Fast for his size, with a substantial head start, he would reach the cover of the trees well before she did. If she plunged into the woodlet in his wake, she’d likely plunge as well into a bullet.

She hesitated at the dropped Taser shotgun but then snatched it up to be sure he didn’t return for it. She angled west of him and demanded more speed of herself and hoped that she made the tree line before he dared to stop, turn, and see where she had gone.

After the bright sun, the sudden shadows pooling in the broad glen seemed to have substance, a palpable darkness that was cool on her skin and a pressure on her eyes, its weight imposing a stillness in the oak grove and stifling all sound except her breathing.

She put down the Taser 12-gauge and slipped her arms into the sleeves of her coat and stood with her back to a massive tree trunk. She drew the Heckler and held it in both hands, arms close to her breast, muzzle directed toward the crosswork of layered limbs above, her stalker somewhere behind her, fifty or sixty feet to the east.

Waiting for her wide-open eyes to become dark adapted, striving to quiet her breathing, she listened intently but still heard only the distant Peterbilts and Macks, nothing nearby. The trucks were so far away that, instead of growling, they made a throaty, threatening purr, as if they were massive saber-toothed tigers that had crossed a gulf of time to hunt long after the extinction of their species.

Alert for any sound from her stalker, she knew that he likewise listened for the smallest revelation of her position. Cautiously she leaned away from the tree and turned her head to look around it.

If the canopy of oaks hadn’t allowed a brace of sun spears to stab down on the black Range Rover, she might not have seen it at the bottom of the glen, about sixty feet to the east and south of where she’d parked her Explorer. The vehicle waited, glossy-dark and as ominous as a hearse, shapes of sunlight in its windows like the pale, luminous faces of the long departed.

The lower half of the south wall of the glen, rising beyond the Range Rover, lay under a heavy thatching of branches. Those shadows were unrelieved. She liked those shadows, the cover they offered.

He would avoid the vehicle, figuring that she’d expect him to make for it and would then draw down on him while he was exposed. For the same reason, he wouldn’t imagine that she would go near it.

Moving anywhere was tricky, because the ground lay strewn with dead leaves that announced her when she stepped on them and with loose stones that would clatter out from underfoot.

The big man’s silence suggested that patience was one of his virtues. Evidently he was content to wait her out.

She couldn’t afford patience. If he had called for backup, a small army of these Arcadian creeps might be en route.

She put her back to the tree again and thought about the Range Rover and the dark slope beyond it. She looked downhill to study the frequency of trees and patted her sport-coat pockets to check where everything was stowed.

She holstered her pistol and sat on the ground and quietly removed her sneakers and pulled off her socks and slipped her bare feet into the shoes and tied the laces tight. With her switchblade, she cut a hole in the ribbed top of one sock. Working quickly, she knotted the toes of the socks together, extracted one of her plastic zip-ties from a coat pocket, freed it from the rubber band that kept it tightly coiled, put the zip-tie through the hole she’d made, and cinched it tightly to that sock. She coiled the plastic once more and stuffed it, with the socks, down the front of her jeans.

She got to her feet and stood with her back against the tree once more and took slow deep breaths and tried to think of another plan. There wasn’t one.

25

EGON GOTTFREY AND HIS CREW of eight descend on Longrin Stables in five vehicles, fast along the approach lane, clouds of dust roiling in their wake, as if they have ignited a prairie fire.

This once-failed property is now a thriving horse-breeding business built on sweat equity, producing standardbreds for harness racing, show-quality Tennessee walking horses, and the National Show Horse, a breed that combines the Arabian and the American saddlebred.

Gottfrey doesn’t care about the Longrins’ hard work or about the beauty of the horses, or about the dust that shrouds him and his crew as they slide to a stop in the receiving yard and pile out of their vehicles, a few of them sneezing.

He cares only about discerning what the Unknown Playwright’s script requires of him next. He’s pretty sure they’re here to find Ancel and Clare Hawk at any cost, and they must knock heads and break knees if necessary.

They are not wearing Kevlar because the law-abiding Longrins aren’t likely to instigate violence. Each of them wears a hands-free earpiece walkie-talkie, and each knows what he or she needs to do.

The last vehicle in the procession, the Cadillac Escalade driven by Paloma Sutherland, parks across the lane, barring exit. She and Sally Jones bail out and take up positions, pistols drawn.

Chris Roberts and Janis Dern park at the Victorian-style house and move fast to mount the porch steps, he at the back, she at the front of the residence. She pounds hard on the door. “FBI! FBI!”

Pedro and Alejandro set out to locate the stable hands and corral them in the fenced exercise yard outside Stable 5.

Gottfrey, accompanied by Vince Penn and Rupert Baldwin, makes his way quickly to Stable 3, where Chase Longrin has an office at one end of the building, opposite the tack room.

Vince is sneezing, and Rupert is cursing between violent fits of coughing. Gottfrey keeps trying to spit out the taste of dust.

The yellowish clouds drift with them; they aren’t able to walk into fresh air. The persistent aggravation of the dust might make a lesser man than Gottfrey concede its reality. However, he’s annoyed not with the dust, which is no more real than the stables, but with the Unknown Playwright who suddenly seems intent on furnishing the scene with more realistic detail than has lately been his style.

When they enter Stable 3, with stalls to both sides and curious horses attendant to their visitors, the smells of manure and straw and horseflesh form a fragrance divine compared to the dust outside. They breathe deeply as they stride toward the end of the structure, and Gottfrey calls out, “Chase Longrin? FBI! FBI, Mr. Longrin.”

Chase Longrin—six feet two, sun-bleached hair, sun-bronzed face—stands at the desk in his office, facing the open door, his expression as hard as that of a defender of the Alamo.

Entering the room, with Vince and Rupert close behind him, Gottfrey says, “Egon Gottfrey. FBI,” as he holds up his ID.

“Yes,” says Longrin, “so I heard. You sure did make a splashy entrance. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud.”

“We have a warrant for the arrest of Ancel and Clare Hawk.”

“You’ve got the wrong ranch. They live on the other side of Worstead, about nineteen miles by the state route.”

“They came here by horseback after two o’clock this morning. Before you deny that, Mr. Longrin, I must advise you that it’s a crime to lie to an FBI agent even if you’re not under oath.”

Looking Rupert Baldwin up and down, Longrin says, “Didn’t the FBI used to have a dress code?”

“We’ve found satellite video, infrared that tracks them all the way from their place to yours,” Gottfrey lies.

“I’d like to see your warrant, Agent Gottfrey.”

“The arrest warrant is for Ancel and Clare Hawk, not you.”

“I mean the warrant to search my property.”

“We are in active and urgent pursuit of suspects in a matter of national security, with reason to believe those we seek are on these premises. We’re operating under a broad FISA court order. A post hoc copy of the warrant is the best you’ll get.”

Rupert Baldwin, pinch-faced perhaps because he’s taken offense at the dress code remark, taps Gottfrey on the shoulder. He draws his boss’s attention to the computer screen on Longrin’s desk.

The screen is quartered into four images, each a security-camera view of part of the property, including the receiving yard where the dust has settled around the Rhino GX and other vehicles.

“Mr. Longrin,” says Gottfrey, “keeping in mind it’s a felony to lie to an FBI agent—where is your security-system video archived? We need to review Ancel and Clare Hawk’s arrival last night, so that we can determine if—and in what vehicle—they left here.”

26

IVAN PETRO DOWN ON ONE KNEE BEHIND A TREE, maintaining a low profile, possessed of a Zen master’s patience, passionate about the revolution, his fierce ambition fueled by bitter envy of those fools above him in the Arcadian ranks, smarter than them, able to quote long passages of Nietzsche and Weber and Freud word for word …