the puddles of moonlight, until he reached Volkonsky’s house. He scanned the grounds, but neither saw nor heard anything.
Moving behind the house, he flattened himself in the shadow next to the back door. It was sealed with crime-scene tape. Delving into the rucksack, he removed kid gloves and a knife. He tried the doorknob—locked, of course. Briefly he weighed the consequences of breaking the seal, decided it was worth it.
He slit the tape, pulled a hand towel from his pack, wrapped it around a rock, and pressed it steadily against the window until the glass gave with a shiver. After plucking out the loose slivers, he reached inside, unlocked the door, and slipped in.
The smell of Volkonsky’s despair hit him: stale smoke from cigarettes and marijuana, bad liquor, boiled onions, rancid cooking oil. He slipped an LED flashlight out of the pack and shined it around low. The kitchen was a mess. Green-and-gray mold grew on a paper plate of cooked cabbage and miniature peppers that must have been sitting out for days. Beer bottles and vodka minis had spilled out of the overflowing recycling bin. Some had shattered on the Saltillo tile floor, the pieces swept into a corner.
He moved into the living/dining area, the rug gritty with dirt, the sofa stained. No decoration of any sort hung on the walls, except for a couple of kid’s drawings taped to a door. One showed a spaceship, the other the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. Beyond that, there were no photographs of wife or children, no sentimental details.
Why hadn’t Volkonsky taken the drawings? Probably he wasn’t much of a father. Ford had a hard time imagining him as a father at all.
The door to the bedroom stood open in the hallway, but still the room smelled stale. The bed had the ratty look of one that was never made, the sheets never changed. Dirty laundry dangled out of the hamper. In the closet, half-full of clothes, Ford found a suit. He felt the material—fine wool—and paged through the rack. Volkonsky had brought a lot of clothes to the wilderness, some of them chic in a kind of Eurotrash way. He must not have realized what he was getting into here, at least socially. But why hadn’t he taken them when he left?
Ford moved down the hall to the second bedroom, which had been turned into an office. The computer was gone, but the unhooked USB and FireWire cables remained, along with a printer, a specialized high-speed modem, and a wi-fi base station. Computer CDs lay scattered about. It looked as though they had been sorted through in a hurry, the unwanted ones discarded.
He opened the top drawer of the computer desk to more mess: leaking pens, chewed pencils, and stacks of printed-out assembly language program code, the kind of stuff that would take years to analyze. In the next drawer he found an untidy stack of file folders. He sorted through them—more printed fragments of code, notes in Russian, software flowcharts. He pulled the pile up, and there, underneath, was an envelope, sealed and stamped, unaddressed, and torn in half.
Ford lifted the two pieces out, unfolded them, and found not a letter, but a page of hexadecimal computer code. Handwritten. The date at the top was Monday, the day Volkonsky left. Nothing more.
Questions flooded Ford. Why had Volkonksy written this, then torn it in half? Why had he stamped it, but not addressed it? Why had he left it behind? What did the code mean? Above all, why had he handwritten it? Nobody handwrote computer code. It took forever and was ridiculously error prone.
Ford had a thought: in a high-security computing environment like the Isabella project, you couldn’t copy, print, transmit, or e-mail any data without the action being logged. But the computer wouldn’t know if you copied it by hand. He stuffed the pieces into his pocket. Whatever they were, they mattered.
From the back porch came the crackle of grit under a footfall.
He switched off the LED and froze. Silence. Then the faintest crick of something between the sole of a shoe and the kitchen floor.
He could not exit either door—the kitchen or the front—without being seen.
Another whispery crunch of a footfall, closer. The intruder knew he was there and was coming for him, moving very slowly, no doubt hoping to ambush him.
Silently Ford crossed the carpet to the back window and reached up. He turned the circular latch and grasped the upper divider, giving it a little upward pressure. It stuck.
He was just about out of time.
A hard shove and the window sash gave. A split second later the intruder made his rush. Ford dived headlong through the window, ripping through the plastic screen just as two rapid shots from a silenced small-caliber handgun shattered the window above him. He rolled on the ground, glass showering around him.
In a flash he was up and running, zigzagging through the shadows under the cottonwoods. At the far end of the trees he sprinted across open ground, heading up the valley. The moon was so bright that he could see his shadow running beside him.
The dull whine of low-muzzle-velocity rounds passed his ears. It had to be Wardlaw—nobody else would have a silencer or shoot like that.
Ford sprinted toward the dark shape of Nakai Rock, swung left behind the rock, and ran up the trail toward the top of the low bluffs. The waspy hum of another round passed to his left. He made a quick jog off the trail and scrambled up through tumbled boulders toward the rim, keeping to cover. A few moments later he came out on top, his legs burning from the effort, and paused to look back. Two hundred yards below he glimpsed a dark figure darting up through the rocks after him.
Ford sprinted along a low spine of slickrock. It was devoid of vegetation and offered no cover—but at least it wouldn’t record his footprints. Ahead he could make out several small gullies that zigzagged toward the far edge of the mesa. In a moment he had reached the first. He leapt and ran down the dry wash at the bottom until it angled sharply as it approached the mesa edge. He flattened himself behind a fin of rock and looked behind. His pursuer had halted at the rim and was examining the sandy ground with his flashlight.
It was unmistakably Wardlaw.
The SIO rose and played the beam about the arroyo, clambered down, and began moving in his direction, gun at the ready.
Ford scrambled up the hidden side, keeping out of sight. As he topped the ravine, briefly showing himself, two more shots followed in quick succession, one kicking off a spray of chips from a nearby rock.
Ford ran across an open expanse of sand, hoping to reach the far side before the SIO reached the top of the canyon. He sprinted over the sandy flat so hard, it felt as if someone were knifing his lungs. Toward the far end he angled toward a scabland of naked, hollowed-out bedrock. It was absurdly open, but beyond lay a crazy mass of hoodoo rocks that would provide cover and a possible means of escape. He jumped off the last dune and ran into the scabland, momentarily obscured from Wardlaw’s view.
He suddenly saw his chance, and changed his idea. Halfway across the scabland was a hollow in the bedrock with a pool of moonshadow just deep enough to hide him. With a quick turn he dropped into it and huddled down. It wasn’t much of a hiding place—all Wardlaw had to do was point his flashlight in the right direction. But he wouldn’t—because he would assume Ford had headed into the excellent cover of the hoodoo rocks beyond.
A few minutes passed—and then he heard the fall of Wardlaw’s running feet on stone, his rasping breath pass by.
He counted to sixty, then cautiously peeked above the shadow. Beyond, in the hoodoo rocks, he could see the play of Wardlaw’s Maglite as he searched deeper and deeper into the rock maze.
Ford leapt up and sprinted back toward Nakai Valley.
AFTER TAKING A CONVOLUTED ROUTE HOME, Ford crept up behind his casita. He circled around, satisfying himself that Wardlaw wasn’t keeping a lookout, then slipped in the back door. The moon had set and dawn was just lightening the eastern sky. The distant scream of a mountain lion drifted across the mesa.
He went into the bedroom, hoping to grab at least a few moments of sleep before breakfast. He paused, staring at the bed.
A envelope lay on the pillow. He plucked it up and pulled out the note.
Ford dropped it back on the pillow and thought wryly that the hazards of the assignment were only now beginning to reveal their true dimensions.
18
AN HOUR LATER, FORD ARRIVED AT breakfast to the reviving smell of coffee, bacon, and flapjacks. He paused in the doorway. It was a reduced group—several team members were down in the Bunker and others were
