IN THE TIFFIN ALLEGRO, she settled with Travis on the queen-size bed and held him and listened to him talk of Cornell’s good sandwiches and coconut-pineapple muffins and Coca-Cola in Atlanta and Mr. Paul Simon and the problem with leaving your toothbrush on the bathroom sink.
He was trying to buy time with his stories, keep her with him by the power of his voice. He’d known they wouldn’t yet be together permanently again as they had been in Virginia, before his dad died, but he had hoped to have a few days with her, not just a few hours.
When it was time for him to join Bernie and Cornell in Bernie’s Mercedes E350, they moved from the bed to the front door in stages, parting in baby steps, pausing for him to ask questions.
“Will you come visit us?”
“You know I will.”
“When?”
“As soon as I can.”
“Will you get the bad guys, they killed my dad.”
“Am I FBI or what?”
“You’re major FBI,” he said.
He didn’t know the depth of the ocean of trouble in which she swam, didn’t know that she was America’s most-wanted fugitive, the beautiful monster of ten thousand newscasts, hunted by legions.
“Do you think Hannah’s okay?” he asked.
Hannah was the pony that Gavin and Jessie had gotten him soon before they’d had to go on the run with the boy. The pony had been left behind.
“Hannah’s being well taken care of, honey.”
“Will I see her again one day?”
“I’m sure of it,” Jane lied.
“I was getting real good, riding her. Uncle Gavin said I was gonna be a real horseman.”
“Which you will be. I’ve no doubt about it.”
“Even rodeos, you think?”
In Nick’s youth, he had competed in rodeos.
“Even rodeos,” Jane said.
At the car, he held fast to her. She didn’t know if she could get him to let go. She didn’t know if she could make herself let go.
In the end, because she was who she was and because he was his mother’s son, they did let go.
She watched the Mercedes drive away into the night, as she had watched Luther and Leland drive away in the light of sunset, watched until there was nothing to see.
Then she loaded all her gear from the motor home into her Ford Explorer Sport.
26
EGON GOTTFREY SITS at a desk in a book-lined study.
Six men stand at various points in the room, watching him. None of them is Ancel Hawk.
They say that one of their friends is already driving the Rhino GX to Austin, where he will strip out the GPS and then abandon the vehicle.
This does not concern Gottfrey. After all, the Rhino cannot be proven to exist, and neither can Austin. The room in which he sits is also an illusion.
He needs only to think of what must be done to put him in sync once more with the intentions of the Unknown Playwright, and all will be well.
From time to time, one of the men questions Gottfrey, and they remain half convinced there are others in the night with whom they must deal.
His answer is always the same, the five words he knows that the U.P. wants to hear from him. “I am an iconic loner.”
Almost an hour after Gottfrey was taken captive, Ancel Hawk finally appears. He carries the Medexpress cooler that contains the control mechanisms in ampules of amber fluid.
As Ancel places the cooler on the desk, lightning rips the fabric of the night, and thunder speaks against the window glass.
One of the other men says, “Ben can do that, Ancel. You keep Clare company, hold her hand.”
Clare Hawk appears in the doorway. “I don’t need my hand held. And we can’t ask any of you to do a thing like this.”
“The bastard deserves it,” another man declares.
“He no doubt does,” Clare says. “But this is going to be on no one’s conscience but mine and Ancel’s.”
The readout on the Medexpress cooler reports a temperature of forty-seven degrees. The control mechanisms are still viable.
An uneasiness arises in Egon Gottfrey. Ever since he shot Rupert Baldwin and Vince Penn, he has assumed that this drama is a stirring story of his dedication to the revolution, his genius for sleuthing, and his skill at violent action. As he watches Ancel Hawk open the cooler and as dry-ice vapor steams from it, a dark thought crosses Gottfrey’s mind. Could it be that the U.P. has taken a detour into Shakespeare territory, the land of Macbeth and Lear and Hamlet? Could this be not at all what Gottfrey has thought? Could this be a tragedy?
27
JANE SAT IN THE EXPLORER, near the Tiffin Allegro, in the dark, with the engine running and the air-conditioning blowing hard. She needed to leave this place, but she could not drive.
She had wept as profoundly as this when she found her mother dead, when she lost Nick, but never otherwise in nearly twenty-eight years of life. Those first two times, she wept from mortal cause—her mother lost, her husband gone forever. But her precious child was not lost, and she despised this sobbing, not because it revealed a fatal weakness in her, but because it seemed to tempt fate. Even though she didn’t believe in fate, she felt that crying this hard, letting grief so rack her, might somehow ensure that this weeping was for Travis in advance of his certain death, that she was losing him by crying so hard for him.
When Ferrante Escobar knocked on the window in the driver’s door, she told him to go away, but he would not go. He bent down, staring in at her, until at last she lowered the window. “I’m all right, Ferrante. I don’t need anyone to talk to. Just a minute. A minute or two, and then I’ll go.”
“I have nothing to say to you, Jane Hawk. I’m not a man of words. I just thought … you might need a hand to hold.”
Because of the disturbing paintings in his office and what his uncle, Enrique, had called his “obsession with blood,” she thought the moment would be creepy when she gave him her hand, but it was instead surprisingly tender. He stood there for a few minutes, his grip gentle, though hers was fierce. And her tears passed.
When she let go of him, he walked away into the dark.
She put up the window and shifted the car into gear and drove out of Indio into Palm Springs. She found a motel and paid cash for a room and took a long shower as hot as she could tolerate. When she dressed, she assumed the identity of Leslie Anderson, using an ash-blond wig, lenses that turned her blue eyes gray, and a fake mole the size of a pea, which attached to her upper lip with spirit gum. Leslie wore too much makeup and Smashbox lipstick.
Before she went out for dinner, she turned on the television and checked a cable-news network. There had been a terrorist attack in, of all places, rural Borrego Valley. It was believed that the area’s water supply had been contaminated with a powerful animal tranquilizer—related to phencyclidine, angel dust, but a hundred times more powerful—that had inspired acts of extreme violence.
Yeah, right.
In a corner booth in a quiet restaurant with low lighting, she ate a filet mignon with sliced fresh tomatoes, asparagus, haricot verts. She drank two glasses of good cabernet.
She was too exhausted to sleep. She walked residential streets for two hours, under the benediction of the infinite and eternal stars. Minute by minute and step by lonely step, as surely as her lungs drew life from the air, her mind drew from the night and all its wonder, drew from it the increasing conviction that she was born for this fight and that she would not lose it. She had compiled and secreted away a lot of evidence. She knew what she needed next. She didn’t know how to get it; but she would figure that out. Bernie Riggowitz had survived Auschwitz, and in spite of all his losses, he stood now with her. Mishpokhe. He was proof that though evil could win in the short term, it could be defeated in time.
She had no illusions. Her life hung by a thread. She was no more special than anyone else. Over the millennia, billions upon billions of people had died, been remembered briefly, been forgotten; and they were now gone as if they’d never existed. She was merely another among those billions. But just as she had no illusions, so in this matter she had no choices. She could be only who she was, could do only what she had always done, and one thing she had never done was surrender.