had nothing to live for anymore. Now a bright future was assured, and he was shortly to be wrung dry by Rita, who was a fabulous ride. She would be even more fabulous if he pretended she was Megan Bookman.
112
The center of the action was upstairs now, and Woody’s mom didn’t have to be concerned about him and Kipp being up here alone, as she had worried when the deputies were first withdrawn.
In his room, with Kipp at his side, Woody had spent half an hour on the Wire with Bella, the golden retriever who lived in Santa Rosa with the Montell family. Of all the members of the Mysterium, she was the most experienced with the uses of the Wire, because for years she had volunteered to remain receptive around the clock, seven days a week, when others were tuned out. And when she had a major news alert to share, she forced connections with all of her kind and implanted the story in their minds. Woody’s awareness of the Wire had at first been subconscious, and his initial use of it had been unintended, when he had drawn Kipp to him. Now he needed to know everything about how to use it. Bella not only advised him but also sent down the Wire a data package that in minutes made him as accomplished at transmission as any of the Mysterians.
The result of this education was a further unlocking of doors that he hadn’t known were closed within his mind, a sense of freedom and completeness rising in him like a helium-filled balloon with the words Happy Birthday emblazoned on it. His metamorphosis had begun with the communion between him and Kipp, when they had stared into each other’s eyes on the bed the previous night, and now thanks to Bella, it was complete.
When it was done, he knelt on the floor with Kipp and held his companion, their faces cheek to cheek, fur to skin, for a long, sweet moment. The boy did not speak, and the dog could not speak, but they were both celebrating thousands of years of mutual dependence and love between their species. They were celebrating as well the maturation of that bond into something magnificent and miraculous that neither of them could have imagined two days earlier.
They were poised on the brink of a radical transformation of the world, which had begun before the earliest recorded history, when an alliance had first been made between one dog and one primitive human being on some hostile plain or in some forest filled with menace. Until then, the only shelter against bitter weather and the mortal dangers posed by nature’s many beasts was a cave and a carefully tended fire. But with that alliance, two predators—dog and man, working together over uncounted millennia—had made of themselves more than predators by virtue of the love that grew between them. This love was not just the instinct of one species to value its own, but a love that put dogs and human beings on a long road toward one destiny. Some might call it evolution, dogs slowly becoming more intelligent until they took a sudden quantum leap forward, and some might call it intelligent design, but whatever the agent of change, neither species was as much as it could be without the other. Dogs needed the hands and voices of human beings, and people needed—desperately needed—to receive unto themselves the innocence of dogs, to acquire their intolerance for deceit, and to seek to match their loyalty.
That it was a mute autistic boy who became the translator between the two species was an irony Woody could have appreciated even in his former condition. The responsibility humbled him now, and he said, “Come on, Kipp. I need to talk with Mom.”
113
In the Oxley house, the agents of Atropos were finished with poker and were preparing for their visit to the Bookmans.
They were armed with pistols, but they had no intention of blasting their way into the house. A simple knock on the door and a credible-looking badge would get them inside. The Bookmans might be expecting trouble, but not trouble that arrived in a vehicle like the FBI used in movies, not trouble that wore a dark suit and spoke respectfully and presented a superbly forged photo ID with the Bureau seal.
Their weapons of choice were Tasers and small spray bottles that fired streams of chloroform. When the targets were stunned with 50,000 volts and then