Shadowfires

trying.”
    “It's my Catholic upbringing,” she said with a touch of irony. “A very stern, strict, religious family, you know.”
    He didn't know. This was the first she had ever spoken of it.
    Softly she said, “And very early, I was sent to a boarding school
for girls, administrated by nuns. I grew to hate it… the endless
Masses… the humiliation of the confessional, revealing my pathetic
little sins. But I guess it shaped me for the better, huh? Might not
be so all-fired incorruptible if I hadn't spent all those years in the hands of the good sisters.”
    He sensed that these revelations were but a twig on an immense and
perhaps ugly tree of grim experience.
    He glanced away from the road for a second, wanting to see her
expression. But he was foiled by the constantly, rapidly changing
mosaic of tree shadows and sunlight that came through the windshield
and dappled her countenance. There was an illusion of fire, and her
face was only half revealed to him, half hidden beyond the shifting
and shimmering curtain of those phantom flames.
    Sighing, she said, “Okay, so if the government knows it
can't persuade me, why's it issuing warrants on a bunch of trumped-up
charges and putting so much manpower into the search for me?”
    “They want to kill you,” Ben said bluntly.
    “ What?”
    “They'd rather get you out of the picture and deal with Eric's
partners, Knowls and Seitz and the others, because they already know
those men are corruptible.”
    She was shocked, and he was not surprised by her shock. She was
not unworldly or terribly naive. But she was, by choice, a present-
focused person who had given little thought to the complexities of
the changing world around her, except when that world impinged upon
her primary desire to wring as much pleasure as possible from the
moment. She accepted a variety of myths as a matter of convenience,
as a way of simplifying her life, and one myth was that her
government would always have her best interests at heart, whether the
issue was war, a reform of the justice system, increased taxation, or
anything else. She was apolitical and saw no reason to be concerned
about who might win-or usurp-the power flowing from the ballot box,
for it was easy to believe in the benign intentions of those who so
ardently desired to serve the public.
    She gaped in astonishment at him. He did not even have to see that
expression through the flickering light and shadow to know it held
tenancy of her face, for he sensed it in the change in her breathing
and in the greater tension that suddenly gripped her and caused her
to sit up straighter.
    “Kill me? No, no, Benny. The U.S. government just executing
civilians as if this were some banana republic? No, surely not.”
    “Not necessarily the whole government, Rachael. The House, Senate,
president, and cabinet secretaries
haven't held meetings to discuss the obstacle you pose, haven't
conspired by the hundreds to terminate you. But someone in the
Pentagon or the DS A or the CIA has determined that
you're standing in the way of the national interest, that you pose a threat to the welfare of millions of citizens. When they weigh the welfare of millions against one or two little murders, the choice is clear to them, as it always is to collectivist thinkers. One or two little murders-tens of thousands of murders-are always justifiable when the welfare of the masses is at stake. At least, that's
how they see it, even if they do pretend to believe in the sanctity
of the individual. So they can order one or two little murders and
even feel righteous about it.”
    “Dear God,” she said with feeling. “What have I dragged you into,
Benny?”
    “You
didn't drag me into anything,” he said. “I forced my way in. You couldn't
keep me out of it. And I've no regrets.”
    She seemed unable to speak.
    Ahead, on the left, a branch road led down to the lake. A sign
announced: lake approach -boat launching facilities.
    Ben turned off the state route and followed the narrower gravel
road down through a crowd of immense trees. In a quarter of a mile,
he drove out of the trees, into a sixty-foot-wide, three-hundred-foot-
long open area by the shore. Sequins of sunlight decorated the lake
in some places, and serpentine streams of sunlight wriggled across
the shifting surface in other places, and here and there brilliant
shafts bounced off the waves and dazzled the eye.
    More than a dozen cars, pickups, and campers were parked at the