“Maybe you didn’t notice, but the Marine in the poster is a guy. He’s a hunk. All by himself, he could wade through an army of boy-band types and knock them all flat.”

They’re eye to eye now, and face-offs are something Janis does well. She has an intimidating stare that disturbs people; they meet it, and they’re afraid, but they’re often even more afraid to look away. One of the men she’s taken up with and later dropped told her that she has ax-murderer eyes. Another said that during sex her yellow-brown eyes were as wild as those of some jungle animal, some fierce predator, which turned him on, except eventually he realized that her stare was predatory when sex wasn’t on the agenda, even in moments that he thought were tender. She receives such insults as compliments. She uses her stare as though it is a stiletto, piercing people with it, some of them being people into whom she would enjoy sliding a real blade.

When the girl doesn’t soon look away, Janis leans closer, until their faces are a foot apart, and she lowers her voice almost to a whisper. “Did Jane Hawk tell you about the brain implants? Or maybe she told your daddy and you overheard it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, even if your daddy knows, he wouldn’t have scared you by sharing it. But I will.”

Maintaining eye contact, Janis touches a forefinger to the crook of the girl’s left arm.

Laurie twitches but says nothing and doesn’t look away.

“That’s where they find a vein and inject you. With three big ampules holding maybe millions of tiny machines suspended in liquid, each just a few molecules. Nanoconstructs. They swim through your blood, into your head, assemble themselves into a web, a control mechanism powered by the electrical current in your brain. Then you’re told to forget it happened, and you forget. For the rest of your life, we own you, but you don’t know it. For the rest of your life, you do exactly what you’re told, and you’re happy to do it. If we say kill your sisters, you will. If we tell you to kill yourself, you will. No more snark from Laurie Longrin. No more smirking, no cheeky backtalk, no attitude. Just obedient little Laurie, so eager to please, eager to kiss my ass if I want it kissed.”

Janis reads desperation in her captive’s eyes and knows that she isn’t misreading this.

The girl can’t keep a faint tremor out of her voice. “If you had such a thing, you’d already be injecting me.”

“I would, yes. Oh, I’d love it. I’d keep you for a pet. But my boss decides who and when—or maybe someone above him decides. My boss says the script requires us to be discreet, to be selective in who we choose to enslave with injections. The script doesn’t call for us to do millions of you overnight.”

Frowning, the girl says, “What script?”

“It’s just the way he talks. But you listen to me, Little Miss Attitude. If I get my hands on those ampules, whether it’s a week from now or a year, I’ll come back for you and inject you. I don’t care what the script says, what my boss says. You’ll spend the rest of your miserable life looking over your shoulder, but you won’t see me coming. Then you’ll be my bootlicker, Little Miss Lickspittle.”

Intimidated, the girl breaks eye contact. But then gathers her courage and says, “Heck, you’re just a walking, talking pile of horseshit, that’s all you are.” She meets her captor’s eyes again and smiles. “What kind of numbnuts thinks potatoes grow from seeds?”

Janis sometimes has a problem with temper. It’s not as though she needs counseling or therapy. Screw that. She’s not a chronic sorehead. She certainly doesn’t have a psychological condition. She is just a hard-charging achiever who sees how the world works and who knows how it should work and who gets damn impatient when she encounters people like this freckled smart-mouth brat who is all attitude, who’ll never be anything but sand in the gears.

There is no danger that Janis will beat Laurie Longrin to death the way Egon beat that drunken cowboy to death.

How beautiful Egon was in his cold, efficient rage, a ma?tre de ballet bringing the grace of dance to brutal violence.

Janis isn’t going to pull her pistol, isn’t going to shoot this kid in her smug, smirky face. There’s no danger of that whatsoever.

Her response to the mockery about the potato seeds is measured, exactly the degree of corporal punishment required to teach this insolent child some manners. She raises her arm and slaps Laurie’s face hard—there has to be some pain, after all, if a lesson is to be learned—and then backhands her with equal vigor.

The girl gasps in shock but doesn’t cry out.

Janis gets up and goes into the adjacent bathroom. For a while, she runs cold water over her stinging hand.

When she returns to the bedroom, the girl sits stone-faced. She doesn’t in any way acknowledge her captor’s presence. A thread of blood sews its way from the right corner of her mouth, down her chin, along her slender throat.

Janis doesn’t return to the chair that earlier she put near the girl, but she doesn’t take the chair back to the place from which she moved it, either. Let the little bitch dread the resumption of their chat. Let her wonder when the conversation will begin again, where it might lead, what consequences it might have.

Instead, Janis goes to the bookcases. She tears the print blocks out of the boards of the hardcovers and rips apart the paperbacks. It is most likely from books that this wayward child acquired her attitude. That was certainly the case with Francine, Janis’s childhood tormentor, who would have treated Cinderella far worse than Cindy’s hateful stepsisters had treated her.

52

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY has recently opened an office in a wing of the Killeen–Fort Hood Regional Airport.

Egon Gottfrey and his men possess Homeland Security ID as genuine as their FBI credentials. Before they leave the Killeen Police Department for the airport, Gottfrey calls the deputy director of Homeland and requests that he instruct the on-duty personnel at the airport office to welcome him and his men as VIPs.

The deputy director is an Arcadian.

This is another advantage of conducting a secret revolution from inside the existing government rather than mounting an armed rebellion from outside. The authorities you will one day exterminate or convert with nanomachine implants are pleased to assist you; there is no resistance. And they have ready for your use just about any expensive piece of equipment you might require.

When Gottfrey arrives, carrying the Medexpress cooler with the control mechanisms meant for Ancel and Clare, this Killeen outpost of Homeland has readied a twin-engine helicopter. Fully equipped for night flight. Nine-passenger capacity. The pilot is on-site to take them to Houston, where they will put down in the vicinity of the bus terminal before 10:00 P.M.

The Rhino GX and the Jeep Wrangler will be driven by Homeland agents stationed in Killeen, though they won’t reach Houston until midnight. They will deliver the vehicles to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, downtown, where Gottfrey, Baldwin, and Penn will spend the night.

The Rhino and the Jeep appear on the vehicle-inventory lists of Homeland, the FBI, and the NSA. But none of those organizations shares such data; so no question will be raised as to why Egon and his men, ostensibly Homeland agents, are driving FBI vehicles.

And so it is: A helo that can’t be proven to exist lifts off from Killeen, a city that can’t be proven to exist, carrying three men whose bodies are only concepts and whose minds, except in Gottfrey’s case, might also be nothing more than concepts, ferrying them to Houston, another city that can’t be proven to exist, through a night sky that had earlier seemed as solid as stone but that, of course, is no more verifiably real than anything else.

Because Gottfrey and his associates haven’t had dinner and won’t have time to eat in Houston, a selection of sandwiches from Subway is provided aboard the helo.

Although the sandwiches are no more real than anything else, they are tasty, aromatic, filling, vividly detailed in their appeal to all five senses. So real. This isn’t the first time something as ordinary as food has briefly shaken Egon’s belief system.

Sometimes when he is weary and tense and frustrated, radical philosophical nihilism is a most difficult faith by which to live.

He doesn’t doubt the truth of it, however, because he recalls how lost he was as a young man, how self-destructive and afraid, before taking the class in which he learned there is no objective basis for truth, that nothing can be proved either by science or math, or by religion. All is illusion.

If he were a better radical nihilist, he would be neither tense nor frustrated. He should just let himself be carried along by the script, enjoy the ride, go with the flow.