Travis would be safe there for a while. A short while. Two days. Maybe three.
Unless Gavin and Jessie had been injected. Then they would reveal his whereabouts.
But they hadn’t been injected. They wouldn’t allow themselves to be captured. They knew what that would mean: nanoweb enslavement.
They were surely dead. They were as much a part of her heart as were its walls of muscle, and they were dead. There would be some news of their death in the morning, some concocted story containing no truth except for the truth of their murders.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that, by enlisting them in her war, she was responsible for their deaths. Yes, they’d understood the risks, no doubt about that. They saw this as their fight, too, as everyone’s war, everyone who loved freedom and had sufficient experience to know that evil was real and implacable. If they could speak to her now from that mysterious place of which no human being knew the full truth, they would absolve her of responsibility, but in her grief she was nevertheless also pierced by guilt.
She dressed and stepped outside and took deep breaths of the crisp night air and stood trembling with a need to act. The sky remained as overcast as it had been when she arrived.
No volume of vodka existed that would bring her sleep.
She wanted to be in Borrego Springs now. But the worst thing she could do would be to rush to Travis. She would need the night to get there. They would be expecting her, and she would be exhausted and easy to take down. She had to have a plan to get in and out of that valley undetected. As an agent working cases involving serial killers and mass murderers, and now since she had been branded a murderer herself and a traitor, she stayed alive by staying cool. But this…this was the ultimate test of her fortitude and prudence in the face of extreme threat. Not only her life but that of her son now depended on her not succumbing to hot emotion.
Nonetheless, she wanted to be closer to Travis, if even just a little closer, and she wanted another thing. She wanted stars.
She returned to her room and put on the excessive eye makeup and the blue lipstick and the chopped-everywhichway black wig, because that was her quickest option. They knew the look now, but they didn’t know the Elizabeth Bennet name; she could use it one more time.
She returned her luggage to the car, turned in the room key, and drove west to Sacramento, and then south toward Stockton.
30
This exhaustion had the substance of a real presence, a mantled thing resting on her neck, its thick cloaks weighing heavily on her shoulders. There was always a moment when iron will and a determined heart could no longer compensate for the fatigue of mind and muscle. Her vision blurred with weariness until, if she stayed on the road, she was a danger to herself and others.
At 11:50 P.M., near Stockton, the overcast abated. Still farther south, when the night cast off the last rags of cloud, Jane exited Interstate 5 at the little community of Lathrop, where she would get a room for the night.
First, however, she stopped along the side of the road on the outskirts of town and got out of the car and walked a few steps into a meadow. The sky was a sea of suns afloat in the eternal dark that only their light relented. The nearest sun of all, which warmed the earth, was hours below the eastern horizon. When it rose, it would reveal a world of wonders, a world on which had been lavished such natural beauty of such astonishing depth and complexity that an honest heart perceived meaning in it and yearned to know. In the night as it was now and in the morning light, there were men and women making music, writing poetry and novels, researching new medicines, fighting wars against malevolent forces, doing hard and honest work, raising families, loving, caring, hoping. A hole in the ground, its galleries shaped into a museum to display works of cruelty and horror—that was not the truth of the world, as Anabel insisted. That “truth” was the delusion of those for whom life was nothing more than a contest for power, who either could not see or refused to see the beauty and the wonder of the world, who wanted to find no meaning beyond themselves, who lived to control, to tell others what to do and think and believe, and who relished crushing those who would not submit. If it was inevitable that evolving technology would provide them with the absolute power they craved, they must still be resisted. When the universe had been brought forth and light had been born within the stars, if even at that first moment all had been shaped toward tyranny and slavery, she would be damned rather than have such a future for herself or her child. If they forced her to wade through blood and never allowed her to find a welcome shore, she would nevertheless seek it until she died. And if they pursued the hellish transformation of this world, she would give them Hell itself by opening the door for them.
And now the motel room. A pillow. Weariness and grief and grace and gratitude. Instant sleep. And with the coming of the morning sun, the wonder and the terror of it all.
Please turn the page for a preview of
the next Jane Hawk novel
by #1 New York Times bestselling author
Dean Koontz
THE FORBIDDEN DOOR
1
At first the breeze was no more than a long sigh, breathing through the Texas high country as though expressing some sadness attendant to Nature herself.
They were sitting in the fresh air, in the late-afternoon light, because they assumed that the house was bugged, that anything they said within its rooms would be monitored in real time.
Likewise, they trusted neither the porches nor the barn, nor the horse stables.
When they had something important to discuss, they retreated to the redwood lawn chairs under the massive oak tree in the backyard, facing a flatness of grassland that rolled on to the distant horizon and, for all that the eye could tell, continued to eternity.
As Sunday afternoon became evening, Ancel and Clare Hawk sat in those chairs, she with a martini, he with Macallan Scotch over ice, steeling themselves for an upcoming television program they didn’t want to watch but that might change their lives.
“What bombshell can they be talking about?” Clare wondered.
“It’s TV news,” Ancel said. “They pitch most every story like it’ll shake the foundations of the world. It’s how they sell soap.”
Clare watched him as he stared out at the deep, trembling grass and the vastness of sky as if he never tired of them and saw some new meaning in them every time he gave them his attention. A big man with a weathered face and work-scarred hands, he looked as if his heart might be as hard as bone, though she’d never known one more tender.
After thirty-four years of marriage, they had endured hardships and shared many successes. But now—and perhaps for as long as they yet might have together—their lives were defined by one blessing and one unbearable loss, the birth of their only child Nick and his death at the age of thirty-two, the previous November.
Clare said, “I’m feeling like it’s more than selling soap, like it’s some vicious damn twist of the knife.”
He reached out with his left hand, which she held tightly. “We thought it all out, Clare. We have plans. We’re ready for whatever.”
“I’m not ready to lose Jane, too. I’ll never be ready.”
“It won’t happen. They’re who they are, she’s who she is, and I’d put my money on her every time.”