Gottfrey is the last to arrive. Among the trees, in addition to the Explorer, stands the 800-horsepower Cadillac Escalade customized by Specialty Vehicle Engineering, assigned to Paloma Sutherland and Sally Jones. Here also are a Jeep Wrangler with the Poison Spyder Package from 4 Wheel Parts, an aftermarket builder, which is shared by Rupert Baldwin and Vince Penn, as well as the bespoke Range Rover by Overfinch assigned to Christopher Roberts and Janis Dern.

In an operation like this, undertaken in a small town, it’s important to split the team among various vehicles, so that they don’t appear to be related and are less likely to call attention to themselves than would a group of outsiders traveling together.

The five men and three women are gathered at the Explorer, half-seen shadows within the deep moonshadows of the cottonwoods, conversing softly, when Gottfrey leaves the Rhino GX and joins them.

The grove of trees stands thirty yards from the county road and directly across from the entrance to Ancel and Clare Hawk’s ranch.

Gottfrey has seen film of the ranch. At its entrance, the private access road is flanked by stone posts supporting an arch of wrought iron incorporating the name HAWK. A single lane of blacktop, bordered by ranch fencing and overhung by live oaks, proceeds 150 yards through rich grassland to the ranch buildings.

From this distance, in daylight, the main residence, stables, barn, and manager’s house can’t be seen beyond the screening oaks. During the day, with binoculars, Pedro and Alejandro took turns watching the sole entrance to—and exit from—the ranch.

Now they monitor the place with ATN PVS7-3 night-vision goggles, MIL-SPEC Generation 4 gear, which gather in all available light across the spectrum and magnify it eighty thousand times.

“At seven-thirty this morning,” Pedro tells Gottfrey, “Ancel and Clare left for church in their Ford F-550. Three minutes later, Juan and Marie Saba followed in their pickup.”

“Are you sure they were just going to church?”

“We have a portable satellite dish. Even out here, it links us to the Internet. Then we back-door NSA audio feed from both houses.”

Gottfrey has to admit the Unknown Playwright deserves praise for a quaint detail like church, which adds verisimilitude to this Texas setting that has otherwise at times seemed thinly sketched.

Alejandro Lobo says, “Juan and Marie returned from church at nine twenty-six. After church, Ancel and Clare remained in town to have breakfast. They returned to the ranch at ten thirty-five.”

“They’ve been there ever since,” Pedro added.

“What’s the situation now?”

“Quiet in both houses,” Alejandro reports. “The Sabas went to bed early. The Hawks watched Sunday Magazine.”

“What was their reaction?”

“Infuriated, sickened, helpless. He said he was going to get good and drunk. She took an Ambien. As far as we can tell, they both knocked themselves out for the night, one way or the other.”

“As far as you can tell, evidently, supposedly, as we are asked and expected to believe,” Gottfrey replies.

“Sir?” Alejandro says in puzzlement, and his twin asks, “You think we missed something?”

“No, no,” Gottfrey assures them. He turns to the other six half-seen figures that might be only spirits in a Shakespearean drama, the black cottonwood shapes like some grove of yew trees where the sorrowing dead gather to lament their passing. “Let’s gear up, people. No engine noise to alert them. We’re going on foot.”

In the cargo space of the Explorer are Kevlar vests and bullet-resistant helmets. They strip off their jackets and shoulder rigs to put on the vests and then rearm themselves.

Although Ancel and Clare Hawk are gunned up, Gottfrey and his crew do not want to kill anyone, merely enslave them with nanotech.

10

SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT, weighed down with weariness, vision blurring from lack of sleep, Jane paid cash for a motel room in Lathrop, California.

She always wanted a king-size bed, not because she tossed and turned in her sleep, which she didn’t, and not because she liked to keep a pistol within easy reach under a pillow adjacent to her own, which she did. For six years, she and Nick had slept in a king-size bed. Whenever she had come half awake in the night, she had reached out to find him; on touching him, she had always felt safe from the storms of life and quickly fell back into sleep. He wasn’t there to be touched anymore. But as long as she left a space for him, when she reached out in the dark, his pillow and his share of the sheets were waiting for him; if drowsy enough, she could believe that he’d gotten up for a moment and would soon come back to warm the bed beside her, whereupon dreams returned to her soft and easy. But if even sleep-sodden she realized that he was gone from her world forever, this provision of mattress consoled her with the thought that on some inconceivable shore beyond this life, he remained her Nick, his love undiminished, and saved a space for her.

Although exhausted, she feared that she would lie awake for so long that she might have to get up and dress and drive on. But when her head touched the pillow, sleep instantly claimed her.

On this difficult night, she expected sleep to be filled with scenes of her child in peril, but instead she dreamed of ships at sea and buses and trains. On the ship, her fellow passengers were the sinister strangers of anxiety dreams. On the train, they were Gavin Washington; his wife, Jessie; Nathan Silverman—Jane’s former mentor at the Bureau—and her mother, all dead in the world of the waking, but here journeying together toward … “No, not yet,” Jane told her mother. “Not yet, not even for you.” She disembarked from the train to board a bus on which other passengers included the two serial killers she killed on a lonely farm, a Dark Web entrepreneur she’d killed in self-defense, and J. J. Crutchfield, the collector of women’s eyes whom she had wounded and captured, who died in prison.

More than once, she reached out to the empty side of the bed, and each time she fell back to sleep, but always there was another bus, a train, a ship at sea.

11

THE HIGH MOON A SILVER COIN in the sequined purse of the night, the shabby Lathrop motel poorly lighted in recognition of the fact that a swirl of neon and a declaration of vacancy, at this late hour, will not induce a single additional traveler to make his bed there …

Parked across the street from those grim lodgings, Ivan Petro does the math for murder but isn’t able to make it work.

The motel has fifteen units. The number of vehicles suggests that only six rooms are rented. Considering that Jane Hawk is in one room, there are as few as five other guests or as many as ten. In an apartment above the motel office, one or two owner-operators of the establishment lie in uneasy sleep, troubled by dreams of bankruptcy. As few as six people other than Jane—or as many as twelve.

If it was six or even seven, he might start in the apartment and kill his way to her room, eliminating potential witnesses. With a lock-release device, he can slip through any door without much noise. If he wears night-vision goggles, the gloom of bedrooms will not render him blind. He can kill fast and quietly with a knife. As skilled as the Hawk bitch is at self-defense, capturing her will involve some struggle, some noise, so that he can’t move against her while other motel guests, on hearing an altercation, might call 911.

There are four reasons why Ivan excels at what he does. First, he is much smarter than other Arcadians in his cell of the cabal. Second, he possesses not merely a passion but also an intellectual basis for the destruction of the historic order and the imposition of a utopia run by a ruling elite; he has read all of Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Freud, so he understands how efficient and stable society would be if all the delusions of meaning and illusions of free will were stripped from the confused masses. Third, he detests those Arcadians who have thus far kept him out of the highest circles of the revolution, and he hates himself for his failure to ascend; and all this anger is jet fuel for his ambition, ensuring that he works harder than anyone else. Fourth, he has great patience. He is not a hotheaded rebel, not a wild-eyed anarchist whose ideology is so tightly wound that he rushes into action with a war cry.

Under these conditions, the risk of trying to take Jane Hawk is too great. He can wait. A better moment will come.

His wristwatch has an alarm function. He sets it for 5:00 A.M. There are no streetlamps where he is parked. He powers his seat into a reclining position. He closes his eyes and, because he is a man who cares about no one but himself and is too certain of his future to worry about himself, he falls asleep in seconds.

12

PEDRO AND ALEJANDRO REMAIN BEHIND with the vehicles in the grove of cottonwoods.

Vince Penn, an army tank on legs, wearing night-vision goggles, leads the way through the meadow, as insects sing to the moon.

Carrying the Medexpress container, Paloma Sutherland is second in the procession. Egon Gottfrey is third, and the remaining four members of the team follow single-file behind him.