The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,18

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,