When she closed the door, she realized that, in the imploded house, still alive in the cab of the truck, the driver continued to pump the accelerator with demonic insistence. The engine roared and an underlying shrill grinding noise might have been the front axle spinning relentlessly against the joists that had not yet given way. If he was one of the adjusted people, something had gone so wrong with his nanoweb control mechanism that he was now perhaps as much of a machine as was the truck he had once commanded, stuck in gear and unable to shift himself into neutral.

She hurried around to the front passenger seat, where Luther had propped the fully automatic 12-gauge shotgun on its butt plate, barrel against the dashboard. She stood it between her legs, keeping it upright by pincering it with her knees, and pulled the door shut.

As they drove past the destroyed residence, the mounded wreckage abruptly cratered as apparently the joists succumbed. The basement swallowed the truck along with a few tons of debris, and the ruins disgorged a thick gray plume. The only portion of the structure remaining upright was a six-foot-wide section of stuccoed wall with a glassless centered window offering a view of churning dust, like a cenotaph standing as a memorial to a lost civilization.

In the backseat, Cornell said, “Good-bye, little blue house.”

Twenty yards north of the ruins, a Lexus SUV was parked aslant the shoulder of the road, its back end on the pavement, the driver’s door standing open. There appeared to be a dead man slumped in the front passenger seat.

“What’s this?” Luther wondered.

Jane figured that the man who had broken down the front door, before the arrival of the garbage truck, had driven the Lexus. Is you whisper sex me, sex me, kill me, kill you … whisper inside head?

To Luther, she said, “I’ll explain later. If I can. Just get us the hell out of here.”

They headed north on the leg of County Highway S3 that was called Borrego Springs Road.

7

ALTHOUGH HE WAS EXPECTING the call, Bernie Riggowitz startled and almost dropped the phone when it rang. He said only, “Yes.”

To allow for an array of scenarios, they had prearranged four possible sites for a rendezvous, each identified only by a number.

Jane said, “One,” which meant she and Luther and Travis were en route in the Suburban with no one wounded and with every reason to believe they could get back to the parking lot, just outside of the campground gate, where they had parted earlier.

Because of the bizarre attack on Holden Hammersmith and the shooting that had left a dead man on the pool deck, Bernie was nervous about remaining at this facility for the fifteen or twenty minutes Luther might require for the drive from the southern end of the valley.

On the other hand, no one was answering 911 calls, suggesting local law enforcement must be either overwhelmed by events that Bernie could only imagine or compromised by the marshaled forces searching for Jane. If no one was dispatching ambulances or patrol cars, the RV park most likely wouldn’t be acrawl with police anytime soon.

In answer to her “One,” he said, “One,” and pressed END.

The call had been so short that the carrier-wave fishermen aboard the trolling airplane could not have had time to lock on either phone’s signal and track it to source.

Nevertheless, Bernie got out of the driver’s seat and stepped into the living room and put the burner on the floor and used a hammer to smash it, as Jane had instructed.

On terminating the call, she would have thrown her phone out the window of the Suburban.

They could no longer communicate. But come good luck or bad, they would not need to speak again until they were face-to-face.

8

DUBOSE DRIVES NORTH on the leg of county Highway S3 called Yanqui Pass Road, turns south on Borrego Springs Road, and after half a mile slows to look at the Lexus in which a corpse slumps in the passenger seat. He parks in front of the abandoned SUV.

Carter Jergen doesn’t want to join in his partner’s inspection of the Lexus. He wants to live and let live, or rather live and let the dead be dead. However, he doesn’t want to be told again that he needs testosterone shots.

Even with his newfound awareness of his mortality, he still needs Radley Dubose’s approval. This need is sick, and Jergen knows it’s sick, but it’s powerful. Dubose is a West Virginia hillbilly with the thinnest patina of sophistication acquired at a second-rate Ivy League school, a lousy dresser, a noisy eater, a mannerless rube who speaks competent French, yes, but with embarrassing pretension. Nonetheless, Dubose is cool. There’s no getting around it. He’s a self-possessed, imperturbable, totally cool dude. Cool has been a goal of Carter Jergen’s since middle school, but he’s made little progress toward coolness. Here he sits in an outfit that would meet with the approval of the best fashion magazine in the world, GQ, a few thousand dollars’ worth of clothes. He also wears a GraffStar Eclipse ultra-slim lightweight titanium wristwatch, and yet he knows in his heart that he is not in the least cool. In fact, when he looks at the GraffStar Eclipse to see what hour it is, as this might be the hour when he dies, he is mortified that he can’t tell the time. The watch has an entirely black face, black hands, and black check marks instead of numbers, and at the moment, anyway, he might as well be looking into a collapsed star, into a black hole, strapped to his wrist. Dubose wears a Timex, or something even cheesier, with a plain white face and numbers, but Jergen is too embarrassed to ask him the time.

At the Lexus, Dubose opens the passenger door to have a closer look at the deceased, while Jergen stands at the driver’s door, pinching his nose against the stench. The dead man has voided his bowels and bladder, and his ears are full of blood.

“One of the fifty we brain-screwed last night,” Dubose says. “Name’s Nelson Luft.”

Dubose is at all times au courant with details like the names of the plebs, the rabble, the nobodies with whom they are currently involved. To Carter Jergen, this has always seemed to be proof that the big man lacks a well-honed mind that can focus on what’s most important. But now even this seems cool, evidence that Dubose can take in the whole picture while remaining focused on salient issues.

“His partner is Henry Lorimar. Henry must be somewhere near.” Moving toward the house, Dubose draws his pistol, suggesting that Henry is another Ramsey Corrigan. “Hackles up, Cubby.”

9

TRAVIS IN THE DUFFEL. Cornell playing prisoner. Luther pushing the Suburban past the speed limit, relying on the lettered doors and roof to grant them safe passage, the pale desert burning away toward stark mountains in every direction, and an eerie sense of something unseen falling toward them at high speed …

Never in her life had Jane bought a lottery ticket or put a coin in a slot machine. She possessed an intuitive awareness of the odds of success and failure in any undertaking, and the odds for a gambler were terrible. If she had to be in the game, she wanted to be the one who stacked the deck or replaced the regulation ivories with a pair of loaded dice. For any operation like this, she thought it out ahead, went over it at least a hundred times in her mind. Once she was on the ground and everyone was in play, she relied equally on training and intuition, and she remained keen for any advantage that might present itself.

Yet she never dared to be certain of the plan’s efficacy while it was unfolding. The more distance they put between themselves and Cornell’s property and the closer they drew to Bernie and the motor home, the greater her tension grew.

She wasn’t superstitious. A broken mirror, a black cat crossing her path, spilled salt—nothing of that nature could ever disquiet her. However, although this world was beautiful beyond reckoning, it was also a dark world. Evil conspired in every corner, in sunshine and in shadow, and only a fool thought otherwise.

So much was at stake for her now, not only her own life but that of her child and those of her friends. For the moment, the personal took priority over the mere fate of humanity and the loss of its free will. She wished that she’d taken an acid reducer. Her hands were cold. Icy. Her chest felt tight. She had lost so much. Luther had lost more. Cornell was rich, but he’d lost the greater part of an ordinary life even before he’d been born. They were not going to lose anything more. This was a dark world, yes, but they were not going to allow the darkness to swallow them. Screw that.

As they approached a crossroad, Luther braked for three black Jeep Grand Cherokees, all arrayed with rooftop lightbars, all with sirens wailing, as they raced from east to west, one behind the other.

Jane read the shields on the doors of the Cherokees: “Homeland Security.”

Luther drove through the intersection in the wake of the Jeeps, and less than half a mile later they came upon an overturned Toyota pickup blackened by a recent fire. The driver had not gotten out alive. Two minutes later, they arrived at a deconstructed motorcycle and the grisly remains of its rider. And then a battered Mini Cooper hung up on the trunk of a cleaved but still standing oak tree.

“WTF?” Luther wondered.