Laurie was pretty sure they would search the house for her but that the search wouldn’t extend to the attic. They would expect that she had fled, perhaps to mount a horse or to run out to the state highway in hope of encountering a motorist who might help.
Whatever these people were, they weren’t real FBI. Real FBI agents didn’t want to use brain implants to make slaves out of people, and they didn’t tear up a kid’s book collection, and they didn’t promise to make you over into Little Miss Lickspittle. These FBI imposters wouldn’t want the county sheriff’s department showing up to check out a report of armed thugs holding hostages. Maybe they would just skedaddle.
As Laurie reached for the phone, she was struck by the thought that perhaps these intruders were FBI after all—FBI gone bad like in the movies, wicked and corrupt. If they had real ID and could prove to the sheriff who they were, then maybe the sheriff would just go away.
Or what if …
If some FBI agents could be so evil, maybe the county sheriff and his deputies couldn’t be trusted, either. Maybe they would take her call and listen with concern and promise to come right away with sirens blaring … but would instead phone the hideous Dern beast or Chris Sexfiend and say, The little bitch is in the lookout at the top of the house. Then the FBI bad hats would come running up here and inject her, and she would have to kiss the Dern monster’s ass every time she was ordered to kiss it.
Laurie stood in the dark room, gazing out at the dark plain, and all that darkness seemed to be seeping into her through her eyes and ears and nose. Although rain had fallen this season and the grass was green, she wished for fire and wind and walls of flame to scare away these hateful invaders.
Then she realized who she could trust. Firemen.
The county had several well-equipped fire stations here and there, and a network of volunteer firemen and firewomen who had undergone training. Her dad was one of them. The firemen were all good people, looking out for one another. She knew many of them, because they got together on Memorial Day and Labor Day for a picnic and games, and again for an evening celebration at a rented hall in Worstead each December.
The chief of the volunteers was Mr. Linwood Haney. His wife, Corrine, was a firewoman. They had a daughter—Bonnie Jean, better known as Beejay—who was Laurie’s age. Beejay, who liked horses and motorbikes, wanted to be a Marine sniper when she grew up, and the Haneys lived only three miles away, which was just about next door, so it was inevitable, like destiny or something, that she and Laurie were friends. Mr. and Mrs. Haney would for sure believe her, and they would come with other firemen and firewomen.
Until she picked up the handset, Laurie forgot that doing so would cause a green indicator light to appear on the intercom panel beside the label marked FIRE WATCH. In fact, the same green indicator had at that instant lit on every phone in the house and the stables, just to the right of the dark buttons labeled MASTER BED and MASTER BATH.
Maybe none of these intruders had previously noticed the words FIRE WATCH on the phone boards. But if one of the creeps happened to be looking at a phone now, he’d wonder where the fire watch was and who might be using a phone at that location.
She quickly returned the handset to its cradle. The green light winked off.
For a long moment, she stood shaking, trying to think what else she could do.
Nothing. There was nothing to be done but call the Haneys, wake them, and persuade them to marshal the volunteer firemen. Be brief but persuasive. Brief enough so that maybe none of the bad-hat FBI agents would notice the FIRE WATCH light, but convincing enough that Mr. Haney wouldn’t think she was pranking him and wouldn’t call back to talk to her parents, thereby alerting the Dern beast and her perverted pals.
Laurie couldn’t stop shaking.
She didn’t like being a scaredy-cat. She wasn’t a scaredy-cat. Just prudent. Mother said prudence was one of the greater virtues.
Horseshit. This wasn’t prudence. This was gutless fear.
What would that cute Ethan Stackpool think of her if he could see her now?
She picked up the handset. Green light. She put the handset down. She picked it up. Green light. She almost put it down again, but then she entered the Haneys’ number.
4
THEY CRUISE in the jacked-up velociraptor, lords of the night, the engine grumbling low, like the voice of some pagan animal god that, in simmering wrath, has stepped out of eternity and into time to hand down hard judgments.
Although he knows the question won’t be adequately answered, from his shotgun position Jergen says, “What are we looking for?”
“Indications, signs, manifestations, clues,” Dubose replies.
“And how will we know them when we see them?”
“I’m not sure how you will know them, my friend, but I’ll see them as stains on the fabric of normalcy.”
So, as sometimes he does, the hulk is going to pretend to the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes. The five hours till dawn might seem like a hundred before the sun rises at last.
County Highway S3 and Borrego Springs Road are two of the four principal entrances to the valley. Three miles south of the junction of those roads, Dubose slows as he passes a truck bearing the power company’s name, which stands just off the pavement along Highway S3, as though loaded with materials and parked in anticipation of some project that will be started in the morning when a crew returns.
In fact, the truck is the property of the NSA and contains a bank of lithium batteries that will power its camera and transmitter for forty-eight hours. The camera is a license-plate scanner that reads the tags on passing vehicles that have turned off California State Highway 78 and come north toward Borrego Springs. The image of every plate will be received in real time at the Desert Flora Study Group tent, where agents keep open back doors to California’s and neighboring states’ DMVs, ready quickly to identify to whom each vehicle is registered.
A similar truck is parked along Borrego Springs Road, a half mile north of Highway 78. At two strategic points just inside the valley, along County Highway S22, which passes east-west through the town of Borrego Springs, other vehicles are performing the same function under different disguises.
Every car, SUV, van, truck, motor home, and bus entering the valley is scrutinized. Any smallest reason for suspicion triggers an investigation of the people in the suspect vehicle.
If Jane Hawk uses one of several unpaved tracks to enter the valley or if she comes off-road altogether in an all-wheel-drive vehicle, men positioned at key points throughout that rough terrain will surely see her. They will scope her out, report her, and relay the tracking of her from one spotter to another, until she can be intercepted and arrested when she arrives at a paved highway, if not before.
They don’t believe she will get here before noon tomorrow. She will not rush in pell-mell. She’ll take time to think it through, devise a plan.
Occupying the driver’s seat as if it is his birthright, Radley Dubose picks at the scab that hasn’t healed over an injustice that frustrates him. “These desk-jockey chickenshits we take orders from, do they have the balls to do what’s necessary to take this country and make it ours? They should’ve let us inject every sheriff’s deputy, use them to augment our forces. Then we could lock down the town and the entire valley the moment we think she’s here, make it a freakin’ concentration camp and grind our way through it, door to door, till we’ve found the bitch and the kid.”
Having long ago taken it upon himself to be the voice of reason in moments when the West Virginia hillbilly wants to do surgery with a chain saw instead of a scalpel, Jergen responds in a low and even tone of voice. “There wasn’t time to inject so many.”