The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,87

was just a thing in his mind, like some part of her had passed straight into him, and he wouldn’t have to tell nobody about it.

The air around him broke with a hissing sound, like air leaking from a tire, and a single green light appeared on the far wall where a red one used to be; a door swung open, bathing the room in a pale blue light. Carter saw he was lying on a gurney, wearing a gown. The tube was still threaded into his hand, and looking at the place where it pulled at his skin under the tape made it hurt fiercely again. The room was larger than he’d guessed, nothing but pure white surfaces except for the place where the door had opened and a few machines on the far wall that looked like nothing he knew.

A figure was standing in the doorway.

He closed his eyes and leaned back, thinking, All right now. All right. I’m ready. Let them come.

“We have a situation.”

It was just past ten P.M. Sykes had appeared at the door of Richards’s office.

“I know,” Richards said. “I’m on it.”

The situation was the girl, the Jane Doe. She wasn’t a Jane Doe anymore. Richards had gotten the news off the law enforcement general feed a little after nine. The girl’s mother was a suspect in a shooting, something at a fraternity house; the boy she’d shot was the son of a federal circuit judge. The gun, which she’d left at the scene, had led local police to a motel near Graceland, where the manager—a list of priors that filled two pages—had ID’d the girl from the photograph the cops had taken of her on Friday, at the convent where the mother had dumped her. The nuns had spilled their story, and something else that Richards didn’t know what to make of—some kind of disturbance at the Memphis Zoo—before one of them had picked out Doyle and Wolgast from a surveillance video taken the night before at the I-55 checkpoint north of Baton Rouge. Local TV had gotten the story in time for the evening news, when the Amber Alert had gone out.

Just like that, the whole world was looking for two federal agents and a little girl named Amy Bellafonte.

“Where are they now?” Sykes asked.

On his terminal, Richards called up the satellite feed and pointed his viewer at the states between Tennessee and Colorado. The transmitter was in Wolgast’s handheld. Richards counted eighteen hot points in the region, then found the one that matched the number of Wolgast’s tracking tag.

“Western Oklahoma.”

Sykes was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder. “Do you think he knows yet?”

Richards recalibrated the viewer, zooming in.

“I’d say so,” he said, and showed Sykes the data stream.

Target velocity, 120 kph.

Then, a moment later:

Target velocity, 133 kph.

They were on the run now. Richards would have to go get them. Locals were involved, maybe state cops. It was going to be ugly, assuming he could even reach them in time. The chopper was already inbound from Fort Carson; Sykes had made the call.

They took the rear stairs to L1 and stepped outside to wait. The temperature had risen since sunset. A thick fog was ascending in loose coils under the lights of the parking circle, like dry ice at a rock concert. They stood together without talking; there was nothing to say. The situation was more or less a complete and total screwup. Richards thought of the photograph, the one that was all over the wires. Amy Bellafonte: beautiful fountain. Black hair falling straight to her shoulders—it looked damp, like she’d been walking in the rain—and a smooth, young face, still with some baby fat fluffing her cheeks; but beneath her brow, dark eyes with a knowing depth. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt zipped to her throat. In one hand she was clutching some kind of toy, a stuffed animal. It might have been a dog. But the eyes: the eyes were what Richards kept coming back to. She was looking straight at the camera as if to say, See? What did you think I was, Richards? You think nobody in the world loves me?

For a second, just one, he thought it. It brushed him like a wing: the wish that he were a different kind of person, that the look in a child’s eyes meant something to him.

Five minutes later they heard the chopper, a pulsing presence coasting in low over the wall of trees to the southeast.