Jane Hawk Thriller

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.

PART TWO (#ulink_90ebc4df-ff5b-5b9d-9086-8f089a42384f)

1 (#ulink_ccb54198-28e1-5406-aab8-d17a03cfd2b3)

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.

Carrying the drawstring bag containing the tactical flashlight, he set out south-southeast. He wondered how he would maintain that course when distance and the bleak deluge screened from him the lights of the house, which were his only reference point.

Perhaps a hundred and fifty yards ahead lay a pine woods expressed like vertical strokes of an artist’s charcoal on white paper, robbed of detail by the waning light and waxing weather. The river ran through some but not all of the ranch’s woodlands. If he got lucky and found it among these nearest trees, he could make his way along its banks to the interstate without fear of becoming disoriented and lost in the blizzard. If nothing else, the woods seemed to offer cover.

Tom didn’t bother to check the wristwatch they had allowed him to keep. It didn’t matter whether fifty-five or fifty-six minutes of the promised two-hour lead remained. He surely did not have that much time. Not really.

Hollister was a murderer. Murder was not merely a crime but also a lie, for it made a claim that some lives had no value. If the billionaire could deny the fundamental truth of the profound meaning of every life, he was a liar’s liar, a font of falsehood. He might already be on the hunt.

With fresh powder pluming from his boots, the rotten drifts of other days and tangled masses of frozen grass crunching underfoot, Tom crossed the meadow, leaving a trail that would not quickly be filled in his wake. Erratic wind not only drove the falling flakes but also fashioned them into pale shapes, phantoms in graveclothes, that hastened across the plain in the weak and dimming light. The land seemed haunted. The world had become so strange that he would not have been surprised if a figure more solid than the apparitions of snow had suddenly loomed before him, a naked beauty with her ruined face concealed by a shimmering mask of scarlet silk.

2 (#ulink_a9d4ac34-a0c7-5bd3-8234-8226e6726c59)

The Counting Sheep Motel in its slow disintegration. The hive hum and swarm buzz of traffic, the amplified serpent hiss as a bus air-braked for passengers waiting on a bench, in the distance the hard tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of what might be either a jackhammer or an automatic weapon. Bright orange sun, ink spill of purple shadows seeping eastward.

In the front passenger seat of Jane’s Explorer Sport, warming the moment with his smile, Vikram Rangnekar said, “Hello, Jane.”

Jane stood at the open window in the driver’s door, pistol drawn, muzzle pointed at the pavement. “What is this?”

“I’ve missed you.”

“Been busy.”

“I lie awake at night worrying about you.”

“I’m okay.”

“You look okay. You look fabulous.”

“So … what is this?” she asked again.

“The disguise is optimal cool. It’s good.”

“Maybe not good enough.”

“May I say, you’re prettier without it.”

“Looking hot isn’t my main objective these days.”

“I have no gun. I mean you no harm.”

“Puts you in a damn small minority.”

“If you don’t shoot me, I can be of great help to you.”

“You’re FBI.”

“Not an agent. Never was. Just a computer buccaneer who used to work for the FBI. I resigned two weeks ago.”

Vikram was a white-hat hacker of great talent. Occasionally the Department of Justice had poached him from the Bureau and put him to work on what would have been criminal black-hat projects if they had not been conducted under the auspices of the nation’s primary law-enforcement agency. He’d had an innocent crush on her even when Nick had been alive, though he knew that she was—and always would be—a one-man woman, and he’d liked to impress her with his mastery at the keyboard. As an agent, before going rogue, Jane had always operated by the book, never resorting to illegal methods. But she had wanted to know what the corrupt inner circle at Justice might be doing, and she had encouraged Vikram to show off. He had developed back doors—“my wicked little babies”—to the computer systems of major telecom companies, alarm-company central stations, and others, and he had instructed Jane in their use. Once she had gone rogue, the ability to ghost through those systems without being detected had more than once gotten her out of a tight corner.

“If I weren’t your friend,” he said, “there would be like a hundred agents here, a SWAT team, helicopters, dogs, bomb robots. But it’s just me.”

“Not only the government wants to wring my neck.”

“Yeah, there’s some freaky group calling themselves Techno Arcadians, but I don’t know what they’re all about.”

Surprised by his knowledge, even as limited as it was, she surveyed her surroundings. Nothing amiss. She looked at Vikram again. “How do you know about the Arcadians? They don’t advertise.”

“Get in. Take us for a drive. I’ll explain.”

“Who were those people at the library?”

“Family. A brother. An uncle. Cousins. You look wonderful.”

“Where are my suitcases?”

“In the back. Take us for a drive. I’ll explain.”