These days, perhaps such impressions were illusions. Maybe no place could long sustain against whatever new theory and collective madness was championed by the lords of the electronic and social media that saturated life. As their highest principle, those shapers of the future believed that the past was in all ways unspeakably primitive, that all change was for the better.
A block back from Palm Canyon Drive, she found a modest motel charging immodest prices, even on a weekday in April when the in-season rates slowly began to phase toward the off. The afternoon temperature was eighty-four degrees. A month from now, it might be a hundred and ten, and nearly as hot at midnight as at noon. The clerk took her cash, xeroxed her driver’s license, gave her a key card.
The luggage she carried from the Explorer to Room 17 included a titanium-alloy attaché case containing $210,000, about half of what she had taken from a creep named Simon Yegg three days earlier.
All the higher-echelon Arcadians squirreled away large sums of cash, getaway money that, in a crisis, would see them through to new lives under different names in distant countries. In spite of their arrogant confidence that they could establish Utopia, they couldn’t rid themselves of a tumor of doubt that prickled in their brains.
Flanking a small table were a pair of skirted armchairs. Jane lifted part of one skirt and slid the attaché case under the chair.
She hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign and engaged the deadbolt.
She parted the draperies enough to see the Explorer and watched for ten minutes, but no one showed an unusual interest in the SUV.
For a while, she sat on the edge of the bed, holding the burner phone that Travis had called last night. She pressed it to her chest, as if it were some magical object that would compel her boy to pick up his phone down there in Borrego Valley, as if the mere fact of holding their phones at the same time would conjoin their hearts and minds so that she would feel him close and know that he was safe.
She dared not call him. Her enemies, who were legion, had surely by now established continual surveillance of Borrego Valley by aircraft equipped to fish from the air those carrier waves that were reserved for cellphones. The latest technology even allowed them to focus on transmissions from disposable phones within a fifty-mile radius. An analytical scanning program, customized for this operation, would search the transmissions for key words like mom and love and dad and sweetheart and Travis.
As she’d warned her boy when he called the previous night, it was now too dangerous to use even disposable phones.
Reluctantly, she returned the phone to one of her suitcases.
45
ABOVE THE FLATNESS of the city of Kelleen, the sky appears likewise flat as it shades toward sapphire prior to twilight, and not only flat but also heavy, as if it is a massive descending slab that might crush everything on the earth under it.
Arriving less than five minutes after Rupert and Vince, but woefully late, Egon Gottfrey parks on the north side of the street. When he steps out of the Rhino GX, he feels oppressed under that too-solid-looking sky.
The historic district of Killeen, Texas, dating to the 1880s, features one-and two-story buildings with common walls, so it appears as if many enterprises occupy one long construct. The squat structures are mostly brick, painted brick, and stone. Substantial iron railings separate the sidewalks from the street. It’s as if the locals are aware the sky is descending with tremendous weight and therefore build low and solid as a defense against calamity.
The meterless parking is vertical to the sidewalk, and the Longrins’ white Mercury Mountaineer is angled nose to the curb in front of a Realtor’s office, across the street from Egon’s Rhino GX.
For a city of more than 140,000, there is little traffic on East C Street at this hour, perhaps because some businesses closed at five o’clock—a loan company, law offices—and because others are evangelical operations like Friends of Jesus Apostolic Ministries and the Upper Room Deliverance Center. Some storefronts with heavily tinted windows are unidentified, maybe occupied or maybe not.
Gottfrey interprets the light traffic and the lack of business signage as just more evidence of the Unknown Playwright’s periodic laziness when it comes to sketching in the details of a scene.
There are also a karaoke bar and a Mexican restaurant with bar, however, so things might be livelier after night has fully fallen.
As if the Unknown Playwright is aware of Gottfrey’s criticism and wishes to tweak him, the crosswalk at the end of the block is a swath of highly detailed brick in an intricate diagonal basket-weave pattern that only a master mason could have executed so precisely.
Eight or nine pedestrians are afoot, half in Army uniforms, no doubt stationed at Fort Hood, which is adjacent to Killeen and nearly surrounds it. On his journey to the Mountaineer, where Rupert and Vince wait, Gottfrey passes three soldiers, each of whom greets him—“Howdy” and “How’re y’all?” and “Evenin’, sir.” He takes this as further tweaking, and he replies, “Yeah, yeah” and “Right back at ya” and “Yada-yada.”
“Vehicle’s unlocked,” Rupert reports to Gottfrey. “We’ve combed through it. Nothing. Except the key was left under the front seat.”
“We think that means they’re not coming back for it,” Vince adds. “Abandoned it. Just walked away. Maybe hiding in Killeen or maybe got some other wheels somehow. Seems like a dead end.”
“There’s no such thing as a dead end,” Gottfrey says.
However, he has noticed there are no traffic cams in this area and no evident security cameras over entrances to these businesses. This fact, more than the historic buildings, makes him feel as though he has been thrown back in time to the Wild West when, to keep tabs on the population, authorities were limited to just their own eyes.
A tall, white-haired, distinguished-looking man is watching them through the glass door of the nearby real-estate agency.
Because Gottfrey is highly attuned to the rhythms of the role he is expected to play, he recognizes that this man is an important walk-on character who might have information that will swing the pursuit of Ancel and Clare in a new and more fruitful direction.
“Wait here,” he tells Rupert and Vince.
When Gottfrey approaches the door of the real-estate agency, it opens, and the white-haired man steps outside. “Unless I’ve lost my nose for righteousness, you gentlemen have the look of the law.”
“FBI,” says Gottfrey, and presents that ID.
The man insists on a handshake. “Jim Lee Cassidy. I’m honored, Agent Gottfrey.” He nods at the Mountaineer. “That handsome vehicle was driven by a down-home church-clean shoulders-back couple who couldn’t have been nicer if’n you held a gun to their heads. But bein’ a suspicious old fart, I felt somethin’ wasn’t right about ’em.”
“They wanted to rent a property or something?”
“No, sir. As they get out of that Mountaineer, it just happens I’m goin’ from my car to my office, carryin’ a valise not latched right. It comes open, spillin’ an embarrassment of private papers on the sidewalk here. A mischievous breeze scatters stuff every which a way, so those two go scramblin’ after everythin’ as if’n the wind is takin’ their own admission papers to Heaven. They hadn’t helped, I would’ve lost some things of considerable consequence.”
From an inner coat pocket, Gottfrey produces a photograph of Ancel and Clare.
“That’s the very pair,” Jim Lee Cassidy confirms.
The Hawks have striven to keep as low a profile as possible, and the Arcadians have used their influence with the media to keep Jane’s in-laws out of the story, hoping to foster in them the false idea that they are not being intensely observed.
He says, “What was it about them that made you suspicious?”
“Well, sir, once the papers was gathered up, me and him fell into conversation, just two minutes or three, but the woman kept tuggin’ his sleeve and remindin’ him they had reservations. Plus it seemed every passin’ vehicle worried her, the way she looked after it. And when a police car cruised by, it made ’em both jumpy.”