She walks past the motel office and along the covered walkway serving the rooms.
The light changes to green, and Ivan eases through the intersection, timing it so that he is gliding past when she lets herself into Room 8.
Most of the motel’s rooms are evidently not yet booked for the night, because only four vehicles stand in the parking lot. Only one of the four is anywhere near Room 8, and it is parked directly in front of that door: a metallic-gray Ford Explorer Sport.
Ivan hangs a U-turn at the next intersection and pulls off the street into an apartment complex across from the motel.
The apartments are in an arrangement of bland stucco boxes tricked up with decorative iron stair railings and faux shutters in a sad attempt at style. In front of the buildings is a long pergola that, during the day, shades the vehicles of residents as well as those of visitors. It now provides moonshade for the Range Rover.
The Explorer Sport is parked between lampposts, and with binoculars Ivan glasses the rear license plates. Using the computer terminal in the console of the customized Rover, he back-doors the California DMV and inputs the number. The vehicle is registered to Leonard Borland at an address in San Francisco.
Ivan switches to Google Street and looks at what stands at that address: a ten-story apartment building. He suspects that if he visited the place, no tenant named Leonard Borland would live there.
Rather than go to that trouble, he returns to the DMV system and seeks driver’s licenses issued to men named Leonard Borland, of which there are several with various middle names. None of them shares the address to which the Explorer Sport is registered.
This might mean only that another Leonard Borland owns the Sport but does not drive it himself, does not drive at all.
But what it might mean isn’t in this case worth considering.
It’s been known for some time that Jane Hawk has a source for forged documents so well crafted that the forger is able to insert them undetected into government records, ensuring they will withstand scrutiny if she is stopped by the highway patrol.
Minutes after checking out the various Leonard Borlands, Ivan Petro receives an electrifying phone call. The guardians with whom Travis Hawk’s mother entrusted him have been found in Borrego Springs, where they have been killed in an exchange of gunfire. The boy has yet to be located. A major search is being organized to comb every inch of the town and the surrounding Borrego Valley.
Almost an hour later, following much fevered calculation, Ivan arrives at a course of action. He isn’t going to call for backup and allow the credit for the capture of Jane Hawk to go to those Arcadians above him in the revolution, many of whom are in the habit of adding to their résumés accomplishments that aren’t theirs.
He calls them poachers, though never to their face. They are dangerous people, such vipers that it’s amazing they aren’t poisoned by the potency of their own venom. He treats them with unfailing respect, though he despises them.
However, he is self-aware enough to know that were he to rise into their ranks and be accepted, he would no longer despise them, would find them ideal company. He despises the insiders only because he isn’t one of them; being excluded is what feeds his hatred.
Since childhood, he’s been a superb hater. He hated his father for the many beatings and hated his indifferent mother for raising no objection to them. His hatred had festered into pure black rancor until, at fifteen, he was big enough and furious enough to pay his old man back with interest and knock some remorse into his mother as well, before walking out on them forever.
Because they had no interest in teaching him anything at all, other than fearful obedience, they no doubt still have no awareness that by their cruelty they taught him the most important of all life lessons: Happiness depends on acquiring as much power as possible, power in all its forms—physical strength, superior knowledge, money and more money, political control over others.
His parents are ignorant alcoholics full of class resentment, but in essence they are alike to the Arcadian poachers who have thus far thwarted Ivan’s ascent in the revolution. He hates them all.
Anyway, he has a plan, and it’s a good one that could elevate him into the hierarchy where he belongs.
The motel is not a place where he can surprise her, overpower her, take custody of her, and put her through a hard interrogation without drawing unwanted attention. If he is patient, a better opportunity will present itself.
If he can break her on his own, learn where the boy is … he can present both mother and child to the revolution as a single package and in such a way that credit is given where it is due.
The cargo area of the Range Rover is stocked with surveillance gear, from which he selects a transponder with a lithium battery. It’s the size of a pack of cigarettes. After programming the unit’s identifier code into his GPS, he crosses the street to the motel.
The best way to accomplish a task like this is boldly, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world to stoop beside a stranger’s car and attach a transponder. The back of this particular unit features a plastic bubble containing a powerful epoxy. With a penknife, Ivan slits the bubble, reaches between the tire and the rear quarter panel, and presses the transponder to the wheel well. The epoxy sets in ten seconds. Because it is an adhesive used to attach heat-dispersing tiles to space shuttles, there is no chance it will be dislodged by any patch of rough road or in a collision.
If people in the passing vehicles notice Ivan at work, they aren’t curious. He crosses the street and returns to the Range Rover without incident.
However, fewer than ten minutes pass before the door of Room 8 opens and the woman exits, carrying luggage. She needs two trips to load the Sport. She is clearly agitated and in a hurry.
He is sure, now beyond all doubt, that she is Jane Hawk.
He suspects she has somehow learned what has happened to Gavin and Jessica Washington, the two guardians of her boy, who have been killed in Borrego Springs.
He watches her drive away from the motel and does not at once pursue her. He doesn’t need to keep her in sight in order to tail her. The transponder that he attached to her Explorer is represented as a blinking red signifier on the screen of the Range Rover GPS.
Ivan waits a few minutes before reversing out of the pergola. He turns left onto the street. Jane Hawk is headed west on Highway 50, toward Sacramento and points beyond, and so is Ivan Petro.
8
FEAR FOR HER LOVELY BOY CONTESTED with sharp grief for Gavin and Jessie. They had known the danger of committing to help Jane and Travis. But they had seen their own freedom threatened by the cabal and its Orwellian technology against which Jane had taken up arms. They had accepted the risk. They were now part of her forever.
If Gavin and Jessie had been found by the Arcadians, those agents had intended either to torture them or enslave them with nanoimplants to learn where Jane’s child was hidden. And now the people who murdered them would scour Borrego Springs and the Borrego Valley in search of Travis.
She could not let fear paralyze her, but neither could she allow it to hurry her into reckless action. During her six years with the Bureau, she’d endured harrowing encounters with serial killers and mass murderers, and during the past few months, with a world of totalitarian sociopaths in pursuit of her, she had faced and escaped more lethal threats than in her entire FBI career. She survived because she could stay cool in the hottest circumstances.