Gavin remained alert for drones. Sometimes he thought he heard one in the distance, but getting a directional fix, before the sound faded, was hampered by the clatter of horseshoes on the stony soil plus the creak and clink of tack.
By the time they came out of the wildland to the gate at the back of their property, near four o’clock, Gavin no longer had any concern about the drones, which must have been flown by hobbyists. He could hear an aircraft circling high over the valley; but he hadn’t detected even a suggestion of the comparatively shrill motor of a drone in almost an hour and a half.
They watered the horses at the trough and led them into the stable and removed their saddles. They conducted them into their stalls and put on their feed bags.
Later, after the horses had been fed and the tack had been properly cared for, when Gavin came out of the stable with the boy, the growl of an airplane crawling the sky caused him to search for a dark shape against the hoarfrost clouds. The craft wasn’t within view, perhaps off to the north, and he assumed it was not the same plane that he’d heard earlier.
4
After Jane hobbled Hendrickson’s ankles with a pair of cable zip-ties, allowing him to walk only in a shuffle, she freed him from the gurney. With pistol drawn, Gilberto accompanied the captive to the bathroom and a few minutes later returned him to the kitchen table. Jane used another two zip-ties to link Hendrickson’s ankle fetters to the rear stretcher bar of the chair in which he sat.
She put her minirecorder in front of him. Wearing a PatrolEyes camera around her neck, with a spiral-bound notebook and pen, she sat directly across the table from him.
Her purpose was only in part to learn whom she needed to pursue to break the command structure of the Arcadians. In addition, his insider’s testimony should be useful in the eventual prosecution of these conspirators, and it might later help exonerate her of the criminal acts she’d been falsely accused of committing.
Gilberto sat witness. His pistol lay on the table, well out of Hendrickson’s reach, in case he still had tricks to spring on them.
A fresh pot of coffee, slices of Carmella’s ricotta pie, and Hendrickson’s new meek demeanor gave the proceedings an almost cozy context that felt surreal. At times the exchanges between Jane and Hendrickson grew eerie, as he seemed eager to please her not in the way a defendant might want to please a prosecutor or judge, but with the disturbing subservience that a child, browbeaten from the cradle and for years thereafter, might respond to a tyrannical parent.
In curious little ways, he seemed to regress from adulthood as the interrogation entered a second hour. He asked for another slice of pie and, eschewing the fork he’d used with the first serving, he broke off pieces of the treat and ate them with his fingers. He had been drinking coffee black but now wanted a lot of cream and four heaping spoons of sugar, essentially making another dessert of the brew. At times in the third and fourth hours, his attention drifted away from her; for ten seconds, fifteen, half a minute, he fell silent and stared into some private elsewhere. Always, Jane could bring him back to the issue at hand, but she had the impression that Hendrickson was slowly becoming dissociated from the reality of a life of submission into which he was sliding.
She wondered if something might be going very wrong with the nanomachine implantation. As it self-assembled its cerebral web, might it be causing subtle brain damage akin to a stroke?
But his speech wasn’t slurred. Neither were there signs of weakness or paralysis. He didn’t complain of numbness, tingling, vertigo, or impaired vision.
He was more likely undergoing a psychological rather than a physiological fracturing.
Supposing he was telling the truth, he’d already given her a treasure of information, though his revelations were limited because of the structure of the Arcadian cabal. In the classic tradition of spy networks and resistance movements, they were organized into numerous cells, each with a limited number of members, and those in one cell didn’t know the identities of those in others. Access to the complete roster of Arcadians remained a privilege of those at the very top of the pyramid. Hendrickson, for all his former power and posturing, didn’t know how far up in the Arcadian architecture his position might be. Considering his grandiose opinion of himself prior to the infusion of a control mechanism, he’d likely imagined that he was closer to the pinnacle than was the case.
What she was getting from him, however, gave her tools to use and new people to go after. She had thought that the now-deceased billionaire David James Michael had perched at the top of the Arcadian pyramid, and she had taken enormous risks to get at him. For the first time since the shocking events in D. J. Michael’s penthouse in San Francisco, she might have a chance to tear apart the Arcadian nest and pull from it a writhing tangle of these vipers, bring them into the sunlight of revelation that they shunned with vampiric dread.
Interrogation could be an exhausting process, especially for someone who was betraying every associate with whom he was entwined in criminal activities. It was no less tiring for the interrogator. Shortly before five o’clock, Jane called for a break. She’d had little to eat in the past twenty-four hours and needed to refuel to sharpen her concentration.
“I’ll get some takeout,” Gilberto said. “There’s a good place down the street.”
“Protein,” Jane said. “Don’t load me up with carbs.”
“It’s Chinese.”
He suggested some dishes, and Jane approved.
“You?” Gilberto asked Hendrickson.
The captive didn’t answer. He sat with his hands upturned on the table, staring at his palms. The faintest smile suggested that he wasn’t reading his future, but perhaps remembering things that his hands had touched and done to his satisfaction.
“Get him what we’re having,” Jane said. “He’s in no position to be picky.”
5
Subhadra labored through an eternal storm, or so it seemed, for the novelette would advance only grudgingly. Tanuja pushed with all her creative energy, as if the narrative were a boulder and she were Sisyphus being punished for trickery, fated never to get the great stone to the top of the hill before it rolled down yet again.
At precisely 4:45 P.M., she suddenly knew intuitively that she was nearing a breakthrough with the story. But she needed to step away from it and do something else for a while, something fun, and let her subconscious wrestle with the novelette. She saved the document and switched off the computer.
She always worked by intuition. Whether it was a novel or a shorter piece, she didn’t outline a plot, and she didn’t produce character sketches before beginning the story itself. She just started to write, guided by the still, small voice of intuition, which was like an open phone line to a higher power, one infinitely more creative than she could ever hope to be.
Like an open phone line, yes, except it didn’t speak to her in full sentences, but instead in isolate images and dreamflow scenes of action and hieroglyphics of emotion and enigmatic lines of blank verse that she then had to translate into comprehensible English, into meaningful fiction. But this time, the still, small voice of intuition was in fact a voice that spoke coherently: Saturday night is for fun, go have fun, forget about Subhadra and her storm, dress up, go out, there is fun to be had, do whatever you feel you must do to be happy, and tomorrow you will write your best work ever.
Initially, the clarity and specificity of that inner voice was strange, disturbing, but then not so much, and then not at all.
She pushed her chair away from the desk and got up. She left her home office without bothering to turn off the lights.
The time had come. There were actions to be taken. What those actions were did not matter. She did not need to think about them. They would come naturally to her. Intuitively.