Flagg has deployed soldiers from California to the Pacific Northwest in search of spies. No one can say how the dark man knows such things, but he predicts that two people will arrive to infiltrate his ranks. The soldiers must kill them without disfiguring their heads in any way. He plans to send these back to the Free Zone in Boulder as a warning of what is to come. Flagg tells a group of sentries posted on the eastern border of Oregon to look out for an old man driving a blue and white SUV:

‘He’s a spy from the other side,’ the Walkin Dude had told them, that horrible grin wreathing his chops. Why it was so horrible none of them could have said, but when it turned your way you felt as if your blood had turned to hot tomato soup in your veins (1064).

Unaware that an ambush awaits him, Judge Farris makes his way slowly over the northern route of the Rockies. The area seems desolate to him. While staying overnight in a motel, the judge sees a crow tapping on his windowpane. It has red flecks in its eyes, and the judge believes that the crow may be the dark man himself.