They have not established traditional roadblocks because, if possible, they want Jane Hawk to enter Borrego Valley by whatever deception she devises, perhaps let her feel a little cocky before closing the exits behind her.
As Jergen reminds the big man of this, Dubose cuts him off. “It’s not just about Hawk now. We injected fifty people last night.”
The hollow feeling in Carter Jergen’s chest expands to his gut. His alarm escalates into fright, but he dares not succumb to fear. “Maybe they’re not all as far gone as this crazy bitch.”
“Maybe not. Maybe nanowebs aren’t in every case facilitating the breakdown and repurposing of highly complex neural pathways. But the human brain has a high plasticity, which makes it vulnerable as hell to this. Maybe the fifty we brain-screwed are in a variety of psychotic states, some of them still able to pass for normal. But none of the freaks will play nice just because we say, ‘Do you see the red queen?’ Gotta contain this fast, take ’em down.”
“Contain it? Fifty dead isn’t containment.”
“Not just fifty. Fifty plus collateral damage.”
Collateral damage. Jergen realizes that he is potentially collateral damage.
“Let them out of the valley,” Dubose says, “it’ll be harder to impose a news blackout on whatever they do. And if we have to check every vehicle going out, we’re revealing our hand to the Hawk bitch, so we might as well check everyone coming in, nail her if we can.”
“Maybe she’s already here.”
“I’d bet on it,” Dubose says.
Although it seems as if Minette Butterworth will at any moment charge them in a fit of savage fury, instead she turns and leaps up the porch steps and disappears into the house, gone in two seconds.
11
A FADED BLUE SKY. Sun-blasted sand and rock. Sparse, seared vegetation in scraggly configurations that suggested the mutant consequence of some long-ago incident involving a devastating release of deadly radiation …
The land seemed to speak, seemed to say, The boy is mine now and forever.
They were on County Highway S22, the Salton Sea behind them, maybe twenty-seven miles from the heart of Borrego Springs, when Jane spotted the big highway department truck parked ten feet off the road, about fifty yards ahead of them. No pavement repairs were under way. No workers were attendant to the vehicle.
“Slow down,” she told Bernie, “but don’t stop.”
As they drifted toward the truck, she saw what she expected: the lens hood of a camera in a motion-detector-activated video-and-transmitter package mounted under the bumper of the truck. Their license plate was scanned and instantly sent to whatever special operations post the Arcadians had set up in Borrego Valley.
She had no concern that Enrique de Soto had let her down this time. A check of the DMV would show that the Tiffin Allegro was registered to Albert Rudolph Neary.
“Okay, up to speed.” As Bernie accelerated, she said, “What’s your name again?”
Instead of answering simply, he elaborated. “Well, Mama named me Albert Rudolph, and she called me Al, but I never did much like Al, even though I loved Mama. So ever since she died when I was just seventeen, I’ve gone by Rudy.”
Still perched on the Euro recliner behind Jane, Luther Tillman said, “So where you from, Rudy?”
“Born in Topeka, left Kansas after Mama died. My dad passed from a heart attack when I was a baby. Came west and been here ever since. Right now I live in Carpinteria, a pretty town, a true little slice of Heaven. Penny, my wife—Jesus bless her soul—she died four years ago. Penny loved the desert, so I spread her ashes there, like she wanted, and I come back every April to visit with her.”
Jane was impressed that Bernie had changed his speech patterns and vernacular, which required a sustained conscious effort. “All that detail—where’d that come from?”
He smiled. “In the wig business, a person has to be something of—you should excuse the expression—a bullshit artist.”
12
BEAUMONT FLOATING IN THE FLUX of the storm and Egon Gottfrey swimming in an ocean of data, fingers stroking the laptop keys …
Sue Ann McMaster, Killeen bus-station clerk, twenty-nine years old, born in Vidor, Texas, is married to Kevin Eugene McMaster, who is the manager of a landscaping company. Sue Ann is the mother of two children, eight-year-old Jack and six-year-old Nancy. Nothing in her life suggests she is connected in any way to the Hawk family.
Gottfrey almost misses a fact that links her not to the Hawks but to at least another person in the chain of deceit that resulted in his being led to that desolate property where Baldwin and Penn now lie dead—assuming one believes they ever existed. Sue Ann McMaster was born Sue Ann Luckman. But following her marriage to Kevin nine years earlier, when she applied for a revised driver’s license to reflect her married name, her previous license was not in the name Luckman, but in the name Spencer. Further digging reveals that a first marriage, at the age of seventeen, to one Roger John Spencer, of Beaumont, ended after eight months, when he was killed in a traffic accident.
Spencer. The fifth name on Gottfrey’s list is Mary Lou Spencer, the bus-station manager here in Beaumont. He needs only five minutes to learn that she is the mother of three, that one of her children was Roger John Spencer, the very same who died in a traffic accident eleven years ago.
If Gottfrey didn’t understand that the world and everything in it is illusionary, he might think it unremarkable that this link between Sue Ann and Mary Lou exists.
Obviously, if Mary is working in the bus business in Beaumont and Sue is, back in the day, perhaps employed at the same station, it is the most natural thing for Roger to encounter his mother’s young coworker, be smitten by her, and eventually marry her. Two years after Roger’s death, when Sue meets Kevin McMaster and marries him and moves to Killeen, it is also logical that she would seek employment at the bus station, perhaps even arrange for a transfer from Beaumont.
If you believe the world is real, intricately detailed, and infinitely layered, you might expect an endless series of minor coincidences of this nature and find nothing suspicious in them.
Because Gottfrey is aware that the world is an exceptionally clever conceit, not as complex and deep as it seems, but merely a narrative spun by the Unknown Playwright for his/her/its enjoyment, he knows at once that this link between Sue and Mary is evidence of a nefarious conspiracy.
In addition, he is certain that the three other names on his list are also players in an elaborate campaign of misdirection with the intention of concealing the true whereabouts of Ancel and Clare. All he needs to do is find their connections and, upon reviewing the material he gathers on them, determine which of them is most likely to know where Jane Hawk’s in-laws have gone. Then he can cut the truth out of the deceitful bastard or bitch, whichever proves to be the case.
Because Gottfrey enjoys back-door access to the NSA’s Utah Data Center and all its myriad connections across the country, he expects to wrap this up in an hour or less.
A prolonged nova of lightning explodes across the day, as if the illusion of a storm sky and a universe beyond has in an instant been ripped away and the searing truth of existence revealed. The thunder, crashing close in the wake of the first flare, rocks the foundations of this world.
The Unknown Playwright approves. The fun will soon begin.
13
BERNIE SLOWED FOR A SUDDEN BACKUP IN TRAFFIC.
The vehicles in line were mostly cars and SUVs. From the high cockpit of the motor home, Jane Hawk had a clear enough view of the obstruction to identify it. She said, “Police roadblock.”
As the motor home came to a halt, she disconnected her safety harness, swiveled the copilot’s chair, and thrust to her feet.
Luther was on the move, heading toward the bedroom at the back of the Tiffin Allegro.
Jane stepped past the dinette booth to a sofa that doubled as a pull-out bed, opposite the fridge and cooktop.
“Give a shout, you need help,” said Bernie.