The Explorer, a stolen vehicle, had been scrubbed of its former identity in Mexico, given a purpose-built 700-horsepower 502 Chevy engine, and purchased from a reliable black-market dealer in Nogales, Arizona, who didn’t keep records. There seemed to be no way it could have been tied to her.
Instead of stepping outside, she closed the door and turned to her right and made her way through the shelves of books. The aisles weren’t a maze to her, because she had scouted the place when she arrived, before settling at the computer.
An EXIT sign marked a door to a back hallway that was fragrant with fresh-brewed coffee. Offices. Storerooms. An open refreshments niche with a refrigerator. A short hall intersected the longer one, and at the end, another door opened out to a small staff-parking area with an alleyway beyond.
Three cars and a Chevy Tahoe had occupied this back lot when she checked it earlier.
Now in addition to those vehicles, a white Cadillac Escalade stood in the fifth of seven spaces, to the west of the library’s back door. The woman in the driver’s seat of the Caddy had the same caramel complexion and black hair as the man at the computer. She had a phone to her ear and was speaking to someone, which didn’t prove complicity in a plot, though her eyes fixed on Jane like a shooter’s eyes on a target.
In any crisis situation, the most important thing to do was get off the X, move, because if you weren’t moving away from the threat, someone with bad intentions was for damn sure moving closer to you.
Avoiding the Escalade, Jane went east. Along the north side of the alley, shadows of two-, three-, and four-story buildings painted a pattern like castle crenellations on the pavement, and she stayed in that shade for what little cover it provided, moving quickly past dumpsters standing sentinel. To the south, past the library, there was a park and beyond that a kindergarten with a fenced playground.
She was opposite the park, where phoenix palms rustled in a light breeze and swayed their shadows on the grass, when the tall man in the raincoat appeared as if conjured, coming toward her, not running, in no hurry, as though it was ordained that she was his to take at will.
The structures to her left housed businesses, the names of which were emblazoned on the back doors: a gift shop, a restaurant, a stationery store, another restaurant. The buildings in that block shared walls, so there were no service passages between enterprises.
When a sedan pulled into the east end of the alley and angled to a stop, serving as a barricade, Jane didn’t bother to look behind herself, because she had no doubt the Escalade had likewise blocked the west end of the alleyway.
As she hurried along, she tried doors, and the third one—CLASSIC PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY—wasn’t locked. She went inside, where a series of small windows near the ceiling admitted enough light to reveal a combination receiving area and storage room.
The shelves were empty. When she turned to the alley door to engage the deadbolt, the lock was broken.
She’d been skillfully herded to this place. The previous tenant had moved out. She had walked into a trap.
3
THE FORMAL DINING ROOM, which seats twenty, isn’t intimate enough for the conversation that Wainwright Hollister intends to have with Thomas Buckle. They are served in the breakfast room, which is separated from the immense kitchen by a butler’s pantry.
A large Francis Bacon painting of smudges, whorls, and jagged lines is the only painting in the twenty-foot-square chamber, a work of alarming dislocations that hangs opposite the ordered vista of nature—groves of evergreens and undulant meadows—visible beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.
They sit at the stainless-steel and cast-glass table. Buckle faces the windows, so the immense and lonely nature of the ranch will have been impressed upon him by the time he learns that he is to be hunted to the death in that cold vastness. Hollister faces the young director and the painting behind him, for the art of Francis Bacon reflects his view of human society as chaotic and confirms his belief in the necessity of imposing order by brute power and extreme violence.
The chef, Andre, is busy in the kitchen. Lovely Mai-Mai serves them, beginning with an icy glass of pinot grigio and small plates of Andre’s Parmesan crisps.
Tom Buckle is clearly charmed by the girl’s beauty and grace. However, the almost comic awkwardness with which he tries to engage her in conversation as she performs her duties has less to do with sexual attraction than with the fact that he is out of his element, the son of a tailor and a seamstress, abashed by the splendor of the wealth all around him and uncertain how to behave with the staff of such a great house. He chats up Mai-Mai as if she is a waitress in a restaurant.
Because she’s well trained, the very ideal of a servant, Mai-Mai is polite but not familiar, at all times smiling but properly distant.
When the two men are alone, Hollister raises his glass in a toast. “To a great adventure together.”
He is amused to see that Buckle rises an inch or two off his chair, intending to get up and lean across the table in order to clink glasses with his host. But at once the director realizes that the width of the table will make this maneuver awkward and that he should take his cue from Hollister and remain seated. He pretends to have been merely adjusting his position in the chair as he says, “To a great adventure.”
After they taste the superb wine, Wainwright Hollister says, “I am prepared to invest six hundred million in a slate of films, but not in a partnership with a traditional studio, where I’m certain the bookkeeping would leave me with a return far under one percent or no return at all.” He is lying, but his singular smile could sell ice to Eskimos or apostasy to the pope.
Although Buckle surely knows that he’s in the presence of a man who thinks big and is worth twenty billion dollars, he is all but struck speechless by the figure his lunch companion has mentioned. “Well … that is … you could … a very valuable catalog of films could be created for that much money.”
Hollister nods agreement. “Exactly—if we avoid the outrageous budgets of the mindless special-effects extravaganzas that Hollywood churns out these days. What I have in mind, Tom, are exciting and intense and meaningful films of the kind you make, with budgets between twenty and sixty million per picture. Timeless stories that will speak to people as powerfully fifty years from now as they will on their initial release.”
Hollister raises his glass again in an unexpressed endorsement of his initial toast, and Buckle takes the cue, raising his glass as well and then drinking with his host, a vision of cinematic glory shining in his eyes.
Leaning forward in his chair, with a genial warmth that he is able to summon as easily as a man with chronic bronchitis can cough up phlegm, Hollister says, “May I tell you a story, Tom, one that I think will make a wonderful motion picture?”
“Of course. Yes. I’d love to hear it.”
“Now, if you find it clichéd or jejune, you must be honest with me. Honesty between partners is essential.”
The word partners visibly heartens Buckle. “I couldn’t agree more, Wayne. But I want to hear it out to the end before I comment. I’ve got to understand the roundness of the concept.”
“Of course you know who Jane Hawk is.”
“Everyone knows who she is—top of the news for weeks.”
“Indicted for espionage, treason, murder,” Hollister recaps.
Buckle nods. “They now say she even murdered her husband, the hero Marine, that he didn’t commit suicide.”
Leaning forward a little more, cocking his head, Hollister speaks in a stage whisper. “What if it’s all lies?”
Buckle looks perplexed. “How can it all be lies? I mean—”
Holding up one hand to stop the young man, Hollister says, “Wait for the roundness of the concept.”
He leans back in his chair, pausing to enjoy one of the Parmesan crisps.
Buckle tries one as well. “These are delicious. I’ve never had anything quite like them. Perfect with this wine.”