Silverman kept thinking about Randolph Kohl’s phone call, after which he had officially labeled Jane a rogue and worse. He had told John Harrow that a warrant for her arrest would be issued by a judge at the request of Homeland Security, related to matters of national security. But when he tried to recall what else Kohl told him, his memory, previously a palace of brightly lighted chambers, seemed to have collapsed into a small and shadowy apartment.
Because of his murky memory and an unusual free-floating anxiety, Silverman thought that something must be wrong with him. Each time he began to doubt himself, however, he was propelled forward by a surge of self-confidence so powerful that it seemed chemically induced. These sharp swings in mood also disturbed him.
It was Ramos who realized that no cell phone had yet been found. Given the nature of William Overton’s professional and personal lives, the attorney would have been tethered to his phone almost as intimately as an unborn baby to its mother.
The initial areas of interest to investigators had been the closet where the dead man lay, the bath where the victim had been restrained for a time, and the bedroom. All drawers had been carefully opened, contents inspected visually but left undisturbed, lest evidence be compromised before the CSI unit arrived. No phone.
“If he entered the house through the connecting door to the garage,” Ramos said, “he might have left the phone in the kitchen.”
“Or forgot it in the car,” Harrow suggested.
Leaving Hubbert in the master suite, Silverman accompanied Harrow and Ramos to the ground floor, where a search for Overton’s phone proved fruitless.
The three ended up on the back patio, overlooking the spa and the immense pool, checking the chairs and tables, in case Overton had spent a little time out there when he’d come home. No phone.
“She took it,” Harrow guessed. “There was something on it she wanted.”
“If she’s had it since Friday night,” Silverman said, “she got what she needed and ditched the phone by now.”
“Maybe not,” Ramos said. “Maybe she figured nobody would find Overton sooner than Monday, so she had time.”
“We can hope,” Harrow agreed. “And the case file we’ve been building on Branwick includes the names and phone numbers of his clients, including Overton. If Homeland Security’s seeking a warrant for her arrest, maybe with some help we can get a current location on Overton’s phone. If she’s still got it, we’ll get her.”
Earlier, they had found the security-camera recorder tucked away in a garage cabinet. Jane had removed the disc and with it the evidence of her presence in the house. Silverman expected her to have been no less careful with the dead man’s phone, but it was worth an interagency request for urgent cooperation in the matter.
10
* * *
HAVING CHECKED OUT of the motel before coming to Valley Air, Jane now left her suitcases and the bag of autopsy reports with Ronnie Fuentes. She also left the tote containing sixty thousand dollars. Where they were going, they could not be encumbered, and the money would be a particular distraction.
Dougal entrusted his duffel bag to Fuentes, after taking from it a pistol-grip short-barrel pump-action twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun plus two boxes of shells. He put the weapon and ammunition in the back of the Gurkha.
As she drove away from Valley Air, Jane said, “Ronnie’s dad, Quito—he served under you in Special Forces?”
“No. I served under him. He was my lieutenant for a while.”
“And you saved his life.”
“Forget about all that. None of it matters.”
“Well, but you did.”
“Don’t hose me with hero,” he grumbled. “Quito saved my life twice before that. I still owe him one.”
11
* * *
SILVERMAN MADE the phone call to the National Security Agency while walking beside Overton’s hundred-foot-long swimming pool. The wind had scattered scarlet bougainvillea petals on the lizard-skin-gray water, where his distorted reflection ghosted his every step.
Non-military organizations dealing with terrorism and national security—the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security, and the FBI—had long been jealous of their turf and cautious of too much cooperation with one another lest they cede some of their authority.
The horrific terrorist attacks in Europe and South America the previous year, combined with four hundred deaths in Seattle, led to a greater willingness of various agencies to work with one another.
As section chief of the Critical Incident Response Group within the FBI, Silverman phoned his counterpart in the National Security Agency, Maurice Moomaw, to request an urgent determination of the location of William Overton’s smartphone, for which he was able to provide the number.
“No problem,” Moomaw said. “In payment, you need only transfer to me your best Human Resources person and sixty million bucks.”
Pretending to be amused by bureaucratic humor, Silverman said, “We’re phasing out humans from the FBI, and anyway I only have three dollars left in my budget for the year.”
“Then I’ll settle for undying gratitude,” Moomaw said. “Back to you soon, Nate.”
At the end of the swimming pool, Silverman stopped and looked toward the house. Harrow and Ramos sat on patio chairs. In spite of the overcast, Harrow wore sunglasses. Ramos smoked a cigarette.
Something about the scene struck Silverman as deeply sinister, though he could not explain why. His inexplicable anxiety, unrelated to Jane, intensified. The skin prickled on the nape of his neck.
Maurice Moomaw would at the moment be in contact with someone at the Utah Data Center, built by the National Security Agency and completed in 2014, a facility with more than a million square feet under roof. Among other things, the Data Center was tasked with snatching from the air every telephone call and text message, as well as other digital transmissions, and storing them for metadata analysis. The NSA did not listen to the calls and read the text messages, but had the capacity to scan the exabytes of data for key words likely to indicate terrorist activity and to analyze signals of foreign origin to deduce the intentions of the nation’s enemies.
Like every car with a GPS, every smartphone contained a locater that issued a unique identifier, which could be satellite-tracked as easily as the phone could send and receive calls, whether it was on or off. Even if Jane had taken what she wanted from Overton’s phone and had thrown it away, there would be some value in knowing where she had been when she disposed of it.
Eleven minutes after Maurice Moomaw disconnected, he called. “The phone is on the grounds of a motel on the outskirts of Napa, California.” He gave Silverman the precise address.
12
* * *
TOWARD SHENNECK’S RANCH. The madding crowd of Los Angeles far behind, the elegant rusticness of Napa swiftly receding, Jane felt as though she were also driving out of reality—or out of reality as she’d known it—into a fantasy, into a kingdom where the acolytes of darkness ruled, unspeakable spells were cast, and the living dead served their living masters.
The two-lane county road rose through the foothills, with the fabled valley of vineyards on the left. To the right were open woods of live oaks and cork oaks and plums underlaid with golden sedge.
As they approached a single-lane dirt fire road angling off the blacktop, Dougal said, “Turn left here.”
“You’re sure?”
He rattled the sheaf of satellite photos in his lap. “I’ve got these memorized. That’s the road, all right.”
She turned onto the narrow lane. The deep tread of the Gurkha’s tires clawed up pebbles and rattled them against the undercarriage.
“It’s called the Singularity,” Dougal said.
“What is?”
“The point where human and computer intelligences will merge with the help of nanotechnology, when humans and machines combine in the next evolutionary step. There’ve been a lot of books about it.”
“Singularity. Sounds sweet.”
“They say it’ll be Utopia. They say human intelligence assisted by machine intelligence will make us a thousand times smarter. They say with nano-machines living by the thousands inside us, constantly cleaning the plaque out of our arteries and monitoring organ health and repairing damage, we’ll live for centuries, maybe forever.”
“Who are they?”
“A lot of very smart people.”