“Plenty of time,” Dubose disagrees. “The new control mechanism takes just four hours to assemble in the brain.”
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department maintains a substation in Borrego Springs. Immediately following the shooting of Gavin and Jessica Washington, the watch captain, a man named Foursquare, and some deputies proceeded as if they had authority to investigate. They backed off when Jergen was able to put Captain Foursquare on the phone with the deputy director of the NSA, a former United States senator who was known as a friend of law enforcement and who assured Foursquare that this was a matter of national security, though the name Jane Hawk was not mentioned.
Jergen perseveres. “Trying to overpower and inject deputies who’re well armed even off duty, who’re suspicious by their very nature and trained to resist aggression … we couldn’t have taken them all by surprise. It would’ve gotten messy.”
Mistaking his hardball tactics for brilliant strategy, Dubose says, “Yes, all right, a few maybe you can’t take by surprise and inject. Big deal. So you blow their brains out. Then you pin the deaths on Jane after she’s either captured or worm food.”
“And what if one of the deputies you intend to kill instead kills you?”
Looking away from the road, regarding Jergen as he might a slow-witted child, the big man says, “Like that could happen.”
“Anyway,” Jergen says, “by the time Jane is here, we’ll have that little zombie army you want, all of them locals who know the area, a lot more of them than all the deputies at the substation.”
Crews have been busy for twenty-four hours, identifying easy targets for injection, approaching them as FBI agents, converting them into adjusted people in the privacy of their homes. More than forty thus far.
Dubose is dismissive. “They’re civilians, not in uniform; they can’t openly carry guns like the deputies can.”
“Not every problem can be settled with a gun,” Jergen says.
Dubose favors him with that pitying look again, but before the hulk can reply, Jergen’s smartphone rings.
It’s from the guy manning the communications hub at the Desert Flora Study Group. Something has gone wrong at one of the houses in which injections are being administered.
5
LAURIE LONGRIN IN THE FIRE-WATCH ROOM, like A bird in a glass cage, unable to fly away, unable to go down below where all the nasty cats were eager to find her and tear off her wings …
When Mr. Linwood Haney answered the phone, having surely been awakened from sleep, Laurie said, “It’s me, Laurie, Laurie Longrin, at Longrin Stables, terrible things are happening here, Mr. Haney.” By the time she had said that much, she became a motormouth, words spinning from her at high speed: “They say FBI, it’s a lie, they’re rotten, they want Mr. and Mrs. Hawk, where they’ve gone, Mom and Dad tied up, this crazy woman hit me, she has a gun, all of them guns, six and six more coming, they want to kill us or worse, I’m in the fire watch, they’ll find me soon, I don’t trust the sheriff, I only trust you.”
Mr. Haney calmed her, though she surprised herself when she interrupted him more than once with additional details of what had happened at Longrin Stables. She couldn’t quite control herself. She was dismayed at the sharp fear in her voice, because she prided herself on being less of a child than some others her age, on being of sturdy Texas rancher stock.
However, it was only when she started talking to Mr. Haney that she truly realized the full extent of the danger to herself, to her parents and sisters. Oh, she’d known they were in deep shit. She wasn’t stupid. But somehow she’d not let herself think clearly about the worst that might happen, maybe because thinking about it would have paralyzed her. When she told Mr. Haney that these vicious, rotten people wanted to kill them or worse, the possibility of such a horror became more real when she heard herself put it into words, so real that her fear flashed into fright, hampering her breathing and raising a pain in her chest, as if some demonic angler had cast a line and snared her heart with one of those fishing lures that had multiple wicked hooks.
She took hope when Mr. Haney believed her. He said, “Something like this happened at Ancel and Clare’s place Sunday night. Stay calm, Laurie, stay where you are. We’re coming. Everything will be okay.”
Staring at the phone, at the green light burning beside the words FIRE WATCH, Laurie said, “Hurry. Please, please hurry.” And she hung up.
6
FEWER THAN FOUR THOUSAND RESIDENTS live in Borrego Springs itself, a desert town that Carter Jergen finds offensive to his every sense and sensibility. The place is too warm, too dry, too dusty, the backwater of all backwaters—with only a pittance of water. Many of the palm trees appear stressed, and the only real grass of which he’s aware is in Christmas Circle, a park in the center of town. There are acres and acres of concrete and blacktop and more acres of nearly barren desert that reach here and there into the town’s precincts, as if the Anza-Borrego Desert is aware of this human encroachment and remains determined to reclaim everything sooner than later. He has seen neither a restaurant serving four-star French cuisine nor one of any kind in which he would want to eat, nor a motel with even half the number of stars in its rating that he would require before staying there, nor a clothing store carrying the finest designer brands. The so-called art gallery contains not one item that resembles any school of art he studied during his university days or since.
Inexplicably, the people who live here seem happy. They are friendly to an annoying extent, saying to him, a total stranger, “Lovely weather!” and “Good morning!” and “Have a nice day!”
He’s been in the valley for almost thirty-six hours. If he had to live here the rest of his life, he’d go into the garage and close it up tight and start the car engine and wait to die of carbon-monoxide poisoning; indeed, he’d get down on the garage floor and suck eagerly on the tailpipe to speed up the process.
When this revolution is won, he will spend his time only in the most cosmopolitan of cities and resorts.
Maybe the citizens who live in the desiccated heart of Borrego Springs are happy because they feel greatly superior to those benighted souls who live down-valley in small clusters of residences—or even in isolated single homes—served by crudely paved or dirt roads.
Jergen and Dubose have been summoned to one of these curious neighborhoods that consists of four single-story stucco houses on spacious grassless lots along an unpaved street off Borrego Springs Road. An unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee blocks the entrance, manned by two Arcadians in jackets emblazoned with the letters FBI.
Because of an orientation meeting that they conducted Monday morning, Jergen and Dubose are known to every operative who has descended on the valley—whether they are FBI, NSA, Homeland, or carry multiple credentials. The VelociRaptor is waved through the roadblock, beyond which four more black Jeep Grand Cherokees are parked along the dead-end street, one in front of each house.
Dubose stops at the address to which they have been summoned, and they step out of the monster Ford.
On an ordinary night, this neighborhood, lacking streetlamps, would lie deep in darkness past 2:00 A.M. Now windows glow in the houses, providing enough ambient light, along with the declining moon, to see large moths capering for the delectation of bats that, with a thrum of membranous wings, swoop low and soar and swoop again, dining in flight.