“Yes, all right,” he responds, and again he proceeds with them toward the buildings.

He has no doubt now that the Unknown Playwright is endorsing Judge Draper-Cruxton’s instructions to break heads and get the job done. Recently, the author of all this has set the scenes with too little detail. These fields, however, are so vividly and intricately presented that they are meant to be a sign to guide him back to the proper performance of his role. Fields of testicle-bearing plants never seen before, they are put here to remind him of what Judge Draper-Cruxton has demanded—and of what she has threatened should he fail to perform as expected.

He has been under great stress, and this revelation has not relieved any of the pressure on him. But at least he now knows what he must do to avoid suffering the pain that the Unknown Playwright is so capable of doling out. Fulfill the dream he’s had of Jane’s in-laws. Shoot Ancel. Slit Clare’s throat.

Yes, they must first be captured, injected, and interrogated after being enslaved. But once they reveal the whereabouts of young Travis, they will be Gottfrey’s to dispose of as he wishes.

He and his men have drawn close to the buildings and now better understand their nature. The house is old, weathered, offering more bare wood than paint. Swaybacked steps. Some porch-railing balusters broken, others missing. Most windows are shattered, and the few that remain intact stare blindly from behind cataracts of dust. The yard is weeds and crawling vines that climb the rotting walls of the abandoned residence. The darkest of the structures is a sun-scorched barn with a rusted-metal roof and concave walls. What appears to be a small stable is in no better condition.

Jane’s in-laws are not likely to have hidden away in such ruins. Yet the lane ends here, and no other dwellings are in sight. Maybe the scene is not only what it appears to be.

Guns drawn, Gottfrey, Rupert, and Vince begin the search.

11

THE HUMBLE DESERT HOME now seeming almost to groan under the weight of an incidental, terrible grandeur bestowed by horror and tragedy, its rooms given a new dimension by a threat to the future of humanity that is here made manifest …

Carter Jergen is in the presence of the beast. The smell of blood and urine. The study window covered by draperies. Only the desk lamp aglow. Ordinary shadows seem to pulse with threat.

The master bedroom and Rooney Corrigan’s home office are served by a different hallway from the one that connects the living room to the kitchen. In the office, DHS agents Solomon and Taratucci keep guard over seventeen-year-old Ramsey, who is in the desk chair.

The teenager’s wrists are zip-tied to the arms of the chair, his ankles to the center post from which radiate five legs with wheels. In light of what the kid has done, the zip-ties have been deemed insufficient restraint. A length of rope twice encircles his chest and is knotted tightly behind the back of the chair. Likewise, rope crosses his thighs twice and secures him to the seat.

Ramsey slumps in his bonds, eyes closed, chin on his chest. He appears to be sleeping, as if four savage murders have exhausted him. He’s a sizable specimen, football-linebacker material.

His blond hair is discolored by the spilled life of others, stiff and matted and spiked. Spattered face. Streaked clothes. Resting on the chair arms, his strong hands are gore-mottled, the creases of the knuckles dark with encrusted blood.

Taratucci, who looks as though he changed careers from Mafia muscle, sits in a chair about five feet from Ramsey. His pistol rests on his thigh and ready in his hand.

Solomon wears a better suit than Taratucci’s, a tailored white shirt, and a club tie. His receding hair is white at the temples, his features patrician, his posture ramrod when he rises from a chair, his manner like that of a cultured attorney for a mainline law firm in business since the 1800s.

“Why is this haywire piece of meat still alive?” Radley Dubose asks. “Why didn’t you make him as dead as the four in the kitchen?”

Solomon does his best to present the facts in a dispassionate, lawyerly recitation.

“For injection, we strapped the Corrigan family in the kitchen chairs. The newest iteration of the nanoweb was established in Mrs. Corrigan in three hours forty minutes. The final implant established in about four hours ten minutes. That last one was Ramsey Corrigan.” Solomon glances at the young man in the office chair. “They all responded to the phrase—‘Do you see the red queen?’ We ran the usual control tests. They were fully adjusted people.”

Originally, the sentence that accessed the mind of an adjusted person and compelled him to follow commands was “Play Manchurian with me,” a reference to the classic novel of mind control, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, published in 1959. After Jane Hawk learned the power of those four words and could make an adjusted person obey her, the sentence was changed to “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira,” a line from Jack Finney’s 1955 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hawk, the troublesome bitch, learned that one, too, necessitating the reprogramming of sixteen thousand adjusted people with yet another sentence: Do you see the red queen? This one, like the first, was from the Richard Condon novel, in which a brainwashed assassin, Raymond Shaw, was activated by the sight of the queen of diamonds whenever told to play a game of solitaire.

“We removed the restraints from all four,” Solomon continued. “We instructed them how to search for Travis Hawk, what their role was. We’re almost finished when—” He looks at the teenager, this time with obvious dread. “Ramsey puts his fists to his head and screams. I never heard such a scream, as if he was slammed by pain, rage, and terror all at once. He began to shake violently and scream louder. Something was wrong with the brain implant.”

Solomon isn’t able to maintain his detachment. A slight tremor comes and goes in his voice. Sometimes he pauses before he can continue.

“Kirk Granger, one of ours … the one dead in the kitchen. He rushes to restrain Ramsey before the kid hurts himself, bends over him with fresh zip-ties. Ramsey shrieks a long stream of obscenities worse than you’d hear in the most-violent ward of a prison for the criminally insane, not coherent, just vicious, rank. He comes out of his chair. He bites … bites Kirk’s face … bites it hard. So damn fast, snake-quick. He tears into Kirk’s face, his throat. He rips a carotid, maybe a jugular. Didn’t see how he took the eyes. Kirk is a martial-arts guy … but he’s blinded then dead, taken down in five seconds. Ramsey scrambles across the table, knocks his dad out of a chair, tramps his throat, snatches a cleaver from a rack, swings it. Such power. It’s just ten seconds after he first went nuts.”

Dubose returns to his unanswered question. “Why doesn’t the sonofabitch have five bullets in his head?”

From his chair, without taking his eyes off Ramsey, Taratucci says, “Don’t be a jerk. You notice all the bullet holes in the kitchen cabinets, the walls? He’s like some bat out of Hell, how fast he moves. You can’t hit what won’t be a target.”

Solomon says, “Brother’s dead, mother runs for it. He wants her more than us, maybe to rape before he kills her. His own mother. It’s chaos. But when we inject an entire household, we bring a Taser XREP twelve-gauge, in case there’s effective resistance. So I put a round in his back while he’s on the porch tearing at her clothes.”

“He was so gone,” Taratucci says, “he didn’t know who she was.”

Solomon says, “She was already dead. When he caught her and dragged her down, she broke her neck.”

Staring at Ramsey Corrigan, Dubose speculates. “He knew—he could feel—something was deep inside his head, enslaving him. The control program tried to repress his fear, maybe applied too much pressure, burnt out some neurons, maybe the nanoweb itself badly malfunctioned, whatever, and just kicked his terror into hyperdrive, triggered a rapid-fire psychological meltdown. His psyche came apart like sugar lace. Personality dissolved. Shenneck said this might rarely happen, but he hoped a collapse would end in a catatonic state or in a condition of feeble physical and mental incoherence. He didn’t think an adjusted person, damaged like this, would instead plunge all the way down through the forbidden door.”