your family will be targeted, too, everyone you drew into your ‘little scenario’?”
“I’ve taken care of my relatives. They’re deeply hidden. Deeply, deeply. The black hats know nothing about them.”
“Wrong. This is Google World, Facebook World, Big Brother masquerading as Big Friend, so they know everything about your family, including what underwear they buy.”
“They have vanished in the mists,” Vikram insisted. “They can’t be found.”
“Anyone can be found.”
“They haven’t found you.”
“More than once they have. It’s been so close I just about had to shed my skin to slip away.”
“Anyway, they don’t have to stay hidden for long. Just until we vindicate you and destroy your enemies.”
In the interest of keeping him real, she gave him some snark. “This is Friday evening. Do you figure to finish the job by Sunday?”
A huge flatbed eighteen-wheeler with tires as large as those on a supersized earthmover came off the interstate. Like prison-yard searchlights, the headlamp beams washed through the Explorer. The truck driver, high in his cab, wore sunglasses at night and looked as hard-faced as a robot. An enormous construct of some kind was chained to the flatbed and concealed by canvas tarps. It was all quite ordinary, surely, but lately even the most mundane things often seemed strange and menacing.
When the truck passed and the sound of it faded, Vikram said, “For every back door I built into a computer system, at the order of someone at Justice—and even twice for the FBI director himself—I also built a second back door for my personal use. They weren’t wise to that. The old guard is enthusiastic about the power that technology can give them but at the same time ignorant about it. They knew epsilon about what I was doing for myself.”
Weariness had pulled Jane down in her seat. Now she sat up straight behind the wheel.
Vikram spoke fast, as if afraid she wouldn’t give him time to win her over. “So now I can ghost through any intelligence-service, law-enforcement, or government computer system of consequence. I can read the encrypted internal emails of every warped agent of every gone-to-the-dark-side agency searching for you. It’s all archived, this history of evil scheming. I’d already been phantom reading, which is how I caught sly passing references to Arcadians now and then. I didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed like they must be some kind of secret society. So then what I did is I scanned a humongous amount of text messages of anyone who mentioned Arcadians, searching for other unusual words that maybe were dog whistles, you know, that meant something special to them. And I found terms they shared like ‘adjusted people’ and ‘brain-screwed’ and something called the ‘Hamlet list,’ though I haven’t been able to figure out what any of it means. I also kept seeing these weird references to a central committee, regional commanders, cell leaders, as if they’re some crazy nest of total revolutionaries. And then what I did is I developed this algorithm, an app to scan all archived messages by the tens of thousands per hour and identify as many people as possible who are using these terms.”
When Vikram ran out of breath, Jane took a moment to find her voice. “You … you’ve got names?”
“Lots of names.”
“How many? A hundred? Two hundred?”
“More than three thousand eight hundred.”
“Holy shit.”
“Some of them are real pooh-bahs, top of the food chain in government, industry, the media.”
Jane had killed several Arcadians who had given her no choice but to cut them down, and she had identified others, perhaps a score of them, maybe two score. “I’ve been collecting evidence, but … but you put together a whole damn membership directory.”
“I’m sure it’s nowhere near complete, but it will be in a few days. What exactly are they up to? Why do all these people want you dead? Did they kill Nick? Why did they kill him?”
Hope thrilled through her, a positive expectation more intense than anything she had felt in weeks. A prickling sensation traced the ladder of her spine, and her heart beat faster, and something akin to joy induced a deep pleasurable shudder. “Vikram, you’re a genius.”
“Yes, I know. But you’re a genius, too. I’ve reviewed your Bureau file. Your IQ is one-sixty-five.”
“I couldn’t have done what you’ve done,” she said.
“Well, I can’t do the things you do. You’re right—I would be a danger to myself with a gun.”
“I’m sorry I called you a bunny rabbit.”
He shrugged. “There’s some truth in the description. Though I would die for you.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”
“Well, but I would.” He looked away from her, gazed into the cloistered realm of the aged industrial district, where the shadows seemed sentient and sinister, where the inadequate lights distorted and concealed more than they revealed. In a voice softened by the particular modesty that is a sensitive shrinking from any indelicate subject, he said, “I’ve admired you for a long time. I won’t call it more than admiration. It can’t lead to anything more. I understand that. I don’t mean to embarrass you, and you must not respond, there is no possible response, but I just needed to say it.”
She reached out and took his hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it once.
Having difficulty swallowing, her chest tight with emotion, she switched on the headlights, pulled away from the curb, and returned to the interstate.
The false twilight of the storm gave way to the true twilight. Darkness came down through the stately pines with the wind-driven crystalfall, and the fragrant trees arrayed themselves in the blizzard’s ermine, so that little of the snow accumulated on the floor of the woods. On sunny days, not much sunlight penetrated the layered vaults of needled branches, and there was little underbrush to inhibit progress.
Tom Buckle was able to move surely if not swiftly among the evergreens. However, the progress that the terrain allowed didn’t build his confidence. Until he found the river, Crystal Creek, he couldn’t know whether he was heading in the right direction, and the river eluded him. He seemed to be moving southeast in a straight line toward the interstate, but in truth he had no references by which he could determine direction. Maybe, in these parts, moss grew only on the north face of the trees or perhaps the pines inclined toward the eastern sun because the mountains to the west shortened the afternoon, but he was no Daniel Boone, and he was likely to be wrong about everything he imagined from moss to inclination. He was half-afraid that he might not be making any headway at all, that in his disorientation, he might be circling through the woods and, were he to switch on the Tac Light, would find himself tramping across tracks he had made earlier.
In this forest of the night, Tom was not blind, but his dark-adapted eyes left him half-sighted. The architecture of nature was rendered in shades of gray and shapes without detail, and at the farther limits of vision, the woods seemed amorphous, changing. The trees were
