The dogs had scampered away not merely to have a last pee of the day, but also to patrol the yard, the stables, and the freestanding garage. By their nature, especially between sunset and sunrise, shepherds were diligent guardians of their family.
The breeze had gone to bed with the sun. In the stillness, there were occasional early season tree toads making themselves sound as big as frogs, an owl on an oak-branch perch, calling hooo-hooo-hooodoo-hooodoo, as if warning of some dark magic at work in the night—and the plane just clear enough to be tracked as it droned east to west and then turned south. Her military experience allowed Jessie to reach certain conclusions with confidence: that the current aircraft was a twin-engine model, larger than the light planes sold by companies like Cessna and Piper, and that it was being flown above three thousand feet, perhaps to avoid unduly disturbing the residents of the valley—or to avoid, as much as possible, raising suspicion in those with reason to be wary. The engine noise dwindled toward the south, and when it seemed within a minute of fading beyond hearing, it changed in character. Jessica listened until she was sure that the craft had turned east. If in a few minutes it changed course northward, there could be little doubt that it was circling the valley.
She opened the kitchen door. Travis had begun to wipe crumbs off the dinette table with a damp dishcloth, after which he would dry the table with a dish towel. Diligent about the simple chores he was given, the boy focused intently on the table, his face serious and his tongue protruding between his teeth. Just then turning away from the dishwasher, Gavin saw Jessie in the doorway. She gestured at him to join her on the porch.
11
Hendrickson dunked the lemon drop cookies in his Coke. But he ate the chocolate chip cookies dry, taking small bites all the way around the circumference of each one and then around again, until there remained just the center, a miniature cookie, that he could pop into his mouth whole. He ate more of these treats than anyone but a hyperactive child or a fat man of gargantuan appetite could have consumed, and all the while he did not look at either of his captors, did not speak a word.
Jane nursed her vodka-and-Coke, watching Hendrickson gimlet-eyed, wondering if his apparent regression into childlike behavior was real or feigned. If it was a performance, what did he have to gain by it? Nothing that she could imagine. If he’d decided not to tell her more about the Arcadians or about his work on their behalf, he didn’t need to fake a psychological implosion; he could simply clam up. He knew she wasn’t capable of physically torturing him. Anyway, when his control mechanism began to function in a few hours, she could demand that he tell her all, and he would not be able to resist. Which argued that whatever was happening to him must be real, either triggered by his terror and despair over his coming enslavement or as a consequence of the nanoconstructs failing to properly assemble without causing brain damage.
She worried that a mental collapse might render him a poor subject for interrogation even after the control mechanism had fully and correctly inserted itself. What good would it be to insist he divulge what he knew if mentally he had regressed to some childlike condition in which he remembered nothing past the age of ten?
She decided to press him for more information now. “You’ve told me all the names in your cell. But as connected as you are, there must be other people you suspect of being Arcadians.”
“You said I could have cookies.”
“And you have them.”
“But I need another Coke.”
“I’ll get it,” Gilberto said.
To Hendrickson, Jane said, “Talk to me while you eat.”
“Okay. If you say so. But what happened to Simon?”
“Your brother? I left him alive.”
“But what happened to him? What did you do?”
“What do you care?”
He lowered his voice almost to a whisper and spoke with evident distress. “I need to know.”
As Gilberto returned with a cold can of cola and put it on the table, he looked down upon Hendrickson’s bent head for a moment and then glanced at Jane as though to be sure that she realized how disconnected their captive had become. With a nod, she assured him that she understood.
If Jane had become for Hendrickson the symbol of ultimate power, and if he had, as she’d earlier thought, always been a man who longed for greater power at the same time that he yearned to submit to it, then she was best advised to keep him fearful of her.
“I broke Simon. Broke him and made him cooperate in your kidnapping. I left him tied up in his fancy theater, lying in his own piss.”
He said nothing and put down a half-eaten cookie.
“What do you think about that?” Jane prodded.
Hendrickson muttered something.
“I can’t hear you,” she said.
He whispered, “Simon was always the strong one.”
“I wasn’t that impressed with your Simon.” She paused for vodka-and-Coke. “Come on now, tell me, who do you suspect might be Techno Arcadians?”
After a silence, he said, “Well, first of all, there’s one more I know is.”
Jane frowned. “You said you’d named all you knew.”
“I named everyone in my cell.”
“Who is the other?”
Hendrickson licked his lips. He glanced at her and quickly away. “Anabel. My mother. She’s one. One of them. She was Bertold Shenneck’s first investor. Even before D. J. Michael. She’s one. Anabel.”
12
When Gavin came onto the porch, Jessie was already standing in the backyard, gazing at a starless sky in which the moon’s ascent could be confirmed by only a pale shapeless blur pressing against the crackle-glazed cloud cover like some spirit at a winter-frosted window. He went to her.
“Hear that?” she asked. “It’s heading east, but I think it’s been circling.”
Wearing her standard prosthetics, she stood with her legs more widely spread than she would have if they had been real, to ensure her balance. Her hands were fisted on her hips, and as she peered into the obscure heavens, her posture and expression were a challenge, as though she had taken umbrage at some injustice and, having brought it to the attention of a higher power, was waiting now for a cosmic correction to be effected. Jessie had high expectations of everyone, including Providence and herself, and this was one of the things he most loved about her.
He listened until he determined that the aircraft had changed directions. “Sounds northbound now.”
“Bet it turns west in a couple minutes. Thinking back on it, maybe there’s been a plane up there all day.”
“It would have to refuel. Change crews.”
“So maybe there’s been two of them, spelling each other.”
Every time an owl hooted from its oak-tree perch, mourning doves sheltering in the stable eaves cooed nervously, though their fragile but deep-set nests put them beyond reach of the larger, predatory bird.
As Gavin listened to the plane, the disquiet of the doves infected him, though his foreboding arose from a threat more serious than a great horned owl.
“I guess I know what you’re thinking,” Jessie said.
“I guess you do.”
According to Jane, in the vicinity of all major cities that might be subject to a terrorist attack, the National Security Agency likely maintained surveillance aircraft staffed and ready to take off at a moment’s notice. They were equipped to seine from an ocean of telecom signals only those carrier waves reserved for cellphones, even specifically for transmissions from disposable phones, burner phones, within a fifty-mile radius. They were fishermen netting data out of a sea of air, able to use an analytical scanning program to search for references to an impending attack—the names of known terrorists, key words in English, Chinese, Russian, and various Middle Eastern languages—and then use track-to-source technology to pinpoint the location of those burner phones.
Jessie said, “What if…”
“Yeah?”
“If the analytical program was customized to search for names like Jane, Travis, Nick…for words like Mom and love and Dad and things like that, could they nail us if she calls our burner?”