you’re innocent.”
“I never said I was innocent. Anyway … innocent of what?”
He was a big guy, about six feet two and solid, with an air of rough experience about him, and yet he suddenly seemed as shy as a boy, looking down at his shoes to avoid meeting her eyes.
“Innocent of what?” she pressed.
He gazed through the open door, at the house shaded by phoenix palms, at the still cascades of fronds in the warm, breathless day.
She waited, and when he looked at her again, he said, “That’s a bitchin’ disguise, but seeing through disguises was part of my job. You’re her. You’re Jane Hawk.”
Sparky, the mastiff, sniffed along the zipper of the tote bag, as though trained to locate the banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills that, among other things, it contained.
“If I were Hawk,” Jane said, “maybe it wouldn’t be smart of you to say so to my face. Half the world hunting her down, she must be one crazy desperate bitch.”
Garret Nolan smiled again. “I won’t say what service I was in. We did black-ops work in Mexico and Central America, no uniforms, we went native. Our actions targeted MS-13, other gangs, those linked to nests of Iranian operatives in Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua.”
He turned his back on her and went to a square of perfboard beside a workbench and took a set of keys from one of the pegs.
“We knew who we were looking for—names, faces—but a lot of the time they changed their appearance. This funny thing happens when you use facial-recognition programs to see through disguises. When you do it long enough, often enough, it’s as if your brain uploads a little of the software, so you develop an eye for a masquerade, no matter how well it’s done.”
When he returned to her, he held out the keys, which she didn’t at once accept.
“Another problem you have is you’re a damn good-looking woman.”
“If I were Hawk, what should I do—scar myself?”
“Women as good-looking as you rarely use so much makeup and eye shadow, such bright lipstick. If it can’t improve the face, maybe it’s meant to obscure it.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“The mole on the upper lip. Why haven’t you had it removed?”
“I’m skittish about doctors and scalpels.”
“Fake moles, fake port-wine birthmarks, fake tattoos—they’re popular camouflage. I don’t need a scalpel. Bet I could remove it with a little spirit-gum solvent.”
“Leslie Anderson,” she insisted. “Born in Portland, late of Vegas, got myself in trouble when I jacked five thousand credit-card numbers that my hacker boss had stolen, went into business for myself, running a buy-and-fence operation, until he found me.”
Nolan still held out the keys. “The color-changing contact lens on your left eye isn’t fitted properly. There’s a thin crescent of blue above the gray. Jane Hawk has blue eyes.”
She remembered how, on first meeting him, he had not looked her up and down, but had stared intently into her eyes.
“The ash-blond wig is the best, tightly fitted for action,” he said. “But if the color was natural, your skin would probably be paler. With your complexion, your hair’s more likely to be honey blond—like Jane Hawk’s.”
She took the keys from him. “I don’t have to be Jane Hawk to need the bike. But if you’re hot on giving it to Leslie Anderson—”
“‘—born in Portland, late of Vegas,’” he said. “Another thing is how you move. Spine straight, shoulders back, athletic, quick and confident. That’s how she moves in what film they have of her.”
“Mama Anderson taught her girl not to slouch.”
“Then there’s the fact the media says Jane Hawk took part in some terrorist attack in Borrego Springs three days ago, maybe a hundred dead, maybe a lot more than that. They say she’s still somewhere in Southern California.”
“If I were her,” Jane said, “I’d be long gone from the state.”
Denied the chance to investigate the tote’s contents, the mastiff grumbled with disappointment when Jane picked up the bag.
“I really can pay for this,” she said.
“Then what would I have to brag on when you’re vindicated?”
She stowed the tote in one of the bike’s saddlebags. “Let’s say I’m her. Why would you do this?”
“From my days in … the service, I know how deeply the enemies of freedom have penetrated this country’s institutions, public and private sector. The way they’re demonizing you, their viciousness and ferocity, tells me you’re right about the plague of suicides, and somehow it’s … engineered.”
“I haven’t heard Hawk says it’s engineered.”
“Maybe because nobody’s given her a chance. Digital technology and biotech—somehow they have to be part of this.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
He said, “People are dazzled by high tech, but there’s a dark side, dark and darker. What horror isn’t possible today … it’ll be possible tomorrow.”
“Or maybe it is, after all, possible today,” she said.
The three rayshaws were of a physical type, big men with thick necks and broad shoulders and sledgehammer fists, their eyes cold, their stares as impersonal as camera lenses, as if they were not of women born, but instead were immortal archetypes of violence, risen from some infernal realm millennia earlier, having come down the centuries on a mission of barbarity, cruelty, and murder.
They escorted Tom Buckle to the guest suite where he’d left his baggage. Nothing he said could engender a response. They spoke to him only to tell him what he must do. They didn’t overtly threaten him; mortal threat was implicit in their every look and action.
Items that didn’t belong to him had been placed on the bed: long underwear, a flannel shirt, a Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit by Hard Corps, two different kinds of socks, supple-looking gloves. Beside the bed stood a pair of boots.
“Strip naked,” one of the men commanded. “Dress in those things.”
Tom recognized the futility of appealing to these creatures’ common humanity, for there was nothing human about them other than their form. Their faces varied, but their expressions were eerily the same, as neutral as the masks of mannequins. No emotion shaped their features. Their faces lacked evidence of
