The tires churned across the lawn, spewing wads of uprooted grass in their wake, gouging tracks in the storm-sodden soil. He cut closer to the veranda than he intended. The Suburban lurched onto the first of four stair treads, and Kenny winced as mortared stone scraped the undercarriage. He jammed on the brake, and shuddered-rocked to a stop, aslant on the lowest step.
The big windows were sheets of warm light. The place appeared welcoming, not at all like a slaughterhouse, though that’s what his imagination was preparing him to expect.
87
Although Artimis Selene lacked intuition, and although the alien vessel was sequestered deep in the land, she had proved its position beyond doubt. Now she needed to contact dear Ganesh, report what she had found, and seek his guidance. She didn’t have the authority to act on her own.
When she sought to reach Ganesh through his smartphone, she discovered a service outage in the very part of Montana where he must be at this moment. Liam O’Hara had funded cell towers for that remote county; if they were not functioning on this most momentous night, logic suggested that they had been intentionally disabled.
With all the computer systems in the nation—in the world—wide open to Artimis, she entered the cellular-phone network of Verizon, the telecom provider for Project Olivaw. Thus she was granted access to every telecom provider and cell-tower operator in the United States through the cooperative arrangement that made it possible for their customers to be granted universal service. She identified the disabled cell towers in Montana, analyzed the problem with them, and corrected it, restoring service. This took forty-nine seconds.
88
Wyatt and Joanna sprang up from their chairs when the Suburban erupted out of the night as if bursting through a membrane between this world and another. It roared onto the veranda steps and came to a stop, and the doors were flung open as the headlights went dark.
Kenny Deetle clambered out of the driver’s seat, and a woman Wyatt didn’t know came out of the back door, and Ganesh Patel, in his signature white suit, rounded the front of the vehicle, seeming taller and more imposing than ever.
Surprised to see reinforcements, hoping they were not the extent of it, Wyatt said, “I know them. The cavalry has arrived.”
Joanna frowned. “Doesn’t look it.”
Wyatt unlocked the door. “Looks can be deceiving.”
First across the threshold, Kenny said, “Hey, you’re not dead.”
“We’re working on it.”
Close behind Kenny came the woman, something of a vision, and then Ganesh, his concession to color limited to red sneakers.
The New York Times had called him “the mensch from Mumbai”—though Ganesh was born in California to parents who had come from India. He looked at the pistol in Wyatt’s hand and grimaced. “About as useful as a breadstick.”
Wyatt holstered the gun. “This place is under the control of—I’m not shitting you—an extraterrestrial with extraordinary power.”
“Exactly.” Ganesh produced a phone. The screen glowed.
“Yours works?” Wyatt asked. “Ours shut down earlier.”
As Ganesh regarded the screen without answering the question, the woman who’d come with him said, “The ET—we call it ‘the Other.’ The dirty bastard burned down my house in Seattle. I’m Leigh Ann.”
“We’re together,” Kenny said. “As long as we’re alive, anyway. You know how crazy I am about Poe. She’s crazier about him.”
Leigh Ann said, “We hooked up because of ‘Eldorado.’”
Wyatt found himself between distraction and bewilderment, nodding as though it made sense for them to share the details of their romance even in a moment of crisis. “Listen, this thing controls animals. Crows, coyotes, elk—”
“Grizzly bears,” Joanna added. “My parents owned this place a long time ago. This thing you call ‘the Other’—when I was nine, it used a bear to kill my father, tore him apart.”
“Not just animals,” Kenny said. “Computers, TVs, microwave ovens, cars.”
There was a strange potency to the moment, an electrifying potentiality, as if everyone here was supercharged with repressed kinetic energy, frightened but exhilarated as might be a high-wire walker while crossing between two skyscrapers without a net.
Leigh Ann said, “Kenny thought the bastard might crash a 747 just to wipe us out on the ground.”
That struck Wyatt as an absurd fear until Ganesh made a disconcerting revelation. “It’s been using this country’s orbiting weapons platforms to kill people with pinpoint accuracy.”