the house itself, but the name, had she seen it, might have held some interest to her.
It read J. Cole.
Virgin number five.
The midnight sky over Wyoming was a limitless black canvas peppered with the white-hot specks of a million scattered stars as Remo Williams drove through the desolate stretch of country between the airport at Wor-land and Thermopolis.
Houses—indeed, any sign of civilization—were few and far between for vast reaches along this lonely route, and Remo found it oddly disconcerting to be traveling through the darkened fields and forests with barely a road sign or streetlight to mark the presence of man in this nearly unspoiled wilderness. The highway itself ran like a flat black desecration through it. Driving along, Remo felt like he had taken a turn into the Twilight Zone—especially when he neared the hot-springs area and the air became humid and thick.
He was relieved when he at last arrived in Thermopolis.
Due to the lateness of the hour, the town was understandably quieter. The crowds were gone from downtown, but the place still held an old-fashioned charm about it. It was almost as if this tiny rural hamlet was a throwback to an earlier, simpler America.
A minute later Remo realized that life in Thermopolis was not as simple as he had thought.
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State police cars patrolled the streets, backed by a handful of local police cruisers. Remo assumed this was connected to the spate of kidnappings two weeks earlier.
He avoided two cruisers that flew angrily past in rapid succession, their blue-and-red lights cutting fierce wedges into the otherwise silent night. Another patrol car was parked near the edge of town, forcing Remo to detour around it, carefully threading his way through a maze of shadowy back streets. He eventually managed to slip out the far side of town undetected.
The blinking amber light that signaled the turnoff to Ranch Ragnarok sprang up over the horizon like a gaunt, one-eyed sentry, and Remo eased onto the bumpy path, kicking up a cloud of dust in his wake. Gravel bounced back atop the asphalt road like excited popcorn kernels.
Remo didn't slow the car until he was several hundred yards along the access road, in the secure darkness of a ponderosa pine forest. He killed the ignition.
Before the engine fully died, Remo was out of the vehicle and moving along the narrow dirt road like a fitful shadow.
As he moved, his heightened senses detected a pack of four large animals—most likely wolves—tramping among the trees to his left. Their stealthy movements would have been undetectable by ordinary human ears, but to Remo they might as well have been baying and howling with every clumsy footfall.
They had heard his car and were coming to investigate.
The wolves wouldn't find anything. Remo left the car and the wolves behind as he ghosted into the
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blackened pines toward Truth Church ranch, leaving neither scent nor spoor.
At the precise moment Remo disappeared into the woods, Buffy Brand was wondering what the devil was going on at Ranch Ragnarok.
The blare of Klaxons had awakened all true acolytes from their bunkers only hours before. Buffy had followed her squad to the main compound, where they met up with the rest of the two hundred or so permanent ranch residents.
It wasn't unusual for residents of the Truth Church ranch to be roused in the middle of the night. At times Esther Clear-Seer called Armageddon alerts at least twice a month—most notably four years ago when she had insisted that all Truth Church followers worldwide quit their jobs and move to the ranch in preparation for the final nuclear holocaust that would wipe out Western civilization. The warheads had, of course, never landed. Esther had brushed aside the false alarm as a "reality-derived readiness drill."
She had also come away from that panicky period several million dollars richer.
There had been other, more subdued drills since then—smaller in scope, mostly owing to the diminished church membership since the failed Apocalypses of previous years—and so no one blinked when they were suddenly put on final alert. What was unusual this time, they soon learned, was that the acolytes, after being issued antiheathen arms, had been instructed to stay topside. Up where Yogi Mom had always insisted the deadly firestorms and radioactive
f
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fallout would obliterate the planet's less blessed inhabitants.
Only a handful of Esther's followers remained underground. Buffy Brand was one of them. She had been placed in front of a bank of monitor screens in the situation room and told to remain on alert. When she asked the acolyte master sergeant what she should be looking for, he had snapped that she'd know it when she saw it. Truth be told, Buffy doubted that the man knew himself what terror they were awaiting.
And so, like the others, Buffy was kept in the dark as her weary eyes shifted from screen to screen across the high-tech board.
The area the exterior cameras monitored was vast. It included the exteriors of the Ragnarok buildings, as well as the plains and forests surrounding the ranch. Mounted on poles and trees, on the high guard towers or on the desolate stretches of fence that cut across the lonely prairie, the cameras kept vigilant eye on the unsuspecting night.
Occasionally a camera would swirl around, and Buffy would catch a glimpse of a Truth Church foot patrol stomping its way through the brush, their black-clad shapes bathed in the washed-out green of night-vision filters.
As her eyes wandered across the vast Wyoming frontier—made alien by the eerie green glow of the cameras—Buffy took a deep breath.
Half the screens before her remained black. They had been hastily shut off earlier in the evening after some of the Ragnarok technicians had recalibrated the positions of the cameras to which they were connected. At each of the five other monitoring stations
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in the security room, the corresponding screens had been shut down.
Unbeknownst to Buffy, the man beside her, who was staring with a sullen intensity at the board in front of him, had been instructed by the Prophetess herself to turn on each of the four dormant cameras at predetermined times. Yogi Mom had been quite specific about when they were to be reactivated, down to the precise second, calibrated to Greenwich Mean Time.
Buffy checked her synchronized watch. She felt weary to the very core of her being.
It was probably the lateness of the hour. Since she had come to Ranch Ragnarok, all members of her acolyte shift were required to go to bed at precisely nine o'clock each night. It was now past midnight, and Buffy was bleary-eyed.
She yawned loudly, rubbing her bloodshot eyes. The acolyte at the adjoining monitoring station shot her an angry look. It had been his job to guard Ragnarok against any and all evil infiltrators, and the racoon-rims around his bloodshot eyes were testament to the fact that he took his job very seriously.
She gave him a lopsided smile by way of apology and turned her attention back to the screens.
The other guard harrumphed in displeasure and began drumming his fingers on the metal console before him. He glanced at his watch.
It was almost time.
Five minutes after he'd left his car, Remo encountered the first night patrol. The man leading the group of ragtag soldiers was
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the same one he and Chiun had encountered the last time he had penetrated Ranch Ragnarok.
The man held his AR-15 menacingly before him. The rest of his patrol did likewise. Remo counted eight in all.
Remo tipped an ear toward the forest and listened. Still more soldiers carrie stomping jthrough the thick woods, some nearby, others farther away. Since the nearest patrol was brandishing weapons—Remo could tell by the way the soldiers carried themselves—he had to assume that the others were armed, as well.
This time Remo was absolutely certain he hadn't tripped any motion detectors or been spotted by any cameras. He had been extracareful since leaving his car. Every time he sensed the hum of electrical equipment, he cut a wide swath around the offending piece of technology.
So why were the soldiers out in force?