“All right with you?” Gilberto asked Jane.
Hendrickson was a condemned man, perhaps only three hours from the moment when Brownian motion jiggled into place the last piece of the nanomechanism. Then spider-web filaments would light up across the surface of his brain as well as deep into the tissue of it, and he would at that moment forget what had been done to him and would be himself in every way except the one that mattered. But which self would that be? The arrogant, vicious Arcadian or an earlier version of Mama Hendrickson’s boy, his psyche having collapsed so completely into a past condition that no command mechanism could restore him to full wicked maturity and his job at the Department of Justice? If so, would that be dying twice, long before the death of flesh and bone, whenever that might come?
In any event, a condemned man always received what he ordered for his last meal.
“Give him the cookies,” she said.
“And a Coke, please,” Hendrickson said, glancing apprehensively at her, then smiling timidly at Gilberto. “Cookies and a Coke would be nice.”
Suddenly Jane could eat no more. She set aside the container of chicken and almonds. A few low waves of nausea washed through her, then quieted away.
While Gilberto got the cookies, Jane fetched two cans of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, one for Hendrickson and one for herself. She got two glasses and scooped a little ice into each one and put them on the table.
“Gilberto, please tell me you’ve got some vodka I can add to mine.”
Thank God, he said yes.
9
Leaving the lights on in the upstairs and downstairs hallways, Sanjay and Tanuja went to the kitchen. He carried his sport coat, and she carried her black purse.
To his eye, the key to the Hyundai Santa Fe Sport glowed as if with supernatural power, as might have the sword of destiny locked in stone, which only good King Arthur had been able to draw from its granite scabbard. It dangled from a peg in the perfboard beside the door to the garage, like a lynchpin holding the kitchen together—the kitchen, the house, the lives they’d known—as though everything would, upon his taking possession of the key, blow away like so many dead leaves in a wind, revealing the truth of the world behind all of humanity’s illusions.
Together, he and Tanuja went into the garage.
The vehicle was spotless, gleaming as it had on the showroom floor when they purchased it. For some reason, he expected it to be spattered with mud and the spokes of its high-end custom wheels to be entangled with torn weeds.
For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he clearly saw the Hyundai in exactly that filthy condition, but also with a broken headlight and a damaged front fender on the passenger side.
He stared at the SUV in bewilderment. A still, small voice deep within him said this meant nothing. Nothing at all. His confusion quickly passed.
Tanuja accompanied him to the back of the Hyundai. He put up the tailgate, and they looked into the cargo space.
Sanjay hadn’t expected to see two 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistols, but when he saw them, he didn’t find them in the least remarkable. In fact, he knew that each gun weighed a mere twenty-six ounces, had a barrel length of three and one-half inches, and featured a white-dot front sight and a Novak Lo-Mount Carry two-dot rear. Stainless-steel slide. Alloy frame. The recoil would be quite manageable.
There was one shoulder rig, into which Sanjay shrugged. He adjusted the straps. He slipped into his sport coat.
Tanuja put her pistol in her purse.
Beside each firearm were two spare ten-round magazines. She dropped one in each front pocket of her sport coat, and her brother did the same.
Also in the cargo space lay a long orange extension cord neatly coiled and beside it an electric reciprocating saw with a twenty-four-inch blade. They would leave those items untouched until they reached their destination.
Sanjay closed the tailgate. He drove. Departing, they left all the garage lights on and didn’t close the big door.
10
Part Cherokee, part Irish, part Hawaiian—the last of those including genetic slivers of various South Pacific and Asian ancestors—Jessica Washington, with her Cherokee complexion and sable hair and almond eyes of shamrock green, was a woman of many parts, including two sets of legs.
When she ran for exercise or competed in a 10K run, she wore the legs with flexible blades for feet. Now, as she prepared dinner and put it on the table with the help of man and boy, she wore more traditional prosthetics.
At the age of twenty-three, nine years earlier, she had lost her legs from the knees down while serving in Afghanistan. She’d been Army, like Gavin, but a noncombatant. Roadside IEDs were equal-opportunity destroyers, however, indifferent to issues of gender, race, religion, and nationality. Gavin had met her following the loss of her legs, and they had been married for eight years. They rarely spoke of her disability or her difference except when one of her prosthetic limbs needed to be repaired or replaced.
Gavin had established a solid post-Army career writing military nonfiction and, more recently, a series of novels featuring a cast of Special Forces operatives. He’d not landed on the bestseller list yet—and maybe he never would—but he was doing all right. Jessie had proved to have considerable organizational skills working as a volunteer advocate for wounded veterans. Their lives were happy and full, especially full since Travis had come to live with them.
This evening, it was the boy’s turn to say grace. For a five-year-old, he made of the duty a detailed expression of gratitude that always brought a smile to Jessie. He thanked God not just for brisket of beef and au gratin potatoes and sugar snap peas and baked corn and dinner rolls and iced tea and carrot cake, but also for Exmoor ponies and Sara Orangetip butterflies, for Bella and Samson and Hannah, for red-tailed hawks and canyon wrens and baleen whale fossils, for Gavin and Jessica, and last of all for Jane, which was when, as always, he ceased thanking God and required of the Big Guy a term upon which any future statements of gratitude would be conditioned: “And thank you for my mom, the best mom ever, so you have to keep her really safe and bring her back to us really soon, like not a year from now but like really, really soon.”
They had music while preparing dinner—classic Sam Cooke—and soft piano during the meal. As the men cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, Jessie stepped onto the back porch for fresh air, which smelled of jasmine and oak mast. The German shepherds, Duke and Queenie, followed her. Only then, with no screening music, did she hear an airplane cruising the night at altitude.
At various times during the day, with Gavin and Travis off on their ride, as Jessie had been about one chore or another, here and there on the property, she had heard a plane, surely not always the same one. The valley was as rural as anywhere in this sprawling county of three million souls. It wasn’t near a major airport. No takeoff or landing paths bisected it. Jets of all sizes crossed the valley, but at such high altitude they could hardly be heard. There were private craft at times, prop planes bound for days of pleasure in farther places, businessmen headed for distant conferences or scouting possible real-estate ventures from the air. But she could not recall a day in which, as today, there seemed to be a constant coarse drone of aircraft.
In fact, it might not just have seemed so, but might have been so. She had played music at times other than dinner and had been performing tasks that took her full attention or that were noisy enough to mask the sound of a plane.