When they discovered a red Honda lying on its flank and smashed roof-first into a retaining wall, as if it had been squashed by an army tank, Jane put both hands on the automatic shotgun that was braced between her knees.
Provided by her source in Reseda, the weapon was a slick knockoff of the Auto Assault-12 that had been developed in the United States. This one had been manufactured without license in Iran. Thirty-eight inches long, including a thirteen-inch barrel. The thirty-two-round drum magazine would empty in six seconds on full auto. Heavy. About fifteen pounds when fully loaded with 12-gauge shells. This one was loaded with slugs instead of buckshot. It fired from a locked breech and looked like a hard gun to manage, though it was in fact sweet. The weapon’s gas-operated system absorbed 80 percent of the recoil, and a spring pared off another 10 percent, so the kickback was a small fraction of that from an ordinary 12-gauge.
They were maybe ten minutes from the RV park where Bernie waited.
10
MAYBE HENRY LORIMAR is prowling around, alive and demented, reduced to a reptile consciousness, but Jergen hopes the brain-screwed pleb is dead in the demolished house.
He and Dubose circle the structure, looking for indications, signs, manifestations, stains on the fabric of normalcy—the usual bullshit stuff. But it seems to Jergen that there is no smallest swatch of clean normalcy, that the fabric is stained from end to end, that everything they see is a sign. And what every sign seems to portend is death.
“Where’s the FBI?” Dubose wonders. “According to the pilot, he overflew an FBI Suburban here just minutes ago.”
“Maybe they weren’t ready to dig through the ruins. Dangerous work. What for, anyway? Who cares if Arlen Hosteen is dead in his garbage truck?”
In such situations, it is never clear if Dubose is considering anything Jergen says. The big man affects that profound-pondering expression that suggests Jergen is a feeble version of Dr. Watson with little to offer.
“And why,” Dubose broods, “did Hosteen come here of all places? What drew him?”
“Maybe he just didn’t like the color of the stucco.”
“What drew Henry Lorimar here?”
Behind the imploded garage, Dubose becomes fascinated with a garden hose. Between the threaded fitting at the end of the hose and the nozzle is one of those one-quart-bottle attachments that allows the water spray to be mixed with lawn fertilizer, pesticide, or other substances. Another bottle lies discarded and empty. The pea gravel is wet in places, not yet dried by the fierce afternoon sun.
“What the hell were they doing here?” Dubose wonders, pinching his chin with thumb and forefinger to convey a meditative mood.
Vague impressions in the thick carpet of pea gravel lead Jergen to risk an observation that might be worthy of mockery. “They aren’t clear, but aren’t these tire tracks?”
Studying the pebbled desert landscaping, Dubose says, “Could these be tire tracks? But from what vehicle? The FBI’s? What were they doing with the hose?”
“Washing the Suburban?” Jergen ventures.
“The entire valley’s descending into chaos, these brain-screwed freaks on a killing spree everywhere, and a couple agents decide to wash their wheels? I don’t think so, my friend, though I understand how deeply you Harvard men are into waxed and shiny transportation.”
Frowning, Dubose crouches and plucks from the gravel a lump of pasty-white substance that he works between thumb and forefinger. He sniffs the material.
Carter Jergen surveys their surroundings for any sign of Henry Lorimar or some other hapless specimen exemplifying the heretofore unanticipated dangers of the direct interfacing of the human brain with a computer.
“Chalky,” Dubose says of the pasty white stuff. “Smells maybe a little like paint.”
11
WITH ITS MASSES OF WITCHY GRAY HAIR and its wet breath, the storm seems to pursue the Rhino GX north from the Gulf of Mexico, blasting bedevilments of wind-driven rain against the tailgate, howling curses at the side windows.
By now the average tropical depression would have exhausted its pyrotechnics; but this is weather as stage setting, and the Unknown Playwright employs it lavishly. As Egon Gottfrey at last arrives in Conroe and wends his way to the northeast perimeter of the city, the storm stabs the darkening day with dagger after dagger, and all the works of man and nature leap, leap, leap in stroboscopic terror.
This neighborhood of handsome houses features multi-acre lots on low rolling hills. In the eerie rapture of lashing silvery rain beribboned with serpentine fog and flickering with the goblin light of the tortured heavens, tall pine trees stand in groups as though they are sentinels on the watch for otherworldly threats that the storm might blow in from some parallel universe.
Egon Gottfrey drives past the target house, circles the block. He parks three doors south and across the street from the residence. A two-story brick beauty painted white. Set well back from the quiet street. Black shutters framing the windows. Four broad front steps leading up to a portico with six columns. In the dismal day, warm amber light is welcoming in several windows.
The wind fails, and now the downpour continues strictly on the vertical.
The Rhino stands under the boughs of an enormous pine, in front of vacant acreage. Gottfrey douses the headlights and switches off the wipers. But to maintain the air-conditioning, he doesn’t kill the engine. The vehicle’s windows are darkly tinted, and the day is too warm for his presence to be betrayed by exhaust vapor. In such a fierce storm, perhaps not even a single soul will be out walking and curious enough to wonder if the idling engine might suggest that someone is conducting surveillance.
On the passenger seat is the Medexpress carrier. The digital readout shows the interior temperature is forty-five degrees, more than cool enough to ensure that the ampules containing the control mechanisms will be effective when injected.
Gottfrey intends to wait for darkness. Ancel and Clare think they are clever. They fail to understand, however, that their roles are not central to this drama, while he is the iconic loner around whom every scene is structured. Their fate shall be enslavement.
12
AS RADLEY DUBOSE PROWLS the scene beside the ruined garage, the white, wet substance clings to his shoes, and pea gravel sticks to the pasty stuff.
This is reason enough for Carter Jergen to remain a few steps back from the site of the investigation. He is wearing gray suede seven-eye lace-up ankle-fit trainers by Axel Arigato. In both the Corrigan and Atlee houses, he barely avoided getting blood on the exquisitely finished suede. He is damn well not going to soil the shoes irrevocably by competing with Dubose in a pointless game of Name the Mysterious Crap.
The big man tramps across the layer of gravel—which seems to average four or five inches in depth—scowling as he considers the subtleties of texture and distribution. With one shoe, he scrapes away the little stones to reveal bare earth.
“It’s mud underneath. Someone recently used a lot of water with an urgent purpose,” he observes solemnly, as though he will shortly retire to his rooms on Baker Street, there to fill his favorite pipe with black tobacco and play his violin while pondering this clue.
Dubose walks in widening circles, scanning the ground. He halts when, in addition to the crunching noise, there arises a metallic sound like an empty soft-drink can crumpling under his weight. He scrapes aside several inches of little stones to reveal a buried California license plate. A pair of plates. Not rusted and long out of date. The current design.