Wilkes shrugged defensively. “You want to talk to her?”
Guilder rubbed his eyes. He supposed he’d have to make the gesture, but talking to Lila was like playing handball by yourself: the ball came right back no matter how hard you slapped it. One of the most significant aggravations of the job was dealing with the woman’s peculiar fantasies, a wall of delusion that Guilder could penetrate only by the roughest sort of insistence. Of all the experts he’d harvested through the years, why hadn’t he thought to get a shrink? Keeping her in babies made her calm; the woman’s special talent was an indispensable commodity that needed to be managed with care. But in the throes of motherhood she was virtually unreachable, and Guilder worried about further damaging her fragile psyche.
Because that was the thing about Lila. Of everyone who had tasted the blood, only she was endowed with the ability to control the virals.
More than control: in Lila’s presence, they became like pets, docile and even affectionate. The feeling was a two-way street; put the woman within two hundred yards of the feedlot, and she turned into a purring cat with a litter of kittens. The effect was nothing Guilder had been able to replicate on his own, though Lord knows he’d tried. Back in the early days, he’d been downright obsessed. Time after time he’d donned the pads and gone into the feedlot, thinking that if he could only find the right mental trick or ingratiating body language or soothing tone of voice they’d fall at his knees the way they did with her, like dogs waiting for their ears to be scratched. But this never happened. They’d tolerate his presence for a whopping three seconds before one of them tossed him in the air—he didn’t register as food, more like a man-sized toy—and the next thing Guilder knew he’d be flying around the place until somebody hit the lights to get him out.
He’d long since stopped trying, of course. The sight of Horace Guilder, Director of the Homeland, being batted around like a beach ball wasn’t exactly the kind of confidence-inspiring image he wanted to broadcast. Nor could anybody on the medical staff explain to his satisfaction just what it was that made Lila different. Her thymus cycled faster, needing the blood every seven days, and her eyes looked different, displaying none of the retinal stain that marked the senior staffers’. But her sensitivity to light was just as pronounced, and as far as Suresh could tell, the virus in her blood was the same as theirs. In the end, the man had thrown up his hands and attributed her abilities to the less than subtle fact that Lila was a woman—the only woman in the fold, which was how Guilder wanted it.
Maybe that’s all there is to it, Suresh had said. Maybe they just think she’s their mother.
Guilder became aware that Wilkes was looking at him. What had they been talking about? Lila? No, Texas. But Wilkes had told him there was something else.
“Which brings me to, um, the second thing.” And that was when Wilkes told Guilder about the bombing in the market.
Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!
“I know, I know,” Wilkes said, shaking his head in his Wilkesian way. “Not the best turn of events.”
“He’s one man. One!”
Guilder’s face, his whole body, tingled with righteous anger. Another volleying burp arose. He wanted vengeance. He wanted things to settle the hell down. He wanted this Sergio, whoever he was, with his head on a goddamn pike.
“We’ve got people working on it. HR is asking around, and we’ve offered double rations to anybody who comes forward with a solid lead. Not everyone down the hill is so enamored.”
“And somebody please tell me how he’s moving through the flatland like it’s a goddamn expressway? Do we not have patrols? Do we not have checkpoints? Can somebody please shed some light on this little detail?”
“We have a theory about that. The evidence points to an organization that’s classically cellular. Clusters of just a few individuals operating within a loose operational framework.”
“I am perfectly aware what a terrorist cell is, Fred.”
His chief of staff made a flustered gesture with his hands. “I’m simply saying that looking for one man may not be the answer. That it’s the idea of Sergio, not Sergio per se, that we’re up against. If you follow me.”
Guilder did, and it wasn’t a cheering thought. He’d been down this