There was no emotion hotter than the terror that blazed in a mother when her child was in peril. Losing her boy would burn her to the ground emotionally. Nevertheless, if she hoped to save him, she must be prudent and coldly calculating, must act strategically and with tactics proven through hard experience.
She would need most of the night to get to Borrego Valley. Her enemies would be expecting her. They would surely staff the valley in daunting numbers. She would be exhausted, easy to take down. She needed to delay until she had a plan and was at her full strength.
She couldn’t sleep. So drive till sleep was possible. Wherever she stopped, she’d be that much closer to her boy when morning came.
After dressing again as Elizabeth Bennet, she put her luggage in the car. She drove west toward Sacramento. Mile by mile, she told herself that the world on its metaled tracks was not engineered with malevolence, that there was mercy in the mechanism, that her child, who was the very image of his father, would not be taken from her as had been her husband, as had been her mother so many years ago. And yet her fear was great.
9
EGON GOTTFREY DINES ALONE in Cathy’S Café in downtown Worstead. Although he takes most meals without company, he is never troubled by loneliness. Were he to have dinner with two or twenty others, he would still be alone, for his own mind is the only thing that he can prove is real. If the café, the town, and the world are illusions, then so might be the minds of other people who occupy the phantom physical bodies with which he interacts.
Only the Unknown Playwright knows for sure.
For whatever reason, the Unknown Playwright wants the food in Cathy’s Café to taste good, and so it does. Gottfrey can’t explain how a disembodied mind divorced from sensory organs can taste and smell and see and hear and feel, but he does all those things.
He might suppose his situation is like that of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix: his paralyzed body suspended in a tank, the illusion of this life nothing more than a digital feed piped into his brain. To embrace that explanation, he’d have to abandon radical philosophical nihilism, which he has embraced since his sophomore year in college, prior to which he’d been deeply confused about life and his purpose. He cannot prove the existence of the tank, the paralyzed body, the digital feed, and neither can he prove that movies exist or that there is an entity named Keanu Reeves.
So he will hold fast to the philosophy that has for so long guided him. Nothing is real. All experience is an illusion provided by a mysterious source. He’s just along for the ride, so to speak.
After dinner, Gottfrey walks through nearby neighborhoods. Worstead is an even less convincing place at night than in daylight. As early as nine o’clock, at least twelve thousand of the town’s supposed fourteen thousand residents must already be in bed.
Of the few places with any action, the busiest seems to be a bar featuring country music, which is surrounded by pickups and SUVs. The roof-mounted sign names the place NASHVILLE WEST, and under that, in smaller lettering, are the words EAT—DRINK—MUSIC.
If the Unknown Playwright wants Egon to believe this world is real, there are instances like this when he or she—or it—makes mistakes that reveal the falsity of the scene. The sign would make sense if all three words were nouns: FOOD—DRINK—MUSIC. Or if all were verbs: EAT—DRINK—LISTEN. But as it now reads, the customer is invited to eat and drink the music, which makes no sense.
Sometimes it seems that Egon is smarter than the Unknown Playwright: a strange idea on which he doesn’t care to dwell.
In his motel room again, at ten o’clock, he changes from street shoes to lace-up hiking boots.
For twenty minutes, he sits staring at the bedside clock.
He trades his sport coat for a warmer jacket that nonetheless conceals his shoulder rig and pistol.
He removes the Medexpress container from the dry-ice chest and carries it out to his Rhino GX. This is the largest luxury SUV made in America, a product of U.S. Specialty Vehicles. It looks like a hardened military transport but with high style, including a matte-black finish. The Rhino is a symbol of his value to the revolution, or so he is supposed to believe.
During the nine-mile drive to Hawk Ranch, even someone far less enlightened than Egon Gottfrey ought to realize that the world is not real, because large areas remain unfinished. These vast plains are often dark to the horizon. Here and there, tiny clusters of distant lights suggest isolated habitats. It’s like stepping behind an intricately assembled stage setting of a bustling city street and discovering a cavernous backstage with counterweight pulleys and fly lines and painted drops, all of it deserted and quiet, belying the metropolis visible from the audience.
Eight miles from Worstead, he goes off-road, guided now by GPS, homing on a locater in the Ford Explorer driven by Pedro Lobo, one of the two youngest members of the team. Pedro and his twin brother, Alejandro, have been maintaining surveillance of the entrance to Hawk Ranch for the past thirty-six hours.
Half a mile from Pedro’s location, Gottfrey switches off his headlamps. If he follows a direct line to Pedro, as shown on the dashboard screen, he’ll supposedly encounter no treacherous terrain.
The enormous meadow is in places runneled, and the grass stands eighteen inches high. Even in this cool night, from time to time, feeble swarms of winged insects, too dimly glimpsed to be identified in the moonlight, are disturbed out of the land, clicking their brittle wings and body shells ineffectively against the Rhino GX.
Pedro has established his surveillance post within a grove of cottonwoods. In the pale moonlight, the trees loom blacker than the star-shot sky.
Gottfrey is the last to arrive. Among the trees, in addition to the Explorer, stands the 800-horsepower Cadillac Escalade customized by Specialty Vehicle Engineering, assigned to Paloma Sutherland and Sally Jones. Here also are a Jeep Wrangler with the Poison Spyder Package from 4 Wheel Parts, an aftermarket builder, which is shared by Rupert Baldwin and Vince Penn, as well as the bespoke Range Rover by Overfinch assigned to Christopher Roberts and Janis Dern.
In an operation like this, undertaken in a small town, it’s important to split the team among various vehicles, so that they don’t appear to be related and are less likely to call attention to themselves than would a group of outsiders traveling together.
The five men and three women are gathered at the Explorer, half-seen shadows within the deep moonshadows of the cottonwoods, conversing softly, when Gottfrey leaves the Rhino GX and joins them.
The grove of trees stands thirty yards from the county road and directly across from the entrance to Ancel and Clare Hawk’s ranch.
Gottfrey has seen film of the ranch. At its entrance, the private access road is flanked by stone posts supporting an arch of wrought iron incorporating the name HAWK. A single lane of blacktop, bordered by ranch fencing and overhung by live oaks, proceeds 150 yards through rich grassland to the ranch buildings.
From this distance, in daylight, the main residence, stables, barn, and manager’s house can’t be seen beyond the screening oaks. During the day, with binoculars, Pedro and Alejandro took turns watching the sole entrance to—and exit from—the ranch.
Now they monitor the place with ATN PVS7-3 night-vision goggles, MIL-SPEC Generation 4 gear, which gather in all available light across the spectrum and magnify it eighty thousand times.
“At seven-thirty this morning,” Pedro tells Gottfrey, “Ancel and Clare left for church in their Ford F-550. Three minutes later, Juan and Marie Saba followed in their pickup.”
“Are you sure they were just going to church?”
“We have a portable satellite dish. Even out here, it links us to the Internet. Then we back-door NSA audio feed from both houses.”