He confirmed her doubt by turning to her and fluttering the fingers of one hand as if they were the pinions of a bird’s wing, a prearranged signal that meant time to fly.
She couldn’t disagree. Jane had warned that the conspirators might become so frustrated by their inability to find her that they would come after her in-laws, hoping to use them to get her. Now that these vicious shits had pulled this stunt with Sunday Magazine, they would expect Clare and Ancel to make a statement to the press tomorrow. So they would come before dawn.
The telephone rang.
Ancel said, “It’s one friend or another, knows Jane, saw the show, wants to say they’re with us. Let it go to voice mail. It won’t be the last. I’m not in the mood tonight. Call ’em back tomorrow. I’m gettin’ that damn bottle of Scotch. What about you?”
“This…it sickens me,” Clare said. “I’m furious and scared for her and…and I feel so helpless.”
“What can I do, honey? What do you want to do?”
“Can’t do a damn thing. This is so rotten. I’m going to bed.”
“You won’t sleep. Not after this.”
“I’ll take an Ambien. I can’t handle whisky like you, I’d be throwing up all night.” She was amazed at how convincingly she delivered her lines. They had never practiced a scene like this.
They spoke no more as they prepared to leave before sunrise.
Clare loved this house, their first and only, where they began their marriage, where they raised Nick, where they learned from Nick and Jane, during a visit, that she was pregnant with their first—and now only—grandchild. Clare wondered when they would be able to return. She wondered if.
7
Because the revolution is everything to him, Ivan Petro works seven days a week, and on this first Sunday in April, he seems destined also to work around the clock.
He is based in Sacramento, where Techno Arcadians maintain a significant network in the state government, which is as corrupt as any, more so than most.
He’s having dinner in his favorite Italian restaurant when he, like thousands of other Arcadians, starts receiving text messages about the incident involving Jane Hawk in Lake Tahoe, including a photograph taken there, showing her current appearance.
No hit team has been dispatched to nail her, because a late-season blizzard in the Sierra Nevada has grounded all helicopters.
Although the highways in that territory are treacherous, they are passable. No one knows what she’s driving or in which direction she’s gone; but she probably will want to get out of the Tahoe area, all the way out of the storm, before going to ground for the night.
If she flees west on Highway 50, she’ll be coming straight toward Ivan Petro.
As he finishes a plate of saltimbocca, he checks the weather report and learns that snow is falling only as far as Riverton. In the twenty miles west of Riverton, there is no town of any size until Placerville, which has a population of maybe ten thousand.
Ivan finishes a second glass of Chianti. He doesn’t order the two servings of cannoli that he was anticipating with such pleasure.
An hour after nightfall, he’s in Placerville, stalking the so-called beautiful monster, on what is shaping up to be perhaps the most important night of his life.
Ivan Petro appears to have a molecular density greater than that of mere flesh and bone, as though the substance of which he’s constituted was first made molten in a coke-fired oven before being poured into a man shape. Teeth as blunt and white as those of a horse, face broad and flushed as if he has spent his entire life in a stinging wind that has left this permanent coloration. People have called him “Big Guy” since he was eleven years old.
Ivan is a hit team all by himself.
It has been assumed that Jane must be staying in motels, paying cash and using forged ID, remaining nowhere more than a night or two. The national chains in the hospitality industry will accept cash in advance from someone without a credit card, but it is far from a common practice. To avoid raising an eyebrow and attracting undue attention, she most likely prefers mom-and-pop operations, one-and two-star motels more accustomed to cash transactions.
Placerville is not so large that it offers scores of mom-and-pop motels. With his Department of Homeland Security credentials and his authoritative demeanor, using a description of Tahoe Jane but not her name, he receives cooperation from the clerks at the front desks of the establishments most likely to interest the fugitive.
In any endeavor like this, luck plays a role. If Jane chose to continue through Placerville to Sacramento and points beyond, Ivan is wasting his time. But luck strikes after his second stop. He is in his Range Rover, a third motel address entered in his navigator, stopped at a red traffic light, when he sees a woman of interest come out of a supermarket.
Carrying what appears to be a deli bag, she passes the Range Rover and crosses the street to the motel on the northwest corner. She resembles the photo of Jane incognita, taken in Tahoe: stylish chopped-shaggy black hair, a little Goth makeup around the eyes.
He can’t see if she is wearing a nose ring or if her lipstick is blue, as in the photograph, but she’s a looker, wearing a sport coat that’s maybe cut for concealed-carry. And she has attitude, moves with grace and confidence that people often mention when talking about Jane Hawk.
She walks past the motel office and along the covered walkway serving the rooms.
The light changes to green, and Ivan eases through the intersection, timing it so that he is gliding past when she lets herself into Room 8.
Most of the motel’s rooms are evidently not yet booked for the night, because only four vehicles stand in the parking lot. Only one of the four is anywhere near Room 8, and it is parked directly in front of that door: a metallic-gray Ford Explorer Scout.
Ivan hangs a U-turn at the next intersection and pulls off the street, into an apartment complex across from the motel.
The apartments are in an arrangement of bland stucco boxes tricked up with decorative iron stair railings and faux shutters in a sad attempt at style. In front of the buildings is a long pergola that, during the day, shades the vehicles of residents as well as those of visitors. It now provides moonshade for the Range Rover.
The Explorer Scout is parked between lampposts, and with binoculars Ivan glasses the rear license plates. Using the computer terminal in the console of the customized Rover, he back-doors the California DMV and inputs the number. The vehicle is registered to Leonard Borland at an address in San Francisco.
Ivan switches to Google Street and looks at what stands at that address: a ten-story apartment building. He suspects that if he visited the place, no tenant named Leonard Borland would live there.
Rather than go to that trouble, he returns to the DMV system and seeks driver’s licenses issued to men named Leonard Borland, of which there are several with various middle names. None of them shares the address to which the Explorer Scout is registered.
This might only mean that another Leonard Borland owns the Scout but does not drive it himself, does not drive at all.
But what it might mean isn’t in this case worth considering.
It’s been known for some time that Jane Hawk has a source for forged documents so well crafted that the forger is able to insert them undetected in government records, ensuring they will withstand scrutiny if she is stopped by the highway patrol.
Minutes after checking out the various Leonard Borlands, Ivan Petro receives an electrifying phone call. The guardians with whom Travis Hawk’s mother entrusted him have been found in Borrego Springs, where they have been killed in an exchange of gunfire. The boy has yet to be located. A major search is being organized to comb every inch of the town and the surrounding Borrego Valley.