she couldn't quite hear. It might be something that she would have been able to identify if the air had been calm, and it might be something she should not have been near enough to hear at all, something the wind had brought from far away.
Either way it was the same sound. It was car doors slamming, men's feet trampling the stiff, frozen weeds, the metallic clicks as shotgun slides pumped and pistol magazines locked into place. She looked up into the sky and tried to discern the constellation of the loon that the old runners had used to navigate as they moved along the Waagwenneyu at night, but it was hidden behind trailing clouds.
When she looked back at the little camp, she could see it through Barraclough's eyes. It would not be hard to find the right trailer, with the shiny new car she had rented in Dallas parked beside it. Ordinary .38 ammunition would pierce the trailer wall. A rifle round in a big-game caliber could go through both walls and kill somebody behind the trailer from three hundred yards out. There was nothing in the flat, empty country that was big enough to hide a running woman.
In the morning Jane went with Martha on her walk. After a time, Martha said, 'You're leaving today, aren't you?'
'Yes.'
'You want something first, don't you?'
'It might not be safe here much longer. I want you to drive up north with her.'
'Where?'
'Nundawaonoga.' It was the Seneca word for the western half of New York State. It was like saying 'Home.' Jane added, 'No planes, no buses, no credit cards.' She held out a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. 'This will pay for a car.'
Martha walked along in silence for a time, then took the money and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket.
'There are people up there I haven't seen in ten years. They'll be very glad to see me.'
'Thank you, Grandmother.'
Martha held Jane in the corner of her eye. 'Why aren't you going with us?'
Jane shook her head. 'He's not looking for her now. He's looking for me.'
29
Farrell paced back and forth in front of the television monitor, the heels of his polished shoes clicking on the old hardwood floor of the Enterprise Development office. 'Take another look at her.' The picture on the monitor was dim and grainy. The sound had been erased. The woman had been caught in a telephoto lens standing on the edge of a freeway beside Barraclough. Every few seconds a car or truck would flash past in the foreground, shrunk by the lens to look smaller than the people beyond it. The woman was Jane. 'Look at the shape of her face, the way she moves. Forget her hair and clothes. She'll change those. Study the things that don't change.'
After ten seconds, the picture vanished in a wash of bright, popping static, and then the tape began to rewind. Farrell turned to his audience of young men. They were sitting on desks, leaning against walls, some even crouched on the floor near the screen. Assembled like this, they were an unprepossessing bunch, but he knew something about each of them that made him feel confident. During his years as a cop, Farrell had become very good at spotting a certain kind of young man early. 'This is the only picture we have of her at the moment, but when we find something that's a little clearer, we'll try to work up some still shots for you. Let's run the tape again.'
As Farrell reached for the play button he could hear the heavy footsteps on the stairs. He straightened as the door swung open and Barraclough walked in. Few of Farrell's trainees had ever seen Barraclough before, but they had just watched the tape, so none of them wondered who he was. Barraclough's empty gray eyes swept the crowd of young men. When a few of the trainees fidgeted involuntarily to correct their posture, the motion seemed to attract Barraclough's gaze to them. He stared, made some secret assessment, and moved on.
The tailored navy blue blazer and gray pants Barraclough wore had the simplicity and precise lines of a uniform. He turned away from the young men, slipped off the coat and tossed it onto Farrell's desk as a simple gesture to make it clear that this place was his, and turned back to them in his starched, Marine-creased white shirt. Strapped under his left arm was a Browning nine-millimeter automatic in a worn shoulder holster, carried muzzle-upward so it could be drawn with little movement. Attached to the strap under the left arm was an extra ammunition clip. The young men could see that this was not the gleaming, compact sidearm of a successful security executive. It was the weapon of a man who had been in gunfights with people who were now dead.
Barraclough judged that his silence had served its purpose. 'Mr. Farrell has probably told you a little about me, but we should know each other better. Let me begin by telling you what I'm not. I'm not your friend.'
A few eyes that had been hovering in his general direction shot to his face but found no comfort or reassurance there. 'If you bring me what I want, I will give you what you want. Simple as that. Mr. Farrell is not your Boy Scout leader. I haven't been spending money on training to make men out of you, as though I gave a shit if you lived or died. I don't. I'm giving you the knowledge and experience to be useful to me. If you want to make something out of yourself, keep your eyes and ears open and you probably can.'
A few of the young men seemed to mine some hint of hope from the notion that they could make something of themselves. He appeared to want to oblige them. 'I'll even tell you how the business works. If you win, you get to have the prizes - the girls, the big house, the cars, people calling you 'sir' for the rest of your life. If you lose, you're dead. You may still walk around for a while before one of the winners happens to notice you, but that's just a technicality. Whatever you have is his. You're a failure, a victim, a corpse.'
Barraclough looked at them with his empty, unreadable eyes for a moment, then spoke again. 'I know at least some of you must have noticed that a couple of guys didn't come back after this last trip. I'm here to tell you what happened to them. They're dead. Mr. Farrell and I left them to guard an unarmed, incapacitated prisoner, and they let the woman you saw on the tape sneak in and poison their breakfast.' He shook his head in amazement and chuckled. 'If she hadn't used enough poison, I would have had to kill them myself.'
A few of the trainees exchanged nervous grins, but Barraclough's smile dissolved. 'That's the other part of our deal: I will always tell you the truth. If you're stupid, you're a liability. You won't just hurt yourself, you'll hurt me. I am not going to let that happen. Not for them, not for you.'
He glanced at Farrell, who was standing near the door. 'Mr. Farrell is going to give you specific assignments over the next day or two. But here's the short version. That woman is all I want right now. When I get her, I want her breathing.' He nodded to Farrell, picked up his coat, and slipped it on as he walked out the door.
Barraclough went down the back stairs and across the parking lot to the next street, where he had left his car, and began the long drive to the Intercontinental Security building in Irvine. He could not keep his mind off that Jane woman. He wanted to tear her head off with his hands. She had blundered into his way when he was at the edge of a triumph, and the collision had obliterated years of small, painfully won successes: years on the police force, always working harder than the others, taking more risks, gradually building a reputation; more years at Intercontinental Security, always working tirelessly, always looking for a way up.
After he had come to Intercontinental, Barraclough had focused his attention on each of the divisions in turn: Home Security, Retail Security, Detectives. Slowly he had brought each of them up to modern standards, and the management team in Chicago had responded by making him Director of Western Regional Operations. But Barraclough had not been working for a promotion. He had always lived by his ability to see farther down the path than anyone else, and he had already moved ahead of Intercontinental's management. All of his efforts to revitalize the old security company were mere sideshows - preparations for what was to happen in the little Van Nuys office of the separate corporation he had formed called Enterprise Development.
Barraclough had designed Enterprise Development to fit inside the skin of Intercontinental Security. Its costs were hidden within the giant company's overhead, its personnel culled from Intercontinental's applicant pool. When Enterprise Development conducted its business, a pretext was constructed so that the employees and equipment of Intercontinental's offices in twenty-six cities could be set to work identifying fingerprints, searching for cars, analyzing traces, performing surveillance.
Enterprise Development had been invented to specialize in exploiting a small and neglected group of criminals: the successful ones who had gotten away with large amounts of money. Some were already wanted by the authorities in the United States or elsewhere but were not actively hunted; others had not yet been discovered or were merely suspected. Some had been convicted and served sentences but had not made restitution. Barraclough used Enterprise Development to identify them, hunt them down, and turn them into cash.
