The bond between Jane and Gwyn had deserved her trust. Marine wives. Marine widows. The three-strand bond of service, duty, and grief. She’d liked the woman. She’d had no reason to suspect that Gwyn was somehow compromised and on an emotional precipice.
Who had Gwyn spoken to on the phone before killing herself? Why had she spoken to anyone? To tell him that Jane was headed next to San Diego? If they—the octopuslike They—had no agent near enough to apprehend her in Alpine, knowing her next destination narrowed their search parameters.
But “near San Diego” encompassed perhaps a hundred square miles and as many as a million and a half people. Maybe that narrowed the search, but it certainly didn’t pinpoint her whereabouts.
In recent weeks, her pursuers had to have figured out that she was using library computers to do her Internet searches. There were numerous libraries in the greater San Diego area, however, including many in colleges and universities. They might anticipate that she’d want to know more about the What If Conference and the Gernsback Institute, after learning about them from Gwyn. But to find her, they would have been required to mount a watch on those websites, with the capability of identifying in real time every query from a San Diego–area library; they would then have needed to be able to immediately track-to-source the query and identify the unique signature of the workstation.
If the searchers were closing in on her even as she concluded her task in the branch library and as she gave forty dollars to the homeless veteran, her second mistake had been to dally in the park next door and make a phone call to Sidney Root in Chicago. If they knew every one of the twenty-two individuals from whom she’d gathered evidence to date, they might expect her to contact one or more of them again. Monitoring real-time phone traffic for that many people, on multiple telecom platforms, would be an enormous task, one that she wasn’t even sure current technology allowed.
Supposing all of that was possible, they would also have to trace her call, raveling backward through the microwave maze of millions of current calls to the particular transmissions from the disposable phone, and then somehow use that signal in a GPS search to locate her in the park.
All within minutes.
With only a few hours’ notice from the time Gwyn had called them, they would have needed to place teams of agents at strategic points throughout the city, so if Jane’s position was determined, at least one team had a chance of reaching her within minutes.
Maybe they had been lucky. But in any case, lucky or not, the entity on her trail suddenly seemed ubiquitous, of greater power and reach than any one law-enforcement organization, more efficient than any of the government agencies with which she was familiar, all but omnipresent and omniscient.
Even if they had identified her vehicle, she would hope to use it for a while yet. Her financial resources were not unlimited, and this was her second set of wheels since this odyssey had begun.
At San Juan Capistrano, she left Interstate 5 for State Highway 74. As the Escape climbed the rugged chaparral-cloaked hills of the Cleveland National Forest, Jane’s mood darkened faster than did the slowly waning day. Greener in this season than it would be later in the year, the borderline-desert landscape was prized by hikers and nature enthusiasts, thought beautiful by some. To her it appeared inhospitable, even bleak, as if beyond the windows of the Ford lay a stricken planet struggling under a dying sun.
Descending then to Lake Elsinore and beyond. A rural world that seemed isolate. Lush meadows and valley scrub. Private graveled-and-oiled lanes leading to properties tucked back from the state route. Small and separate groves of cottonwoods and conifers testifying to an aquifer under land that would have been otherwise hardscrabble.
The remoteness was an illusion, because the hive of Southern California remained quickly accessible to the west, and even in this less bustling inland empire, “small” towns like Perris and Hemet boasted seventy or eighty thousand residents each.
She came to a private lane flanked by live oaks, turned right, and stopped at a plank gate painted white and infilled with wire. She put down her window and reached to the call box. She didn’t need to announce herself. She had a personal five-digit code that she entered on the keypad, and the gate swung open.
Beyond lay, for her, the most important place in the world.
23
* * *
THE WHITE CLAPBOARD HOUSE was a modest residence but for the luxury of a deep veranda that encircled it entirely.
Duke and Queenie were lying on that porch, among the wicker chairs, and they sprang to their feet as the Ford reached the end of the long driveway. Two German shepherds, superb specimens with deep chests and well-sprung ribs and straight backs, they were both family pets and also guard dogs that had been well trained.
Jane pulled to a stop behind Gavin’s prized apple-green ’48 Ford pickup that he had chopped and channeled and sectioned himself, adding ’37 La Salle fenders and a highly customized La Salle nose section with stainless-steel grillwork, making it a street rod of singular style.
The dogs knew her because she had left her driver’s window down to ensure they caught her scent even before she got out of the Ford.
They padded down the porch steps and sprinted to her, tails lashing the air in delight. Had she been a stranger, their approach would have been far different, circling and wary and full of menace.
Dropping to one knee, she gave each dog its share of affection. They lavished their tongues on her hands, a friendly greeting that might have repelled some people but that she received happily. They were guardians of her treasure, and she slept better knowing they were here.
As much as she loved the dogs and admired the discipline that Gavin had instilled in them, she had not come here primarily to see them. After a minute, she rose to her feet and moved toward the house, the shepherds gamboling at her sides.
With the fluid springy step of a double amputee whose knee-down prosthetics ended in bladelike feet that allowed her to be a tough competitor in a 10K run, Jessica came through the front door and onto the veranda. Jet-black hair. Cherokee complexion. Blessed with beauty that came from the headwaters of her gene pool, she was as always a striking figure.
She’d lost her legs nine years earlier, when she’d been twenty-three, serving in Afghanistan. She’d been an Army noncombatant, but roadside IEDs didn’t distinguish between armed troops and support services. Although she’d lost limbs in that godforsaken country, she found Gavin there—a combatant who had seen much hot action but had come through untouched. They had been married for eight years.
Jane bounded up the steps before Jess could spring down them, and they hugged fiercely there on the veranda as around them the dogs whidded this way and that, whacking the wicker chairs with their tails, whimpering with pleasure at this unexpected reunion.
“Why didn’t you call?” Jess asked.
“Tell you later.”
She had three spare disposable phones, all activated. Each had been purchased from a different retailer, in three widely separated towns. She had not yet used any of them, there was no way her pursuers could have a trace on them, but events in San Diego had so spooked her that she didn’t want to risk calling this special place, this haven in a world that was otherwise increasingly a jungle of hazard and chaos.
“You look good,” Jess said.
“You lie like a rug, girlfriend.”
“He talks about you all the time.”
“I think about him all the time.”
“God, it’s good to see you.”