Like some huge nocturnal dragonfly, the helo passes over the Houston sprawl, descends into it, and puts down in an empty lot across the street from the bus station. The wind from the churning blades stirs up ghostly winged figures of dust that fly away into the lamplit streets. Gottfrey and his men wait until the blades cease whisking the air and the dust settles before they disembark and walk to the nearby terminal.

The head of vehicle maintenance is Louis Calloway. Off duty at this hour, he has returned from his home to walk them through what happened with the bus from Killeen when Lonnie John Bricker signed over possession of it and drove another coach to San Antonio.

What it boils down to is this:

The garage has a number of high-ceiling bays in which buses are parked between trips. Here the interiors are cleaned and a mechanic inspects the vehicle’s engine, drive train, and other systems, using a checklist of items to be confirmed. There are no walls between the bays. It’s a cavernous space, shadowy in places. If Ancel and Clare failed to disembark on arrival from Killeen, if they hid in the tiny lavatory, they might have gotten out of the bus once it arrived in one of these bays and might have entered another bus that had been serviced. They could have hidden in the second coach’s recently cleaned lavatory, waiting to be on the road before stepping out of the cramped lavatory to take seats for which they never purchased tickets.

Although this scenario is possible, there are problems with it, most of which even Vince Penn is able to identify. For one thing, no passengers are allowed here. Ancel and Clare would have needed to be as schooled and skilled as covert agents, as well as supernaturally lucky, to slip out of the Killeen bus and into another one without being seen by the workers in the garage.

Furthermore, they would have needed to exit the first coach quickly, before someone came to clean it, and within seconds board another bus on which service had been completed, there to hide in the lav. But how would they know which vehicles were serviced and which were not? And what would they do if the new vehicle in which they hid was fully booked and later proved to have no open seats when they emerged from its lavatory?

Perhaps they took the risk. If so, it has paid off. No driver in mid-trip has reported an excess of passengers.

But would they commit to a bus without knowing its destination? Maybe. Because of their daughter-in-law, they know surveillance of travelers is ubiquitous these days. To disappear during a trip via any form of public transportation, they need some ruse like this.

From Louis Calloway, head of vehicle maintenance, Gottfrey requests a list identifying the buses that were in the service bays when the coach from Killeen was there, the cities to which those buses were next dispatched, the addresses of the terminals that were ultimate destinations, an ETA for each, and other scheduled stops between Houston and the end-of-trip terminals, if any.

Following up on these leads and reviewing the archived video from all these terminals in search of Jane Hawk’s in-laws will be a huge amount of work. After a long and eventful day, Gottfrey and his men are too tired to take on this task.

As it seems the script requires, he emails his immediate Arcadian superior and attaches the list that Calloway provides. He asks for support staff to follow these leads while he, Rupert, and Vince catch a few hours of sleep.

In the back of the taxi, for the trip to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Rupert takes the hump seat, with Gottfrey to his left and Vince to his right, to spare his boss the ordeal of sitting beside the ever-chatty Agent Penn. The Medexpress carrier is on the floor between Gottfrey’s feet, the readout showing forty-one degrees, still plenty cool enough to keep the nanomechanisms in stasis.

They aren’t a block from the bus station when Gottfrey receives a call from the leader of their cell, Sheila Draper-Cruxton, a court of appeals judge. Their smartphones share an NSA-devised encryption program guaranteeing a private conversation. She has received the Calloway list and is assigning people to follow up on it.

Like revolutionary political movements since time immemorial, the Techno Arcadians are organized into cells, with a limited number of people in each. If one Arcadian goes rogue, he won’t know enough names to betray a significant portion of the conspiracy and destroy it. Those at the top of each cell receive instructions through a regional commander who is known to them only by a nom de guerre, and all the regional commanders get their orders from the members of a mysterious central committee who, through surrogates, recruited them.

The Unknown Playwright seems to love all this hugger-muggery, though Gottfrey could do with less of it.

Anyway, Judge Draper-Cruxton has received word from her regional commander that the people with whom Jane Hawk secreted her child were killed Sunday afternoon in Borrego Springs, California. The boy is surely hidden somewhere in Borrego Valley.

In the past twenty-four hours, Arcadians from various agencies have quietly established observation posts at every road entering the valley. A substantial contingent of agents has infiltrated the territory, not merely to search for the boy but also to be ready for the mother, because it is believed she will come for her child.

In fact, according to Judge Draper-Cruxton, earlier today an Arcadian attached to the Department of Homeland Security was shot to death in an oak woods north of Los Angeles. A fire was set to cover the crime. There is reason to believe that the dead man crossed paths with Jane Hawk and that she is already on her way to the boy.

The elegant Sheila Draper-Cruxton is a deeply cultured woman, a paragon of refinement, and Egon likes to listen to her feminine and mannerly yet very direct voice as she says, “These developments make the search for the in-laws more urgent by the hour.”

“We’re doing all we can,” Gottfrey assures her, keeping his voice low enough that the cab driver can’t hear. “I’m trying my best to follow the script.”

“I assure you I did not intend those to be words of criticism. I have every confidence in your ability and dedication. However, if the in-laws know anything about where the unfortunate child might be hidden in Borrego Valley, we must extract the information from them posthaste. When Jane goes there for the boy, we should already be waiting with him. We can play the spider and she the buzzing fly.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You should get some sleep, but be prepared to jump at a moment’s notice if the Calloway list should lead us to the in-laws somewhere there in Texas.”

“I can do that, I can jump, you know I can jump,” Gottfrey says. Listening to himself, he realizes he is mentally fuzzy.

“Are you quite all right?” Judge Draper-Cruxton asks.

“Just tired. Been a lot of busy scenes in the script lately.”

“How very true,” says the judge. “We are forcing Hawk into a corner. This little drama is accelerating to an endgame. Another thing—those control mechanisms that were sent to you in Worstead. Did you leave them with your people there?”

“No. I’ve kept them with me. They were meant for the in-laws.”

“Very well, then. I will send six agents to support your people at the Longrin ranch. They will bring more control mechanisms. Just in case we are unable to find the in-laws, it has been decided that we must inject Chase and Alexis Longrin on the off chance they know Ancel and Clare’s ultimate destination.”

“I doubt the in-laws shared that with them.”

“I doubt it, as well,” says the judge. “However, Chase and Alexis have fucked us over. I have no patience for coddling such human debris. We’ll zombify these ignorant shitkickers and peel their brains for what they know.”

Never before has Gottfrey heard such dialogue coming from his poised and cultivated cell leader. He wonders what the Unknown Playwright means to signify by her descent into crudity. Is the intention to convey that perhaps in spite of the judge’s expressed certainty, she isn’t really sure they can bring down Jane Hawk?

53

THE ROOM IN DARKNESS but for the drapery-filtered light from the window opposite the foot of the bed, a soft and spectral glow ribbed with thin shadows marking the folds of fabric, like an X-ray of some alien species with strange bone structure …

The motel stood on a quiet street, but Jane couldn’t rest.

Lying in bed, head raised on pillows, she wasn’t able to keep her eyes closed. Faces foiled sleep, materializing in her interior darkness. Gavin and Jessie Washington. Nathan Silverman, her mentor at the Bureau. Nick. Repeatedly, Nick. Her mother lost these many years. Most disturbing of all, Travis. Disturbing because her unconscious chose to include him among the gallery of those other faces, all of which belonged to people who had gone to graves.