Earlier, Gottfrey had switched on the radio, which happened to be tuned to an NPR program featuring an interview with Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and hot-tub philosopher invented by the Unknown Playwright to spice this world with humor. Musk says, among other curious things, that there is only a one in a billion chance that this world is base reality; he says it’s almost certainly true that we exist in a computer simulation. If Musk were a real person, as Gottfrey is, instead of a character in this cosmic drama, and if Musk studied radical philosophical nihilism, he’d know, as Gottfrey knows beyond doubt, that there is no computer simulation because the existence of computers, like the existence of everything else, can’t be proved. They are imaginary magical devices.
It’s no coincidence that Gottfrey was inspired to turn on the radio, that it was tuned to an NPR station, and that the interview with Musk was under way; the U.P. wants to poke a little fun at him and remind him that all his efforts on the computer, which have led to the discovery of Ancel and Clare’s whereabouts, were really the work of the U.P., who will be responsible for his triumph.
Ahead repeated lightning shapes the city out of the gloom, the buildings shivering in the storm flares, light running liquidly along the superstructure of a bridge. An ominous red beacon swivels high atop what might be a radio-station transmission tower, like some lighthouse marking the place where the world finally will end.
The Unknown Playwright is investing the scene with so much dramatic weather that Gottfrey is certain that the climax of this episode will occur soon.
In Houston, he turns north on Interstate 45, the midafternoon traffic crawling through the drumming downpour, so thick that he can no longer exceed the speed limit. He is not troubled by the delay.
Conroe is only forty miles away, a thriving city of a little over eighty thousand, on the southern edge of Sam Houston National Forest. In Conroe, Jane Hawk’s in-laws have taken refuge, certain that their sanctuary cannot be discovered.
1
THE LITTLE HOUSE GROANED IN DISTRESS, as if awakening from a long sleep and realizing how very old it was, how arthritic its joints, how brittle its bones. When Jane tried to leave, the back door stuck as though swollen and warped, but the problem was that the entire rear wall of the structure had tweaked. In the now misaligned frame, the encased door was wedged tight.
She holstered her pistol and gripped the knob with both hands and put everything she had into a hard sustained pull, but the door wouldn’t budge.
The four-pane window in the top half wasn’t big enough to get through, even if she broke out the muntins along with the remaining glass.
The bigger window above the sink was painted shut, with thicker muntins. She would need too long to clear it and clamber out.
She tried the door again, wrenching it from side to side even as she pulled on it.
Although the living room ceiling had collapsed onto the truck, the driver remained in control. Insanely, he pumped the accelerator, as if he foolishly believed that the front wheels could be forced out of the spaces between the floor joists into which they had crashed. The powerful engine screamed. The floor of the house shuddered, creaked, and cracked as the wheels strove to force the vehicle forward.
With the sleeve of her sport coat, Jane wiped sweat off her brow, out of her salt-stung eyes. She was trained, conditioned, born to deal with lethal threats, to outthink and outmaneuver whatever villainous sonofabitch—or bitch—wanted to take her down. But this was chaos, bedlam wrought by a self-destructive, unpredictable lunatic. Reason and wit wouldn’t necessarily carry the day. Anyway, the immediate enemy was the house; guns and hand-to-hand combat skills were of no use against an inanimate adversary.
She considered returning to the living room, trying to pop the driver through the windshield. However, the ceiling and the attic structure had crashed down on him, burying the truck, and she wasn’t likely to have a clear shot. Besides, things were continuing to come apart, especially toward the front of the house, and returning there might be the death of her.
The garage. There would be no electric power, because surely the circuit breakers had all been tripped when the truck rammed into the residence. But the big tilt-up garage door could be manually operated.
As Jane turned toward the connecting door where her telltale shard of glass was undisturbed, the maniacal driver tramped the accelerator all the way down and didn’t let up this time. The truck’s voice escalated until it sounded less like a machine and more like some denizen of a Jurassic swamp, expressing its mindless fury in a world where intelligence and reason counted for nothing, where the only guarantors of life were brute strength and ferocity. A reeking pale-blue cloud of exhaust fumes flooded out of the living room, into the kitchen. Under Jane’s feet, under the vinyl tiles, slabs of plywood began to shift and stress against one another like those tectonic plates in the earth that could crack open the faults in continents and shove mountain ranges from the bowels of the planet, creating towering alps where once there were flat plains.
She moved toward the door between kitchen and garage, and a more profound shudder passed through the house, a thunderous quaking, followed by tortured sounds of structure deconstructing. She thought the immense truck was about to plunge entirely into the basement, but instead the garage broke loose of the residence and collapsed. The connecting door burst inward, debris—including a large rafter—erupting toward Jane. She leaped sideways and jumped back, and the four-by-six came to a stop where she had been standing, gouging a wide ribbon of vinyl skin off the subflooring. The door to the garage was blocked now by lumber and sharp-edged sheets of corrugated-metal roofing and masses of pink fiberglass insulation acrawl with highly agitated silverfish.
The house tweaked again. Windows shattered. The valve stem in the ancient sink faucet must have failed; the handle and spindle and packing nut and faucet guts blew loose, and a high-pressure stream of water shot into the air. The truck screamed. The air thickened with fumes. Frosted-plastic panels buckled and cracked and fell out of the ceiling light box, the floor sagged, and the back door rattled violently in its frame.
If it’s still wedged tight, it wouldn’t rattle. Rattling means loose.
She stepped across the intruding garage rafter and yanked on the door, yanked again, and it opened. Rushing onto the back porch, down the steps, onto the pea gravel, she exhaled the bitter exhaust fumes and sucked in fresh air and heard herself saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Wheeling along the weedy ruts that served as the driveway, the Chevy Suburban approached from the barn.
As Jane hurried to the vehicle, a black helicopter clattered past at an altitude of no more than two hundred feet. She looked up, visoring her eyes with one hand, and watched it turn east and then circle west.
Luther braked to a stop.
Jane opened the passenger door but didn’t get aboard. She stood watching the helo as it executed a 180.
An Airbus H120. Manufactured in Canada. Seating for the pilot and four passengers. Used by various agencies of the United States government.
The Airbus was coming back for another look.
“Luther, get out of the car,” she said urgently.
“What’s happening?”
“Get out, hurry! Just Luther. Not you, Cornell, not Travis.”
Inside the house, the garbage truck shrieked, and the building continued to come apart.
The helicopter had almost executed its turn. It was perhaps a quarter mile directly south of their position.
Luther opened his door and got out of the Suburban and regarded Jane across the roof. “What’re we doing?”
The helicopter had completed its turn. Heading for them now.
“Wave,” she said.
Luther looked toward the approaching aircraft.
“Wave at them. Remember the white FBI on our roof. We aren’t leaving here. Just arrived. We have this covered, checking it out.”
2