At 4:20 A.M. Thursday, after nine hours of restful sleep, Jane sat up on the rollaway and swung her legs out of bed, as instantly and fully awake as if roused by a gunshot. Incorporated in the last of her dreams had been a recognition of something that she had overlooked in that Kentucky village.
Horrified by the condition into which the people of that town had fallen, in her vehement determination to extract the children from imprisonment, she had not considered that her usual precautions might not be sufficient to the strange circumstances of Iron Furnace. She had instructed one keeper of the children to destroy all the security video at the fake school. But what if the town itself was fitted out with more than a few traffic cams?
Given the importance of its function as a conversion center, and considering that the Arcadians must be studying this experiment in total control in order to refine it for future application, Iron Furnace might be surveilled down to the square foot, around the clock. If cameras were everywhere, she hadn’t noticed an excess, but these days cameras of the highest quality were so small and could be so cunningly integrated into any setting that she might not have been aware of them.
She had parked the Ford Escape on a quiet residential street where no camera should have caught her going to or from it. But what if they had identified her wheels? License-plate scanning was a rapidly growing automatic function of many police vehicles. She could travel anonymously only as long as they didn’t have a vehicle description and plate number.
Having slept in jeans and sweater, she put on her shoes, her rig with pistol, and her sport coat. While the four girls remained deep in sleep, she let herself out of the room, onto the awning-covered dimly lighted promenade, and closed the door behind her.
The Oklahoma night was chilly, clear, and quiet.
She studied the parking lot, which was darker than she would have liked, the shadowed shapes of vehicles like a line of immense porcine creatures feeding at a trough.
In the street, a delivery truck bearing a dairy’s name and logo passed slowly. Suspiciously slow? In an age when nothing was what it seemed, even a milk truck warranted sharp attention. She watched it out of sight and listened in expectation that its engine noise would stop receding and grow louder as it returned. But then the sound of it diminished beyond hearing.
Nothing on the farther side of the street strummed any chord of danger from the harpstrings of her intuition, and she was willing to believe that the children were safe.
She went to her nearby Ford and retrieved tools from under the front passenger seat: screwdriver, Phillips-head screwdriver, pliers, adjustable wrench, each instrument in a separate pocket in a folding chamois kit. A hammer was wrapped separately.
Working quickly and quietly, hoping to avoid drawing attention, she unscrewed the front and back plates from the Ford. She put them in the car.
Without plates, she would be at risk of drawing a patrolman’s attention. But as soon as they were out of Ardmore, they would exit I-35 and find a place where they were unobserved. She’d work on the front plate with pliers and hammer, to make it appear as if it had been crankled in some minor mishap, though her purpose would be to distort it so that any flat-reading scanner would be foiled. They could mix up some mud with which to splatter the back of the Ford, with emphasis on the rear plate. This deception might keep them safe until Sacket Ranch. But any lawman who by chance got a look at both the front and back plates would know the scam when he saw it.
The girls were still sleeping when Jane returned to the room. She took advantage of the moment to lay out a change of clothes and be first in the bathroom. She showered quickly, for she was unable to hear anything other than the drumming of water on the walls and floor of the stall, so that her imagination alternately scripted the kidnapping of the children and then a sudden bloody assault on them.