He and Harrow listened for perhaps two minutes. The quiet was so unrelieved that if there were people inside the house, they must have been in cryogenic suspension.
The agent who had disappeared along the east side of the house reappeared through the iron gate. He crouched beside a hedge, all but invisible in his dark clothes.
A moment later Harrow’s phone vibrated. He listened, gave the order to fade back, and terminated the call. To Silverman, he said, “Through a window, he saw a dead body on the kitchen floor.”
Harrow stepped to the back of the van and gave the go order to the SWAT team to take the Branwick house and clear its rooms.
This was a day of revelations, each with greater import than the one before it, and the weight of them seemed to be compounding into a prophecy that Nathan Silverman didn’t want to believe. Even if Jane was in the jaws of a vise through no fault of her own, her son at risk, even though her motives might be pure, she was tangled in a very dark web. In desperation, people did things that the law could not forgive regardless of the circumstances. He liked her, he understood her, he trusted her…and yet his image of her had begun ever so slightly to fray around the edges.
17
* * *
JANE BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Gurkha RPV, racing north on I-5, the six-speed automatic transmission smooth, road noise less than she expected because of the insulating armor. Las Padres National Forest to her left, Angeles National Forest to her right, she piloted the Gurkha high into the Tehachapi Mountains, with only flyspeck towns immediately ahead—a couple thousand souls here, a few hundred there—otherwise a vast darkness under a shrouded sky in which the moon and stars were buried.
Her Ford Escape waited back in Malibu, parked in the actor’s garage, from which she would one day retrieve it if she lived.
Trahern in the passenger seat, seeming smaller than he did in the Ford. Looking less comical, more menacing, by association with this military-style vehicle. Looking in fact like a dangerous revolutionary bent on blowing up banks and stock exchanges. Although mumbling to himself from time to time, he invited no conversation.
They were a few miles from the Tejon Pass when Jane said, “So he takes your check and gives you the pink slip and doesn’t even want to know what you might do that could maybe link him to one kind of mess or another, screw up his reputation?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“That was a question.”
“To what point?”
“Why would he do that?”
“We go way back.”
“Well, that explains everything.”
“Good.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
He took a handkerchief from a pocket, hocked up phlegm, spat it in the hankie, and tucked it away.
She said, “I go back and forth about you.”
“Everybody does.”
“So why would he do that, no questions asked?”
“You won’t let this go, will you?”
“I need to understand you.”
“Nobody can understand anybody,” he groused. “In a nutshell, the man lied about his age to join the Army at sixteen. Served four years, three in Special Forces. We went through some shit together.”
“War?”
“It was like a war. They didn’t call it that.”
“What was the shit you went through together? Specifically.”
“You never heard this.”
“Never heard what?”
“He thinks I saved his life.”
“Why does he think that?”
“I killed a bunch of people who were trying to kill him and a few other spec ops guys.”
“How many are a bunch?”
“Twelve, maybe fourteen.”
“And you got the Distinguished Service Cross.”
“No. That was for another thing. Now will you just shut up for a while?”
“Shutting up,” she said.
They crossed the Tejon Pass at four thousand one hundred feet and began the descent into the San Joaquin Valley, thousands of square miles that had once been the most productive farmland in the world.
On both sides of the highway, boundless reaches of flat land darkled away to distant mountains that stood moon-abandoned and only half real, like faintly limned mystical peaks in a vision. Here and there in that immensity glimmered the lonely lights of isolated farmhouses, as well as twinkling clusters that marked small towns with names like Pumpkin Center and Dustin Acres and Buttonwillow.
Jane wondered if in this bucolic realm there might be people who lived with a sense of peace and belonging, untouched by the stresses and anxieties borne elsewhere in the modern world. And if there were such people…how numbered were their days?
18
* * *
IN SPITE OF the grievous face wound and the early effects of decomposition, the dead man on the floor was recognizably Robert Branwick, also known as Jimmy Radburn. In his wallet, teased out of his hip pocket without disturbing the position of the corpse, a driver’s license confirmed the visual ID.
The kitchen cabinets had been significantly damaged by shotgun blasts. Having ricocheted off hard surfaces, spent buckshot littered the floor.
“Branwick doesn’t have a weapon,” John Harrow said.
“Maybe he did and his killer took it,” Silverman suggested.
“Doesn’t feel that way.”
Silverman had to agree that it didn’t.
“If Branwick had a shotgun and was up against someone with a pistol, he’d still be alive, and there’d be a different stiff on the floor.”
Three bits of video ran through Silverman’s memory: this dead man when alive, carrying two briefcases through the park…the roller-skating woman taking the two bags from him…the skater and Jane fleeing the hotel garage after emptying the briefcases into a large trash bag.
Perhaps Harrow was remembering the same video when he said, “Shot point-blank in the face, no apparent weapon on him. If his hands test positive for gunpowder residue, I’ll concede he had a weapon. If they don’t test positive, he was essentially executed.”
“Not necessarily. But let’s wait for the lab report.”
The SWAT team had gone. Another agent leaned in from the hallway. “L.A. police and CSI van are five minutes out.”
When the agent retreated, Harrow said to Silverman, “Hawk’s husband killed himself.”
“That’s right.”
“She’s on leave.”
“She was.”
“But she’s not now? If she was working on something in my jurisdiction, why wasn’t I given a heads-up?”
“Cut me some slack, John. I’ll do whatever needs to be done tomorrow. There are pieces of this you don’t have, and I’m still trying to put them together.”
“What I do have is the whole Vinyl operation evaporated under my watch, and one stone-dead guy who was the heart of it.”
“I understand. But you’ve got the list of Vinyl’s clients you’ve been gathering for months. Now we can start moving against the worst of them.”
“Without Branwick to testify.”
“You’ll have some of the other rats to testify.”
“I’m just saying, there are consequences to delay.”
“There are consequences to delay,” Silverman agreed, “and there are consequences to hasty action, always consequences.”
He consulted his wristwatch, which read 11:05 P.M. because it was still counting by East Coast time. His eyes were grainy. He was running on fumes. Nothing more for him here. He needed to check in to his hotel, grab something to eat, and consider the events of the day to determine if, in retrospect, they had the same dark implications that they had seemed to have as he’d experienced them.
19
* * *
JANE WANTED TO DRIVE faster, but she feared being pulled over by the highway patrol. The armored vehicle was an eye-catcher that would tend to interest cops. Trahern—like some huge Bolshevik bomb-thrower displaced in time—did not remotely resemble a man who could pay nearly half a million for a set of wheels. If a patrolman asked them to step out of the car, he was likely to discover that they were packing concealed weapons. If Jane was taken into custody, she would have nothing to do but wait for her enemies to find her.