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already pushing for
them to make up the time they’d lost on their week off. Jezebel decided to
turbo-charge their effort by riding past about twenty-five other possibilities
herself during daylight hours. The guards had to take turns driving her while
she sensed for actives. She hadn’t driven a car herself since Chance’s murder.
This gave her a chance to get to know the whole team.
    None of the Washington-state leads
registered as actives. Still, working day and night, and using the new cluster
techniques, they effectively tripled their previous output. On Tuesday, they
were able to eliminate every suspect in the Oregon region. Unfortunately, to
accomplish this feat, they missed a meeting that London wanted them to spy on.
    Jez refused to pass the phone to
Daniel when the complaints came in. “He needs his sleep.”
    The calls escalated up the chain,
culminating with Director Baker, code-named Trench Coat. He complained loudly
for thirty minutes while she used her best, customer-service listening on him.
After the “B word” was used, she promptly hung up and removed all intelligence
requests from the queue for the next two days. She didn’t tell him why. He’d
figure it out. The guards, now loyal to Jez, had orders to pass all future
harassment through her. Whenever the London chief started a phone conversation
with yelling or profanity, she hung up.
    On Thursday, they hit pay dirt on a
UFO-worshipping commune in Idaho. The Right Reverend Alvin Turwilliger had been
contacted by aliens. He had proof that he would show his sworn followers.
According to the locals, the cult was harmless; they espoused a desire to have
a complete sample of the human gene pool when the aliens returned. In practice,
this meant that the leader had children with as many varieties of women as
possible.
    They also had an obscure tenet
about growing all of their own food in their sealed compound. This food
included algae, hydroponic tomatoes, and tanks of shrimp. The reverend had been
a shoe salesman and carnival barker in his previous professions. There was no
way he would know enough of the science to get this right. So Jez stopped by to
investigate at the coffee house he frequented.
    She spotted the reverend
immediately. He was eating pie and charming a teenage waitress. Jez tried to
sneak up so she could listen in, but the reverend snapped his head toward her
like a cat who’d just heard the can opener. He was definitely active. The
waitress spit in his pie when he ignored her to buzz around the new girl.
    After twenty minutes hearing about
Turwilliger’s personal religious organization, Jez steered the topic toward
food science. The reverend replied, “That’s not really my area. Francine is the
wizard there. It’s why I married her.”
    “Why self-contained?” she pressed.
    The reverend leaned closer. “It has
to do with the shadows, the light and dark cycles of an Ideal Planet.” His eyes
sparkled. Here, his zealotry came to the surface. “Inhabitable planets are rare
in our galaxy. Finding them is difficult. Right now, however, we can find gas
giants easily. All we need to do is narrow our search to the giants with lots
of moons that are in their sun’s Goldilocks zone—not too hot and not too cold
to sustain human life. If we go to the expense of traveling to one of these
systems, it would provide us with a dozen Earth-sized moons. That way, there’ll
be plenty of room for centuries of expansion...and options in case we make
mistakes.”
    “You’ve obviously put a lot of
thought into this. Is this theory from another wife?” she asked.
    He shook his head, and whispered, “Sacred
scriptures from the Mother Ship.”
    “Why Idaho?”
    “The mountains here give us shadow
for about the right amount of time each day, as well as the extreme temperature
swings we can expect on the surface of a moon in an Ideal System.”
    The man was deadpan serious.
Furthermore, her scalp was tingling with the same sort of feeling the