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 took 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?”