“With nothing good.”
“With this, whatever it is,” she said, revealing two of the sleeves of silvery insulation that contained ampules, which she had evidently snatched off the table while Sanjay was crawling under it.
He said, “It’s crazy, Linc Crossley being with them.”
“It’s just as crazy without him.”
The land sloped gently westward. A narrowing of the horse trail bracketed them with weeds that tapped and scraped at the vehicle, as if with brittle fingers the resurrected residents of an ancient burial ground were protesting this intrusion on sacred soil.
“Could Ashima and Burt be part of this?” Tanuja wondered.
“What would they have to gain?”
“What little they didn’t already steal from us. And revenge.”
“Not after eight years. They’re lucky they avoided prison, and they know it.”
Out of the rain and fog and formless dark, order appeared as two parallel lines. At first pale, perhaps illusory, they acquired reality, crisp edges: the double white line defining the center of the county road.
The slope terminated in the flat expanse of blacktop. Sanjay turned left, away from their house and the SUV that blocked access to it. He braked at once, however, because a Range Rover stood across both lanes, leaving too little room to drive past it either fore or aft. The headlights were not on, but the blinkers silvered the falling rain in front of it and bloodied the rain behind.
Doors opened and two men got out of the vehicle, shadowy figures, solemn and methodical and unhurried, like those who had forced their way into the house.
Sanjay shifted into reverse, backed up at speed, wheeled hard right, fishtailed the Hyundai 180 degrees, braked, shifted into drive, switched on the lights, and fled north, past the SUV blocking their driveway. The road dead-ended in a turnaround, where the fall-off from the pavement was so gentle that there were no guardrails.
“They have all-wheel drive like we do,” Tanuja warned.
“But maybe not nerve enough,” Sanjay said as they crossed the graveled shoulder and angled down a weeded slope, broomstraw and brambles shredding against the undercarriage.
The mist thickened in the realm below, born out of the depths, and in its ascent was shaped by the wind into stampeding forms that flung themselves at the Hyundai and flared around it. Phalanxes of eucalyptuses stood guard against descent, penetrated by the herded fog but seemingly impenetrable to all else.
Having walked the land for years, Sanjay knew the architecture of earth, rock, and flora. To him, this wilderness wasn’t wild, but a palace of elegant chambers and passageways. He steered between jambs of rock, across a canted threshold of stone, onto a slope of rain-jeweled ribbon grass, and toward the trees, as if the wall they presented was as insubstantial as the fog that seethed between them.
“Sanjay, no,” Tanuja warned as he maintained speed.
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Jhav!” she cried, an obscenity he had never before heard her use in any language. She braced herself for impact.
At the last moment, he thought he’d angled toward the wrong point in the tree line, but then the unbroken rampart of forest was revealed to be an illusion. The trees to the left were older growth, twenty feet downhill from the younger specimens to the right; the distance differential made them appear the same size and age, and the abrupt drop in the land hid the truth that one long phalanx was in fact two. The Hyundai plunged. Sanjay swung the vehicle hard to the right. It didn’t roll. He drove behind the younger stand of eucalyptus, which was a natural windbreak, three trees deep, rather than a full forest. He continued north along a narrow escarpment, trees to the right, a black void to the left where the land descended—more steeply now—three or four hundred feet to the canyon floor.
They’d had no option other than an off-road escape, but he knew that this escarpment narrowed until it terminated in an out-fold of canyon wall. They needed to go down into less hospitable territory.
Twin luminous globes appeared behind them, haloed in the mist, shimmering witchily in the rain, nothing of their source revealed, like some otherworldly visitation, but of course they were the headlights of the Range Rover.
Sanjay wheeled the Hyundai off the ridge line, into the void.
9
Gaining Sara Holdsteck’s trust had taken Jane Hawk much longer than she would require to get answers to the few essential questions that she had come there to ask.
She popped a pill with her coffee.
Sara raised her eyebrows.
“Acid reducer,” Jane explained.
“Taken with black, black coffee.”
“Coffee doesn’t reflux on me. The mess the world’s in, the arrogant elitists who screwed it up, who believe in nothing but power, like your ex-husband. That’s the acid, why I need this.”
“You have an extra one of those?”
Jane shook a tablet from the bottle and passed it across the table. “So Simon occupies the house you used to own.”
Sara swallowed the pill. “I hear he has a live-in hottie.”
“I know about the hottie. But there are some things about the house I couldn’t get from research. I need you to tell me.”
“Anything. Whatever. But…maybe it’s time I knew your name.”
“Elizabeth Bennet,” Jane lied.
“Like in Pride and Prejudice.”
“Is it?”
“Do you sometimes go as Elizabeth Darcy?”
Jane smiled. “Not that I recall.”
“All right, Lizzy. What do you want to know about the house?”
A few minutes later, Jane changed the subject. “I also need some info about certain of his personal habits.”
When a sudden acceleration of wind drove raindrops against the house with the hard snap of a nail-gun barrage, Sara didn’t startle as before or glance at the blinded windows. In a quiet, steady voice she spoke dispassionately about Simon Yegg, apparently now convinced there was a chance that some justice would be settled upon him.
Jane’s last item concerned family. “You ever meet his brother?”
“Simon has a brother?”
“A half brother. Same mother, different fathers.”
“His dad died when Simon was eight, his mom six years later.”
“No. She divorced the father. He later died in a fire. Mother’s not dead.”
“Damn. Did the man never say a word of truth?”
“His tongue’s not made for it. You know a Booth Hendrickson?”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s the half brother. Born in Florida. Raised in Nevada, California. Tall. Salt-and-pepper hair. Pale green eyes. Talks like he’s Boston Society. Five-thousand-dollar suits.”
“Rings no bell.”
“He’s very high up in the Department of Justice. Only a couple rungs below the attorney general. Through a network of associates, he seems to have a lot of power in other agencies.”
Sara digested that revelation. Her souring expression suggested that she might be glad to have taken the pill Jane had given her. “Other agencies? Like the IRS?”
“Not just the IRS. He’s a unique cross-agency player.”
“What—he and Simon ruin na?ve women and split the proceeds?”
“I doubt Hendrickson wants a dime. He does it for his brother.”
“How touching.”
“They have different last names. They don’t advertise their relationship. Hendrickson has much bigger interests of his own that he wouldn’t want compromised by Simon. But they’re close, and I was able to link them.”
“You said you’re after Simon because of who he hangs with. You mean Hendrickson?”
“Yeah. I’m going to get at Hendrickson through Simon. After Hendrickson…others just as corrupt as those two.” Jane got to her feet and picked up the Heckler and holstered it. “It’ll be best for you if you never tell anyone about me or what we discussed.”
“Who would I tell? I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
“That’ll change if you let it. You’re smarter now about who might be rotten. Just remember the pistol rig, a new security code.”
“Code tonight. The rig tomorrow. I won’t be going to Paris, either. Or Yosemite.”
Jane went to the back door that led to a patio.