“Okay, and I swear we won’t look at your cards when you’re out of the room.”
Jessie carried the briefcase containing $110,000, and the boy stayed close by her side all the way to the garage.
Gavin followed behind with Duke and Queenie. The dogs sprang into the Rover through the tailgate.
The horses would be all right for the night. In the morning, he would call someone and arrange to have the stallion, mare, and pony professionally stabled for a month. He had to believe that this bad business would be finished in a month. One way or another, it would be finished.
18
Tanuja was herself, Tanuja Shukla, born in Mumbai, reborn in America, orphaned when her beloved parents fell out of the sky, but she was also Emma Dodge, born in Long Beach, now a personal shopper for wealthy women in Bel Air and Beverly Hills, as chronicled in the recent novel published by Random House. She was as well Alecto, a daughter of Gaea, one of the Furies, having stepped safely down the long sky through which dear Baap and Mai had fallen, to cohabit Tanuja’s body and to share the pages of the story of Emma Dodge. Tanuja-Emma-Alecto, triune entity, stood in the grand foyer of the Chatterjee residence, for the moment uncertain of her purpose. As a writer, Tanuja used her free will to create whole worlds, in one of which she’d shaped Emma, who possessed no free will, and borrowed Alecto from unknown writers who had created her millennia earlier. For all her reputation as a divinity, Alecto possessed no more free will than Emma, both being fictional, and yet in this still point between the past and the future, to bring this moment of indecision to a necessary end, it was Alecto who rose to the occasion.
Gazing at her reflection in one of the mirrors that hung above the chinoiserie sideboards in the foyer, Tanuja saw not the author of Alecto Rising, but Alecto herself, dark eyes encircled by darker eye shadow, lips black, and when she put a hand to those lips, the fingernails were black as well. Within fierce Alecto, she saw the shadow of another divinity from another pantheon entirely, Kali in her terrible Chandi aspect, wearing a necklace of human skulls. In fact, there were shadows within Kali, shades of uncounted vengeful deities from all of pagan history, gathered now in Tanuja, and she their avatar, brought here, this night, to do their will, not her own, and so she turned from the mirror when she heard voices and laughter elsewhere in the house.
19
From the dark garage into the dark night, without the aid of headlights, Gavin drove not along the lane toward the county road, but instead to the back gate in the property fence and out into the wildland, into which he and Travis had ridden their horses earlier in the day.
Travis sat belted in the backseat. Jessica rode shotgun, literally, with a 12-gauge racked stock-down in a dashboard-mounted clamp directly in front of her.
Under the starless overcast, through which the moon was only a ghostlight, the rough land lay crisp and clear before Gavin, though it was rendered an otherworldly green by the night-vision goggles that had been stowed under the driver’s seat and that he now wore.
These were not average night-vision devices like the Bushnell Equinox Z or ATN Viper X-1. They were ATN PVS7-3 goggles, MIL-SPEC Generation 4 gear used by all branches of the U.S. military, and although they were available for purchase by civilians, they cost north of $60,000. Jane had provided a pair for this sole purpose. Gavin didn’t think she had bought them, and he was discreet enough not to ask how she’d obtained them.
The device gathered all the available light—even infrared that could not be seen by the unassisted human eye—amplified it more than eighty thousand times, and with image-enhancement technology presented a 120-degree field of view. The image was rendered in an eerie green hue because the eye was most sensitive to wavelengths of light that were nearest 555 nanometers, the green neighborhood on the spectrum, which allowed the display to be dimmer without losing clarity, thus conserving the battery.
Off-road at night in rough terrain, they could not have risked headlights and taillights, which in this unpopulated and untraveled terrain would have made a spectacle of their escape, especially to an aerial observer. The blush of red brake lights reflecting off slopes of scree and through fields of blond grass would be less noticeable from a distance, but Gavin nonetheless strove to minimize the use of brakes.
The engine noise might betray them on departure, but less so after the first mile. Any agent on the ground would be hard put to get an accurate fix on the Rover’s location in this stark country of discontinuous hills and zigzagging canyons scored into the land less by erosion than by thousands of years of earthquakes, which provided a maze of hard surfaces off which sound could ricochet until it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
“We’re drivin’ blind,” the boy said from the backseat.
“You and I are,” Jessie said, “but not my man here.”
“Clear as noon to me,” Gavin said, though in fact the view through the goggles disturbed him.
The strange green light robbed all things of their true color, as though before him lay an alien moon in a universe where the laws of electromagnetic radiation were far different from those of the world on which he’d been born. This radiance seemed also to drown everything that it illuminated, the qualities of light and water married in its effect, the semidesert now submerged in a sea, the Land Rover a submarine at great depth, under terrible pressure.
He had gone little more than a mile before he realized the reason for his disquiet, which now grew sharper. In the museum that was his memory, there were no halls or chambers into which he would not go, but there were places he preferred over others. He wasn’t fond of revisiting recollections of night missions in Afghanistan, conducted with this technology. Primitive villages of mud bricks plastered over with stucco. Isolated compounds of graceless concrete structures. All laid with traps, sometimes with tripwires. Every dark-green doorway and every dark-green window a possible assassin’s lair. Then sudden action, a running black-green figure silhouetted against a pale-green concrete wall. Firing while on the move. Acid-green muzzle flare. Your return fire, more accurate than his, brought him strangely en pointe, his cloak flaring, as if a dance were about to begin, but it was a dance an instant long, and as he fell, the gout of green blood was almost black against the concrete backdrop. Gavin understood the peril that Jane was in, the hydra-headed and formidable nature of her enemies, and the risk that he and Jessie had taken by standing steadfast with her, but it was only now, looking at the world again through night-vision gear, when he fully appreciated that this was war, with all the horrors of combat, war in the homeland, Americans against Americans.
20
And so she led Sanjay through the elegantly furnished house, past big windows that in daylight might have revealed a dramatic canyon view funneling toward the sea in the distance, but that now were blinded by shifting cataracts of fog. They passed through a lamplit living room, a shadowy dining room, and into a kitchen.
Beyond the open kitchen lay a family room, and in the family room stood a six-sided table designed for card games, and on the table were a few plates of canapés, and in the chairs were three women and three men. They were enjoying a pre-dinner game of cards, their conversation animated, their attention fixed largely on the hands they had been dealt and on the discard that the current player was making.