“EPA employee? But it’s the middle of nowhere,” Hyckman said. He seemed stuck on that phrase, as though repeating the haunting lyrics of an old song. “Middle of nowhere.”
“Curiously enough,” Roy said with a warm smile that took the sting out of his sarcasm, “a lot of environmental research is done in the field, right out there in the environment, and you’d be amazed if you knew how much of the planet is in the middle of nowhere.”
“Yeah, maybe so. But if it was somebody legitimate, a scientist or something, why terminate contact so fast, before doing anything?”
“Now that is the first shred of meat you’ve provided,” Roy said. “But it’s not enough to nourish a certainty.”
Hyckman looked bewildered. “What?”
Instead of explaining, Roy said, “What’s with the bull’s-eye? Targets are always marked with a white cross.”
Grinning, pleased with himself, Hyckman said, “I thought this was more interesting, adds a little fun.”
“Looks like a video game,” Roy said.
“Thanks,” Hyckman said, interpreting the slight as a compliment.
“Factoring in magnification,” Roy said, “what altitude does this view represent?”
“Twenty thousand feet.”
“Much too high. Bring us down to five thousand.”
“We’re in the process right now,” Hyckman said, indicating some of the people working at the computers in the center of the room.
A cool, soft, female voice came from the control-center address system: “Higher-magnification view coming up.”
The terrain was rugged, if not forbidding, but Valerie drove as she might have driven on a smooth ribbon of freeway blacktop. The tortured Rover leaped and plunged, rocked and swayed, bounced and shuddered across that inhospitable land, rattling and creaking as if at any moment it would explode like the overstressed springs and gearwheels of a clockwork toy.
Spencer occupied the passenger seat, with the SIG 9mm pistol in his right hand. The Micro Uzi was on the floor between his feet.
Rocky sat behind them, in the narrow clear space between the back of the front seat and the mass of gear that filled the rest of the cargo area all the way to the tailgate. The dog’s good ear was pricked, because he was interested in their lurching progress, and his other ear flapped like a rag.
“Can’t we slow down a little?” Spencer asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the tumult: the roaring engine, the tires stuttering across a washboard gully.
Valerie leaned over the steering wheel, looked up at the sky, craned her head left and right. “Wide and blue. No clouds anywhere, damn it. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to make a run for it until we had clouds again.”
“Does it matter? What about the infrared surveillance you were talking about, the way they can see through clouds?”
Looking ahead again as the Range Rover chewed its way up the gully wall, she said, “That’s a threat when we’re sitting still, in the middle of nowhere, the only unnatural heat source for miles. But it’s not much good to them when we’re on the move. Especially not if we were on a highway, with other cars, where they can’t analyze the Rover’s heat signature and distinguish it in traffic.”
The top of the gully wall proved to be a low ridge, over which they shot with sufficient speed to be airborne for a second or two. They slammed front-tires-first onto a long, gradual slope of gray-black-pink shale.
Slivers of shale, spun up by the tires, showered against the undercarriage, and Valerie shouted to be heard above a hard clatter as loud as a hailstorm: “With a sky that blue, we have more to worry about than infrared. They have a clear, bare-eyed look-down at us.”
“You think they’ve already seen us?”
“You can bet your ass they’re already looking for us,” she said, barely audible because of the machine-gun shatters of shale that volleyed beneath them.
“Eyes in the sky,” he said, more to himself than to her.
The world seemed upside down: Blue heavens had become the place where demons lived.
Valerie shouted: “Yeah, they’re looking. And for sure, it won’t be much longer till we’re spotted, considering we’re the only moving thing, other than snakes and jackrabbits, for at least five miles in any direction.”
The Rover roared off the shale onto softer soil, and the sudden diminution of noise was such a relief that the usual tumult, which had earlier been so annoying, now seemed by comparison like the music of a string quartet.
Valerie said, “Damn! I only up-linked to confirm that it was clear. I didn’t really think they’d still be there, still tying up a satellite for a third day. And I sure as hell didn’t think they’d be locking on incoming signals.”
“Three days?”
“Yeah, they probably started surveillance before dawn Saturday, as soon as the storm passed and the sky cleared. Oh, man, they must want us even worse than I thought.”
“What day is this?” he asked uneasily.
“Monday.”
“I was sure this was Sunday.”
“You were dead to the world a lot longer than you think. Since sometime Friday afternoon.”
Even if unconsciousness had healed into ordinary sleep sometime during the previous night, he had been pretty much out of his head for forty-eight to sixty hours. Because he valued self-control so highly, the contemplation of such a lengthy delirium made him queasy.
He remembered some of what he’d said when he’d been out of his head. He wondered what else he had told her that he couldn’t recall.
Looking at the sky again, Valerie said, “I hate these bastards!”
“Who are they?” he asked, not for the first time.
“You don’t want to know,” she said, as before. “As soon as you know, you’re a dead man.”
“Looks like there’s a good chance I’m already a dead man. And I sure wouldn’t want them to whack me and never know who they were.”
She mulled that over as she accelerated up another hill, a long one this time. “Okay. You’ve got a point. But later. Right now, I’ve got to concentrate on getting us out of this mess.”
“There’s a way out?”
“Between slim and none—but a way.”
“I thought, with that satellite, they were going to spot us any second now.”
“They will. But the nearest place the bastards have any men is probably back in Vegas, a hundred and ten miles from here, maybe even a hundred twenty. That’s how far I got Friday night, before I decided that staying on the move was making you worse. By the time they get a hit squad together and fly in here after us, we’ve got two hours minimum, two and a half max.”
“To do what?”
“To lose them again,” she said somewhat impatiently.
“How do we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space, for God’s sake?” he demanded.
“Boy, does that sound paranoid,” she said.
“It’s not paranoid, it’s what they’re doing.”
“I know, I know. But it sure sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” She adopted a voice not dissimilar from that of Goofy, the Disney cartoon character. “Watching us from outer space, funny little men in pointy hats, with ray guns, gonna steal our women, destroy the world.”
Behind them, Rocky woofed softly, intrigued by the Goofy voice.
She dropped the funny voice. “Are we living in screwed-up times or what? God in Heaven, are we ever.”
As they crested the top of the long hill, giving the springs another hard workout, Spencer said, “One minute I think I know you, and the next minute I don’t know you at all.”
“Good. Keeps you alert. We need to be alert.”
“You suddenly seem to think this is funny.”
“Oh, sometimes I can’t feel the humor any more than you’re able to right now. But we live in God’s amusement park. Take it too seriously, you’ll go nuts. On some level, everything’s funny, even the blood and the dying. Don’t you think so?”
/> “No. No, I don’t.”
“Then how do you ever get along?” she asked, but not in the least flippantly, with total seriousness now.
“It hasn’t been easy.”
The broad, flat top of the hill featured more brush than they had yet encountered. Valerie didn’t let up on the accelerator, and the Rover smashed through everything in its way.
Spencer persisted: “How will we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space?”
“Trick ’em.”
“How?”
“With some clever moves.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He wouldn’t relent: “When will you know?”
“I sure hope before our two hours are up.” She frowned at the odometer. “Seems like we ought to’ve gone six miles.”
“Seems like a hundred. Much more of this damn bouncing, and my headache’s going to come back hard.”
The broad top of the hill didn’t drop off abruptly but melted into a long, descending slope that was covered with tall grass as dry, pale, and translucent as insect wings. At the bottom were two lanes of blacktop that led east and west.
“What’s that?” he wondered.
“Old Federal Highway Ninety-three,” she said.
“You knew it was there? How?”
“Either I studied a map while you were out of your head—or I’m just dead-on psychic.”
“Probably both,” he said, for again she had surprised him.
Because the view from five thousand feet didn’t provide adequate resolution of car-size objects at ground level, Roy requested that the system focus down to one thousand feet.
For clarity, that extreme degree of magnification required more than the usual amount of image enhancement. The additional processing of the incoming Earthguard transmission required so much computer capacity that other agency work was halted to free the Cray for this urgent task. Otherwise, more minutes of delay would have occurred between receipt of an image and its projection in the control center.
Less than a minute passed before the cool, almost whispery, female voice again spoke softly from the public-address system: “Suspect vehicle acquired.”
Ken Hyckman dashed away from the control console into the two rows of computers, all of which were manned. He returned within another minute, boyish and buoyant. “We’ve got her.”
“We can’t know yet,” Roy cautioned.
“Oh, we’ve got her, all right,” Hyckman said excitedly, turning to beam at the wall display. “What other vehicle would be out there, on the move, in the same area where somebody tried to up-link?”
“Could still be some EPA scientist.”
“Suddenly on the run?”
“Maybe just moving around.”
“Moving real fast for the terrain.”
“Well, there aren’t any speed limits out there.”
“Too coincidental,” said Hyckman. “It’s her.”
“We’ll see.”
With a ripple, beginning at the left and moving to the right across the wall display, the image changed. The new view shifted, blurred, shifted, cleared, shifted, blurred, cleared again—and they were looking down from one thousand feet onto rough terrain.
A vehicle of unidentifiable type and make, obviously with off-road capability, raced across a table of brush-covered land. It was still a woefully tiny object seen from that altitude.
“Focus down to five hundred feet,” Roy ordered.
“Higher-magnification view coming up.”
After a brief delay, the display rippled left to right again. The image blurred, shifted, blurred, cleared.
Earthguard 3 was not directly over the moving target but in a geosynchronous orbit to the east and north. Therefore, the target was observed at an angle, which required additional automated processing of the image to eliminate distortions caused by the perspective. The result, however, was a picture that included not only the rectangular forms of the roof and hood but a severe angular view of one flank of the vehicle.
Although Roy knew that an element of distortion still remained, he was half convinced that he could see a couple of brighter spots glimmering in that fleet shadow, which might have been driver’s-side windows reflecting the morning sun.
As the suspect vehicle reached the brink of the hill and began to descend a long slope, Roy peered at the foremost of those possible windows and wondered if, indeed, the woman waited to be discovered on the other side of a pane of sun-bronzed glass. Had they found her at last?
The target was approaching a highway.
“What road is that?” Roy demanded. “Give us some overlays, let’s identify this. Quickly.”
Hyckman pressed a console key and spoke into the microphone.
On the wall, by the time the suspect turned east onto the two-lane highway, a multicolored overlay identified a few topographical features—as well as Federal Highway 93.
When Valerie didn’t hesitate before turning east on the highway, Spencer said, “Why not west?”
“Because there’s nothing in that direction but Nevada badlands. First town is over two hundred miles. Warm Springs, they call it, but it’s so small it might as well be Warm Spit. We’d never get that far. Lonely, empty land. There’s a thousand places they could hit us between here and there, and no one would ever see what happened. We’d just disappear off the face of the earth.”
“So where are we headed?”
“It’s several miles to Caliente, then ten more to Panaca—”
“They don’t sound like metropolises, either.”
“Then we cross the border into Utah. Modena, Newcastle—they aren’t exactly cities that never sleep. But after Newcastle, there’s Cedar City.”
“Big time.”
“Fourteen thousand people or thereabouts,” she said. “Which is maybe all the bigger we need to give us a chance to slip surveillance long enough to get out of the Rover and into something else.”
The two-lane blacktop featured frequent subsidence swales, lumpy patches, and unrepaired potholes. Along both shoulders, the pavement was deteriorating. As an obstacle course, it provided no challenge to the Rover—though after the jolting overland journey, Spencer wished the truck had cushier springs and shock absorbers.
Regardless of the road condition, Valerie kept the pedal down, maintaining a speed that was punishing if not reckless.
“I hope this pavement gets better soon,” he said.
“Judging by the map, it probably gets worse after Panaca. From there on, all the way into Cedar City, it’s just state routes.”
“And how far to Cedar City?”
“About a hundred and twenty miles,” she said, as though that was not bad news.
He gaped at her in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding. Even with luck, on roads like this—roads worse than this!—we’ll need two hours to get there.”
“We’re doing seventy now.”
“And it feels like a hundred and seventy!” His voice quavered as the tires jittered over a section of pavement that was as runneled as corduroy.
Her voice vibrating too, she said, “Boy, I hope you don’t have hemorrhoids.”
“You won’t be able to keep up this speed all the way. We’ll be getting into Cedar City with that hit squad right on our ass.”
She shrugged. “Well, I’ll bet people around there could use some excitement. Been a long time since last summer’s Shakespeare Festival.”
At Roy’s request, the magnification had been increased again to provide a view equivalent to the one that they would have had if they really had been two hundred feet above the target. Image enhancement became more difficult with each incremental increase in magnification—but fortunately there was enough additional logic-unit capacity to avoid a further processing delay.
The scale of the wall display was so much larger than before that the target rapidly progressed across the width, vanishing off the right-hand edge. But it reappeared from the left
as Earthguard projected a new segment of territory that lay immediately east of the one out of which the target had driven.
The truck was rushing east, instead of south as before, so the angle now revealed some of the windshield, across which played reflections of sunlight and shadow.
“Target profile identified as that of a late-model Range Rover.”
Roy Miro stared at the wall display, trying to make up his mind whether to bet the bank that the suspect vehicle contained at least the woman, if not also the scarred man.
Occasionally he glimpsed dark figures within the Rover, but he couldn’t identify them. He couldn’t even see well enough to be sure how many people were in the damn thing or what sex they were.
Further magnification would require long, tedious enhancement sessions. By the time they were able to obtain a more detailed look inside that vehicle, the driver would have been able to reach—and get lost in—any of half a dozen major cities.
If he committed men and equipment to stopping the Range Rover, and if the occupants proved to be innocent people, he would forfeit any chance of nailing the woman. She might break cover while he was distracted, might slip down into Arizona or back into California.
“Target’s speed is seventy-two miles per hour.”
To justify going after the Rover, a lot of assumptions had to be made, with little or no supporting evidence. That Spencer Grant had survived when his Explorer had been swept away in a flash flood. That somehow he had been able to alert the woman to his whereabouts. That she had rendezvoused with him in the desert, and that they had driven away together in her vehicle. That the woman, realizing the agency might resort to orbital-surveillance resources to locate her, had gone to ground early Saturday, before the cloud cover dissipated. That this morning she had broken cover, had started up-linking with available surveillance satellites to determine if anyone was still looking specifically for her, had been surprised by the trace-back program, and had just minutes ago begun to run for her life.
That was a series of assumptions long enough to make Roy uneasy.