"They won't all be traveling together. From the tracks it looks like a couple dozen vehicles headed in different directions. We'll run down a few of them. With luck we'll pick up Lise and the other major targets. With a little more warning we would have had drones in the air to keep watch. But we didn't have time and anyway every drone on the continent has been shipped to the far west, surveying the fucking oil allotments for earthquake damage."

Sigmund was still growling into his handset. Then he switched it off and said to Weil, "The plane's gone."

Turk Findley's bush plane, presumably. Gone. Escaped. Should he be pleased about that?

"The aircraft, at least, we can track," Weil said.

And Lise along with it.

Brian looked back at the ruins of the compound. Black smoke gushed from collapsed foundations and small fires burned fitfully in the surrounding desert. Of the brick and adobe buildings that had once stood there, nothing remained.

* * * * *

They spent the night in what passed for public accommodations in Kubelick's Grave, a tile-roofed motel in which Brian shared a unit with Sigmund and Weil. Two beds and a cot—Brian got the cot.

Most of the afternoon and evening he spent listening to Sigmund make and take calls. The name of the Executive Action Committee was frequently invoked.

That night, unable to sleep in his cot, cold despite the banging antique electric heater, it occurred to Brian to wonder whether they had found out about Lise's last call to him.

Were his calls tapped for audio? Lise's callback code had been unfamiliar to him, probably a disposable loaded with anonymous minutes, so they wouldn't have been able to trace it. And there hadn't been anything really incriminating about the call. Apart from the fact that Brian had failed to report it. Which would suggest that his loyalties were divided. That he might not be a trustworthy DGS man.

He wanted to be angry with Lise. Hated her pointless personal involvement in this fucking mess, her obsessive need to sort out her father's disappearance and turn the story into some kind of memoir.

He wanted to be angry with her, and he was angry with himself when he didn't succeed.

* * * * *

Reports on the round-up of fugitive Fourths began to come in before dawn, Sigmund shouting into his phone while Brian hurriedly dressed.

Success had been mixed, he gathered.

"At least half the population of the compound is still at large," Weil said. "Our guys intercepted three vehicles carrying a total of fifteen people, none of them the major players. The good news—"

Brian braced himself.