The helo racketed east through the night, looped around to the south, and approached them again.
When he realized the aircraft was coming in as low as before, maybe even lower, as though to skid-kiss the roof of the Land Rover, Gavin braked to a stop. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Jessie scrambling out of the open tailgate. She closed it behind her and crouched at the back of the vehicle.
Ghostly celebrants seemed to spring from graves as the helo passed over the land, billows of dust and chaff shapen into dancers that whirled away into the haunted dark. The blades of the rotary wing carved slabs of air and threw them down to rock the Rover on its tires.
As the chopper passed at reckless altitude, Jessie fired the shotgun three times in quick succession, and then pulled off a fourth round aimed at its tail rotor.
This wasn’t a movie, so the aircraft did not burst into flames, as there was no reason that it should. But a knocking noise and the sharp keening of metal parts grinding against each other at high speed suggested that she’d done some damage.
The pilot arced west and south, away from the canyon, and the helo yawed as it gained a little altitude.
Jessie opened the front passenger door and boarded the Rover, and Gavin set out after the helicopter as she slammed her door. He had no intention of giving pursuit for any purpose other than to keep it in sight until he knew whether it was seriously disabled.
Whatever mechanical problem a few loads of point-blank buckshot might have caused, it quickly metastasized into a crisis. The pilot ceased lateral flight and hovered and started to put down, the rotary wing stuttering. When the helo was about forty feet off the ground, its blades locked. Without lift, it dropped hard, snapped a skid, tipped, and came to rest canted to starboard, propped at an angle by wing blades.
Gavin stripped off his night-vision goggles and gave them to Jessie. He switched on the headlights. The pale land and dark scrub seemed to leap at them out of a void, the green world gone, this more familiar world stabilizing under them.
Travis scrambled off the floor, onto the backseat, when Jessie told him to belt up. He tried his best to do so with the dogs half atop him and excitedly licking his hands and face.
Keeping in mind the possibility of gunfire, Gavin drove wide of the downed aircraft. However, the sidewash of the Rover’s high beams revealed one man on his knees beside the craft and another in the open cockpit door above, getting ready to jump.
The hills unveiled their contours more readily to headlights than to the amplified moonlight and infrared of the NVGs. Gavin oriented himself as best he could as Jessie read aloud the compass heading, and then he drove south-southwest through the wildlands faster than he had dared in a green world.
The tremors took him then. Not for long, not violently enough to make his teeth chatter. If there had been a cold sweat on his brow and down his back before this, he didn’t realize it until now.
In spite of how practiced Jessie had been in both showdowns, Gavin knew that she was shaken, too, when she said, “Afghanistan used to be half a world away. I liked it better there.”
9
Jane Hawk allowed herself far fewer superstitions than did most people, one of which was that long good-byes were more likely to be final good-byes than were short ones. Better to say “until next time” or “see you soon” than to say “good-bye” at any length.
Behind the mortuary, beside her Explorer Sport, in the chilly darkness of 3:30 Sunday morning, Jane said to Gilberto Mendez, “See you soon,” and she thanked him, and she told him that she loved him.
It was her conviction, not superstition, that this civilization was built on love—on the love of people for one another and on the love that surpasseth all understanding. In this age of cynicism and snark, genuine emotion was mocked, love derided as sentimentalism. In this world of rapid change, there were few things to which you could hold fast. Wisdom acquired through centuries of experience, traditions, and beloved neighborhoods eroded and washed away, and with them went the people who found solace and meaning in those things, who once would have been part of your life for most of your life. Now a rootless population, believing in nothing but the style and fashion of the moment, produced a culture of surface conformity under which the reality was a loveless realm in which soon everyone would live as a stranger in a strange land. When you loved enough important qualities of a person, then you loved him or her, and you had better say it while time remained.
She loved Gilberto’s faithfulness to Carmella, his devotion to his children, his respect for the dignity of the dead and for the eternal nature of their souls, his love of freedom, and his lifelong commitment to the Marine way, to semper fi. Therefore, her good-bye consisted of just those eight heartfelt words, “See you soon. Thank you. I love you.” She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek.
At 3:31, she was on the road in her SUV that had been rebuilt in Mexico, wearing the chopped-everywhichway Vogue-punk black wig and the eye shadow and the blue lipstick and the nose ring that went with the photo on the Elizabeth Bennet driver’s license.
In the passenger seat was Booth Hendrickson, still under her control because she had accessed him by saying “Play Manchurian with me,” and had not released him with the words Auf Wiedersehen. She believed in the efficacy of the control mechanism, even in his case. Nevertheless, for this first leg of the journey, his wrists were bound together with a zip-tie that also looped through his belt, so that he could not lift his hands from his lap.
He wore his suit; but a too-roomy shirt belonging to Gilberto had replaced his custom-tailored shirt from which Jane had earlier cut one arm when preparing him for injection. He wore no tie. Before having his hands encumbered by his belt, he had nervously fingered his buttoned collar and had appeared distressed that his outfit remained incomplete.
Heading east toward San Bernardino, she didn’t speak to him, nor he to her. For the first half hour, she welcomed the silence, the time to think about what lay ahead and how best to cope with it. But soon the man’s servile obedience to her preference for quiet, his placid expression unchanging mile by mile, and his dead-eyed stare that never wavered from the dark road ahead…all that became too eerie for her to countenance.
Since she still had nothing to say to him, she opted for music. She wanted no trackable GPS in any car she acquired, but she always needed a vast store of music, which not unpleasantly reminded her of the life she might have lived if her father had not murdered her mother so many years ago.
In recent days, she had found herself listening more often to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in A Major, K. 488, in part because the concerto’s opening movement inspired a soaring optimism that was much needed in her current circumstances.
Within this exceptional concerto, however, was a melancholy movement so piercing, so expressive of the deepest sorrow, that she couldn’t hear it without thinking about Nick and her mother. And about Nathan Silverman, who had once been her boss at the FBI and whom she had spared from a life of Arcadian slavery by an act of loving violence that would weigh upon her forever. This sequence in K. 488 didn’t depress her, but balanced the optimism of the opening movement and made her feel complete of heart and clear of mind.
As that movement was nearing an end, Hendrickson violated her instruction to remain silent, but only to say, “It’s so beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
She told him.
“I was allowed no time for music.”
She considered that statement for a moment before she said, “You’ll have it now, all the way to Tahoe, one music or another.”
He said only, “Thank you,” gazing at the highway with the stony expression of a sphinx whose stare was fixed on the rim of eternity.