This frustration would explain why, once he found her, he had come after her alone instead of waiting for backup, as any clear-thinking Arcadian would have done. She was the prize of prizes, the cure for his frustration, and he must be loath to share the credit for her capture.

When she’d thwarted the Taser attack, especially if the hammer injured him, his confidence would have been rattled. Now, within a few minutes, she’d moved aggressively through the shadows, shooting ten rounds and setting two fires, counting on chaos to unsettle him further. When a man who rarely entertained much self-doubt began to wonder if he might be vulnerable after all, then what virtues he possessed—such as patience—frequently deserted him.

Fire could create its own draft. The heat from this second blaze drew toward it the cool air in the glen, a breeze that hugged the ground and chased the flames toward the top of the slope. But there were countercurrents, and when flaming debris was cast high enough by the lower draft, it was spun back into this little valley, some of it descending as harmless ashes, some still burning when it fell upon combustible material.

Maybe she’d misjudged him. Maybe the chaos she’d sown would grow out of control and consume her with him. Maybe playing with fire, as she had been doing for many weeks, figuratively and now literally, had drawn the devil to her or she to him, and this was now the fire of her final judgment.

She wriggled under the Range Rover.

30

AT THE LONGRIN HOUSE, Janis Dern’s insistent knocking and loud proclamation of her status as FBI bring to the door a freckle-faced girl of about twelve, a tomboy type in sneakers and worn blue jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words SEMPER FI.

The kid says, “Good gracious, lady, we’re not deaf.”

“Who’re you?” Janis demands.

“Laurie Longrin. If you’d like to have a seat on the porch, I can bring you some iced tea or lemonade, whichever you prefer.”

“Where’s your mother, your father?”

“Dad’s over in his office at Stable Three. Mom is out in the potato patch, plantin’ seeds.”

“Where would that be?”

The girl gestures more or less northwest, then steps across the threshold, pulls the door shut, and squeezes past Janis. “Come on, I’ll show you the way.”

Janis is the youngest of four sisters. As a consequence of that experience, she has determined never to have children, and in fact never to trust a child.

She says, “Hey, hey, wait a second,” halting Laurie at the porch steps. “This isn’t a farm. It’s a horse-breeding operation.”

“We’re versatile,” Laurie says. “We make horses and potatoes. Carrots, too, onions and radishes. And we sew really nice quilts.”

“I know your type,” Janis says. “You’re a conniving little shit, aren’t you?”

Before the girl can respond, Janis turns to the door, opens it, shouts, “FBI, FBI,” and enters the house.

The noxious child forces her way past Janis, into the foyer, sees Chris Roberts following the hall forward from the kitchen, and sprints up the stairs. “Here they come, Mom, and they aren’t the freakin’ FBI!”

Janis races after the kid, reaches the top of the stairs in time to see her disappear into a room near the end of the hall. A door slams. By the time Janis gets there, the door is locked.

If she were an FBI agent in reality and not just on paper, this situation would present Janis Dern with a problem regarding illegal searches and seizures. However, because she’s in no danger of having to answer to anyone at the Bureau or Homeland, only to her Techno Arcadian superiors, who expect results by any means necessary, she draws her pistol and kicks the door hard and kicks it again.

There is no deadbolt, only a simple privacy latch, which comes apart on the second kick, and the door rackets open.

Pistol in both hands, though expecting no serious resistance let alone a firefight, Janis enters the room low and so fast that the rebounding door misses her.

A home office. Laurie to the left, looking too damn pleased with herself. Devious little bitch. Her mother, Alexis, sitting at the desk, working so intently on a computer that she doesn’t even look up when the door crashes open.

“What’re you doing?” Janis demands of the mother. “Get away from the computer.”

Chris Roberts crosses the room in a few long strides, seizes the wheeled office chair, and shoves the woman away from the desk.

“Too late!” cries the infuriating brat.

In Chase Longrin’s office in Stable 3, a sudden tumult issues from the speaker in the twelve-line phone on the desk, followed by Janis Dern’s voice: “What’re you doing? Get away from the computer.”

Egon Gottfrey hadn’t previously noticed the red indicator light glowing above the word INTERCOM. As they had arrived in the stable and announced themselves, before they even found this office, Longrin must have opened a line between here and somewhere in the house.

A young girl’s voice comes over the intercom: “Too late!”

Gottfrey looks up at Chase Longrin, who is smiling.

Studying the computer screen, Chris Roberts says, “I think she just deleted the security-system video archives.”

Ancel and Clare Hawk came here in the night, on horseback, and they left in one vehicle or another, which would have been captured by the security cameras.

Janis looms over the smug child, glaring down at her, wanting to grab a fistful of her hair and pull hard and knock her down. “I know your type, oh, I know your type, you smartass little puke.”

Undaunted, the girl says, “What kind of numbnuts would believe potatoes grow from seeds?”

Raising the pistol as if to slash the barrel across Laurie’s face, Janis doesn’t intend to strike the girl, only to scare the exasperating self-satisfied look off that freckled countenance. It’s a patented Francine look. Exactly like Janis’s sister Francine.

The mother pulls a gun from under her chair and fires a round into the ceiling, bringing down a rain of plaster chips.

Janis pivots toward the mother, and here they are, each with a pistol in a two-hand grip, each a trigger pull away from blood and maybe death.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody wants this,” says Chris, having been careful not to draw his weapon.

“Maybe I want this,” Janis disagrees.

“This isn’t like you,” Chris says. “What’s got you so pissed?”

“Little Miss Semper Fi, this ugly freckled gash, thinks the rules don’t apply to her.”

“I’m not ugly,” the girl declares. “I know that for a fact.”

“It’s you,” the mother accuses Janis, “who thinks the rules don’t apply to her. You and these other bastards. Get out of my house.”

“It’s our house,” Janis says, “until we give it back to you.”

Chris Roberts needs two tense minutes to negotiate an end to the standoff in Alexis Longrin’s home office.

31

NEAR THE TOP OF THE NORTH SLOPE, Ivan Petro stands in shadow, watching firelight colonize the darkness, the thin smoke growing thicker. The acrid scent burns in his nostrils.

He now knows the meaning of disquiet as never before. He has long taken pride in being above all fear, being the bearer of fear who brings it to others. Being a learned man, even although self-taught, he can define disquiet: the mildest state of fear, a general uneasiness threaded with doubt. Knowing the definition and being gripped by disquiet are, however, different things, for in fact those threads of doubt are more like wires vibrating in his veins.

There are some in the revolution who embrace a disturbing explanation for why Jane Hawk is so elusive and so successful at bringing down everyone she targets. They think it’s not just her Bureau training and her natural talents that make her a singular threat. They say she is also empowered by insanity, a special kind of mad rage because of her husband’s murder and the threat to her child. Some serial killers carve their way through a long list of victims, active for years before being apprehended, because their madness is strangely coupled with reason rather than being divorced from it, and they have as well a heightened sense of intuition, so that they not only think outside the box, but also outside the box that the first box came in.

Ivan has thought this Insane Jane explanation is fanciful at best, but in truth ridiculous. He has secretly scorned those who find the idea compelling.

He’s no longer sure what to think of her, though at the moment no theory exists that he would scorn.

There is no way to spot her in this shadowed valley where spreading fire dances and, in its dancing, throws off a thousand phantom figures of shadow, light, and smoke. Its many voices—some sibilant, some full of croak and crackle—provide cover for any sounds she makes.

His injured hand throbs, stiff and all but useless. The thin haze of smoke makes his eyes itch and water. Although he is standing still, he finds himself breathing as fast as if he were running.