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