Behind her, Sara said, “Oh, my God.”
Jane turned. She saw in the woman’s face something that was disconcertingly like awe.
“I know who you are. Black hair, not blond. Black eyes, not blue. But it’s you.”
“I’m nobody.”
Sara didn’t say that Jane, once a decorated FBI agent, was now at the top of the Bureau’s most-wanted list, the object of a media frenzy. She pointed to the banner headline on the Los Angeles Times. “There’s no truth in the news, is there? Not about you, not about anything. We’re living in a world of lies.”
“There’s always truth, Sara. Under an ocean of deceit, there’s truth just waiting.”
The woman’s weariness gave way to an earnest look, to an air of edgy enthusiasm that troubled Jane. “Whatever they’ve done, you’re taking it to them. Whatever they’re hiding, you’re digging it up.” She rose from her chair. “People, some people anyway, sense we’re being manipulated about what to think of you, but we don’t know why they want you to be so hated. I wish…wish I had what you have, could do what you’re doing.”
“I’m nobody,” Jane repeated, though not in the interest of denying her identity. “I could be dead tomorrow. If not tonight.”
“You won’t be, though. Not you.”
The fervor in the woman’s voice, a shining something in her eyes, chilled Jane for reasons she could not entirely understand.
“Yes, me,” she said. “Dead sooner than later. Or something worse than dead.”
To discourage a response, she stepped outside with her last word and closed the door. She crossed the concrete patio, hurried alongside the house and into the street, toward the car that she’d parked a block and a half away.
The singular chill persisted in her bones, colder than the late-March rain. She cast a shadow under the streetlamps, which was good. The sharp wind stung her face, and the blown rain blurred her vision, which was also good. The darkness—that of the lowering storm clouds and especially that of the star-shot sky fixed eternal above the storm—made her feel small and fragile, which was both good and right.
10
They switchbacked down the canyon slope at precarious angles more felt than seen, in a mist that curdled and became less animate as the wind diminished with their altitude and as the walls of the declivity drew closer on both sides. The special off-road tires churned through sodden weeds and sandy mud, spun and slid sideways on wet layered shale that splintered and sluiced out from under the Santa Fe Sport. Storm runoff followed ancient channels, foaming torrents that, in the crossing, surged against the wheels as though to tip the Hyundai out of Sanjay’s control and roll it into ruin. Where there was no shale or stone of any kind, he feared that the hundreds of feet of compacted soil, saturated by hours of relentless rain, would begin to move under their vehicle like an immense beast from a thousand millennia in the past, avalanching them into the lower darkness and burying them there beyond all possibility of escape or rescue.
Despite the focus demanded of him by the terrain and weather, from time to time Sanjay glanced upslope, or Tanuja encouraged him to do so, and always above them, finding its way toward them, was the Range Rover with its sinister passengers. If their pursuers were not drawing steadily closer, neither were they falling much behind. As he could see them by the lights that guided them, so the lights of the Hyundai encouraged their pursuit.
When the gauntlet of trees and brush and mud and rushing water had been navigated, they arrived at the canyon’s bottom, where thousands of storm spates converged to form a temporary brown river surging and tossing southward. Sanjay switched off the headlights before turning in the same direction that the river raced.
“Maybe they’ll think we went north,” he said.
“They won’t,” Tanuja disagreed, although she was not by nature a pessimist. “Without headlights, we’ll have to go slower. They’ll catch us sooner.”
“I don’t intend to go slower, Tanny,” he assured her.
In the formation of the river, the descending water had washed debris from its banks, even objects as large as rotting sections of long-fallen trees, which tumbled and wallowed along in the filthy currents. Furthermore, over many thousands of years and countless storms, the land here had been smoothed until the banks, short of flood tide, were almost as navigable as causeways.
Although the Hyundai could no longer be seen by those farther up the canyon wall, Sanjay was at first all but blind, the way ahead obscure. The brown water was dimly visible on their right because of its agitation and its freight of pale flotsam, but also because its churning generated lush garlands of vaguely phosphorescent foam that flowered upon it and gave definition to its sinuous form.
“We’ll leave tire tracks in the soft earth,” Sanjay said, “but in this rain, those ought to wash away in a minute or two. And where there’s scree instead of mud, we won’t leave tracks at all. They’ll have to go slower than they want, looking for where we might have turned away from the river and gone uphill again.”
“Suddenly you’ve got a chaska for danger,” Tanuja said.
“I’ve got no taste for it at all,” he objected. “But I sure am obsessed with staying alive.”
11
Waiting for the heater to bake the chill out of her bones, Jane Hawk sat behind the wheel of her Ford Explorer Sport, staring at a nightscape distorted by rain shimmering down the windshield. Through that fluid lens, the streetlamps appeared to quiver, receding like great scaffold-mounted torches along some shadowy road that led to Death and onward to Damnation.
She had purchased her current vehicle from an all-cash black-market dealer who worked out of a series of barns on a former horse ranch near Nogales, Arizona. The Explorer Sport had been stolen in the United States and reworked in Mexico, where among other improvements it had been given a purpose-built 825-horsepower 502 Chevy engine.
If you had to go on the run, hunted by law-enforcement and national-security agencies at the federal, state, and local level, it paid to have been an FBI agent who had learned how various criminal enterprises operated and where to find them.
At Jane’s request, the navigation system had been stripped from the Explorer. If those searching for her got a lead on the vehicle, a GPS would give them her location with such specificity, mile by mile, that they could take her as elegantly as a bird of prey snatching a field mouse from a meadow. To avoid carrying other locaters, she had no smartphone and no computer.
The hot air streaming from the dashboard vents warmed her but failed to alleviate the deeper chill, which wasn’t physical. It had gripped her when Sara Holdsteck regarded her with fervent admiration if not even reverence.
Jane didn’t want to be anybody’s hero. She had undertaken this fight for two selfish reasons: to restore her husband’s reputation, because Nick had not committed suicide as the evidence indicated; and to save the life of her only child, five-year-old Travis, who’d been threatened when her investigation of Nick’s death led to the discovery of a conspiracy in some of the highest offices of government and industry. The roots of that cabal spread day by day through a nation of people unaware of their extreme peril.