If we’re patient. If we can bide our time and stay low.
Some of their powerful friends were minor politicians from countries in Europe and even the United States. A few were not minor. There was even a famous American actor who came around now and again to pledge his financial support to the cause; he would drink Grey Goose and sit poking the embers in the giant fireplace in the den. Think of what the world could be, he would say, his eyes reflecting the guttering flames. Think how beautiful it could be.
The boy was in his teens by then. He spoke five languages and had developed a gift for regional accents capable of fooling native speakers. His American English was especially good—midwestern, the way all the newscasters talked. He was tall and lean and fair-haired, the scar from the brick long-since buried away. He was shaping up to be everything his caretakers had dreamed of.
By then, they had given him his nickname: Mangouste. Mongoose. He’d liked the sound of it, and insisted on it whenever he was among friends. He chose to believe it had always been his name, even when he had lived alone on the streets—especially then. The name was like a heartbeat, like something real and true at the center of him, a thing to remain constant across the years and miles and lies that would make up his life.
All this time later, half a world away, Mangouste leaned back and pressed his hands to the forest floor behind himself. He felt the vibration in his palms. The thrum of heavy machinery, deep in the ground.
If we’re patient.
If we can bide our time.
Mangouste closed his eyes. The time for patience was over.
CHAPTER SIX
Highway 395 was empty. This stretch of it, far north and west of Barstow, lay nowhere near any inhabited place. Dryden was in his Explorer, following Claire. They passed an old billboard positioned at ground level, its face just blank wood, baked white by years of exposure in the desert. A quarter mile farther on, the Land Rover braked and turned off onto the flat hardpan. In the sweep of its headlights, Dryden saw nothing but open country and a few low hills.
He followed the Land Rover. It rolled another two hundred feet and then Claire killed its headlights. Dryden pulled up beside her and did the same. The Mojave was pitch black, one horizon glowing faintly red in the predawn like a heated blade.
When they’d left the trailer they’d gone east, away from the incoming police units, then made a wide backroad loop to reach Arrowhead from the other side and retrieve Dryden’s Explorer; now they were an hour’s drive away from the crime scene.
Claire opened the Land Rover’s door and got out. In the glow of the dome light, she walked forward and crouched at the base of a Joshua tree and came back up with a cell phone in her hand. It looked like a cheap pay-as-you-go model, the kind you could use a few times and throw away, without leaving any trail that led back to your real name. No doubt it was the same phone she had used to call Dryden earlier, before reaching this spot and stowing it here.
A disposable phone, and still Claire had felt the need to leave it behind when she went to the trailer. Dryden considered the degree of paranoia that would inform such precautions.
Claire pocketed the phone and returned to the SUV, waving for Dryden to join her. Dryden shut off the Explorer, stepped out, and got into the Land Rover on the passenger side.
Even in the near dark, Dryden could sense the condition Claire was in: the same exhaustion she’d shown in the trailer. Her breathing sounded wrong. In silhouette against the dim horizon, she sat slumped at the wheel, all but holding on to it for support.
“I’ve barely slept for the past three days,” she said. “Couple hours total, maybe.”
“Tell me what this is,” Dryden said. “All of it.”
Claire nodded but didn’t speak for a long time. Dryden had the impression that only stress had been propping her up earlier. She took a deep breath, then let go of the wheel and turned in her seat. She reached down behind the seatback, took something from the floor in front of the middle bench seat, and set it on the console between herself and Dryden. In the dark it sounded like a hard plastic case.
Claire opened it and reached inside, and a second later the screen of a tablet computer flared to life, bathing the Land Rover’s interior with pale light.
The plastic container was the size of a briefcase, its interior and lid both padded with gray foam. The tablet computer was strapped to the lid’s underside, facing upward now because the lid lay fully open.