The cargo area of the Range Rover is stocked with surveillance gear, from which he selects a transponder with a lithium battery. It’s the size of a pack of cigarettes. After programming the unit’s identifier code into his GPS, he crosses the street to the motel.

The best way to accomplish a task like this is boldly, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world to stoop beside a stranger’s car and attach a transponder. The back of this particular unit features a plastic bubble containing a powerful epoxy. With a penknife, Ivan slits the bubble, reaches between the tire and the rear quarter panel, and presses the transponder to the wheel well. The epoxy sets in ten seconds. Because it is an adhesive used to attach heat-dispersing tiles to space shuttles, there is no chance it will be dislodged by any patch of rough road or in a collision.

If people in the passing vehicles notice Ivan at work, they aren’t curious. He crosses the street and returns to the Range Rover without incident.

However, fewer than ten minutes pass before the door of Room 8 opens and the woman exits, carrying luggage. She needs two trips to load the Sport. She is clearly agitated and in a hurry.

He is sure, now beyond all doubt, that she is Jane Hawk.

He suspects she has somehow learned what has happened to Gavin and Jessica Washington, the two guardians of her boy, who have been killed in Borrego Springs.

He watches her drive away from the motel and does not at once pursue her. He doesn’t need to keep her in sight in order to tail her. The transponder that he attached to her Explorer is represented as a blinking red signifier on the screen of the Range Rover GPS.

Ivan waits a few minutes before reversing out of the pergola. He turns left onto the street. Jane Hawk is headed west on Highway 50, toward Sacramento and points beyond, and so is Ivan Petro.

8

FEAR FOR HER LOVELY BOY CONTESTED with sharp grief for Gavin and Jessie. They had known the danger of committing to help Jane and Travis. But they had seen their own freedom threatened by the cabal and its Orwellian technology against which Jane had taken up arms. They had accepted the risk. They were now part of her forever.

If Gavin and Jessie had been found by the Arcadians, those agents had intended either to torture them or enslave them with nanoimplants to learn where Jane’s child was hidden. And now the people who murdered them would scour Borrego Springs and the Borrego Valley in search of Travis.

She could not let fear paralyze her, but neither could she allow it to hurry her into reckless action. During her six years with the Bureau, she’d endured harrowing encounters with serial killers and mass murderers, and during the past few months, with a world of totalitarian sociopaths in pursuit of her, she had faced and escaped more lethal threats than in her entire FBI career. She survived because she could stay cool in the hottest circumstances.

There was no emotion hotter than the terror that blazed in a mother when her child was in peril. Losing her boy would burn her to the ground emotionally. Nevertheless, if she hoped to save him, she must be prudent and coldly calculating, must act strategically and with tactics proven through hard experience.

She would need most of the night to get to Borrego Valley. Her enemies would be expecting her. They would surely staff the valley in daunting numbers. She would be exhausted, easy to take down. She needed to delay until she had a plan and was at her full strength.

She couldn’t sleep. So drive till sleep was possible. Wherever she stopped, she’d be that much closer to her boy when morning came.

After dressing again as Elizabeth Bennet, she put her luggage in the car. She drove west toward Sacramento. Mile by mile, she told herself that the world on its metaled tracks was not engineered with malevolence, that there was mercy in the mechanism, that her child, who was the very image of his father, would not be taken from her as had been her husband, as had been her mother so many years ago. And yet her fear was great.

9

EGON GOTTFREY DINES ALONE in Cathy’S Café in downtown Worstead. Although he takes most meals without company, he is never troubled by loneliness. Were he to have dinner with two or twenty others, he would still be alone, for his own mind is the only thing that he can prove is real. If the café, the town, and the world are illusions, then so might be the minds of other people who occupy the phantom physical bodies with which he interacts.

Only the Unknown Playwright knows for sure.

For whatever reason, the Unknown Playwright wants the food in Cathy’s Café to taste good, and so it does. Gottfrey can’t explain how a disembodied mind divorced from sensory organs can taste and smell and see and hear and feel, but he does all those things.

He might suppose his situation is like that of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix: his paralyzed body suspended in a tank, the illusion of this life nothing more than a digital feed piped into his brain. To embrace that explanation, he’d have to abandon radical philosophical nihilism, which he has embraced since his sophomore year in college, prior to which he’d been deeply confused about life and his purpose. He cannot prove the existence of the tank, the paralyzed body, the digital feed, and neither can he prove that movies exist or that there is an entity named Keanu Reeves.

So he will hold fast to the philosophy that has for so long guided him. Nothing is real. All experience is an illusion provided by a mysterious source. He’s just along for the ride, so to speak.

After dinner, Gottfrey walks through nearby neighborhoods. Worstead is an even less convincing place at night than in daylight. As early as nine o’clock, at least twelve thousand of the town’s supposed fourteen thousand residents must already be in bed.

Of the few places with any action, the busiest seems to be a bar featuring country music, which is surrounded by pickups and SUVs. The roof-mounted sign names the place NASHVILLE WEST, and under that, in smaller lettering, are the words EAT—DRINK—MUSIC.

If the Unknown Playwright wants Egon to believe this world is real, there are instances like this when he or she—or it—makes mistakes that reveal the falsity of the scene. The sign would make sense if all three words were nouns: FOOD—DRINK—MUSIC. Or if all were verbs: EAT—DRINK—LISTEN. But as it now reads, the customer is invited to eat and drink the music, which makes no sense.

Sometimes it seems that Egon is smarter than the Unknown Playwright: a strange idea on which he doesn’t care to dwell.

In his motel room again, at ten o’clock, he changes from street shoes to lace-up hiking boots.

For twenty minutes, he sits staring at the bedside clock.

He trades his sport coat for a warmer jacket that nonetheless conceals his shoulder rig and pistol.

He removes the Medexpress container from the dry-ice chest and carries it out to his Rhino GX. This is the largest luxury SUV made in America, a product of U.S. Specialty Vehicles. It looks like a hardened military transport but with high style, including a matte-black finish. The Rhino is a symbol of his value to the revolution, or so he is supposed to believe.

During the nine-mile drive to Hawk Ranch, even someone far less enlightened than Egon Gottfrey ought to realize that the world is not real, because large areas remain unfinished. These vast plains are often dark to the horizon. Here and there, tiny clusters of distant lights suggest isolated habitats. It’s like stepping behind an intricately assembled stage setting of a bustling city street and discovering a cavernous backstage with counterweight pulleys and fly lines and painted drops, all of it deserted and quiet, belying the metropolis visible from the audience.

Eight miles from Worstead, he goes off-road, guided now by GPS, homing on a locater in the Ford Explorer driven by Pedro Lobo, one of the two youngest members of the team. Pedro and his twin brother, Alejandro, have been maintaining surveillance of the entrance to Hawk Ranch for the past thirty-six hours.

Half a mile from Pedro’s location, Gottfrey switches off his headlamps. If he follows a direct line to Pedro, as shown on the dashboard screen, he’ll supposedly encounter no treacherous terrain.

The enormous meadow is in places runneled, and the grass stands eighteen inches high. Even in this cool night, from time to time, feeble swarms of winged insects, too dimly glimpsed to be identified in the moonlight, are disturbed out of the land, clicking their brittle wings and body shells ineffectively against the Rhino GX.

Pedro has established his surveillance post within a grove of cottonwoods. In the pale moonlight, the trees loom blacker than the star-shot sky.