FEWER THAN FOUR THOUSAND RESIDENTS live in Borrego Springs itself, a desert town that Carter Jergen finds offensive to his every sense and sensibility. The place is too warm, too dry, too dusty, the backwater of all backwaters—with only a pittance of water. Many of the palm trees appear stressed, and the only real grass of which he’s aware is in Christmas Circle, a park in the center of town. There are acres and acres of concrete and blacktop and more acres of nearly barren desert that reach here and there into the town’s precincts, as if the Anza-Borrego Desert is aware of this human encroachment and remains determined to reclaim everything sooner than later. He has seen neither a restaurant serving four-star French cuisine nor one of any kind in which he would want to eat, nor a motel with even half the number of stars in its rating that he would require before staying there, nor a clothing store carrying the finest designer brands. The so-called art gallery contains not one item that resembles any school of art he studied during his university days or since.

Inexplicably, the people who live here seem happy. They are friendly to an annoying extent, saying to him, a total stranger, “Lovely weather!” and “Good morning!” and “Have a nice day!”

He’s been in the valley for almost thirty-six hours. If he had to live here the rest of his life, he’d go into the garage and close it up tight and start the car engine and wait to die of carbon-monoxide poisoning; indeed, he’d get down on the garage floor and suck eagerly on the tailpipe to speed up the process.

When this revolution is won, he will spend his time only in the most cosmopolitan of cities and resorts.

Maybe the citizens who live in the desiccated heart of Borrego Springs are happy because they feel greatly superior to those benighted souls who live down-valley in small clusters of residences—or even in isolated single homes—served by crudely paved or dirt roads.

Jergen and Dubose have been summoned to one of these curious neighborhoods that consists of four single-story stucco houses on spacious grassless lots along an unpaved street off Borrego Springs Road. An unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee blocks the entrance, manned by two Arcadians in jackets emblazoned with the letters FBI.

Because of an orientation meeting that they conducted Monday morning, Jergen and Dubose are known to every operative who has descended on the valley—whether they are FBI, NSA, Homeland, or carry multiple credentials. The VelociRaptor is waved through the roadblock, beyond which four more black Jeep Grand Cherokees are parked along the dead-end street, one in front of each house.

Dubose stops at the address to which they have been summoned, and they step out of the monster Ford.

On an ordinary night, this neighborhood, lacking streetlamps, would lie deep in darkness past 2:00 A.M. Now windows glow in the houses, providing enough ambient light, along with the declining moon, to see large moths capering for the delectation of bats that, with a thrum of membranous wings, swoop low and soar and swoop again, dining in flight.

Instead of a lawn, a thick layer of smooth plum-size stones surrounds the house, as though giant mythical birds, perhaps a flock of Arabian rocs, have stopped here during the night to cough up the contents of their craws. Here and there, specimen cacti rise from the hard landscaping, shadowy shapes like malformed dwarves out of some Tolkien dream.

Following Dubose along a walkway of concrete stepping squares, listening to overhead bats using their sharp little teeth to crunch the crisp bodies of flying-beetle entrées that are being served after the moth appetizers, Jergen feels ever more acutely that he is a stranger in a strange land.

One of the three agents assigned to the conversion of the people in this residence opens the door. “Ahmed al-Adel,” he says, for he doesn’t expect them to remember his name from the orientation meeting fifteen hours earlier. He is a tall, handsome thirtysomething son of Iraqi immigrants.

Like the others who have invaded this street with Medexpress containers filled with control mechanisms, Ahmed is clean-shaven, neatly barbered, dressed in a black suit and a white shirt and a black tie. He and the other agents came here a little more than four hours previously, at nine o’clock in the evening; but regardless of the hour, it is always easier to elicit quick, complete cooperation from people when FBI agents are dressed and carry themselves as the movies have long portrayed them.

Operating to a degree incognito, Jergen and Dubose avoid the men-in-black cliché. Jergen favors a desert-spa look: a sport coat by Ring Jacket, gray with a white micro-dot pattern; slim-cut white slacks by the same designer; gray-suede, seven-eye lace-up ankle-fit trainers by Axel Arigato. In a spirit of fun, he wears a GraffStar Eclipse ultra-slim lightweight titanium watch with an entirely black face, black hands, and black check marks instead of numbers.

Dubose, reliably a sartorial embarrassment, looks as though he just came in from plowing a cornfield and didn’t completely change clothes, but threw on a couple glitzy items to add some flash for a quick trip to Vegas.

“They’re in the kitchen,” says Ahmed.

In these houses reside eleven people who have received nanoweb control mechanisms; they will soon be enlisted in the valley-wide search for the boy and his mother. The residents of these four homes were selected for injection because none is a child below the age of sixteen. Others have been injected before these people, and still others will be injected in the remaining hours of the night.

Their controls are the latest generation and include a feature known as “the whispering room.” While activating the whispering-room feature, they can communicate via microwave transmission, brain to brain, as the celebrated Elon Musk, founder of Tesla automobiles, has predicted will one day be possible and desirable. This makes them highly effective searchers, fifty or more individuals sharing a hive mind, quickly communicating their positions, situations, and discoveries to one another.

This residence is supposed to house two people, Robert and Minette Butterworth, both in their mid-thirties—he a history teacher, she an English teacher. They are seated at the kitchen table, zip-tied to their chairs, mouths covered with duct tape, though not because there is anyone to be alerted by their cries.

Prior to the injections and during the four hours after, while the nanoconstructs foil the blood-brain barrier and assemble within their skulls, those who have been chosen to become adjusted people tend to be tedious. They demand their constitutional rights, ask insistent questions, and in general make an annoyance of themselves. Duct tape is the best cure for their tiresome prattle.

Robert and Minette are pale, wide-eyed with sustained fright, soon to be under the control of their nanowebs, but they are not the only residents of the house. A younger woman resembling Minette is also duct-taped and sits at the table in a wheelchair.

The two agents working with Ahmed al-Adel are here as well. Malcolm Kingman is an imposing African American with the face and demeanor of a caring man of the cloth, but the direct and filleting stare of a judge at the Nuremberg trials. Zita Hernandez, a pretty woman of perhaps thirty, rounds out an admirably diverse crew.

Hernandez is of the most interest to Jergen, not just because of her beauty. She wears exquisitely tailored black slacks, a white buttoned-to-the-throat shirt by Michael Kors, a black blazer from Ralph Lauren. The only thing she needs help with is her shoes.

Jergen would like to dress her. After undressing her.

Lovely Zita indicates the pajama-clad woman in the wheelchair. “This is Glynis Gallworth, Minette’s sister. She’s visiting from Alexandria, Virginia, for a week. She was sleeping in a back bedroom. We didn’t know she was there till things were well along here in the kitchen.”

Jergen finds this bit of information perplexing. Alexandria is an upscale, sophisticated town. He is not able to imagine willingly leaving Alexandria to spend a week in a small house with unfortunate décor, on a dead-end dirt street in this desert wasteland.

Zita says, “Glynis is paraplegic ever since a spinal injury when she was a teenager. She works in the State Department in D.C. She’s too clueless about the situation to be … in the know,” by which she means to say, She’s not one of us.

Glynis appears to be as terrified as her sister and the sister’s husband.

“We injected them,” says Malcolm Kingman, “but we’re not sure if we should inject her.”

“This is Arcadian 101,” Dubose says.

Kingman and Ahmed al-Adel exchange a look, and then both look at Zita.