There is no desert-flora study group. Trespassers will, however, be prosecuted, though prosecution might be the least that will be done to them.
Beyond the sign is a tent forty feet on a side and ten feet high, with seven or eight people busy therein. The tent contains a communications hub through which a task force of eighty agents—already in the valley—is being organized, instructed, and tracked in the search for young Travis Hawk and his mother. Four computer workstations, manned around the clock, enable field operatives to call in the names of locals whom they determine suspicious, license-plate numbers, and other inquiries that can then be expeditiously researched through the numerous law-enforcement and government-intelligence-agency data troves to which Arcadians have access. A freezer full of pizzas and sandwiches, two microwave ovens, and a refrigerator containing bottled water and sodas provide minimum amenities, though most agents in the search party will get their meals from fast-food outlets in Borrego Springs.
Behind the tent are three large trucks. One contains tanks of propane and the generator that powers this temporary installation; on its roof, a satellite dish is canted toward the stars. The second truck provides six spacious portable toilets with sinks and running water. The third is fitted out as a dormitory offering beds for ten, though most of the agents will sleep in their vehicles as the need for rest overcomes them.
The most reasonable projection of the task-force commander and his advisers is that the boy will be found and his mother captured or killed within the next twenty-four hours.
Carter Jergen stands just outside the open zippered-flap door of the tent, in the outfall of light, staring across the highway at more pale wasteland and then dark mountains rising like a wall that make him feel as if he’s in an ancient crater where a frightful mass impacted millennia ago. When he looks at the sky, the stars and moon seem menacing, as though the universe is a mechanism with a million-year cycle that, in its current repetition, is shortly to arrive at the fateful moment when an asteroid slams into this same ground, instantly pulverizing him so that no scrap of flesh or bit of bone will remain to prove he ever existed.
Of course it’s not an incoming asteroid he fears. Irrationally, it’s a human being, a mere hundred-twenty-five-pound woman with the looks of a supermodel.
She has proved so difficult to kill that it seems as though, while still an infant, she must have been dipped in the water of immortality, like the Trojan War hero Achilles, except that even the entire foot by which she’d been held had been submerged, leaving her without a vulnerable Achilles’ heel.
After the shootout in the market, where they killed Gavin and Jessica Washington on Sunday afternoon, Carter Jergen and Radley Dubose, acting as agents of the National Security Agency but in fact serving the Techno Arcadian agenda, had called in backup to assist in the search for Travis Hawk and to prepare for what seems to be an inevitable attempt by his mother to get to her son first and spirit him out of the area to a new safe haven.
Jergen wishes they had taken the two guardians of the boy by surprise, so they could either have tortured them or injected them with control mechanisms to learn the child’s whereabouts. If they have the boy, they’ll have Jane. Better yet … kill him and thereby break her spirit beyond recovery.
Homeland has run a psychological profile of Jane Hawk. They predict a 90 percent chance that, if they catch and kill the boy, she will be so shattered by her failure to protect him, she’ll kill herself, sparing them from having to face off against her.
Jergen might take more solace from the conclusions of that report if Homeland’s profiles of potential foreign and domestic terrorists had not usually been woefully poor predictors of those individuals’ true intentions, behavior, and prospects.
The outfall of light in which Jergen stands now abruptly diminishes to such an extent that he can be pretty sure Radley Dubose has followed him out of the tent. Dubose, the pride of Crap County, West Virginia, had been accepted into Princeton, perhaps by a chronically intoxicated dean of admissions, and had graduated no doubt by delivering, in person, a threat to disembowel the president of the university if denied a diploma. He stands about six feet five and weighs around 230 pounds, and Jergen thinks it’s a sure bet that Dubose’s DNA traces back to 40,000 B.C., to an early Cro-Magnon generation and an ancestor who was the first hired thug in service to the first petty dictator in human history.
Although he fills a doorway with his physical bulk and can paralyze a rabid wolf with his glower, Dubose moves with the grace of a dancer and perfect stealth. Only the occlusion of light from within the tent is a clue to his presence. Jergen can’t even hear his partner breathing.
Still staring at the sky, Jergen says, “I know the valley isn’t a crater, but it feels like one. Do you ever wonder if something big and fast is coming out of all those stars, some asteroid that’ll make us as extinct as the dinosaurs?”
Dubose says, “The only asteroid coming down right now is me, and the only shit I’m going to make extinct is that tight-ass Hawk bitch and the little brat that popped out of her twat five years ago.”
Jergen sighs. “Princeton certainly imparts to its graduates a flair for colorful expression.”
“What is it with your fixation on where we went to school? You’re thirty-seven. I’m thirty-five. Princeton was just a stupid thing I had to get through to go where I wanted. Do you have some kind of weird sentimental attachment to Harvard?”
As Dubose looms at his side, Jergen says, “Generations of my family’s men have graduated from Harvard. It’s a matter of family pride, achievement, tradition.”
“There it is again, that freaky Boston Brahmin way of looking at the world. Going to classes, playing lacrosse, pledging a fraternity—none of that involves risk. And the only reward is the status you have in the eyes of the ever-fewer number of people who think Harvard is special. That’s not an achievement.”
“I suppose you’ll tell me what is.”
“Generations of my family have distilled whiskey, grown pot, sold capsules of speed and ecstasy, and never got caught. Now there you have a truly awesome tradition and achievement.”
“Selling drugs to children might be a tradition, but it’s not an achievement.”
“My old man and uncle never sold younger than middle school. A fourteen-year-old isn’t a child. Hell, that’s the age of consent.”
“It isn’t the age of consent, not even in the darkest hollers of West Virginia.”
“It used to be,” Dubose says.
“Yeah, and if you go back a century or two, most places didn’t even bother having an age of consent.”
Dubose puts an arm around Jergen’s shoulders in a gesture of unwelcome camaraderie. “Those were the days, huh? Too bad we don’t have a time machine.” He pats Jergen’s shoulder. “We’ve had four hours of sleep, some terrific pizza, and enough caffeine to make a sloth hyperactive. Let’s get on the hunt.”
Like the fearsome, rough beast in Yeats’s poem that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, Dubose moves toward a row of vehicles parked in darkness on the south side of the tent.
Jergen follows. “It wasn’t terrific pizza. It sucked.”
“Because you had that pizza for pussies, nothing on the cheese but black olives, mushrooms, some kind of fairy grass.”
“It was cilantro.”
“If you’d had the five-meat pizza, you’d feel fortified.”