In addition, there is an Airbus H120 helicopter with pilot and copilot to provide aerial search and surveillance as needed.
Men are currently placing portable marker lights along both sides of the runway, one every ten feet. The markers are battery powered and can be turned on remotely when one of the de Havillands is coming in for a night landing, then switched off when the plane is safely down.
The proprietors of the air park must be pleased with the value of the contract they received, but they must also be dazzled—or at least surprised—by the size of this operation. Maybe they wonder why such “testing” couldn’t have been conducted on one of the many military bases situated in desert terrain.
Wise men and women, however, know what questions should not be asked. And these days, the words You don’t want to know are an ever more common American catchphrase.
Radley Dubose, who has been talking to the runway lighting crew, returns now to the VelociRaptor.
“They’ll be done in three hours. We’ll have an Otter in the air by seven in the morning.”
As though this desert possesses consciousness, knows how Jergen detests it, and therefore resolves to enflame his disgust at every opportunity, it now sends the two tarantulas skittering out of the shadows once more, but this time locked in more furious combat. The ridden spider stilts erratically on its hairy legs, rushing forward, then circling in place, twitching, furious, frenzied. The bedeviled creature flings itself onto its back, whereupon it and the rider flail their ghastly legs at each other, their repulsive bodies paled by dust as fine as talcum powder. They erupt apart and onto their feet, face-to-face, and strain to their full height, en pointe and legs quivering with tension, so that it seems one or the other will now deliver a lethal bite. Then they relax and, side by side, scurry away into the darkness once more.
“What the hell was that all about?” Jergen wonders.
“Romance,” says Dubose. “My friend, if you can’t recognize passion when you see it, too damn much time has passed since you were last in the saddle.”
11
LIKE SOME COLD HAUNT that has crossed over from the world of the dead, Janis Dern drifts through pools of shadow and amber light, under a series of conical lamps attached to the central roof beam, raising not one squeak from the plywood underfoot.
Stacked six to seven feet high, boxes wall the main north-south aisle, except where shadowed passageways intersect from the west and east. In air scented with dust and aging cardboard, the shredded webs of dead spiders hang from the rafters and quiver in a draft, like the gray and tattered flags of forgotten nations, and scattered on the floor are bright flecks of Christmas-ornament glitter sparkling red, green, gold, and silver.
Janis keeps her right hand on the pistol in her belt holster. If the tomboy initially took the scissors with her to use them for self-defense, perhaps she’d left them on the dresser because she had since acquired a better weapon. She might have taken a handgun from one of the nightstands flanking her parents’ bed. She is not yet thirteen, a child who should fear firearms and who should certainly have had no training in their use. However, these days there are a great many irresponsible parents, and it is possible that the snarky little bitch knows how to stand, hold, and aim to compensate for recoil.
At first Janis approaches every intersection with exaggerated caution—until she recognizes that ahead of her an open set of steel stairs spirals up to some higher redoubt. She knows at once that the girl has gone there, that this is why the brat didn’t flee the house for the cover of the night outside. The upper room, whatever it might be, provides something that the brat wants, some advantage, some weapon, some …
“Oh, shit,” she says, “a phone.”
No longer concerned that the tomboy is armed and lying in wait among the stacks of boxes, Janis hurries to the stairs and ascends the tight spirals like a bullet speeding through a rifled barrel.
At the top is a small room of windowed walls offering a 360-degree view of the night, a phone on a shelf between two windows, but no girl.
Suddenly a great turbulence of sound and wind arises, the many panes thrumming and, where loosely fit, rattling in their frames. Dust and chaff and dead leaves and shingle splinters are swept off the surrounding roof of the house to flail the windows as though some pestilential swarm has come out of the deep prairie night. A fierce bright shaft stabs down and sweeps across the glass, flooding the high redoubt with light and with the shadows of mullions and muntins that distort and twist their way around the room as they are harried by the passage of the beam.…
Janis stands astonished, pierced by a sense of the uncanny, but this disturbance of the mind and heart lasts only a moment before she realizes that a helicopter has come down fast out of the night. Following her realization, the craft appears behind the searchlight, clearing the roof by no more than twenty feet, to hover above the Escalade that blocks the entry lane. Spotlighted, Sally Jones looks up and waves at the helo, as though she assumes it represents some additional support about which she hasn’t been told.
The little bitch tomboy, the deceitful smart-ass sure-to-be-one-day-whore, used the phone here, called in someone. Not the county sheriff. There’s no law-enforcement designation on the helo. Whoever these bastards are, they believe what bullshit the snot-eating geek told them, so they come roaring in like a brigade of Texas Rangers. This is shaping up to be another version of the fiasco at the Hawks’ ranch on Sunday night, when that sonofabitch Juan Saba, the ranch manager, stood them off.
Abruptly Janis remembers that she told Laurie Longrin about the brain implants in some detail. The injections. The nanoconstructs. How they penetrate the blood-brain barrier. How they assemble into a web across and into the tissue of the brain.
All that is something Jane Hawk clearly knows, but it’s not something that anyone in the conspiracy is authorized to reveal to others. Janis wanted to terrorize the freckle-faced potato-sucking piglet, and she figured to get hold of a control mechanism later and inject the little rat—or, failing that, to lobby Egon Gottfrey to have the injected parents eventually kill the children and then themselves—so that what she revealed to Laurie wouldn’t matter.
Now it matters.
She needs to find the girl. Quick.
12
THE DARK TEXAS plain infinite in appearance. The sky overhead infinite in fact. Chris Roberts in his radically hot, bespoke Range Rover by Overfinch North America. On top of the world, an insider in the most powerful cabal of insiders in all history, Techno Arcadian fighter for Utopia, one of the rulers of the ruled, destined to live forever—Infinite! Eternal!—if medical technology progresses as it has done in recent years. Puff Daddy on the CD deck. So hard-ass cool! Chris singing along with Puff Daddy like he did when he was thirteen, so long ago. Puff Daddy and Faith Evans. So hot, pure sex! Thinking about shacking up with Janis Dern for a torrid week …
He is cruising back and forth on the two-lane state highway, all that lonely blacktop to himself at this late hour. He hopes the Longrin kid will appear on the shoulder of the road, but thus far she remains missing.
His attention is drawn to the running lights of a helicopter approaching from out of the northwest. In even small cities these days, policing is done by air as well as on the streets, and the sight of an airborne patrol spotlighting a fleeing fugitive’s car as it races recklessly along a freeway is common stuff on the evening news. In the hinterlands like this, however, the skies are usually quiet at night. Chris intuits trouble in this aerial apparition.