“Not every Ivy Leaguer is an Arcadian or could be. Or should be,” Jergen says.
“Certainly not a lot of them at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s distressing that Penn’s even considered Ivy League.”
Being a Harvard man and proud of it, Carter Jergen is pretty sure he’s being mocked with that Penn comment, but now they arrive at the Washington residence. Time to get down to business.
The house is a cozy-looking place with a generous front porch. All the lights are on. There’s a barnlike building to the left and a stable beyond that, both dark.
What most interests Carter Jergen is the truck that the first responders arrived in, which is parked near the porch steps. It’s a Hennessey VelociRaptor 6 × 6, a bespoke version of the four-door Ford F-150 Raptor with new axles, two additional wheels, supertough-looking off-road tires, and a ton of other upgrades. It’s black, it’s amazing, it’s a fabulous truck.
Recently some Arcadians in the NSA and Homeland and elsewhere have been assigned impressive vehicles, mostly bespoke Range Rovers created by Overfinch North America, with performance upgrades, a carbon-fiber styling package, a dual-valve titanium exhaust system, and other cool stuff. Jergen has envied the hell out of them.
But this. This truck is another level of perk altogether.
There are two men waiting on the back porch. They’re wearing slim-fit Ring Jacket suits, which manage to look casual in spite of the exquisite Neapolitan tailoring, and their seven-fold Cesare Attolini ties are in playful soft-polka-dot patterns.
Jergen feels underdressed in a black T-shirt, Diesel Black Gold denim jacket with embroidered scorpions, and black Dior Homme jeans, but he is, after all, a field op, not a front-office guy.
Dubose’s outfit is unspeakable, suitable for knocking around in small-town West Virginia and not much else.
The back door of the house is closed, but Jergen can hear old music from before his time, a song titled “Get a Job.”
The men on the porch don’t give their names. They are brisk, almost brusque. They succinctly lay out the situation.
It became known at 4:00 P.M. on Friday that Gavin and Jessica Washington were harboring the five-year-old son of Jane Hawk. A decision was made to establish surveillance of the entrance to their private lane and to monitor the house by remotely opening the mics in their phones, computers, and TVs, as well as with the cameras in their computers and TVs. As their televisions did not have Internet links, they proved useless.
At 3:00 A.M. Saturday, NSA electronic-surveillance aircraft out of Los Angeles, rebased to Orange County airport, began spelling each other over the valley, fishing for all incoming and outgoing burner-phone traffic with the hope of identifying a call from Jane Hawk to the Washingtons and using track-to-source to locate her.
At 7:20 P.M., after dinner, the Washingtons and the boy agreed to play Old Maid. They accompanied the game with classic doo-wop music. Their conversation was unremarkable, partly obscured by the music. After a while, when they turned up the volume of the iPod, they couldn’t be heard talking. It was assumed either that they were speaking softly and the music drowned out their conversation or that they’d run out of things to say to one another.
After a series of quieter tunes—“Sincerely” by the Moonglows, “Earth Angel” by the Penguins, and “Only You” by the Platters—the suspicion arose that the Washingtons and the boy were no longer in the house. An operative was sent on foot from the county road to reconnoiter. He circled the house, peering in windows, subsequently entered, and confirmed that the house was deserted. The deck of Old Maid cards on the table had not been removed from the box.
Four vehicles are registered to Gavin and Jessica Washington. Three are currently in the garage. A rebuilt and customized ’87 Land Rover is missing, and it apparently has no GPS. A back gate in the ranch fencing, left open, suggests that the three became aware of surveillance and fled overland.
A team of specialists is en route. On arrival, they will take the house and other buildings apart in search of clues as to Jane Hawk’s activities or whereabouts. Meanwhile, Jergen and Dubose are tasked with pursuing the Washingtons and the boy overland, assisted by an aerial night-search helicopter which is currently incoming.
In fact, no sooner has the aerial unit been mentioned than the helo roars overhead, shaking the long branchlets of the live oaks and stirring up whirling masses of dry leaves that chitter like a plague of locusts before it moves off toward the open gate.
One of the agents in a Ring Jacket suit holds a vehicle key, and a thrill passes through Carter Jergen as he looks at the hulking black Hennessey VelociRaptor 6 × 6.
The second agent in a Ring Jacket suit produces a clipboard, and it is necessary for Dubose and Jergen to sign one document that relinquishes the Range Rover and a second that acknowledges their possession of the VelociRaptor as their new official vehicle.
“On the front seats in the truck,” the agent says, “you’ll find night-vision gear. You have direct voice communication with the helo crew to coordinate the search.”
Jergen makes the mistake of letting Dubose sign the documents first. By the time Jergen signs them, the backwoods boy has the key. Smiling, he says, “I’ll drive.”
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Gilberto insisted that he keep a watch on Hendrickson, even though the man was now controlled and sleeping in the kitchen chair to which his ankles were zip-tied.
“I’ll sleep when you leave. I couldn’t sleep anyway with him here. Even before you had to…inject him, the guy was a strange piece of work, miswired. Now he’s like a zombie or something. Makes my skin crawl.”
Hector and his son had brought Jane’s Ford Explorer Sport from Newport Coast and parked it alongside the funeral home. Gilberto carried her suitcase to the guest room.
Jane was too tired to shower, but she showered anyway because she wanted to be on the road as soon as possible after she woke in the morning. She set the alarm clock for 3:00 A.M.
She switched off the bedside lamp and stretched out and put her head on the pillow.
The bedroom lay at the front of the apartment, overlooking the street. The single window featured draperies, but she had neglected to draw them shut. Now she didn’t have the energy to cross the room and close them.
The faintest glow of streetlamps patinated a portion of the ceiling with tarnished silver. In the light of passing vehicles, the skeletal shadow of an ancient sycamore, not yet leafed for spring, swooned across the ceiling and the walls, its direction depending on whether the traffic was racing east or west, toppling again and yet again, each time in silence, into darkness.
During the past few months, whether Jane slept fitfully or soundly, she had always dreamed, as though each day was so crammed with events that she needed twenty-four hours to properly consider the meaning of them, to let the unconscious mind review them and either counsel her with scenarios of reassurance or ring loud its alarms.
Now she dreamed of being on the road, behind the wheel, traveling through a country of the mind with illogical geography, snow-draped forests of evergreens melting into red-rock deserts, cityscapes blurring into lonely shorelines. Nick sat beside her, Travis in the backseat, and sometimes her mother was alive again and sitting at Travis’s side, and all was well, until Nick said, I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself. When she looked at him, he wasn’t Nick any longer; he was Booth Hendrickson with eyes closed, sleeping as she had ordered him to sleep, until he turned his head toward her and opened his eyes, which were as pure white as hard-boiled eggs. Nobody knows, he repeated, and he was holding a hypodermic syringe, which he stabbed into her neck.
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