As a student of history, he has long believed that a man who seeks to reach the heights of power is most likely to fulfill his ambitions if at his side is an equally ambitious and ruthless wife. No matter how brilliant the man, the mate who is twined with him in the pursuit of dominion brings to the enterprise a female insight and cunning that must not be undervalued.
And what a bonus it is that Inga, in addition to her unslakable thirst for ever more wealth and ever more power, is so exquisitely and entirely hot.
The drawback to such a wife, of course, is that she is intent on having her own pleasures and satisfactions, which requires of him both time and energy—and not least of all the sharing of the power that they have acquired. There are times when he thinks an Aspasia girl could be programmed to be tireless and ruthless in helping her husband to reach Olympus and yet remain sublimely submissive to him, so that he would not have to humor her about such fanciful concerns as that the rayshaws are not washing their hands often enough.
As he watches her begin to peel the potatoes, which for some reason is less erotic than watching her wash them, he hears a harsh noise and looks at the sky beyond the window. At first it sounds like one of the low-flying executive helicopters that ferry other émigrés from Silicon Valley to their getaway homes in this land of wine and roses.
The wall-mounted phone rings, rings. Bertold impatiently plucks the handset from its cradle. “This better not be phone sales.”
“She’s coming for you,” says Booth Hendrickson, their good friend in the Department of Justice.
Those words are at first mystifying, but they begin to take on meaning as Bertold realizes that the racket outside doesn’t have the air-chopping rhythm of a rotary wing.
“The Hawk bitch,” Booth elaborates. “She’s coming now.”
“What the hell is that?” Inga asks.
Bertold’s attention is drawn from sky to land, to movement on the long, sloped meadow behind the house. Racing toward them through wild mustard and grass and exploding flocks of butterflies is some damn thing that seems to be half SUV and half tank.
He drops the phone as Inga drops potato and peeler, for it seems as if the armored car might crash through window and wall, shoving the sink and the cabinets into them and crushing them into the center island. The Shennecks are strangers to fair combat, and for a crucial moment their reason is plucked from them by the claws of panic. He steps right as she steps left, knocking against each other, unbalancing each other, for it seems that whichever way they run, they will pitch into the impending destruction instead of escaping it. The weirdness and suddenness of the assault paralyze them, the hurtling mass less like a vehicle than like an instrument of divine wrath thrown out of the sky, its judgment inescapable.
An instant later, the machine veers away from the kitchen, jumps the few low steps between lawn and terrace, crashes through the view wall, quaking the entire house, breaking upon the family room in a glittering surf-spray of shattering glass, like some Leviathan of the deep beaching itself in sparkling foam, though it does not lie helpless. The armored behemoth might have collapsed the floor into the basement if there had been a basement, but the house was built upon a slab. Instead, it plows forward, shoving aside what furniture does not splinter apart under its hardened tires, turning toward the breakfast area and kitchen, and the open floor plan is nearly as accommodating as a carpool lane.
The house includes a safe room, with secret doors and walls of steel plate, with its own air and power supply, where Bertold and Inga could safely wait out a home invasion, but there are just two entrances, the first in the living room, the second in the master suite. They can reach neither as the massive vehicle roars into the breakfast area, scattering into splinters a pair of Palecek chairs, and halts, engine idling with a sound like the panting of a panther god out of some Congolese myth.
The front passenger door is thrown open, and out steps a tall man with a pistol-grip shotgun. He has a face for noir films, made hard by dark experience, and his gray eyes cut at the Shennecks, so that they hold fast to each other in a way that they have never done before.
But it is the woman stepping out of the driver’s door who for the first time in Bertold’s memory gives him cause to take seriously his mortality. For a moment, he thinks that she must be a girl from Aspasia, her intellect and personality restored by some failure of her control mechanism, for she turns on him a blue-eyed stare as bright with the memory of suffering as with the fire of vengeance. But then he recalls Booth’s words, which in the midst of chaos did not fully register—The Hawk bitch, she’s coming now—and he knows that before him stands the relentless force that has for two months evaded steadily growing legions of searchers, she whose husband might have had a post-military career in politics if the computer model had not identified him as a problematic individual, she who has successfully hidden her child from those same legions. She holds a pistol in a two-hand grip, arms straight out before her as she approaches him, and it seems that he will die here before the rayshaws can arrive from the gatehouse.
She says, “If you didn’t put me on your Hamlet list, you should have. Because you’re sure as hell on mine.”
21
* * *
UNDER A SKY DARK and swollen, two sedans raced east on the county road, into territory where neighbors were few and far between. They slid in hard turns onto the private drive and braked abruptly before a ranch-style gate that was fashioned from three-inch-diameter pipes. Silverman, Harrow, and Ramos got out of the first car, leaving their driver, a Sacramento agent, behind the wheel. In the second sedan were three more men out of the Sacramento field office.
Far back on the property and uphill, under thunderheads that seemed to be avalanching toward it, a large ultramodern house with cantilevered view decks overlooked the valley, as if it were a fantastic glass ship washed up there by a flood.
Near the gate stood a modest Victorian home.
Before Silverman could push the button on the call box, the front door of the nearer house opened, and two men stepped onto the porch. They were of a type: tall, solid, clean-shaven, their faces expressionless, their eyes as watchful as those of Dobermans trained to protect and defend, kin to the wrong kind of hired muscle that you sometimes saw around certain entertainment-world celebrities unhinged by their sudden wealth and fame.
One of the men came along the walk to the gate, while the other remained on the porch.
Silverman flashed his FBI badge. “We need to see Dr. Shenneck right away.”
“You’re not on the admissions list.”
“Who are you?” Harrow asked.
Instead of offering a name, the man said, “Security.”
The guard’s stare was direct, even bold, yet Silverman saw no discernible emotion in it, just as there was none in his face, not the suspicion that his job required, not the latent hostility that motivated some men to take a job that might now and then provide an excuse for violence.
“Call your boss,” Harrow said. “We need to see him right away, it’s a matter of life and death. His life and death.”
From somewhere beyond the main house rose the racket of a racing engine. Both the guard who had spoken to Silverman and the one on the porch looked toward the noise.
A thunderclap and its echoes masked the engine, but then the thunder faded and the growling of the unseen vehicle could be heard again.
In addition to their size and demeanor, some elusive quality about these guards riveted Silverman’s attention. Their formidable appearance and direct manner seemed like a mask, their status as security personnel more of a role than a truth.