By law, every vehicle in California was required to carry a valid registration and proof of insurance.
“Hey, who the hell are you?” the guy in the cargo hold demanded.
Clutching the envelope, Joe turned away from the van.
He saw no point in trying to run. This man might be as quick to shoot people in the back as were the other two.
With a clatter and a
Joe walked directly toward the sound. A sledge-faced specimen with Popeye forearms, neck sufficiently thick to support a small car, came around the side of the van, and Joe opted for the surprise of instant and unreasonable aggression, driving one knee hard into his crotch.
Retching, wheezing for air, the guy started to bend forward, and Joe head-butted him in the face. He hit the ground unconscious, breathing noisily through his open mouth because his broken nose was streaming blood.
Although, as a kid, Joe had been a fighter and something of a troublemaker, he had not raised a fist against anyone since he met and married Michelle. Until today. Now, twice in the past two hours, he had resorted to violence, astonishing himself.
More than astonished, he was sickened by this primitive rage. He had never known such wrath before, not even during his troubled youth, yet here he was struggling to control it again as he had struggled in the public lavatory in Santa Monica. For the past year, the fall of Flight 353 had filled him with terrible despondency and grief, but he was beginning to realize that those feelings were like layers of oil atop another — darker — emotion that he had been denying; what filled the chambers of his heart to the brim was anger.
If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space, where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater. But now, given any excuse to vent his fury on
Rubbing the top of his head, which hurt from butting the guy in the face, looking down at the unconscious hulk with the bleeding nose, Joe felt a satisfaction that he did not want to feel. A wild glee simultaneously thrilled and repulsed him.
Dressed in a T-shirt promoting the videogame Quake, baggy black pants, and red sneakers, the fallen man appeared to be in his late twenties, at least a decade younger than his two associates. His hands were massive enough to juggle cantaloupes, and a single letter was tattooed on the base phalange of each finger, thumbs excluded, to spell out ANABOLIC, as in anabolic steroid.
This was no stranger to violence.
Nevertheless, although self-defense justified a preemptive strike, Joe was disturbed by the savage pleasure he took from such swift brutality.
The guy sure didn’t look like an officer of the law. Regardless of his appearance, he might be a cop, in which case assaulting him ensured serious consequences.
To Joe’s surprise, even the prospect of jail didn’t diminish his twisted satisfaction in the ferocity with which he had acted. He felt half nauseated, half out of his mind — but more alive than he had been in a year.
Exhilarated yet fearful of the moral depths into which this new empowering anger might take him, he glanced in both directions along the cemetery road. There was no oncoming traffic. He knelt beside his victim.
Breath whistled wetly through the man’s throat, and he issued a soft childlike sigh. His eyelids fluttered, but he did not regain consciousness while his pockets were searched.
Joe found nothing but a few coins, a nail clipper, a set of house keys, and a wallet that contained the standard ID and credit cards. The guy’s name was Wallace Morton Blick. He was carrying no police-agency badge or identification. Joe kept only the driver’s license and returned the wallet to the pocket from which he had extracted it.
The two gunmen had not reappeared from the rugged scrub land beyond the cemetery hill. They had scrambled over the crest, after the woman, little more than a minute ago; even if she quickly slipped away from them, they weren’t likely to give up on her and return after only a brief search.
Wondering at his boldness, Joe quickly dragged Wallace Blick away from the rear corner of the white van. He tucked him close to the flank of the vehicle, where he was less likely to be seen by anyone who came along the roadway. He rolled him onto his side so he would not choke on the blood that might be draining from his nasal passages down the back of his throat.
Joe went to the open rear door. He climbed into the back of the van. The low rumble of the idling engine vibrated in the floorboard.
The cramped cargo hold was lined on both sides with electronic communications, eavesdropping, and tracking equipment. A pair of compact command chairs, bolted to the floor, could be swiveled to face the arrayed devices on each side.
Squeezing past the first chair, Joe settled into the second, in front of an active computer. The interior of the van was air-conditioned, but the seat was still warm because Blick had vacated it less than a minute ago.
On the computer screen was a map. The streets had names meant to evoke feelings of peace and tranquillity, and Joe recognized them as the service roads through the cemetery.
A small blinking light on the map drew his attention. It was green, stationary, and located approximately where the van itself was parked.
A second blinking light, this one red and also stationary, was on the same road but some distance behind the van. He was sure that it represented his Honda.
The tracking system no doubt utilized a CD-ROM with exhaustive maps of Los Angeles County and environs, maybe of the entire state of California or of the country coast to coast. A single compact disc had sufficient capacity to contain detailed street maps for all of the contiguous states and Canada.
Someone had fixed a powerful transponder to his car. It emitted a microwave signal that could be followed from quite a distance. The computer utilized surveillance-satellite uplinks to triangulate the signal, then placed the Honda on the map relative to the position of the van, so they could track him without maintaining visual contact.
Leaving Santa Monica, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, Joe had seen no suspicious vehicle in his rearview mirror. This van had been able to stalk him while streets away or miles behind, out of sight.
As a reporter, he had once gone on a mobile surveillance with federal agents, a group of high-spirited cowboys from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had used a similar but less sophisticated system than this.
Acutely aware that the battered Blick or one of the other two men might trap him here if he delayed too long, Joe swiveled in his chair, surveying the back of the van for some indication of the agency involved in this operation. They were tidy. He couldn’t spot a single clue.
Two publications lay beside the computer station at which Blick had been working: one issue each of
Mr. Wallace Blick, of the ANABOLIC tattoo, was a techno geek with an edge.
When Joe climbed out of the van, Blick was groaning but not yet conscious. His legs pumped, a flurry of kicks, as if he were a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, and his cool red sneakers tore divots from the grass.
Neither of the men in Hawaiian shirts had returned from the desert scrub beyond the hill.
Joe hadn’t heard any more gunshots, although the terrain might have muffled them.
He hurried to his car. The door handle was bright with the kiss of the sun, and he hissed with pain when he touched it.
The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. He cranked down the window.
As he started the Honda, he glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a flatbed truck with board sides
