He had been with Gavin and Jessie for more than two months. If something happened to them, he was alone. Five years old and alone.
Her heart as loud as a cortege drum, but much faster than the meter of mourning, reverberating in blood and bone …
Travis was a little toughie, being strong like he knew his dad would have been, scared but self-controlled. Jane was able to get the situation from him. Gavin and Jessie had realized they were under surveillance, had somehow been connected to Jane. In their Land Rover, with Travis and their two German shepherds, they’d escaped from their house into the dark desert hills. They were pursued—“This crazy-big truck and like even a helicopter, Mom, a helicopter that could see us in the dark”—but they avoided capture. They drove to a bolt-hole, long ago approved by Jane, in the Borrego Valley, south of Borrego Springs. After settling in a small house on acreage owned by a man named Cornell Jasperson, Gavin shaved his head and Jessie changed her appearance with a wig and makeup, and they went into town to buy supplies. They meant to be back in two hours. Eight had now passed.
They must be dead. They would not have allowed themselves to be captured, and they would never have shirked their responsibility to look after Travis. Gavin and Jessie were ex-Army, two of the best and most reliable people Jane had ever known.
She’d loved them like a brother and sister before she’d left her child in their care, and she loved them yet more for their unfailing commitment to Travis. Even in these dark times of so much terror and death, when each day brought new threats and sorrows, new shocks to mind and heart, she had not become inured to loss. This one pierced her, a psychic bullet that would have dropped her into tears and numbing grief if her child had not been in such jeopardy.
She didn’t tell Travis they were dead. She could discern by the catch in his voice that he suspected as much, but there was nothing to be gained by confirming his fear. She needed to project calm and confidence, to give him reason for courage.
“Where are you, sweetheart? In the house where they left you?”
If he was still in the house where Gavin and Jessie had meant to hole up with him, he was more likely to be found sooner.
“No. Me and the dogs, we walked over to Cornell’s place like we were supposed to if there was trouble.”
Cornell lived off the grid. He was not likely to be linked to Gavin and Jessie soon. Travis might be safe there for two or three days, though not much longer. The word might was a gut punch.
“Honey, you’ll be safe with the dogs and Cornell until I can come for you. I will come for you, sweetie. Nothing can stop me.”
“I know. I know you will.”
“Are you all right with Cornell?”
“He’s kind of weird, but he’s nice.”
Cornell was a brilliant eccentric whose eccentricities were complicated by a mild form of autism.
“There’s no reason to be afraid of Cornell. You do what he tells you, sweetie, and I’ll come for you just as soon as I can.”
“Okay. I can’t wait, but I will.”
“We can’t talk even on burner phones again. It’s too dangerous now. But I’ll come for you.” She got to her feet and was steady this time. “Nobody ever loved anyone more than I love you, Travis.”
“Me, too. I miss you all the time a lot. Do you have the lady I gave you?”
The lady was a cameo, the face of a broken locket that he had found and that he thought important because, to his mind if not to hers, the profile carved in soapstone resembled Jane.
It was on the nightstand with other objects—switchblade, butane lighter, penlight, small canister of Sabre 5.0 pepper spray, four zip-ties each held in tight coils by a rubber band—the tools and simple weapons and instruments of restraint that she had cleaned out of the pockets of her sport coat before hanging it up. Plucking the cameo off the nightstand, she said, “It’s in my hand right now.”
“It’s good luck. It’s like everything is gonna be all right if you just always have the lady.”
“I know, baby. I have her. I’ll never lose her. Everything will be all right.”
5
BEFORE DINNER, EGON GOTTFREY RETURNS to his motel to see if the courier has arrived from the laboratory in Menlo Park, California.
Waiting for him at the front desk is a large white Styrofoam chest of the kind that might contain mail-order steaks or a dozen pints of gelato in exotic flavors.
This marionette theater in which he has a role is well managed, and the necessary props never fail to appear where they are needed.
He carries the insulated box to his room, where he uses his switchblade to slit the tape sealing the lid in place. Clouds of pale, cold vapor issue from perforated packets of dry ice that coddle a Medexpress container twice the size of a lunch box.
In a compartment without dry ice are hypodermic syringes, cannulas, and other items related to intravenous injections.
In the bathroom, Gottfrey places the Medexpress container on the counter beside the sink. The digital readout reports an interior temperature of thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. He swings back the lid and counts twelve insulated sleeves of quilted, silvery material about an inch in diameter and seven inches long, each containing a glass ampule of cloudy amber fluid.
Three ampules for each person residing at Hawk Ranch. The ranch manager, Juan Saba, and his wife, Marie. And Ancel and Clare Hawk.
Each set of three ampules contains a nanotech brain implant. A control mechanism. Hundreds of thousands of parts, maybe millions, each comprising just a few molecules. Inert until injected, warmed by the subject’s blood, they become brain-tropic.
The concept intrigues Gottfrey. Although he has not received such an implant, he considers himself to be a marionette controlled by unknown forces. And when he injects people with these mechanisms, to some extent he becomes their puppeteer, a marionette who controls marionettes of his own. His mind controls their minds.
The incredibly tiny nanoconstructs migrate through veins to the heart, then through arteries to the brain, where they penetrate the blood-brain barrier and pass through the walls of capillaries just as do vital substances that the brain needs. They enter the tissue of the brain and self-assemble into a complex weblike structure.
The injected people are programmed to be obedient. They are made to forget they have been injected. They don’t know they are enslaved. They become “adjusted people.” The control is so complete that they will commit suicide if told to do so.
Indeed, Clare and Ancel Hawk’s son, Nick, had been in a special class of adjusted people, those on the Hamlet list. The Arcadians have developed a computer model that identifies men and women who excel in their fields of endeavor and who possess certain traits that suggest they will become leaders with considerable influence in the culture; if those individuals hold positions on key issues that conflict with Arcadian philosophy and goals, they are injected and controlled. To doubly ensure they don’t influence others with their dangerous ideas and don’t pass their unique genomes on to a lot of children, they are instructed to kill themselves.
This control mechanism might terrify Gottfrey if he didn’t believe that the brain and the body it controls are both illusions, as is everything else in so-called reality. His disembodied mind is the only thing that exists. When nothing is real, there is nothing to fear. You need only surrender to the Unknown Playwright who crafts the narrative and go where the play takes you; it’s like being in a fascinating dream from which you never wake.
He closes the Medexpress container and returns with it to the bedroom, where he places it in the Styrofoam chest with the dry ice.
When he goes out for dinner, he leaves the lights on and hangs the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the doorknob.
6