IN CASE THE AUTHORITIES were stopping all incoming and outgoing traffic at the roadblocks, as they had done little more than two and a half hours earlier, Cornell Jasperson would leave Borrego Valley in the motor home, tucked under the platform bed, where Luther Tillman had hidden earlier. Travis would occupy the smaller space under the built-in sofa, where Jane had been concealed.
She helped the boy extricate himself from the duffel bag, and she knelt beside the Suburban to hold him close, to feel the beating of his heart and look into his eyes. They were his father’s eyes in every striation, in their crystalline clarity, in the directness with which they met her eyes.
“Good so far,” she said. “Not much farther to go. Mr. Riggowitz will show you where to hide. He’s a lovely man. Do exactly what he tells you to do.”
“I will.”
“Listen, in there where you’re going to hide, there might be this cockroach. Don’t let it scare you at the wrong moment.”
“Cock-a-roaches don’t scare me, Mom.”
“I should have said don’t let it startle you. Be very quiet and still, and everything will be all right.”
“Why can’t you hide in the motor home with us?”
“There aren’t enough spaces to hide, sweetie. Besides, Luther and I are going to be Bernie’s escort. Like a police escort.”
She hugged him very tight again and kissed his cheek, his brow.
“Hurry now. Mr. Riggowitz is waiting.”
As Luther led the boy to meet Bernie at the starboard door of the Tiffin Allegro, into which Cornell had already climbed, as Jane got to her feet, she heard the helicopter.
16
CARTER JERGEN LYING HELPLESS on a catafalque of pea gravel, under a searing sun as fierce as the eye of some merciless monocular judge, a chorus of crickets singing a monotonous dirge …
The agony first squeezes from him screams more terrible than those to which any of the people he’s executed have ever given voice. But either his nervous system short-circuits from an overload of pain or his brain is pumping out a flood of endorphins, for the torment soon subsides to mere misery. He doesn’t know exactly where he’s been shot and lacks the courage to assess his wounds. He is too weak to move and growing weaker by the moment. Bleeding out. He can smell the blood.
He is lying on his side, facing Radley Dubose, whom he believes is dead. The big man is sprawled flat on his back, arms out to his sides.
Then Dubose speaks. “An historic moment, my friend.”
“Call nine-one-one,” says Jergen as a flicker of hope fires through his unadjusted brain.
“No can do, Cubby. I’m paralyzed from the neck down. No feeling at all. Wish I’d called Desert Flora about the bitch Hawk before I called the pilot. Now only the pilot knows.”
Jergen begins to weep.
“No tears are warranted,” Dubose counsels. “This is a great and noble death.”
“Noble?” Carter Jergen is still capable of astonishment and a small flame of anger. “Noble? Tell me what the hell is noble about it?”
“We’re dying for the revolution.”
Jergen’s words come in a rhythm of exhaustion. “We’re dying ’cause you tooted at a creepy old, crazy old skank demented from a lifetime of vicious heat, tarantulas, snakes, flying bats eating flying beetles in the night, and four useless desert-rat husbands, who she probably deserved, the hateful bitch.”
“Whom, not who,” Dubose corrects. “Love the revolution, my friend. It is our monument.”
Jergen’s vision is fading. He can draw only shallow breaths. “It’s bullshit. The revolution. Just bullshit.”
“All revolutions are bullshit, Cubby. That is … until you win one. Then you rule like gods and take what you want, who you want. Meanwhile … man, what a ride.”
Jergen’s hearing is fading, too. Dubose sounds distant. He can hardly hear the big man. He whispers an expression of love, such as he knows it: “You were always so cool. How could this happen to you when you were always so cool?”
If Dubose answers, Jergen does not hear him.
17
THE POSSIBLE EVIL INTENTIONS of those who fly the Airbus H120 imparted to the aircraft a monstrous quality, so that as it streaked across the desert scrub toward the RV campground, it appeared less like a machine than like a huge wasp with lethal venom to deliver. The helo’s approach was so direct and fast, Jane could only assume that in the half hour since the pilot left them unmolested at the ruined house, he had found a reason to reconsider their legitimacy and to seek them out.
Now he and his crewmate had seen Travis being led to the motor home, a boy approximately the size of the one they were hunting.
Jane pulled open the front passenger door and grabbed the Auto Assault-12 as the chopper racketed over the car, over the Tiffin Allegro, and executed an arc of return.
She hated this. She was trained for the street, not for the battlefield. In the Bureau, and even since, when she’d been forced to kill, the enemy had been a person, dimensional and detailed; she had seen his face, had known beyond all doubt that he was malicious and an immediate threat to her life or the life of an innocent. But this confrontation was of the nature of war, not law enforcement. She couldn’t see the faces of the men in the chopper, didn’t know their names, didn’t with certainty understand their intentions. In war you needed to kill at a distance, at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise you could be overwhelmed and lose your advantage—and then the fight. But the need to do this made her feel … not wicked, not even unclean, but in part responsible because it might not have come to this if she had been a little smarter, quicker.
There was no time for self-examination. She existed only for her boy, to give him a chance at life and perhaps yet a world worth living in. What laws Jane broke and what sins she committed in his defense were a cancer on no one else’s soul but her own, and she alone would bear the consequences all the way to the grave and perhaps beyond.
The pilot used the Airbus H120 as a weapon of intimidation, clearing the roof of the motor home by no more than twenty feet. Maybe the copilot was also a shooter. Jane couldn’t know if they were strictly on a surveillance run or might be combat ready. When the chopper crossed the Suburban and turned its flank to her, the starboard door might be open to facilitate automatic fire.
Loaded with slugs, the Auto Assault-12 had an effective range of one hundred meters. As the helo passed over the Suburban far lower than that, Jane moved boldly under it and emptied the drum magazine. With a muzzle velocity of eleven hundred feet per second, the shotgun pumped out thirty-two slugs in six seconds. The auto-fire reports stuttered loud across the parking lot, but the recoil-reduction system was as effective as claimed, the butt plate of the stock bumping against her shoulder not with jarring violence, but as if giving her a rapid series of attaboys to encourage her attack.
At such close range, the slugs ripped holes in the aircraft’s undercarriage. Wrecked one of the skids. Rattled hard through the whirling rotor blades to no good effect. Tore up the tail pylon. Blew out the tail rotor. Disintegrated the horizontal stabilizer.
Seventy or eighty feet past Jane, the Airbus wobbled into an uncontrolled death spin. It came back toward her, and a thrill of terror fired her heart as if it were a drum magazine in her breast. Then the chopper spun away from her, drawing a gray spiral of smoke on the bright air. The engine quit, and the helo tipped, and a blade of the rotary wing gouged the blacktop. The Airbus flipped, tumbled, exploded, vanishing in a beautiful bright flower of infinite petals that for a moment seemed to grant pilot and copilot absolution in death, but then the broken craft reappeared as a scorched carcass, and the petals of flame became mere tongues of fire that licked through the wreckage with fiendish hunger.
Jane turned toward the Suburban.
The two dogs were at the side window of the cargo area, neither of them barking. They seemed not to have been frightened by either the gunfire or the crashing Airbus. Their dark liquid eyes regarded Jane with grave interest, as though in their veins flowed the blood of seers, as if they intended, by the intensity of their stares, to convey to her the nature of some oncoming calamity.
Luther stood on the farther side of the vehicle. “Shit.”