“You’re missing the point here, Patrick. It’s—”

“Can she?”

Silence, and then, “You need to look at the big picture, what’s best for everyone.”

My anger was tightening. “When were you planning to reunite them?”

“When we had what we needed on the other people in Blake’s network and on the quantum encryption research. There’s a lot at stake here. We have to get this right. If the Chinese beat us to developing the network, we might not get a second chance.”

“Are you going to get the two of them into witness protection?”

“We’ll have to see. It’ll depend on how much intel Mannie is able to provide about the other players overseas.” Thurman shook his head. “I don’t even know how many laws he broke this week.”

“I don’t even know how many laws you broke this week.” Thurman might have had the best intentions, but keeping an innocent woman imprisoned and helping Mannie escape were not his calls to make. “It’s time to make this right.”

He studied me. “Are you going to turn me in?”

“You free his wife, you do the right thing with witness protection, and I won’t have a reason to.”

“That can be arranged.”

“And then you resign. You’re finished at the Bureau.”

“And if I don’t quit?”

“I’m guessing prison. But that’ll all depend on which of those laws we end up addressing. Now, you need to go tell Mannie that Hope is safe—and that you’re going to let him see her.”

On a normal day, I might have felt more satisfaction from wrapping up something like this, but today, all I could think of was Christie and the news she’d told me while we were at the hospital.

While Thurman went to speak with his confidential informant, I went home to see my wife.

84

Over the next several months, Christie and I had many conversations about life and God and death and hope.

Some days were better than others.

“How can you love a God who would do this to you?” I asked her one night in a moment of anger.

“Sometimes, Pat, I think you want a God small enough to be able to tell him what to do.”

“No,” I said. “I want a God big enough so that I don’t have to.”

A touch of silence. “I used to think the same thing.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I realized that his love wasn’t something I’d ever be able to understand, but if I was going to believe in him in the good times, then I needed to believe in him in the hard times too. Otherwise I was just using him.”

“If he’s small enough to understand, he wouldn’t be big enough to worship,” I said.

“Something like that. Yes.”

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