This wasn’t a working ranch. It housed no animals; therefore, it had never been fenced. Combination heat-and-motion detectors were installed throughout the seventy acres, arrayed to sound the alarm only when an intruder was more than three feet tall and produced a body-heat signature suggesting a gross weight of a hundred pounds or more. This prevented false positives by coyotes and other creatures outside the intruder profile, though now and then deer triggered an alert that brought the heavily armed rayshaws to investigate.
Lying beside Jane on the crest, glassing the property below, Dougal said, “So the character in the novel was named Raymond Shaw.”
“In The Manchurian Candidate. Yeah. The book and the movie.”
“Haven’t read it, didn’t see it.”
“Shaw’s a prisoner of war in Korea. Brainwashed by communists, sent back to the U.S. to assassinate political figures. He doesn’t know what’s been done to him. When he’s activated, he kills—and forgets the killing.”
“So the control mechanism wires into one of these guys, strips away most memories, most of his personality, programs him to kill, and Shenneck calls him a rayshaw. What a twisted sonofabitch. He’s not just vicious and evil. He’s also an asshole.”
Remembering Overton’s defense of Shenneck for naming the ranch Gee Zee, Ground Zero, Jane said, “?‘He likes his little jokes.’ And according to Overton, that’s Shenneck’s favorite book and movie since he was fourteen. He didn’t identify with either the hero or with Raymond Shaw. But the brainwashers really inspired him.”
15
* * *
AFTER AN HOUR in the air, the Citation Excel descended through the overcast to the Napa County Airport runway.
Silverman enjoyed no sense of relief that he was on land again. Completing the task ahead was likely to leave him feeling as empty as the pale high-altitude sky through which they had come north.
As the trail grew hot and the quarry seemed within reach, he should have felt a simmering sense of gratification, a building excitement, but he did not. He needed to find Jane Hawk, and he would. But he wouldn’t take pleasure in arresting her. Considering that the charges against her would include murder, she might resist. Once, he would have thought it impossible that she would turn a gun on him, but now he believed she might do anything. He dreaded that she might create a situation in which he would have to use violence against her, would have to shoot her, this girl who, under other circumstances, he could have loved as if she were his own daughter.
As he deplaned and walked across the tarmac with Harrow and Ramos, toward the waiting car and driver from the Sacramento field office, a cold resolve came over Silverman, a resolution that at first surprised him and that he resisted. But by the time they were in the car and being driven to the motel where Overton’s phone had been found, he resigned himself to the necessity of answering Jane’s resistance with lethal force if it came to that. She had betrayed him, after all. She had betrayed the Bureau. She had betrayed her country. If, in the penultimate moment, she chose to commit suicide by cop, he would oblige her and not be troubled by remorse. She was no longer the person he had known. She had become a stranger, a danger to society, a threat to the innocent. If it fell to him to pull the trigger and put her down, he’d do it without hesitation. This was his job. And the job had never been easy.
16
* * *
IF THE PLANET MIGHT be alive, as some believed, and if Earth might be the mother of humanity, it was a mother with a heart of ice, for the ground was cold under Jane as she lay in the grass at the crest of the hill, its glacial soil leeching the warmth from her flesh and bones. The day lay mild upon the land, winter fading into spring, yet the slaty zinc-gray clouds chilled her spirits, so that the binocular image of Shenneck’s house shivered like a mirage as tremors passed through her.
“See anything?” Dougal asked.
“No.”
Before they launched an assault, they needed to be sure that Bertold and Inga Shenneck were in the house.
Nothing moved across those seventy acres except the grass and the trees as they were stirred by a faint breeze. For long minutes, the scene might have been laid past the end of civilization, when some of humanity’s structures remained, but not humanity.
Then…a figure beyond a wall of glass. At first without convincing substance, like a shadowy shade spooking through a house forsaken by the living. Then she passed closer to the windows, in what might have been a family room, a woman in white slacks, white blouse, tall and lithe, with the in-motion posture of a model on a fashion-show runway.
“First floor, on the left,” Jane said.
“I see her,” Dougal said. “Where’s he?”
The woman disappeared behind granite…and reappeared in the kitchen.
“If she’s there,” Jane said, “maybe we assume he is, too.”
“What if we go roaring down there, and he’s not. We’ll never get a second chance.”
“I have a burner phone. I know the number at the house. If he answers, I hang up and we go in fast.”
“If she answers?”
“Then I’m Leslie Granger again, assistant to Mr. Overton’s personal assistant, Connie, and I have a question for Mr. Shenneck.”
“Either way, if they’re suspicious, it could give them a one-minute warning,” Dougal worried.
17
* * *
THE MOTEL OFFICE FEATURED racks of pamphlets enticing Napa Valley tourists to numerous attractions, most of them wineries. It looked clean and smelled clean and was well lighted, a simple but cheerful space.
Tio Barrera, the general manager, was also the front-desk clerk this shift. The sight of FBI credentials furrowed his young brow and brought forth a visible pulse in his right temple.
He provided Silverman with the motel registry, which indicated that only one guest in the past twenty-four hours had paid cash for a room. Her name was Rachel Harrington. She supposedly lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She had provided an Indiana driver’s license for ID, and the night clerk had confirmed the license number as well as the address on it. She had taken two rooms.
“Two?” John Harrow said. “Someone was traveling with her?”
“Is she still in residence?” Silverman asked, though she had paid for only one night.
Barrera checked his key drawer. “No. I’ve got two keys here for each of those rooms.”
“Someone was traveling with her?” Harrow repeated.
Barrera didn’t know. Phil Olney, the clerk on the graveyard shift, lived nearby. The manager summoned him with a phone call.
Olney, a retired hospital orderly who was supplementing his pension with the motel job, arrived in less than five minutes. His fringe of white hair bristled around his head as if Barrera’s phone call had given him an electric shock.
When Silverman produced a photo of Jane with shorter dark hair, Olney said, “Yeah, that’s her. Lovely lady.”
“Why two rooms?” Silverman asked.
“For her husband and the kids.”
Harrow said, “You saw the husband, the kids?”
“No. They were in the car.”
Consulting the register, Silverman said, “A Ford Explorer.”
“That’s right.”
Silverman read aloud the license-plate number she had provided. Although it was no doubt as phony as her address in Fort Wayne, Special Agent Ramos made note of it in the pocket-size spiral-bound notebook he carried.
“You see the Explorer?” Harrow asked Phil Olney.
“No, sir. But she was a nice lady, she wouldn’t lie. You could hear her choke up a little when she talked about her golden.”
“Her what?”
“Her golden retriever. Scootie. He passed away not long ago.”
Silverman asked Barrera, “Have those rooms been cleaned?”
“Yes, of course. Hours ago.”
“Did the maid find a cell phone, a smartphone, in either room?”
Barrera looked surprised. “No. But it’s funny…another maid found an iPhone in the trash can at the diner next door.”
“Where is it?”
“The phone? It was broken.”
“But where is it, Mr. Barrera?”
“I think she still has it. The maid.”
18
* * *
SEEN THROUGH THE WIDE WINDOW above the sink, in radiant white arrayed, pale-blond hair piled up and pinned, Inga Shenneck looked too celestial for kitchen work. Even with the powerful magnification that the binoculars provided, Jane couldn’t tell what the woman was doing. Maybe washing vegetables or fruit.