By the time Jane returned to Pacifica, a hard wind had followed the rain out of the northwest, blowing dead needles and cones from the pines, scarlet flowers from the flame trees, silver-blue dollar-coin leaves from eucalyptuses, shakes from shingled roofs, rolling empty collection-day trash containers along the streets, tumbling drained soda cans, fighting an invisible bull with a great cape of plastic torn from a construction-site fence.
Rather than risk driving to Henry Waldlock’s Greek revival house, she parked a block from her Explorer Sport and walked to it and used a burner phone to make a 911 call in which she identified herself and said that the cost-control analyst needed to be freed from the water closet in his master bathroom. She ventured out of the SUV and found a street drain and dropped the phone into it.
With the wound in her side burning as if she had been branded, she set out on a seventy-mile drive that would take her across the Golden Gate Bridge to the town of Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, to the home of Dr. Porter Walkins, who weeks earlier had treated both a badly wounded ally of hers, Dougal Trahern, and Jane herself; it was he who dressed the scratch she incurred in a confrontation with a coyote, who began treating her with human rabies immune globulin and human diploid cell vaccine.
If he trusted in the innocence of his patient, Dr. Walkins would treat a gunshot wound without filing the required police report. He was the kind of man who could watch the news and separate the small grain of truth—if there was one—from the great mass of chaff. He believed in Jane after the violent events at the Shenneck ranch in Napa, earlier in the month, and she hoped he would still believe in her after whatever media firestorm ensued from the death of David James Michael.
By the time she reached the Golden Gate, the diminished rain needled through thick fog incoming off the ocean. The wind shaped the mist into phantom forms, which it harried west to east, as if the ghosts of countless sailors drowned at sea were returning to shore, an exodus from many thousands of watery graves in some Last Days accounting of the human experience and a reckoning of its debts.
Traffic crept across the great expanse of cabled red steel, the aureoled headlights of oncoming vehicles tunneling the fog. In that passage, the Pacific unseen on her left, the bay and city shrouded on her right, Jane Hawk began at last to grapple with the mystery of what had happened to D. J. Michael.
Cornered by a hundred policemen dispatched by prosecutors with ironclad proof of his crimes against humanity, the billionaire would have done nothing more drastic than summon his attorneys and set aside ten million for his defense. No narcissist with his enormous arrogance would admit the least wrongdoing or readily accept defeat, and he certainly would not despair to the extent of taking his life.
Do you hear destiny whispering, Jane?
When he had spoken of destiny and the whispering room, had he suggested by the cupping of his ear that he could hear microwave instructions in some receptive chamber of his own brain? Or had he meant that an entire world of people—in the service of an elite caste—would one day be accessible to be marshaled simultaneously for whatever task their controllers wished them to undertake?
Whichever D. J. Michael might have meant, it seemed clear that a faction within the Arcadians had conspired to sedate him without his knowledge and inject him with a nanotech control mechanism. In the history of revolution, no king had ever been deposed by a means more sinister than this, more intimate. Those would-be gods who had conceived this new pantheon, lacking the power of monotheism, were the residents of a modern Olympus where they not only ruled but also conspired against one another, proving themselves no more elevated than the members of a street gang contesting with knives and guns for dominion of a worn-down neighborhood or public-housing project.
Just north of San Pablo Bay, the fog feathered away and Jane drove out of the rain. The sky remained low, trailing thin, gray rags like grave clothes worn to tatters by the restless wandering of some cold and withered decedent whose spirit would not depart it. To her, just now, this land that was so fertile and these communities that were so vital—Novato and Petaluma and Rohnert Park—looked bleak, shadowed even on this sunless day, haunted not by the dead but by the ghosts of days to come, by the destiny that whispered to David James Michael.
She understood that the reasons for her mood were many, having accumulated over nearly five months since Nick’s death. But there was one among the many that most acutely affected her.
Don’t you hear the whispering, Jane? All the whispering in the whispering room? If you don’t hear it yet, you soon will.
The billionaire had been confident that the day of Jane’s induction into the legions of the controlled was near at hand, when she would be like unto the citizens of Iron Furnace.
She found herself returning in memory to the previous night, when she’d been in Henry Waldlock’s spare bedroom while he passed the evening unaware of her presence, watching some thundering movie about giant robots or whatever. She had braced the bedroom door with a straight-backed chair before daring to catch a few hours of sleep.
The door had still been braced shut when she woke and went to Waldlock’s room to chloroform and bind him.
There was no way into that spare bedroom except through the barricaded door.
The bathroom adjacent to those guest quarters had not served two bedrooms. No one could have reached her through the bath.
She hadn’t checked to be sure that the windows were locked. She should have checked. But it was ludicrous to suppose some villain with the skills of a cat burglar had come upon her through a window.
Anyway, she had slept because she was exhausted, not because she had been sedated.
The only place she could have been slipped a sedative without her knowledge was at the restaurant in Pacifica, where she’d eaten an early dinner before going to see Waldlock. But no one had known she was in town; no one could have anticipated where she would dine.
Paranoia. Understandable but dangerous. If she’d been injected, she would not have gone after D. J. Michael. She would be controlled. Unless there was a new generation of control mechanism, one that took longer than a few hours to self-assemble in the brain…
In Santa Rosa, she parked in a residential neighborhood, a block from her destination. The street was patinated with leaves applied to the pavement by the recent wind and rain, and the trees still dripped.
Dr. Porter Walkins was that rarity among contemporary doctors, a general practitioner whose offices were attached to his residence. Jane knew he took his lunch at home, during an hour when he allowed no patient appointments, but she didn’t know if that hour started at noon or twelve-thirty.
She sat in the Explorer for twenty minutes before setting out on foot for the address he’d given her when he had treated her for possible exposure to rabies. The pain that had subsided during the drive from San Francisco burned anew with her activity. One block seemed like three. Given her bedraggled appearance and considering that her disguise had been taken from her by the shrieking ape and the rain, she was relieved when she reached the physician’s house without encountering anyone.
She went around to the back of the white Victorian with blue-and-white gingerbread, mounted the porch steps, and saw the doctor through a kitchen window. He was alone and appeared to be making a sandwich. It was 12:35 when she knocked on the door.