them from the Delorios’ house.
Marty couldn’t see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense of reality to the nightmarish moment.
He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the house and in neighbors’ yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.
“He’s my husband,” Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could sense the cops staring at her as she approached.
He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at even when rain-soaked and distraught; she wasn’t merely attractive but smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.
Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet, even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if he’d gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to come.
No.
No, that wasn’t instinct speaking. That was just his overactive imagination at work. The curse of the writer’s imagination. Always searching for the next plot twist.
Life wasn’t like fiction. Real stories didn’t have second and third acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements. Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life went on as usual.
The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.
He thought he saw hostility in their faces.
Another siren swelled in the distance.
He was so cold.
Three
The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.
He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle. Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New York, but he had never visited Central Park; those fields and vales were encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and introspection.
Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.
Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.
The device was as big as an attache case, though square instead of rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette-lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television set: mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background, interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in yellow, and county roads in blue; unpaved dirt and gravel byways were represented by broken black lines. Population centers—precious few in this part of the world—were pink.
Their vehicle was a red dot of light near the middle of the screen. The dot moved steadily along the emerald-green line that was Interstate 40.
“About four miles ahead now,” Oslett said.
Karl Clocker, the driver, did not respond. Even in the best of times, Clocker was not much of a conversationalist. The average rock was more talkative.
The square screen of the electronic map was set to a mid-range scale, displaying a hundred square miles of territory in a ten-mile-by-ten-mile grid. Oslett touched one of the buttons, and the map blinked off, replaced almost instantly by a twenty-five-square-mile block, five miles on a side, that enlarged one quadrant of the first picture to fill the screen.
The red dot representing their car was now four times larger than before. It was no longer in the center of the picture but off to the right side.
Near the left end of the display, less than four miles away, a blinking white X remained stationary just a fraction of an inch to the right of Interstate 40. X marked the prize.
Oslett enjoyed working with the map because the screen was so colorful, like the board of a well-designed video game. He liked video games a lot. In fact, although he was thirty-two, some of his favorite places were arcades, where arrays of cool machines tantalized the eye with strobing light in every color and romanced the ear with incessant beeps, tweets, buzzes, hoots, whoops, waw-waws, clangs, booms, riffs of music, and oscillating electronic tones.
Unfortunately, the map had none of the action of a game. And it lacked sound effects altogether.
Still, it excited him because not just anyone could get his hands on the device—which was called a SATU, for Satellite Assisted Tracking Unit. It wasn’t sold to the public, partly because the cost was so exorbitant that potential purchasers were too few to justify marketing it broadly. Besides, some of the technology was encumbered by strict national-security prohibitions against dissemination. And because the map was primarily a tool for serious clandestine tracking and surveillance, most of the relatively small number of existing units were currently used by federally controlled law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering agencies or were in the hands of similar organizations in countries allied with the United States.
“Three miles,” he told Clocker.
The hulking driver did not even grunt by way of reply. Wires trailed from the SATU and terminated in a three- inch-diameter suction cup that Oslett had fixed to the highest portion of the curved windshield. A locus of microminiature electronics in the base of the cup was the transmitter and receiver of a satellite up-link package. Through coded bursts of microwaves, the SATU could quickly interface with scores of geosynchronous communication and survey satellites owned by private industry and various military services, override their security systems, insert its program in their logic units, and enlist them in its operations without either disturbing their primary functions or alerting their ground monitors to the invasion.
By using two satellites to search for—and get a lock on—the unique signal of a particular transponder, the SATU could triangulate a precise position for the carrier of that transponder. Usually the target transmitter was an inconspicuous package that had been planted in the undercarriage of the surveillance subject’s car—sometimes in his plane or boat—so he could be followed at a distance without ever being aware that someone was tailing him.
