She stood up and he heard her rummaging about in the darkened room. A moment later something solid and heavy with sharp corners hit him on the chest and tumbled into his lap.
"Read your own goddamn book!" Cheryl stood next to the couch, breathing hard. "It's all in there. How certain companies made fortunes by raping the world and quietly disposing of anyone who got in their way. How a few scientists tried to warn people what was happening and were persecuted or ended up dead for their trouble. My own father, you might remember. You ought to read it. It might do you good--certainly jog your memory about a few things you've obviously forgotten."
Chase smoothed the rumpled dust jacket and placed the book on the table. There wasn't anything Cheryl could say that he hadn't already thought about and agonized over. He was even prepared to concede that she was right; morally right, that is. But moral Tightness or wrong-ness wasn't the issue. He
"You've spoken to Nick about it. How does he feel?"
"He thinks you've taken leave of your senses."
"Then he must have changed his mind overnight," Chase said. "I told him about Gelstrom on the way back from Desert Range. His exact words were, 'Money is the means to an end, not an end in itself. If the guy wants to pay for his sins, why try to stop him?' "
"You omitted to tell him that Gelstrom murdered my father."
"The reason I didn't tell him that is because we don't know whether Gelstrom was responsible. We don't know that anyone was. It could have been an accident."
Cheryl laughed, an ugly sound in the dim room. "What the hell is this, Gavin? A meeting of the Joseph Earl Gelstrom Appreciation Society?" He couldn't see her face but he knew its expression. She said with a vehemence he'd never heard before, "At least Nick has principles he believes in--and adheres to."
Well, well, well. It began to look as though a true-confessions therapy session had been going on here while he was running himself ragged at the UN. Little wonder that when he got back to the hotel he'd walked into an atmosphere you could have cut with a blunt shovel.
"Where do we go from here?" "I guess that's up to you."
"I've given them my answer. I'm not going back on it."
"Then I guess you have my answer too."
"I don't want to lose you, Cheryl."
"No?" The word was a bark, short and brutal. "I thought perhaps you were looking forward to working with Ruth Patton."
"Ruth isn't involved in the project." What the hell was this?
"Is she involved with you?"
"What do you mean?"
Cheryl was leaning stiffly against the back of the couch, her face a pale indecipherable blur. "You ought to be more careful, Gavin. Especially in front of your son."
A sickening chill swept through him. He tasted something vile at the back of his throat. He felt as if the solid foundation of his life had given way, as if he had been betrayed: first Nick, and then Cheryl, and now Dan. There were other emotions mixed in with it, sorrow, self-pity, and a thin streak of stubborn, bitter defiance.
He took a breath and said very calmly, "I'm not doing this for Ruth, for Prothero or Van Dorn, for Gelstrom, or for myself. If you can't see why I'm doing it, if you won't try to understand, then you and I have nothing more to say to each other."
"I didn't think we had," said Cheryl, tight-lipped and dry-eyed.
By dawn of the day after the incident at the UN, armored ground forces, airborne troops, and two squadrons of helicopter gunships had been mobilized for a combined assault on an area adjacent to the White River, roughly ten miles south of the small town of Lund in eastern Nevada.
Intelligence reports indicated that members of the religious sect known as the Faith had been living in the vicinity for at least ten years, yet three sorties by reconnaissance aircraft had so far failed to pinpoint the exact location. The army commander in charge of the operation doubted whether the settlement could number much above three hundred people, but even so a community of that size should have been easy to spot in the emptiness of sparse scrub and bare mountain peaks. He ordered another sweep at first light, this time employing the full range of detection devices at their disposal, including high-resolution film, infrared and spectroscopic analysis.
Meanwhile roadblocks were set up on every highway, minor road and backwoods trail within a radius of fifty miles from the target point. Which turned out to be a real headache. There were literally hundreds of unmapped mining trails crisscrossing the valley between Currant Summit and Mount Grafton, and it seemed impossible to seal off the area so that individuals and small groups couldn't sneak through the cordon.
