“Better you don’t know a name. There’s no revolution without him. He’s from the central committee.”

Jane leaned toward the console and looked through the driver’s door window at the agent. She didn’t have to fake anxiety; her voice was shot through with fear for her boy. “Hey, listen, the guy in the RV is a mean ballbuster. You want to know who really runs the DOJ and the Bureau, pulls the strings—it’s not the attorney general or the director, it’s that sonofabitch back there. If we don’t get him out of here fast and then something goes wrong, we’ll wind up with needles in our arms. Maybe you have bigger worries right now, but number one with me is being injected and brain-fucked. So can you just, damn it, please cut us some slack?”

The agent glanced at the Tiffin again, then quickly away, as if the man up there behind the wheel might curse him with the evil eye. He was harried, shaken, thrown off his game by recent weird events. “All right. Go on through. But slow. It’s a mess.”

Although Luther and Jane had been granted permission to proceed, the other agents watched them with sharp suspicion as they passed. Beyond the wrecked Cadillac and the burning Dodge Charger, four more bodies were splayed on the pavement, two perhaps cut down by gunfire, at least one of the others butchered in a manner that Jane could not discern.

Small flying insects of a species unknown to her had ventured forth from their shadowed havens into the desert heat, enticed by the feast of fresh blood. Wings silvered by sunlight, they swarmed in shimmering hysteria above the dead, and the burning car smoked into a sky as pale and dry as the land below. Beyond the windows of the impounded vehicles alongside the highway could be seen stricken faces, drivers and passengers who seemed as patient as spectral voyagers waiting on the bank of that final, black river for the ferry that forever conveyed travelers in only one direction.

As the scene of horror and chilling portent receded, Jane felt no relief. The junction of State Highways 78 and 86 lay about twenty miles ahead, and the town of Indio—where they would return to the comparative safety of Ferrante Escobar’s fenced property—was almost another fifty miles farther. In seventy miles, in this new wicked world aborning, anything could happen.

22

IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, the downpour ceases only temporarily, to facilitate Egon Gottfrey’s approach to the target house. Once he gains entrance to the residence, no doubt the Unknown Playwright will cue the lightning and thunder, crank on the spigot, and flood the scene with storm effects once more, as this act of the drama moves toward its violent, Wagnerian conclusion.

Carrying the Medexpress container and a tote bag, he crosses the quiet street to the house that stands three doors south of the one where Ancel and Clare Hawk abide in a false sense of security. He turns north.

The storm in intermission clots and blackens the sky no less than during its performance. The early dusk it has brought to Conroe becomes darker with each step that Gottfrey takes.

The following is what he knows by dint of extensive use of NSA data troves and connections. Sue Ann McMaster, born Sue Ann Luckman, the clerk at the bus station in Killeen, was once married to Roger John Spencer, her first husband, for eight months prior to his death in a traffic accident. Roger’s mother is Mary Ann Spencer, now the manager of the bus station in Beaumont, who presented Egon with the staged video of Ancel and Clare stand-ins arriving from Houston. Tucker Treadmont, the young Uber driver with man breasts and a snarky attitude—who led Egon, Rupert, and Vince out of Beaumont to an abandoned house in the boonies—is the son of Arnette and Cory Treadmont. Arnette’s maiden name is Lemon. She is the daughter of Lisa and Carl Lemon. Carl is Lisa’s second husband. Her first was one Bobby Lee Bricker. Lisa and Bobby Lee, now in their seventies, had a child all those years ago and named him Lonnie John. Lonnie John Bricker isn’t only the half brother of Arnette Lemon Treadmont, but is also the driver who, during a Skype interview with Gottfrey, claimed that Ancel and Clare Hawk were passengers when, on Monday, he drove the 10:25 bus from Killeen to Houston. This leaves Jim Lee Cassidy, the tall, folksy, white-haired Realtor and lying sack of shit in Killeen, who claimed that Ancel and Clare had been getting out of the Mercury Mountaineer in front of his office when his valise fell open, spilling a lot of important papers; supposedly they helped him pick up the documents before the wind blew them away, and then they hurried off in the direction of the bus station. Jim Lee Cassidy is surely the wily bastard who worked out this chain of deception. Sue Ann McMaster and her husband live in a house in Killeen that they acquired through Cassidy, as do Lonnie John Bricker and his partner. Arnette and Cory Treadmont had lived in Beaumont, where their son Tucker still resides, but they later moved to Killeen, where they bought a house through the ever-busy Jim Lee Cassidy. The links between Cassidy and the Hawks were more difficult to uncover. Jim Lee has an older sister, Corrina June, seventy, who is married to one Preston Eugene Fletcher. Preston Fletcher has a twin sister, Posey, who is married to one Johnny Don Ackerman. Posey and Johnny Don have two daughters and a son, all grown. The son is Dr. David Ackerman, forty-two, a military historian and a civilian employee at the Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico, to which Nick Hawk had for a while been assigned. There Nick met Jane.

Those are facts known to Gottfrey, and the following are suppositions he makes from those discoveries. Nick and Jane Hawk were friends with Dr. David Ackerman at Quantico. Subsequent to Nick’s death and Jane’s ascension to the most-wanted-fugitive list, David Ackerman discreetly contacted the Hawks to say that he wanted to help any way he could, and Jane vouched for him to her in-laws. At some point it was decided that Ancel and Clare might one day need a bolt-hole and a plan to obscure the journey they would make to get to it. David Ackerman’s parents, Posey and Johnny Don, now retired, made a lot of money in the construction industry in Conroe. They lived in a large house on three acres, but owned as well a vacation home in Florida, where they spent part of the year. Whether they were home in Conroe or not, they were pleased to allow Ancel and Clare to hide there if and when the need arose. So Ancel and Claire didn’t drive the Longrins’ Mercury Mountaineer to Killeen. Say they drove it as far as Austin. Say they were met in Austin by Dr. David Ackerman’s sisters, Kay and Lucy. Say Kay drove them four hours to the house in Conroe, while Lucy drove the Mountaineer to Killeen and parked it in front of the real estate company owned by her uncle Jim Lee Cassidy, who then waited for the authorities to tie the Mercury Mountaineer to the Hawks and locate the vehicle by its GPS signal, so that he could send them to Sue Ann McMaster and the bus station.

Texas isn’t real and neither are Texans, but Egon Gottfrey hates the state and its people nonetheless.

There’s no point hating the Unknown Playwright who created Texas and Texans; because when all is said and done, this has been conceived as a dramatic vehicle in which Gottfrey will triumph and achieve greatness as an iconic loner. But though he doesn’t hate the U.P., Gottfrey does sometimes wonder about his/her/its mental state.

Now the street darkles under the paused storm.

He arrives at the Ackerman property.

Posey and Johnny Don are in Florida.

Although the daughters, Kay and Lucy, will do all errands for Ancel and Clare, so that the fugitives can remain in the house and not risk being recognized, the siblings will now be at their own homes with their families.

Gottfrey follows the long driveway to the house.

The landscape lights, evidently on a timer, are not yet lit.

Immense pine trees overhang the driveway.

All is secluded, dark, and quiet except for the rainwater that drips from the branches of the pines.

The house has a security system provided by Vigilant Eagle, Inc. It no longer works.

From his hotel suite in Beaumont, using a laptop, via the NSA, Gottfrey had entered the Vigilant Eagle computer system by a back door. From there he’d accessed the computer that the alarm company had installed in the Ackerman house to monitor and ensure the proper response condition was at all times maintained by door, window, motion-detection, and glass-break sensors. He did a bit of fiddling.

The readouts that are part of the alarm keypads throughout the residence continue to show a properly functioning system. But when he forces entry, no alarm will sound and no alert will be received at Vigilant Eagle’s central station.

He circles the imposing house, studying it.

A few lights brighten windows upstairs. The only lights downstairs are toward the front of the residence.

Some windows are covered with draperies or at least sheers, but others allow him views of the interior. He doesn’t see anyone.