“Inform the agency. Contain it. Dismantle it.”

But his expression had a hunger to it that told me he was lying. If Hellmouth Jack still worked for an agency, the place would have been crawling with agents and military. Which meant he had nothing behind him. No one backing him up. Which meant he planned to use this moment for himself.

As the light got brighter and you could almost sense the sun, I could see the rumpled contours of his tattered gray suit. The left sleeve of the jacket had a tear. A fresh cut along the side of his face. His fancy shoes were caked in drying mud. A line of blood had dried on his white dress shirt.

“How many people have you killed?” I asked.

“Enough. Langer did some of it, at my urging, before he got wise. But I ran over Larry—botched that. I killed quite a few of Vilcapampa’s people. Never cared for Vilcapampa. I would’ve killed Allie if I’d had to, but, in the end, it was clear you hadn’t told her anything.”

“But you left my husband alone.”

He laughed. “Jill, it was clear you never confided in him. About much of anything. Now, get up. We’re going to find Silvina’s secret, you and me together. I owe you that much.”

I think he meant to murder me, in the end. After we’d found the promised land. I do believe that.

Starving, dehydrated, I got to my feet. Rough canvas with nothing much inside. I stumbled, caught my balance. Hellmouth Jack let me get my water out of my pack.

I threw the empty bottle at him and he ducked.

A big grin then.

“Don’t you want to know my real name?” he asked. As if it had been on his mind.

As if he’d seen this encounter in his daydreams a hundred times before.

I said nothing.

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter now.

[97]

We searched for three days. All along the gravel slope, the plateaus above that greeted us like strange moonscapes. We labored at our task with at first the serious formality of captive and captor. Then, as we found nothing, more like coequals. Because I had begun to become frantic, too. The site of the main mining excavation had been filled in. A brief elation at the discovery of a kind of silo dissolved when it became clear it was empty. Some sort of nascent septic system.