“In case you haven’t thought it through, it’s us or them. And it’s damn well not going to be me. One rogue bitch Bureau agent and her bumpkin in-laws can’t get the better of us. We’re an ass-kicking head-busting machine, never been anything like us.”
Stepping behind Rupert, Gottfrey considers the laptop screen. An analytic program is assessing and enhancing an image taken from orbit. Changes occur with such speed that he can’t understand what is before him. “Find anything? Where maybe they went on horseback?”
“I back-doored our satellites—government, commercial—couldn’t get shit on this part of Texas after sunset yesterday.”
“What about China?”
China is all about weaponizing space and orbital surveillance, so NSA has seeded a rootkit in their military’s computer network. A hacker like Rupert can dive in and float through the Chinese system at such a low level they don’t know anybody’s swimming there.
“I finally found some relevant Chicom video,” Rupert confirms.
Although it is as dark as Satan’s colon on those plains at night, the Chinese are even more interested in what America does in the dark than in the day. They fear the U.S. has mobile missile platforms that are shifted around at night. The Chicoms have highly sensitive look-down capability in infrared, and Rupert is working with a segment of streamed video that he cloned from their archives.
“In that meadowland, after a cool day when the ground didn’t soak up heat, there’s not much background infrared to filter out.”
“But there’s wildlife,” Gottfrey says.
“Most too small to matter, except deer. And deer travel in small families, usually more than two. It’s largely federal land not licensed for grazing, so we don’t have to sort out a lot of cattle.”
Pointing to the constantly melting and solidifying image on the screen, Gottfrey says, “What am I going to see when this clarifies?”
“Horses are big—fifteen or sixteen hundred pounds for Clare Hawk’s mare, two thousand for Ancel’s stallion. They put out strong heat signatures, especially carrying riders and exerting themselves. I’ve processed this once, just now giving it a final cleanup.”
When a scene resolves and freezes, it isn’t like the raw image captured by satellite. It’s been analyzed and enhanced—translated—to make sense to the human eye. The straight-down angle on the meadowland is rendered in shades of gray, faint whorling-feathering patterns that represent the effect of a fitful breeze in the grass. Here and there, faint reddish hazes represent ground-source heat, and scattered small hot-red points might be the issue of wildlife.
The most prominent features in the image are two ruby-red heat signatures brighter and larger than the others.
As Rupert works the keyboard, the static image evolves into a video stream. The red signifiers move through the gray featherings toward a bisecting band without pattern near which are clustered reddish geometric shapes representing six or eight buildings.
“By the time the Chicom satellite passed over here, the Hawks had already gone almost twenty miles from their ranch.”
“How do you know those aren’t a couple deer?”
“A female deer tends to follow a male, behind and a little off to one side. And deer won’t travel as directly as this. They wander. These are horses under the guidance of riders.”
“But we can’t know this is Clare and Ancel Hawk.”
“The satellite captured them at two-ten A.M. There’s not likely to be a pair of other riders out at that hour.”
“What’re those buildings?”
“Another ranch. The band of gray without pattern is the state route that passes through Worstead before it gets to this place.”
When the video ends, Egon Gottfrey says, “That’s all you have?”
“Satellite’s moving damn fast. You don’t get a feature-length film of anything.”
“What if they didn’t stop at that other ranch? They might have passed it by, crossed the road, and gone somewhere else.”
Rupert turns to the second laptop and calls up a file. “Just finished putting this together before you knocked.”
The first photo, captured from Google Street View, shows a gated entrance to a property and a sign that reads LONGRIN STABLES.
Rupert clicks away the first photo and splits the screen for two Texas DMV images of driver’s licenses, one for Chase Longrin, one for Alexis Longrin. They appear to be in their early thirties, good-looking in spite of the poor quality of DMV photography.
“Husband and wife,” Rupert says. “We recently became suspicious of them. Maybe they’re a conduit for messages from Jane to her in-laws. Nick Hawk and Chase Longrin were best friends in high school.”
Gottfrey considers the two faces. Chase still looks like a high-school jock. Alexis is a pretty woman.
It’s noon. Almost ten hours since the two riders on horseback—if they were riders and horses—had been captured by the satellite.
Gottfrey says, “Let’s go have a chat with the Longrins.”
18
THE WOMAN IN RESEDA, known as Judy White but also as Lois Jones, neither of which was her real name, claimed to be a Syrian refugee, though her accent sounded sometimes like Eastern European Slavic, at other times flat-out Russian. She didn’t answer her phone in any traditional manner. “You have wrong number, go away.”
From experience, Jane knew neither Judy nor Lois would hang up.
“We’ve done business before.”
“I not in business. Read palms. Tell fortunes. My gift. Is life mission, not business.”
“Enrique introduced us.”
“You have wrong number, go away.”
“When I saw you a week or so ago, the last thing you said to me was, ‘Go. Go where you go. You want to die, so go die.’ ”
“Was nothing personal. Just opinion. Observation. My gift.”
“You’re going to get two photos by email.” Jane explained what she needed. “I want to stop by and get everything in three hours.”
“Want, want, want. Everybody want. Is impossible, three hours.”
“I’ll pay triple the usual.”
“Don’t die on way here, nobody to pay us.”
“I’ll do my best to get there alive.”
“So you say.” Judy and Lois terminated the call.
19
THIS GUY SAID HE KNEW A GUY who bought cars from Enrique de Soto, reworked wheels to outrun anything a cop might jack around in. This guy who knew a guy, he swaggered like some TV-wrestling star.
Enrique’s product started out stolen and went for a makeover in Nogales, Mexico, where its identifiers were removed and the GPS was stripped out. The vehicle was either given a new engine compatible to the Batmobile or otherwise supercharged. Anything you purchased from Enrique came with a valid California DMV registration or with one from a DMV of your choice in any Canadian province.
This guy who knew a guy also knew what sweet prices Enrique charged for his merchandise, and he was dumb enough to think that Enrique kept a bank’s worth of cash on the premises.
Ricky de Soto worked out of several weathered barns on a former horse ranch near Nogales, Arizona, directly across the border from Nogales, Mexico. The front barn held no vehicles, but was stocked with junk furniture and other items to provide Ricky with cover as an antiques dealer.
So that morning, this guy who knew a guy came into Ricky’s office without an appointment, smelling of some pussy-boy cologne. Obviously a bodybuilder. Shaved and waxed bullet head. Tattoo of a snake around his throat. Wearing a loose black raincoat in a warm rainless morning. He was accompanied by a nervous dude who resembled Mick Jagger but even skinnier, with the bad teeth of a methhead.
They evidently didn’t think they looked like what they were. The one with the tattoo mentioned a good customer of Enrique’s and started talking cars, a lot of shit picked up from bad movies. The methhead thought he was casual, easing around the office, pretending to admire the cheap vases and the mantel clocks that passed for collectibles, but he was moving away from his buddy and into a backup shooting position.
Bullet Head’s raincoat didn’t hang right, because there was no weight on the left side to balance the concealed sawed-off shotgun in a sling under the right-side panel of fabric.