Hollister’s movie was in fact reality, and Tom Buckle was the doomed lead in a noir thriller where the theme was meant to be the hopelessness of hoping. He was Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A. Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.
Watching him undress, the three men said nothing.
He obeyed them. He could do nothing but obey. He believed Hollister’s assertion that they were killing machines.
For twenty-six years, he had lived a relatively charmed life, on a glide path into film directing. He’d never known terror until now. He was terrified not only of these creatures and of Hollister, but also by a sudden sense that a sinkhole might open in his psyche, a sucking black madness from which there could be no escape.
As Tom dressed in the storm suit, Mai-Mai’s suicide played in his memory so vividly that the room around him seemed to darkle like a theater where all the light was contained within the screen: her exquisite face, her beautiful body, she a symbol of mystical power, as if she were a goddess who stepped down from a heretofore unknown pantheon, the scene remembered in black-white-gray, as though from a movie made in the 1930s, but for the scarlet silk scarf that slid off her hand and the muzzle flash of the pistol, her collapsing with an awful grace, her seeming power revealed as an illusion, removed from this world with as little concern as Hollister might give to a cockroach before stamping on it.
The room was warm, but Tom felt as cold as the snow-swept world beyond the windows. His heart drummed with fear, but there was anger in it, too, an icy rage that scared him. He had never been an angry man. He worried that his fury might compel him to do something that would diminish his already slim chance of survival.
When he was suited and booted, with the hood snug around his face, the three men led him into the vast garage, where Hollister maintained a collection of expensive, exotic vehicles: a Lamborghini Huracán, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Bugatti Chiron, an armored Gurkha by Terradyne, and maybe twenty others. A showroom-tile floor. A pin spot highlighting each set of wheels.
They took him to a Hennessey VelociRaptor 6 × 6, which was a bespoke version of a Ford F-150 Raptor, a jacked-up six-wheel crew-cab truck with numerous upgrades. The driver sat alone in the front. The other two rayshaws flanked their prisoner in the backseat, so that Tom felt wedged between the jaws of a vise.
As they drove into the gray light and spiraling snow showers of the late afternoon, the hulk to Tom’s right recited the simple rules of the hunt. The quarry would be given a two-hour lead. On foot, he could head in any direction that he wished—except that he must not attempt to return to the residence. Security sensors would be aware of his approach well before he drew near the house, and he would be cut down by Crystal Creek Ranch personnel with Uzis.
“Adjusted people,” Tom said, still struggling to believe what ample evidence proved to be true.
His instructor’s facial features remained as graven as cemetery granite, his stare chisel sharp but shallow. “The quarry will be armed with a nine-millimeter Glock featuring a ten-round magazine.” Neither he nor the other men used Tom’s name or even once referred to him with the pronoun you.
The rayshaw produced the gun, sans ammunition, and briefly explained its features.
Tom owned a pistol with which he practiced, at most, once a year. The other three hundred and sixty-four days, the weapon was in the back of his nightstand drawer. He had no illusions about being a good marksman.
His instructor gave him the Glock. “The magazine and ammunition will be provided upon arrival at the starting position of the hunt. The quarry will also receive six PowerBars for energy, as well as a tactical flashlight.”
“A map,” Tom said. “A map and a compass.”
None of the three men responded.
Snow raveled now in countless skeins through the loom of the day and formed a pristine fabric on the land.
“Hollister said I’d have a fair chance.” There was no evidence that they had heard him. Nevertheless, he said. “What’s fair about this? Nothing. Nothing’s fair about it.”
His own voice embarrassed him, sounded like the whining of a coddled child. He fell silent.
The VelociRaptor grumbled into the growing storm and the slowly dimming day, flakes like midget moths swarming through the beams of the headlights. They had turned off the blacktop that linked the residence to the distant airplane hangar housing the Gulfstream V, and seemed to be following a dirt track difficult to discern under thin shifting scarves of snow.
Fifteen or twenty minutes from the house, the truck came to a stop. The men flanking Tom opened the back doors and got out.
When he hesitated to follow, one of them said, “Now,” putting such menace into one word that Tom at once obeyed.
In Garret Nolan’s garage, Jane straddled the motorcycle, flexed her hands around the grips, looking it over—speedometer/tachometer, clutch lever, brake lever, throttle—getting the feel of the machine before putting up the kickstand.
Nolan said, “One more thing you should know. They say Jane Hawk avoids bus stations, train stations, and airports because facial-recognition programs scan travelers for known terrorists and wanted criminals. But that’s not good enough anymore.”
Jane was curious, but Leslie Anderson was on the run only from her former boss, not from the feds, so neither of them expressed interest in what Nolan had said.
“About a year ago,” he continued, “the Chinese government began deploying among their police departments these freaky damn eyeglass-mounted cameras equipped with face-rec tech. Now some of my buddies still in U.S. spec ops recently received the same gear.”
Six months earlier, Jane would have taken such a claim with the entire contents of a salt shaker. Fixed-camera recognition systems were connected to remote facial databases stored in the cloud, so vast they—along with artificial-intelligence analytics—couldn’t be loaded onto the front end of a wearable camera. But technology was advancing at a remarkable pace, especially the tech that could be used for population control and oppression.
“These sunglasses are wired to a handheld device with an offline facial database of up to ten thousand faces,” Nolan said. “The AI is good enough to match a suspect’s face to one in the d-base in just six hundred milliseconds. Fixed cameras have limited lines of sight, but someone wearing these can look everywhere.”
She couldn’t restrain herself from saying, “That sucks.”
Nolan said, “If this gear is being issued to some in the military, you can bet your ass security agencies on the domestic side also have them. So maybe if you ever happen to run into Jane Hawk someday, tell her the one face currently sure to be in that portable d-base is hers. Nowhere is safe.”
“Has anywhere ever been?”
From the seat of a nearby Harley, he picked up a pearl-white Shoei X-9 Air helmet with a dark-smoke shield. “Too bad you can’t wear this everywhere.”
Accepting the helmet, Jane said, “What if they nail me and trace this bike back to you?”
“They
