Intimidated, the girl breaks eye contact. But then gathers her courage and says, “Heck, you’re just a walking, talking pile of horseshit, that’s all you are.” She meets her captor’s eyes again and smiles. “What kind of numbnuts thinks potatoes grow from seeds?”
Janis sometimes has a problem with temper. It’s not as though she needs counseling or therapy. Screw that. She’s not a chronic sorehead. She certainly doesn’t have a psychological condition. She is just a hard-charging achiever who sees how the world works and who knows how it should work and who gets damn impatient when she encounters people like this freckled smart-mouth brat who is all attitude, who’ll never be anything but sand in the gears.
There is no danger that Janis will beat Laurie Longrin to death the way Egon beat that drunken cowboy to death.
How beautiful Egon was in his cold, efficient rage, a ma?tre de ballet bringing the grace of dance to brutal violence.
Janis isn’t going to pull her pistol, isn’t going to shoot this kid in her smug, smirky face. There’s no danger of that whatsoever.
Her response to the mockery about the potato seeds is measured, exactly the degree of corporal punishment required to teach this insolent child some manners. She raises her arm and slaps Laurie’s face hard—there has to be some pain, after all, if a lesson is to be learned—and then backhands her with equal vigor.
The girl gasps in shock but doesn’t cry out.
Janis gets up and goes into the adjacent bathroom. For a while, she runs cold water over her stinging hand.
When she returns to the bedroom, the girl sits stone-faced. She doesn’t in any way acknowledge her captor’s presence. A thread of blood sews its way from the right corner of her mouth, down her chin, along her slender throat.
Janis doesn’t return to the chair that earlier she put near the girl, but she doesn’t take the chair back to the place from which she moved it, either. Let the little bitch dread the resumption of their chat. Let her wonder when the conversation will begin again, where it might lead, what consequences it might have.
Instead, Janis goes to the bookcases. She tears the print blocks out of the boards of the hardcovers and rips apart the paperbacks. It is most likely from books that this wayward child acquired her attitude. That was certainly the case with Francine, Janis’s childhood tormentor, who would have treated Cinderella far worse than Cindy’s hateful stepsisters had treated her.
52
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY has recently opened an office in a wing of the Killeen–Fort Hood Regional Airport.
Egon Gottfrey and his men possess Homeland Security ID as genuine as their FBI credentials. Before they leave the Killeen Police Department for the airport, Gottfrey calls the deputy director of Homeland and requests that he instruct the on-duty personnel at the airport office to welcome him and his men as VIPs.
The deputy director is an Arcadian.
This is another advantage of conducting a secret revolution from inside the existing government rather than mounting an armed rebellion from outside. The authorities you will one day exterminate or convert with nanomachine implants are pleased to assist you; there is no resistance. And they have ready for your use just about any expensive piece of equipment you might require.
When Gottfrey arrives, carrying the Medexpress cooler with the control mechanisms meant for Ancel and Clare, this Killeen outpost of Homeland has readied a twin-engine helicopter. Fully equipped for night flight. Nine-passenger capacity. The pilot is on-site to take them to Houston, where they will put down in the vicinity of the bus terminal before 10:00 P.M.
The Rhino GX and the Jeep Wrangler will be driven by Homeland agents stationed in Killeen, though they won’t reach Houston until midnight. They will deliver the vehicles to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, downtown, where Gottfrey, Baldwin, and Penn will spend the night.
The Rhino and the Jeep appear on the vehicle-inventory lists of Homeland, the FBI, and the NSA. But none of those organizations shares such data; so no question will be raised as to why Egon and his men, ostensibly Homeland agents, are driving FBI vehicles.
And so it is: A helo that can’t be proven to exist lifts off from Killeen, a city that can’t be proven to exist, carrying three men whose bodies are only concepts and whose minds, except in Gottfrey’s case, might also be nothing more than concepts, ferrying them to Houston, another city that can’t be proven to exist, through a night sky that had earlier seemed as solid as stone but that, of course, is no more verifiably real than anything else.
Because Gottfrey and his associates haven’t had dinner and won’t have time to eat in Houston, a selection of sandwiches from Subway is provided aboard the helo.
Although the sandwiches are no more real than anything else, they are tasty, aromatic, filling, vividly detailed in their appeal to all five senses. So real. This isn’t the first time something as ordinary as food has briefly shaken Egon’s belief system.
Sometimes when he is weary and tense and frustrated, radical philosophical nihilism is a most difficult faith by which to live.
He doesn’t doubt the truth of it, however, because he recalls how lost he was as a young man, how self-destructive and afraid, before taking the class in which he learned there is no objective basis for truth, that nothing can be proved either by science or math, or by religion. All is illusion.
If he were a better radical nihilist, he would be neither tense nor frustrated. He should just let himself be carried along by the script, enjoy the ride, go with the flow.
Like some huge nocturnal dragonfly, the helo passes over the Houston sprawl, descends into it, and puts down in an empty lot across the street from the bus station. The wind from the churning blades stirs up ghostly winged figures of dust that fly away into the lamplit streets. Gottfrey and his men wait until the blades cease whisking the air and the dust settles before they disembark and walk to the nearby terminal.
The head of vehicle maintenance is Louis Calloway. Off duty at this hour, he has returned from his home to walk them through what happened with the bus from Killeen when Lonnie John Bricker signed over possession of it and drove another coach to San Antonio.
What it boils down to is this:
The garage has a number of high-ceiling bays in which buses are parked between trips. Here the interiors are cleaned and a mechanic inspects the vehicle’s engine, drive train, and other systems, using a checklist of items to be confirmed. There are no walls between the bays. It’s a cavernous space, shadowy in places. If Ancel and Clare failed to disembark on arrival from Killeen, if they hid in the tiny lavatory, they might have gotten out of the bus once it arrived in one of these bays and might have entered another bus that had been serviced. They could have hidden in the second coach’s recently cleaned lavatory, waiting to be on the road before stepping out of the cramped lavatory to take seats for which they never purchased tickets.
Although this scenario is possible, there are problems with it, most of which even Vince Penn is able to identify. For one thing, no passengers are allowed here. Ancel and Clare would have needed to be as schooled and skilled as covert agents, as well as supernaturally lucky, to slip out of the Killeen bus and into another one without being seen by the workers in the garage.
Furthermore, they would have needed to exit the first coach quickly, before someone came to clean it, and within seconds board another bus on which service had been completed, there to hide in the lav. But how would they know which vehicles were serviced and which were not? And what would they do if the new vehicle in which they hid was fully booked and later proved to have no open seats when they emerged from its lavatory?
Perhaps they took the risk. If so, it has paid off. No driver in mid-trip has reported an excess of passengers.