The Forbidden Door Read online

  Anyway, he has a plan, and it’s a good one that could elevate him into the hierarchy where he belongs.

  The motel is not a place where he can surprise her, overpower her, take custody of her, and put her through a hard interrogation without drawing unwanted attention. If he is patient, a better opportunity will present itself.

  If he can break her on his own, learn where the boy is…he can present both mother and child to the revolution as a single package and in such a way that credit is given where it is due.

  The cargo area of the Range Rover is stocked with surveillance gear, from which he selects a transponder with a lithium battery. It’s the size of a pack of cigarettes. After programming the unit’s identifier code into his GPS, he crosses the street to the motel.

  The best way to accomplish a task like this is boldly, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world to stoop beside a stranger’s car and attach a transponder. The back of this particular unit features a plastic bubble containing a powerful epoxy. With a penknife, Ivan slits the bubble, reaches between the tire and the rear quarter panel, and presses the transponder to the wheel well. The epoxy sets in ten seconds. Because it is an adhesive used to attach heat-dispersing tiles to space shuttles, there is no chance it will be dislodged by any patch of rough road or in a collision.

  If people in the passing vehicles notice Ivan at work, they aren’t curious. He crosses the street and returns to the Range Rover without incident.

  However, fewer than ten minutes pass before the door of Room 8 opens and the woman exits, carrying luggage. She needs two trips to load the Sport. She is clearly agitated and in a hurry.

  He is sure, now beyond all doubt, that she is Jane Hawk.

  He suspects she has somehow learned what has happened to Gavin and Jessica Washington, the two guardians of her boy, who have been killed in Borrego Springs.

  He watches her drive away from the motel and does not at once pursue her. He doesn’t need to keep her in sight in order to tail her. The transponder that he attached to her Explorer is represented as a blinking red signifier on the screen of the Range Rover GPS.

  Ivan waits a few minutes before reversing out of the pergola. He turns left onto the street. Jane Hawk is headed west on Highway 50, toward Sacramento and points beyond, and so is Ivan Petro.

  8

  FEAR FOR HER LOVELY BOY contested with sharp grief for Gavin and Jessie. They had known the danger of committing to help Jane and Travis. But they had seen their own freedom threatened by the cabal and its Orwellian technology against which Jane had taken up arms. They had accepted the risk. They were now part of her forever.

  If Gavin and Jessie had been found by the Arcadians, those agents had intended either to torture them or enslave them with nanoimplants to learn where Jane’s child was hidden. And now the people who murdered them would scour Borrego Springs and the Borrego Valley in search of Travis.

  She could not let fear paralyze her, but neither could she allow it to hurry her into reckless action. During her six years with the Bureau, she’d endured harrowing encounters with serial killers and mass murderers, and during the past few months, with a world of totalitarian sociopaths in pursuit of her, she had faced and escaped more lethal threats than in her entire FBI career. She survived because she could stay cool in the hottest circumstances.

  There was no emotion hotter than the terror that blazed in a mother when her child was in peril. Losing her boy would burn her to the ground emotionally. Nevertheless, if she hoped to save him, she must be prudent and coldly calculating, must act strategically and with tactics proven through hard experience.

  She would need most of the night to get to Borrego Valley. Her enemies would be expecting her. They would surely staff the valley in daunting numbers. She would be exhausted, easy to take down. She needed to delay until she had a plan and was at her full strength.

  She couldn’t sleep. So drive till sleep was possible. Wherever she stopped, she’d be that much closer to her boy when morning came.

  After dressing again as Elizabeth Bennet, she put her luggage in the car. She drove west toward Sacramento. Mile by mile, she told herself that the world on its metaled tracks was not engineered with malevolence, that there was mercy in the mechanism, that her child, who was the very image of his father, would not be taken from her as had been her husband, as had been her mother so many years ago. And yet her fear was great.

  9

  EGON GOTTFREY DINES ALONE IN Cathy’s Café in downtown Worstead. Although he takes most meals without company, he is never troubled by loneliness. Were he to have dinner with two or twenty others, he would still be alone, for his own mind is the only thing that he can prove is real. If the café, the town, and the world are illusions, then so might be the minds of other people who occupy the phantom physical bodies with which he interacts.

  Only the Unknown Playwright knows for sure.

  For whatever reason, the Unknown Playwright wants the food in Cathy’s Café to taste good, and so it does. Gottfrey can’t explain how a disembodied mind divorced from sensory organs can taste and smell and see and hear and feel, but he does all those things.

  He might suppose his situation is like that of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix: his paralyzed body suspended in a tank, the illusion of this life nothing more than a digital feed piped into his brain. To embrace that explanation, he’d have to abandon radical philosophical nihilism, which he has embraced since his sophomore year in college, prior to which he’d been deeply confused about life and his purpose. He cannot prove the existence of the tank, the paralyzed body, the digital feed, and neither can he prove that movies exist or that there is an entity named Keanu Reeves.

  So he will hold fast to the philosophy that has for so long guided him. Nothing is real. All experience is an illusion provided by a mysterious source. He’s just along for the ride, so to speak.

  After dinner, Gottfrey walks through nearby neighborhoods. Worstead is an even less convincing place at night than in daylight. As early as nine o’clock, at least twelve thousand of the town’s supposed fourteen thousand residents must already be in bed.

  Of the few places with any action, the busiest seems to be a bar featuring country music, which is surrounded by pickups and SUVs. The roof-mounted sign names the place NASHVILLE WEST, and under that, in smaller lettering, are the words EAT—DRINK—MUSIC.

  If the Unknown Playwright wants Egon to believe this world is real, there are instances like this when he or she—or it—makes mistakes that reveal the falsity of the scene. The sign would make sense if all three words were nouns: FOOD—DRINK—MUSIC. Or if all were verbs: EAT—DRINK—LISTEN. But as it now reads, the customer is invited to eat and drink the music, which makes no sense.

  Sometimes it seems that Egon is smarter than the Unknown Playwright: a strange idea on which he doesn’t care to dwell.

  In his motel room again, at ten o’clock, he changes from street shoes to lace-up hiking boots.

  For twenty minutes, he sits staring at the bedside clock.

  He trades his sport coat for a warmer jacket that nonetheless conceals his shoulder rig and pistol.

  He removes the Medexpress container from the dry-ice chest and carries it out to his Rhino GX. This is the largest luxury SUV made in America, a product of U.S. Specialty Vehicles. It looks like a hardened military transport but with high style, including a matte-black finish. The Rhino is a symbol of his value to the revolution, or so he is supposed to believe.

  During the nine-mile drive to Hawk Ranch, even someone far less enlightened than Egon Gottfrey ought to realize that the world is not real, because large areas remain unfinished. These vast plains are often dark to the horizon. Here and there, tiny clusters of distant lights suggest isolated habitats. It’s like stepping behind an intricately assembled stage setting of a bustling city street and discovering a cavernous backstage with counterweight pulleys a
nd fly lines and painted drops, all of it deserted and quiet, belying the metropolis visible from the audience.

  Eight miles from Worstead, he goes off-road, guided now by GPS, homing on a locater in the Ford Explorer driven by Pedro Lobo, one of the two youngest members of the team. Pedro and his twin brother, Alejandro, have been maintaining surveillance of the entrance to Hawk Ranch for the past thirty-six hours.

  Half a mile from Pedro’s location, Gottfrey switches off his headlamps. If he follows a direct line to Pedro, as shown on the dashboard screen, he’ll supposedly encounter no treacherous terrain.

  The enormous meadow is in places runneled, and the grass stands eighteen inches high. Even in this cool night, from time to time, feeble swarms of winged insects, too dimly glimpsed to be identified in the moonlight, are disturbed out of the land, clicking their brittle wings and body shells ineffectively against the Rhino GX.

  Pedro has established his surveillance post within a grove of cottonwoods. In the pale moonlight, the trees loom blacker than the star-shot sky.

  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.