Instead of a lawn, a thick layer of smooth plum-size stones surrounds the house, as though giant mythical birds, perhaps a flock of Arabian rocs, have stopped here during the night to cough up the contents of their craws. Here and there, specimen cacti rise from the hard landscaping, shadowy shapes like malformed dwarves out of some Tolkien dream.
Following Dubose along a walkway of concrete stepping squares, listening to overhead bats using their sharp little teeth to crunch the crisp bodies of flying-beetle entrées that are being served after the moth appetizers, Jergen feels ever more acutely that he is a stranger in a strange land.
One of the three agents assigned to the conversion of the people in this residence opens the door. “Ahmed al-Adel,” he says, for he doesn’t expect them to remember his name from the orientation meeting fifteen hours earlier. He is a tall, handsome thirtysomething son of Iraqi immigrants.
Like the others who have invaded this street with Medexpress containers filled with control mechanisms, Ahmed is clean-shaven, neatly barbered, dressed in a black suit and a white shirt and a black tie. He and the other agents came here a little more than four hours previously, at nine o’clock in the evening; but regardless of the hour, it is always easier to elicit quick, complete cooperation from people when FBI agents are dressed and carry themselves as the movies have long portrayed them.
Operating to a degree incognito, Jergen and Dubose avoid the men-in-black cliché. Jergen favors a desert-spa look: a sport coat by Ring Jacket, gray with a white micro-dot pattern; slim-cut white slacks by the same designer; gray-suede, seven-eye lace-up ankle-fit trainers by Axel Arigato. In a spirit of fun, he wears a GraffStar Eclipse ultra-slim lightweight titanium watch with an entirely black face, black hands, and black check marks instead of numbers.
Dubose, reliably a sartorial embarrassment, looks as though he just came in from plowing a cornfield and didn’t completely change clothes, but threw on a couple glitzy items to add some flash for a quick trip to Vegas.
“They’re in the kitchen,” says Ahmed.
In these houses reside eleven people who have received nanoweb control mechanisms; they will soon be enlisted in the valley-wide search for the boy and his mother. The residents of these four homes were selected for injection because none is a child below the age of sixteen. Others have been injected before these people, and still others will be injected in the remaining hours of the night.
Their controls are the latest generation and include a feature known as “the whispering room.” While activating the whispering-room feature, they can communicate via microwave transmission, brain to brain, as the celebrated Elon Musk, founder of Tesla automobiles, has predicted will one day be possible and desirable. This makes them highly effective searchers, fifty or more individuals sharing a hive mind, quickly communicating their positions, situations, and discoveries to one another.
This residence is supposed to house two people, Robert and Minette Butterworth, both in their mid-thirties—he a history teacher, she an English teacher. They are seated at the kitchen table, zip-tied to their chairs, mouths covered with duct tape, though not because there is anyone to be alerted by their cries.
Prior to the injections and during the four hours after, while the nanoconstructs foil the blood-brain barrier and assemble within their skulls, those who have been chosen to become adjusted people tend to be tedious. They demand their constitutional rights, ask insistent questions, and in general make an annoyance of themselves. Duct tape is the best cure for their tiresome prattle.
Robert and Minette are pale, wide-eyed with sustained fright, soon to be under the control of their nanowebs, but they are not the only residents of the house. A younger woman resembling Minette is also duct-taped and sits at the table in a wheelchair.
The two agents working with Ahmed al-Adel are here as well. Malcolm Kingman is an imposing African American with the face and demeanor of a caring man of the cloth, but the direct and filleting stare of a judge at the Nuremberg trials. Zita Hernandez, a pretty woman of perhaps thirty, rounds out an admirably diverse crew.
Hernandez is of the most interest to Jergen, not just because of her beauty. She wears exquisitely tailored black slacks, a white buttoned-to-the-throat shirt by Michael Kors, a black blazer from Ralph Lauren. The only thing she needs help with is her shoes.
Jergen would like to dress her. After undressing her.
Lovely Zita indicates the pajama-clad woman in the wheelchair. “This is Glynis Gallworth, Minette’s sister. She’s visiting from Alexandria, Virginia, for a week. She was sleeping in a back bedroom. We didn’t know she was there till things were well along here in the kitchen.”
Jergen finds this bit of information perplexing. Alexandria is an upscale, sophisticated town. He is not able to imagine willingly leaving Alexandria to spend a week in a small house with unfortunate décor, on a dead-end dirt street in this desert wasteland.
Zita says, “Glynis is paraplegic ever since a spinal injury when she was a teenager. She works in the State Department in D.C. She’s too clueless about the situation to be … in the know,” by which she means to say, She’s not one of us.
Glynis appears to be as terrified as her sister and the sister’s husband.
“We injected them,” says Malcolm Kingman, “but we’re not sure if we should inject her.”
“This is Arcadian 101,” Dubose says.
Kingman and Ahmed al-Adel exchange a look, and then both look at Zita.
Dubose smiles at Glynis. “Ma’am, I’m sure you don’t know what your sister and brother-in-law got tangled in. This is an urgent matter of national security, involving a pending act of nuclear terrorism.”
The astonished Minette and Robert shake their heads and protest these outrageous charges through the duct tape.
Glynis appears both dubious and frightened, but also confused.
Dubose says, “We have an emergency FISA court order allowing a deposition to be performed with a truth serum,” as if even a FISA court could order such a thing. “Your name is not in that court order. My associates should have known you couldn’t be included in this procedure. But because the nation’s survival is at stake and this involves top-secret information, we can’t allow you to witness the questioning of your sister and her husband.”
With that, the big man steps behind the wheelchair and rolls Glynis out of the kitchen, into the living room, and back to the bedroom where she had been sleeping.
Carter Jergen smiles at Zita Hernandez, and she holds his gaze in what seems like an expression of erotic interest.
Both Ahmed al-Adel and Malcolm Kingman flinch and grimace when the gunshot echoes from the back of the house, which does not speak well of them.
Zita, however, remains impassive even through the second and third shots. Jergen likes her a lot.
7
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS and high in the windowed fire watch, Laurie Longrin was up far past her usual bedtime, but she wasn’t in the least sleepy. Fear affected her like a kind of caffeine, fear for herself and her sisters and her parents.
But there was something else besides fear. She stood in the grip of an exciting expectation, waiting for the firemen to roar into sight, not in a red pumper truck with its deluge gun, but in their many pickups and SUVs, the equivalent of an old-fashioned posse, come in high Lone Star style to chase out the evildoers and save the innocent.
What she felt was in fact more than expectation. Something like exhilaration. Her fear was all mixed up with this crazy wild thrill, a reckless confidence that butt was going to be kicked, the bad cast down, the good lifted up, the world made right again.
She wasn’t a Pollyanna. She knew good didn’t always triumph, not at first try, anyway. There were a megamillion ways things could go wrong. Bad people were often more clever than good people because they spent their entire rotten lives scheming and conniving.