As they descended to the new freeway via an elevated connector, Jane saw a patrol car below, snugged against the right-hand shoulder of the roadway, waiting for an unsuspecting motorist to enter the down ramp faster than the posted speed allowed. She looked at the speedometer. She was all right.
“A few weeks ago,” she continued, “I spoke to a forensic pathologist, Dr. Emily Rossman, who had worked in the Los Angeles medical examiner’s office. When she trephined the skull of a woman who committed suicide, she saw the nanoweb.”
They swept past the cruiser and merged one lane to the left, heading south on State Highway 73. In the rearview mirror, she saw the patrol car’s headlights bloom. Its roof-mounted lightbar suddenly blazed and began flashing with authority.
“Dr. Rossman saw a gossamer fairylike structure of intricately designed circuits netting all four lobes of the brain, disappearing into various sulci, with a concentration on the corpus callosum. She was scared shitless. She thought she was looking at evidence of an extraterrestrial invasion.”
The patrol car was coming up fast behind them, but no siren wailed yet.
“Shortly after Dr. Rossman opened the cadaver’s skull, maybe as a reaction to contact with the air, the nanoweb dissolved. She said it was ‘like the way certain salts absorb moisture from the air and just deliquesce.’”
Still without a siren, the cruiser moved one lane to the left of the Explorer and sped past, dwindling in the night as if it, too, were a construct of deliquescent salts.
“There was residue?” Vikram asked.
“Some. Dr. Rossman sent it to the lab. She never got the report because the next day she was told to leave and accept severance pay or be fired. They had trumped up a charge against her.”
“Don’t they videotape autopsies?”
“As I recall, the video disappeared.”
Vikram pointed to a sign that listed upcoming exits. “We’re close now. Get off at MacArthur Boulevard.”
The patrol car was nearing the top of the exit ramp as Jane drove onto the bottom of it.
Halfway up the ramp, she glanced in the rearview mirror to see if another black-and-white might be tailing her. Nothing.
She said, “I feel boxed in even when I’m not.”
“Which is why you’ve survived this long.”
From MacArthur Boulevard, they turned onto Bison—and saw a cluster of four police vehicles in front of a store in an upscale strip mall to the right.
“Tell me that’s not where we’re going,” Jane said.
“It’s not. Turn right at the next corner.”
He pointed to a self-storage facility on the north side of the street. “There’s a package waiting for us. A ladder to the stars.”
The clear heavens of the day have slipped behind blankets heavy with unspent rain to bed down for the night. In the southeast, as the sea of clouds rolls across the last quadrant of the sky, the moon is drowning.
La Cañada Flintridge, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, north and east of Los Angeles, offers a high-quality suburban lifestyle, neighborhoods of well-kept homes on tree-lined avenues. Strangely, the pavement is in need of considerable repair and the lampposts provide no light on the street where Ashok Rangnekar lives with his wife, Doris.
Charlie Weatherwax, missionary for the truth of random cruelty, is being driven by the second-in-command of his four-member crew, Mustafa al-Yamani. Because they are valued members of the Arcadian revolution, they have been assigned a luxury SUV, a Mercedes-Benz G550 Squared with a 4.0-liter 416-horsepower biturbo V8, which will go from zero to sixty miles per hour in 5.8 seconds, provided at the expense of the Department of Homeland Security, which is one of the agencies for which they hold valid credentials.
Mustafa is an ambitious thirty-two-year-old who intends one day to live in a mansion on Long Island Sound, in East Egg village, and be warmly welcomed by old-money society as one of their own. In the interest of remaking himself to fulfill his dream, he has petitioned Homeland Security to allow him to proceed in court to have his name changed to Tom Buchanan, but permission has not been granted, as the department is currently short of the number of employees with Arabic names that it needs to meet its multicultural quotas.
Charlie and Mustafa are adamantly not two of a kind, and yet they get along well. Charlie’s high-protein low-carb diet, augmented with eighty vitamin pills a day and regular drinks of Clean Green, is a Spartan regimen compared to Mustafa’s fondness for the richest French cuisine and his tendency to order two desserts with dinner. Charlie is six feet three and lean as a wolf, while Mustafa is five feet eight and as solid as a pit bull. Mustafa pursues only icy blue-eyed blondes, while Charlie will bed any good-looking woman as long as she likes a little pain and/or humiliation with her sex, which he is able to deliver in a most refined manner.
“What kind of deplorable neighborhood is this?” Mustafa asks with evident distaste. Although English is his second language, he has diligently bleached every trace of an accent from his speech. “They don’t remove the dead trees, and that lamppost looks as though it fell over months ago.”
Charlie says, “We’re at the extreme northern end of the valley, on the very edge of La Cañada. People who live here aren’t looking for downtown action.”
“Yes, well, if this Vikram fellow hacked millions of dollars from nine different government agencies, whatever is he doing in a place like this?”
“Perhaps,” Charlie said, “he thinks it’s the last place we’d ever look.”
“With all the money he tweaked out of the system, why would he choose to live with an uncle and aunt?”
“Maybe because he likes them.”
“They must be a wildly entertaining couple if he’s willing to settle in a backwater like this.”
Long in preparation for his ascendancy to the social heights of East Egg, Mustafa carries a cordless razor with which he freshens his shave every three or four hours, wears a cologne so subtle that one is not consciously aware of its scent, and sleeps every other night with whitening strips affixed to his teeth. A cosmetic surgeon has refashioned his proud Arabic nose into something Mustafa thinks British and suggestive of English blood in his family tree dating to the age of colonialism. The hair between the knuckles of his fingers has been removed by electrolysis, and his nails are at all times so well manicured that his hands resemble those of an exquisitely detailed mannequin.
Now those hands suddenly tighten on the steering wheel. Mustafa brakes almost to a full stop, so that behind them the headlights of the Cadillac Escalade, which carries three other agents on Charlie’s four-man team, flare brightly in the tailgate window of the G550. He points to a large white sign with black lettering. “What do you make of that?”
DANGER
PROCEED AT RISK
