The man’s assistant stands there. Pelayo sits comfortably on the bed. It’s so quiet Tom hears the scritch-scritch of his daughter coloring in her book. He moves his left arm some and the pain still hits him behind his eyes.

“You may be correct,” he says. “But it’s not right.”

Pelayo smiles, leans over, gives him a gentle slap on the knee. “For a while there was a world where you and your kind struggled to report the truth. That’s now gone. Every newspaper and television network is now handcuffed to their ideology, their way of looking at the world. Governments once pretended they worked for the poor common man. That’s gone as well. Your elected representatives in this so-called democracy won’t pass legislation because their paymaster lobbyists tell them what to do.”

Pelayo stands up, shakes his head, brushes each hand as if there was some sort of dust or contaminant there. “In some ways I admire you, Tom Cornwall, still bravely struggling to stay alive and pertinent in this world. But in reality, you’re playing in the shadows, thinking it’s real. None of it’s real.”

Tom says, “Someday, you and your kind will be stopped.”

“Not today, not ever,” Pelayo says, now glancing at his watch. “And you best pray that your wife has not been stopped. She has…eleven minutes to contact me.”

Tom looks to his daughter and asks the question. “What happens at the twelve-minute mark?”

Pelayo says softly and with great courtesy. “Please, Tom, not in front of the little girl.”

CHAPTER 46

AT SOME point just outside of Three Rivers, Texas, the deadline passes.

But my mission still goes on.

The destination town is flat, with a two-lane state road passing through, and as I go by the Y intersection of Route 72 (King David Drive) and Route 281 (North Harborth Avenue), there’s a McDonald’s restaurant with flapping, colorful banners saying JUST OPENED PLEASE STOP BY.

The homes are all single story, in tidy square yards with scraggly brown and green lawns. There’s not much here, but there’s enough, and I slowly go down what appears to be the main road, North Harborth Avenue. There are a couple of service stations, a dollar store, and little stores here and there set back from the road. This is what my supposed betters call flyover country, even though the people in that part of the country pump the oil, grow the food, and mine the ore.

My supposed betters should hope they never band together and go on strike.

I don’t have time, and I don’t have what I need—an idea of where Linden Street is located. I also don’t have much money, which I discovered about thirty minutes ago, when I was making a fast refueling in the previous town, called Kenedy. There I found that my wallet had been stripped of the cash from my go bag—probably by one of the bystanders back at the river rescue—and I made an equally fast withdrawal from a Bank of America ATM.