The Night Window Page 6

  The meadows were clotted with old snow and silvered with fresh, but he felt as if he stood on a burnt plain, in a world scourged by an apocalyptic fire, the pine woods in the distance as black as columns of char, the current storm an ashfall, the incinerated sky in slow collapse, the unseen sun not merely in decline but dying in the wake of a nova flare.

  He could almost believe he was asleep, all this a dreamscape of a world in the wake of judgment. The insanity of the Arcadian scheme and the suddenness with which he’d been plunged into mortal peril merely because his talent put him on a list of undesirables seemed too fantastic to be other than a nightmare that would dissolve when he thrust up from his pillow and threw back the covers and switched on a bedside lamp.

  Although he’d never known such cold as this, the day abruptly grew colder when the early stillness of the storm was swept away by a sudden wind out of the northwest. The snowflakes that had kissed his face now nipped. Wind stung his eyes, and tears blurred his vision.

  15

  Because she was riding a bike much different from the one on which she had sped away with Garret Nolan, Jane risked cruising to the motel, a one-star enterprise trying to pass for a two, where she had left her luggage the previous night.

  Her locked suitcases contained nothing irreplaceable. However, because of the urgency of the investigation she’d undertaken and the ever-growing intensity of the search for her, she didn’t have time to go clothes shopping or visit the source in Reseda from whom she obtained guns, driver’s licenses in multiple identities, license plates, color-changing contact lenses, wigs, and other items that were essential to the chameleon changes that kept her free and alive.

  They had apparently tied the Ford Explorer Sport to her; but that didn’t mean they knew where her lodgings were. In fact, if they knew, they wouldn’t have come after her in the library, but would have been lying in wait in the motel room when she returned.

  If she could safely retrieve her bags, so much the better.

  The entire San Fernando Valley had once been a thriving part of the California dream; but some communities were now in decline. The almost third-world shabbiness of this neighborhood belied the Golden State’s image of high style and glamour that was barely sustained by the grace and beauty of the better coastal towns. Potholed streets, littered and unkempt parks, used hypodermic needles glittering in the gutters, graffiti, public urination, and homeless people camped in the doorways of vacant buildings were testament to corrupt and incompetent governance.

  The Counting Sheep Motel was a mom-and-pop operation, cracked white stucco with blue trim, sixteen units on two levels encircling a courtyard with a swimming pool. The pool was small, its coping fissured and stained; a mermaid and her adoring entourage of cartoon fish were painted on the bottom, shimmering under water that seemed not quite as clear as it ought to be.

  Jane’s room—number three—was on the ground floor, at the front of the building. There was no sign of unusual activity.

  She rode to the end of the block, turned right, curbed the Big Dog, and fed coins to the parking meter.

  After taking the tote from one of the saddlebags, she walked back to a bar and grill called Lucky O’Hara’s, across the street from the motel. She took her helmet off only as she reached the entrance. In addition to the name of the establishment, the sign above the door featured a pot of gold and a leprechaun.

  Assuming Lucky O’Hara had earlier enjoyed a lunchtime rush, now at three thirty-five the crowd had gone. Two retirees sat at the horseshoe bar, each alone, one of them in low conversation with the bartender. A young couple engaged in an intense discussion in one of the booths that lined both side walls. The tables at the front of the room were not occupied. Jane sat at a window table for two, with a clear view of the motel that stood across the street and somewhat west of her position.

  If the owner and staff and primary clientele of Lucky O’Hara’s had once been Irish Americans, that seemed no longer the case. The waitress who took Jane’s order—two hamburger steaks, one atop the other, hold the hash brown potatoes, add extra vegetables, a side of pepper slaw, a bottle of Corona—was a pretty blond-haired black-eyed girl with a Bosnian accent.

  The pilsner glass was frosted, the Corona ice cold. Properly chilled beer was one of the humble pleasures that kept her in a positive frame of mind during this ordeal of threat and violence. A hot shower, a piece of favorite music, the fragrance of a flowering jasmine vine growing on a trellis, and countless other little graces reminded her of how sweet life had once been and could be again. As motivation, a desire to live well and freely again was second only to her fierce determination to keep her child safe and to give him a future from which those who would enslave him had been eradicated.

  She watched the motel during lunch. Red curb restricted parking to the farther side of the street. There were no paneled vans that suggested surveillance. No obvious sentry slouched in any of the cars or SUVs.

  A few doors south of the motel, overdressed for the mild day in layers of ragged sweaters and a black-and-green tartan scarf, masses of hair and beard bristling as if fossilized in that configuration following an electric shock, a vagrant sat on the sidewalk, his back against the wall of a vacant storefront. Beside him stood a shopping cart in which were heaped large green trash bags bulging with whatever eccentric collection constituted his treasure.

  Such a disguise was within the repertoire of a true stakeout artist. The vagrant was the sole subject of Jane’s suspicion—until he got to his feet, stepped to the recessed entry of the building, dropped his trousers, and defecated. Although a federal agent on such an assignment would take pride in the exactitude of the details of his costume and behavior, he would not feel obliged to take a dump in public for the sake of authenticity.

  Glittering in the sunlight, traffic passed in riotous variety. Jane could not detect any vehicles repeatedly circling the block in a rolling surveillance of the motel.

  The appearance of normalcy at Counting Sheep concerned her. When nothing whatsoever in a scene looked suspicious, when it seemed picture-postcard serene and downright churchy, it was at such high contrast with everyplace else in this fallen world that you had to wonder if it was a setup. She had developed measured paranoia as a survival trait not just since going on the run, but from her years in law enforcement.

  She spooned ice from her water tumbler into the pilsner glass to chill the remaining beer, finished lunch, eyed her watch—4:33—ordered another Corona in a chilled glass, and asked for the check.

  She paid and tipped 30 percent as soon as the beer arrived, so that when she took another hour, the waitress wouldn’t worry that maybe she would skip out on the check. She said, “The bastard was supposed to be here when I arrived. I’ll give him another hour to hang himself.”

  Whether she had acquired her cynicism in Bosnia or California, the waitress bluntly said, “Dump him.”

  “I keep saying I will, but I don’t.”

  “Girl like you has options.”

  “So far none better than him.”

  “They play too much video game.”

  “Who does?” Jane asked.

  “This generation men. Video game, porn, Internet—they don’t know how to be real anymore.”

  “Prince Charming is dead,” Jane agreed.

  “Not dead. Just lost. We need to find. You can’t find when you won’t look.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Do you keep looking for him?”

  “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 eas
tward. 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.

  1

  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 the directions that were not forbidden to him. He had no paths to follow. And in the arc of escape allowed him, each of those two hundred seventy degrees appeared to be a direct route to certain death. He was not an outdoorsman. His survival skills were limited to the savvy that kept his film career alive, and that had not yet proved to be enough to put him on even the B list of directors. As the child of a tailor and a seamstress, having spent thousands of hours watching uncounted movies, his experience of the natural world was limited to city parks, public beaches, and documentaries. In this immense, unpopulated snow-swept tract of land, he simply didn’t know the first thing to do any more than if he had just stepped out of a starship onto the surface of a planet at the farther end of the galaxy.

  He felt small and vulnerable,
as he hadn’t felt since childhood. His breath plumed from him in pale ghostly vapors, as if with each exhalation he were shedding a fraction of the spirit that inhabited his too-mortal flesh.

  If he didn’t know how to survive, one thing he did know was that Hollister would never mount the fair pursuit he promised, that the crazy sonofabitch wouldn’t come on foot, but in an all-wheel-drive vehicle. And the billionaire would be tracking his quarry by means far more sophisticated than reading footprints and sifting spoor from the masking snow.

  Before leaving California, Tom had checked out Crystal Creek Ranch on the Internet. Google Street offered no images, but Google Earth provided extensive satellite photographs. He had been dazzled by the size of the main residence and its associated buildings, enchanted by the verdant vastness of these twelve thousand acres.

  Now he remembered the watercourse for which the ranch was named. Less of a creek than a small river, it spilled out of the western highlands and flowed past the house, southeast through various woods and meadows, continuing far beyond Hollister’s property and eventually passing under Interstate 70.

  Using the glow of the distant residence as a reference point, Tom tried to call to mind the satellite images of the ranch and remember the route by which the interstate proceeded somewhat south and then more directly east toward Kansas. His recollection was at best hazy.

  He had no idea how many miles he would have to walk in order to reach the highway. Thirty? Fifty? It was so distant that even on a clear night the headlights of the traffic could probably not be seen from here. Yet the interstate offered his only hope of finding help.

  The Hollister property was surrounded by other enormous—and lonely—ranches, as well as by unpopulated federal territory. He might wander for days and never encounter a neighbor or a single government land manager.