“I look, I hope, I date—but always with knife in purse.”
“Really? A knife in your purse?”
The waitress shrugged. “Is L.A. A girl can’t take chances these days.”
Jane nursed the second beer through another hour, watching the motel while pretending to be waiting for Mr. Wrong. The homeless man with the shopping cart moved on to defecate elsewhere. The elastic shadows stretched eastward. The traffic quarreled in greater volume through the street, as if there were no other avenue in all the world, every traveler bound frantically for the same and perhaps terrible place. Counting Sheep continued to represent itself as innocent and safe.
Excessive hesitation was the mother of failure. Winning required considered action. Get off the X. Move.
She returned to the motorcycle parked on the side street. She cruised around the block, pulled into the motel lot, and parked in front of Room 5, two doors north of the unit in which she’d left her luggage.
No one was currently in the immediate vicinity. If she was a figure of interest to someone, he might be watching her from behind a window, through parted draperies.
She took off her helmet, left it on the seat of the Big Dog, and went boldly to Room 3.
High situational awareness. In Condition Yellow. No eyes in the back of her head, but alert for any sound that didn’t belong in the basketweave of street noise.
She keyed the door and pushed, and it swung into a coolness of shadows, revealing the furniture as colorless shapes in the gloom.
Before crossing the threshold, she slid her right hand under her sport coat, to the grip of the pistol in her shoulder rig.
Warily, she glanced back at the parking lot, at the street, at the motel office to the south. Nothing.
A single-file succession of fat crows, eerily silent for their raucous kind, passed low overhead. Crisply defined shadows, blacker against the pavement than the birds were black against the sky, glided past her feet, as if to encourage her to flee with them.
She was not Jane Hawk. She was Leslie Anderson. If her pursuers knew about the Anderson ID and this motel, they would have come for her in this place rather than at the library. Somehow they knew about the car, but only the car.
She entered, closed the door, switched on lights. A housekeeper had been here. The bed was made. The fragrance of an orange-scented aerosol freshened the room, though under it lay the faint lingering staleness of marijuana smoke from some previous guest. The door to the small bathroom stood open wide, and a frosted window admitted enough light to reveal that no one waited in there.
All seemed the same as when she had checked in the previous afternoon. Nonetheless, she sensed a wrongness in the room that she could not define.
Two sliding mirrored doors served the closet. As she approached them, she looked not at her image, but at the reflection of the room behind her, which seemed somehow strange and not an exact likeness, as if a threat thus far invisible might materialize from some dark dimension suddenly folding into this one.
Engine noise swelled as a vehicle pulled off the street and into the motel lot. She focused on the room door reflected in the mirror before her. The engine died. A car door slammed. She waited. Nothing.
Sometimes in the deep of night, when the sleeper’s fantasy is benign—a golden meadow, an enchanting forest—anxiety arises with no apparent cause, just before the dream is invaded by men without faces, whose fingers are razor-sharp knives. Her disquiet now was akin to the dreamer’s apprehension, the cause intuited rather than perceived.
As she slid the left-hand closet door to the right, it stuttered slightly in its corroded tracks. Her two suitcases were gone. She pushed both doors to the left. The other half of the closet also proved to be empty.
She drew the Heckler & Koch Compact .45 and turned to the room, which had taken unto itself the strangeness that she had previously perceived only in the mirror, so that every mundane object seemed to have an alien aspect, malevolent purpose.
The bathroom window was too small to serve as an exit. The room door offered the only way out.
Draperies with blackout linings covered the window to the left of the door. She would gain nothing by parting those greasy panels of fabric to see what awaited her outside. Whatever it might be, she had no choice other than to go to it.
Pistol in hand but held under her sport coat, she opened the door. After the lamplit room, the sun-shot world made her squint. She stepped outside.
The Big Dog Bulldog Bagger had disappeared. To her left, in front of Room 1, under an ill-kept phoenix palm, stood the metallic-gray Ford Explorer Sport that she had abandoned at the library several towns from here.
Neither of the exits from the motel parking lot was blockaded. No cops. No plainclothes agents.
All seemed counterfeit, as if the street were only a movie set on a studio backlot.
In the new world aborning, reality seemed frequently displaced by virtual reality.
Most people were so enchanted by high technology, they didn’t see its potential for oppression, but Jane was aware of the darkness at the core of the machine. The current culture deviated radically from previous human experience, ruthlessly reducing each woman and man to mere political units to be manipulated, balkanizing them into communities according to their likes and dislikes, so everything from cars to candy bars could be more effectively marketed, robbing them of their privacy, denying them both a real community of diverse views and the possibility of personal evolution by censoring the world they saw through the Internet to make it conform to the preferred beliefs of their self-appointed betters.
In such a world, there were daily moments like this one at the Counting Sheep Motel, across the street from Lucky O’Hara’s Bar and Grille with its smiling leprechaun and pot of gold, situations that felt unreal, that suggested the world had come unmoored from reason.
A man sat in the front passenger seat of her Explorer. In the shade of the big tree, with patterns of palm fronds reflected on the windshield, little of him could be seen.
As Jane approached the driver’s door, she held the pistol at her side, against her leg.
The window in the driver’s door was down, allowing her a better view of the guy who waited for her. She knew him. Vikram Rangnekar of the FBI.
The wind did not shriek, but moaned as if Nature had fallen into despair, and the snow slanted out of the northwest with none of the softness that the scene suggested, so that Tom Buckle turned his back to the icy teeth of the blizzard.
His vision cleared as the tears that the wind stung from his eyes briefly warmed his cheeks. In the gray spectral light of the hidden and fast-declining sun, the vast plain seemed not to fade into the storm, but to be dissolving at its farthest edges, crumbling away into some white void.
He looked southwest toward the great house. The lights were not entirely screened by the snow, but there weren’t even vague window shapes or identifiable lampposts, only a low hazy amber glow to mark the location of the distant residence. Tom yearned for the warmth within Wainwright Hollister’s walls. He briefly fantasized about returning to steal a vehicle—something big like the VelociRaptor or the armored Gurkha—and escaping overland or battering through some formidable gate at the entrance to the ranch. However, he believed what he’d been told about the security system’s ability to detect his approach and about the ruthlessness with which he would be machine-gunned.
For precious minutes, with his two hours of lead time ticking away, he stood in indecision, unable to set out in one of