Isabel Chartiers had a sweater the color of an old crayon, the violet one, the second from the end of the box.
Maya turned it in her hands. The wool was hand-knit. There were three small dark spots on the right cuff that were almost certainly chocolate. The smell of the sweater was the smell of a child who had used a particular kind of European laundry powder and a particular shampoo and the kind of bath soap that came shaped like a duck. There was a pony hair on the inside of the elbow. The pony was, by the color of the hair, the small bay in the photograph.
She held the sweater with the cuff out.
In a wide circle around her, in the central training cage, the five raptors stood at attention. They had been brought in one at a time over the previous hour and let to mass. They had stayed. They were watching her. She had not, in the eight months she had worked with the line, ever been in this cage with all five of them at once.
Spartacus was at her ten o’clock. Hector at her two. Achilles at her seven. Perseus and Orestes, the more nervous pair, at her four and five. Their colors were the working green-brown of the raptor at function. Their scales lay flat. Their eyes were on her hand and the sweater.
Outside the cage, Sherman had a console with a dial and his finger on the dial. He kept clearing his throat. He had a stain on his lab coat at the right pocket where a marker had bled. He had not eaten breakfast and his blood sugar was, by the small twitch at the corner of his eye, getting expensive.
“When each one sniffs her clothing,” Sherman said, “I’ll give him a jolt.”
“We want them to protect her,” Maya said. “Not be afraid of her.”
“What then.”
“Oxytocin to the forebrain.”
“They’re not going into labor.”
“In males,” she said, “it reduces infanticide. It promotes parenting behavior and long-term pair bonding.”
Nick, beside the console outside the bars, made a small sound that was almost a laugh.
“The Daddy drug,” he said. “Didn’t know there was one.”
Sherman pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He was sweating hard in spite of the lab cool.
“I’m doing this under protest.”
“Noted,” Maya said. “Dial in the oxytocin.”
She turned with the sweater. She held it out to Achilles first, because Achilles was the smallest and the most likely to break the spell early. He came forward two paces. He lowered his snout. He sniffed the cuff. The pupil of his red eye narrowed and the small membrane that sometimes worked across the eye when he was thinking flicked once.
She felt, against the floor of her stomach, the small drop of trust an animal does for the first time. She had felt it twice before in her career. Once with a wolf in Saskatchewan whose ear she had learned to read. Once with a leopard in a circus tent that had decided, for reasons she would never know, to come down off a perch and lay its head on her boot.
She took the sweater to Perseus. Perseus sniffed once and gave the small nod-flick that was, in this line, the sign for a thing accepted. Then to Orestes. Orestes wanted to take the sleeve in his teeth and Maya let him have a corner for two seconds and pulled it back gently, and he gave the corner up without protest. Then to Hector, whose nostrils worked twice and who held the smell longer than any of the others, and last to Spartacus.
Spartacus was different.
She had known he was going to be different. Spartacus was going to be different at every stage of every drill from this morning forward, and the shape of his being different was not, today, a shape she could read fully. He came forward when she came to him. He lowered his head. He sniffed.
He sniffed the sweater for a long time.
Then he lifted his head and looked her in the face and held the look, and Maya, who had taught herself not to break this look, did not break it, and they held the look for a count she lost track of. Behind her, Sherman was working a dial.
Spartacus turned his head, very slightly, toward Sherman.
The motion was not the motion of a thing being dosed. It was the motion of a thing letting itself be dosed.
She broke the look.
“Good,” she said.
She walked out of the cage. The door slid open six inches. She squeezed out. The door slid shut behind her with the small definite click of an old industrial bolt seating. She kept walking, past the console, past Nick, past Sherman with his sweat and his dial, out into the corridor and into the small ladies’ room at the end of the corridor. The light in the ladies’ room was a fluorescent that had been buzzing for two months and would buzz for two more before maintenance got to it. She ran the cold tap in the sink and put both hands under it and washed.
In the mirror her face was, for a long second, the face she was used to.
Then it was not.
She turned the tap off. She dried her hands. She came out.
That afternoon they ran the assault.
They had built the practice village in the valley over the previous three weeks. Four buildings of plywood and corrugated metal and welded studs, the proportions of the warehouses on the Tangier waterfront. The build was rough. Sherman had said, twice, that it was rough. Nick had said, both times, that the kidnappers were not going to send a team to inspect their training village before the real thing.
The five raptors, three of them today, came out of the chute in flak vests strapped around their bodies and stopped. They clustered together and stood with their snouts low.
“The body armor doesn’t seem to bother them,” Joyce said. He was in the dugout observation blind beside Maya and Sherman and Nick.
“They’re used to harnesses,” Sherman said. “It’s lightweight.”
Maya pointed to a meter on the panel.
“They’re talking it over.”
“Talking?”
“Ultra-sounds.” The needle on the meter was hopping all over the upper register. “Way out of our range.”
Out in the valley, the three raptors had spread out. They had taken three different angles of approach to the cluster of buildings. Their throats were working but no sound that any human could hear came out.
Spartacus, in the lead, lifted his snout.
He caught it. He grunted, deep, a sound the dugout did pick up. The other two responded. They settled their gazes on a low corrugated-metal shed at the south edge of the cluster. They moved.
“That’s it, fellas,” Nick said into the headset, low. “Triangulate.”
Spartacus opened his jaws and made another ultrasound, and the three of them charged in unison.
Wham. Orestes head-butted through the front door, shoulder leading.
Smash. Perseus hopped feet-first through a side window. Glass that was not glass exploded out the other side.
Cruunch. Spartacus hit the opposite wall, punched both forearms through the corrugated metal, and tore a section of the wall the size of a doorway clean off the studs.
Inside the shed, on triggers Sherman had set on a delay, four mannequins in fake camouflage and holding weapons that fired blanks lit up in a four-point spray of automatic noise. The raptors hit them. Weapons and arms and torso parts went, in the brief comprehensive way of plywood mannequins, in every direction. The four mannequins were down inside three seconds.
Then they came to the fifth.
The fifth mannequin was not a kidnapper. It was a small mannequin, a child’s height, dressed in a duplicate of Isabel Chartiers’s sweater, the violet one with the chocolate spots, that had been knit by an aunt of one of Joyce’s research assistants in a small town outside Lausanne. The mannequin’s face had been painted to approximate Isabel’s. The hair had been a wig from a costume-shop catalogue.
Orestes, leading, had his jaws open and the bite half down before he froze.
He sniffed.
He knocked the mannequin onto its side. He sniffed again. He stepped back. Spartacus grunted and Orestes moved away. The alpha stepped in. Spartacus sniffed. He took the mannequin in both clawed hands and, with a careful steady motion, set it back upright. He stayed with his head lowered to the mannequin’s shoulder for a long second. Then he stepped away.
In the dugout, Joyce exhaled the breath he had been holding.
“That was spectacular,” he said. “Even with the kidnappers loaded up and on full alert.”
“Thin walls,” Nick said. “No corridors to go down.”
“They’re ready.”
“They’re ready to take on an army of dummies. Flesh and blood kidnappers, though.”
“Ready or not,” Joyce said, “the payoff is scheduled for Thursday. We go tomorrow.”
He climbed out of the bunker. Nick was not pleased with the hurry-up. Maya saw the line tighten at the corner of his mouth.
“Blast them with bliss, Sherman,” Nick said. “And feed them when they get back inside.”
Maya watched Sherman dial it in. She watched the three raptors go loose in the open field, jaws lolling, eyes half-lidded, the way a dog goes when its belly has been scratched in the right place. Her stomach dropped. She had taught them to love a smell. In Tangier, the smell was going to be in a room full of men who needed to die.
In Tangier, there was going to be more than one mannequin. The chemistry would hold or it would not hold.
She thought, watching them, about the herd that kept chewing.
She thought about Calvin in his trapeze tights in a hotel bar in Cleveland and what Calvin had said to her the night she had returned the ring, which was you’ll see, when you’re forty. She was four years from forty and Calvin had been right about exactly one of the things he had said, and that one thing was that she had a face that shut down easily. Her face had shut down. Nick was looking at her. He had seen.
“Maya.”
“What.”
“You all right.”
“Yes.”
She was not. She had been better an hour ago. She had been, this morning, before she had walked into the cage with the violet sweater, what she would consider all right in the small private way she meant the term. She was, this evening, not the same word.
She went up to her room above the courtyard. She took the lab coat off and laid it on the bed, and she sat on the edge of the bed in her grey turtleneck and her cargo pants and her bare feet and looked at her own hands. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had, today, taught five killers to love a child.
They were, she understood, going to do it. They were going to go in there in the morning, and the killers were going to do what she had taught them to do, and the small girl, with luck and with the oxytocin and with the chemistry of pony hair on a violet cuff, was going to come out alive.
The chemistry, however, was the chemistry. The chemistry was not love.
She laid back on the bed. She closed her eyes.
You turn your back, and they can’t help themselves. She had said it to Nick last night. She had meant it as a warning. She had meant it as a comfort. Tomorrow she was going to find out which.
A church bell rang the half-hour, thin in the cold. She did not get up. She kept seeing the violet cuff in Spartacus’s mouth.