by Dean Koontz
Gottfrey hammers the arms raised in defense, fingers snapping like breadsticks, and knocks out of the man the feeble cry for help that is more of a wretched gagging than it is a shout.
Five blows later, the task complete, Egon Gottfrey thumbs the button, which collapses the baton.
He returns to the Rhino and drives away. His heart rate is maybe sixty beats per minute. He isn’t breathing hard. What he’s done required little effort and no anger or other strong emotion.
The cowboy—like everyone and everything else—means nothing to him. Gottfrey isn’t angered by the turn of events at Hawk Ranch, and he harbors no spite—certainly no rage—against the stranger in the roadhouse parking lot. As always, he merely intuits what the script requires of him. He is not an independent agent.
There is no objective basis from which to determine what is true or real. Consequently, nothing is true or real except his mind. He is only along for the ride.
15
A DEPARTING GUEST SLAMMED A DOOR. Jane half woke in the motel room in Lathrop, after five hours of sack time.
She lay for a while in the dark, in a slowly dissolving web of sleep, trying to imagine that she had only dreamed the death of her husband and the danger to her child, that she had herewith awakened into a world where she and Nick and Travis still lived in Virginia, facing a future filled with the promise of peace and grace.
She possessed an ability to adapt quickly to change and threat, though not by resorting to denial, at which she was no good at all. She threw aside the blanket, swung her legs out of bed, and knew this was still a world of murder, slander, envy, theft, deceit, and implacable evil, where peace must be won each day, where legions didn’t know grace or, perceiving it, thought it mere weakness.
Having showered the previous evening, she dressed and made herself up to look like the photo on another of the forged driver’s licenses she possessed, this one in the name of Elinor Dashwood.
When all this began, she had shoulder-length blond hair, which was now cut short. She pulled on a pixie-cut chestnut-brown wig. Nonprescription contact lenses morphed her blue eyes brown. Stage-prop glasses with black frames gave her a studious appearance.
A successful disguise was a simple one. The reflection in the bathroom mirror wouldn’t fool her son, but she didn’t look enough like the traitor in the news to be recognized on the street.
No casual disguise could deceive the facial-recognition software married to security systems in airports, train stations, and bus depots, which was why she could travel only by car.
She loaded her luggage into her Explorer Sport, a stolen and remade vehicle, without GPS, purchased with cash from an off-market dealer in Arizona. She drove out of Lathrop, south on Interstate 5.
Hours later, she left the interstate for a truck stop, filled the SUV’s tank, and bought takeout—ham sandwiches, black coffee. She ate in the Explorer, in a remote corner of the parking lot, far from easy observation by all the drivers coming and going.
She was still more than an hour north of Los Angeles, in this busy plot of commerce aswarm with trucks and other vehicles, the magnificent and sparsely populated San Joaquin Valley all around, and the blue sky as serene as the world under it could never be.
She used one of her burner phones to call another disposable that she’d left with a friend who had lost his wife and one of his two daughters in this secret civil war. He was now hiding out in Texas. His name had been linked to hers in the news. When Luther Tillman answered on the third ring, she said, “Just me.”
“Best two words I’ve heard in days, knowing you’re out there.”
“Good to hear your voice, too.”
In metropolitan areas, the National Security Agency had planes that could be launched to scoop telecom signals from those carrier waves reserved for disposable cellphones and apply track-to-source technology to locate terrorists communicating in the run-up to an attack. Neither Jane nor Luther was in a metro area. There was no chance this conversation would be monitored in real time by anyone.
Nevertheless, they used no names and spoke discreetly. What was impossible yesterday might have become possible today.
Referring to Luther’s daughter Jolie, who had almost been injected with a control mechanism, whose sister and mother were now enslaved and lost to her, Jane said, “How’s the girl?”
“Angry. But not angry with me anymore for getting involved in this. She knows I really had no choice. She’s smart, resilient.”
“So how are you?”
“Not good. Feeling lost. But hanging in there.”
Jane took a breath to speak, hesitated, shuddered, and took another breath. “Man, I so hate what I’m about to do.”
“If there’s any way I can help, tell me. I’m going a little crazy here. Being off duty, it’s not me.”
“Jolie needs you there.”
“She wants them crushed for what happened to her mom and sister. She wants that real bad. I want to give her that.”
“And if she loses you, too?”
“If we don’t blow this wide open, she not only loses me. She loses herself, her future, her freedom.”
Jane sat in silence for a moment, watching a large motor home negotiate the parking lot. Then she said, “You know what’s the most important thing in the world to me?”
“Yeah. You showed me the cameo.”
“Now I need to go into a very tight place and get him out of there before they find him. I’m not able to do it alone.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. Neck deep.”
“Where are you? Where do you need me to be?”
“My friends, where you are now, they’ll fly you to Palm Springs tomorrow morning, then drive you to Indio.” She gave him an address.
“What do I need to bring?”
“What you used to carry every day to work,” she said.
He’d been a sheriff in Minnesota, and whatever else he might have brought to work every day, he always carried a gun.
She said, “First thing after we hang up, have someone there take a photo of you, a head shot.” She gave him an email address. “On the subject line, put ‘Emergency.’ The only message should be ‘You’re expecting the attached photo.’ ”
Luther read the email address, and she confirmed it.
“You better believe we’ll do this,” he said, “no matter what it takes.”
“I believe. I have to, or otherwise fall apart,” she said. “With you, I believe we will, we’ll do it.”
He said, “I owe you for what I have left, for Jolie. I love you for that.”
“You’re the best. Just stay cool.”
“Hell, I’ve had ice in my veins for days now.”
16
IN THE DISTANT SOUTHEAST, TILLED fields moist from irrigation, issuing a thin mist from the respiring earth…Much nearer and to the south, a weedy field leading to an open grove of live oaks…
In the truck-stop parking lot, Jane reviewed her options one more time, the people from whom she might seek help. She needed someone in addition to Luther Tillman. Her preference among the possibilities was an unlikely choice, but she kept returning to him.
A week earlier, in Texas, she had been driving the desert night in a black Ford Escape when a Texas Highway Patrol officer pulled her over. She’d left him cuffed to her vehicle, which had been hot once it had been connected to her, and made off with his cruiser, a black-and-white Dodge Charger. Certain that she couldn’t outrun the roadblocks, she’d used the patrol car’s lightbar to pull over a Mercedes E350, intending to take the car and use the driver as cover, because the police would be looking for a woman alone. She hadn’t expected that she and the eighty-one-year-old widower who owned the E350, Bernie Riggowitz, would spend more than twelve hours together or that they would bond so completely.
Now she too
k from her wallet a photo of his late wife that he’d given her, with whom he’d driven all over the country on extended road trips. Miriam was lovely, her face a portrait of kindness.
Jane called Bernie’s cell number. When he answered, she said, “I’m looking at this picture of Miriam you gave me, and I can’t help asking myself, how did a guy like you win over a doll like her?”
“I’m no plosher, so I won’t say I was a double for Cary Grant back then. But I was sweet as halva. Halva and chutzpa can take a guy a long way, plus I could dance a little. How’s by you, Alice?”
She had told him that her name was Alice Liddell. Because he never followed the news—Feh! It’s all lies or depressing—he hadn’t known she was the most-wanted fugitive in America, only that she was “mixed up in something you need to mix yourself out of.”
“Maybe by now,” Jane said, “you know more about me.”
“Oh, you’re everywhere. I know all kinds of shmontses about you now. I might believe one percent of it if I was stupid. But anyone wants me to spill anything about you, they can go talk to the wall.”
“You’re a peach. Where are you, Bernie?”
“I’m here in Scottsdale with Nasia and Segev making over me, everything ipsy-pipsy. But…”
Nasia was his daughter, Segev his son-in-law.
“But?” she said.
“But they want me to stop traveling, move in here, be pampered to death. They think Miriam’s in that grave. They won’t understand she’s out there everywhere we ever went together all those years of driving. I’m not lonely on the road, ’cause she’s always with me.”
“Nasia is your only child, isn’t she?”
“My best blessing now that Miriam’s gone. So I have to pretend maybe I’ll give up the road, which I won’t.”
“You know I have such a blessing, too.”
“Do I know? Since I found out, I can’t sleep for worry. You never mentioned when we had our little drive together.”
“You didn’t know who I was then. My kid is suddenly in a very bad jam. I can’t get him…” Speaking about her helplessness brought a tightness to her chest, a knot of emotion that made it hard to speak for a moment. “I can’t get him out of this jam alone.”
“The way you talk, a person would think I’m a stranger. You can’t just tell me what I should do?”
“It’s going to be damn dangerous. I have no right—”
“Are we mishpokhe or what?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“What it means is, it means family.”
“That’s very sweet. But in fact we aren’t family.”
“I know my own family, bubeleh—who is and who’s not. Didn’t you call me Grandpa one day in Texas? And didn’t I tell that nice policeman you were my granddaughter? So then it’s settled. Tell me what, when, where.”
Under that serene blue sky, on the tumultuous surface of the earth, as long as there were Bernies and Luthers, there was hope.
Jane said, “You and Miriam traveled sometimes in a motor home.”
“We took most trips by car, some in a Fleetwood Southwind. It’s a different country one way from the other, but always beautiful.”
“You could still drive a motor home?”
“Can I walk, can I talk, can I twiddle my thumbs? I could drive you coast to coast without a bump.”
“What size was that Fleetwood of yours?”
“Thirty-two feet, but I can do longer. Gas is better than diesel. A diesel pusher—engine in back—will be a lot heavier and harder to turn. Where are we going?”
“Tell you tomorrow. Let’s meet in Indio, near Palm Springs.” She gave him the address. “Can you be there tomorrow afternoon?”
“Indio’s five hours from here. I could be there and back and there again, with time to stop for a nosh. You got a motor home?”
“I’ll have one. From Enrique, the guy we visited in Nogales that time. Meanwhile, have someone take a photo of you, a head shot.” She gave him the email address that she’d given to Luther.
“Don’t you worry,” Bernie said. “Whatever we need to do, we’ll do it twice.”
“There’s no way I can ever thank you enough, Bernie.”
“So before you hang up, say the word for me.”
“What word?”
“What we are and always will be.”
Her voice caught again in her throat. “Mishpokhe.”
“Pretty good. You should let that kh rattle against the roof of your mouth a little better, but not bad for a first try, bubeleh.”
17
GOTTFREY NEVER SLEEPS MORE THAN a few hours. He doesn’t know why he needs any sleep. Sleep is a requirement of the body, and his body isn’t real. A disembodied mind should function without sleep.
But he isn’t the author of this drama, isn’t responsible for the conflicting details that suggest a careless playwright.
He is only along for the ride.
After a late breakfast in the Holiday Inn coffee shop, he walks two blocks to the Best Western, where Rupert Baldwin is staying.
The sky over Worstead is wooly and gray. The air pools in stillness; but a predawn breeze earlier smoothed a layer of pale dust along the gutter, in and out of which wander paw prints laid down by a dog or by the coyote that he saw the previous night.
At the Best Western, when Gottfrey knocks on the door to Room 16, Rupert calls out, “It’s not locked.”
In the same Hush Puppies and rumpled corduroy suit and beige shirt and bolo tie that he was wearing for the operation at Hawk Ranch, Rupert sits at a small table with two chairs. Through reading glasses, he squints at one of two laptops that are open and in use.
The bedspread has not been turned back, though it is slightly rumpled, as if Rupert had rested sleeplessly atop it for a short while before getting on with the search for Ancel and Clare Hawk.
Closing the door behind him, Gottfrey says, “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Didn’t need to.”
Intrigued, Gottfrey asks, “Do you ever?”
Without looking up, Rupert asks, “Do I ever what?”
“Need to sleep.”
“Not when I have Hershey’s Special Dark and can wash down some crank with Red Bull.” He taps a can of the high-caffeine energy drink, beside which is a bag of miniature dark-chocolate candy bars.
“ ‘Crank’? You’re using methamphetamine?”
“Not often. Only since this case. I hate this slut. I want her dead sooner than now. I want her in-laws injected and licking my boots, and then I want them dead.”
“There’s another one,” Gottfrey says. “A conflicting detail. You never wear boots.”
Rupert finally looks up from the laptop, frowning, his stare as sharp as the prongs of a meat fork. “Something wrong with you?”
Gottfrey shrugs. “Things should’ve gone better last night.”
“Better? Hell, it couldn’t have gone worse.” Rupert returns his attention to the laptop. “When all the Hawks are dead, including her brat, I’m going to surprise that shitkicker Juan Saba, cut off his package, and feed it to his wife before I blow her brains out.”
“You sure are passionate about this. Dedicated to the mission.”
“In case you haven’t thought it through, it’s us or them. And it’s damn well not going to be me. One rogue bitch Bureau agent and her bumpkin in-laws can’t get the better of us. We’re an ass-kicking head-busting machine, never been anything like us.”
Stepping behind Rupert, Gottfrey considers the laptop screen. An analytic program is assessing and enhancing an image taken from orbit. Changes occur with such speed that he can’t understand what is before him. “Find anything? Where maybe they went on horseback?”
“I back-doored our satellites—government, commercial—couldn’t get s
hit on this part of Texas after sunset yesterday.”
“What about China?”
China is all about weaponizing space and orbital surveillance, so NSA has seeded a rootkit in their military’s computer network. A hacker like Rupert can dive in and float through the Chinese system at such a low level they don’t know anybody’s swimming there.
“I finally found some relevant Chicom video,” Rupert confirms.
Although it is as dark as Satan’s colon on those plains at night, the Chinese are even more interested in what America does in the dark than in the day. They fear the U.S. has mobile missile platforms that are shifted around at night. The Chicoms have highly sensitive look-down capability in infrared, and Rupert is working with a segment of streamed video that he cloned from their archives.
“In that meadowland, after a cool day when the ground didn’t soak up heat, there’s not much background infrared to filter out.”
“But there’s wildlife,” Gottfrey says.
“Most too small to matter, except deer. And deer travel in small families, usually more than two. It’s largely federal land not licensed for grazing, so we don’t have to sort out a lot of cattle.”
Pointing to the constantly melting and solidifying image on the screen, Gottfrey says, “What am I going to see when this clarifies?”
“Horses are big—fifteen or sixteen hundred pounds for Clare Hawk’s mare, two thousand for Ancel’s stallion. They put out strong heat signatures, especially carrying riders and exerting themselves. I’ve processed this once, just now giving it a final cleanup.”
When a scene resolves and freezes, it isn’t like the raw image captured by satellite. It’s been analyzed and enhanced—translated—to make sense to the human eye. The straight-down angle on the meadowland is rendered in shades of gray, faint whorling-feathering patterns that represent the effect of a fitful breeze in the grass. Here and there, faint reddish hazes represent ground-source heat, and scattered small hot-red points might be the issue of wildlife.