size of a pea attached to her upper lip with spirit gum, wearing a little too much makeup and Smashbox lipstick, she was deep in her Leslie Anderson identity. Because she looked younger than she was and wore a pair of stage-prop glasses with bright red frames, she could be mistaken for a studious college girl. She never behaved in a furtive or nervous manner, as the most-wanted fugitive on the FBI list might be expected to do, but called attention to herself in subtle ways—yawning, stretching, muttering at the computer screen—and chatted up anyone who spoke to her. She was confident that no average citizen would easily see through Leslie Anderson and recognize the wanted woman whom the media called “the beautiful monster.”
However, the guy kept staring at her. Twice when she casually glanced in his direction, he quickly looked away, pretending to be absorbed in the data on his screen.
His genetic roots were in the subcontinent of India. Caramel skin, black hair, large dark eyes. Perhaps thirty pounds overweight. A pleasant, round face. Maybe twenty-five. Dressed in khakis and a yellow pullover.
He didn’t fit the profile of someone in law enforcement or that of an intelligence-agency spook. Nevertheless, he made her uneasy. More than uneasy. She never dismissed the still, small voice of intuition that had so often kept her alive.
So, Condition Orange. Two options: engage or evade. The second was nearly always the better choice, as the first was more likely to lead to Condition Red and a violent confrontation.
Jane backed out of the website she had been exploring, wiped the browsing history, clicked off the computer, picked up her tote, and walked out of the alcove.
As she moved toward the front desk, she glanced back. The plump man was standing, holding something in one hand, at his side, so she couldn’t identify it, and watching her as he spoke into his phone.
When she opened the door at the main entrance, she saw another man standing by her metallic-gray Ford Explorer Sport in the public parking lot, talking on his phone. Tall, lean, dressed all in black, he was too distant for her to see his face. But on this mild sunny day, his knee-length raincoat might have been worn to conceal a sawed-off shotgun or maybe a Taser XREP 12-gauge that could deliver an electronic projectile and a disabling shock from a distance of a hundred feet. He looked as real as death and yet phantasmal, like an assassin who had slipped through a rent in the cosmic fabric between this world and another, on some mystical mission.
The Explorer, a stolen vehicle, had been scrubbed of its former identity in Mexico, given a purpose-built 700-horsepower 502 Chevy engine, and purchased from a reliable black-market dealer in Nogales, Arizona, who didn’t keep records. There seemed to be no way it could have been tied to her.
Instead of stepping outside, she closed the door and turned to her right and made her way through the shelves of books. The aisles weren’t a maze to her, because she had scouted the place when she arrived, before settling at the computer.
An EXIT sign marked a door to a back hallway that was fragrant with fresh-brewed coffee. Offices. Storerooms. An open refreshments niche with a refrigerator. A short hall intersected the longer one, and at the end, another door opened out to a small staff-parking area with an alleyway beyond.
Three cars and a Chevy Tahoe had occupied this back lot when she’d checked it earlier.
Now, in addition to those vehicles, a white Cadillac Escalade stood in the fifth of seven spaces, to the west of the library’s rear door. The woman in the driver’s seat of the Caddy had the same caramel complexion and black hair as the man at the computer. She had a phone to her ear and was speaking to someone, which didn’t prove complicity in a plot, though her eyes fixed on Jane like a shooter’s eyes on a target.
In any crisis situation, the most important thing to do was get off the X, move, because if you weren’t moving away from the threat, someone with bad intentions was for damn sure moving closer to you.
Avoiding the Escalade, Jane went east. Along the north side of the alley, shadows of two-, three-, and four-story buildings painted a pattern like castle crenellations on the pavement, and she stayed in that shade for what little cover it provided, moving quickly past Dumpsters standing sentinel. To the south, past the library, there was a park, and beyond the park a kindergarten with a fenced playground.
She was opposite the park, where phoenix palms rustled in a light breeze and swayed their shadows on the grass, when the tall man in the raincoat appeared as if conjured, coming toward her, not running, in no hurry, as though it was ordained that she was his to take at will.
The structures to her left housed businesses, the names of which were emblazoned on the back doors: a gift shop, a restaurant, a stationery store, another restaurant. The buildings in that block shared walls, so there were no service passages between enterprises.
When a sedan pulled into the east end of the alley and angled to a stop, serving as a barricade, Jane didn’t bother to look behind herself, because she had no doubt the Escalade had likewise blocked the west end of the alleyway.
As she hurried along, she tried doors, and the third one—CLASSIC PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY—wasn’t locked. She went inside, where a series of small windows near the ceiling admitted enough light to reveal a combination receiving area and storage room.
The shelves were empty. When she turned to the alley door to engage the deadbolt, the lock was broken.
She’d been skillfully herded to this place. The previous tenant had moved out. She had walked into a trap.
The formal dining room, which seats twenty, isn’t intimate enough for the conversation that Wainwright Hollister intends to have with Thomas Buckle. They are served in the breakfast room, which is separated from the immense kitchen by a butler’s pantry.
A large Francis Bacon painting of smudges, whorls, and jagged lines is the only painting in the twenty-foot-square chamber, a work of alarming dislocations that hangs opposite the ordered vista of nature—groves of evergreens and undulant meadows—visible beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.
They sit at the stainless-steel and cast-glass table. Buckle faces the windows, so the immense and lonely nature of the ranch will be impressed upon him by the time he learns that he is to be hunted to the death in that cold vastness. Hollister faces the young director and the painting behind him, for the art of Francis Bacon reflects his view of human society as chaotic, confirms his belief in the need to impose order by brute power and extreme violence.
The chef, Andre, is busy in the kitchen. Lovely Mai-Mai serves them, beginning with an icy glass of pinot grigio and small plates of Andre’s Parmesan crisps. She wears a verbena fragrance as subtle as the mere memory of a scent.
Tom Buckle is clearly charmed by the girl’s beauty and grace. However, the almost comic awkwardness with which he tries to engage her in conversation as she performs her duties has less to do with sexual attraction than with the fact that he is out of his element, the son of a tailor and a seamstress, abashed by the splendor of the wealth all around him and uncertain how to behave with the staff of such a great house. He chats up Mai-Mai as if she were a waitress in a restaurant.
Because she’s well trained, the very ideal of a servant, Mai-Mai is polite but not familiar, at all times smiling but properly distant.
When the two men are alone, Hollister raises his glass in a toast. “To a great adventure together.”
He is amused
