“What is so important about you?” he asked rhetorically.
“Nothing.”
“Well, certainly not nothing. Far from nothing. That was my whale on the phone. A few hours ago, this person offered me five million dollars for your safe return. I just doubled the price, and they didn’t even blink. I insisted on meeting, and they didn’t hesitate.”
The car came to a light, and they sat in silence. When the light turned green, Butler squinted knowingly at her.
“How interesting.”
“What?” Con asked.
“We’re well away from that mob, but you know what?”
“What?”
“You didn’t try and get out. You’re not restrained. No one is holding a gun on you, yet you didn’t even try your door.” Butler thought through the implications.
“And you walked into that bar alone. I’m not the only one taking risks here.”
Butler shook his head tiredly. “Pieces are being moved around the board, and I’m not even sure what game it is we’re playing.”
Welcome to my world. “If you don’t know the game, what makes you think you’re one of the players? Doesn’t that make you one of the pieces?”
Butler didn’t care for that idea one bit. “What are you suggesting? That we’re both pawns?”
Con shrugged at him as if to suggest his very question was tiresome. “On the bright side, at least now you know the game.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
They drove south toward the North Carolina border before turning west along the John H. Kerr Reservoir, skirting the edge of the waterway. The sedan rode nearly silent, slaloming through the turns on the dark country road. Butler, in the dim glow of the car’s interior, stared straight ahead, probably lost in thought about how to spend ten million dollars. His price for ferrying her across this uncrossable divide. She didn’t think she’d be coming back, but felt neither sad nor afraid. She was here on her own terms, and that brought a certain calm that had been missing. The car slowed and turned off onto a gravel road. They had arrived.
The partial moon broke from behind the clouds and shone across the water, casting a spectral glow on a phalanx of enormous black towers rising up alongside the dam. Narrower at the base, the towers widened like giant megaphones turned up at the ambivalent night sky. Con could feel the churn of the massive turbines through the floor of the car. She had never seen a carbon-recapture plant in real life, but like everyone else, she knew all about them. As a child of the twenty-first century, she vacillated between hope that so-called climate therapies could undo the damage done by her ancestors and cynicism that it was anything other than a Band-Aid at this point.
“It’s massive,” she said, awestruck.
“Fourth largest on the East Coast,” Butler confirmed. “One guess who owns it.”
“Gaddis,” Con answered, feeling the knot tightening.
“Indeed,” Butler said, opening the center console and removing a locked wooden box. From it, he took a small pistol that looked as if it had never been fired. He tried to insert the magazine backward, but maybe that was because it was dark. Maybe.
“You have a gun? Why didn’t you bring it into the bar with you?” Con asked.
“Can you imagine what would’ve happened if I’d pulled a gun on those people?”
He had a point, but those people? That was an interesting way to talk about his devoted followers.
The car stopped in the dale between two of the towers. It shut off its headlights, but Butler turned them back on, muttering about it being too dark for his taste. His nerves had returned, and he sat there waiting, gun in one hand and sipping from a flask with the other. Apparently after the almond fiasco, he wasn’t in a sharing mood and didn’t offer her a taste. That suited her fine; she wanted a clear head for whatever came next.
A light, misting rain began to fall.
“You know, you are the first clone I’ve ever met,” Butler said.
“Oh? And did I live down to expectations?”
“You seem fine. A bit of a bitch, but I doubt that has anything to do with you being a clone.”
“Well, you didn’t catch me on a good day.”
“Touché,” he replied and toasted her with his flask.
“So you’ve really never met a clone before?”
“Is this the part where you are incredulous that someone can hate someone they’ve never met? I’ll save you the time. I don’t hate clones. I hate the idea of clones.”