“Uh-huh.”
“Smarter than me. They’ve identified like fifteen objections to proceeding with nanotech and refuted each one. Some critics think it’s not possible, a waste of resources. Others say it’s dangerous, like if the nano-machines start replicating and consume the entire biomass of the planet in a few weeks.”
She said, “The video by Shenneck, the one with the mice, talks about non-replicating nano-machines.”
“The smart people have convincing answers to their critics.”
Jane wondered, “Those fifteen objections…does one of them say there’s a tendency to evil in human beings? Do they explain how to guarantee such powerful technology won’t be used for evil?”
“No, it’s not one of the fifteen.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They seem to think the more intelligent people are, the less evil they do.”
“Uh-huh.”
For a while, the woods became less open, trees crowding closer to one another. The overcast robbed the day of sunshine, and trees crowning the fire road wove a gloom without benefit of shadows.
Deer roamed these foothills, and she slowed down in regard for them. If an ordinary vehicle impacted a buck or even a doe at high speed, it could be totaled, but the armored Gurkha would probably plow forward, straight over the animal, with no significant damage.
Concern for the Gurkha wasn’t why she reduced speed. There were already two people dead, even if they had been venomous reptiles in human form, and surely more deaths to come, perhaps including her own. She didn’t want to have to get out of the vehicle to administer a mercy shot to a crippled deer. She had the curious conviction that such a moment would undo her emotionally as nothing else could.
Dougal said, “Another mile or so, the woods start to give way to open land, rolling hills. A mile after that, you’ll turn west.”
She glanced at him. He looked older than he was and battered and haunted, yet tough and ready and serene. She sensed in him no fear, but instead a pleasant anticipation that caused a humorless half smile, a wolfish smile, to come and go across his face.
“You really have been waiting for something like this.”
He gave her that pellucid gray call-of-the-wild stare, and she imagined that in battle he’d be brutal without being cruel, dealing swift death without hesitation, for he knew there was a profound difference between killing and murder.
“The free kitchen, after-school programs, keeping porn out of libraries—all that needs done, but it’s dealing with the aftermath, not with the causes. I’m in the mood to deal with a cause.”
13
* * *
UPON LEARNING FROM Maurice Moomaw that Overton’s stolen phone was on the grounds of a motel in Napa, Silverman had called to hire a private jet from a charter company operating out of Van Nuys Airport, which he’d used in another matter a year earlier. He might face questions about the expenditure, especially because there would be a surcharge for the last-minute booking, but if he nailed a rogue agent, cost would cease to be an issue.
Using a window-hook suction-cup beacon on the unmarked sedan and sounding the siren all but continuously, John Harrow had driven Silverman and Ramos from Beverly Hills to Van Nuys, via Santa Monica Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway, approximately twenty-four miles through gruesome Sunday afternoon traffic, in thirty-one minutes, in spite of encountering a backup related to a three-vehicle accident.
The Citation Excel, a midsize eight-seat jet, was readied just as the three arrived, but though the co-pilot was aboard, they had to wait fourteen minutes for an on-call pilot to get there.
They were in the air just under an hour after receiving word from the NSA regarding the location of Overton’s phone.
Already, four agents out of the FBI’s Sacramento field office would be closing in on the motel to put it under surveillance.
Silverman’s job involved more management meetings and boring bureaucratic politics than street time. He was usually energized and buoyed by being out of the office and in the thick of things.
As the suburban sprawl of the San Fernando Valley fell away beneath them, however, his anxiety grew worse. Although every action he had taken thus far was what he ought to do, what he needed to do, he felt…felt as if he were not fully in control of himself, as if he must be sliding ever faster down a slippery slope. In Texas the previous day, the vastness spawned in him a sense that he might float into the all-encompassing sky. That feeling returned as the jet gained altitude. He seemed to be getting lighter by the minute. He waited for gravity to let go of him, for the jet to pierce Earth’s atmosphere and drift toward eternity, its engines no longer functioning in the vacuum of space.
“Are you all right?” John Harrow asked from his seat across the aisle.
“What? Oh. Yes. I’m fine. I just realized I forgot to call my wife this morning. And last night.”
“Better spend the flight time composing an apology,” Harrow advised. “And don’t go home without something expensive.”
“Oh, Rishona’s not like that. She’s as understanding as the day is long.”
“You’re a lucky man, Nathan.”
“As I tell myself every night and first thing every morning,” Silverman said, though his words rang hollow to his ear. He had begun to feel like a roulette player who never got the color right, whether he bet the red or the black.
14
* * *
THE FIRE ROAD ENDED, and the woods opened out to meadowed hills, as Dougal had promised. In four-wheel drive, the Gurkha tamed the territory, and a mile farther, they came to a stream, which had also been visible on the Google Earth photos. Much of the year it might be dry, but at the moment water flowed over a course of time-smoothed stones. Here, Jane turned west and drove until Dougal told her to stop halfway up a long slope.
Together, they got out of the Gurkha and ascended on foot through a meadow carpeted with a variety of grasses and decorated with formations of chaparral lily in early bloom. Rabbits dining on sweet grass hopped away from them or sat up on their hindquarters to watch them pass. Cicadas sang, and orange butterflies with narrow dark margins on their wings took flight.
Near the top, Jane and Dougal proceeded in a crouch rather than walk erect, and then crawled onto the crest. A hundred yards below them lay the main house at Gee Zee Ranch, large and low-slung, a sweeping ultramodern structure of glass and steel, with dark-gray granite support walls polished in some places, textured in others.
Half concealed by wild grass and made small by distance, Jane and Dougal each had a pair of binoculars with nonreflective lenses that wouldn’t betray them. She surveyed the house, which she’d seen before only as roofs and extended decks on the Google Earth photos.
A long blacktop driveway led southwest from the main house to the distant county road. At the end of the private drive stood the gatehouse, the original residence before the Shennecks had bought the land: a two-story Victorian with minimal decorative millwork.
According to Overton, six rayshaws lived in the gatehouse. They did the cleaning and maintenance on the entire property, but their primary function was security. They were men who, like the girls at Aspasia, had been reduced to a lower level of consciousness, their sense of self greatly diminished, unfailingly obedient to their masters, Bertold Shenneck and his wife. Programmed.