I STAY AT A MOTEL DOWN THE ROAD AND HEAD BACK TO Washington before dawn the next morning.
I’m on a remote stretch of highway, across the New York state border, the sun is coming up, and I’m still thinking about Jack. I pull over and get out of the car. I’m a hundred meters or so from one of the many finger lakes that pepper the borderlands between the two states.
The air is freezing. A few pines, snow on their branches, are scattered between the road and the shore. There’s no traffic, nothing except a light breeze in the trees to interrupt my thoughts.
And, suddenly, we’re on the beach. It’s a month or two after we bought the house. It’s night, and it’s warm. The waves are rolling in, the stars are out; a fire crackles beside us. Hope is massaging my shoulder muscles, transporting me to a place I’d like to visit more often, and she’s talking about when Jack first came into their life.
‘I was anxious about pretty much the whole world back then, Josh, but he took my fears away – about life, and about death.’ She scoops up a handful of sand and lets the grains slip through her fingers. ‘He used to tell me about the Shawnee, and their being in tune with nature. Jack sees connections in everything. He sees his ancestors in everything.’
‘That’s because Jack smokes a lot of stuff he shouldn’t,’ I say. ‘When we die, we die.’
She claps me lightly on the back of the head, then leans forward and kisses me. ‘If I go before you, Joshua Cain, which I hope I do, but not for a very long time yet, I am going to find a way of proving that you’re wrong.’
The city is dark and rainswept.
I’m too tired to return the rental car, and pull gratefully into the last parking space outside my building. I look around as I pull my case from the trunk, but see nothing unusual. Mo’s directive, which he emailed before he flew back to San Francisco, appears to have done the trick.
The apartment has the chill of disuse. Maybe that’s because I’m out of a job. Reuben said I should go back to my patients. How can I? I’m filled with a sense of impotence and dread.
Unable to sleep and too distracted to watch TV, I go to the only place that offers any comfort. I sit and stare at the painting. A sliver of light from the hallway glints on Jack’s ankh, tree and eight-pointed star. I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at them before the room is filled with the scent of lemons. Hope’s Ô de Lancôme. And I hear the voice in my head.
After Mo’s diagnosis, I no longer know whose it is – hers or mine – but it doesn’t much matter. Are you just going to sit here, Josh, and feel sorry for yourself? Or are you going to get off your ass?
‘Doctor Cain? Doctor Cain …?’
I open my eyes. The flight attendant smiles as she folds my table and returns my seat to its upright position. ‘Sorry to wake you, Doctor, but we’ll be on the ground in around thirty-five minutes. I thought you might want to take the opportunity to freshen up.’
I’ve been out for the best part of three hours.
I get up and go to the bathroom. My leg hurts, but I make a supreme effort not to let it show. My face, regrettably, is better known than I’d like it to be. Some of the other passengers stare.
Back in my seat, I flick between the two documents I was reading before I fell asleep.
One of them is the agenda of the international psychiatry conference where, the day after tomorrow, I will be keynote speaker. The other is the interim accident report on the V-22 crash, which was released by the Department of Defense while I was mid-Atlantic. It says that the right gearbox seized due to a key component failure, causing a near instantaneous loss of power to its rotor. Because the Osprey was decelerating, it didn’t have enough forward speed for sustained flight, causing it to invert. It hit the trees and exploded on impact, killing the three crew, Schweizer and Offutt. Hetta and I had been thrown clear as it flipped.
There was no sign of sabotage, and inspection of the V-22 fleet uncovered no systemic flaw. I can still hear Schweizer’s laughter in my head: the moment he said the President would never kill the Grid when he understood what it could do; that he’d want to build it bigger, faster, better.
I strap myself back into my seat and gaze out the window as the SAS Airbus’s slow turn gives me a perfect view of the blue waters of the Stockholm archipelago. Southern Sweden looks bleak. Despite a few faltering signs of spring, there’s still a lot of snow on the ground.
Thompson will go to Jerusalem in a few days. I’ve been immersed in articles on the conference’s multi-layered security system. Initially developed by US and Israeli defense experts, Needle Eye – a series of concentric rings from the city perimeter to the convention center – has been enhanced by European, Russian, Chinese and Indian contractors, supported by their security services.
As a result, Saudi, Israel, Palestine, Iran and Turkey will join the US, the UK, France, Germany, China, India and Russia – twelve nations – in formal attendance. All their major faith leaders will be there too. Christy will remain in D.C. with the Vice President to dispense national security advice during the three days Thompson will be away.
Expectations are mixed, but hopes remain high and Thompson’s ratings, at home and abroad, have taken off again.