For a long moment, she stood shaking, trying to think what else she could do.

Nothing. There was nothing to be done but call the Haneys, wake them, and persuade them to marshal the volunteer firemen. Be brief but persuasive. Brief enough so that maybe none of the bad-hat FBI agents would notice the FIRE WATCH light, but convincing enough that Mr. Haney wouldn’t think she was pranking him and wouldn’t call back to talk to her parents, thereby alerting the Dern beast and her perverted pals.

Laurie couldn’t stop shaking.

She didn’t like being a scaredy-cat. She wasn’t a scaredy-cat. Just prudent. Mother said prudence was one of the greater virtues.

Horseshit. This wasn’t prudence. This was gutless fear.

What would that cute Ethan Stackpool think of her if he could see her now?

She picked up the handset. Green light. She put the handset down. She picked it up. Green light. She almost put it down again, but then she entered the Haneys’ number.

4

THEY CRUISE in the jacked-up velociraptor, lords of the night, the engine grumbling low, like the voice of some pagan animal god that, in simmering wrath, has stepped out of eternity and into time to hand down hard judgments.

Although he knows the question won’t be adequately answered, from his shotgun position Jergen says, “What are we looking for?”

“Indications, signs, manifestations, clues,” Dubose replies.

“And how will we know them when we see them?”

“I’m not sure how you will know them, my friend, but I’ll see them as stains on the fabric of normalcy.”

So, as sometimes he does, the hulk is going to pretend to the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes. The five hours till dawn might seem like a hundred before the sun rises at last.

County Highway S3 and Borrego Springs Road are two of the four principal entrances to the valley. Three miles south of the junction of those roads, Dubose slows as he passes a truck bearing the power company’s name, which stands just off the pavement along Highway S3, as though loaded with materials and parked in anticipation of some project that will be started in the morning when a crew returns.

In fact, the truck is the property of the NSA and contains a bank of lithium batteries that will power its camera and transmitter for forty-eight hours. The camera is a license-plate scanner that reads the tags on passing vehicles that have turned off California State Highway 78 and come north toward Borrego Springs. The image of every plate will be received in real time at the Desert Flora Study Group tent, where agents keep open back doors to California’s and neighboring states’ DMVs, ready quickly to identify to whom each vehicle is registered.

A similar truck is parked along Borrego Springs Road, a half mile north of Highway 78. At two strategic points just inside the valley, along County Highway S22, which passes east-west through the town of Borrego Springs, other vehicles are performing the same function under different disguises.

Every car, SUV, van, truck, motor home, and bus entering the valley is scrutinized. Any smallest reason for suspicion triggers an investigation of the people in the suspect vehicle.

If Jane Hawk uses one of several unpaved tracks to enter the valley or if she comes off-road altogether in an all-wheel-drive vehicle, men positioned at key points throughout that rough terrain will surely see her. They will scope her out, report her, and relay the tracking of her from one spotter to another, until she can be intercepted and arrested when she arrives at a paved highway, if not before.

They don’t believe she will get here before noon tomorrow. She will not rush in pell-mell. She’ll take time to think it through, devise a plan.

Occupying the driver’s seat as if it is his birthright, Radley Dubose picks at the scab that hasn’t healed over an injustice that frustrates him. “These desk-jockey chickenshits we take orders from, do they have the balls to do what’s necessary to take this country and make it ours? They should’ve let us inject every sheriff’s deputy, use them to augment our forces. Then we could lock down the town and the entire valley the moment we think she’s here, make it a freakin’ concentration camp and grind our way through it, door to door, till we’ve found the bitch and the kid.”

Having long ago taken it upon himself to be the voice of reason in moments when the West Virginia hillbilly wants to do surgery with a chain saw instead of a scalpel, Jergen responds in a low and even tone of voice. “There wasn’t time to inject so many.”

“Plenty of time,” Dubose disagrees. “The new control mechanism takes just four hours to assemble in the brain.”

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department maintains a substation in Borrego Springs. Immediately following the shooting of Gavin and Jessica Washington, the watch captain, a man named Foursquare, and some deputies proceeded as if they had authority to investigate. They backed off when Jergen was able to put Captain Foursquare on the phone with the deputy director of the NSA, a former United States senator who was known as a friend of law enforcement and who assured Foursquare that this was a matter of national security, though the name Jane Hawk was not mentioned.

Jergen perseveres. “Trying to overpower and inject deputies who’re well armed even off duty, who’re suspicious by their very nature and trained to resist aggression … we couldn’t have taken them all by surprise. It would’ve gotten messy.”

Mistaking his hardball tactics for brilliant strategy, Dubose says, “Yes, all right, a few maybe you can’t take by surprise and inject. Big deal. So you blow their brains out. Then you pin the deaths on Jane after she’s either captured or worm food.”

“And what if one of the deputies you intend to kill instead kills you?”

Looking away from the road, regarding Jergen as he might a slow-witted child, the big man says, “Like that could happen.”

“Anyway,” Jergen says, “by the time Jane is here, we’ll have that little zombie army you want, all of them locals who know the area, a lot more of them than all the deputies at the substation.”

Crews have been busy for twenty-four hours, identifying easy targets for injection, approaching them as FBI agents, converting them into adjusted people in the privacy of their homes. More than forty thus far.

Dubose is dismissive. “They’re civilians, not in uniform; they can’t openly carry guns like the deputies can.”

“Not every problem can be settled with a gun,” Jergen says.

Dubose favors him with that pitying look again, but before the hulk can reply, Jergen’s smartphone rings.

It’s from the guy manning the communications hub at the Desert Flora Study Group. Something has gone wrong at one of the houses in which injections are being administered.

5

LAURIE LONGRIN IN THE FIRE-WATCH ROOM, like A bird in a glass cage, unable to fly away, unable to go down below where all the nasty cats were eager to find her and tear off her wings …

When Mr. Linwood Haney answered the phone, having surely been awakened from sleep, Laurie said, “It’s me, Laurie, Laurie Longrin, at Longrin Stables, terrible things are happening here, Mr. Haney.” By the time she had said that much, she became a motormouth, words spinning from her at high speed: “They say FBI, it’s a lie, they’re rotten, they want Mr. and Mrs. Hawk, where they’ve gone, Mom and Dad tied up, this crazy woman hit me, she has a gun, all of them guns, six and six more coming, they want to kill us or worse, I’m in the fire watch, they’ll find me soon, I don’t trust the sheriff, I only trust you.”

Mr. Haney calmed her, though she surprised herself when she interrupted him more than once with additional details of what had happened at Longrin Stables. She couldn’t quite control herself. She was dismayed at the sharp fear in her voice, because she prided herself on being less of a child than some others her age, on being of sturdy Texas rancher stock.

However, it was only when she started talking to Mr. Haney that she truly realized the full extent of the danger to herself, to her parents and sisters. Oh, she’d known they were in deep shit. She wasn’t stupid. But somehow she’d not let herself think clearly about the worst that might happen, maybe because thinking about it would have paralyzed her. When she told Mr. Haney that these vicious, rotten people wanted to kill them or worse, the possibility of such a horror became more real when she heard herself put it into words, so real that her fear flashed into fright, hampering her breathing and raising a pain in her chest, as if some demonic angler had cast a line and snared her heart with one of those fishing lures that had multiple wicked hooks.

She took hope when Mr. Haney believed her. He said, “Something like this happened at Ancel and Clare’s place Sunday night. Stay calm, Laurie, stay where you are. We’re coming. Everything will be okay.”

Staring at the phone, at the green light burning beside the words FIRE WATCH, Laurie said, “Hurry. Please, please hurry.” And she hung up.

6