The Devil's bed

In the quiet of the church, Bo heard the blower kick on, and a cool draft touched the back of his neck. It was not as cold as the muzzle of the gun Moses held there.

“You declined their offer?” Bo asked.

“If offer it was. They didn’t need me. They had my prints all over the weaponry. If in fact they wanted me to pull the trigger and put the round into her, it would have been the last thing I ever did. So I took my leave.”

“Just like that?”

“When I was stronger, they exchanged my handcuffs for a strait-jacket. A mistake. It was a Posey,” he said. “Posey makes four kinds. The one they chose is the simplest to escape. The weakness is the buckles. You work them against any sharp, hard edge, the frame of a cot for example, and you can knock them loose pretty quickly. Took me three minutes. Houdini could do it in less time and while he was hanging upside down. Now there was a genius.”

Moses resettled himself in the pew behind Bo. The kiss of the gun barrel ended, but Bo knew the weapon was still trained on him.

“You continue to have resources,” Bo noted.

“An elementary piece of any stratagem. Always have a backup cache somewhere,” Moses said. “What I’ve been wondering since I read about your crime spree in the papers is what’s the connection. I’d guess the people who framed you are the same ones who nabbed me.”

“What difference does it make?”

“I hate a puzzle with missing pieces. Who are these people, Thorsen? Why do they want the First Lady dead?”

“Why do you want the First Lady dead?”

“I have a pretty good reason. And I think you know it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“About you knowing?”

“About the good reason. About what really happened that night on the bluff at Wildwood twenty years ago. What you think went down didn’t. It wasn’t Tom Jorgenson with Kate. It was his brother, Roland. All this time you’ve hated the wrong man.”

“Of course you’re lying. Your job is to save her.”

“Think about it for a minute. Two brothers very similar in build and appearance. One, a man committed to peace. The other, an artist with an unconventional lifestyle. One, a father. The other, an uncle who’d been generally distant. Think about the strength of the man you fought. A politician or a worker in iron? Ask yourself who was more likely to have been with Kate that night.”

The blower shut off and the church lapsed again into a deep silence. Moses didn’t speak. The figures in the stained glass windows were dark images now, barely discernible as human.

Bo said, “It was incest no matter how you cut it, but Tom Jorgenson wasn’t guilty. The guilty one is dead.”

“Why didn’t she tell me this herself?”

“You never gave her a chance. I was there. Every time she tried to explain, you cut her off. You didn’t want to hear. But you know what? I also think you didn’t really want her dead.”

“Didn’t want her dead? I should have killed her years ago, and her father.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I thought I’d found a family in the Company. I thought I’d found a place I belonged. Until I spent time on the Devil’s Bed. That pretty well cleared my thinking. I knew what I had to do.”

“What was that? Kill everyone who ever lied to you? If you’re like most of us, it would be a long list.”

“I didn’t care about everyone.”

“Only those you’d hoped would be family? I talked with Father Cannon. I know about Wildwood.”

Moses didn’t argue, but neither did he agree.

“But when you had the chance to kill Kate,” Bo said, “you offered her her life. After all your careful planning, why did you even hesitate? You know what I think? I think in that moment when you had her on her knees, you understood that she wasn’t the real monster, that all those years ago she was just a scared kid involved in something way over her head. It was her father who needed killing. Except that it wasn’t. The man you really wanted dead killed himself a long time ago.”

“How is it you know her personal history?” Moses asked.

“She told me.”

“She could have lied.”

“When you had the gun barrel to her forehead and looked into her eyes on the bluff, were they the eyes of a woman who was lying?”

For a long time, Moses said nothing. Bo could hear the man breathing at his back, could feel the warm breath breaking against his neck.

“Why did they frame you?” Moses asked.

“Because they tried to kill me and couldn’t. They want me dead because I know who they are,” Bo said.

“And that would be?”

“NOMan.”

“NOMan?”

“National Operations Management. It’s a federal government agency, established as an information conduit. Ostensibly. I’m pretty sure that all along it was meant for something else.”

Bo explained what he knew about the organization. When he’d finished, Moses laughed quietly.

“Ever read theOdyssey, Thorsen?”

Bo heard a door open in the far recesses of the church. The pew behind Bo creaked.

“It’s just Otter,” Bo said quickly.

“Bo?” It was Otter’s voice preceding him.

Bo spoke quietly over his shoulder. “Look, Moses, we can work this out together. We both have a stake in what happens.”