell, hearing, vision, skin tone, lung volume, physical strength and endurance, even sexual function. One of the men actually grew back a full head of hair.”

“A virus did this?”

Sykes nodded. “Like I said, this is the layman’s version. But I’ve got people downstairs who think that’s exactly what happened. Some of them have degrees in subjects I can’t even spell. They talk to me like I’m a child, and they’re not wrong.”

“What happened to them? The four patients.”

Sykes leaned back in his chair, his face darkening a little. “Well, this isn’t the happiest part of the story, I’m afraid. They’re all dead. The longest any of them survived was eighty-six days. Cerebral aneurysm, heart attack, stroke. Their bodies just kind of blew a fuse.”

“What about the others?”

“No one knows. Disappeared without a trace, including the tour operator, who turned out to be a pretty shady character. It’s likely he was actually working as a drug mule, using these tours as a cover.” Sykes gave a shrug. “I’ve probably said too much. But I think this will help you put things in perspective. We’re not talking about curing one disease, Agent. We’re talking about curing everything. How long would a human being live if there were no cancer, no heart disease, no diabetes, no Alzheimer’s? And we’ve reached the point where we need, absolutely require, human test subjects. Not a nice term, but there really is no other. And that’s where you come in. I need you to get me these men.”

“Why not the marshals? Isn’t this more up their alley?”

Sykes shook his head dismissively. “Glorified corrections officers, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Believe me, we started there. If I had a sofa I needed carried up the stairs, they’d be the first guys I’d call. But for this, no.”

Sykes opened the file on his desk and began to read. “Bradford Joseph Wolgast, born Ashland, Oregon, September 29, 1974. BS in criminal justice 1996, SUNY Buffalo, high honors, recruited by the Bureau but declines, accepts a graduate fellowship at Stony Brook for a PhD in political science but leaves after two years to join the Bureau. After training at Quantico sent to—” He raised his eyebrows at Wolgast. “—Dayton?”

Wolgast shrugged. “It wasn’t very exciting.”

“Well, we all do our time. Two years in the sticks, a little of this, a little of that, mostly piddly shit but good ratings all around. After 9/11 asks to transfer to counterterrorism, back to Quantico for eighteen months, assigned to the Denver field office September ’04 as liaison to the Treasury, tracking funds moved through U.S. banks by Russian nationals, i.e., the Russian Mafia, though we don’t call them that. On the personal side: no political affiliations, no memberships, doesn’t even subscribe to the newspaper. Parents deceased. Dates a little but no steady girlfriends. Marries Lila Kyle, an orthopedic surgeon. Divorced four years later.” He closed the file and lifted his eyes to Wolgast. “What we need, Agent, is somebody who, to be perfectly candid, has a certain polish. Good negotiation skills, not just with the prisoners but with the prison authorities. Somebody who knows how to tread lightly, won’t leave a large impression. What we’re doing here is perfectly legal—hell, it may be the most important piece of medical research in the history of mankind. But it could be easily misunderstood. I’m telling you as much as I am because I think it will help if you understand the stakes, how high they are.”

Wolgast guessed Sykes was telling him maybe ten percent of the story—a persuasive ten percent, but even so. “Is it safe?”

Sykes shrugged. “There’s safe and then there’s safe. I won’t lie to you. There are risks. But we’ll do everything we can to minimize them. A bad outcome isn’t in anybody’s interest here. And I remind you that these are death row inmates. Not the nicest men you’d ever care to meet, and they don’t exactly have a lot of options. We’re giving them a chance to live out their lives, and maybe make a significant contribution to medical science at the same time. It’s not a bad deal, not by a long shot. Everybody’s on the side of the angels here.”

Wolgast took a last moment to think. It was all a little hard to take in. “I guess I don’t see why the military is involved.”

At this, Sykes stiffened; he seemed almost offended. “Don’t you? Think about it, Agent. Let’s say a soldier on the ground in Khorramabad or Grozny takes a piece of shrapnel. A roadside bomb, say, a bunch of C-4 in a lead pipe full of deck screws. Maybe it’s a piece of black-market Russian ordnance. Believe me, I’ve seen firsthand what these things can do. We have to dust him out of there, maybe en route he bleeds to death, but if he’s lucky he gets to the field hospital, where a trauma surgeon, two medics, and three nurses patch him up as best they can before evacuating him to Germany or Saud. It’s painful, it’s awful, it’s his rotten luck, and he’s probably out of the war. He’s a broken asset. All the money we’ve spent on his training is a total loss. And it gets worse. He comes home depressed, angry, maybe missing a limb or something worse, with nothing good to say about anyone or anything. Down at the corner tavern he tells his buddies, I lost my leg, I’m pissing into a bag for the rest of my life, and for what?” Sykes leaned back in his chair, letting the story sink in. “We’ve been at war for fifteen years, Agent. By the looks of things, we’ll be in it for fifteen more if we’re lucky. I won’t kid you. The single biggest challenge the military faces, has always faced, is keeping soldiers on the field. So, let’s say the same GI takes the same piece of shrapnel but within half a day his body’s healed itself and he’s back in his unit, fighting for God and country. You think the military wouldn’t be interested in something like that?”

Wolgast felt chastened. “I see your point.”

“Good, because you should.” Sykes’s expression softened; the lecture was over. “So maybe it’s the military who’s picking up the check. I say let them, because frankly, what we’ve spent so far would make your eyes pop out. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to live to meet my great-great-great-grandchildren. Hell, I’d like to hit a golf ball three hundred yards on my hundredth birthday and then go home to make love to my wife until she walks funny for a week. Who wouldn’t?” He looked at Wolgast searchingly. “The side of the angels, Agent. Nothing more or less. Do we have a deal?”

They shook, and Sykes walked him to the door. Richards was waiting to take him back to the van. “One last question,” Wolgast asked. “Why ‘NOAH’? What’s it stand for?”

Sykes glanced quickly at Richards. In that moment, Wolgast felt the balance of power shifting in the room; Sykes might have been technically in charge, but in some way, Wolgast felt certain, he also reported to Richards, who was probably the link between the military and whoever was really running the show: USAMRIID, Homeland, maybe NSA.

Sykes turned back to Wolgast. “It doesn’t stand for anything. Let’s put it this way. You ever read the Bible?”

“Some.” Wolgast looked at the both of them. “When I was a kid. My mother was a Methodist.”

Sykes allowed himself a second, final smile. “Go look it up. The story of Noah and the ark. See how long he lived. That’s all I’ll say.”

That night, back in his Denver apartment, Wolgast did as Sykes had said. He didn’t own a Bible, probably hadn’t laid eyes on one since his wedding day. But he found a concordance online.

And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died.

It was then that he realized what the missing piece was, the thing Sykes hadn’t said. It would be in his file, of course. It was the reason, of all the federal agents they might have chosen, that they’d picked him.

They’d chosen him because of Eva, because he’d had to watch his daughter die.

In the morning, he awoke to the chirp of his handheld; he was dreaming, and in the dream it was Lila, calling him back to tell him the baby had been born—not hers and David’s baby, but their own. For a moment Wolgast felt happy, but then his mind cleared and he realized where he was—Huntsville, the motel—and his hand found the phone on the nightstand and punched the Receive button without his even looking at the screen to see who it was. He heard the static of the encryption and then the opening line.

“All set,” Sykes told him. “Everything should be in hand. Just get Carter to sign. And don’t pack your bags quite yet. We may have another errand for you to run.”

He looked at the clock: 6:58. Doyle was in the shower. Wolgast heard the faucet shut off with a groan, then the blast of a hair dryer. He had a vague memory of hearing Doyle returning from the bar—a rush of street noise from the open door, a muttered apology, and then the sound of water running—and looking at the clock and seeing it was a little after two A.M.

Doyle stepped into the room, a towel wrapped at his waist. Steam moistened the air around him. “Good, you’re up.” His eyes were bright, his skin flushed from the heat of the shower. How the guy could stay out half the night drinking and still look like he was ready to run a marathon was beyond Wolgast’s comprehension.

Wolgast cleared his throat. “How’s the fiber-optic business?”

Doyle dropped onto the opposite bed and ran a hand through his damp hair. “You’d be surprised, how interesting a business that is. People underestimate it, I think.”

“Let me guess. The one with the pants?”

Doyle grinned, giving his eyebrows a playful wag. “They all had pants, boss.” He tipped his head at Wolgast. “What happened to you? You look like you got dragged from a car.”

Wolgast looked down at himself to discover he’d slept the night in his clothes. This was becoming something of a habit; ever since he’d gotten the email from Lila, he’d spent most nights on the sofa of his apartment, watching television until he fell asleep, as if going to bed like a normal person was something he was no longer qualified to do.

“Forget about it,” he said. “Must have been a boring game.” He rose and stretched. “We heard from Sykes. Let’s get this over with.”

They ate breakfast at a Denny’s and drove back to Polunsky. The warden was waiting for them in his office. Was it just the mood of the morning, Wolgast thought, or did he look like he hadn’t slept very well, either?

“Don’t bother to sit,” the warden said, and handed them an envelope.

Wolgast examined the contents. It was all pretty much as he expected: a writ of commutation from the governor’s office and a court order transferring Carter to their custody as a federal prisoner. Assuming Carter signed, they could have him in transit to the federal lockup at El Reno by dinner. From there, he’d be moved to three other federal facilities, his trail growing fainter each time, until somewhere around two weeks or three or a month at most, a black van would pull into the compound, and a man now known simply as Number Twelve would step out, blinking at the Colorado sunshine.

The last items in the envelope were Carter’s death certificate and a medical examiner’s report, both dated March 23. On the morning of the twenty-third, three days hence, Anthony Lloyd Carter would die in his cell from a cerebral aneurysm.

Wolgast returned the documents to the envelope and put it in his pocket, a chill snaking through him. How easy it was to make a human being disappear, just like that. “Thank you, Warden. We appreciate your cooperation.”

The warden looked at each of them in turn, his jaw set. “I’m also instructed to say I never heard of you guys.”

Wolgast did his best to smile. “Is there a problem with that?”

“I’m supposing if there were, one of those ME reports would show up with my name on it. I’ve got kids, Agent.” He picked up his phone and punched a number. “Have two COs bring Anthony Carter to the cages, then come to my office.” He hung up and looked at Wolgast. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to wait outside. I look at you any longer, I’m going to have a hard time forgetting about all this. Good day, gentlemen.”

Ten minutes later, a pair of guards stepped into the outer office. The older one had the benevolent, overfed look of a shopping mall Santa, but the other guard, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, was wearing a snarl on his face that Wolgast didn’t like. There was always one guard who liked the job for the wrong reasons, and this was the one.

“You the guys looking for Carter?”

Wolgast nodded and showed his credentials. “That’s right. Special Agents Wolgast and Doyle.”

“Don’t matter who you are,” the heavy one said. “The warden says to take you, we’ll take you.”

They led Wolgast and Doyle down to the visiting area. Carter was sitting on the other side of the glass, the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. He was small, just as Doyle had said, and his jumpsuit fit him loosely, like the clothing on a Ken doll. There were many ways to look condemned, Wolgast had learned, and Carter’s look wasn’t scared or angry but simply resigned, like the world had been taking slow bites of him his whole life.

Wolgast gestured at the shackles, turning toward the two COs. “Take those off, please.”

The older one shook his head. “That’s standard.”

“I don’t care what it is. Take them off.” Wolgast lifted the phone from its cradle on the wall. “Anthony Carter? I’m Special Agent Wolgast. This is Special Agent Doyle. We’re from the FBI. These men are going to come around and remove those shackles. I asked them to do that. You’ll cooperate with them, won’t you?”

Carter gave a tight nod. His voice on the other end of the phone was quiet. “Yessir.”

“Anything else you need to make you comfortable?”

Carter looked at him quizzically. How long since anybody had asked him a question like that?

“I’s all right,” he said.

Wolgast turned to face the guards. “Well? How about it? Am I talking to myself here, or am I going to have to call the warden?”

A moment passed as the guards looked at each other, deciding what to do. Then the one named Dennis stepped from the room and reappeared a moment later on the far side of the glass. Wolgast stood and watched, keeping his eyes fixed on the guard while he removed the shackles.

“That it?” said the heavy guard.

“That’s it. We’ll want to be left alone for a while. We’ll tell the OD when we’re done.”

“Suit yourself,” the guard said and walked out, closing the door behind him.

There was only one chair in the room, a folding metal seat, like something from a high school auditorium. Wolgast took it and positioned himself squarely to the glass, while Doyle remained standing behind him. The talking was Wolgast’s to do. He picked up the phone again.

“Better?”

Carter hesitated a moment, appraising him, then nodded. “Yessir. Thank you. Pincher always does ’em too tight.”

Pincher. Wolgast made a mental note of this. “You hungry? They give you breakfast in there?”

“Pancakes.” Carter shrugged. “That was five hours ago, though.”

Wolgast swiveled to look at Doyle, raising his eyebrows. Doyle nodded and left the room. For a few minutes, Wolgast just waited. Despite the large No Smoking sign, the edge of the counter was rutted with brown burn marks.

“You said you from the FBI?”

“That’s right, Anthony.”

A trace of a smile flicked across Carter’s face. “Like on that show?”

Wolgast didn’t know what Carter was talking about, but that was fine; it would give Carter something to explain.

“What show’s that, Anthony?”

“The one with the woman. The one with the aliens.”

Wolgast thought a moment, then remembered. Of course: The X-Files. It had been off the air for what, twenty years? Carter had probably seen it as a kid, in reruns. Wolgast couldn’t remember very much about it, just the idea of it—alien abductions, some kind of conspiracy to hush the thing up. That was Carter’s impression of the FBI.

“I liked that show too. You getting on in here all right?”

Carter squared his shoulders. “You came here to ask me that?”

“You’re a smart guy, Anthony. No, that’s not the reason.”

“What the reason then?”

Wolgast leaned closer to the glass; he found Carter’s eyes and held them with his own.

“I know about this place, Anthony. Terrell Unit. I know what goes on in here. I’m just making sure you’re being treated properly.”

Carter eyed him skeptically. “Does tolerable, I guess.”

“The guards okay with you?”

“Pincher’s tight with the cuffs, but he’s all right most of the time.” Carter lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Dennis ain’t no friend of mine. Some of the others, too.”

The door opened behind Carter and Doyle entered, bearing a yellow tray from the commissary. He placed the tray on the counter in front of Carter: a cheeseburger and fries, gleaming with grease, resting on waxed paper in a little plastic basket. Beside it sat a carton of chocolate milk.

“Go on, Anthony,” Wolgast said, and gestured toward the tray. “We can talk when you’re done.”

Carter placed the receiver on the counter and lifted the cheeseburger to his mouth. Three bites and the thing was half gone. Carter wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and got to work on the fries while Wolgast watched. Carter’s concentration was total. It was like watching a dog eat, Wolgast thought.

Doyle had returned to Wolgast’s side of the glass. “Damn,” he said quietly, “that guy sure was hungry.”

“They got anything for dessert down there?”

“Bunch of dried-up looking pies. Some éclairs looked like dog turds.”

Wolgast thought a moment. “On second thought, skip dessert. Get him a glass of iced tea. Make it nice, too, if you can. Dress it up a little.”

Doyle frowned. “He’s got the milk. I don’t know if they even have iced tea down there. It’s like a barnyard.”

“This is Texas, Phil.” Wolgast suppressed the impatience in his voice. “Trust me, they have tea. Just go find it.”

Doyle shrugged and left again. When Carter had finished his meal, he licked the salt off his fingers, one by one, and sighed deeply. When he picked up the receiver, Wolgast did the same.

“How’s that, Anthony? Feeling better?”

Through the receiver, Wolgast could hear the watery heaviness of Carter’s breathing; his eyes were slack and glazed with pleasure. All those calories, all those protein molecules, all those complex carbohydrates hitting his system like a hammer. Wolgast might just as well have given him a fifth of whiskey.

“Yessir. Thank you.”

“A man’s got to eat. A man can’t live on pancakes.”

A silent moment passed. Carter licked his lips with a slow tongue. His voice, when he spoke, was almost a whisper. “What you want from me?”

“You’ve got it backward, Anthony,” Wolgast said, nodding. “It’s me who’s here to find out what I can do for you.”

Carter dropped his eyes to the counter, the grease-stained wreckage of his meal. “He sent you, didn’t he.”

“Who’s that, Anthony?”

“Woman’s husband.” Carter frowned at the memory. “Mr. Wood. He come here once. Told me he found Jesus.”

Wolgast remembered what Doyle had told him in the car. Two years ago, and it was still on Carter’s mind.

“No, he didn’t send me, Anthony. You have my word.”

“Told him I was sorry,” Carter insisted, his voice cracking. “Told everybody. Ain’t gonna say it no more.”

“No one’s saying you have to, Anthony. I know you’re sorry. That’s why I came all this way to see you.”

“All what way?”

“A long way, Anthony.” Wolgast nodded slowly. “A very, very long way.”

Wolgast paused, searching Carter’s face. There was something about him, different from the others. He felt the moment opening, like a door.

“Anthony, what would you say if I told you I could get you out of this place?”

Behind the glass, Carter eyed him cautiously. “How you mean?”

“Just like I said. Right now. Today. You could leave Terrell and never come back.”

Carter’s eyes floated with incomprehension; the idea was too much to process. “I’d say now I know you’s fooling with me.”

“No lie, Anthony. That’s why we came all this way. You may not know it, but you’re a special man. You could say you’re one of a kind.”

“You talk about me leaving here?” Carter frowned bitterly. “Ain’t make no sense. Not after all this time. Ain’t got no appeal. Lawyer said so in a letter.”

“Not an appeal, Anthony. Better than that. Just you, getting out of here. How does that sound to you?”

“It sound great.” Carter sat back and crossed his arms over his chest with a defiant laugh. “It sound too good to be true. This Terrell.”

It always amazed Wolgast how much accepting the idea of commutation resembled the five stages of grief. Right now, Carter was in denial. The idea was just too much to take in.

“I know where you are. I know this place. It’s the death house, Anthony. It’s not the place where you belong. That’s why I’m here. And not for just anyone. Not these other men. For you, Anthony.”

Carter’s posture relaxed. “I ain’t nobody special. I knows that.”

“But you are. You may not know it, but you are. You see, I need a favor from you, Anthony. This deal’s a two-way street. I can get you out of here, but there’s something I need for you to do for me in return.”

“A favor?”

“The people I work for, Anthony, they saw what was going to happen to you in here. They know what’s going to happen in June, and they don’t think it’s right. They don’t think it’s right the way you’ve been treated, that your lawyer has up and left you here like this. And they realized they could do something about it, and that they had a job they needed you to do instead.”

Carter frowned in confusion. “Cuttin’, you mean? Like that lady’s lawn?”

Jesus, Wolgast thought. He actually thought he wanted him to cut the grass. “No, Anthony. Nothing like that. Something much more important.” Wolgast lowered his voice again. “You see, that’s the thing. What I need you to do is so important, I can’t tell you what it is. Because I don’t even know myself.”

“How you know it’s so important you don’t know what it is?”

“You’re a smart man, Anthony, and you’re right to ask that. But you’re going to have to trust me. I can get you out of here, right now. All you have to do is say you want to.”

That was when Wolgast pulled the warden’s envelope from his pocket and opened it. He always felt like a magician at this moment, lifting his hat to show a rabbit. With his free hand, he flattened the document against the glass for Carter to see.

“Do you know what this is? This is a writ of commutation, Anthony, signed by Governor Jenna Bush. It’s dated today, right there at the bottom. You know what that means, a commutation?”

Carter was squinting at the paper. “I don’t go to the needle?”

“That’s right, Anthony. Not in June, not ever.”

Wolgast returned the paper to his jacket pocket. Now it was bait, something to want. The other document, the one Carter would have to sign—which he would sign, Wolgast felt certain, when all the hemming and hawing was over; the one in which Anthony Lloyd Carter, Texas inmate 999642, handed one hundred percent of his earthly person, past, present, and future, to Project NOAH—was tucked against it. By the time this second piece of paper saw daylight, the whole point was not to read it.

Carter gave a slow nod. “Always liked her. Liked her when she was first lady.”

Wolgast let the error pass. “She’s just one of the people I work for, Anthony. There are others. You might recognize some of the names if I told you, but I can’t. And they asked me to come and see you, and tell you how much they need you.”

“So I do this thing for you, and you get me out? But you can’t tell me what it is?”

“That’s pretty much the deal, Anthony. Say no, and I’ll move on. Say yes, and you can leave Terrell tonight. It’s that simple.”

The door into the cage opened once more; Doyle stepped through, holding the tea. He’d done as Wolgast had asked, balancing the glass on a saucer with a long spoon beside it and a wedge of lemon and packets of sugar. He placed it all on the counter in front of Carter. Carter looked at the glass, his face gone slack. That was when Wolgast thought it. Anthony Carter wasn’t guilty, at least not in the way the court had spun it. With the others, it was always clear right off what Wolgast was dealing with, that the story was the story. But not in this case. Something had happened that day in the yard; the woman had died. But there was more to it, maybe a lot more. Looking at Carter, this was the space into which Wolgast felt his mind moving, like a dark room with no windows and one locked door. This, he knew, was the place where he would find Anthony Carter—he’d find him in the dark—and when he did, Carter would show him the key that would open the door.

He spoke with his eyes locked on the glass. “I jes’ want …” he began.

Wolgast waited for him to finish. When he didn’t, Wolgast spoke again. “What do you want, Anthony? Tell me.”

Carter lifted his free hand to the side of the glass and brushed the tips of his fingers against it. The glass was cool, and sweating with moisture; Carter drew his hand away and rubbed the beads of water between his thumb and fingers, slowly, his eyes focused on this gesture with complete attention. So intense was his concentration that Wolgast could feel the man’s whole mind opening up to it, taking it in. It was as if the sensation of cool water on his fingertips was the key to every mystery of his life. He raised his eyes to Wolgast’s.

“I need the time … to figure it,” he said softly. “The thing that happened. With the lady.”

And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years …

“I can give you that time, Anthony,” Wolgast said. “All the time in the world. An ocean of time.”

Another moment passed. Then Carter nodded.

“What I got to do?”

Wolgast and Doyle got to George Bush Intercontinental a little after seven; the traffic was murderous, but they still arrived with ninety minutes to spare. They dumped the rental and rode the shuttle to the Continental terminal, showed their credentials to bypass security, and made their way through the crowds to the gate at the far end of the concourse.

Doyle excused himself to find something to eat; Wolgast wasn’t hungry, though he knew he’d probably regret this decision later on, especially if their flight got hung up. He checked his handheld. Still nothing from Sykes. He was glad. All he wanted to do was get the hell out of Texas. Just a few other passengers were waiting at the gate; a couple of families, some students plugged into Blu-rays or iPods, a handful of men in suits talking on cell phones or tapping on laptops. Wolgast checked his watch: seven twenty-five. By now, he thought, Anthony Carter would be in the back of a van well on his way to El Reno, leaving in his wake a flurry of shredded records and a fading memory that he had ever existed at all. By the end of the day, even his federal ID number would be purged; the man named Anthony Carter would be nothing but a rumor, a vague disturbance no bigger than a ripple on the surface of the world.

Wolgast leaned back in his chair and realized how exhausted he was. It always came upon him like this, like the sudden unclenching of a fist. These trips left him physically and emotionally hollowed out, and with a nagging conscience he always had to apply some effort to squash. He was just too damn good at this, too good at finding the one gesture, the one right thing to say. A man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove; to understand him, you had to figure out what that dust was made of, what was left of him after the rest of his life, past and future, had turned to vapor. Usually it was something simple—anger or sadness or shame, or simply the need for forgiveness. A few wanted nothing at all; all that remained was a dumb animal rage at the world and all its systems. Anthony was different: it had taken Wolgast a while to figure this out. Anthony was like a human question mark, a living, breathing expression of pure puzzlement. He actually didn’t know why he was in Terrell. Not that he didn’t understand his sentence; that was clear, and he had accepted it—as nearly all of them did, because they had to. All you had to do was read the last words of condemned men to know that. “Tell everyone I love them. I’m sorry. Okay, Warden, let’s do this.” Always words to that effect, and chilling to read, as Wolgast had done by the pageful. But some piece of the puzzle was still missing for Anthony Carter. Wolgast had seen it when Carter touched the side of the glass—before then, even, when he’d asked about Rachel Wood’s husband and said he was sorry without saying it. Whether Carter couldn’t remember what had happened that day in the Woods’ yard or couldn’t make his actions add up to the man he thought he was, Wolgast couldn’t be certain. Either way, Anthony Carter needed to find this piece of himself before he died.

From his seat, Wolgast had a good view of the airfield through the terminal windows; the sun was going down, its last rays angling sharply off the fuselages of parked aircraft. The flight home always did him good; a few hours in the air, chasing the sunset, and he’d feel like himself again. He never drank or read or slept, just sat perfectly still, breathing the plane’s bottled air and fixing his eyes out the window as the ground below him slipped into darkness. Once, on a flight back from Tallahassee, Wolgast’s plane had flown around a storm front so huge it looked like an airborne mountain range, its roiling interior lit like a crèche with jags of lightning. A night in September: they were somewhere over Oklahoma, he thought, or Kansas, someplace flat and empty. It could have been farther west. The cabin was dark; nearly everyone on the plane was sleeping, including Doyle, seated beside him with a pillow tucked against his stubbled cheek. For twenty full minutes the plane had ridden the edge of the storm without so much as a jostle. In all his life, Wolgast had never seen anything like it, had never felt himself so completely in the presence of nature’s immensity, its planet-sized power. The air inside the storm was a cataclysm of pure atmospheric voltage, yet here he was, sealed in silence, hurtling along with nothing but thirty thousand feet of empty air below him, watching it all as if it were a movie on a screen, a movie without sound. He waited for the pilot’s drawling voice to crackle over the intercom and say something about the weather, to let the other passengers in on the show, but this never happened, and when they landed in Denver, forty minutes late, Wolgast never mentioned it, not even to Doyle.

He thought, now, that he’d like to call Lila and tell her about it. The feeling was so strong, so clear in his mind, that it took a moment for him to realize how crazy this was, that it was just the time machine talking. The time machine: that’s the name the counselor had given it. She was a friend of Lila’s from the hospital whom they had visited just a couple of times, a woman in her thirties with long hair, prematurely gray, and large eyes, permanently damp with sympathy. She liked to take her shoes off at the start of each visit and sit with her legs folded under her, like a camp counselor about to lead them in song, and she spoke so quietly that Wolgast had to lean forward from the sofa to hear her. From time to time, she explained in her tiny voice, their minds would play tricks on them. It wasn’t a warning, the way she said it; she was simply stating a fact. He and Lila might do something or see something and have a strong feeling from the past. They might, for instance, find themselves standing in the checkout line of the grocery with a packet of diapers in their cart, or tiptoeing past Eva’s room, as if she were asleep. Those would be the hardest moments, the woman explained, because they’d have to relive their loss all over again; but as the months passed, she assured them, this would happen less and less.

The thing was, these moments weren’t hard for Wolgast. They still happened to him every now and then, even three years after the fact, and when they did, he didn’t mind at all: far from it. They were unexpected presents his mind could give him. But it was different for Lila, he knew.

“Agent Wolgast?”

He turned in his chair. The simple gray suit, the inexpensive but comfortable oxford shoes, the blandly forgettable tie: Wolgast might have been looking in a mirror. But the face was new to him.

He rose and reached into his pocket to show his ID. “That’s me.”

“Special Agent Williams, Houston field office.” They shook. “I’m afraid you won’t be taking this flight after all. I’ve got a car outside for you.”

“Is there a message?”

Williams drew an envelope from his pocket. “I think this is probably what you’re looking for.”

Wolgast accepted the envelope. Inside was a fax. He sat and read, then read it again. He was still reading when Doyle returned, sipping from a straw and carrying a bag from Taco Bell.

Wolgast lifted his gaze to Williams. “Give us a second, will you?”

Williams moved off down the concourse.

“What is it?” Doyle said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Wolgast shook his head. He passed the fax to Doyle.

“Sweet Jesus, Phil. It’s a civilian.”