“Yes, a laptop. But no printer or scanner. I’m suspicious this is someone’s getaway. The printer, the scanner, at home.”

“What about a phone?”

I thought for a minute. “Don’t remember seeing one.”

“Well, the phone line runs from the camper to the utility box. We’ll see what we can find out about that, like whose account it is. I’ll also tell Wesley what’s going on.”

“If the phone line was used only for AOL,” Lucy said as she walked in and shut the door, “there won’t be any telephone account. The only account will be AOL, which will still come back to Perley, the guy whose credit card number got pinched.”

She looked alert but a little tousled in jeans and a leather jacket. Sitting next to me, she examined the whites of my eyes, and felt the glands in my neck.

“Stick out your tongue,” she seriously said.

“Stop it!” I pushed her away, coughing and laughing at the same time.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better. Where’s Janet?” I said.

“Talking. Out somewhere. What kind of computer’s in there?”

“I didn’t take time to study it,” I replied. “I didn’t notice any of the particulars.”

“Was it on?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t check.”

“I need to get in it.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked, looking at her.

“I think I need to go with you.”

“Will they let you do that?” Marino asked.

“Who the hell is they?”

“The drones you work for,” he replied.

“They put me on the case. They expect me to break it.”

Her eyes never stopped moving to windows and the door. Lucy had been infected and would succumb from her exposure to law enforcement. Beneath her jacket she wore a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter pistol in a leather holster with extra magazines. She probably had brass knuckles in her pocket. She tensed as the door opened and another ranger hurried in, his hair still wet from the shower, eyes nervous and excited.

“Can I help you?” he asked us, taking off his coat.

“Yeah,” Marino said, getting up from his chair. “What kind of car you got?”

Fourteen

The flatbed truck was waiting when we arrived, the vinyl-shrouded camper on top of it gleaming an eerie translucent blue beneath the stars and moon and still hooked to a pickup truck. We were parking nearby on a dirt road at the edge of a field when a huge plane passed alarmingly low overhead, its roar louder than a commercial jet.

“What the hell?” Marino exclaimed, opening the door of the ranger’s Jeep.

“I think that’s our ride to Utah,” Lucy said from the back, where she and I were sitting.

The ranger was staring up through his windshield, incredulous, as if the rapture had come. “Holy shit. Oh my God. We’re being invaded!”

A HMMWV came down first, wrapped in corrugated cardboard, a heavy wooden platform underneath. It sounded like an explosion when it landed on the hard-packed dead grass of the field and was dragged by parachutes caught in the wind. Then green nylon wilted over the multiwheeled vehicle, and more rucksacks blossomed in the heavens as more cargo drifted down and tumbled to the ground. Paratroopers followed, oscillating two or three times before landing nimbly on their feet and running out of their harnesses. They gathered up billowing nylon as the sound of their C-17 receded beyond the moon.