Booth Hendrickson is on the run in a Dior Homme suit and Paul Malone shoes, already gasping for breath, his dignity offended, nauseated by the thought of being captured, of being subjected to torture and mockery.
Once the venomous Hawk bitch gets to them, powerful and well-protected Arcadians like Booth Hendrickson have been found dead in a long-abandoned rat-infested factory, dead in their own heavily guarded residences, shattered and dead on a public street after a nine-story fall. There’s nothing supernatural about her; she’s just a pleb like billions of others, just a good-looking piece of tail who suffers from the delusion that she was born with rights other than those that her betters choose to bestow on her, polluting the world with her every breath. The only reason she’s been able to take down so many of Booth’s associates is because she’s gone bat-shit insane with revenge. Insanity makes her bold, fearless, unpredictable. That’s Hendrickson’s analysis—although, in the quick, maybe her kind of insanity is just as fearsome as any supernatural power.
He hurries uphill, along the line of vehicles waiting to turn right at the intersection. He tries the front passenger door on a Tesla, startling the driver. Locked. On to a silver Lexus SUV. Yanks open the door. A little girl holding a plush-toy toad regards him wide-eyed. No good. Booth slams the door. He looks back and across lanes to the Cadillac limo, where the driver stands watching, not yet coming after him.
He moves on to a brand of car he doesn’t know—maybe a Honda, maybe a Toyota; he has no interest in brands that aren’t advertised in the luxury-oriented magazines he reads—and he opens the front door. The driver is a twentysomething woman in jeans, cowgirl shirt with decorative stitching, red neckerchief, and something like a half-size Stetson—a cowboy hat in a car—and she appears frightened.
Flashing his Department of Justice ID, he says, “FBI,” because no one is impressed by the letters DOJ. Anyway, the DOJ oversees the Bureau. “I need your assistance—I need your car,” he declares as he clambers into the passenger seat and pulls shut the door.
Her fright instead proves to be righteous indignation when she snatches from the dashboard a bobble-head statue of some cartoon character Hendrickson doesn’t recognize and starts bashing him with it. “Hey, hey, hey, get out, get the hell out!”
Infuriated that she would resist a legitimate law-enforcement official, he tears the bobble-head out of her grip and throws it into the backseat as with his right hand he draws his pistol. The traffic light turns green and car horns blare. He demands, “Turn right. Move, move, move!”
The chauffeur appears at the driver’s door, and Booth squeezes off a shot, blowing out that window.
Because she hasn’t seen the chauffeur, the cowgirl thinks her assailant has fired a warning shot to force her cooperation. She shouts—“Shit!”—and tramps on the gas and takes the corner in a wide turn.
10
Of all the people in the numerous vehicles lined up in three lanes, many must have seen Hendrickson bail out of the limousine and try to jack a car—an extraordinary moment of street theater—but no one other than Gilberto made any effort to intervene. An effort that nearly got him shot.
Speckled with window glass, dodging cars as impatient motorists swerved around him, he hurried back to the limo and got behind the wheel and pulled shut the door. He set out in pursuit of the yellow Subaru that Hendrickson had carjacked.
When he turned off MacArthur Boulevard onto Bison, he saw the Subaru ahead of him, closer than he expected, moving erratically from lane to lane.
The burner phone that Jane had provided lay on the seat beside him. Driving with one hand, he keyed in the number of her burner.
She took the call. “Yeah?”
“Somehow he knew. He went out the emergency hatch in the roof.”
“Where are you?”
“He carjacked this woman. I’m following. On Bison, headed toward Jamboree.”
“She’ll have a phone,” Jane said.
“Yeah. You better split.”
“Splitting,” she said. “Call you in a few minutes.”
11
The cowgirl is agitated, which is understandable, and she’s frightened, which she ought to be, but more than anything, she’s angry, glancing at him with exasperation so hot that he can almost feel it.
“Make a U-turn,” he tells her. “Here, do it, here!”
She swings the car toward a break in the median, and now they are heading back down Bison toward MacArthur Boulevard, where the traffic light ahead of them is red.
“You trashed my window. That’s gonna cost me.”
Her purse is resting between her thigh and the console. When Hendrickson takes it, she tries to snatch it back.
He raps her knuckles sharply with the barrel of the pistol. “Just drive, damn it.”
“That’s my money, you can’t have it.”
“I don’t want your money. I’m FBI.”
“Gimme my money.”
“I only want your phone. I’m FBI!”
“Get your own freakin’ phone.”
“Keep your hands on the wheel.”
She grabs for the iPhone.
He jams the pistol against her neck. “Are you stupid?”
“You kill me, who drives?”
“I will, sitting in your blood.”
“You’re no FBI.”
“What’re you stopping for?”
“You think maybe for the red light?”
“Screw the red light. Keep going.” When she doesn’t tramp the accelerator, he moves the pistol from her throat to her temple. “Now, bitch!”
Six lanes of traffic, three westbound and three eastbound, flash past on MacArthur. She lays on the horn as she takes the plunge, as if anyone will hear it in time to stop. Although Booth commands her to do this, he at once regrets his imprudence, fording this Amazon of traffic not with the stout heart of an adventurer, but in sudden fright. His alarm is so primitive that a hurtling eighteen-wheeler seems like a living leviathan that will scoop them into its maw and swallow them. Horns blare, brakes shriek, but they reach the farther shore after just two near misses, so maybe his luck is changing.
“Take 73 south,” he orders.
“Why? Where?”
He raps the side of her head with the barrel of the pistol hard enough to hurt, to knock a little sense into her. “You don’t need to know where. Faster, damn it, put the pedal down.”
As they descend the entrance ramp to State Highway 73, he quickly makes a call with her iPhone, keying in the emergency number for a multi-agency task force dubbed J-Spotter, which is coordinating efforts to apprehend Jane Hawk. It’s a rare example of cooperation between five entities that otherwise jealously guard their jurisdictions: the FBI, Homeland Security, the NSA, the CIA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Their vast combined resources—money, personnel, satellites, aircraft, vehicles, armaments—in combination with local police departments, allow them to put a team in the vicinity of any Hawk sighting anywhere in the country within half an hour, perhaps in some locations as soon as ten minutes.
“FASTER!” Hendrickson shouts.
“I’m already speedin’.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m FBI.”
“That’s steamin’ bullshit,” she says, but she’s sufficiently frightened of the gun to put the car up to eighty.
The heads of the five agencies in the coalition aren’t aware that the impetus to create J-Spotter came from Techno Arcadians in their ranks, and that members of the conspiracy fully control the task force. While the stated purpose of this effort is to arrest Jane Hawk and prosecute her for murder, treason, and other trumped-up charges, the Arcadians intend to inject her with a control mechanism to learn who might have been assisting her, and then kill her in such a way as to make her death appear to be the result of natural causes.
When Hendrickson’s call is answered on the second ring, he announces himself not by name but by a seven-digit identifier. He specifies the guard-gated community in which Simon lives, gives the address of the house, and finishes by saying, “Blackbird is there now but not for long.”
Their code name for Jane Hawk is Blackbird.