She had accepted that she might die during this endeavor. Even if she exposed and destroyed the conspiracy, she’d almost certainly afterward be murdered as a matter of revenge. Her enemies were people of great power and wealth, unaccustomed to defeat, and they would not endure it with grace. Travis was hidden away with friends, where he wasn’t likely to be found; were she to be killed, he would be raised with love and proper guidance.
Her chances of survival, slim as they were, depended on staying tightly focused, on keeping her purpose narrow and her motivation personal, proceeding with confidence tempered by humility. Although the future of freedom hung in the balance, she was no Joan of Arc and didn’t want to be weighed down by a grand obligation like the one that had inspired the Maid of Orleans, at the insistence of adoring crowds, to put on armor and pick up a sword. Charismatic crusaders of that kind were doomed even in triumph, destroyed by exalted ambition if not by pride. And what Jane’s enemies could do to her, if they brought her down, would be far worse than being burned alive at the stake.
She turned on the windshield wipers and drove away from the curb. A difficult task awaited her, and time was running out.
12
The dreary rain like a forewarning of despair to come, the claustrophobic closed-coffin darkness of the night, the half-seen python-muscled river in its serpentine flow to the right of them like some pagan god of fate whose forward slithery rush compelled them to follow, heedless of all consequences…
Tanuja Shukla made no claim to psychic powers. The future was as unknown to her as to anyone. But as they neared the southern end of the canyon, where the surging cataracts would flood between the piers of a bridge and under the county road, the exhilaration of their apparent escape gave way to a vague presentiment of disaster.
Sanjay’s strategy seemed to have worked. The imprudent speed with which he’d driven headlong into the gloom had brought them a few rocky moments when the ground under the Hyundai had become briefly treacherous, when they were startled by massive entanglements of tumbleweed and other loose brush, as big as the SUV itself, that blew down from higher ground and against the vehicle with a skreak and clatter as of some beast born of myth and mist. But for several minutes now, the headlights of the Range Rover had not cleaved the night and rain behind them. Their pursuers evidently had turned away from the river to follow a false trail or had fallen so far behind that turnings in the land concealed them.
Yet as Sanjay drove out of the mouth of the canyon, up a slope of gravel, onto the county road, and turned right onto the bridge, Tanuja braced herself for a crisis. It arrived at once in the form of a big Chevrolet crew-cab pickup jacked on outsized tires.
They were headed west, and the truck came from that direction. They had every reason to expect that it would cruise past them, driven by someone as innocent as they were. Instead, it angled to a stop on the bridge approach. The back doors on both sides were flung open, and men jumped out into the rain.
There was no turning back into the canyon. Nor could they do a 360, because less than two miles to the east lay the dead end and the house that they had so recently fled.
If Sanjay had slowed in the face of this emerging threat, they would have been lost. But even as the pickup skidded to a stop and the doors began to open, he accelerated. The Santa Fe Sport shot forward, and for one mad instant, Tanuja thought her brother meant to ram the Chevy head-on.
The man who jumped down from the starboard side of the truck held a shotgun in his right hand. He looked surprised to see their Hyundai rocketing toward him, his face pale and wide eyes glittering with reflections of their headlights. He wasn’t fast enough to bring up the shotgun in a two-hand grip and wasn’t smart enough to fling himself out of harm’s way. The Hyundai clipped the open door, and the door checked the gunman hard, knocking him off his feet and backward as they careened past.
“Holy shit!” Tanuja declared on impact.
The Chevy blocked too much of the roadway, and Sanjay could not get past it on the pavement. He steered down a graveled slope, the angle of descent seeming even more severe than it was because they had lost one headlight in the collision, the single remaining beam lending a cockeyed aspect to all that lay before them. He fought the steering wheel as the back end of the Hyundai slid clockwise. With the vehicle horizontal to the shoulder of the highway above them, at a scary slant that encouraged Tanuja to brace herself in expectation of a roll, Sanjay drove west across the face of the incline, well past the pickup, perhaps out of shotgun range, before angling uphill and returning to the blacktop.
Tanuja looked at the starboard mirror as her brother glanced at the rearview. Speaking over each other, she said, “Here they come, here they come!” as he said, “We can outrun a freaking crew-cab pickup!”
“They’re just letting that guy lie there on the road,” she said. “Maybe he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead,” Sanjay said.
“The door hit him hard.”
“Not that hard.”
“I don’t care if he’s dead. He was going to shoot us.”
“Who are these crazy bastards?”
“Rakshasa,” Tanuja said, referring to a race of demons from Hindu mythology, an element of fantasy she had used in a novelette.
“Hoods, goons, torpedoes,” Sanjay said, “but working for who, doing what, why us?”
“And how the hell did they know where we’d come out of the canyon?”
Bullets of rain fragmented off the windshield as the Santa Fe Sport topped ninety miles per hour and, even with all-wheel drive, seemed to risk hydroplaning off the rain-swept blacktop.
They were still in a rural area, but the road undulated and curved through a miles-long downgrade toward the densely populated lowlands of Orange County. The crew-cab pickup had ceased falling farther behind but wasn’t gaining, either, when in the distance a pulsing light quickened out of the dark and mist, the source hidden beyond the far fall of the highway, at first as eerie as an alien close encounter à la Spielberg: white and red, red and blue, white and red….
“Hey, cops!” Sanjay said. “We’re okay, Tanny. It’s the cops.”
“Lincoln Crossley’s the cops, a sheriff’s deputy, same thing,” said Tanuja, and she remembered Linc temporarily rendered sightless by insecticide and firing his gun blindly even though he’d been as likely to hit his two companions as to kill either her or Sanjay. She groaned as a patrol car topped the distant rise, the lightbar on its roof flaring brighter. The siren could now be heard even over the roar of rain and engine. “We are so screwed.”
“We aren’t screwed,” Sanjay disagreed.
“We are so screwed.”
“What do you know? You write hopeful fantasy, magic realism, whatever. I’m the noir guy, and I say we’re not screwed.”
“Chodu,” she said.
“We are not chodu.”
“We are so chodu,” she insisted as the siren swelled louder.
13
The storm relented from a downpour to a fitful drizzle by the time Jane parked around the corner and almost two blocks from her destination in the city of Orange. She walked from there, carrying a zippered tote bag.
If the authorities ever made a connection between her and the metallic-gray Explorer, a vehicle description would be put on the National Crime Information Center website, with an alert to every law-enforcement agency in the nation. Thereafter, she would be in constant jeopardy while driving it. She would need two or three days to get new license plates and a DMV registration from her current source for forged documents in Reseda, north of Los Angeles; it might be safer to abandon the SUV than to use it during the interim between an NCIC listing and the receipt of new plates and documents.