“Call nine-one-one,” says Jergen as a flicker of hope fires through his unadjusted brain.

“No can do, Cubby. I’m paralyzed from the neck down. No feeling at all. Wish I’d called Desert Flora about the bitch Hawk before I called the pilot. Now only the pilot knows.”

Jergen begins to weep.

“No tears are warranted,” Dubose counsels. “This is a great and noble death.”

“Noble?” Carter Jergen is still capable of astonishment and a small flame of anger. “Noble? Tell me what the hell is noble about it?”

“We’re dying for the revolution.”

Jergen’s words come in a rhythm of exhaustion. “We’re dying ’cause you tooted at a creepy old, crazy old skank demented from a lifetime of vicious heat, tarantulas, snakes, flying bats eating flying beetles in the night, and four useless desert-rat husbands, who she probably deserved, the hateful bitch.”

“Whom, not who,” Dubose corrects. “Love the revolution, my friend. It is our monument.”

Jergen’s vision is fading. He can draw only shallow breaths. “It’s bullshit. The revolution. Just bullshit.”

“All revolutions are bullshit, Cubby. That is … until you win one. Then you rule like gods and take what you want, who you want. Meanwhile … man, what a ride.”

Jergen’s hearing is fading, too. Dubose sounds distant. He can hardly hear the big man. He whispers an expression of love, such as he knows it: “You were always so cool. How could this happen to you when you were always so cool?”

If Dubose answers, Jergen does not hear him.

17

THE POSSIBLE EVIL INTENTIONS of those who fly the Airbus H120 imparted to the aircraft a monstrous quality, so that as it streaked across the desert scrub toward the RV campground, it appeared less like a machine than like a huge wasp with lethal venom to deliver. The helo’s approach was so direct and fast, Jane could only assume that in the half hour since the pilot left them unmolested at the ruined house, he had found a reason to reconsider their legitimacy and to seek them out.

Now he and his crewmate had seen Travis being led to the motor home, a boy approximately the size of the one they were hunting.

Jane pulled open the front passenger door and grabbed the Auto Assault-12 as the chopper racketed over the car, over the Tiffin Allegro, and executed an arc of return.

She hated this. She was trained for the street, not for the battlefield. In the Bureau, and even since, when she’d been forced to kill, the enemy had been a person, dimensional and detailed; she had seen his face, had known beyond all doubt that he was malicious and an immediate threat to her life or the life of an innocent. But this confrontation was of the nature of war, not law enforcement. She couldn’t see the faces of the men in the chopper, didn’t know their names, didn’t with certainty understand their intentions. In war you needed to kill at a distance, at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise you could be overwhelmed and lose your advantage—and then the fight. But the need to do this made her feel … not wicked, not even unclean, but in part responsible because it might not have come to this if she had been a little smarter, quicker.

There was no time for self-examination. She existed only for her boy, to give him a chance at life and perhaps yet a world worth living in. What laws Jane broke and what sins she committed in his defense were a cancer on no one else’s soul but her own, and she alone would bear the consequences all the way to the grave and perhaps beyond.

The pilot used the Airbus H120 as a weapon of intimidation, clearing the roof of the motor home by no more than twenty feet. Maybe the copilot was also a shooter. Jane couldn’t know if they were strictly on a surveillance run or might be combat ready. When the chopper crossed the Suburban and turned its flank to her, the starboard door might be open to facilitate automatic fire.

Loaded with slugs, the Auto Assault-12 had an effective range of one hundred meters. As the helo passed over the Suburban far lower than that, Jane moved boldly under it and emptied the drum magazine. With a muzzle velocity of eleven hundred feet per second, the shotgun pumped out thirty-two slugs in six seconds. The auto-fire reports stuttered loud across the parking lot, but the recoil-reduction system was as effective as claimed, the butt plate of the stock bumping against her shoulder not with jarring violence, but as if giving her a rapid series of attaboys to encourage her attack.

At such close range, the slugs ripped holes in the aircraft’s undercarriage. Wrecked one of the skids. Rattled hard through the whirling rotor blades to no good effect. Tore up the tail pylon. Blew out the tail rotor. Disintegrated the horizontal stabilizer.

Seventy or eighty feet past Jane, the Airbus wobbled into an uncontrolled death spin. It came back toward her, and a thrill of terror fired her heart as if it were a drum magazine in her breast. Then the chopper spun away from her, drawing a gray spiral of smoke on the bright air. The engine quit, and the helo tipped, and a blade of the rotary wing gouged the blacktop. The Airbus flipped, tumbled, exploded, vanishing in a beautiful bright flower of infinite petals that for a moment seemed to grant pilot and copilot absolution in death, but then the broken craft reappeared as a scorched carcass, and the petals of flame became mere tongues of fire that licked through the wreckage with fiendish hunger.

Jane turned toward the Suburban.

The two dogs were at the side window of the cargo area, neither of them barking. They seemed not to have been frightened by either the gunfire or the crashing Airbus. Their dark liquid eyes regarded Jane with grave interest, as though in their veins flowed the blood of seers, as if they intended, by the intensity of their stares, to convey to her the nature of some oncoming calamity.

Luther stood on the farther side of the vehicle. “Shit.”

“An avalanche of it,” she agreed.

“You think they had time to report finding us?”

“Maybe.”

“They’d be excited, overconfident, caught up in the moment.”

They were both aboard the Suburban. The engine of the motor home turned over, started.

Jane said, “We’re too deep in for a change of plans. It’s this or nothing. Let’s roll.”

18

IN THE BEDROOM OF THE TIFFIN ALLEGRO, Cornell Jasperson found the secret space under the queen-size bed to be comfortable and even pleasant. He was not having an anxiety attack, but darkness always calmed him in the throes of such an event, and it calmed him now. As when he was burning with anxiety, Cornell imagined himself floating in a soothing pool of cool water. Under the bed platform, where no one could touch him, he wouldn’t go nutbar and make a spectacle of himself at the very worst moment, which might have happened if he had remained in the Suburban.

The motor home began to move, slowly at first and then faster. Engine rumble and road noise filtered up into the secret space where Cornell lay. It wasn’t pleasant to the ear, but he could endure it. This wasn’t like the sound of the airplane that had touched him all over like thousands of crawling ants and spooked him into an anxiety attack. He would be all right. He really would. Nobody could touch him here.

Mr. Riggowitz seemed like a good person. Very old, but gentle and concerned. A nice smile. When he’d shown Cornell the space under the bed, Mr. Riggowitz said he’d driven from one end of the country to the other, over and over again, so he knew what he was doing behind the wheel of the motor home. He would do a fine job. They were safe in his hands.

Nevertheless, Cornell wished that their driver was Mr. Paul Simon, the songwriter and singer. He knew it wasn’t realistic to wish for this. Mr. Paul Simon was too famous and probably too rich to drive a bus for anyone, though a constant kindness in his music suggested he would be a person of humility and understanding who would do anything that he could to assist someone in distress.

A disturbing thought occurred to Cornell. Until recently, he had worn his hair in dreadlocks like Mr. Bob Marley, the singer, but he cut them off when he learned that the reggae star had been dead for decades. Although he loved Mr. Paul Simon’s music, he did not closely follow the singer’s life, and now he realized that he didn’t know if Mr. Paul Simon was alive or had passed away.

If Mr. Paul Simon had passed away, Cornell shouldn’t be wishing that the singer-songwriter was driving the motor home. Mr. Riggowitz was very old, but alive, which made him better suited to the task.

Thinking about all this, Cornell became nervous. The darkness and the imaginary pool of cool and soothing water were helpful, but to further calm himself, he began to sing aloud softly “Diamonds on the soles of my shoes.”

19