Carter Woodbine is certain to have offshore accounts totaling tens of millions, secreted in tax havens that have no extradition treaties with the United States. However, if catastrophe strikes and his political connections collapse, he could suddenly go from being a treasured friend of the high and mighty to a pariah. In that case, he will need this pot of money to get out of the country, slip deep into Central—or even South—America, buy overnight citizenship under a new name in some hellhole dictatorship, and then charter a suitable jet to convey him to a mountainous principality or an island nation where at least a significant part of his wealth is safely stored.
Michael has taken from Woodbine not just five hundred thousand dollars, but perhaps as much as three million when the value of the Bentley and its cache are added to the haul. In service to the furious attorney, exceedingly dangerous men, perhaps numerous and hoping to receive a generous reward, will be on the lookout for this car across Southern California. Nevertheless, at least for the time being, no police or federal agents will be seeking it.
He returns to the house, to the library, to the wine and cheese and crackers, to the striking view of the storm that is comforting in its textured and bracing reality. In spite of the superhuman abilities that have been bestowed on him, he remains unaware that within the hour he will be swept from his refuge into desperate circumstances.
EDEN
Following the three-lane blacktop, Nina knows what the rain and the night conceal. Grassy hills rise in the east, and beyond the hills lies the lesser desert, and beyond the first desert waits the true and more barren desert. To the west is woven a webwork of small cities and suburbs that crowd the shores of the sea, far from LA but bustling with commerce and compulsion, with ecstasy and horror, grace and cruelty, where most people are time ridden and wearier than they might know.
This broad and fertile valley lies between those two worlds, a quiet refuge. She came here once before, eight years earlier, when John was five years old and her parents were a year away from their encounter with a hit-and-run driver. The four of them enjoyed a rare family vacation, three days at a mom-and-pop motel with a swimming pool. The town at the south end of the valley, to which she and John are at the moment headed, is a picturesque mix of Victorian and Spanish architecture, with numerous art galleries and craft shops, in part a farm community—apple orchards, nut orchards—and in part a low-key tourist destination because of the local history and two popular annual festivals.
Her dad had called it Eden. Compared to the hood where Nina was raised, it’s as close to Eden as anywhere she has seen. Sometimes she daydreams of retiring here. How much better it would be to start a new life in this valley not in thirty years, but now.
As the road curves, the headlights sweep through the orchards. The producing groves are farther south. At this northern end of the valley, broad fields of trees have died in recent years and not yet been cut down, a consequence of foolish state water policies that have also destroyed tens of thousands of acres of once productive farmland in the Central Valley. At the moment, there is abundant rain, but California is a place of periodic droughts that require wise preparations. Illuminated by the sweeping beams, the leafless trees bristle with withered branches that, in the wind, jitter like agitated arachnidan colonies in a dream infested with tarantulas.
This is early-to-bed country, where those who work hard for a living rise before dawn. This ugly weather further discourages travel. The rearview mirror reveals dark, empty lanes. Hours have passed since Nina had reason to suspect a tail. Now headlights appear behind her, at the height of what might be a pickup perched on oversize tires. She imagines some teenager and his date hurrying to meet the be-home-by hour that was set by her parents.
However, when she rounds a curve, the straightaway ahead is blocked by a pair of angled SUVs, big Lincoln Aviators. As she takes her foot off the accelerator, the vehicle behind her proves to be two. They approach fast, side by side.
Having seen the double pursuit in the passenger-side mirror, John leans forward, squinting through the windshield at the hulking Aviators. “They aren’t cops.”
“No,” she agrees, desperately scanning the ground to the left and right as their speed falls.
“Aleem?” John says. “Aleem all the way out here?”
All the way out here because they mean to take the boy. All the way out here because they mean to finish her.
“They tagged us,” she says.
Although Aleem and his crew can’t have known her destination, they must be pleased that she has led them to hundreds of acres of abandoned apple orchards, in the isolation of hard rain and fierce wind, an ideal place for a boy to be snatched into a life of crime and violence, for a woman to be murdered and buried where her body won’t be found for years, if ever.
“The phone,” she says, and John plucks it out of a cup holder to do what they previously discussed. “Upload the post.”
The depth of the drainage ditch alongside the highway can’t be gauged with water racing through it, but it’s maybe three feet wide. The land slopes up about four feet from the ditch to the orchard at an ascendable angle, but if the ditch isn’t just a foot deep, if it is as much as three feet, the Ford’s undercarriage might get hung up when the front wheels drop. The Explorer has four-wheel drive, made for rough overland travel, but she’s driven it only on paved roads. She doesn’t know the full range of its abilities and limitations.
They are coasting toward the blockade, with two vehicles fast approaching behind them. White light floods through the liftgate window, filling the Ford as though a supernatural visitation has come upon them.
Ahead, the filthy surging water vanishes into a culvert over which an access road to the dead orchard offers an exit from the closing trap, though not a certain escape. Nina brakes. The tires stutter on the slick pavement, and she pulls the wheel hard to the right, and the Ford leans into the turn so that she holds her breath and thinks, Please.
Then they are off the highway, heading west. The barren apple trees stand in tight regimental order, preventing her from driving between any two of them; however, the alleys separating one row of trees from another were made wide enough for harvesters to pass in their machines and trucks. Years with little rain and much hard sun have cured the land into hardpan that the current torrents haven’t softened much. Pools have formed, dark mirrors across which the headlight beams skip, and repeatedly the Explorer raises wings of water that flare out into the orchard.
“Posted,” John declares. Uplit by the glow of the iPhone, his face is a séance apparition. “But what does it mean—‘the ninth hour.’”
“It’s code, a call for help that won’t look like that to anyone other than Michael.”
“But what can he do when he’s . . . wherever he is?”
The alleys to the left and right are suddenly flushed with light that silhouettes the gaunt trees and alchemizes the lead-gray rain to silver, as the squadron of SUVs enters the orchard, racing to cut off Nina from most of her options.
THE HAUNTED ORCHARD
Kuba follows Nina, gaining on her, while the homeys in the other SUVs flank her in parallel alleys. He says, “What’s this fuckin’ place, all these creepy trees?”