He now knows the meaning of disquiet as never before. He has long taken pride in being above all fear, being the bearer of fear who brings it to others. Being a learned man, even although self-taught, he can define disquiet: the mildest state of fear, a general uneasiness threaded with doubt. Knowing the definition and being gripped by disquiet are, however, different things, for in fact those threads of doubt are more like wires vibrating in his veins.
There are some in the revolution who embrace a disturbing explanation for why Jane Hawk is so elusive and so successful at bringing down everyone she targets. They think it’s not just her Bureau training and her natural talents that make her a singular threat. They say she is also empowered by insanity, a special kind of mad rage because of her husband’s murder and the threat to her child. Some serial killers carve their way through a long list of victims, active for years before being apprehended, because their madness is strangely coupled with reason rather than being divorced from it, and they have as well a heightened sense of intuition, so that they not only think outside the box, but also outside the box that the first box came in.
Ivan has thought this Insane Jane explanation is fanciful at best, but in truth ridiculous. He has secretly scorned those who find the idea compelling.
He’s no longer sure what to think of her, though at the moment no theory exists that he would scorn.
There is no way to spot her in this shadowed valley where spreading fire dances and, in its dancing, throws off a thousand phantom figures of shadow, light, and smoke. Its many voices—some sibilant, some full of croak and crackle—provide cover for any sounds she makes.
His injured hand throbs, stiff and all but useless. The thin haze of smoke makes his eyes itch and water. Although he is standing still, he finds himself breathing as fast as if he were running.
The Range Rover is not at this moment threatened by the blaze, but suddenly he is sure that her intention is to disable it, so he can’t drive out of the woods. She means to strand him and then stalk him through the bewildering, shifting shapes of fire and shadow.
He is a man of reason, self-taught but highly learned, a man who lives by facts and numbers and sharp calculations, with a seldom exercised imagination, with no taste for fantasy in literature or films. He is likewise proudly free of all superstition. Brains and brute strength are all he’s ever needed. Yet a previously unknown sensation crawls his spine, prickles his nerves, and in spite of the growing heat in the glen, a coldness arises within his chest.
Furious that some primitive belief in the uncanny is embedded in him and waiting for the right circumstances to conjure it, Ivan is determined to repress it and assert himself as a man of reason, fearless action, and unstoppable force.
There are two threats to the Range Rover—the spreading fire and the woman who set the fire. If he must kill her, rather than capture her, in order to drive the vehicle out of the glen before the fire consumes it, then he will.
And when he presents Jane Hawk’s bloody, broken body to his smug superiors, maybe he’ll shoot them, too, if they don’t promote him as he has long deserved.
Pistol in his right hand, arm straight out in front of him, he strides down the shadowed slope, as fearless as a terminator robot from the future, turning his head left and right, scanning the woods for a target, periodically glancing back, moving fast because she would expect him to come slowly if he came at all.
32
SUCH WAS THE CLEARANCE under the Range Rover that Jane had to lie with her head turned to the side, one cheek flat to the earth.
He might assume that she had taken up a position on the level bottom of the glen, behind one tree or another, where shadows hadn’t been faded by firelight. Or he might think she’d gotten into the Rover, intending to ambush him as he reached to open the driver’s door.
She didn’t believe he would give any credit to the possibility that she was lying concealed under the vehicle.
For one thing, because of his size, he could never squirm beneath the SUV; and so he’d assume that the space wouldn’t accommodate her, either. In chaotic moments, a hunter of people had a strong tendency to calculate the options available to his target based on his own limitations if he’d been the hunted one.
Furthermore, it seemed reckless of her to commit herself to such a confining space. Given her reputation and her success taking down people at the top of the conspiracy, he wouldn’t expect her to be so imprudent.
What seemed like a rash act to a man like him, however, was simple necessity to a mother whose child remained a couple hundred miles away, in peril and arguably the second-most-wanted fugitive in America.
If she’d meant to kill the man, she would have done this a different way. But there were questions for which she urgently needed answers.
With bright appetite, the second fire grazed across the south slope, hungry but not yet ravenous. Unless a stronger breeze sprang up, the flames weren’t likely to reach the Rover before Jane’s quarry appeared.
Most of the smoke rose through the trees, drawn toward cooler air, but a thin haze drifted under the Rover. Although the growing conflagration had many voices, the cover it would give her when she moved wasn’t sufficient to mask a cough. She breathed into the crook of her elbow, the sleeve of her sport coat against her nose, peering over her forearm at the floor of the glen where perhaps the big man would appear.
She cursed him silently, willed him to arrive, commanded his attendance as if she had the power over him that he would have over the “adjusted people” who had been injected with nanomechanisms, prayed for his deliverance into her hands. Suddenly there he was, visible to her only from the ankles down, evidently committed to boldness, moving fast, heading directly for the Range Rover.
Then he did something she had not expected.
33
LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES since the first fire flared, but in that brief time, this transformation from Thoreau to Poe, from a tranquil sylvan retreat into a Halloween-night scene, the previously noble trees now grotesque black shapes backdropped by veins of fire that bleed out in a steadily greater flood …
Ivan Petro has nothing to gain by caution. The glen is a stage, and the bitch controls it as if she’s both author and director. She has set the scene, designed the visuals, put the Rover in the center of the proscenium arch, and she’s given him only one entrance to the play—down the path he’s taken and straight to the driver’s door. If she hasn’t used these distractions to flee, if she’s watching, she sees him approach and chooses to let him get closer to the vehicle.
Every ancient, moss-mottled tree trunk offers an assassin cover, and Ivan worries that the bitch might even have climbed into one of these long-enduring oaks to lie upon a sturdy limb and stare down at him through a filigree of leaves.
He has been transformed no less than has the glen. He can smell his own sour sweat, and his stomach feels as if a knot has been tied in it. For the first time in maybe eighteen years, since he repaid his father’s violence with some of his own and freed himself from the hell that is family, he suffers a surge of acid reflux so strong that a bitter taste arises in the back of his mouth.
If the bitch is hiding in the Rover, she isn’t in the cargo area, because even lying flat in that space, she’d be only an inch or two below the windows, too easily seen. She isn’t in the front seat, either, because there would be too many obstacles in her way—steering wheel, pedals, console—nowhere to get low except in the footwell that serves the passenger seat, where she would be too visible in spite of the darkness gathered in the vehicle.
So if she’s in there, she must be on the floor behind the front passenger seat, with her back pressed to the door, her feet braced against the transmission hump, her gun in a two-hand grip, waiting for him to appear, fire-lit, in one of the side windows.