From a distance, the growl of the engine rose to a roar, and a third man, alike to the first two, came out of the open front door, onto the porch. He looked uphill toward the main house, and then at Harrow, and then at Silverman, his comportment machinelike.
Abruptly Silverman intuited that each man’s mask was less veil than gloss, that behind the mask was not a different man but instead an emptiness. He knew this because he saw himself in them, himself as he had been a few times during this strange day, as he had been at the Beverly Hills hotel when he had awakened in confusion, as he had been when he’d found the second gun—the .45 Kimber Raptor II—in his nightstand drawer, as he had been when he’d experienced nausea and disorientation while he stood in front of the hotel to wait for John Harrow, as he had been when an interior voice renamed Jane the Mother of Lies, as he had been when the jet lifted off from Van Nuys Airport and gravity seemed to be deserting him. At times today, he had felt lost, and these security guards looked as he had felt, lost beneath their gloss of dutiful concern and competence. He thought of the puncture mark on the vein in the crook of his arm, which he’d dismissed as an insect bite, of Randolph Kohl speaking with the voice of Booth Hendrickson, of how he twice forgot to call Rishona, whose heart and his were synchronized. A flash of insight told him that, impossibly but certainly, these three guards were hollow men, shape without form, shade without color, and that to some degree he was becoming like them. If he could be hollowed out, if he could become someone he had never been before, then anything could happen. In fact the impossible would happen here, now and going forward. In recognition of whatever horror was unfolding, he backed away from the ranch gate and from the guards.
Ramos said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nathan?” John Harrow said.
As Silverman backed between the sedan and the gate, the engine roar from the vicinity of the main house terminated in a colossal crash, the unmistakable ringing as huge sheets of glass dissolved.
As lightning pulsed behind the clouds like the lamps of some enormous vessel passing in the shroud, John Harrow stepped onto the low gate and swung over it and shouted at the nearest of Shenneck’s security guards to admit the cars. But as hard thunder chased the lightning, as Harrow sprinted up the driveway toward the main house, the two men on the porch drew pistols from under their jackets and shot him in the back.
22
* * *
JANE WITH DOUGAL, perhaps fleeing the past, perhaps hoping to redeem it, venturing into a future darker than the darkest days of history, heard the knocking of her heart and ignored it, tasted the acid of fear and swallowed it.
Across a brittleness of broken wall glass and a hard clatter of splintered chair wood, harried at gunpoint to the stairs and to the second floor, Bertold Shenneck progressed weak-limbed and shuddering, as might a dung beetle stripped of its exoskeleton. Having set out to change the world and rule it through mass murder and slavery, he had seemed to act with courage when, at enormous personal risk, he broke laws and trashed two thousand years of philosophical consensus as to the equal value of each human life. But what might have looked like courage proved to be a deficit of common sense and an excess of self-importance, too strong a faith in his genius and superiority—not courage at all, but the rash actions of an ordinary narcissist incapable of imagining that he might fail. The invasion of his house and an up-close view of a gun muzzle had been all that was required to reduce him from king lion to a quivering peasant mouse.
On the other hand, treading on glass and climbing stairs, not in the least concerned about being shot in the back, Inga Shenneck seemed unfazed by this turn of events, her faith in herself only enhanced by any setback. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, what hell you’re bringing down on yourselves. If you take this one step farther, you’re going to end up in a deep room, in a world of pain, taken apart piece by piece. This is stupid, this is idiocy, you will pay for this, you’ll beg for death. History will roll over pieces of shit like you. We are the future, we will rewrite history, and you will never have existed, useless human debris, both of you.”
On the second floor, Dougal dragged a hallway sideboard away from the wall, blocked the head of the stairs with it, and took up a position behind the furniture. The rayshaws should already have been there.
At gunpoint, Jane hurried the Shennecks onward to Bertold’s home office. There, she instructed him to sit at his desk and fire up his computer.
She pointed to a side chair and said to Inga, “Take it to the corner over there. Sit in it, face the wall, your back to the room.”
The woman’s mouth twisted in a sneer of dismissal and purest hatred that belied the impression of angelic radiance encouraged by her all-white ensemble. She gripped the chair by its head rail, her intent as evident as if she had announced it.
“You have to swing the chair to throw it,” Jane warned, “so you’ll be in Hell before it leaves your hands.”
“When you’re dead,” Inga promised, “I’ll take a long piss on your corpse.”
Jane gave her only amused contempt. “What a potty mouth. Get in the corner, Bad Barbie.”
As Inga settled in the chair, her back to the room, thunder rocked the sky once more, and peppered through the rolling sound of a storm impending, there also came a barrage of gunfire rattling in the distance. The rayshaws shooting at—whom?
23
* * *
HARROW FALLING FORWARD into a blood spray from the exit wounds in his chest, a colony of crows exploding from nearby trees with a raucous denunciation of those who would disturb their peace, black wings sculling the gray sky, Ramos and the nearest security guard drawing their weapons simultaneously, Ramos the quicker and better shot, putting a round in the mannequin face of the emotionless assassin, surviving a death-reflex near miss in return.
With the first Bureau sedan now between him and the house, Silverman saw Harrow’s killers leap from the porch and head uphill toward the main residence, as two other guards appeared around the side of the Victorian, one of them with a shotgun, the other with an Uzi machine gun.
Silverman dropped to the ground, sheltering behind the car, just as the driver, recognizing his profound vulnerability, shifted the sedan into reverse, either forgetting about the vehicle behind him or assuming the other driver would also at once speed backward out of an untenable situation. Bumpers clashed, taillights and headlights shattered. Silverman lay flat on the ground behind the first sedan as the Uzi and the shotgun opened fire. Car windows dissolved. Sheet metal shrieked as bullets tore it. Fiberglass cracked. Tires popped. Men screamed in pain but only briefly.