Kitabı oku: «Jane Hawk Thriller»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE: Sucker Punch

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

PART TWO: Bad Weather

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

PART THREE: Storm Troopers

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

PART FOUR: No Escape

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

PART FIVE: Jane in Chains

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

PART SIX: Free Will

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By Dean Koontz

About the Publisher

PART ONE

1

The triple-pane floor-to-ceiling windows of Hollister’s study frame the rising plain to the west, the foothills, and the distant Rocky Mountains that were long ago born from the earth in cataclysm, now dark and majestic against a sullen sky. It is a view to match the man who stands at this wall of glass. The word cataclysm is a synonym for disaster or upheaval but also for revolution, and he is the leader of the greatest revolution in history. The greatest and the last. The end of history is near, after which his vision of a pacified world will endure forever.

Meanwhile, there are mundane tasks to perform, obligations to address. For one thing, there is someone who needs to be killed.

In a few hours, when a late-season storm descends on these high plains east of Denver, the hunt will begin, and one of two men will die at the hands of the other, a fact Wainwright Warwick Hollister finds neither exhilarating nor frightening. Of profound importance to Hollister is that he avoid the character weaknesses of his father, Orenthal Hollister, and at all times comport himself in a more formidable and responsible manner than had his old man. Among other things, this means that when someone needs to be eliminated, the killing can’t always be done by a hireling. If a man is too finicky to get blood on his hands once in a while, or if he lacks the courage to put himself at physical risk, then he can’t claim to be a leader in this world of wolves, nor even a member of the pack, but is instead only a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

The hunt will occur here, on Crystal Creek Ranch, Hollister’s twelve-thousand-acre spread, unto itself a world of pine forests and rolling meadows. The chase will not be fair, because Hollister does not believe in fairness, which exists nowhere either in nature or in the human sphere. Fairness is an illusion of the weak and ignorant; it is the insincere promise made by those who manipulate the masses for gain.

The quarry, however, will have a chance to survive. A very slim one, but a chance. Although Hollister’s father, Orenthal, had been a powerful man physically as well as financially, his heart had been that of a coward. If ever he had decided that he couldn’t farm out all the violence required for the furtherance of his business, if he’d seen the moral need for every prince to be also a warrior, he wouldn’t have given the quarry any chance whatsoever. The hunt would have been an empty ritual with only one possible end: the triumph of Orenthal and the death of his prey.

Now the security system, which always knows Hollister’s location in this forty-six-thousand-square-foot residence, speaks in a soft, feminine voice. “Thomas Buckle has arrived in the library.”

Thomas Buckle is a houseguest from L.A. The sole passenger on Hollister’s Gulfstream V, he landed two hours earlier, at eleven o’clock this morning, on Crystal Creek’s six-thousand-foot airstrip, was driven 1.6 miles from the hangar to the main house in a Rolls-Royce Phantom, and settled in a guest suite on the main floor.

He will most likely be dead by dawn.

The house is a sleek ultramodern masterpiece of native stone, glass, and stainless steel, with floors of limestone on which ornately figured antique Persian carpets float like lush warm islands on a cold pale sea.

The library contains twenty-five thousand volumes that Hollister inherited from his father. The old man was a lifelong reader of novels. But his son has no use for fiction. Wainwright Warwick Hollister is a realist from his epidermis to his marrow. Orenthal also read many works of philosophy, forever searching for the meaning of life. His son has no use for philosophy because he already knows the two words that give life its meaning: money and power. Only money and power can defend against the chaos of this world and ensure a life of pleasure. Those people whom he can’t buy, Hollister can destroy. People are tools, unless they decline to be used, whereupon they become merely obstructions that must be broken and quickly swept aside—or eliminated entirely.

With no need for his father’s books, he had considered donating the collection to a charity or university but instead moved them to this place as a reminder of the old man’s fatal weakness.

Now, at one o’clock, as Hollister enters the library, Thomas Buckle turns from the shelves and says, “What a magnificent collection. First editions of everything from Ray Bradbury to Tom Wolfe. Hammett and Hemingway. Stark and Steinbeck. Such eclectic taste.”

Buckle is twenty-six, handsome enough to be an actor, though he dreams of a career as a famous film director. He has already made two low-budget movies acclaimed by some critics, but box-office success has eluded him. He is at a crucial juncture, an ambitious young man of considerable talent whose philosophy and vision are at odds with the common wisdom that currently prevails in Hollywood, which he has begun to discover will limit his opportunities.

He has come here in response to a personal phone call from Wainwright Hollister, who expressed admiration for the young man’s work and a desire to discuss a business proposal involving film production. This is a lie. However, as people are tools, so lies are nothing more than the various grips that one must apply to make them perform as wanted.

Upon the director’s arrival, Hollister had briefly greeted him; now there is no need for the formalities of introduction. A smile is all he requires when he says, “Perhaps you would like to select one of these novels that’s never been filmed and make it our first project together.”

Although he is the least sentimental of men and although he has no capacity for the more tender emotions, Wainwright Hollister is graced with a broad, almost supernaturally pleasant face that can produce a smile with as many charming permutations as that of any courtesan in history, and he can use it to bewitch both women and men. They see compassion when in fact he regards them with icy contempt, see mercy when they should see cruelty, see humility when he views them with condescension. He is universally thought to be a most amiable man with a singular capacity for friendship, though in his heart he views everyone as a stranger too unknowable ever to be a friend. He uses his supple, glorious smile as if it were a farmer’s seeding machine, planting kernels of deceit deep in everyone he meets.

Having been flown to Colorado in high style and having been treated like a prodigal son, Thomas Buckle takes seriously the offer to select any book in this library to translate to film. He looks around wonderingly at the shelves of material. “Oh, well, I sure wouldn’t want to make that choice lightly, sir. I’d want to have a better idea of what’s here.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to pore through the collection later,” Hollister lies. “Let’s have lunch. And please dispense with the ‘sir.’ I haven’t been knighted. Just call me Wayne. ‘Wainwright’ is a mouthful, and ‘Warwick’ sounds like the villain in some superhero movie.”

Thomas Buckle is an honest young man. His father is a tailor, a salaried employee of a dry-cleaning shop, and his mother works as a department store seamstress. Although his parents struggled to contribute to his film school tuition, Thomas paid for most of it, having worked part-time jobs since his freshman year in high school. On his two movies, he cut his fees for writing and directing, in order to increase the budget for actors and scene setups. He’s too naïve to realize that his producing partner on those projects cleverly siphoned off some of the studio’s money, which Hollister discovered from the exhaustive investigation he commissioned of Buckle’s affairs. As the child of honest people, as an earnest artist and a striver in the all-American tradition, the young man has an abundance of hope and determination, but a serious deficit of street smarts; much to learn and no time left to learn it.

As they make their way from the library to the dining room, Tom Buckle can’t restrain himself from commenting on the grandeur of the house and the high pedigree of the paintings on the walls—Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst … He is a poor boy enchanted by Hollister’s great wealth, much as the sorcerer’s apprentice might be captivated by the mystery of his master during the first day on the job.

There is no envy in his manner, no evidence of greed. Rather, as a filmmaker, he is besotted with the visuals. The drama of the house appeals to him as a story setting, and he is spinning some private narrative in his mind. Perhaps he imagines a biographical film of his own life, with this scene as the turning point between failure and phenomenal success.

Hollister enjoys answering questions about the architecture and the art, telling anecdotes of construction and acquisition. Only when he senses Tom Buckle has been drawn into his host’s orbit, and then with great calculation, does Hollister put one arm around the young director’s shoulders in the manner of a doting uncle.

This familiarity is received without the slightest stiffening or surprise. Honest men from honest families are at a disadvantage in this world of lies. The poor fool is as good as dead already.

2

The wisdom of millennia and numerous cultures was stacked on a grid maze of shelves flanking dimly lighted aisles in which no one searched for knowledge, all as quiet as an undiscovered pharaoh’s tomb in a pyramid drifted over by a thousand feet of sand.

That first Friday in April, Jane Hawk was ensconced in a library in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, using one of the public-access workstations that were nestled in a computer alcove, which currently offered the only action in the building. Because every computer featured a GPS locater, as did smartphones and electronic tablets and laptops, she carried none of those things. Although the authorities searching for her knew she used library computers, on this occasion she avoided websites they might expect to be of interest to her. Consequently, she was relatively secure in the conviction that none of her probes would trigger a track-to-source security program and pinpoint her location.

In her effort to expose a cabal of totalitarians at the highest echelons of government and private industry, she’d repeatedly zeroed in on a person who appeared to be at the point of the pyramid, only to discover each time that the true numero uno was someone else still cloaked in mystery. Recently, she had been urgently working with those names, all wealthy individuals, seeking connections among them. She had found one: a very public commitment to philanthropy, perhaps because being seen to have a charitable nature could be cover for dark intentions.

Although there were tens of thousands of charities they could have chosen, the people she knew to be near the top of this cabal served on the boards of many of the same nonprofits. And the one whose name was most often associated with theirs, Wainwright Warwick Hollister, a new figure to her, happened to be the wealthiest of them all.

In a conspiracy this radical, this bent on transforming America—indeed the world—the supreme leader, the self-appointed intellectual who inspired the loyalty of others, did not necessarily have to be the one with the most money. A fanatical passion for change and dominance might lift a man of modest means to that position.

However, Hollister, a megabillionaire, had a generously funded foundation of his own, and the deeper she probed into it, the more curious and suspicious it seemed.

Wainwright Hollister’s foundation, ostensibly formed to support cancer research, had made significant donations to a nonprofit under the control of Dr. Bertold Shenneck, the genius who had conceived of, developed, and refined the nanotech brain implant that made possible the cabal’s quest for absolute power. Bingo.

Many people using a computer or smartphone became so distracted that they ceased to be aware of what happened in the world around them and were in Condition White, one of the four Cooper Color Codes describing levels of situational awareness. After earning a college degree in forensic psychology in three years, after eighteen weeks of training at Quantico, and after having served as an FBI agent for six years before going rogue, Jane was perpetually in Condition Yellow: relaxed but alert, aware, not in expectation of an attack, but never oblivious of significant events around her.

Continuous situational awareness was necessary to avoid being cast abruptly into Condition Red, with a genuine threat imminent.

Between yellow and red was Condition Orange, when an aware and alert person recognized something strange or wrong in a situation, a potential threat looming. In this case, through peripheral vision, she realized that a man who’d entered after her and settled at one of the other computers was spending considerably more time watching her than the screen before him.

Maybe he was staring at her just because he liked the way she looked. She had considerable experience of men’s admiration.

Her own hair concealed by an excellent shaggy-cut ash-blond wig, blue eyes made gray by contact lenses, a fake mole the size of a pea attached to her upper lip with spirit gum, wearing a little too much makeup and Smashbox lipstick, she was deep in her Leslie Anderson identity. Because she looked younger than she was and wore a pair of stage-prop glasses with bright red frames, she could be mistaken for a studious college girl. She never behaved in a furtive or nervous manner, as the most-wanted fugitive on the FBI list might be expected to do, but called attention to herself in subtle ways—yawning, stretching, muttering at the computer screen—and chatted up anyone who spoke to her. She was confident that no average citizen would easily see through Leslie Anderson and recognize the wanted woman whom the media called “the beautiful monster.”

However, the guy kept staring at her. Twice when she casually glanced in his direction, he quickly looked away, pretending to be absorbed in the data on his screen.

His genetic roots were in the subcontinent of India. Caramel skin, black hair, large dark eyes. Perhaps thirty pounds overweight. A pleasant, round face. Maybe twenty-five. Dressed in khakis and a yellow pullover.

He didn’t fit the profile of someone in law enforcement or that of an intelligence-agency spook. Nevertheless, he made her uneasy. More than uneasy. She never dismissed the still, small voice of intuition that had so often kept her alive.

So, Condition Orange. Two options: engage or evade. The second was nearly always the better choice, as the first was more likely to lead to Condition Red and a violent confrontation.

Jane backed out of the website she had been exploring, wiped the browsing history, clicked off the computer, picked up her tote, and walked out of the alcove.

As she moved toward the front desk, she glanced back. The plump man was standing, holding something in one hand, at his side, so she couldn’t identify it, and watching her as he spoke into his phone.

When she opened the door at the main entrance, she saw another man standing by her metallic-gray Ford Explorer Sport in the public parking lot, talking on his phone. Tall, lean, dressed all in black, he was too distant for her to see his face. But on this mild sunny day, his knee-length raincoat might have been worn to conceal a sawed-off shotgun or maybe a Taser XREP 12-gauge that could deliver an electronic projectile and a disabling shock from a distance of a hundred feet. He looked as real as death and yet phantasmal, like an assassin who had slipped through a rent in the cosmic fabric between this world and another, on some mystical mission.

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’d 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 rear 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 the park 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 be 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, confirms his belief in the need to impose 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. She wears a verbena fragrance as subtle as the mere memory of a scent.

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 were 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, 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. 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.”

“Andre, my chef,” Hollister says, “is an adjusted person. He is obsessed with food. He lives only to cook.”

If the term adjusted person strikes Thomas Buckle as odd, he gives no indication of puzzlement.

After a sip of wine, Hollister continues. “According to friends of hers, Jane became obsessed with proving her husband, Nick, didn’t commit suicide, that he was murdered, and when she took a leave of absence from the FBI, she devoted herself to investigating Nick’s death. On the other hand, authorities and media say she was merely putting up a good front to divert suspicion from her role in his death. We’re told she drugged him and got him into the bathtub and slit his throat, cutting his carotid artery with his Marine Ka-Bar knife in such a way that it looked to the coroner as if he’d taken his own life. But what if that’s all a lie?”

Buckle is intrigued. “What if is the essence of storytelling. So what if?”

Hollister continues with relish. “Jane told friends that in her research she found a fifteen-percent increase in suicides during the past few years, that all of it involved well-liked, stable people successful in their professions, happy in their relationships, none with a history of depression, people like her husband.”

“A few nights ago,” Tom Buckle says, “on that TV show Sunday Magazine, they did an hour about Hawk. They included experts who said the rate of suicide isn’t constant. It goes up, goes down. And all this about happy people killing themselves isn’t the case.”

“Remember my what-if, Tom. What if it’s all a lie, and some in the media are part of it? What if Jane Hawk is on to something, and they need to demonize her with false charges, silence her?”

“You see this as a conspiracy story.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, then, it sure would be a conspiracy of unprecedented proportions.”

“Unprecedented,” Hollister agrees. “Heroic. Involving thousands of powerful people in government and the private sector. Let’s say these conspirators called themselves … Techno Arcadians.”

“Arcadia. From ancient Greece. A place of peace, innocence, prosperity. Essentially Utopia.”

Hollister beams and claps his hands twice. “You are just the young man to understand my story.”

“But why ‘techno’?”

“Do you know what nanotechnology is, Tom?”

“Very tiny machines made up of a handful of atoms, or maybe molecules. They say it’s the future, with unlimited medical and industrial applications.”

“You are so cutting-edge,” Hollister declares and pushes a call button on the table leg. “When I saw your films, I said, ‘This is a guy on the cutting edge.’ I’m delighted to see I was right.”

In answer to the silent summons, Mai-Mai returns to freshen their wine and remove the empty plates that held the Parmesan crisps.

Thomas Buckle smiles at her and thanks her, but he seems to have intuited that the proper behavior in these circumstances is to treat her with reserve, not as if she were working at Olive Garden.

The entertainment business hasn’t coarsened him yet, for though Mai-Mai fascinates and attracts him, he watches her not with evident lust, but with an almost adolescent wistfulness and yearning.

When the two men are alone once more, Hollister says, “Let’s suppose these conspirators, these Techno Arcadians, have developed a nanomachine brain implant, a control mechanism, that makes complete puppets of the people in whom it’s installed. And the puppets don’t know what’s been done to them, don’t know they’re now … property.”

The director blinks, blinks, and a certain quiet excitement comes over him that has nothing to do with six hundred million dollars, that arises from his passion for filmmaking.

“So … central to the story would be the issue of free will. A conspiracy intent on subjugating all humanity, the death of freedom, a sort of technologically imposed slavery.”

Hollister grins like an amateur author thrilled that a real writer found merit in his scenario. “You like it so far?”

“I damn well do. I like it more by the minute. Even though Jane Hawk inspired the idea, we can’t say this is her story, so we’d have to change the character to maybe a CIA agent or something, make her a little older. Maybe it’s even a male lead. But one thing … why would anyone submit to having such a brain implant surgically installed?”

Leaning forward again, punctuating his revelation with a wink, Hollister speaks in a stage whisper. “No surgery required. You drug them or otherwise overpower them when they’re alone, and the implant is administered by injection.”

4

Jane Hawk hurried out of the storage room. Milky daylight spilled through a large sales area and curdled to gray in a hallway. Two doors stood open on each side of the hall, a shadowy bath and dark empty offices.

At the front of the store, two frosted-glass show windows each bore the words CLASSIC PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY painted in script, reversed from Jane’s perspective. Between the windows stood a door with a frosted inlay, and as she approached it, a man shape loomed beyond like a stalker emerging out of fog in a disturbing dream.

He must be one of them. She’d have to take him down to get to the street and away, but even if he was a mortal threat, she could not risk resorting to gunfire when there were sure to be pedestrians on the sidewalk.

The tall man in the raincoat might already be entering the back of the place from the alleyway.

Jane’s attention swung toward an interior door to her right, four panels of solid wood, no glass. If it was only a closet, she was cornered.

Instead, beyond lay stairs ascending into gloom. In nearly blinding darkness, she used the handrail to guard against a fall until she arrived at a landing. Another flight led up to a second landing where pale light issued from an open door.

Perhaps the photographer who had once run a business out of the ground floor had lived above his studio.

Considering that the people closing in on her seemed to have herded her into this building, one of them might be waiting in the second-floor apartment.

Her heart labored but didn’t race, for she was in the grip of dread rather than full-blown fright. If these were Arcadians—and who else could they be?—they were not going to kill her here. They were going to corner her, Taser her, chloroform her, and convey her to a secure facility where she could scream herself hoarse without being heard by anyone sympathetic to her plight.

Ultimately they were going to inject her with the neural lace that would web her brain and enslave her. Then they would drain from her the names of everyone who had been of assistance to her in this crusade and would insist upon knowing the whereabouts of her five-year-old son, Travis. When she was their obedient puppet, they would eventually instruct her to kill herself.

But not just herself. She knew these elitist creeps. She knew the icy coldness of their minds, the blackness of their hearts, the pure contempt with which they viewed those who did not share their misanthropic view of humanity and did not endorse their narcissism. They would relish cruel vengeance for the trouble she had caused them, for their comrades who had tried to murder her and had been killed instead. They would instruct her to torture her own child and slaughter him; only when he was brutally ravaged and dead would they tell her to kill herself. In the thrall of the nanoweb, with its filaments wound through her brain, she would be unable to resist even the most horrific of their commands.

Compared to injection, a quick death would be a mercy.

She put her tote beside the open door. Drew the Heckler & Koch Compact .45 from the rig under her sport coat. She hated clearing doorways in such situations, but there was no time to hesitate.

Pistol in a two-hand grip, leading with head and gun, low and fast, she crossed the threshold, stepped to the right, back against the wall, eyes on the Heckler’s front sight as she swept the room left to right.

Three windows facing the street. No blinds or drapes. Morning light slanting in under scalloped fabric awnings. No furniture. No carpeting on the hardwood floor. Nothing moved except a few dust balls stirred by the slight draft she’d made on entering.

An archway connected this room to others toward the back of the building, where darkness reigned, and there was a door on the right, ajar.

She held her breath and heard only silence. Both training and intuition argued that if someone was in the apartment with her, he would have made a move by now.

The silence was broken when a sound rose from below, perhaps someone ascending the stairs.

She returned to the apartment entrance to retrieve her tote. Among other things, it contained $90,000, all of which—and more—she had taken from the stashes of wealthy Arcadians who had tried and failed to kill her. She couldn’t afford to lose it; she was fighting a quiet war, but a war nonetheless, and wars cost money.

The building was old, and the stairs creaked under the weight of whoever was climbing them.

She closed the door. The deadbolt was intact. She engaged it.

5

Mai-Mai serves a small chopped salad sprinkled with pine nuts and crumbles of feta cheese.

Tom Buckle smiles and thanks her and watches her lithe form as she exits through the butler’s pantry.

When the girl is gone, Wainwright Hollister says, “I need to explain how an injectable brain implant might be feasible, Tom. I don’t want you to think of this as a science-fiction movie. It’s a thoroughly contemporary thriller.”

“I know a little about nanotech, Wayne, just enough to accept the premise.”

“Good. Very good. Now suppose hundreds of thousands of these microscopic constructs can be suspended in ampules of fluid and stored at temperatures between—oh, let’s say—thirty-six and fifty degrees, where they remain in stasis. When injected, the warmth of the blood gradually activates them. They’re brain-tropic. The veins conduct them to the heart, then the carotid and vertebral arteries bring them to the brain. Do you know what the blood-brain barrier is, Tom?”

Buckle evidently finds the salad highly agreeable and pauses to swallow a mouthful before saying, “I’ve heard of it, but I’m no whiz when it comes to medical matters.”

“Nor do you need to be. You’re an artist and a damn fine one. Ideas and emotions are the stuff of your work. So … the blood-brain barrier is a complex biological mechanism that allows vital substances in the blood to penetrate the walls of the brain’s numerous capillaries while keeping out harmful substances such as certain drugs. Let’s imagine these amazingly tiny nanoconstructs have been designed to pass through the blood-brain barrier, after which they assemble into a control mechanism in the brain.”

“Could they really self-assemble? I mean … many, many thousands of them?”

“An excellent question, Tom. We wouldn’t have a viable story if I didn’t have an answer!” Hollister pauses to enjoy his salad.

“It’s snowing.” Thomas Buckle points to the windows behind his host.

Hollister turns in his chair to watch the first snowflakes, the size of quarters and half dollars, spiraling out of the low clouds like some jackpot disgorged by a celestial slot machine.

Refocusing his attention on his guest, he says, “The forecast is for twelve inches. Temperature will drop to the low twenties by nightfall. No wind yet, but it’s coming. Winter lingers on these plains. Have you experienced a storm in territory such as this?”

“I’m a California boy. My experience of snow is entirely from TV and movies.”

Hollister nods. “If a man were on the run from a killer on a night like the one coming, his least concern might be his would-be assassin. The weather itself could be the deadlier foe.” Before Buckle might wonder at this odd statement, his host favors him with a beguiling smile. “I’ve got a story in mind for just such a movie. But before I bore you with a second scenario, let’s see if I can make my nano tale convincing to the end. You asked how these tiny constructs could be made to self-assemble in the brain. Have you heard the term ‘Brownian movement’?”

6

Jane was at the moment safe behind the locked door of the second-floor apartment, although not safe for long.

This was a two-story building, and like all the buildings on this block—whether two, three, or four stories—it had a flat roof with a low parapet. There would be an exit to the roof somewhere in these rooms, probably by way of a metal spiral staircase tucked into a service closet.

But she didn’t want to go up and out that way. If she got to the roof through a trapdoor or through a stairhead shed, she might discover that they had anticipated her and had stationed one of their own up there to greet her. Then she would have nowhere to go.

Even if no sonofabitch with an XREP Taser waited above, Jane didn’t fancy a wild flight across rooftops as in a James Bond flick. Although the buildings varied in height, they were contiguous, and she was likely to find service ladders bolted to walls to allow roof-maintenance men easy passage from one elevation to another. However, she’d already counted five agents in this operation, so there might be more. And if they had mounted a force of that size, they might also have a drone at their service.

She’d previously survived an encounter with two weaponized drones in a San Diego park, something similar to a DJI Inspire 1 Pro with a three-axis gimbaled camera. An eight- or ten-pound drone couldn’t be fitted with even a miniature belt feed loaded with .22-caliber rounds, because the recoil would destabilize the craft. But those in San Diego featured a low-recoil compressed-air weapon that fired needle-like quarrels perhaps containing a tranquilizer.

The people now closing in on her would not risk using such a drone on a busy suburban street in a commercial district, but they might keep one hovering above the roofs where, if she appeared, she could be at once dropped unconscious without much chance that anyone at street level would see the assault.

The prospect of a machine assailant gave her a deeper chill than did a thug with a Taser XREP 12-gauge, not necessarily for good reason, but because it seemed to herald a new world in which those people not enslaved by nanoweb neural lace would be policed and punished by robots incapable of empathy or mercy.

She went to the front windows of the apartment living room, which faced onto the street and offered her the best—the only—chance of escaping capture.

7

Sitting with his back to the windows, Hollister is so attuned to the moment, so looking forward to Tom Buckle’s sudden realization of his dire situation, so enthusiastic about the pending hunt, his senses so heightened that he can almost feel the huge snowflakes spiraling through the windless day behind his back, can almost hear those delicate wheels of crystal lace turning as they descend, can almost smell the blood that will form patterns in brilliant contrast across a canvas of snow.

“Brownian movement,” he explains, “is progress by random motion. It’s one of nature’s primary mechanisms, Tom. The easiest way to explain is with the example of ribosomes, those tiny mitten-shaped organelles that exist in enormous numbers in the cytoplasm of human cells. They manufacture proteins.”

When his host pauses for wine, Buckle appears to be dazzled when he says, “Man, you’ve really worked this story out in detail.”

Hollister can feel his blue eyes twinkling with merriment, and he knows his captivating smile has never served him better. “Only because I so very much want you to be part of this, to sign on for this adventure with me. Now, ribosomes. Each one has more than fifty different components. If you break down thousands of ribosomes into their individual components and thoroughly mix them in a suspending fluid, then they ricochet off the molecules of the suspending medium and keep knocking against one another until one by one the fifty-some parts come together like puzzle pieces and, amazingly, assemble into whole ribosomes again. That is Brownian movement. It works with Bertold Shenneck’s control mechanism because each of the components is designed to fit in only one place, so the puzzle can’t assemble incorrectly.”

“‘Shenneck’?” Buckle asks.

Hollister should not have mentioned Shenneck, who had in fact invented the nanoweb implant. Now he covers his slip of the tongue. “As I was working this out, I needed to name some characters. That’s just what I call the scientist who developed the nanoweb implant.”

“It’s a good name for the character, but …” The director frowns. “It sounds a little familiar. We should check it out, make sure there’s not a prominent Bertold Shenneck out there anywhere.”

Hollister dismisses the issue with a wave of one hand. “I’m not wedded to the name. Not at all. You’re better than I am at this.”

Having finished his salad, the director blots his mouth on his napkin. “So how long does it take this brain implant to assemble once it’s been injected?”

“Maybe eight or ten hours with the first-generation implant, but the device will be improved, so it might be brought down to, say, four hours. The subject has no memory of being restrained and injected. Once the control mechanism is in place, his mind can be accessed with a key phrase like ‘Play Manchurian with me.’ Once accessed, he’ll do anything he’s told to do—and think he’s acting of his own volition.”

The key phrase delights Buckle. “That great Cold War movie about brainwashing. The Manchurian Candidate. John Frankenheimer directed from a Richard Condon novel. Sinatra and Laurence Harvey. Angela Lansbury as Harvey’s power-mad mother. About 1962, I think.”

“Shenneck liked his little jokes. The scientist character. Whatever we’re going to call him.”

“My head is swimming, Wayne, but in a good way. I’m really getting into the whole concept. But exactly how does this tie to Jane Hawk, where we started?”

Responding to the call button, Mai-Mai enters to remove the salad plates.

Hollister says, “Just imagine, Tom, that these Techno Arcadians are intent not only on repressing the unruly masses by injecting and controlling selected leaders in politics, religion, business, and the arts. They also want to prevent charismatic individuals with wrong ideas from influencing the culture.”

Tom smiles at Mai-Mai and then responds to his host. “What wrong ideas?”

“Any ideas in disagreement with Arcadian philosophy. Let’s say it’s been decided that controlling these charismatic types isn’t enough, that it’s necessary to remove their unique genomes from society, prevent them from propagating. So they receive a brain implant and are later directed to commit suicide.”

Tom Buckle nods. “Like Jane Hawk’s husband. But how would these people be chosen for elimination?”

“A computer model identifies them by their public statements, beliefs, accomplishments. Then they’re put on the Hamlet list.”

“‘Hamlet’? Why Hamlet?”

“The theory is that if someone had killed Hamlet in the first act, a lot more people would have been alive at the end.”

Frowning, Tom Buckle says, “For the movie, we’d probably have to call it something other than the Hamlet list. Anyway, how many people would be on this list?”

“Let’s imagine the computer model says that, in a country as large as ours, two hundred and ten thousand of the most charismatic potential leaders in each generation would have to be removed at the rate of eight thousand four hundred a year.”

“Mass murder. This is a very dark movie, Wayne.”

“To the Arcadians, it’s not murder. They think of it as culling from the herd any individuals with dangerous potential, a necessary step toward peace and stability.”

Mai-Mai returns with the entrée: sea bass, asparagus, and miniature buttered raviolis stuffed with mascarpone and red peppers.

Conversation throughout the main course focuses on what changes to make in the lead character and possible twists and turns in the story line. Hollister mentions the “whispering room,” a feature of the brain implants, by which adjusted people are able to communicate with one another via microwave transmission, brain to brain, as Elon Musk, of Tesla and Space X fame, has predicted will eventually be possible. They have the potential of forming a hive mind. The idea delights Buckle. Hollister enjoys this blue-sky session far more than he would if he were actually going to finance a motion picture.

Movies are terrible investments. Perhaps three out of ten make a profit. And there are countless ways that the distribution company can massage the box office numbers and pad the costs, so when there is a profit, much of it disappears.

However, Tom is bright and enthusiastic. Inventing this movie with him is a pleasure. The more the young man talks, the clearer it becomes that the computer model was right to put him on the Hamlet list, and it is good that he will be dead by dawn.

When Mai-Mai returns to remove their plates, Hollister says, “The time has come for you to do as we discussed.”

She meets his stare, and though she is submissive, she is also afraid. Her lips part as if she will speak, but instead of words, her voluptuous mouth produces only tremors.

As she stands beside her master’s chair, Hollister takes one of her hands in both of his, and he smiles reassuringly. He speaks to her as he might to a daughter. “It’s all right, child. It’s just a moment of performance art. You have always excelled as an artist. This is what you were born to do.”

Her fear abates. The tremor fades. She answers his smile with an affectionate smile of her own. She bends down to kiss his cheek.

Tom Buckle watches with evident perplexity. When Mai-Mai leaves the room with their plates, the filmmaker is at a loss for words and covers his uncertainty by taking a sip of wine and savoring it.

“I see you’re curious about Mai-Mai,” Hollister says.

“No, not at all,” Buckle demurs. “It’s none of my business.”

“In fact, Tom, it’s the essence of your business here. Mai-Mai is twenty-seven, a year older than you, an exceptional woman.”

Tom glances toward the swinging door through which Mai-Mai left the room. “She’s quite beautiful.”

“Quite,” Hollister echoes. “She’s also supremely talented. Her paintings redefine realism. They’re stunning. By the time she was twenty-two, she’d won numerous awards. By the time she was twenty-four, her work was represented by the most prestigious galleries. She broke new ground as well by combining several of her larger paintings with a unique form of performance art that began to draw enthusiastic crowds.”

“Does she still paint?”

“Oh, yes. Better than ever. Magnificent images exquisitely rendered.”

“Then why …”

“Why is she here serving us lunch?”

“I can’t help but wonder.”

“She creates paintings but doesn’t sell them anymore.”

“You sure know how to build mystery, Wayne.”

Hollister smiles. “I’ve intrigued you, have I?”

“Greatly. I’d love to see these paintings.”

“You can’t. After she finishes a new canvas, she destroys it.”

Bafflement creases Tom Buckle’s brow. “Whyever would she do such a thing?”

“Because she’s an adjusted person. She made the list.”

This incident with Mai-Mai has disoriented Tom just enough so that the word list has no immediate meaning for him.

“The Hamlet list,” Hollister explains.

Puzzlement gives way to misunderstanding, and Tom smiles. “You give one hell of a pitch meeting, Wayne. And she’s quite an actress.”

“She’s not an actress,” Hollister assures him. “She’s just an obedient little bitch. She destroys them because I tell her to.”

Just then Tom Buckle’s gaze shifts from his host to the wall of glass behind him. “What on earth …?” Tom rises from his chair.

Wainwright Hollister gets to his feet as well and turns to the window.

Mai-Mai stands naked on the terrace, in the swiftly falling snow, facing them and smiling serenely, seeming more mystical than real.

“Her body is as perfect as her face,” says Hollister, “but one can grow tired even of such perfection. I’ve had enough of her.”

A scarlet silk scarf drapes Mai-Mai’s right hand. It slides to the snow-carpeted terrace, revealing a pistol.

“Performance art,” Tom Buckle tells himself, for he is both confused and in denial.

Soundlessly snow falls and falls, cascades of white petals, as Mai-Mai puts the barrel of the gun in her mouth and seems to breathe out the dragon fire of muzzle flash, seems to fold to the terrace in slow motion, the flowerfall of snow settling silently on her silent corpse.

8

Jane raised the lower sash of a double-hung window.

A foot below the windowsill, running nearly the width of the building, a five-foot-wide cantilevered marquee overhung the public sidewalk, the front of it bearing the name of the closed photography studio.

She dropped her tote onto the lid of the marquee and followed it through the window.

The entire block was from the Art Deco period, and each of the shared-wall buildings had its own stylized marquee, each separated from the next by a two-foot-wide gap. Jane hurried eastward, sprang from that first projection onto a second, from the second onto a third.

With the tote slung over her left shoulder, she knelt on the edge of the third marquee, facing the building, gripped the decorative masonry cornice, and slid backward into empty air, hanging by her hands for a moment before dropping to the sidewalk.

She startled an old guy in a tam-o’-shanter and walking with a three-footed cane. “Pretty girls falling from the sky!” he declared. “These are days of miracles and wonder.”

In the drop, her tote had slid off her arm. She snared it from the sidewalk.

“If only I were fifty years younger,” he said.

Jane said, “If only I were fifty years older,” kissed him on the cheek, stepped between two parked cars, and dodged across three lanes of traffic.

From the farther side of the street, she looked back and saw the man in the dark raincoat at the open window through which she had exited the building, and below him another man venturing forth from the recessed entryway to the former photography studio. They both had spotted her.

At the corner, she turned north, out of their sight. Ahead, a thirtysomething guy was preparing to climb onto a fully chromed Harley Road King cruiser. His open-face helmet boasted an American flag decal. She hoped it meant something to him.

Breathless, she said, “Give a girl a ride?”

He didn’t look her up and down as men usually did, only met her eyes. “Where you going?”

“Anywhere but here. And fast.”

“Cops or not cops?”

She had to give him something to win cooperation. “Maybe they carry a badge, but it’s bogus.”

As he swung aboard the saddle, he said, “Climb on and hold tight.”

She sat just forward of the saddlebags, tote straps over one shoulder, arms around him.

The motor was hopped up, with the distinct sound of Screamin’ Eagle pistons and cylinders.

Jane glanced over her shoulder. One of her pursuers turned the corner.

The Road King shot away from the curb.

9

The sky unseen behind the raveling white skeins with which it cocooned the world, and on the terrace Mai-Mai’s once lovely form stiffening under a crystalline lacework …

This side of the windows, Tom Buckle repeats, “Performance art,” though the artist is not going to stand up, bloodied and brainless, to take a bow.

Adam, Brad, and Carl, the three most senior members of the ranch’s eighteen-man security force, who once had other names and personalities and real lives, enter the breakfast room. They are dressed in black, with the Crystal Creek Ranch logo in white stitching on the breast pockets of their shirts.

Although Tom Buckle still regards the suicide of Mai-Mai with stunned disbelief, he at once responds to these three men with fear and alarm, as well he should. They have the intensity of wolves on the hunt, and though their stares are as sharp as filleting knives, there is a deadness in their eyes that implies, quite accurately, that they are as coldhearted as machines.

“Tom,” Hollister says in a tone of voice that suggests nothing out of the ordinary has occurred, “do you remember the name of the brainwashed assassin in The Manchurian Candidate?”

Tom eases away from the newcomers. “What is this? What the hell is happening here?”

In answer to his own question, Hollister says, “His name was Raymond Shaw. Specimens like these three”—he gestures toward the security agents—“we call rayshaws. One word. Lowercase r. They’re adjusted people, injected with a control mechanism. But this nanoweb is different from those administered to Mai-Mai and Nick Hawk and others on the Hamlet list. This version scrubs away their memories, every last one, deconstructs their personalities, and programs them to be bodyguards who, without hesitation, will give their lives for their master. I am their master, Tom, and if I tell them to kill you, they will do so with extreme prejudice.”

The film director eases away from the rayshaws until he backs into a sideboard. He is physically rigid, but there is no doubt he’s reeling mentally and emotionally.

“Your work has earned you a place on the Hamlet list, Tom, and therefore a death sentence.”

The filmmaker dares to look away from the rayshaws and meet his host’s eyes. Although he is a screenwriter as well as a director, he is at a loss for words, perhaps struggling to make sense of this bizarre turn of events and plug it into a dramatic structure that promises him a triumphant resolution.

“I could order these men to subdue you and inject you and send you back to California with no knowledge of anything that has occurred here.”

Wainwright Hollister rounds the end of the table, approaching Tom Buckle.

“Do you know Roger and Jennifer Boseman?”

As if shell-shocked, Tom says, “What?”

“Roger and Jennifer Boseman?”

“They live next to me, neighbors, next door.”

“Their daughter Kaylee, ten years old. She’s quite a beautiful child. After you’re injected, adjusted, and sent home, if I call you in a few weeks and instruct you to kidnap Kaylee, rape her, torture her, kill her, and then kill yourself … you will obey.”

He comes face-to-face with his guest.

“After that outrage, the two acclaimed films you’ve made will be judged the work of a monster, withdrawn from distribution in all formats, never to be seen again. Whatever small effect you’ve thus far had on the culture will be erased.”

The director finally accepts what he desperately doesn’t want to believe. “Dear God, it’s real. The nanoweb, the injections, the enslavement.”

“Yes. But ‘enslavement’ is the wrong word, Tom. Most human beings are impetuous, imprudent, ignorant, given to superstition and other irrational behavior. They’re maladjusted. For their own sake and to preserve this fragile planet, we merely intend to adjust them.”

“You’re insane.”

“No, Tom. I’m the clearest-thinking person you’ll ever meet. I have no illusions about the meaning of life.”

Hollister favors the younger man with a kindly smile worthy of a country doctor in a painting by Norman Rockwell.

“I’m also a man of profound convictions. I don’t always leave the dirty work to others. Sometimes I do the adjusting myself. The adjusting or, as in your case, the extermination. But I am also a fair man, Tom. In the contest to come, you will have a chance to survive.”

As though inspired by countless moments of movie heroics, Tom Buckle throws a punch, but as ineptly as a supporting character who is playing a fool. Hollister blocks the blow with a forearm, seizes Buckle’s wrist, twists that arm up behind the man’s back, and shoves him hard. The director staggers into the window wall and slaps both palms against the glass to stop himself from crashing through.

To the rayshaws, Hollister says, “Mr. Buckle needs to be suited up and instructed as to the rules of the hunt.”

Just then the first wind of the storm invades the terrace, and the scarlet silk scarf, which once covered Mai-Mai’s pistol, billows off the snow-skinned flagstones and undulates six or seven feet above her corpse, as though it is her very spirit, risen from her hushed and cooling heart.

10

The twin-cam engine, maybe 95ci, gave the bike true zip. The driver worked the five-speed transmission with finesse and took hard corners with the confidence of a Star Wars character piloting an antigravity sled.

After an almost twenty-minute ride, he slowed in a residential neighborhood in a part of the valley far enough north that it didn’t qualify as a Los Angeles suburb. The houses were old, the properties large, the trees tall and plentiful, live oaks and eucalyptuses and all kinds of palms, some of them long left untrimmed.

He pulled into a driveway that ran alongside a meticulously maintained bungalow with craftsman details. The place was shaded by immense, well-kept phoenix palms.

At the back of the property stood a separate garage with three double-wide doors, one of which rose as the Harley approached. The driver coasted under the up-folding panels, stopped in the garage, killed the engine, and put down the kickstand.

Jane had been expecting him to drop her miles from where they started, but in a public place. Evidently he had brought her home instead. The three garage bays were deep and open to one another, housing a well-equipped machine shop and a number of motorcycles.

Wary not so much because he’d brought her here of all places, but because the world in its dark ways had woven wariness through her bones, she got off the Road King, alert for trouble.

He removed his helmet, put it on the bike seat, stripped off his driving gloves, combed his thick hair with one hand. Wide-set malachite eyes. Clean, strong features. The suggestion that a smile was imminent.

Jane said, “Thanks for the lift.”

He cocked his head to study her.

“But where are we, and how far do I have to hike to get a bus?”

A low growl drew her attention. An enormous dog stood at the open garage door. A mastiff with an apricot-fawn coat, black face, and sooted ears.

Mastiffs had a reputation as aggressive, which they weren’t—unless trained to be.

Her rescuer finally spoke. “You leaned in all the way, never tensed no matter how radical the rake.”

“I’ve ridden before.”

“Ridden or driven?”

“Both.”

Indicating the glowering dog, his master said, “Sparky’s harmless. No bark, no bite.”

“No wag, either.”

“Give him time. Maybe old Sparky knows you’re carrying a concealed weapon.”

“How would he know that?”

“Maybe the cut of your sport coat.”

“Your dog has street smarts.”

“Also, when you were holding tight and leaning in, I felt it against my back.”

She shrugged. “It’s a dangerous world. A girl’s got to look out for herself.”

“Too true. Anyway, I’ve got a solid bike for you.”

“I didn’t know I was in the market for one.”

“You were on foot, so they must’ve made your car.”

“‘They’?”

“The guys with bogus badges.”

“You brought me all the way here to sell me a bike?”

“I didn’t say sell.”

“I’m not going to work for it.”

“Stay cool. I’m way married. My wife’s in the house right now. She saw us drive up. Anyway, she’s all I need.”

Jane put down the tote bag to have both hands free. She glanced toward the house. Maybe the wife existed, maybe she didn’t. If she existed, perhaps she was insurance against an attempted assault—or maybe she was cool with rape and would even assist her husband. Jane had once taken down a serial killer whose wife charmed his targets into a sense of safety so they could be easily abducted; she cooked elaborate meals for the girls during the weeks that her husband used them, brought fresh flowers to their windowless basement prison, and assisted in the disposal of their broken bodies after hubby wearied of them. She said she did it because she loved him so much.

“Name’s Garret. Garret Nolan.”

“I’m Leslie Anderson,” she lied.

His face finally formed the smile that had been pending. There was a knowing quality to it, which disturbed Jane.

The mastiff had entered the garage. He intently sniffed her shoes as though to map the journey that had brought her here.

Garret Nolan went to a wall switch and clicked on the lights in all six vehicle stalls. “Racers, street cruisers, touring bikes. I break them down, build them better, customize them. If you need to get all the way to the Canadian border, you’ll want a bagger.”

From the Canadian border reference, she inferred that he had assumed more about her status as a fugitive than she’d given him reason to deduce. She felt the skin crepe on the back of her neck.

“I have two Road Kings,” he continued, “rebuilt slick, but I’ve got too much in them just to give them away. What I can give you is this 2012 Big Dog Bulldog Bagger, which I was going to tear down next. It’s a righteous bike.”

“You don’t have to give me anything. I have money. I can pay.”

“I won’t take your money. The Big Dog has a lot of miles on it, but it’s in good shape. I’ve ridden it myself. You don’t need it flashed up with Performance Machine wheels, Kuryakyn mufflers, and all the rest. It’s a reliable beast of burden and won’t call undue attention. Test ride it around the neighborhood. You like it, take it. There isn’t a license plate, but you could maybe go a couple thousand miles before a cop might notice.”

She stared at him in silence until his lingering half smile flatlined. Then she said, “I ask for a ride out of a tight spot, and you want to give me a bike. What’s this about, Mr. Nolan?”

He shrugged. “I believe you. I want to help.”

“Believe me about what?”

“That you’re innocent.”

“I never said I was innocent. Anyway … innocent of what?”

He was a big guy, about six feet two and solid, with an air of rough experience about him, and yet he suddenly seemed as shy as a boy, looking down at his shoes to avoid meeting her eyes.

“Innocent of what?” she pressed.

He gazed through the open door, at the house shaded by phoenix palms, at the still cascades of fronds in the warm, breathless day.

She waited, and when he looked at her again, he said, “That’s a bitchin’ disguise, but seeing through disguises was part of my job. You’re her. You’re Jane Hawk.”

11

Sparky, the mastiff, sniffed along the zipper of the tote bag, as though trained to locate the banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills that, among other things, it contained.

“If I were Hawk,” Jane said, “maybe it wouldn’t be smart of you to say so to my face. Half the world hunting her down, she must be one crazy desperate bitch.”

Garret Nolan smiled again. “I won’t say what service I was in. We did black-ops work in Mexico and Central America, no uniforms, we went native. Our actions targeted MS-13, other gangs, those linked to nests of Iranian operatives in Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua.”

He turned his back on her and went to a square of perfboard beside a workbench and took a set of keys from one of the pegs.

“We knew who we were looking for—names, faces—but a lot of the time they changed their appearance. This funny thing happens when you use facial-recognition programs to see through disguises. When you do it long enough, often enough, it’s as if your brain uploads a little of the software, so you develop an eye for a masquerade, no matter how well it’s done.”

When he returned to her, he held out the keys, which she didn’t at once accept.

“Another problem you have is you’re a damn good-looking woman.”

“If I were Hawk, what should I do—scar myself?”

“Women as good-looking as you rarely use so much makeup and eye shadow, such bright lipstick. If it can’t improve the face, maybe it’s meant to obscure it.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“The mole on the upper lip. Why haven’t you had it removed?”

“I’m skittish about doctors and scalpels.”

“Fake moles, fake port-wine birthmarks, fake tattoos—they’re popular camouflage. I don’t need a scalpel. Bet I could remove it with a little spirit-gum solvent.”

“Leslie Anderson,” she insisted. “Born in Portland, late of Vegas, got myself in trouble when I jacked five thousand credit-card numbers that my hacker boss had stolen, went into business for myself, running a buy-and-fence operation, until he found me.”

Nolan still held out the keys. “The color-changing contact lens on your left eye isn’t fitted properly. There’s a thin crescent of blue above the gray. Jane Hawk has blue eyes.”

She remembered how, on first meeting him, he had not looked her up and down, but had stared intently into her eyes.

“The ash-blond wig is the best, tightly fitted for action,” he said. “But if the color was natural, your skin would probably be paler. With your complexion, your hair’s more likely to be honey blond—like Jane Hawk’s.”

She took the keys from him. “I don’t have to be Jane Hawk to need the bike. But if you’re hot on giving it to Leslie Anderson—”

“‘—born in Portland, late of Vegas,’” he said. “Another thing is how you move. Spine straight, shoulders back, athletic, quick and confident. That’s how she moves in what film they have of her.”

“Mama Anderson taught her girl not to slouch.”

“Then there’s the fact the media says Jane Hawk took part in some terrorist attack in Borrego Springs three days ago, maybe a hundred dead, maybe a lot more than that. They say she’s still somewhere in Southern California.”

“If I were her,” Jane said, “I’d be long gone from the state.”

Denied the chance to investigate the tote’s contents, the mastiff grumbled with disappointment when Jane picked up the bag.

“I really can pay for this,” she said.

“Then what would I have to brag on when you’re vindicated?”

She stowed the tote in one of the bike’s saddlebags. “Let’s say I’m her. Why would you do this?”

“From my days in … the service, I know how deeply the enemies of freedom have penetrated this country’s institutions, public and private sector. The way they’re demonizing you, their viciousness and ferocity, tells me you’re right about the plague of suicides, and somehow it’s … engineered.”

“I haven’t heard Hawk says it’s engineered.”

“Maybe because nobody’s given her a chance. Digital technology and biotech—somehow they have to be part of this.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He said, “People are dazzled by high tech, but there’s a dark side, dark and darker. What horror isn’t possible today … it’ll be possible tomorrow.”

“Or maybe it is, after all, possible today,” she said.

12

The three rayshaws were of a physical type, big men with thick necks and broad shoulders and sledgehammer fists, their eyes cold, their stares as impersonal as camera lenses, as if they were not of women born, but instead were immortal archetypes of violence, risen from some infernal realm millennia earlier, having come down the centuries on a mission of barbarity, cruelty, and murder.

They escorted Tom Buckle to the guest suite where he’d left his baggage. Nothing he said could engender a response. They spoke to him only to tell him what he must do. They didn’t overtly threaten him; mortal threat was implicit in their every look and action.

Items that didn’t belong to him had been placed on the bed: long underwear, a flannel shirt, a Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit by Hard Corps, two different kinds of socks, supple-looking gloves. Beside the bed stood a pair of boots.

“Strip naked,” one of the men commanded. “Dress in those things.”

Tom recognized the futility of appealing to these creatures’ common humanity, for there was nothing human about them other than their form. Their faces varied, but their expressions were eerily the same, as neutral as the masks of mannequins. No emotion shaped their features. Their faces lacked evidence of personality, and they seemed as remote and ghastly as the pale whiteness of the moon in daylight.

Wainwright Hollister’s movie was in fact reality, and Tom Buckle was the doomed lead in a noir thriller where the theme was meant to be the hopelessness of hoping. He was Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A. Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.

Watching him undress, the three men said nothing.

He obeyed them. He could do nothing but obey. He believed Hollister’s assertion that they were killing machines.

For twenty-six years, he had lived a relatively charmed life, on a glide path into film directing. He’d never known terror until now. He was terrified not only of these creatures and of Hollister, but also by a sudden sense that a sinkhole might open in his psyche, a sucking black madness from which there could be no escape.

As Tom dressed in the storm suit, Mai-Mai’s suicide played in his memory so vividly that the room around him seemed to darkle like a theater where all the light was contained within the screen: her exquisite face, her beautiful body, she a symbol of mystical power, as if she were a goddess who stepped down from a heretofore unknown pantheon, the scene remembered in black-white-gray, as though from a movie made in the 1930s, but for the scarlet silk scarf that slid off her hand and the muzzle flash of the pistol, her collapsing with an awful grace, her seeming power revealed as an illusion, removed from this world with as little concern as Hollister might give to a cockroach before stamping on it.

The room was warm, but Tom felt as cold as the snow-swept world beyond the windows. His heart drummed with fear, but there was anger in it, too, an icy rage that scared him. He had never been an angry man. He worried that his fury might compel him to do something that would diminish his already slim chance of survival.

When he was suited and booted, with the hood snug around his face, the three men led him into the vast garage, where Hollister maintained a collection of expensive, exotic vehicles: a Lamborghini Huracán, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Bugatti Chiron, an armored Gurkha by Terradyne, and maybe twenty others. A showroom-tile floor. A pin spot highlighting each set of wheels.

They took him to a Hennessey VelociRaptor 6 × 6, which was a bespoke version of a Ford F-150 Raptor, a jacked-up six-wheel crew-cab truck with numerous upgrades. The driver sat alone in the front. The other two rayshaws flanked their prisoner in the backseat, so that Tom felt wedged between the jaws of a vise.

As they drove into the gray light and spiraling snow showers of the late afternoon, the hulk to Tom’s right recited the simple rules of the hunt. The quarry would be given a two-hour lead. On foot, he could head in any direction that he wished—except that he must not attempt to return to the residence. Security sensors would be aware of his approach well before he drew near the house, and he would be cut down by Crystal Creek Ranch personnel with Uzis.

“Adjusted people,” Tom said, still struggling to believe what ample evidence proved to be true.

His instructor’s facial features remained as graven as cemetery granite, his stare chisel sharp but shallow. “The quarry will be armed with a nine-millimeter Glock featuring a ten-round magazine.” Neither he nor the other men used Tom’s name or even once referred to him with the pronoun you.

The rayshaw produced the gun, sans ammunition, and briefly explained its features.

Tom owned a pistol with which he practiced, at most, once a year. The other three hundred and sixty-four days, the weapon was in the back of his nightstand drawer. He had no illusions about being a good marksman.

His instructor gave him the Glock. “The magazine and ammunition will be provided upon arrival at the starting position of the hunt. The quarry will also receive six PowerBars for energy, as well as a tactical flashlight.”

“A map,” Tom said. “A map and a compass.”

None of the three men responded.

Snow raveled now in countless skeins through the loom of the day and formed a pristine fabric on the land.

“Hollister said I’d have a fair chance.” There was no evidence that they had heard him. Nevertheless, he said. “What’s fair about this? Nothing. Nothing’s fair about it.”

His own voice embarrassed him, sounded like the whining of a coddled child. He fell silent.

The VelociRaptor grumbled into the growing storm and the slowly dimming day, flakes like midget moths swarming through the beams of the headlights. They had turned off the blacktop that linked the residence to the distant airplane hangar housing the Gulfstream V, and seemed to be following a dirt track difficult to discern under thin shifting scarves of snow.

Fifteen or twenty minutes from the house, the truck came to a stop. The men flanking Tom opened the back doors and got out.

When he hesitated to follow, one of them said, “Now,” putting such menace into one word that Tom at once obeyed.