Driving without the SUV’s tags, they were at some risk, but the alternative was more certain to lead to disaster.
An ordinary screwdriver was sufficient to detach the license plates. Jane removed them boldly, without looking around furtively, as if she had a perfectly legitimate reason for doing so.
More sirens arose in the distance. The sky resounded with the chop-chop-chop of the rotary wing of a helicopter. In fact, when she looked up, she saw one helo to the west, following the shoreline, a standard police aircraft, and a larger chopper—with a military profile—coming in from the northeast, both heading south toward Newport Coast.
She got into the Mercedes. She tucked the license plates and the screwdrivers under the seat. “Let’s scoot.”
This vehicle was still a deathtrap. They had to be rid of it soon. The authorities would quickly learn that she had escaped in Simon’s GL 550. Ten minutes after that, by satellite, they would be tracking its position by the locater built into its GPS.
19
Like a vision out of Edgar Allan Poe’s most fevered and eerie imaginings, the three-story building thrust against the sky as if it were the House of Usher heaving up from the tarn that once claimed it, a night scene concurrent with the bright daylight all around, yet resistant to the sun’s revelation. Hulking, shadow-filled and shadow-casting, soot-stained and fissured, its shattered windows looking in upon cavernous darkness, partly collapsed yet looming with menace, it was like some haunted palace through which a hideous throng stormed ceaselessly in silence.
The high school had been the site of a Saturday night rally for peace, even though the nation wasn’t at war with anyone other than stateless bands of terrorists. In the eight months since the event, how and why a peace protest could have turned violent hadn’t been explained to anyone’s satisfaction. There might have been a speaker who, while supportive of the crowd’s antiwar sentiment, did not a hundred percent agree with their assessment of those groups and individuals most despised as warmongers. In these days of desperate and unreasoned passions, even a well-meaning speaker might inadvertently enrage a crowd with a few ill-chosen words. Some said the flashpoint had something to do with Israel. Others said it was about the dissing of a champion of some South American revolution. Still others insisted that it hadn’t been political at all, that a contingent of racists had infiltrated the gathering and seized the sound system to spew their hate, though some survivors had no such memories. As yet no definitive answer had been provided regarding the identity of those who’d brought Molotov cocktails and quantities of jellied gasoline to a peace rally or why so many attendees were carrying guns at an event intended to promote brotherhood and understanding. If a gymnasium that seated twelve hundred hadn’t been two hundred people over that capacity, if some of the doors serving it had not been blockaded, the death toll might not have reached three hundred. If the fire alarms had worked, first responders might have arrived in time to save most of the building. In spite of state and federal investigations, the many mysteries of the Independence Day Rally for Peace had grown deeper and more complex with time.
Jane knew nothing of the truth of this place, but she suspected that several adjusted people, brains webbed with control mechanisms, perhaps among those named on the Hamlet list, had been sent here to commit suicide and to take with them as many others as they could. The Techno Arcadians’ strategy involved disguising their operations as the work of terrorists and madmen, seeding social chaos so the public would cry out for order. This would allow a steady ratcheting up of security measures and rights restrictions until such a day that even those who had not been adjusted with brain implants would celebrate the firm but enlightened rule of their betters.
Construction fencing surrounded the school and its immediate grounds, but the fabric privacy panels attached to the chain-link had in many places been slashed away by the curious. Signs that warned of toxic chemicals and of the unstable nature of the ruins had been defaced with obscene suggestions.
The building should have been demolished. But although the ruins had been combed repeatedly for clues, the ongoing federal investigations required that the site be preserved to avoid the destruction of possible evidence.
The school backed up to a football field flanked by stadium seating beyond the view of the street. Gilberto drove the GL 550 across that weedy, untended expanse of ground, gaining speed until he rammed the gate in the fence, broke the cheap hinges, and slammed through the rickety barrier. With shattered headlights and a buckled hood, the Mercedes came to a stop on the former faculty parking lot, where the undulant blacktop had been deformed and imprinted with fernlike patterns by the heat pouring off the burning building.
They were about half a mile from the residential street on which Gilberto had parked his Suburban earlier that morning.
“There’s a shortcut,” he said. “I won’t be as much as ten minutes, maybe a couple minutes less.”
Together, he and Jane propped the damaged gate in place. It looked reasonably intact in the unlikely event someone chanced by.
She returned to the Mercedes and opened the tailgate and took Hendrickson’s pulse, which was steady if somewhat slow. She lifted the red neckerchief and watched his eyes moving under their lids. He muttered wordlessly and yawned. She replaced the cloth and sprayed it lightly with chloroform.
The sun was still forty minutes below the summit of the sky, but the shadow cast by the school seemed longer than it should have been this close to noon. She heard traffic noise in the distance but nothing nearby, no trilling bird, no settling noises in the ruins. Even the damaged Mercedes and its cooling engine failed to make a sound, as if three hundred casualties in one blazing hour had left this area forever a dead zone.
In Newport Coast, they would have found and freed Simon by now. They would know that two vehicles were missing from his collection. They would have determined that Jane Hawk and a male accomplice had departed the scene in Simon’s Mercedes. Thereafter, it would take only a few minutes to get the registration number of the vehicle from the DMV and cross-check with the manufacturer’s records to obtain the unique signal of the GPS.
It was too much to hope that the minor damage caused by the impact with the gate in the construction fencing had disabled the GPS to the extent of silencing the transponder by which the Mercedes could be tracked. The wolves would soon be coming.
20
Tanuja Shukla woke, opened her eyes without lifting her head from the pillow, and saw it was 11:19 A.M. on Saturday. The clock must be wrong. She never slept so late. Besides, she remained tired to the bone, as though, after an exhausting day, she had been asleep only two or three hours.
She was wearing her wristwatch. She never wore it to bed, but there it was, on her wrist. The watch and clock concurred.
She threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the mattress. Her pajamas were damp with sweat and clung to her body.
A soreness at one corner of her mouth. She put a hand to her lips. Dried blood crumbled against her fingertips.
For a moment she was mystified, but then she remembered the fall.