Dark Rivers of the Heart

ELEVEN

Friday afternoon, after discussing Spencer Grant’s scar with Dr. Mondello, Roy Miro left Los Angeles International aboard an agency Learjet, with a glass of properly chilled Robert Mondavi chardonnay in one hand and a bowl of shelled pistachios in his lap. He was the only passenger, and he expected to be in Las Vegas in an hour.

A few minutes short of his destination, his flight was diverted to Flagstaff, Arizona. Flash floods, spawned by the worst storm to batter Nevada in a decade, had inundated lower areas of Las Vegas. Also, lightning had damaged vital electronic systems at the airport, McCarran International, forcing a suspension of service.

By the time the jet was on the ground in Flagstaff, the official word was that McCarran would resume operations in two hours or less. Roy remained aboard, so he would not waste precious minutes returning from the terminal when the pilot learned that McCarran was up and running again.

He passed the time, at first, by linking to Mama in Virginia and using her extensive data-bank connections to teach a lesson to Captain Harris Descoteaux, the Los Angeles police officer who had irritated him earlier in the day. Descoteaux had too little respect for higher authority. Soon, however, in addition to a Caribbean lilt, his voice would have a new note of humility.

Later, Roy watched a PBS documentary on one of three television sets that served the passenger compartment of the Lear. The program was about Dr. Jack Kevorkian — dubbed Dr. Death by the media — who had made it his mission in life to assist the terminally ill when they expressed a desire to commit suicide, though he was persecuted by the law for doing so.

Roy was enthralled by the documentary. More than once, he was moved to tears. By the middle of the program, he was compelled to lean forward from his chair and place one hand flat on the screen each time Jack Kevorkian appeared in closeup. With his palm against the blessed image of the doctor’s face, Roy could feel the purity of the man, a saintly aura, a thrill of spiritual power.

In a fair world, in a society based on true justice, Kevorkian would have been left to do his work in peace. Roy was depressed to hear about the man’s suffering at the hands of regressive forces.

He took solace, however, from the knowledge that the day was swiftly approaching when a man like Kevorkian would never again be treated as a pariah. He would be embraced by a grateful nation and provided with an office, facilities, and salary commensurate with his contribution to a better world.

The world was so full of suffering and injustice that anyone who wanted to be assisted in suicide, terminally ill or not, should have that assistance. Roy passionately believed that even those who were chronically but not terminally ill, including many of the elderly, should be granted eternal rest if they wished to have it.

Those who didn’t see the wisdom of self-elimination should not be abandoned, either. They should be given free counseling, until they could perceive the immeasurable beauty of the gift that they were being offered.

Hand on the screen. Kevorkian in closeup. Feel the power.

The day would come when the disabled would suffer no more pain or indignities. No more wheelchairs or leg braces. No more Seeing Eye dogs. No more hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, no more grueling sessions with speech therapists. Only the peace of endless sleep.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s face filled the screen. Smiling. Oh, that smile.

Roy put both hands to the warm glass. He opened his heart and permitted that fabulous smile to flow into him. He unchained his soul and allowed Kevorkian’s spiritual power to lift him up.

Eventually the science of genetic engineering would ensure that none but healthy children were born, and eventually they would all be beautiful, as well as strong and sound. They would be perfect. Until that day came, however, Roy saw a need for an assisted-suicide program for infants born with less than the full use of their five senses and all four limbs. He was even ahead of Kevorkian on this.

In fact, when his hard work with the agency was done, when the country had the compassionate government that it deserved and was on the threshold of Utopia, he would like to spend the rest of his life serving in a suicide-assistance program for infants. He could not imagine anything more rewarding than holding a defective baby in his arms while a lethal injection was administered, comforting the child as it passed from imperfect flesh to a transcendent spiritual plane.

His heart swelled with love for those less fortunate than he. The halt and blind. The maimed and the ill and the elderly and the depressed and the learning impaired.

After two hours on the ground in Flagstaff, by the time McCarran reopened and the Learjet departed for a second try at Las Vegas, the documentary had ended. Kevorkian’s smile was no longer to be seen. Nevertheless, Roy remained in a state of rapture that he was sure would last for at least several days.

The power was now in him. He would experience no more failure, no more setbacks.

In flight, he received a telephone call from the agent seeking Ethel and George Porth, the grandparents who had raised Spencer Grant after the death of his mother. According to county property records, the Porths had once owned the house at the San Francisco address in Grant’s military records, but they had sold it ten years ago. The buyers had resold it seven years thereafter, and the new owners, in residence just three years, had never heard of the Porths and had no clue as to their whereabouts. The agent was continuing the search.

Roy had every confidence that they would find the Porths. The tide had turned in their favor. Feel the power.

By the time the Learjet landed in Las Vegas, night had fallen. Although the sky was overcast, the rain had stopped.

Roy was met at the debarkation gate by a driver who looked like a Spam loaf in a suit. He said only that his name was Prock and that the car was in front of the terminal. Glowering, he stalked away, expecting to be followed, clearly uninterested in small talk, as rude as the most arrogant maître d’ in New York City.

Roy decided to be amused rather than insulted.

The nondescript Chevrolet was parked illegally in the loading zone. Although Prock seemed bigger than the car that he was driving, somehow he fit inside.

The air was chilly, but Roy found it invigorating.

Because Prock kept the heater turned up high, the interior of the Chevy was stuffy, but Roy chose to think of it as cozy.

He was in a brilliant mood.

They went downtown with illegal haste.

Though Prock stayed on secondary streets and kept away from the busy hotels and casinos, the glare of those neon-lined avenues was reflected on the bellies of the low clouds. The red-orange-green-yellow sky might have seemed like a vision of Hell to a gambler who had just lost next week’s grocery money, but Roy found it festive.

After delivering Roy to the agency’s downtown headquarters, Prock drove off to deliver his baggage to the hotel for him.

On the fifth floor of the high rise, Bobby Dubois was waiting. Dubois, the evening duty officer, was a tall, lanky Texan with mud-brown eyes and hair the color of range dust, on whom clothes hung like thrift-shop castaways on a stick-and-straw scarecrow. Although big-boned, rough-hewn, with a mottled complexion, with jug-handle ears, with teeth as crooked as the tombstones in a cow-town cemetery, with not a single feature that even the kindest critic could deem perfect, Dubois had a good-old-boy charm and an easy manner that distracted attention from the fact he was a biological tragedy.

Sometimes Roy was surprised that he could be around Dubois for long periods, yet resist the urge to commit a mercy killing.

“That boy, he’s some cute sonofabitch, the way he drove out of that roadblock and into the amusement park,” Dubois said as he led Roy down the hall from his office to the satellite-surveillance room. “And that dog of his, just bobbin’ its head up and down, up and down, like one of them spring-necked novelties that people put on the rear-window shelves in their cars. That dog, he got palsy or what?”

“I don’t know,” Roy said.

“My granpap, he once had a dog with palsy. Name was Scooter, but we called him Boomer ’cause he could cut the godawfulest loud farts. I’m talkin’ about the dog, you understand, not my granpap.”

“Of course,” Roy said as they reached the door at the end of the hall.

“Boomer got palsied his last year,” Dubois said, hesitating with his hand on the doorknob. “’Course he was older than dirt by then, so it wasn’t any surprise. You should’ve seen that poor hound shake. Palsied up somethin’ fierce. Let me tell you, Roy, when old Boomer lifted a hind leg and let go with his stream, all palsied like he was — you dived for cover or wished you was in another county.”

“Sounds like someone should have put him to sleep,” Roy said as Dubois opened the door.

The Texan followed Roy into the satellite-surveillance center. “Nah, Boomer was a good old dog. If the tables had been turned, that old hound wouldn’t never have taken a gun and put granpap to sleep.”

Roy really was in a good mood. He could have listened to Bobby Dubois for hours.

The satellite-surveillance center was forty feet by sixty feet. Only two of the twelve computer workstations in the middle of the room were manned, both by women wearing headsets and murmuring into mouthpieces as they studied the data streaming across their VDTs. A third technician was working at a light table, examining several large photographic negatives through a magnifying glass.

One of the two longer walls was largely occupied by an immense screen on which was projected a map of the world. Cloud formations were superimposed on it, along with green lettering that indicated weather conditions planetwide.

Red, blue, white, yellow, and green lights blinked steadily, revealing the current positions of scores of satellites. Many were electronic-communications packages handling microwave relays of telephone, television, and radio signals. Others were engaged in topographical mapping, oil exploration, meteorology, astronomy, international espionage, and domestic surveillance, among numerous other tasks.

The owners of those satellites ranged from public corporations to government agencies and military services. Some were the property of nations other than the United States or of businesses based beyond U.S. shores. Regardless of the ownership or origin, however, every satellite on that wall display could be accessed and used by the agency, and the legitimate operators usually remained unaware that their systems had been invaded.

At a U-shaped control console in front of the huge screen, Bobby Dubois said, “The sonofabitch rode straight out of Spaceport Vegas off into the desert, and our boys weren’t equipped to chase around playin’ Lawrence of Arabia.”

“Did you put up a chopper to track him?”

“Weather turned bad too fast. A real toad-drowner, rain comin’ down like every angel in Heaven was takin’ a leak at the same time.”

Dubois pushed a button on the console, and the map of the world faded from the wall. An actual satellite view of Oregon, Idaho, California, and Nevada appeared in its place. Seen from orbit, the boundaries of those four states would have been difficult to define, so borders were overlaid in orange lines.

Western and southern Oregon, southern Idaho, northern through central California, and all of Nevada were concealed below a dense layer of clouds.

“This here’s a direct satellite feed. There’s just a three-minute delay for transmission and then conversion of the digital code back into images again,” said Dubois.

Along eastern Nevada and eastern Idaho, soft pulses of light rippled through the clouds. Roy knew that he was seeing lightning from above the storm. It was strangely beautiful.

“Right now, the only storm activity is out on the eastern edge of the front. ’Cept for an isolated patch of spit-thin rain here and there, things are pretty quiet all the way back to the ass-end of Oregon. But we can’t just do a look-down for the sonofabitch, not even with infrared. It’d be like trying to see the bottom of a soup bowl through clam chowder.”

“How long until clear skies?” Roy asked.

“There’s a kick-ass wind at higher altitudes, pushing the front east-southeast, so we should have a clear look at the whole Mojave and surrounding territory before dawn.”

A surveillance subject, sitting in bright sunshine and reading a newspaper, could be filmed from a satellite with sufficiently high resolution that the headlines on his paper would be legible. However, in clear weather, in an unpopulated wasteland that boasted no animals as large as a man, locating and identifying a moving object as large as a Ford Explorer would not be easy, because the territory to be examined was so vast. Nevertheless, it could be done.

Roy said, “He could leave the desert for one highway or another, put the pedal to the metal, and be long gone by morning.”

“Damn few paved roads in this part of the state. We got lookout teams in every direction, on every serious highway and sorry strip of blacktop. Interstate Fifteen, Federal Highway Ninety-five, Federal Highway Ninety-three. Plus State Routes One-forty-six, One-fifty-six, One-fifty-eight, One-sixty, One-sixty-eight, and One-sixty-nine. Lookin’ for a green Ford Explorer with some body damage fore and aft. Lookin’ for a man with a dog in any vehicle. Lookin’ for a man with a big facial scar. Hell, we got this whole part of the state locked down tighter than a mosquito’s butt.”

“Unless he already got off the desert and back onto a highway before you put your men in place.”

“We moved quick. Anyway, in a storm as bad as that one, goin’ overland, he made piss-poor time. Fact is, he’s damn lucky if he didn’t bog down somewhere, four-wheel drive or no four-wheel drive. We’ll nail the sonofabitch tomorrow.”

“I hope you’re right,” Roy said.

“I’d bet my pecker on it.”

“And they say Las Vegas locals aren’t big gamblers.”

“How’s he tied up with the woman anyway?”

“I wish I knew,” Roy said, watching as lightning flowered softly under the clouds on the leading edge of the storm front. “What about this tape of the conversation between Grant and the old woman?”

“You want to hear that?”

“Yes.”

“It starts from when he first says the name Hannah Rainey.”

“Let’s give it a listen,” Roy said, turning away from the wall display.

All the way down the hall, into the elevator, and down to the deepest subterranean level of the building, Dubois talked about the best places to get good chili in Vegas, as though he had reason to believe that Roy cared. “There’s this joint on Paradise Road, the chili’s so hot some folks been known to spontaneously combust from eatin’ it, whoosh, they just go up like torches.”

The elevator reached the subbasement.

“We’re talkin’ chili that makes you sweat from your fingernails, makes your belly button pop out like a meat thermometer.”

The doors slid open.

Roy stepped into a windowless concrete room.

Along the far wall were scores of recording machines.

In the middle of the room, rising from a computer workstation, was the most stunningly gorgeous woman Roy had ever seen, blond and green-eyed, so beautiful that she took his breath away, so beautiful that she set his heart to racing and sent his blood pressure soaring high into the stroke-risk zone, so achingly beautiful that no words could adequately describe her — nor could any music ever written be sweet enough to celebrate her — so beautiful and so incomparable that he couldn’t breathe or speak, so radiant that she blinded him to the dreariness of that bunker and left him surrounded by her magnificent light.

The flood had disappeared over the cliff like bathwater down a tub drain. The arroyo was now merely an enormous ditch.

To a considerable depth, the soil was mostly sand, extremely porous, so the rain had not puddled on it. The downpour had filtered quickly into a deep aquifer. The surface had dried out and firmed up almost as rapidly as the empty channel had previously turned into a racing, spumous river.

Nevertheless, before she had risked taking the Range Rover into the channel, although the machine was as surefooted as a tank, she had walked the route from the eroded arroyo wall to the Explorer and checked the condition of the ground. Satisfied that the bed of the ghost river wasn’t muddy or soft and that it would provide sufficient traction, she had driven the Rover into that declivity and had backed between the two columns of rock to the suspended Explorer.

Even now, after rescuing the dog and putting him in the back of the Rover, and after disentangling Grant from his safety harness, she was amazed by the precarious position in which the Explorer had come to rest. She was tempted to lean past the unconscious man and look through the gaping hole where the side window had been, but even if she could have seen much in the darkness, she knew that she wouldn’t enjoy the view.

The flood tide had lifted the truck more than ten feet above the floor of the arroyo before wedging it in that pincer of stone, on the brink of the cliff. Now that the river had vanished beneath it, the Explorer hung up there, its four wheels in midair, as though gripped in a pair of tweezers that belonged to a giant.

When she’d first seen it, she’d stood in childlike wonder, mouth open and eyes wide. She was no less astonished than she would have been if she’d seen a flying saucer and its unearthly crew.

She’d been certain that Grant had been swept out of the truck and carried to his death. Or that he was dead inside.

To get up to his truck, she’d had to back her Rover under it, putting the rear wheels uncomfortably close to the edge of the cliff. Then she had stood on the roof, which brought her head just to the bottom of the Explorer’s front passenger door. She had reached up to the handle and, in spite of the awkward angle, had managed to open the door.

Water poured out, but the dog was what startled her. Whimpering and miserable, huddled on the passenger seat, he had peered down at her with a mixture of alarm and yearning.

She didn’t want him jumping onto the Rover. He might slip on that smooth surface and fracture a leg, or tumble and break his neck.

Although the pooch hadn’t looked as if he would perform any canine stunts, she had warned him to stay where he was. She climbed down from the Rover, drove it forward five yards, turned it around to direct the headlights on the ground under the Explorer, got out again, and coaxed the dog to jump to the sandy riverbed.

He needed a lot of coaxing. Poised on the edge of the seat, he repeatedly built up the courage to jump. But each time, he turned his head away at the last moment and shrank back, as if he were facing a chasm instead of a ten-or twelve-foot drop.

Finally, she remembered how Theda Davidowitz had often talked to Sparkle, and she tried the same approach with this dog: “Come on, sweetums, come to mama, come on. Little sweetums, little pretty-eyed snookie-wookums.”

In the truck above, the pooch pricked one ear and regarded her with acute interest.

“Come here, come on, snookums, little sweetums.”

He began to quiver with excitement.

“Come to mama. Come on, little pretty eyes.”

The dog crouched on the seat, muscles tensed, poised to leap.

“Come give mama a kissie, little cutie, little cutie baby.”

She felt idiotic, but the dog jumped. He sprang out of the open door of the Explorer, sailed in a long graceful arc through the night air, and landed on all fours.

He was so startled by his own agility and bravery that he turned to look up at the truck and then sat down as if in shock. He flopped onto his side, breathing hard.

She had to carry him to the Rover and lay him in the cargo area directly behind the front seat. He repeatedly rolled his eyes at her, and he licked her hand once.

“You’re a strange one,” she said, and the dog sighed.

Then she had turned the Rover around again, backed it under the suspended Explorer, and climbed up to find Spencer Grant slumped behind the steering wheel, woozily conscious.

Now he was out cold again. He was murmuring to someone in a dream, and she wondered how she would get him out of the Explorer if he didn’t revive soon.

She tried talking to him and shaking him gently, but she wasn’t able to get a response from him. He was already damp and shivering, so there was no point in scooping a handful of water off the floor and splashing his face.

His injuries needed to be treated as soon as possible, but that was not the primary reason that she was anxious to get him into the Rover and away from there. Dangerous people were searching for him. With their resources, even hampered by weather and terrain, they would find him if she didn’t quickly move him to a secure place.

Grant solved her dilemma not merely by regaining consciousness but by virtually exploding out of his unnatural sleep. With a gasp and a wordless cry, he bolted upright in his seat, bathed in a sudden sweat yet shuddering so furiously that his teeth chattered.

He was face-to-face with her, inches away, and even in the poor light, she saw the horror in his eyes. Worse, there was a bleakness that transmitted his chill deep into her own heart.

He spoke urgently, though exhaustion and thirst had reduced his voice to a coarse whisper: “Nobody knows.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Nobody. Nobody knows.”

“Easy. You’ll be okay.”

“Nobody knows,” he insisted, and he seemed to be caught between fear and grief, between terror and tears.

A terrible hopelessness informed his tortured voice and every aspect of his face to such an extent that she was struck speechless. It seemed foolish to continue to repeat meaningless reassurances to a man who appeared to have been granted a vision of the cankerous souls in Hades.

Though he looked into her eyes, Spencer seemed to be gazing at someone or something far away, and he was speaking in a rush of words, more to himself than to her: “It’s a chain, iron chain, it runs through me, through my brain, my heart, through my guts, a chain, no way to get loose, no escape.”

He was scaring her. She hadn’t thought that she could be scared anymore, at least not easily, certainly not with mere words. But he was scaring her witless.

“Come on, Spencer,” she said. “Let’s go. Okay? Help me get you out of here.”

When the slightly chubby, twinkly-eyed man stepped out of the elevator with Bobby Dubois into the windowless subbasement, he halted in his tracks and gazed at Eve as a starving man might have stared at a bowl of peaches and cream.

Eve Jammer was accustomed to having a powerful effect on men. When she had been a topless showgirl on the Las Vegas stage, she had been one beauty among many — yet the eyes of all the men had followed her nearly to the exclusion of the other women, as though something about her face and body was not just more appealing to the eye but so harmonious that it was like a secret siren’s song. She drew men’s eyes to herself as inevitably as a skillful hypnotist could capture a subject’s mind by swinging a gold medallion on a chain or simply with the sinuous movements of his hands.

Even poor little Thurmon Stookey — the dentist who’d had the bad luck to be in the same hotel elevator with the two gorillas from whom Eve had taken the million in cash — had been vulnerable to her charms at a time when he should have been too terrified to entertain the slightest thought of sex. With the two goons dead on the elevator floor and the Korth.38 pointed at his face, Stookey had let his eyes drift from the bore of the revolver to the lush cleavage revealed by Eve’s low-cut sweater. Judging by the glimmer that had come into his myopic eyes just as she’d squeezed the trigger, Eve figured that the dentist’s final thought had not been God help me but What a set.

No man had ever affected Eve to even a small fraction of the extent to which she affected most men. Indeed, she could take or leave most men. Her interest was drawn only to those from whom she might extract money or from whom she might learn the tricks of obtaining and holding on to power. Her ultimate goal was to be extremely rich and feared, not loved. Being an object of fear, totally in control, having the power of life and death over others: That was infinitely more erotic than any man’s body or lovemaking skills could ever be.

Still, when she was introduced to Roy Miro, she felt something unusual. A flutter of the heart. A mild disorientation that was not in the least unpleasant.

What she was feeling couldn’t have been called desire. Eve’s desires were all exhaustively mapped and labeled, and the periodic satisfaction of each was achieved with mathematical calculation, to a schedule as precise as that kept by a fascist train conductor. She had no time or patience for spontaneity in either business or personal affairs; the intrusion of unplanned passion would have been as repulsive to her as being forced to eat worms.

Undeniably, however, she felt something from the first moment she saw Roy Miro. And minute by minute, as they discussed the Grant-Davidowitz tape and then listened to it, her peculiar interest in him increased. An unfamiliar thrill of anticipation coursed through her as she wondered where events were leading.

For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what qualities of the man inspired her fascination. He was rather pleasant looking, with merry blue eyes, a choirboy face, and a sweet smile — but he was not handsome in the usual sense of the word. He was fifteen pounds overweight, somewhat pale, and he didn’t appear to be rich. He dressed with less flair than any Nazarene passing out religious publications door-to-door.

Frequently Miro asked her to replay a passage of the Grant-Davidowitz recording, as though it contained a clue that required pondering, but she knew that he had become preoccupied with her and had missed something.

For both Eve and Miro, Bobby Dubois pretty much ceased to exist. In spite of his height and physical awkwardness, in spite of his colorful and ceaseless chatter, Dubois was of no more interest to either of them than were the bunker’s plain concrete walls.

When everything on the recording had been played and replayed, Miro went through some shuffle and jive to the effect that he was unable to do anything about Grant for the time being, except wait: wait for him to surface; wait for the skies to clear so a satellite search could begin; wait for search teams already in the field to turn up something; wait for agents investigating other aspects of the case, in other cities, to get back to him. Then he asked Eve if she was free for dinner.

She accepted the invitation with an uncharacteristic lack of coyness. She had a growing sense that what she responded to in the man was some secret power that he possessed, a strength that was mostly hidden and that could be glimpsed only in the self-confidence of his easy smile and in those blue-blue eyes that never revealed anything but amusement, as if this man expected always to have the last laugh.

Although Miro had been assigned a car from the agency pool while he was in Vegas, he rode in her own Honda to a favorite restaurant of hers on Flamingo Road. Reflections of a sea of neon rolled in tidal patterns across low clouds, and the night seemed filled with magic.

She expected to get to know him better over dinner and a couple of glasses of wine — and to understand, by dessert, why he fascinated her. However, his skills as a conversationalist were equivalent to his looks: pleasant enough, but far from beguiling. Nothing that Miro said, nothing that he did, no gesture, no look brought Eve any closer to understanding the curious attraction that he held for her.

By the time they left the restaurant and crossed the parking lot toward her car, she was frustrated and confused. She didn’t know whether she should invite him back to her place or not. She didn’t want sex with him. It wasn’t that kind of attraction, exactly. Of course, some men revealed their truest selves when they had sex: by what they liked to do, by how they did it, by what they said and how they acted both during and after. But she didn’t want to take him home, do it with him, get all sweaty, go the whole disgusting route, and still not understand what it was about him that so intrigued her.

She was in a dilemma.

Then, as they drew near to her car, with the cold wind soughing in a nearby row of palm trees and the air scented with the aroma of charcoal-broiled steaks from the restaurant, Roy Miro did the most unexpected and outrageous thing that Eve had ever seen in thirty-three years of outrageous experience.

An immeasurable time after getting down from the Explorer and into the Range Rover — which could have been an hour or two minutes or thirty days and thirty nights, for all he knew — Spencer woke and saw a herd of tumbleweed pacing them. The shadows of mesquite and paddle-leaf cactus leaped through the headlights.

He rolled his head to the left, against the back of the seat, and saw Valerie behind the wheel. “Hi.”

“Hi, there.”

“How’d you get here?”

“That’s too complicated for you right now.”

“I’m a complicated guy.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Where we going?”

“Away.”

“Good.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Woozy.”

“Don’t pee on the seat,” she said with obvious amusement.

He said, “I’ll try not to.”

“Good.”

“Where’s my dog?”

“Who do you think’s licking your ear?”

“Oh.”

“He’s right there behind you.”

“Hi, pal.”

“What’s his name,” she asked.

“Rocky.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“About what?”

“The name. Doesn’t fit.”

“I named him that so he’d have more confidence.”

“Isn’t working,” she said.

Strange rock formations loomed, like temples to gods forgotten before human beings had been capable of conceiving the idea of time and counting the passage of days. They awed him, and she drove among them with great expertise, whipping left and right, down a long hill, onto a vast, dark flatness.

“Never knew his real name,” Spencer said.

“Real name?”

“Puppy name. Before the pound.”

“Wasn’t Rocky.”

“Probably not.”

“What was it before Spencer?”

“He was never named Spencer.”

“So you’re clearheaded enough to be evasive.”

“Not really. Just habit. What’s your name?”

“Valerie Keene.”

“Liar.”

He went away for a while. When he came around again, there was still desert: sand and stone, scrub and tumbleweed, darkness pierced by headlights.

“Valerie,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“What’s your real name?”

“Bess.”

“Bess what?”

“Bess Baer.”

“Spell it.”

“B-A-E-R.”

“Really?”

“Really. For now.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“It means that’s your name now, after Valerie.”

“So?”

“What was your name before Valerie?”

“Hannah Rainey.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, realizing that he was firing on only four of six cylinders. “Before that?”

“Gina Delucio.”

“Was that real?”

“It felt real.”

“Is that the name you were born with?”

“You mean my puppy name?”

“Yeah. That your puppy name?”

“Nobody’s called me by my puppy name since before I was in the pound,” she said.

“You’re very funny.”

“You like funny women?”

“I must.”

“‘And then the funny woman,’” she said, as if reading from a printed page, “‘and the cowardly dog and the mysterious man rode off into the desert in search of their real names.’”

“In search of a place to puke.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.”

She applied the brakes, and he flung open the door.

Later, when he woke, still riding through the dark desert, he said, “I have the most god-awful taste in my mouth.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Bess.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, Baer. Bess Baer. What’s your name?”

“My faithful Indian sidekick calls me Kemosabe.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit,” he said.

“Well, that’s what ‘Kemosabe’ means.”

“Are we ever going to stop?”

“Not while we have cloud cover.”

“What’ve clouds got to do with anything?”

“Satellites,” she said.

“You are the strangest woman I’ve ever known.”

“Just wait.”

“How the hell did you find me?”

“Maybe I’m psychic.”

“Are you psychic?”

“No.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. He could almost imagine that he was on a merry-go-round. “I was supposed to find you.”

“Surprise.”

“I wanted to help you.”

“Thanks.”

He let go of his grip on the world of the waking. For a while all was silent and serene. Then he walked out of the darkness and opened the red door. There were rats in the catacombs.

Roy did a crazy thing. Even as he was doing it, he was amazed at the risk he was taking.

He decided that he should be himself in front of Eve Jammer. His real self. His deeply committed, compassionate, caring self that was never more than half revealed in the bland, bureaucratic functionary that he appeared to be to most people.

Roy was willing to take risks with this stunning woman, because he sensed that her mind was as marvelous as her ravishing face and body. The woman within, so close to emotional and intellectual perfection, would understand him as no one else ever had.

Over dinner, they had not found the key that would open the doors in their souls and let them merge, which was their destiny. As they were leaving the restaurant, Roy was concerned that their moment of opportunity would pass and that their destiny would be thwarted, so he tapped the power of Dr. Kevorkian, which he’d recently absorbed from the television in the Learjet. He found the courage to reveal his true heart to Eve and force the fulfillment of their destiny.

Behind the restaurant, a blue Dodge van was parked three spaces to the right of Eve’s Honda, and a man and woman were getting out of it, on their way to dinner. They were in their forties, and the man was in a wheelchair. He was being lowered from a side door of the van on an electric lift, which he operated without assistance.

Otherwise, the parking lot was deserted.

To Eve, Roy said, “Come with me a minute. Come say hello.”

“Huh?”

Roy walked directly to the Dodge. “Good evening,” he said as he reached under his coat to his shoulder holster.

The couple looked up at him, and both said, “Good evening,” with a thread of puzzlement sewn through their voices, as if trying to recall where they had met him before.

“I feel your pain,” Roy said as he drew his pistol.

He shot the man in the head.

His second round hit the woman in the throat, but it didn’t finish her. She fell to the ground, twitching grotesquely.

Roy stepped past the dead man in the wheelchair. To the woman on the ground, he said, “Sorry,” and then he shot her again.

The new silencer on the Beretta worked well. With the February wind moaning through the palm fronds, none of the three shots would have been audible farther than ten feet away.

Roy turned to Eve Jammer.

She looked thunderstruck.

He wondered if he had been too impulsive for a first date.

“So sad,” he said, “the quality of life that some people are forced to endure.”

Eve looked up from the bodies and met Roy’s eyes. She didn’t scream or even speak. Of course, she might have been in shock. But he didn’t think that was the case. She seemed to want to understand.

Maybe everything would be all right after all.

“Can’t leave them like this.” He holstered his gun and pulled on his gloves. “They have a right to be treated with dignity.”

The remote-control unit that operated the wheelchair lift was attached to the arm of the chair. Roy pressed a button and sent the dead man back up from the parking lot.

He climbed into the van through the double-wide sliding door, which had been pushed to one side. When the wheelchair completed its ascent, he rolled it inside.

Assuming that the man and woman were husband and wife, Roy planned the tableau accordingly. The situation was so public that he didn’t have time to be original. He would have to repeat what he had done with the Bettonfields on Wednesday evening in Beverly Hills.

Tall lampposts were spaced around the parking lot. Just enough bluish light came through the open door to allow him to do his work.

He lifted the dead man out of the chair and placed him faceup on the floor. The van was uncarpeted. Roy was remorseful about that, but he had no padding or blankets with which to make the couple’s final rest more comfortable.

He pushed the chair into a corner, out of the way.

Outside again, while Eve watched, Roy lifted the dead woman and put her into the van. He climbed in after her and arranged her beside her husband. He folded her right hand around her husband’s left.

Both of the woman’s eyes were open, as was one of her husband’s, and Roy was about to press them shut with his gloved fingers when a better idea occurred to him. He peeled up the husband’s closed eyelid and waited to see if it would remain open. It did. He turned the man’s head to the left and the woman’s head to the right, so they were gazing into each other’s eyes, into the eternity that they now shared in a far better realm than Las Vegas, Nevada, far better than any place in this dismal, imperfect world.

He crouched at the feet of the cadavers for a moment, admiring his work. The tenderness expressed by their positions was enormously pleasing to him. Obviously, they had been in love and were now together forever, as any lovers would wish to be.

Eve Jammer stood at the open door, staring at the dead couple. Even the desert wind seemed to be aware of her exceptional beauty and to treasure it, for her golden hair was shaped into exquisitely tapered streamers. She appeared not windblown but windadored.

“It’s so sad,” Roy said. “What quality of life could they have had — with him imprisoned in a wheelchair, and with her tied to him by bonds of love? Their lives were so limited by his infirmities, their futures tethered to that damned chair. How much better now.”

Without saying a word, Eve turned away and walked to the Honda.

Roy got out of the Dodge van and, after one last look at the loving couple, closed the sliding door.

Eve was waiting behind the wheel of her car, with the engine running. If she had been frightened of him, she would have tried to drive away without him or would have run back to the restaurant.

He got in the Honda and buckled his safety harness.

They sat in silence.

Clearly, she intuited that he was no murderer, that what he had done was a moral act, and that he operated on a higher plane than did the average man. Her silence was only indicative of her struggle to translate her intuition into intellectual concepts and thereby more fully understand him.

She drove out of the parking lot.

Roy took off his leather gloves and returned them to the inside coat pocket from which he had gotten them.

For a while, Eve followed a random route through a series of residential neighborhoods, just driving to drive, going nowhere yet.

To Roy, the lights in all the huddled houses no longer seemed to be either warm or mysterious, as they had seemed on other nights and in other neighborhoods, in other cities, when he had cruised similar streets alone. Now they were merely sad: terribly sad little lights that inadequately illuminated the sad little lives of people who would never enjoy a passionate commitment to an ideal, not of the sort that so enriched Roy’s life, sad little people who would never rise above the herd as he had risen, who would never experience a transcendent relationship with anyone as exceptional as Eve Jammer.

When at last the time seemed right, he said, “I yearn for a better world. But more than better, Eve. Oh, much more.”

She didn’t reply.

“Perfection,” he said quietly but with great conviction, “in all things. Perfect laws and perfect justice. Perfect beauty. I dream of a perfect society, where everyone enjoys perfect health, perfect equality, in which the economy hums always like a perfectly tuned machine, where everyone lives in harmony with everyone else and with nature. Where no offense is ever given or taken. Where all dreams are perfectly rational and considerate. Where all dreams come true.”

He was so moved by his soliloquy that his voice became thick toward the end of it, and he had to blink back tears.

Still she said nothing.

Night streets. Lighted windows. Little houses, little lives. So much confusion, sadness, yearning, and alienation in those houses.

“I do what I can,” he said, “to make an ideal world. I scrub away some of its imperfect elements and push it inch by grudging inch toward perfection. Oh, not that I think I can change the world. Not alone, not me, and not even a thousand or a hundred thousand like me. But I light a little candle whenever I can, one little candle after another, pushing back the darkness one small shadow at a time.”

They were on the east side of town, almost at the city limits, cruising into higher land and less populated neighborhoods than they had traveled previously. At an intersection, she suddenly made a U-turn and headed back into the sea of lights from which they’d come.

“You may say I’m a dreamer,” Roy admitted. “But I’m not the only one. I think you’re a dreamer, too, Eve, in your own special way. If you can admit being a dreamer…maybe if all of us dreamers can admit it and join together, the world could someday live as one.”

Her silence was now profound.

He dared to look at her, and she was more devastating than he had remembered. His heart thudded slow and heavy, weighed down by the sweet burden of her beauty.

When at last she spoke, her voice was quavery. “You didn’t take anything from them.”

It wasn’t fear that made her words shimmer as they passed along her elegant throat and across her ripe lips but, rather, a tremendous excitement. And her tremulous voice in turn excited Roy. He said, “No. Nothing.”

“Not even the money from her purse or his wallet.”

“Of course not. I’m not a taker, Eve. I’m a giver.”

“I’ve never seen…” She seemed unable to find the words even to describe what he had done.

“Yes, I know,” he said, delighted to see how completely he had swept her away.

“…never seen such…”

“Yes.”

“…never such…”

“I know, dear one. I know.”

“…such power,” she said.

That was not the word he had thought that she was searching for. But she had pronounced it with such passion, imbued it with so much erotic energy, he could not be disappointed that she had yet to grasp the full meaning of what he had done.

“They’re just going out for dinner,” she said excitedly. She had begun to drive too fast, recklessly. “Just going out to dinner, an ordinary night, nothing special, and—wham! — you whack them! Just like that, Jesus, take them out, and not even to get anything that belongs to them, not even because they crossed you or anything like that. Just for me. Just for me, to show me who you really are.”

“Well, yes, for you,” he said. “But not only for you, Eve. Don’t you see? I removed two imperfect lives from creation, inching the world closer to perfection. And at the same time, I relieved those two sad people of the burden of this cruel life, this imperfect world, where nothing could ever be as they hoped. I gave to the world, and I gave to those poor people, and there were no losers.”

“You’re like the wind,” she said breathlessly, “like a fantastic storm wind, hurricane, tornado, except there’s no weatherman to warn anyone you’re coming. You’ve got the power of the storm, you’re a force of nature — sweeping out of nowhere, for no reason. Wham!”

Worried that she was missing the point, Roy said, “Wait, wait a minute, Eve, listen to me.”

She was so excited that she couldn’t drive anymore. She angled the Honda to the curb, tramped the brakes so hard that Roy would have been pitched into the windshield if his harness hadn’t been buckled.

Slamming the gearshift into park with nearly enough force to snap it off, she turned to him. “You’re an earthquake, just like an earthquake. People can be walking along, carefree, sun shining, birds singing — and then the ground opens and just swallows them up.”

She laughed with delight. Hers was a girlish, trilling, musical laugh, so infectious that he had difficulty not laughing with her.

He took her hands in his. They were elegant, long-fingered, as exquisitely shaped as the hands of Guinevere, and the touch of them was more than any man deserved.

Unfortunately, the radius and ulna, above the perfectly shaped carpals of her wrist, were not of the supreme caliber of the bones in her hands. He was careful not to look at them. Or touch them.

“Eve, listen. You must understand. It’s extremely important that you understand.”

She grew solemn at once, realizing that they had reached a most serious point in their relationship. She was even more beautiful when somber than when laughing.

He said, “You’re right, this is a great power. The greatest of all powers, and that’s why you’ve got to be clear about it.”

Although the only light in the car came from the instrument panel, her green eyes blazed as if with the reflection of summer sun. They were perfect eyes, as flawless and compelling as those of the woman for whom he had been hunting this past year, whose photograph he carried in his wallet.

Eve’s left brow was perfect too. But a slight irregularity marred her right superciliary arch, above her eye socket: It was regrettably too prominent, only fractionally more so than the left, formed with barely half a gram too much bone, but nevertheless out of balance and shy of the perfection on the left.

That was okay. He could live with that. He would just focus on her angelic eyes below her brow, and on each of her incomparable hands below her knobby radius and ulna. Though flawed, she was the only woman he’d ever seen with more than one perfect feature. Ever, ever, ever. And her treasures weren’t limited to her hands and eyes.

“Unlike other power, Eve, this doesn’t flow from anger,” he explained, wanting this precious woman to understand his mission and his innermost self. “It doesn’t come from hatred, either. It’s not the power of rage, envy, bitterness, greed. It’s not like the power some people find in courage or honor — or that they gain from a belief in God. It transcends those powers, Eve. Do you know what it is?”

She was rapt, unable to speak. She only shook her head: no.

“My power,” he said, “is the power of compassion.”

“Compassion,” she whispered.

“Compassion. If you try to understand other people, to feel their pain, to really know the anguish of their lives, to love them in spite of their faults, you’re overcome by such pity, such intense pity, it’s intolerable. It must be relieved. So you tap into the immeasurable, inexhaustible power of compassion. You act to relieve suffering, to ease the world a hairsbreadth closer to perfection.”

“Compassion,” she whispered again, as if she had never heard the word before, or as if he had shown her a definition of it that she had never previously appreciated.

Roy could not look away from her mouth as she repeated the word twice again. Her lips were divine. He couldn’t imagine why he had thought that Melissa Wicklun’s lips were perfect, for Eve’s lips made Melissa’s seem less attractive than those of a leprous toad. These were lips beside which the ripest plum would look as withered as a prune, beside which the sweetest strawberry would look sour.

Playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, he continued her first lesson in moral refinement: “When you’re motivated solely by compassion, when no personal gain is involved, then any act is moral, utterly moral, and you owe no explanations to anyone, ever. Acting from compassion, you’re freed forever from doubt, and that is a power like no other.”

“Any act,” she said, so overcome by the concept that she could barely find enough breath to speak.

“Any,” he assured her.

She licked her lips.

Oh, God, her tongue was so delicate, glistened so intriguingly, slipped so sensuously across her lips, was so perfectly tapered that a faint sigh of ecstasy escaped him before he was quite aware of it.

Perfect lips. Perfect tongue. If only her chin had not been tragically fleshy. Others might think it was the chin of a goddess, but Roy was cursed with a greater sensitivity to imperfection than were other men. He was acutely aware of the smidgin of excess fat that lent her chin a barely perceptible puffy look. He would just have to focus on her lips, on her tongue, and not allow his gaze to drift down from there.

“How many have you done?” she asked.

“Done? Oh. You mean, like back at the restaurant.”

“Yes. How many?”

“Well, I don’t count them. That would seem…I don’t know…it would seem prideful. I don’t want praise. No. My satisfaction is just in doing what I know is right. It’s a very private satisfaction.”

“How many?” she persisted. “A rough estimate.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Over the years…a couple of hundred, a few hundred, something like that.”

She closed her eyes and shivered. “When you do them…just before you do them and they look in your eyes, are they afraid?”

“Yes, but I wish they weren’t. I wish they could see that I know their anguish, that I’m acting from compassion, that it’s going to be quick and painless.”

With her own eyes closed, half swooning, she said, “They look into your eyes, and they see the power you have over them, the power of a storm, and they’re afraid.”

He released her right hand and pointed his forefinger at the flat section of bone immediately above the root of her perfect nose. It was a nose that made all the other fine noses seem as unformed as the “nose” on a coconut shell. Slowly, he moved his finger toward her face as he said, “You. Have. The. Most. Exquisite. Glabella. I. Have. Ever. Seen.”

With the last word, he touched his finger to her glabella, the flat portion of the front skull bone between her unimpeachable left superciliary arch and her unfortunately bony right superciliary arch, directly above her nose.

Although her eyes were closed, Eve didn’t flinch with surprise at his touch. She seemed to have developed such a closeness to him, so quickly, that she was aware of his every intention and slightest movement without the aid of vision — and without relying on any of the other five senses, for that matter.

He took his finger off her glabella. “Do you believe in fate?”

“Yes.”

“We are fate.”

She opened her eyes and said, “Let’s go back to my place.”

On the trip to her house, she broke traffic laws by the score. Roy didn’t approve, but he withheld his criticism.

She lived in a small two-story house in a recently completed tract. It was nearly identical to the other houses on the street.

Roy had expected glamour. Disappointed, he reminded himself that Eve, though stunning, was but another woefully underpaid bureaucrat.

As they waited in the Honda, in the driveway, for the automatic garage door to finish lifting out of the way, he said, “How did a woman like you wind up working in the agency?”

“I wanted the job, and my father had the influence to make it happen,” she said, driving into the garage.

“Who’s your father?”

“He’s a rotten sonofabitch,” she said. “I hate him. Let’s not go into all that, Roy, please. Don’t ruin the mood.”

The last thing that he wanted to do was ruin the mood.

Out of the car, at the door between the garage and the house, as Eve fumbled in her purse for keys, she was suddenly nervous and clumsy. She turned to him, leaned close. “Oh, God, I can’t stop thinking about it, how you did them, how you just walked up and did them. Such power in the way you did it.”

She was virtually smouldering with desire. He could feel the heat rolling off her, driving the February chill out of the garage.

“You have so much to teach me,” she said.

A turning point in their relationship had arrived. Roy needed to explain one more thing about himself. He’d been delaying bringing it up, for fear she would not understand this one quirk as easily as she had absorbed and accepted what he’d had to say about the power of compassion. But he could delay no longer.

As Eve returned her attention to her purse and at last extracted the ring of keys from it, Roy said, “I want to see you undressed.”

“Yes, darling, yes,” she said, and the keys clinked noisily as she searched for the right one on the ring.

He said, “I want to see you entirely nude.”

“Entirely, yes, all for you.”

“I have to know how much of the rest of you is as perfect as the perfect parts that I can already see.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said, hastily inserting the correct key into the dead-bolt lock.

“From the soles of your feet to the curve of your spine, to the backs of your ears, to the pores in the skin of your scalp. I want to see every inch of you, nothing hidden, nothing at all.”

Throwing open the unlocked door, rushing inside, switching on a kitchen light, she said, “Oh, you are too much, you are so strong. Every crevice, darling, every inch and fold and crevice.”

As she dropped her purse and keys on the kitchen table and began to strip out of her coat, he followed her inside and said, “But that doesn’t mean I want to undress or…or anything.”

That stopped her. She blinked at him.

He said, “I want to see. And touch you, but not much of that. Just a little touching, when something looks perfect, to feel if the skin is as smooth and silky as it appears, to test the resilience, to feel if the muscle tension is as wonderful as it looks. You don’t have to touch me at all.” He hurried on, afraid that he was losing her. “I want to make love to you, to the perfect parts of you, make passionate love with my eyes, with a few quick touches, perhaps, but with nothing else. I don’t want to spoil it by doing…what other people do. Don’t want to debase it. Don’t need that sort of thing.”

She stared at him so long that he almost turned and fled.

Suddenly Eve squealed shrilly, and Roy took a step back, more than half afraid of her. Offended and humiliated, she might fling herself at him and claw his face, tear at his eyes.

Then, to his astonishment, he realized that she was laughing, though not cruelly, not laughing at him. She was laughing with pure joy. She hugged herself and squealed as if she were a schoolgirl, and her sublime green eyes shone with delight.

“My God,” she said tremulously, “you’re even better than you seemed, even better than I thought, better than I could ever hope. You’re perfect, Roy, you’re perfect, perfect.”

He smiled uncertainly. He was still not entirely free of the fear that she was going to claw him.

Eve grabbed his right hand, pulled him through the kitchen, across a dining room, snapping on lights and talking as she went: “I was willing…if you wanted that. But that’s not what I want, either, all that pawing and squeezing, all that sweating, it disgusts me, having another person’s sweat all over me, all slick and sticky with another person’s sweat, I can’t stand that, it sickens me.”

“Fluids,” he said with revulsion, “how can there be anything sexy about another person’s fluids, exchanging fluids?”

With growing excitement, pulling him into a hallway, Eve said, “Fluids, my God, doesn’t it make you want to die, just die, with all the fluids that have to be involved, so much that’s wet. They all want to lick and suck my breasts, all that saliva, it’s so hideous, and shoving their tongues in my mouth—”

“Spittle!” he said, grimacing. “What’s so erotic about swapping spit, for God’s sake?”

They had reached the threshold of her bedroom. He stopped her on the brink of the paradise that they were about to create together.

“If I ever kiss you,” he promised, “it’ll be a dry kiss, as dry as paper, dry as sand.”

Eve was shaking with excitement.

“No tongue,” he swore. “Even the lips mustn’t be moist.”

“And never lips to lips—”

“—because then even in a dry kiss—”

“—we’d be swapping—”

“—breath for breath—”

“—and there’s moisture in breath—”

“—vapors from the lungs,” he said.

With a gladdening of his heart almost too sweet to endure, Roy knew that this splendid woman was, indeed, more like him than he ever could have hoped when he first stepped out of that elevator and saw her. They were two voices in harmony, two hearts beating in unison, two souls soaring to the same song, emphatically simpatico.

“No man has ever been in this bedroom,” she said, leading him across the threshold. “Only you. Only you.”

The portion of the walls immediately to the left and right of the bed, as well as the area of the ceiling directly above it, was mirrored. Otherwise, the walls and ceiling were upholstered with midnight-blue satin the precise shade of the carpet. A single chair stood in a corner, upholstered in silvery silk. The two windows were covered with polished-nickel blinds. The bed was sleek and modern, with radius footboard, bookcase headboard, tall flanking cabinets, and a light bridge; it was finished with several coats of high-gloss, midnight-blue lacquer in which glimmered silvery speckles like stars. Above the headboard was another mirror. Instead of a bedspread, she had a silver-fox fur throw—“Just fake fur,” she assured him when he expressed concern about the rights of helpless animals — which was the most lustrous and luxurious thing he had ever seen.

Here was the glamour for which Roy had yearned.

The computerized lighting was voice-activated. It offered six distinct moods through clever combinations of strategically placed halogen pin spots (with a variety of colored lenses), mirror-framing neon in three colors (that could be displayed singly or two or three at a time), and imaginative applications of fiber optics. Furthermore, each mood could be subtly adjusted by a voice-activated rheostat that responded to the commands “up” and “down.”

When Eve touched a button on the headboard, the tambour doors on the tall bed-flanking cabinets hummed up, out of sight. Shelves were revealed, laden with bottles of lotions and scented oils, ten or twelve rubber phalluses in various sizes and colors, and a collection of battery-powered and hand-operated sex toys that were bewildering in their design and complexity.

Eve switched on a CD player with a hundred-disc carousel and set it for random play. “It’s loaded with everything from Rod Stewart to Metallica, Elton John, Garth Brooks, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, James Brown and the Famous Flames, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Somehow it’s more exciting when there’s so many different kinds of music and when you never know what will be playing next.”

After taking off his topcoat but not his suit jacket, Roy Miro moved the upholstered chair out of the corner. He positioned it to one side of the bed, near the footboard, to ensure a glorious view yet to avoid, as much as possible, casting his reflections in the mirrors and spoiling the multitudinous images of her perfection.

He sat in the chair and smiled.

She stood beside the bed, fully clothed, while Elton John sang about healing hands. “This is like a dream. To be here, doing exactly what I like to do, but with someone who can appreciate me—”

“I appreciate you, I do.”

“—who can adore me—”

“I adore you.”

“—who can surrender to me—”

“I’m yours.”

“—without soiling the beauty of it.”

“No fluids. No pawing.”

“Suddenly,” she said, “I’m as shy as a virgin.”

“I could stare at you for hours, fully clothed.”

She tore off her blouse so violently that buttons popped and the fabric ripped. In a minute she was completely nude, and more of what had been hidden proved to be perfect than imperfect.

Reveling in his gasp of pleased disbelief, she said, “You see why I don’t like to make love in the usual way? When I have me, what do I need with anyone else?”

Thereafter, she turned from him and proceeded as she would have done if he’d not been there. Clearly, she took intense satisfaction from knowing that she could hold him totally in her power without ever having to touch him.

She stood before the mirror, examining herself from every angle, caressing herself tenderly, wonderingly, and her rapture at what she saw was so exciting to Roy that he could draw only shallow breaths.

When she finally went to the bed, with Bruce Springsteen singing about whiskey and cars, she cast off the silver-fox throw. For just a moment, Roy was disappointed, for he had wanted to see her writhing upon those lustrous pelts, whether faux or real. But she pulled back the top sheet and the lower sheet as well, revealing a black rubber mattress cover that instantly intrigued him.

From a shelf in one of the open cabinets, she removed a bottle of jewel-pure amber oil, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small pool of it in the center of the bed. A subtle and appealing fragrance, as light and fresh as a spring breeze, drifted to Roy: not a floral scent, but spices — cinnamon, ginger, and other, more exotic ingredients.

While James Brown sang about urgent desire, Eve rolled onto the big bed, straddling the puddle of oil. She anointed her hands and began working the amber essence into her flawless skin. For fifteen minutes, her hands moved knowingly over every curve and plane of her body, lingering at each lovely, yielding roundness and at each shadowy, mysterious cleft. More often than not, what Eve touched was perfect. But when she touched a part that was beneath Roy’s standards and dismaying to him, he focused on her hands, for they themselves were without flaw — at least below the too-bony radii and ulnae.

The sight of Eve upon the glistening black rubber, her lush body all gold and pink, slick with a fluid that was satisfyingly pure and not of human origin, had elevated Roy Miro to a spiritual plane that he had never before attained, not even by the use of secret Eastern techniques of meditation, not even when a channeler had once brought forth the spirit of his dead mother at a séance in Pacific Heights, not even with peyote or vibrating crystals or high-colonic therapy administered by an innocent-looking twenty-year-old technician dressed accommodatingly as a Girl Scout. And judging by the lazy pace that she had set, Eve expected to spend hours in the exploration of her magnificent self.

Consequently, Roy did something that he had never done before. He took his pager from his pocket, and because there was no way to switch off the beeper on this particular model, he popped open the plastic plate on the back and removed the batteries.

For one night, his country would have to get along without him, and suffering humanity would have to make do without its champion.

Pain brought Spencer out of a black-and-white dream featuring surreal architecture and mutant biology, all the more disturbing for the lack of color. His entire body was a mass of chronic aches, dull and relentlessly throbbing, but a sharp pain in the top of his head was what broke the chains of his unnatural sleep.

It was still night. Or night again. He didn’t know which.

He was lying on his back, on an air mattress, under a blanket. His shoulders and head were elevated by a pillow and by something under the pillow.

The soft hissing sound and characteristic eerie glow of a Coleman lantern identified the light source somewhere behind him.

The lambent light revealed weather-smoothed rock formations to the left and right. Directly ahead of him lay a slab of what he supposed was the Mojave with an icing of night, which the beams of the lantern couldn’t melt. Overhead, stretched from one thrust of rock to the other, was a cover of desert-camouflage canvas.

Another sharp pain lanced across his scalp.

“Be still,” she said.

He realized that his pillow rested on her crossed legs and that his head lay in her lap.

“What’re you doing?” He was spooked by the weakness of his own voice.

She said, “Sewing up this laceration.”

“You can’t do that.”

“It keeps breaking open and bleeding.”

“I’m not a quilt.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“Aren’t I?”

“Are you?”

“No. Be still.”

“It hurts.”

“Of course.”

“It’ll get infected,” he worried.

“I shaved the area first, then sterilized it.”

“You shaved my head?”

“Just one little spot, around the gash.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“You mean in terms of barbering or doctoring?”

“Either one.”

“I’ve got a little basic knowledge.”

“Ouch, damn it!”

“If you’re going to be such a baby, I’ll use a spritz of local anesthetic.”

“You have that? Why didn’t you use it?”

“You were already unconscious.”

He closed his eyes, walked through a black-and-white place made of bones, under an arch of skulls, and then opened his eyes again and said, “Well, I’m not now.”

“You’re not what?”

“Unconscious,” he said.

“You just were again. A few minutes passed between our last exchange and this one. And while you were out that time, I almost finished. Another stitch and I’m through.”

“Why’d we stop?”

“You weren’t traveling well.”

“Sure, I was.”

“You needed some treatment. Now you need rest. Besides, the cloud cover is breaking up fast.”

“Got to go. Early bird gets the tomato.”

“Tomato? That’s interesting.”

He frowned. “I say tomato? Why’re you trying to confuse me?”

“Because it’s so easy. There — the last suture.”

Spencer closed his grainy eyes. In the somber black-and-white world, jackals with human faces were prowling the vine-tangled rubble of a once-great cathedral. He could hear children crying in rooms hidden beneath the ruins.

When he opened his eyes, he found that he was lying flat. His head was now elevated only a couple of inches on the pillow.

Valerie was sitting on the ground beside him, watching over him. Her dark hair fell softly along one side of her face, and she was pretty in the lamplight.

“You’re pretty in the lamplight,” he said.

“Next you’ll be asking if I’m an Aquarius or a Capricorn.”

“Nah, I don’t give a shit.”

She laughed.

“I like your laugh,” he said.

She smiled, turned her head, and ruminated on the dark desert.

He said, “What do you like about me?”

“I like your dog.”

“He’s a great dog. What else?”

Looking at him again, she said, “You’ve got nice eyes.”

“I do?”

“Honest eyes.”

“Are they? Used to have nice hair, too. All shaved off now. I was butchered.”

“Barbered. Just one small spot.”

“Barbered and then butchered. What are you doing out here in the desert?”

She stared at him awhile, then looked away without answering.

He wouldn’t let her off that easily. “What are you doing out here? I’ll just keep asking until the repetition drives you insane. What are you doing out here?”

“Saving your ass.”

“Tricky. I mean, what were you doing here in the first place?”

“Looking for you.”

“Why?” he wondered.

“Because you’ve been looking for me.”

“But how’d you find me, for God’s sake?”

“Ouija board.”

“I don’t think I can believe anything you say.”

“You’re right. It was Tarot cards.”

“Who’re we running from?”

She shrugged. The desert engaged her attention again. At last she said, “History, I guess.”

“There you go, trying to confuse me again.”

“Specifically, the cockroach.”

“We’re running from a cockroach?”

“That’s what I call him, ’cause it infuriates him.”

His gaze rolled from Valerie to the tarp that hung ten feet above them. “Why the roof?”

“Blends with the terrain. It’s a heat-dispersing fabric too, so we won’t show up strong on any infrared look-down.”

“Look-down?”

“Eyes in the sky.”

“God?”

“No, the cockroach.”

“The cockroach has eyes in the sky?”

“He and his people, yeah.”

Spencer thought about that. Finally he said, “I’m not sure if I’m awake or dreaming.”

“Some days,” she said, “neither am I.”

In the black-and-white world, the sky seethed with eyes, and a great white owl flew overhead, casting a moonshadow in the shape of an angel.

Eve’s desire was insatiable, and her energy was inexhaustible, as though each protracted bout of ecstasy electrified rather than enervated her. At the end of an hour, she seemed more vital than ever, more beautiful, aglow.

Before Roy’s adoring eyes, her incredible body seemed to be sculpted and pumped up by her ceaseless rhythmic flexing-contracting-flexing, by her writhing-thrashing-thrusting, just as a long session of lifting weights pumped up a bodybuilder. After years of exploring all the ways she could satisfy herself, she enjoyed a flexibility that Roy judged to be somewhere between that of a gold-medal Olympic gymnast and a carnival contortionist, combined with the endurance of an Alaskan dogsled team. There was no doubt whatsoever that a session in bed with herself provided a thorough workout for every muscle from her radiant head to her cute toes.

Regardless of the astounding knots into which she tied herself, regardless of the bizarre intimacies she took with herself, she never looked at all grotesque or absurd, but unfailingly beautiful, from any angle, in even the most unlikely acts. She was always milk and honey on that black rubber, peaches and cream, flowing and smooth, the most desirable creature ever to grace the earth.

Halfway through the second hour, Roy was convinced that sixty percent of this angel’s features — body and face overall — were perfect by even the most stringent standards. Another thirty-five percent of her was not perfect but so close to perfect as to break his heart, and only five percent was plain.

Nothing about her — no slightest line or concavity or convexity — was ugly.

Roy was certain that Eve must soon stop pleasuring herself or otherwise collapse unconscious. But by the end of the second hour, she seemed to have more appetite and capacity than when she’d begun. The power of her sensuality was so great that every piece of music was changed by her horizontal dance, until it seemed that all of it, even the Bach, had been expressly composed as the score for a pornographic movie. From time to time she called out the number of a new lighting arrangement, said “up” or “down” to the rheostat, and her selection was always the most flattering for the next position into which she folded herself.

She was thrilled by watching herself in the mirrors. And by watching herself watch herself. And by watching herself as she watched herself watching herself. The infinity of images bounced back and forth between the mirrors on opposite walls, until she could believe that she had filled the universe with replications of herself. The mirrors seemed magical, transmitting all the energy of each reflection back into her own dynamic flesh, overloading her with power, until she was a runaway blond engine of eroticism.

Sometime during the third hour, batteries gave out in a few of her favorite toys, gears froze in others, and she surrendered herself once more to the expertise of her own bare hands. For a while, in fact, her hands seemed to be separate entities from her, each alive in its own right. They were in such a frenzy of lust that they couldn’t occupy themselves with just one of her many treasures for any length of time; they kept sliding over her ample curves, up-around-down her oiled skin, massaging and tweaking and caressing and stroking one delight after another. They were like a pair of starving diners at a fabulous smorgasbord that had been prepared to celebrate the imminence of Armageddon, allowed only precious seconds to gorge themselves before all was obliterated by a sun gone nova.

But the sun did not go nova, of course, and eventually — if gradually — those matchless hands slowed, slowed, finally stopped, and were sated. As was their mistress.

For a while, after it was over, Roy couldn’t get up from his chair. He couldn’t even slump back from the edge of it. He was numb, paralyzed, tingling strangely in every extremity.

In time, Eve rose from the bed and stepped into the adjoining bathroom. When she returned, carrying two plush towels — one damp, one dry — she was no longer gleaming with oil. With the damp cloth, she removed the glistening residue from the rubber mattress cover, then carefully wiped it down with the dry towel. She replaced the bottom sheet that she had earlier cast off.

Roy joined her on the bed. Eve lay on her back, her head on a pillow. He stretched out beside her, on his back, his head on another pillow. She was still gloriously nude, and he remained fully clothed — though at some point during the night, he had loosened his necktie by an inch.

Neither of them made the mistake of trying to comment upon what had transpired. Mere words could not have done the experience justice and might have made a nearly religious odyssey seem somehow tawdry. Anyway, Roy already knew that it had been good for Eve; and as for himself, well, he had seen more physical human perfection in those few hours — and in action—than in his entire life theretofore.

After a while, gazing at his darling’s reflection on the ceiling as she stared at his, Roy began to talk, and the night entered a new phase of communion that was nearly as intimate, intense, and life-changing as the more physical phase that had preceded it. He spoke further about the power of compassion, refining the concept for her. He told her that humankind always hungered for perfection. People would endure unendurable pain, accept awful deprivation, countenance savage brutalities, live in constant and abject terror — if only they were convinced that their sufferings were the tolls that must be paid on the highway to Utopia, to Heaven on earth. A person motivated by compassion — yet who was also aware of the masses’ willingness to suffer — could change the world. Although he, Roy Miro of the merry blue eyes and Santa Claus smile, did not believe that he possessed the charisma to be that leader of leaders who would launch the next crusade for perfection, he hoped to be one who served that special person and served him well.

“I light my little candles,” he said. “One at a time.”

For hours Roy talked while Eve interjected numerous questions and perceptive comments. He was excited to see how she thrilled to his ideas almost as she had thrilled to her battery-powered toys and to her own practiced hands.

She was especially moved when he explained how an enlightened society ought to expand on the work of Dr. Kevorkian, compassionately assisting in the self-destruction not solely of suicidal people but also of those poor souls who were deeply depressed, offering easy exits not only to the terminally ill but to the chronically ill, the disabled, the maimed, the psychologically impaired.

And when Roy talked about his concept for a suicide-assistance program for infants, to bring a compassionate solution to the problem of babies born with even the slightest defects that might affect their lives, Eve made a few breathless sounds similar to those that had escaped her in the throes of passion. She pressed her hands to her breasts once more, though this time only in an attempt to quiet the fierce pounding of her heart.

As Eve filled her hands with her bosoms, Roy could not take his eyes off the reflection of her that hovered above him. For a moment he thought that he might weep at the sight of her sixty-percent-perfect face and form.

Sometime before dawn, intellectual orgasms sent them spiraling into sleep, as physical orgasms had not the power to do. Roy was so fulfilled that he didn’t even dream.

Hours later, Eve woke him. She had already showered and dressed for the day.

“You’ve never been more radiant,” he told her.

“You’ve changed my life,” she said.

“And you mine.”

Although she was late for work in her concrete bunker, she drove him to the Strip hotel at which Prock, his taciturn driver from the previous night, had left his luggage. It was Saturday, but Eve worked seven days a week. Roy admired her commitment.

The desert morning was bright. The sky was a cool, serene blue.

At the hotel, under the entrance portico, before Roy got out of the car, he and Eve made plans to see each other soon, to experience again the pleasures of the night just past.

He stood by the front entrance to watch her drive away. When she was gone, he went inside. He passed the front desk, crossed the raucous casino, and took an elevator to the thirty-sixth and highest floor in the main tower.

He didn’t recall putting one foot in front of the other since getting out of her car. As far as he knew, he had floated into the elevator.

He had never imagined that his pursuit of the fugitive bitch and the scarred man would lead him to the most perfect woman in existence. Destiny was a funny thing.

When the doors opened at the thirty-sixth floor, Roy stepped into a long corridor with custom-sculpted, tone-on-tone, wall-to-wall Edward Fields carpet. Wide enough to be considered a gallery rather than a hallway, the space was furnished with early-nineteenth-century French antiques and paintings of some quality from the same period.

This was one of three floors originally designed to offer huge luxury suites, free of charge, to high rollers who were willing to wager fortunes at the games downstairs. The thirty-fifth and thirty-fourth floors still served that function. However, since the agency had purchased the resort for its moneymaking and money-laundering potential, the suites on the top floor had been set aside for the convenience of out-of-town operatives of a certain executive level.

The thirty-sixth floor was served by its own concierge, who was established in a cozy office across from the elevator. Roy picked up the key to his suite from the man on duty, Henri, who didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow over the rumpled condition of his guest’s suit.

Key in hand, on his way to his rooms, whistling softly, Roy looked forward to a hot shower, a shave, and a lavish room-service breakfast. But when he opened the gilded door and went into the suite, he found two local agents waiting for him. They were in a state of acute but respectful consternation, and only when Roy saw them did he remember that his pager was in one of his jacket pockets and the batteries in another.

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you since four o’clock this morning,” said one of his visitors.

“We’ve located Grant’s Explorer,” said the second.

“Abandoned,” said the first. “There’s a ground search under way for him—”

“—though he might be dead—”

“—or rescued—”

“—because it looks like someone got there before us—”

“—anyway, there are other tire tracks—”

“—so we don’t have much time; we’ve got to move.”

In his mind’s eye, Roy pictured Eve Jammer: golden and pink, oiled and limber, writhing on black rubber, more perfect than not. That would sustain him, no matter how bad the day proved to be.

Spencer woke in the purple shade under the camouflage tarp, but the desert beyond was bathed in harsh white sunshine.

The light stung his eyes, forcing him to squint, although that pain was as nothing compared with the headache that cleaved his brow from temple to temple, on a slight diagonal. Against the backs of his eyeballs, red lights spun with the abrasiveness of razor-blade pinwheels.

He was hot as well. Burning up. Though he suspected that the day was not especially warm.

Thirsty. His tongue felt swollen. It was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His throat was scratchy, raw.

He was still lying on an air mattress, with his head on a meager pillow, under a blanket in spite of the insufferable heat — but he was no longer lying alone. The woman was snuggled against his right side, exerting a sweet pressure against his flank, hip, thigh. Somehow he had gotten his right arm around her without meeting an objection—Way to go, Spence, my man! — and now he relished the feel of her under his hand: so warm, so soft, so sleek, so furry.

Uncommonly furry for a woman.

He turned his head and saw Rocky.

“Hi, pal.”

Talking was painful. Each word was a spiny burr being torn out of his throat. His own speech echoed piercingly through his skull, as though it had been stepped up by amplifiers inside his sinus cavities.

The dog licked Spencer’s right ear.

Whispering to spare his throat, he said, “Yeah, I love you too.”

“Am I interrupting anything?” Valerie asked, dropping to her knees at his left side.

“Just a boy and his dog, hangin’ out together.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Lousy.”

“Are you allergic to any drugs?”

“Hate the taste of Pepto-Bismol.”

“Are you allergic to any antibiotics?”

“Everything’s spinning.”

“Are you allergic to any antibiotics?”

“Strawberries give me hives.”

“Are you delirious or just difficult?”

“Both.”

Maybe he drifted away for a while, because the next thing he knew, she was giving him an injection in his left arm. He smelled the alcohol with which she had swabbed the area over the vein.

“Antibiotic?” he whispered.

“Liquified strawberries.”

The dog was no longer lying at Spencer’s side. He was sitting next to the woman, watching with interest as she withdrew the needle from his master’s arm.

Spencer said, “I have an infection?”

“Maybe secondary. I’m taking no chances.”

“You a nurse?”

“Not a doctor, not a nurse.”

“How do you know what to do?”

“He tells me,” she said, indicating Rocky.

“Always joking. Must be a comedian.”

“Yes, but licensed to give injections. Do you think you can hold down some water?”

“How about bacon and eggs?”

“Water seems hard enough. Last time, you spit it up.”

“Disgusting.”

“You apologized.”

“I’m a gentleman.”

Even with her assistance, he was tested to his limits merely by the effort required to sit up. He choked on the water a couple of times, but it tasted cool and sweet, and he thought he would be able to keep it in his stomach.

After she eased him flat onto his back again, he said, “Tell me the truth.”

“If I know it.”

“Am I dying?”

“No.”

“We have one rule around here,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Never lie to the dog.”

She looked at Rocky.

The mutt wagged his tail.

“Lie to yourself. Lie to me. But never lie to the dog.”

“As rules go, it seems pretty sensible,” she said.

“So am I dying?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s better,” Spencer said, and he passed out.

Roy Miro took fifteen minutes to shave, brush his teeth, and shower. He changed into chinos, a red cotton sweater, and a tan corduroy jacket. He had no time for the breakfast that he so badly wanted. The concierge, Henri, provided him with two chocolate-almond croissants in a white paper bag and two cups of the finest Colombian coffee in a disposable plastic thermos.

In a corner of the hotel parking lot, a Bell JetRanger executive helicopter was waiting for Roy. As on the jet from L.A., he was the only person in the plushly upholstered passenger cabin.

On the flight out to the discovery in the Mojave, Roy ate both croissants and drank the black coffee while using his attaché case computer to connect to Mama. He reviewed the overnight developments in the investigation.

Not much had happened. Back in southern California, John Kleck had not turned up any leads that might tell them where the woman had gone after abandoning her car at the airport in Orange County. Likewise, they had not succeeded in tracing the telephone number to which Grant’s cleverly programmed system had faxed photos of Roy and his men from the Malibu cabin.

The biggest news, which wasn’t much, came from San Francisco. The agent tracking down George and Ethel Porth — the grandparents who evidently had raised Spencer Grant following his mother’s passing — now knew, from public records, that a death certificate had been issued for Ethel ten years ago. Evidently that was why her husband sold the house at that time. George Porth had died, too, just three years ago. Now that the agent couldn’t hope to talk with the Porths about their grandson, he was pursuing other avenues of investigation.

Through Mama, Roy routed a message to the agent’s E-mail number in San Francisco, suggesting that he check the records of the probate court to determine if the grandson had been an heir to either the estate of Ethel Porth or that of her husband. Maybe the Porths had not known their grandson as “Spencer Grant” and had used his real name in their wills. If for some inexplicable reason they had aided and abetted his use of that false identity for purposes including enlistment in the military, they nevertheless might have cited his real name when disposing of their estates.

It wasn’t much of a lead, but it was worth checking out.

As Roy unplugged the computer and closed it, the pilot of the JetRanger alerted him, by way of the public-address system, that they were one minute from their destination. “Coming up on our right.”

Roy leaned to the window beside his seat. They were paralleling a wide arroyo, heading almost due east across the desert.

The glare of sun on sand was intense. He took sunglasses from an inner jacket pocket and put them on.

Ahead, three Jeep wagons, all agency hardware, were clustered in the middle of the dry wash. Eight men were waiting around the vehicles, and most of them were watching the approaching helicopter.

The JetRanger swept over the Jeeps and agents, and suddenly the land below dropped a thousand feet as the chopper soared across the brink of a precipice. Roy’s stomach dropped, too, because of the abrupt change in perspective and because of something that he had glimpsed but couldn’t quite believe that he had really seen.

High over the valley floor, the pilot entered a wide starboard turn and brought Roy around for a better look at the place where the arroyo met the edge of the cliff. In fact, using the two towers of rock in the middle of the dry wash as a visual fulcrum, he flew a full three-hundred-sixty-degree circle. Roy had a chance to see the Explorer from every amazing angle.

He took off his sunglasses. The truck was still there in the full glare of daylight. He put the glasses on as the JetRanger brought him around again and landed in the arroyo, near the Jeeps.

Disembarking from the chopper, Roy was met by Ted Tavelov, the agent in charge at the site. Tavelov was shorter and twenty years older than Roy, lean and sun browned; he had leathery skin and a dry-as-beef-jerky look from having spent too many years outdoors in the desert. He was dressed in cowboy boots, jeans, a blue flannel shirt, and a Stetson. Although the day was cool, Tavelov wore no jacket, as if he had stored up so much Mojave heat in his sun-cured flesh that he would never again be cold.

As they walked toward the Explorer, the chopper engine fell silent behind them. The rotors wheezed more slowly to a halt.

Roy said, “There’s no sign of either the man or the dog, so I hear.”

“Nothing in there but a dead rat.”

“Was the water really that high when it jammed the truck between those rocks?”

“Yep. Sometime yesterday afternoon, at the height of the storm.”

“Then maybe he was washed out, went over the falls.”

“Not if he stayed buckled up.”

“Well, farther up the river, maybe he tried to swim for shore.”

“Man would have to be a fool to try swimming in a flash flood, the water moving like an express train. This man a fool?”

“No.”

“See these tracks here,” Tavelov said, pointing to tire marks in the silt of the arroyo bed. “Even what little wind there’s been since the storm has worn ’em down some. But you can still see where somebody drove down the south bank, under the Explorer, probably stood on the roof of his vehicle to get up there.”

“When would the arroyo have dried up enough for that?”

“Water level drops fast when the rain stops. And this ground, deep sand — it dries out quick. Say…seven or eight last night.”

Standing deep inside the rock-walled passage, gazing up at the Explorer, Roy said, “Grant could’ve climbed down and walked away before the other vehicle got here.”

“Fact is, you’ll see some vague footprints that don’t belong to the first group of my hopeless asshole assistants who tramped up the scene. And judging by ’em, you might make a case that a woman drove in here and took him away. Him and the dog. And his luggage.”

Roy frowned. “A woman?”

“One set of prints is of a size that you know it’s got to be a man. Even big women don’t often have feet as big as would be in proportion to the rest of ’em. The second set is small prints, which might be those of a boy, say ten to thirteen. But I doubt any boy was drivin’ on his own out here. Some small men have feet might step into shoes that size. But not many. So most likely it was a woman.”

If a woman had come to Grant’s rescue, Roy was obliged to wonder if she was the woman, the fugitive. That raised anew the questions that had plagued him since Wednesday night: Who was Spencer Grant, what in the hell did the bastard have to do with the woman, what sort of wild card was he, was he likely to screw up their operations, and would he put them all at risk of exposure?

Yesterday, when Roy had stood in Eve’s bunker, listening to the laser-disc recording, he’d been more baffled than enlightened by what he’d heard. Judging by the questions and the few comments that Grant managed to insert into Davidowitz’s monologue, he knew little about “Hannah Rainey,” but for mysterious reasons, he was busily learning everything he could. Until then, Roy had assumed that Grant and the woman already had some kind of close relationship; so the task had been to determine the nature of that relationship and to figure how much sensitive information the woman had shared with Grant. But if the guy didn’t already know her, why had he been at her bungalow that rainy night, and why had he made it his personal crusade to find her?

Roy didn’t want to believe that the woman had shown up here in the arroyo, because to believe it was to be even more confused. “So you’re saying what — that he called someone on his cellular and she came right out to get him?”

Tavelov was not rattled by Roy’s sarcasm. “Could’ve been some desert rat, likes living out where there aren’t phones, electricity. There are some. Though none I know about for twenty miles. Or it could’ve been an off-roader, just having himself some fun.”

“In a storm.”

“Storm was over. Anyway, the world’s full of fools.”

“And whoever it is just happens to stumble across the Explorer. In this whole vast desert.”

Tavelov shrugged. “We found the truck. It’s your job, making sense of it.”

Walking back to the entrance of the rock-walled sluiceway, staring at the far riverbank, Roy said, “Whoever she was, she drove into the arroyo from the south, then also drove out to the south. Can we follow those tire tracks?”

“Yep, you can — pretty clear for maybe four hundred yards, then spotty for another two hundred. Then they vanish. The wind wiped ’em out in some places. Other places, ground’s too hard to take tracks.”

“Well, let’s search farther out, see if the tracks reappear.”

“Already tried. While we were waiting.”

Tavelov gave an edge to the word “waiting.”

Roy said, “My damn pager was broken, and I didn’t know it.”

“By foot and chopper, we pretty much had a good look-around in every direction to the south bank of the wash. Went three miles east, three south, three west.”

“Well,” Roy said, “extend the search. Go out six miles and see if you can pick up the trail again.”

“Just going to be a waste of time.”

Roy thought of Eve as she had been last night, and that memory gave him the strength to remain calm, to smile, and to say, with characteristic pleasantness, “Probably is a waste of time, probably is. But I guess we’ve got to try anyway.”

“Wind’s picking up.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Definitely picking up. Going to erase everything.”

Perfection on black rubber.

Roy said, “Then let’s try to stay ahead of it. Bring in more men, another chopper, push out ten miles in each direction.”

Spencer was not awake. But he wasn’t asleep, either. He was taking a drunkard’s walk along the thin line between.

He heard himself mumbling. He couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. Yet he was ever in the grip of a feverish urgency, certain there was something important that he must tell someone — although what that vital information was, and to whom he must impart it, eluded him.

Occasionally he opened his eyes. Blurry vision. He blinked. Squinted. Couldn’t see well enough to be sure even if it was daytime or if the light came from the Coleman lantern.

Always, Valerie was there. Close enough for him to know, even with his vision so poor, that it was her. Sometimes she was wiping his face with a damp cloth, sometimes changing a cool compress on his forehead. Sometimes she was just watching, and he sensed that she was worried, though he couldn’t clearly see her expression.

Once, when he swam up from his personal darkness and stared out through the distorting pools that shimmered in his eye sockets, Valerie was turned half away from him, busy at a hidden task. Behind him, farther back under the camouflage tarp, the Rover’s engine was idling. He heard another familiar sound: the soft but unmistakable tick-tickety-tick of well-practiced fingers flying over a computer keyboard. Odd.

From time to time, she talked to him. Those were the moments when he was best able to focus his mind and to mumble something that was halfway comprehensible, though he still faded in and out.

Once he faded in to hear himself asking, “…how’d you find me…out here…way out here…between nothing and nowhere?”

“Bug on your Explorer.”

“Cockroach?”

“The other kind of bug.”

“Spider?”

“Electronic.”

“Bug on my truck?”

“That’s right. I put it there.”

“Like…you mean…a transmitter thing?” he asked fuzzily.

“Just like a transmitter thing.”

“Why?”

“Because you followed me home.”

“When?”

“Tuesday night. No point denying it.”

“Oh, yeah. Night we met.”

“You make it sound almost romantic.”

“Was for me.”

Valerie was silent. Finally she said, “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“Liked you right off.”

After another silence, she said, “You come to The Red Door, chat me up, seem like just a nice customer, then you follow me home.”

The full meaning of her revelations was sinking in gradually, and a slow-dawning amazement was overtaking him. “You knew?”

“You were good. But if I couldn’t spot a tail, I’d have been dead a long time ago.”

“The bug. How?”

“How did I plant it? Went out the back door while you were sitting across the street in your truck. Hot-wired somebody’s car a block or so away, drove to my street, parked up the block from you, waited till you left, then followed you.”

“Followed me?”

“What’s good for the goose.”

“Followed me…Malibu?”

“Followed you Malibu.”

“And I never saw.”

“Well, you weren’t expecting to be followed.”

“Jesus.”

“I climbed your gate, waited till all the lights were out in your cabin.”

“Jesus.”

“Fixed the transmitter to the undercarriage of your truck, wired it to work off the battery.”

“You just happened to have a transmitter.”

“You’d be surprised what I just happen to have.”

“Maybe not anymore.”

Although Spencer didn’t want to leave her, Valerie grew blurrier and faded into shadows. He drifted into his inner darkness once more.

Later he must have swum up again, because she was shimmering in front of him. He heard himself say, “Bug on my truck,” with amazement.

“I had to know who you were, why you were following me. I knew you weren’t one of them.”

He said weakly, “Cockroach’s people.”

“That’s right.”

“Coulda been one of them.”

“No, because you’d have blown my brains out the first time you were close enough to do it.”

“They don’t like you, huh?”

“Not much. So I wondered who you were.”

“Now you know.”

“Not really. You’re a mystery, Spencer Grant.”

“Me a mystery!” He laughed. Pain hammered across his entire head when he laughed, but he laughed anyway. “Least you have a name for me.”

“Sure. But no more real than those you have for me.”

“It’s real.”

“Sure.”

“Legal name. Spencer Grant. Guaranteed.”

“Maybe. But who were you before you were a cop, before you went to UCLA, way back before you were in the army?”

“You know all about me.”

“Not all. Just what you’ve left on the records, just as much as you wanted anybody to find. Following me home, you spooked me, so I started checking you out.”

“You moved out of the bungalow because of me.”

“Didn’t know who the hell you were. But I figured if you could find me, so could they. Again.”

“And they did.”

“The very next day.”

“So when I spooked you…I saved you.”

“You could look at it that way.”

“Without me, you’d have been there.”

“Maybe.”

“When the SWAT team hit.”

“Probably.”

“Seems like it’s all sort of…meant to be.”

“But what were you doing there?” she asked.

“Well…”

“In my house.”

“You were gone.”

“So?”

“Wasn’t your place anymore.”

“Did you know it wasn’t my place anymore when you went in?”

The full meaning of her revelations kept giving him delayed jolts. He blinked furiously, vainly trying to see her face clearly. “Jesus, if you bugged my truck…!”

“What?”

“Then were you following me Wednesday night?”

She said, “Yeah. Seeing what you were all about.”

“From Malibu…?”

“To The Red Door.”

“Then back to your place in Santa Monica?”

“I wasn’t inside like you were.”

“But you saw it go down, the assault.”

“From a distance. Don’t change the subject.”

“What subject?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“You were going to explain why you broke into my house Wednesday night,” she reminded him. She wasn’t angry. Her voice wasn’t sharp. He would have felt better if she’d been flat-out angry with him.

“You…you didn’t show up at work.”

“So you break into my house?”

“Didn’t break in.”

“Have I forgotten that I sent you an invitation?”

“Door was unlocked.”

“Every unlocked door is an invitation to you?”

“I was…worried.”

“Yeah, worried. Come on, tell me the truth. What were you looking for in my house that night?”

“I was…”

“You were what?”

“I needed…”

“What? What did you need in my house?”

Spencer wasn’t sure whether he was dying from his injuries or from embarrassment. Whatever the case, he lost consciousness.

The Bell JetRanger transported Roy Miro from the dry wash in the open desert straight to the landing pad on the roof of the agency’s high rise in downtown Las Vegas. While a ground and air search was being conducted in the Mojave for the woman and the vehicle that had taken Spencer Grant away from the wreckage of his Explorer, Roy spent Saturday afternoon in the fifth-floor satellite-surveillance center.

While he worked, he ate a substantial lunch that he ordered from the commissary, to compensate for missing the lavish breakfast about which he’d fantasized. Besides, later he would need all the energy that he was able to muster, when he went home with Eve Jammer again.

The previous evening, when Bobby Dubois had brought Roy to that same room, it had been quiet, operating with a minimal staff. Now every computer and other piece of equipment was manned, and murmured conversations were being conducted throughout the large chamber.

Most likely, the vehicle they were seeking had traveled a considerable distance during the night, in spite of the inhospitable terrain. Grant and the woman might even have gotten far enough to pick up a highway beyond the surveillance posts that the agency had established on every route out of the southern half of the state, in which case they had slipped through the net again.

On the other hand, perhaps they hadn’t gotten far at all. They might have bogged down. They might have had mechanical failure.

Perhaps Grant had been injured in the Explorer. According to Ted Tavelov, bloodstains discolored the driver’s seat, and it didn’t appear as if the blood had come from the dead rat. If Grant was in bad shape, maybe he’d been unable to travel far.

Roy was determined to think positively. The world was what you made it — or tried to make it. His entire life was committed to that philosophy.

Of the available satellites in geosynchronous orbits that kept them positioned over the western and southwestern United States at all times, three were capable of the intense degree of surveillance that Roy Miro wished to conduct of the state of Nevada and of all neighboring states. One of those three space-based observation posts was under the control of the Drug Enforcement Administration. One was owned by the Environmental Protection Agency. The third was a military venture officially shared by the army, navy, air force, marines, and coast guard — but it was, in fact, under the iron-fisted political control of the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

No contest. The Environmental Protection Agency.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, in spite of the dedication of its agents and largely because of meddling politicians, had pretty much failed in its assigned mission. And the military services, at least in these years following the end of the Cold War, were confused as to their purpose, underfunded, and moribund.

By contrast, the Environmental Protection Agency was fulfilling its mission to an unprecedented degree for a government agency, in part because there was no well-organized criminal element or interest group opposed to it, and because many of its workers were motivated by a fierce desire to save the natural world. The EPA cooperated so successfully with the Department of Justice that a citizen who even inadvertently contaminated protected wetlands was at risk of spending more time in prison than would a doped-up gangsta dude who killed a 7-Eleven clerk, a pregnant mother, two nuns, and a kitten while he was stealing forty dollars and a Mars bar.

Consequently, because shining success bred increased budgets and the greatest access to additional off-budget funding, the EPA owned the finest of hardware, from office equipment to orbital surveillance satellites. If any federal bureaucracy were to obtain independent control of nuclear weapons, it would be the EPA, although it was the least likely to use them — except, perhaps, in a turf dispute with the Department of the Interior.

To find Spencer Grant and the woman, therefore, the agency was using the EPA surveillance satellite — Earthguard 3—which was in a geosynchronous orbit over the western United States. To seize complete and uncontested use of that asset, Mama infiltrated EPA computers and fed them false data to the effect that Earthguard 3 had experienced sudden, total systems failure. Scientists at EPA satellite-tracking facilities had immediately mounted a campaign to diagnose the ills of Earthguard 3 by long-distance telemechanical testing. However, Mama had secretly intercepted all commands sent to that eighty-million-dollar package of sophisticated electronics — and she would continue to do so until the agency no longer needed Earthguard 3, at which time she would allow it to go on-line again for the EPA.

From space, the agency could now conduct a supra-magnified visual inspection of a multistate area. It could focus all the way down to a square-meter-by-square-meter search pattern if the need arose to get in that tight on a suspect vehicle or person.

Earthguard 3 also provided two methods of highly advanced night surveillance. Using profile-guided infrared, it could differentiate between a vehicle and stationary sources of radiant heat by the very fact of the target’s mobility and by its distinct thermal signature. The system also could employ a variation on Star Tron night-vision technology to magnify ambient light by a factor of eighteen thousand, making a night scene appear nearly as bright as an overcast day — although with a monochromatic, eerie green cast.

All images were automatically processed through an enhancement program aboard the satellite prior to encoding and transmission. And upon receipt in the Vegas control center, an equally automated but more sophisticated enhancement program, run on the latest-generation Cray supercomputer, further clarified the high-definition video image before projecting it on the wall display. If additional clarification was desired, stills taken from the tape could be subjected to more enhancement procedures under the supervision of talented technicians.

The effectiveness of satellite surveillance — whether infrared, night-vision, or ordinary telescopic photography — varied according to the territory under scrutiny. Generally, the more populated an area, the less successful a space-based search for anything as small as a single individual or vehicle, because there were far too many objects in motion and too many heat sources to be sorted through and analyzed either accurately or on a timely basis. Towns were easier to observe than cities, rural areas easier than towns, and open highways could be monitored better than metropolitan streets.

If Spencer Grant and the woman had been delayed in their flight, as Roy hoped, they were still in ideal territory to be located and tracked by Earthguard 3. Barren, unpopulated desert.

Saturday afternoon through evening, as suspect vehicles were spotted, they were either studied and eliminated or maintained on an under-observation list until a determination could be made that their occupants didn’t fit the fugitive-party profile: woman, man, and dog.

After watching the big wall display for hours, Roy was impressed by how perfect their part of the world appeared to be from orbit. All colors were soft and subdued, and all shapes appeared harmonious.

The illusion of perfection was more convincing when Earthguard was surveying larger rather than smaller areas and was, therefore, using the lowest magnification. It was most convincing when the image was in infrared. The less he was able to detect obvious signs of human civilization, the closer to perfection the planet appeared.

Perhaps those extremists who insisted that the population of the earth be expediently reduced by ninety percent, by any means, to save the ecology were onto something. What quality of life could anyone have in a world that civilization had utterly despoiled?

If such a program of population reduction was ever instituted, he would take deep personal satisfaction in helping to administer it, although the work would be exhausting and often thankless.

The day waned without either the ground or air search turning up a trace of the fugitives. At nightfall the hunt was called off until dawn. And Earthguard 3, with all its eyes and all its ways of seeing, was no more successful than the men on foot and the helicopter crews, though at least it could continue searching throughout the night.

Roy remained in the satellite-surveillance center until almost eight o’clock, when he left with Eve Jammer for dinner at an Armenian restaurant. Over a tasty fattoush salad and then superb rack of lamb, they discussed the concept of massive and rapid population reduction. They imagined ways in which it might be achieved without undesirable side effects, such as nuclear radiation and uncontrollable riots in the streets. And they conceived several fair methods of determining which ten percent of the population would survive to carry on a less chaotic and drastically perfected version of the human saga. They sketched possible symbols for the population-reduction movement, composed inspiring slogans, and debated what the uniforms ought to look like. They were in a state of high excitement by the time they left the restaurant to go to Eve’s place. They might have killed any cop who had been foolish enough to stop them for doing seventy miles an hour through hospital and residential zones.

The stained and shadowed walls had faces. Strange, embedded faces. Half-seen, tortured expressions. Mouths open in cries for mercy that were never answered. Hands. Reaching hands. Silently beseeching. Ghostly white tableaux, streaked gray and rust-red in some places, mottled brown and yellow in others. Face by face and body beside body, some limbs overlapping, but always the posture of the supplicant, always the expressions of despairing beggars: pleading, imploring, praying.

“Nobody knows…nobody knows…”

“Spencer? Can you hear me, Spencer?”

Valerie’s voice echoed down a long tunnel to him as he walked in a place between wakefulness and true sleep, between denial and acceptance, between one hell and another.

“Easy now, easy, don’t be afraid, it’s okay, you’re dreaming.”

“No. See? See? Here in the catacombs, here, the catacombs.”

“Only a dream.”

“Like in school, in the book, pictures, like in Rome, martyrs, down in the catacombs, but worse, worse, worse…”

“You can walk away from there. It’s only a dream.”

He heard his own voice diminishing from a shout to a withered, miserable cry: “Oh God, oh my God, oh my God!”

“Here, take my hand. Spencer, can you hear me? Hold my hand. I’m here. I’m with you.”

“They were so afraid, afraid, all alone and afraid. See how afraid they are? Alone, no one to hear, no one, nobody ever knew, so afraid. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, help me, Jesus.”

“Come on, hold my hand, that’s it, that’s good, hold tight. I’m right here with you. You aren’t alone anymore, Spencer.”

He held on to her warm hand, and somehow she led him away from the blind white faces, the silent cries.

By the power of her hand, Spencer drifted, lighter than air, up from the deep place, through darkness, through a red door. Not the door with wet handprints on the aged-white background. This door was entirely red, dry, with a film of dust. It opened into sapphire-blue light, black booths and chairs, polished-steel trim, mirrored walls. Deserted bandstand. A handful of people drinking quietly at tables. In jeans and a suede jacket instead of slit skirt and black sweater, she sat on a barstool beside him, because business was slow. He was lying on an air mattress, sweating yet chilled, and she was perched on a stool, yet they were at the same level, holding hands, talking easily, as though they were old friends, with the hiss of the Coleman lantern in the background.

He knew he was delirious. He didn’t care. She was so pretty.

“Why did you go into my house Wednesday night?”

“Already told you?”

“No. You keep avoiding an answer.”

“Needed to know about you.”

“Why?”

“You hate me?”

“Of course not. I just want to understand.”

“Went to your place, sting grenades coming through the windows.”

“You could’ve walked away when you realized what trouble I was.”

“No, can’t let you end up in a ditch, eighty miles from home.”

“What?”

“Or in catacombs.”

“After you knew I was trouble, why’d you wade in deeper?”

“Told you. I liked you first time we met.”

“That was just Tuesday night! I’m a stranger to you.”

“I want…”

“What?”

“I want…a life.”

“You don’t have a life?”

“A life…with hope.”

The cocktail lounge dissolved, and the blue light changed to sour yellow. The stained and shadowed walls had faces. White faces, death masks, mouths open in voiceless terror, silently beseeching.

A spider followed the electrical cord that hung in loops from the ceiling, and its exaggerated shadow scurried across the stained white faces of the innocent.

Later, in the cocktail lounge again, he said to her, “You’re a good person.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Theda.”

“Theda thinks everyone’s a good person.”

“She was so sick. You took care of her.”

“Only for a couple of weeks.”

“Day and night.”

“Wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Now me.”

“I haven’t pulled you through yet.”

“More I learn about you, the better you are.”

She said, “Hell, maybe I am a saint.”

“No. Just a good person. Too sarcastic to be a saint.”

She laughed. “I can’t help liking you, Spencer Grant.”

“This is nice. Getting to know each other.”

“Is that what we’re doing?”

Impulsively, he said, “I love you.”

Valerie was silent for so long that Spencer thought he’d lost consciousness again.

At last she said, “You’re delirious.”

“Not about this.”

“I’ll change the compress on your forehead.”

“I love you.”

“You better be quiet, try to get some rest.”

“I’ll always love you.”

“Be quiet, you strange man,” she said with what he believed and hoped was affection. “Just be quiet and rest.”

“Always,” he repeated.

Having confessed that the hope he sought was her, Spencer was so greatly relieved that he sank into a darkness without catacombs.

A long time later, not certain if he was awake or asleep, in a half-light that might have been dawn, dusk, lamp glow, or the cold and sourceless luminosity of a dream, Spencer was surprised to hear himself say, “Michael.”

“Ah, you’re back,” she said.

“Michael.”

“No one here’s named Michael.”

“You need to know about him,” Spencer warned.

“Okay. Tell me.”

He wished he could see her. There was only light and shadow, not even a blurred shape anymore.

He said, “You need to know if…if you’re going to be with me.”

“Tell me,” she encouraged.

“Don’t hate me when you know.”

“I’m not an easy hater. Trust me, Spencer. Trust me and talk to me. Who is Michael?”

His voice was fragile. “Died when he was fourteen.”

“Michael was a friend?”

“He was me. Died fourteen…wasn’t buried till he was sixteen.”

“Michael was you?”

“Walking around dead two years, then I was Spencer.”

“What was your…what was Michael’s last name?”

He knew then that he must be awake, not dreaming, because he had never felt as bad in a dream as he felt at that moment. The need to reveal could no longer be repressed, yet revelation was agony. His heart beat hard and fast, though it was pierced by secrets as painful as needles. “His last name…was the devil’s name.”

“What was the devil’s name?”

Spencer was silent, trying to speak but unable.

“What was the devil’s name?” she asked again.

“Ackblom,” he said, spitting out the hated syllables.

“Ackblom? Why do you say that’s the name of the devil?”

“Don’t you remember? Didn’t you ever hear?”

“I guess you’ll have to tell me.”

“Before Michael was Spencer,” said Spencer, “he had a dad. Like other boys…had a dad…but not like other dads. His f-father’s name was…was…his name was Steven. Steven Ackblom. The artist.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he pleaded, his voice breaking apart, word by desperate word.

“You’re the boy?”

“Don’t hate me.”

“You’re that boy.”

“Don’t hate me.”

“Why would I hate you?”

“Because…I’m the boy.”

“The boy who was a hero,” she said.

“No.”

“Yes, you were.”

“I couldn’t save them.”

“But you saved all those who might’ve come after them.”

The sound of his own voice chilled him deeper than cold rain had chilled him earlier. “Couldn’t save them.”

“It’s all right.”

“Couldn’t save them.” He felt a hand upon his face. Upon his scar. Tracing the hot line of his cicatricial brand.

She said, “You poor bastard. You poor, sweet bastard.”

Saturday night, perched on the edge of a chair in Eve Jammer’s bedroom, Roy Miro saw examples of perfection that even the best-equipped surveillance satellite could not have shown him.

This time, Eve didn’t pull the satin sheets back to reveal black rubber and didn’t use scented oils. She had a new — and stranger — set of toys. And although Roy was surprised to discover that it was possible, Eve achieved greater heights of self-gratification and had a greater erotic impact on him than she had managed the night before.

After a night of cataloguing Eve’s perfections, Roy required the greatest patience for the imperfect day that followed.

Through Sunday morning and afternoon, satellite surveillance, helicopters, and on-foot search teams had no more success locating the fugitives than they’d had on Saturday.

Operatives in Carmel, California — sent there following Theda Davidowitz’s revelation to Grant that “Hannah Rainey” had thought it was the ideal place to live — were enjoying the natural beauty and the refreshing winter fog. Of the woman, however, they had seen no sign.

From Orange County, John Kleck issued another important-sounding report to the effect that he had come up with no leads whatsoever.

In San Francisco, the agent who had tracked down the Porths, only to discover that they had died years ago, had gained access to probate records. He’d learned that Ethel Porth’s estate had passed entirely to George; George’s estate had passed to their grandson — Spencer Grant of Malibu, California, sole issue of the Porths’ only child, Jennifer. Nothing had been found to indicate that Grant had ever gone by another name or that his father’s identity was known.

From a corner of the satellite-surveillance control center, Roy spoke by telephone with Thomas Summerton. Although it was Sunday, Summerton was in his office in Washington rather than at his estate in Virginia. As security conscious as ever, he treated Roy’s call as a wrong number, then phoned back on a deep-cover line a while later, using a scrambling device matched to Roy’s.

“Hell of a mess in Arizona,” Summerton said. He was furious.

Roy didn’t know what his boss was talking about.

Summerton said, “Rich asshole activist out there, thinks he can save the world. You see the news?”

“Too busy,” Roy said.

“This asshole — he’s gotten some evidence that would embarrass me on the Texas situation last year. He’s been feeling out some people about how best to break the story. So we were going to hit him quick, make sure there was evidence of drug dealing on his property.”

“The asset-forfeiture provision?”

“Yeah. Seize everything. When his family has nothing to live on and he doesn’t have the assets to pay for a serious defense, he’ll come around. They usually do. But then the operation went wrong.”

They usually do, Roy thought wearily. But he didn’t speak his mind. He knew Summerton wouldn’t appreciate candor. Besides, that thought had been a prime example of shamefully negative thinking.

“Now,” Summerton said dourly, “an FBI agent’s dead, out there in Arizona.”

“A real one or a floater like me?”

“A real one. The asshole activist’s wife and boy are dead in the front yard too, and he’s sniping from the house, so we can’t hide the bodies from the TV cameras down the block. And anyway, a neighbor has it all on videotape!”

“Did the guy kill his own wife and kid?”

“I wish. But maybe it can still look that way.”

“Even with videotape?”

“You’ve been around long enough to know photographic evidence rarely clinches anything. Look at the Rodney King video. Hell, look at the Zapruder film of the Kennedy hit.” Summerton sighed. “So I hope you’ve got good news for me, Roy, something to cheer me up.”

Being Summerton’s right-hand man was getting to be dreary work. Roy wished that he could report some progress on his current case.

“Well,” Summerton said, just before hanging up, “right now no news seems like good news to me.”

Later, prior to leaving the Vegas offices on Sunday evening, Roy decided to ask Mama to use NEXIS and other data-search services to scan for “Jennifer Corrine Porth” in all media data banks that were offered on various information networks — and to report by morning. The past fifteen to twenty years’ issues of many major newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, were electronically stored and available for on-line research. In a previous perusal of those resources, Mama had turned up the name “Spencer Grant” only related to the killing of the two carjackers in Los Angeles a few years ago. But she might have more luck with the mother’s name.

If Jennifer Corrine Porth had died in a colorful fashion — or if she’d had even a middle-level reputation in business, government, or the arts — her death would have made a few major newspapers. And if Mama located any stories about her or any long obituaries, a valuable reference to Jennifer’s only surviving child might be buried in them.

Roy stubbornly clung to positive thinking. He was confident that Mama would find a reference to Jennifer and break the case wide open.

The woman. The boy. The barn in the background. The man in the shadows.

He didn’t have to take the photographs out of the envelope in which he was keeping them to recall those images with total clarity. The pictures teased his memory, for he knew that he’d seen the people in them before. A long time ago. In some compelling context.

Sunday night, Eve helped to keep Roy’s spirits high and his thoughts on a positive track. Aware that she was adored and that Roy’s adoration gave her total power over him, she worked herself into a frenzy that exceeded anything he had seen before.

For part of their unforgettable third encounter, he sat on the closed lid of the toilet, watching, while she proved that a shower stall could be as conducive to erotic games as any fur-draped, satin-sheeted, or rubber-covered bed.

He was astounded that anyone would have thought to invent and manufacture many of the water toys in her collection. Those devices were cleverly designed, intriguingly flexible, glistening with such lifelike need, convincingly biological in their battery-or hand-powered throbbing, mysterious and thrilling in their serpentine-knobby-dimpled-rubbery complexity. Roy was able to identify with them as if they were extensions of the body — part human, part machine — that he sometimes inhabited in dreams. When Eve handled those toys, Roy felt as though her perfect hands were fondling portions of his own anatomy by remote control.

In the blurring steam, the hot water, and the lather of scented soap, Eve seemed to be ninety percent perfect rather than just sixty percent. She was as unreal as an idealized woman in a painting.

Nothing this side of death could have been more fulfilling for Roy than watching Eve methodically stimulate one exquisite anatomical feature at a time, in each case with a device that seemed to be the amputated but functioning organ of a superlover from the future. Roy was able to focus his observations so tightly that Eve herself ceased to exist for him, and each sensuous encounter in the large shower stall — with bench and grab bars — was between one perfect body part and its fleshless analogue: erotic geometry, prurient physics, a study in the fluid dynamics of insatiable lust. The experience was untainted by personality or by any other human trait or association. Roy was transported into extreme realms of voyeuristic pleasure so intense that he almost screamed with the pain of his joy.

Spencer woke when the sun was above the eastern mountains. The light was coppery, and long morning shadows spilled westward across the badlands from every thrust of rock and impertinence of gnarled vegetation.

His vision wasn’t blurred. The sun no longer stung his eyes.

Out at the edge of the shade that was provided by the tarp, Valerie sat on the ground, her back to him. She was bent to a task that he couldn’t see.

Rocky was sitting at Valerie’s side, his back also to Spencer.

An engine was idling. Spencer had the strength to lift his head and turn toward the sound. The Range Rover. Behind him, deeper in the tarp-covered niche. An orange utility cord led from the open driver’s door of the Rover to Valerie.

Spencer felt dreadful, but he was grateful for the improvement in his condition since his most recent bout of consciousness. His skull no longer seemed about to explode; his headache was down to a dull thump over his right eye. Dry mouth. Chapped lips. But his throat wasn’t hot and achy anymore.

The morning was genuinely warm. The heat wasn’t from a fever, because his forehead felt cool. He threw back the blanket.

He yawned, stretched — and groaned. His muscles ached, but after the battering he had taken, that was to be expected.

Alerted by Spencer’s groan, Rocky hurried to him. The mutt was grinning, trembling, whipping his tail from side to side, in a frenzy of delight to see his master awake.

Spencer endured an enthusiastic face licking before he managed to get a grip on the dog’s collar and hold him at tongue’s length.

Looking over her shoulder, Valerie said, “Good morning.”

She was as lovely in the early sun as she had been in lamplight.

He almost repeated that sentiment aloud but was disconcerted by a dim memory of having said too much already, when he had been out of his head. He suspected himself not merely of having revealed secrets that he would rather have kept but of having been artlessly candid about his feelings for her, as ingenuous as an infatuated puppy.

As he sat up, denying the dog another lick at his face, Spencer said, “No offense, pal, but you stink something fierce.”

He got to his knees, rose to his feet, and swayed for a moment.

“Dizzy?” Valerie asked.

“No. That’s gone.”

“Good. I think you had a bad concussion. I’m no doctor — as you made clear. But I’ve got some reference books with me.”

“Just a little weak now. Hungry. Starving, in fact.”

“That’s a good sign, I think.”

Now that Rocky was no longer in his face, Spencer realized that the dog didn’t stink. He himself was the offending party: the wet-mud fragrance of the river, the sourness of several fever sweats.

Valerie returned to her work.

Being careful to stay upwind of her, and trying not to let the playful mutt trip him, Spencer shuffled to the edge of the shaded enclosure to see what the woman was doing.

A computer sat on a black plastic mat on the ground. It wasn’t a laptop but a full PC with a MasterPiece surge protector between the logic unit and the color monitor. The keyboard was on her lap.

It was remarkable to see such an elaborate high-tech workstation plunked down in the middle of a primitive landscape that had remained largely unchanged for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.

“How many megabytes?” he asked.

“Not mega. Giga. Ten gigabytes.”

“You need all that?”

“Some of the programs I use are pretty damn complex. They fill up a lot of hard disk.”

The orange electrical cord from the Rover was plugged into the logic unit. Another orange cord led from the back of the logic unit to a peculiar device sitting in the sunlight ten feet beyond the shade line of their tarp-covered hideaway: It looked like an inverted Frisbee with a flared rather than inward-curling rim; underneath, at its center, it was fixed to a ball joint, which was in turn fixed to a four-inch flexible black metal arm, which disappeared into a gray box approximately a foot square and four inches deep.

Busy at the keyboard, Valerie answered his question before he could ask it. “Satellite up-link.”

“You talking to aliens?” he asked, only half joking.

“Right now, to the dee-oh-dee computer,” she said, pausing to study the data that scrolled up the screen.

“Dee-oh-dee?” he wondered.

“Department of Defense.”

DOD.

He squatted on his haunches. “Are you a government agent?”

“I didn’t say I was talking to the DOD computer with the DOD’s permission. Or knowledge, for that matter. I up-linked to a phone-company satellite, accessed one of their lines reserved for systems testing, called in to the DOD deep computer in Arlington, Virginia.”

“Deep,” he mused.

“Heavily secured.”

“I bet that’s not a number you got from directory assistance.”

“Phone number’s not the hardest part. It’s more difficult to get the operating codes that let you use their system once you’re into it. Without them, being able to make the connection wouldn’t matter.”

“And you have those codes?”

“I’ve had full access to DOD for fourteen months.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard again. “Hardest to get is the access code to the program with which they periodically change all the other access codes. But if you don’t have that sucker, you can’t stay current unless they send you a new invitation every once in a while.”

“So fourteen months ago, you just happened to find all these numbers and whatnot scrawled on a rest room wall?”

“Three people I loved gave their lives for those codes.”

That response, though delivered in no graver a tone of voice than anything else Valerie had said, carried an emotional weight that left Spencer silent and pondering for a while.

A foot-long lizard — mostly brown, flecked with black and gold — slithered from under a nearby rock into the sunshine and scampered across the warm sand. When it saw Valerie, it froze and watched her. Its silver-and-green eyes were protuberant, with pebbly lids.

Rocky saw the lizard too. He retreated behind his master.

Spencer found himself smiling at the reptile, although he was not sure why he should be so pleased by its sudden appearance. Then he realized that he was unconsciously fingering the carved soapstone medallion that hung against his chest, and he understood. Louis Lee. Pheasants and dragons. Prosperity and long life.

Three people I loved gave their lives for those codes.

Spencer’s smile faded. To Valerie, he said, “What are you?”

Without looking up from the display screen, she said, “You mean, am I an international terrorist or a good patriotic American?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it like that.”

Instead of answering him, she said, “Over the past five days, I tried to learn what I could about you. Not very damn much. You’ve just about erased yourself from official existence. So I think I’ve got a right to ask the same question: What are you?”

He shrugged. “Just someone who values his privacy.”

“Sure. And what I am is a concerned and interested citizen — not a whole lot different from you.”

“Except I don’t know how to get into DOD.”

“You fiddled with your military records.”

“That’s an easy-access database compared with the big muddy you’re wading in right now. What the hell are you looking for?”

“The DOD tracks every satellite in orbit: civilian, government, military — both domestic and foreign. I’m one-stop shopping for all the satellites with the surveillance capabilities to look down into this little corner of the world and find us if we go out and about.”

“I thought that was part of a dream,” he said uneasily, “that talk about eyes in the sky.”

“You’d be surprised what’s up there. ‘Surprised’ is one word. As for surveillance, there are probably two to six satellites with that capability in orbit over the western and southwestern states.”

Rattled, he said, “What happens when you identify them?”

“The DOD will have their access codes. I’ll use those to up-link to each satellite, poke around in its current programs, and see if it’s looking for us.”

“This awesome lady here pokes around in satellites,” he said to Rocky, but the dog seemed less impressed than his master was, as if canines had been up to similar shenanigans for ages. To Valerie, Spencer said, “I don’t think the word ‘hacker’ is adequate for you.”

“So…what did they call people like me when you were on that computer-crime task force?”

“I don’t think we even conceived there were people like you.”

“Well, we’re here.”

“They’d really hunt us with satellites?” he asked doubtfully. “I mean, we’re not that important — are we?”

“They think I am. And you’ve got them totally confused. They can’t figure out how the hell you fit in. Until they get an idea what you’re all about, they’ll figure you’re as dangerous to them as I am — maybe more so. The unknown — that’s you, from their viewpoint — is always more frightening than the known.”

He mulled that over. “Who’re these people you’re talking about?”

“Maybe you’re safer if you don’t know.”

Spencer opened his mouth to respond, then held his silence. He didn’t want to argue. Not yet, anyway. First, he needed to clean up and get something to eat.

Without pausing in her work, Valerie explained that plastic jugs of bottled water, a basin, liquid soap, sponges, and a clean towel were just inside the Rover’s tailgate. “Don’t use a lot of water. It’s our drinking supply if we have to be out here a few more days.”

Rocky followed his master to the truck, glancing back nervously at the lizard in the sun.

Spencer discovered that Valerie had salvaged his belongings from the Explorer. He was able to shave and change into clean clothes, in addition to taking a sponge bath. He felt refreshed, and he could no longer smell his own body odor. He couldn’t get his hair quite as clean as he would have liked, however, because his scalp was tender, not just around the sutured laceration but across the entire crown of his head.

The Rover was a truck-style station wagon, like the Explorer, and it was packed solid with gear and supplies from the tailgate to within two feet of the front seats. The food was just where a well-organized person would stow it: in boxes and coolers immediately behind the two-foot clear space, easily accessible from either the driver’s or passenger’s seat.

Most of the provisions were canned and bottled, except for boxes of crackers. Because Spencer was too hungry to take the time to cook, he selected two small tins of Vienna sausages, two snack-size packets of cheese crackers, and a single-serving lunch-box can of pears.

In one of the Styrofoam coolers, also within easy reach of the front seats, he found weapons. A SIG 9mm pistol. A Micro Uzi that appeared to have been illegally converted for full automatic fire. There were spare magazines of ammunition for both.

Spencer stared at the weapons, then turned to look through the windshield at the woman sitting with her computer, twenty feet away.

That Valerie was skilled at many things, Spencer had no doubt. She seemed so well prepared for every contingency that she could serve as the paradigm not only for all Girl Scouts but for doomsday survivalists. She was clever, intelligent, funny, daring, courageous, and easy to look at in lamplight, in sunlight, in any light at all. Undoubtedly she was also practiced in the use of both the pistol and the submachine gun, because otherwise she was too practical to be in possession of them: She simply wouldn’t waste space on tools that she couldn’t use, and she wouldn’t risk the penalties for possession of a fully automatic Uzi unless she was able — and willing — to fire it.

Spencer wondered if she had ever been forced to shoot at another human being. He hoped not. And he hoped that she would never be driven to such an extreme. Sadly, however, life seemed to be handing her nothing but extremes.

He opened a tin of sausages with the ring tab on top. Resisting an urge to wolf down the contents in a single great mouthful, he ate one of the miniature frankfurters, then another. Nothing had ever tasted half as good. He popped the third in his mouth as he returned to Valerie.

Rocky danced and whimpered at his side, begging for his share.

“Mine,” Spencer said.

Though he hunkered down beside Valerie, he didn’t speak to her. She seemed especially focused on the cryptic data that filled the display screen.

The lizard was in the sun, alert and poised to flee, at the same spot where it had been almost half an hour earlier. Tiny dinosaur.

Spencer opened a second can of sausages, shared two with the dog, and was just finishing the last of the rest when Valerie jerked in surprise.

She gasped. “Oh, shit!”

The lizard vanished under the rock from which it had appeared.

Spencer glimpsed a word flashing on the display screen: LOCKON.

Valerie hit the power switch on the logic unit.

Just before the screen went dead, Spencer saw two more words flash under the first: TRACE BACK.

Valerie exploded to her feet, yanked both utility-cord plugs from the computer, and sprinted into the sun, to the microwave dish. “Load everything into the Rover!”

Getting to his feet, Spencer said, “What’s happening?”

“They’re using an EPA satellite.” She had already retrieved the microwave dish and had turned toward him. “And they’re running some sort of weird damned security program. Locks onto any invasive signal and traces back.” Hurrying past him, she said, “Help me pack. Move, damn it, move!”

He balanced the keyboard on top of the monitor and picked up the entire workstation, including the rubber mat beneath it. Following Valerie to the Rover, his bruised muscles protesting at the demand for haste, he said, “They found us?”

“Bastards!” she fumed.

“Maybe you switched off in time.”

“No.”

“How can they be sure it’s us?”

“They’ll know.”

“It was just a microwave signal, no fingerprints on it.”

“They’re coming,” she insisted.

Sunday night, their third night together, Eve Jammer and Roy Miro had begun their passionate but contact-free lovemaking earlier in the evening than they had done previously. Therefore, although that session was the longest and most ardent to date, they concluded before midnight. Thereafter, they lay chastely side by side on her bed, in the soft blue glow of indirect neon, each of them guarded by the loving eyes of the other’s reflection in the ceiling mirror. Eve was as naked as the day that she’d slipped into the world, and Roy was fully clothed. In time they enjoyed a deep and restful sleep.

Because he had brought an overnight bag, Roy was able to get ready for work in the morning without returning to his hotel suite on the Strip. He showered in the guest bath, rather than in Eve’s, for he had no desire to undress and reveal his many imperfections, from his stubby toes to his knobby knees, to his paunch, to the spray of freckles and the two moles on his chest. Besides, neither of them wanted to follow the other’s session in any shower stall. If he were to stand on tiles wet with her bathwater or vice versa…well, in a subtle but disturbing way, that act would violate the satisfyingly dry relationship, free of fluid exchanges, which they had established and on which they thrived.

He supposed some people would think them mad. But anyone who was truly in love would understand.

With no need to go to the hotel, Roy arrived at the satellite-communications room early Monday. When he walked through the door, he knew that something exciting had transpired only moments before. Several people were gathered down front, gazing up at the wall display, and the buzz of conversation had a positive sound.

Ken Hyckman, the morning duty officer, was smiling broadly. Clearly eager to be the first to impart the good news, he waved at Roy to come down to the U-shaped control console.

Hyckman was a tall, blandly handsome, blown-dry type. He looked as if he had joined the agency following an attempt at a career as a TV news anchorman.

According to Eve, Hyckman had made several passes at her, but she had put a chill on him each time. If Roy had thought that Ken Hyckman was in any way a threat to Eve, he would have blown the bastard’s head off right there, and to hell with the consequences. He found considerable peace of mind, however, in the knowledge that he had fallen in love with a woman who could pretty much take care of herself.

“We found them!” Hyckman announced as Roy approached him at the control console. “She up-linked to Earthguard to see if we were using it for satellite surveillance.”

“How do you know it’s her?”

“It’s her style.”

“Admittedly, she’s a bold one,” Roy said. “But I hope you’ve got more to go on than sheer instinct.”

“Well, hell, the up-link was from the middle of nowhere. Who else would it be?” Hyckman asked, pointing at the wall.

The orbital view currently on display was a simple, enhanced, telescopic look-down that included the southern halves of Nevada and Utah, plus the northern third of Arizona. Las Vegas was in the lower left corner. The three red and two white rings of a small, flashing bull’s-eye marked the remote position from which the up-link had been initiated.

Hyckman said, “One hundred and fifteen miles north-northeast of Vegas, in desert flats northeast of Pahroc Summit and northwest of Oak Springs Summit. Middle of nowhere, like I told you.”

“It’s an EPA satellite we’re using,” Roy reminded him. “Could have been an EPA employee trying to up-link to get an aerial view of his work site beamed down to a computer there. Or a spectrographic analysis of the terrain. Or a hundred other things.”

“EPA employee? But it’s the middle of nowhere,” Hyckman said. He seemed stuck on that phrase, as though repeating the haunting lyrics of an old song. “Middle of nowhere.”

“Curiously enough,” Roy said with a warm smile that took the sting out of his sarcasm, “a lot of environmental research is done in the field, right out there in the environment, and you’d be amazed if you knew how much of the planet is in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yeah, maybe so. But if it was somebody legitimate, a scientist or something, why terminate contact so fast, before doing anything?”

“Now that is the first shred of meat you’ve provided,” Roy said. “But it’s not enough to nourish a certainty.”

Hyckman looked bewildered. “What?”

Instead of explaining, Roy said, “What’s with the bull’s-eye? Targets are always marked with a white cross.”

Grinning, pleased with himself, Hyckman said, “I thought this was more interesting, adds a little fun.”

“Looks like a video game,” Roy said.

“Thanks,” Hyckman said, interpreting the slight as a compliment.

“Factoring in magnification,” Roy said, “what altitude does this view represent?”

“Twenty thousand feet.”

“Much too high. Bring us down to five thousand.”

“We’re in the process right now,” Hyckman said, indicating some of the people working at the computers in the center of the room.

A cool, soft, female voice came from the control-center address system: “Higher-magnification view coming up.”

The terrain was rugged, if not forbidding, but Valerie drove as she might have driven on a smooth ribbon of freeway blacktop. The tortured Rover leaped and plunged, rocked and swayed, bounced and shuddered across that inhospitable land, rattling and creaking as if at any moment it would explode like the overstressed springs and gearwheels of a clockwork toy.

Spencer occupied the passenger seat, with the SIG 9mm pistol in his right hand. The Micro Uzi was on the floor between his feet.

Rocky sat behind them, in the narrow clear space between the back of the front seat and the mass of gear that filled the rest of the cargo area all the way to the tailgate. The dog’s good ear was pricked, because he was interested in their lurching progress, and his other ear flapped like a rag.

“Can’t we slow down a little?” Spencer asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the tumult: the roaring engine, the tires stuttering across a washboard gully.

Valerie leaned over the steering wheel, looked up at the sky, craned her head left and right. “Wide and blue. No clouds anywhere, damn it. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to make a run for it until we had clouds again.”

“Does it matter? What about the infrared surveillance you were talking about, the way they can see through clouds?”

Looking ahead again as the Range Rover chewed its way up the gully wall, she said, “That’s a threat when we’re sitting still, in the middle of nowhere, the only unnatural heat source for miles. But it’s not much good to them when we’re on the move. Especially not if we were on a highway, with other cars, where they can’t analyze the Rover’s heat signature and distinguish it in traffic.”

The top of the gully wall proved to be a low ridge, over which they shot with sufficient speed to be airborne for a second or two. They slammed front-tires-first onto a long, gradual slope of gray-black-pink shale.

Slivers of shale, spun up by the tires, showered against the undercarriage, and Valerie shouted to be heard above a hard clatter as loud as a hailstorm: “With a sky that blue, we have more to worry about than infrared. They have a clear, bare-eyed look-down at us.”

“You think they’ve already seen us?”

“You can bet your ass they’re already looking for us,” she said, barely audible because of the machine-gun shatters of shale that volleyed beneath them.

“Eyes in the sky,” he said, more to himself than to her.

The world seemed upside down: Blue heavens had become the place where demons lived.

Valerie shouted: “Yeah, they’re looking. And for sure, it won’t be much longer till we’re spotted, considering we’re the only moving thing, other than snakes and jackrabbits, for at least five miles in any direction.”

The Rover roared off the shale onto softer soil, and the sudden diminution of noise was such a relief that the usual tumult, which had earlier been so annoying, now seemed by comparison like the music of a string quartet.

Valerie said, “Damn! I only up-linked to confirm that it was clear. I didn’t really think they’d still be there, still tying up a satellite for a third day. And I sure as hell didn’t think they’d be locking on incoming signals.”

“Three days?”

“Yeah, they probably started surveillance before dawn Saturday, as soon as the storm passed and the sky cleared. Oh, man, they must want us even worse than I thought.”

“What day is this?” he asked uneasily.

“Monday.”

“I was sure this was Sunday.”

“You were dead to the world a lot longer than you think. Since sometime Friday afternoon.”

Even if unconsciousness had healed into ordinary sleep sometime during the previous night, he had been pretty much out of his head for forty-eight to sixty hours. Because he valued self-control so highly, the contemplation of such a lengthy delirium made him queasy.

He remembered some of what he’d said when he’d been out of his head. He wondered what else he had told her that he couldn’t recall.

Looking at the sky again, Valerie said, “I hate these bastards!”

“Who are they?” he asked, not for the first time.

“You don’t want to know,” she said, as before. “As soon as you know, you’re a dead man.”

“Looks like there’s a good chance I’m already a dead man. And I sure wouldn’t want them to whack me and never know who they were.”

She mulled that over as she accelerated up another hill, a long one this time. “Okay. You’ve got a point. But later. Right now, I’ve got to concentrate on getting us out of this mess.”

“There’s a way out?”

“Between slim and none — but a way.”

“I thought, with that satellite, they were going to spot us any second now.”

“They will. But the nearest place the bastards have any men is probably back in Vegas, a hundred and ten miles from here, maybe even a hundred twenty. That’s how far I got Friday night, before I decided that staying on the move was making you worse. By the time they get a hit squad together and fly in here after us, we’ve got two hours minimum, two and a half max.”

“To do what?”

“To lose them again,” she said somewhat impatiently.

“How do we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space, for God’s sake?” he demanded.

“Boy, does that sound paranoid,” she said.

“It’s not paranoid, it’s what they’re doing.”

“I know, I know. But it sure sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” She adopted a voice not dissimilar from that of Goofy, the Disney cartoon character. “Watching us from outer space, funny little men in pointy hats, with ray guns, gonna steal our women, destroy the world.”

Behind them, Rocky woofed softly, intrigued by the Goofy voice.

She dropped the funny voice. “Are we living in screwed-up times or what? God in Heaven, are we ever.”

As they crested the top of the long hill, giving the springs another hard workout, Spencer said, “One minute I think I know you, and the next minute I don’t know you at all.”

“Good. Keeps you alert. We need to be alert.”

“You suddenly seem to think this is funny.”

“Oh, sometimes I can’t feel the humor any more than you’re able to right now. But we live in God’s amusement park. Take it too seriously, you’ll go nuts. On some level, everything’s funny, even the blood and the dying. Don’t you think so?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Then how do you ever get along?” she asked, but not in the least flippantly, with total seriousness now.

“It hasn’t been easy.”

The broad, flat top of the hill featured more brush than they had yet encountered. Valerie didn’t let up on the accelerator, and the Rover smashed through everything in its way.

Spencer persisted: “How will we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space?”

“Trick ’em.”

“How?”

“With some clever moves.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He wouldn’t relent: “When will you know?”

“I sure hope before our two hours are up.” She frowned at the odometer. “Seems like we ought to’ve gone six miles.”

“Seems like a hundred. Much more of this damn bouncing, and my headache’s going to come back hard.”

The broad top of the hill didn’t drop off abruptly but melted into a long, descending slope that was covered with tall grass as dry, pale, and translucent as insect wings. At the bottom were two lanes of blacktop that led east and west.

“What’s that?” he wondered.

“Old Federal Highway Ninety-three,” she said.

“You knew it was there? How?”

“Either I studied a map while you were out of your head — or I’m just dead-on psychic.”

“Probably both,” he said, for again she had surprised him.

Because the view from five thousand feet didn’t provide adequate resolution of car-size objects at ground level, Roy requested that the system focus down to one thousand feet.

For clarity, that extreme degree of magnification required more than the usual amount of image enhancement. The additional processing of the incoming Earthguard transmission required so much computer capacity that other agency work was halted to free the Cray for this urgent task. Otherwise, more minutes of delay would have occurred between receipt of an image and its projection in the control center.

Less than a minute passed before the cool, almost whispery, female voice again spoke softly from the public-address system: “Suspect vehicle acquired.”

Ken Hyckman dashed away from the control console into the two rows of computers, all of which were manned. He returned within another minute, boyish and buoyant. “We’ve got her.”

“We can’t know yet,” Roy cautioned.

“Oh, we’ve got her, all right,” Hyckman said excitedly, turning to beam at the wall display. “What other vehicle would be out there, on the move, in the same area where somebody tried to up-link?”

“Could still be some EPA scientist.”

“Suddenly on the run?”

“Maybe just moving around.”

“Moving real fast for the terrain.”

“Well, there aren’t any speed limits out there.”

“Too coincidental,” said Hyckman. “It’s her.”

“We’ll see.”

With a ripple, beginning at the left and moving to the right across the wall display, the image changed. The new view shifted, blurred, shifted, cleared, shifted, blurred, cleared again — and they were looking down from one thousand feet onto rough terrain.

A vehicle of unidentifiable type and make, obviously with off-road capability, raced across a table of brush-covered land. It was still a woefully tiny object seen from that altitude.

“Focus down to five hundred feet,” Roy ordered.

“Higher-magnification view coming up.”

After a brief delay, the display rippled left to right again. The image blurred, shifted, blurred, cleared.

Earthguard 3 was not directly over the moving target but in a geosynchronous orbit to the east and north. Therefore, the target was observed at an angle, which required additional automated processing of the image to eliminate distortions caused by the perspective. The result, however, was a picture that included not only the rectangular forms of the roof and hood but a severe angular view of one flank of the vehicle.

Although Roy knew that an element of distortion still remained, he was half convinced that he could see a couple of brighter spots glimmering in that fleet shadow, which might have been driver’s-side windows reflecting the morning sun.

As the suspect vehicle reached the brink of the hill and began to descend a long slope, Roy peered at the foremost of those possible windows and wondered if, indeed, the woman waited to be discovered on the other side of a pane of sun-bronzed glass. Had they found her at last?

The target was approaching a highway.

“What road is that?” Roy demanded. “Give us some overlays, let’s identify this. Quickly.”

Hyckman pressed a console key and spoke into the microphone.

On the wall, by the time the suspect turned east onto the two-lane highway, a multicolored overlay identified a few topographical features — as well as Federal Highway 93.

When Valerie didn’t hesitate before turning east on the highway, Spencer said, “Why not west?”

“Because there’s nothing in that direction but Nevada badlands. First town is over two hundred miles. Warm Springs, they call it, but it’s so small it might as well be Warm Spit. We’d never get that far. Lonely, empty land. There’s a thousand places they could hit us between here and there, and no one would ever see what happened. We’d just disappear off the face of the earth.”

“So where are we headed?”

“It’s several miles to Caliente, then ten more to Panaca—”

“They don’t sound like metropolises, either.”

“Then we cross the border into Utah. Modena, Newcastle — they aren’t exactly cities that never sleep. But after Newcastle, there’s Cedar City.”

“Big time.”

“Fourteen thousand people or thereabouts,” she said. “Which is maybe all the bigger we need to give us a chance to slip surveillance long enough to get out of the Rover and into something else.”

The two-lane blacktop featured frequent subsidence swales, lumpy patches, and unrepaired potholes. Along both shoulders, the pavement was deteriorating. As an obstacle course, it provided no challenge to the Rover — though after the jolting overland journey, Spencer wished the truck had cushier springs and shock absorbers.

Regardless of the road condition, Valerie kept the pedal down, maintaining a speed that was punishing if not reckless.

“I hope this pavement gets better soon,” he said.

“Judging by the map, it probably gets worse after Panaca. From there on, all the way into Cedar City, it’s just state routes.”

“And how far to Cedar City?”

“About a hundred and twenty miles,” she said, as though that was not bad news.

He gaped at her in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding. Even with luck, on roads like this — roads worse than this! — we’ll need two hours to get there.”

“We’re doing seventy now.”

“And it feels like a hundred and seventy!” His voice quavered as the tires jittered over a section of pavement that was as runneled as corduroy.

Her voice vibrating too, she said, “Boy, I hope you don’t have hemorrhoids.”

“You won’t be able to keep up this speed all the way. We’ll be getting into Cedar City with that hit squad right on our ass.”

She shrugged. “Well, I’ll bet people around there could use some excitement. Been a long time since last summer’s Shakespeare Festival.”

At Roy’s request, the magnification had been increased again to provide a view equivalent to the one that they would have had if they really had been two hundred feet above the target. Image enhancement became more difficult with each incremental increase in magnification — but fortunately there was enough additional logic-unit capacity to avoid a further processing delay.

The scale of the wall display was so much larger than before that the target rapidly progressed across the width, vanishing off the right-hand edge. But it reappeared from the left as Earthguard projected a new segment of territory that lay immediately east of the one out of which the target had driven.

The truck was rushing east, instead of south as before, so the angle now revealed some of the windshield, across which played reflections of sunlight and shadow.

“Target profile identified as that of a late-model Range Rover.”

Roy Miro stared at the wall display, trying to make up his mind whether to bet the bank that the suspect vehicle contained at least the woman, if not also the scarred man.

Occasionally he glimpsed dark figures within the Rover, but he couldn’t identify them. He couldn’t even see well enough to be sure how many people were in the damn thing or what sex they were.

Further magnification would require long, tedious enhancement sessions. By the time they were able to obtain a more detailed look inside that vehicle, the driver would have been able to reach — and get lost in — any of half a dozen major cities.

If he committed men and equipment to stopping the Range Rover, and if the occupants proved to be innocent people, he would forfeit any chance of nailing the woman. She might break cover while he was distracted, might slip down into Arizona or back into California.

“Target’s speed is seventy-two miles per hour.”

To justify going after the Rover, a lot of assumptions had to be made, with little or no supporting evidence. That Spencer Grant had survived when his Explorer had been swept away in a flash flood. That somehow he had been able to alert the woman to his whereabouts. That she had rendezvoused with him in the desert, and that they had driven away together in her vehicle. That the woman, realizing the agency might resort to orbital-surveillance resources to locate her, had gone to ground early Saturday, before the cloud cover dissipated. That this morning she had broken cover, had started up-linking with available surveillance satellites to determine if anyone was still looking specifically for her, had been surprised by the trace-back program, and had just minutes ago begun to run for her life.

That was a series of assumptions long enough to make Roy uneasy.

“Target’s speed is seventy-four miles per hour.”

“Too damn fast for the roads in that area,” Ken Hyckman said. “It’s her, and she’s scared.”

Saturday and Sunday, Earthguard had discovered two hundred sixteen suspect vehicles in the designated search zone, most of which had been engaged in off-road recreation of one kind or another. The drivers and passengers eventually had gotten out of their vehicles, been observed either by satellite or chopper overflight, and proved not to be Grant or the woman. This might be number two hundred seventeen on that list of false alarms.

“Target’s speed is seventy-six miles per hour.”

On the other hand, this was the best suspect they’d had in more than two days of searching.

And ever since Friday afternoon in Flagstaff, Arizona, the power of Kevorkian had been with him. It had brought him to Eve and had changed his life. He should trust in it to guide his decisions.

He closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, and said, “Let’s put a team together and go after them.”

“Yes!” Ken Hyckman said, punching one fist into the air in an annoying, adolescent expression of enthusiasm.

“Twelve men, full assault gear,” Roy said, “leaving in fifteen minutes or less. Arrange transport from the roof here, so we don’t waste time. Two large executive choppers.”

“You got it,” Hyckman promised.

“Make sure they understand to terminate the woman on sight.”

“Of course.”

“With extreme prejudice.”

Hyckman nodded.

“Give her no chance—no chance—to slip loose again. But we have to take Grant alive, interrogate him, find out how he fits into all this, who the sonofabitch is working for.”

“To give you the quality of satellite look-down you’ll need in the field,” Hyckman said, “we’ll have to remote-program Earthguard to alter its orbit temporarily, nail it specifically to that Rover.”

“Do it,” Roy said.

TWELVE

By that Monday morning in February, Captain Harris Descoteaux, of the Los Angeles Police Department, would not have been surprised to discover that he had died the previous Friday and had been in Hell ever since. The outrages perpetrated upon him would have occupied the time and energies of numerous clever, malicious, industrious demons.

At eleven-thirty Friday night, as Harris was making love to his wife, Jessica, and as their daughters — Willa and Ondine — were asleep or watching television in other bedrooms, an FBI special-weapons-and-tactics team, in a joint operation between the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, raided the Descoteaux house on a quiet street in Burbank. The assault was executed with the stalwart commitment and merciless force exhibited by any platoon of United States Marines in any battle in any war in the country’s history.

On all sides of the house, with a synchronization that would have been envied by the most demanding symphony-orchestra conductor, stun grenades were launched through windows. The blasts of sound instantly disoriented Harris, Jessica, and their daughters, and also temporarily impaired their motor-nerve functions.

Even as porcelain figurines toppled and paintings clattered against walls in response to those shock waves, the front and back doors were battered down. Heavily armed men in black helmets and bullet-resistant vests swarmed into the Descoteaux residence and dispersed like a doomsday tide through its rooms.

One moment, in romantically soft amber lamplight, Harris was in the arms of his wife, gliding back and forth on the sweet dissolving edge of bliss. The next moment, passion having turned to terror, he was staggering around in the infuriatingly dim lamplight, naked and confused. His limbs twitched, his knees repeatedly buckled, and the room seemed to tumble like a giant barrel in a carnival fun house.

Though his ears were ringing, he heard men shouting elsewhere in the house: “FBI! FBI! FBI!” The booming voices weren’t reassuring. Addled by a stun grenade, he couldn’t think what those letters meant.

He remembered the nightstand. His revolver. Loaded.

He couldn’t recall how to open a drawer. Suddenly it seemed to require superhuman intelligence, the dexterity of a torch juggler.

Then the bedroom was crowded with men as big as professional football players, all shouting at once. They forced Harris to lie facedown on the floor, with his hands behind his head.

His mind cleared. He remembered the meaning of FBI. Terror and confusion didn’t evaporate, but diminished to fear and bafflement.

A helicopter roared into position above the house. Searchlights swept the yard. Over the furious pounding of the rotors, Harris heard a sound so cold that he felt as if ice had formed in his blood: his daughters, screaming as the doors to their rooms crashed open.

Being required to lie naked on the floor while Jessica was rousted from bed, equally naked, was deeply humiliating. They made her stand in a corner, with only her hands to cover herself, while they searched the bed for weapons. After an eternity, they tossed a blanket to her, and she wrapped herself in it.

Harris was eventually permitted to sit on the edge of the bed, still naked, burning with humiliation. They presented the search warrant, and he was surprised to find his name and address. He had assumed that they had invaded the wrong house. He explained that he was an LAPD captain, but they already knew and were unmoved.

At last Harris was permitted to dress in gray exercise sweats. He and Jessica were taken into the living room.

Ondine and Willa were huddled on the sofa, hugging each other for emotional support. The girls tried to rush to their parents but were restrained by officers who ordered them to remain seated.

Ondine was thirteen, and Willa was fourteen. Both girls had their mother’s beauty. Ondine was dressed for bed in panties and a T-shirt that featured the face of a rap singer. Willa was wearing a cut-off T-shirt, cut-off pajama bottoms, and yellow knee socks.

Some officers were looking at the girls in a way they had no right to look. Harris asked that his daughters be allowed to put on robes, but he was ignored. While Jessica was taken to an armchair, Harris was flanked by two men who tried to lead him out of the room.

When he again requested that the girls be given robes and was ignored, he pulled away from his escorts, indignant. His indignation was interpreted as resistance. He was hit in the stomach with the butt of an assault rifle, driven to his knees, and handcuffed.

In the garage, a man who identified himself as “Agent Gurland” was at the workbench, examining a hundred plastic-wrapped kilos of cocaine, worth millions. Harris stared in disbelief, with a growing chill, as he was told that the coke had been found in his garage.

“I’m innocent. I’m a cop. I’ve been set up. This is nuts!”

Gurland perfunctorily recited a list of constitutional rights.

Harris was infuriated by their indifference to everything he said. His anger and frustration earned him more rough handling as he was escorted out of the house to a car at the curb. Along the street, neighbors had come onto their lawns and porches to watch.

He was taken to a federal detention facility. There he was permitted to call his attorney — who was his brother, Darius.

By virtue of being a policeman, and therefore endangered if confined with cop-hating felons, he expected to be segregated in the lockup. Instead, he was put into a holding cell with six men waiting to be charged on offenses ranging from interstate transportation of illegal drugs to the hatchet murder of a federal marshal.

All claimed that they were being railroaded. Although a few were obviously bad pieces of work, the captain found himself more than half believing their protestations of innocence.

At two-thirty Saturday morning, sitting across from Harris at a scarred Formica-topped table in a lawyer-client conference room, Darius said, “This is total bullshit, total, it stinks, it really reeks. You’re the most honest man I’ve ever known, a straight arrow since you were a kid. You made it hell for a brother to measure up. You’re an annoying goddamned saint, is what you are! Anyone who says you’re a cocaine dealer is a moron or a liar. Listen, don’t worry about this, don’t worry for a minute, a second, a nanosecond. You have an exemplary past, not a stain, the record of an annoying goddamned saint. We’ll get low bail, and eventually we’ll convince them it’s a mistake or a conspiracy. Listen, I swear to you, it’s never going to go to trial, on our mother’s grave, I swear to you.”

Darius was five years younger than Harris but resembled him to such an extent that they seemed to be twins. He was also as brilliant as he was hyperkinetic, a fine criminal trial attorney. If Darius said there was no reason to worry, Harris would try not to worry.

“Listen, if it’s a conspiracy,” Darius said, “who’s behind it? What walking slime would do this? Why? What enemies have you made?”

“I can’t think of any. Not any who’re capable of this.”

“It’s total bullshit. We’ll have them crawling on their bellies to apologize, the bastards, the morons, the ignorant geeks. This burns me. Even saints make enemies, Harris.”

“I can’t point a finger,” Harris insisted.

“Maybe saints especially make enemies.”

Less than eight hours later, shortly after ten o’clock Saturday morning, with his brother at his side, Harris was brought before a judge. He was ordered held for trial. The federal prosecutor wanted a ten-million-dollar bail, but Darius argued for Harris’s release on his own recognizance. Bail was set at five hundred thousand, which Darius considered acceptable because Harris would be free upon posting ten percent to a bondsman’s ninety.

Harris and Jessica had seventy-three thousand in stocks and savings accounts. Since Harris didn’t intend to flee prosecution, they would get their money back when he went to court.

The situation wasn’t ideal. But before they could proceed to structure a legal counteroffensive and get the charges dismissed, Harris had to regain his freedom and escape the extraordinary danger faced by a police officer in jail. At least events were finally moving in the right direction.

Seven hours later, at five o’clock Saturday afternoon, Harris was taken from the holding cell to the lawyer-client conference room, where Darius was waiting for him again — with bad news. The FBI had persuaded a judge that probable cause existed to conclude that the Descoteaux house had been used for illegal purposes, thus permitting immediate application of federal property-forfeiture statutes. The FBI and DEA then acquired liens against the house and its contents.

To protect the government’s interests, federal marshals had evicted Jessica, Willa, and Ondine, permitting them to pack only a few articles of clothing. The locks had been changed. At least for the time being, guards were posted at the property.

Darius said, “This is crap. Okay, maybe it doesn’t technically violate the recent Supreme Court decision on forfeiture, but it sure as hell violates the spirit. For one thing, the court said they now have to give the property owner a notice of intent to seize.”

“Intent to seize?” Harris said, bewildered.

“Of course, they’ll say they served that notice at the same time as the eviction order, which they did. But the court clearly meant there should be a decent interval between notice and eviction.”

Harris didn’t understand. “Evicted Jessica and the girls?”

“Don’t worry about them,” Darius said. “They’re staying with Bonnie and me. They’re all right.”

“How can they evict them?”

“Until the Supreme Court rules on other aspects of forfeiture laws, if it ever does, eviction can still take place prior to the hearing, which is unfair. Unfair? Jesus, it’s worse than unfair, it’s totalitarian. At least these days you get a hearing, which wasn’t required till recently. You’ll go before a judge in ten days, and he’ll listen to your argument against forfeiture.”

“It’s my house.”

“That’s no argument. We’ll do better than that.”

“But it’s my house.”

“I have to tell you, the hearing doesn’t mean much. The feds will pull every trick in the book to be sure it’s assigned to a judge with a strong history of endorsing the forfeiture laws. I’ll try to prevent that, try to get you a judge who still remembers this is supposed to be a democracy. But the reality is, ninety-nine percent of the time, the feds get the judge they want. We’ll have a hearing, but the ruling is almost certain to be against us and in favor of forfeiture.”

Harris was having difficulty absorbing the horror of what his brother had told him. Shaking his head, he said, “They can’t put my family out of the house. I haven’t been convicted of anything.”

“You’re a cop. You must know how the forfeiture laws work. They’ve been on the books ten years, growing broader every year.”

“I’m a cop, yes, not a prosecutor. I get the bad guys, and the district attorney’s office decides under what laws to prosecute.”

“Then this will be an unpleasant lesson. See…to lose your property under forfeiture statutes, you don’t have to be convicted.”

“They can take my property even if I’m found innocent?” Harris said, and he was sure that he was having a nightmare based on some Kafka short story he’d read in college.

“Harris, listen very closely here. Forget about conviction or acquittal. They can take your property and not even charge you with a crime. Without taking you to court. Of course, you have been charged, which gives them an even stronger hand.”

“Wait, wait. How did this happen?”

“If there’s evidence of any nature that the property was used for an illegal purpose, even one of which you have no knowledge, that’s sufficient probable cause for forfeiture. Isn’t that a cute touch? You don’t even have to know about it, to lose your property.”

“No, I mean, how did this happen in America?”

“The war against drugs. That’s what the forfeiture laws were written for. To come down hard on drug dealers, break them.”

Darius was more subdued than on his previous visit that morning. His hyperkinetic nature was expressed not primarily in his usual, voluble flow of words as much as in his ceaseless fidgeting.

Harris was as alarmed by the change in his brother as by what he was learning. “This evidence, the cocaine, was planted.”

“You know that, I know that. But the court has to see you prove it before it’ll reverse a forfeiture.”

“You mean, I’m guilty till proven innocent.”

“That’s the way the forfeiture laws work. But at least you’ve been charged with a crime. You’ll have your day in court. By proving you’re innocent in a criminal trial, you’ll indirectly have a chance to prove forfeiture was unjustified. Now, I hope to God they don’t drop the charges.”

Harris blinked in surprise. “You hope they don’t drop them?”

“If they drop the charges, no criminal trial. Then the best chance you’ll ever have to get your house back is at the upcoming hearing I mentioned.”

“My best chance? At this rigged hearing?”

“Not rigged exactly. Just in front of their judge.”

“What’s the difference?”

Darius nodded wearily. “Not much. And once forfeiture is approved in that hearing, if you didn’t have a criminal trial in which to state your case, you’d have to initiate legal action, sue the FBI and the DEA, to get the forfeiture overturned. That would be an uphill battle. Government attorneys would repeatedly attempt to have your suit dismissed — until they found a sympathetic court. Even if you got a jury or panel of judges to overturn the forfeiture, the government would appeal and appeal, trying to exhaust you.”

“But if they dropped the charges against me, how could they still keep my house?” He understood what his brother had told him. He just didn’t understand the logic or the justice of it.

“Like I explained,” Darius said patiently, “all they have to show is evidence the property was used for illegal purposes. Not that you or any member of your family was involved in that activity.”

“But then who would they claim was stashing cocaine there?”

Darius sighed. “They don’t have to name anyone.”

Astonished, reluctantly accepting the full monstrousness of it at last, Harris said, “They can seize my house by claiming someone was dealing drugs out of it — but not have to name a suspect?”

“As long as they have evidence, yes.”

“The evidence was planted!”

“Like I explained already, you’d have to prove that to a court.”

“But if they don’t charge me with a crime, I might never get into a court with a suit of my own.”

“Right.” Darius smiled humorlessly. “Now you see why I hope to God they don’t drop the charges. Now you understand the rules.”

“Rules?” Harris said. “These aren’t rules. This is madness.”

He needed to pace, work off a sudden dark energy that filled him. His anger and outrage were so great that his knees were weak when he tried to stand. Halfway to his feet, he was forced to sit again, as if suffering the effects of another stun grenade.

“You okay?” Darius worried.

“But these laws were only supposed to target major drug dealers, racketeers, Mafia.”

“Sure. People who might liquidate property, flee the country before they went to trial. That was the original intent when the laws were passed. But now there are two hundred federal offenses, not just drug offenses, that allow property forfeiture without trial, and they were used fifty thousand times last year.”

“Fifty thousand!”

“It’s becoming a major source of funding for law enforcement. Once liquidated, eighty percent of seized assets goes to the police agencies in the case, twenty percent to the prosecutor.”

They sat in silence. The old-fashioned wall clock ticked softly. The sound brought to mind the image of a time bomb, and Harris felt as though he were, in fact, sitting on just such an explosive device.

No less angry than he had been but more in control of his anger, he said at last, “They’re going to sell my house, aren’t they?”

“Well, at least this is a federal seizure. If it was under the California forfeiture law, it’d be gone ten days after the hearing. Feds give us more time.”

“They’ll sell it.”

“Listen, we’ll do everything we can to overturn before then….” Darius’s voice trailed away. He was no longer able to look his brother in the eyes. Finally he said, “And even after assets are liquidated, if you can overturn, then you can get compensation — though not for any costs you incurred related to the forfeiture.”

“But I can kiss my house good-bye. I might get money back but not my house. And I can’t get back all the time this will take.”

“There’s legislation in Congress to reform these laws.”

“Reform? Not toss them out completely?”

“No. The government likes the laws too much. Even the proposed reforms don’t go far enough and don’t have wide support yet.”

“Evicted my family,” Harris said, still gripped by disbelief.

“Harris, I feel rotten. I’ll do everything I can, I’ll be a tiger on their ass, I swear, but I ought to be able to do more.”

Harris’s hands were fisted again on the table. “None of this is your fault, little brother. You didn’t write the laws. We’ll…just cope. Somehow, we’ll cope. The important thing now is to post bail, so I can get out of here.”

Darius put the heels of his coal-black hands to his eyes and pressed gently, as if trying to banish his weariness. Like Harris, he hadn’t slept the previous night. “That’s going to take until Monday. I’ll go to my bank first thing Monday morning—”

“No, no. You don’t have to put up your money for bail. We’ve got it. Didn’t Jessica tell you? And our bank’s open Saturdays.”

“She told me. But—”

“Not open now, but it was earlier. God, I wanted out today.”

Lowering his hands from his face, Darius met his brother’s eyes with reluctance. “Harris, they’ve impounded your bank accounts too.”

“They can’t do that,” he said angrily, but no longer with any conviction. “Can they?”

“Savings, checking, all of it, whether it was a joint account with Jessie, in your name, or just in her name. They’re calling it all illegal drug profits, even the Christmas-club account.”

Harris felt as if he’d been hit in the face. A strange numbness began to spread through him. “Darius, I can’t…I can’t let you put up all the bail. Not fifty thousand. We have some stocks—”

“Your brokerage account’s impounded too, pending forfeiture.”

Harris stared at the clock. The second hand twitched around the face. The time-bomb sound seemed louder, louder.

Reaching across the conference-room table, putting his hands over Harris’s fists, Darius said, “Big brother, I swear, we’ll get through this together.”

“With everything impounded…we have nothing but the cash in my wallet and Jessica’s purse. Jesus. Maybe just her purse. My wallet is in the nightstand drawer at home, if she didn’t think to bring it when…when they made her and the girls leave.”

“So Bonnie and I are putting up bail, and we don’t want any argument about it,” Darius said.

Tick…tick…tick…

Harris’s entire face was numb. The back of his neck was numb, pebbled with gooseflesh. Numb and cold.

Darius squeezed his brother’s hands reassuringly once more, and then finally let go.

Harris said, “How are Jessica and I going to rent a place if we can’t put together first month, last month, and security deposit?”

“You’ll move in with Bonnie and me for the duration. That’s already been settled.”

“Your house isn’t that big. You don’t have room for four more.”

“Jessie and the girls are already with us. You’re just one more. Sure, it’ll be tight, but we’ll be fine. Nobody’ll mind if it’s a bit of a squeeze. We’re family. We’re in this together.”

“But this might take months to get resolved. My God, it could take years, couldn’t it?”

Tick…tick…tick…

Later, as Darius was about to leave, he said, “I want you to think hard about enemies, Harris. This isn’t all just a big mistake. This took planning, cunning, and contacts. Somewhere, you’ve got a smart and powerful enemy, whether you realize it or not. Think about it. If you come up with any names, that might help me.”

Saturday night, Harris shared a windowless four-bed cell with two alleged murderers and with a rapist who bragged about assaulting women in ten states. He slept only fitfully.

Sunday night, he slept much better, only because he was by then utterly exhausted. Dreams tormented him. All were nightmares, and in each, sooner or later, there was a clock ticking, ticking.

Monday, he was up at dawn, eager to be free. He was loath to let Darius and Bonnie tie up so much money to make his bail. Of course, he had no intention of fleeing jurisdiction, so they wouldn’t lose their funds. And he had developed a prison claustrophobia that, if it continued to worsen, would soon be intolerable.

Though his situation was dreadful, unthinkable, he nevertheless took some solace from the certainty that the worst was behind him. Everything had been taken away — or soon would be taken. He was at the bottom, and in spite of the long fight ahead, he had nowhere to go but up.

That was Monday morning. Early.

At Caliente, Nevada, the federal highway angled north, but at Panaca they left it for a state route that turned east toward the Utah border. The rural highway carried them into higher land that had a stark, cauldron-of-creation quality, almost pre-Mesozoic, even though it was forested with pine and spruce.

As crazy as it sounded, Spencer was nevertheless completely convinced by Valerie’s fear of satellite surveillance. All was blue above, with no monstrous mechanical presences hovering like something out of Star Wars, but he was uncomfortably aware of being watched, mile by lonely mile.

Regardless of the eye in the sky and the professional killers who might be en route to Utah to intercept them, Spencer was ravenous. Two small cans of Vienna sausages had not satisfied his hunger. He ate cheese crackers and washed them down with a Coke.

Behind the front seats, sitting erect in his narrow quarters, Rocky was so enthusiastic about Valerie’s way with a Rover that he expressed no interest in the cheese crackers. He grinned broadly. His head bobbed up and down, up and down.

“What’s with the dog?” she asked.

“He likes the way you drive. He has a need for speed.”

“Really? He’s such a frightened little guy most of the time.”

“I just found out about this speed thing myself,” Spencer said.

“Why’s he so afraid of everything?”

“He was abused before he wound up in the pound, before I brought him home. I don’t know what’s in his past.”

“Well, it’s nice to see him enjoying himself so much.”

Rocky’s head bobbed enthusiastically.

As tree shadows flickered across the roadway, Spencer said, “I don’t know what’s in your past, either.” Instead of responding, she eased down on the accelerator, but Spencer persisted: “Who are you running from? Now they’re my enemies too. I have a right to know.”

She stared intently at the road. “They don’t have a name.”

“What — a secret society of fanatical assassins, like in an old Fu Manchu novel?”

“More or less.” She was serious. “It’s a nameless government agency, financed by misdirected appropriations intended for lots of other programs. Also by hundreds of millions of dollars a year from cases involving the asset-forfeiture laws. Originally it was intended to be used to conceal the illegal actions and botched operations of government bureaus and agencies ranging from the post office to the FBI. A political pressure-release valve.”

“An independent cover-up squad.”

“Then if a reporter or anybody discovered evidence of a cover-up in a case that, say, the FBI had investigated, that cover-up couldn’t be traced to anyone in the FBI itself. This independent group covers the Bureau’s ass, so the Bureau never has to destroy evidence, bribe judges, intimidate witnesses, all that nasty stuff. The perpetrators are mysterious, nameless. No proof they’re government employees.”

The sky was still blue and cloudless, but the day seemed darker than it had been before.

Spencer said, “There’s enough paranoia in this concept for half a dozen Oliver Stone movies.”

“Stone sees the shadow of the oppressor but doesn’t understand who casts it,” she said. “Hell, even the average FBI or ATF agent is unaware this agency exists. It operates at a very high level.”

“How high?” he wondered.

“Its top officers answer to Thomas Summerton.”

Spencer frowned. “Is that name supposed to mean something?”

“He’s independently wealthy, a major political fund-raiser and wheeler-dealer. And currently the first deputy attorney general.”

“Of what?”

“Of the Kingdom of Oz — what do you think?” she said impatiently. “First Deputy Attorney General of the United States!”

“You’ve got to be putting me on.”

“Look it up in an almanac, read a newspaper.”

“I don’t mean you’re kidding about him being the first deputy. I mean, about him being involved in a conspiracy like this.”

“I know it for a fact. I know him. Personally.”

“But in that position, he’s the second most powerful person in the Department of Justice. The next link up the chain from him…”

“Curdles your blood, doesn’t it?”

“Are you saying the attorney general knows about this?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I hope not. I’ve never seen any evidence. But I don’t rule out anything anymore.”

Ahead, in the westbound lane, a gray Chevrolet van topped a hill and came toward them. Spencer didn’t like the looks of it. According to Valerie’s schedule, they weren’t likely to be in immediate danger for the better part of two hours yet. But she might be wrong. Maybe the agency didn’t have to fly in thugs from Vegas. Maybe it already had operatives in the area.

He wanted to tell her to turn off the road at once. They had to put trees between themselves and any fusillade of machine-gun fire directed at them. But there was nowhere to go: no connecting road in sight and a six-foot drop beyond the narrow shoulder.

He put his hand on the SIG 9mm pistol that lay in his lap.

As the oncoming Chevy passed the Rover, the driver gave them a look of astonished recognition. He was big. About forty. A broad, hard face. His eyes widened, and his mouth opened as he spoke to another man in the van with him, and then he was gone.

Spencer turned in his seat to look after the Chevy, but because of Rocky and half a ton of gear, he wasn’t able to see through the tailgate window. He peered in his side mirror and watched the van as it dwindled westward behind them. No brake lights. It wasn’t turning to follow the Rover.

Belatedly, he realized that the driver’s look of astonishment had nothing to do with recognition. The man simply had been amazed by how fast they were going. According to the speedometer, Valerie was pressing eighty-five miles per hour, thirty over the legal speed limit and fifteen or twenty too fast for the condition of the road.

Spencer’s heart was thudding. Not because of her driving.

Valerie met his eyes again. She was clearly aware of the fear that had gripped him. “I warned you that you didn’t really want to know who they are.” She turned her attention to the highway. “Kind of gives you the heebie-jeebies, doesn’t it?”

“Heebie-jeebies doesn’t quite describe it. I feel as if…”

“You’ve been given an ice-water enema?” she suggested.

“You find even this funny?”

“On one level.”

“Not me. Jesus. If the attorney general knows,” he said, “then the next link up the chain—”

“The President of the United States.”

“I don’t know what’s worse: that maybe the president and the attorney general sanction an agency like you described…or that it operates at such a high level without their knowledge. Because if they don’t know, and they stumble across its existence—”

“They’re dead meat.”

“And if they don’t know, then the people who’re running this country aren’t the people we elected.”

“I can’t say it goes as high as the attorney general. And I don’t have a clue about Oval Office involvement. I hope not. But—”

“But you don’t rule out anything anymore,” he finished for her.

“Not after what I’ve been through. These days, I don’t really trust anyone but God and myself. Lately I’m not so sure about God.”

Down in the concrete aural cavity, where the agency listened to Las Vegas with a multitude of secret ears, Roy Miro said good-bye to Eve Jammer.

There were no tears, no qualms at being separated and possibly never seeing each other again. They were confident of being together soon. Roy was still energized by the spiritual power of Kevorkian, felt all but immortal. For her part, Eve seemed never to have realized that she could die or that anything she truly wanted — such as Roy — could be denied her.

They stood close. He put down his attaché case to be able to hold her flawless hands, and he said, “I’ll try to be back here this evening, but there’s no guarantee.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said huskily. “But if you can’t make it, I’ll do something to remember you by, something that will remind me how exciting you are and make me even more eager to have you back.”

“What? Tell me what you’re going to do, so I can carry the image in my mind, an image of you to make the time away pass faster.”

He was surprised at how good he was at this love talk. He had always known that he was a shameless romantic, but he had never been sure that he would know how to act when and if he ever found a woman who measured up to his standards.

“I don’t want to tell you now,” she said playfully. “I want you to dream, wonder, imagine. Because when you get back and I tell you—then we’ll have the most thrilling night we’ve had yet.”

The heat pouring off Eve was incredible. Roy wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and melt in her radiance.

He kissed her on the cheek. His lips were chapped from the desert air, and her skin was hot. It was a deliciously dry kiss.

Turning away from her was agony. At the elevator, as the doors slid open, he looked back.

She was poised on one foot, the other raised. On the concrete floor was a black spider.

“Darling, no!” he said.

She looked up at him, baffled.

“A spider is a perfect little creation, Mother Nature at her best. A spinner of beautiful webs. A perfectly engineered killing machine. Its kind have been here since before the first man ever walked the earth. It deserves to live in peace.”

“I don’t like them much,” she said with the cutest little pout that Roy had ever seen.

“When I get back, we’ll examine one together, under a magnifying glass,” he promised. “You’ll see how perfect it is, how compact and efficient and functional. Once I show you how perfect arachnids are, they’ll never seem the same to you again. You’ll cherish them.”

“Well,” she said reluctantly, “all right,” and she carefully stepped over the spider instead of tramping on it.

Full of love, Roy rode the elevator to the top floor of the high rise. He climbed a service staircase to the roof.

Eight of the twelve men in the strike force had already boarded the first of the two customized executive helicopters. With a hard clatter of rotors, the craft lifted into the sky, up and away.

The second — and identical — chopper was hovering at the north side of the building. When the landing pad was clear, the helicopter descended to pick up the four other men, all of whom were in civilian clothes but were carrying duffel bags full of weapons and gear.

Roy boarded last and sat at the back of the cabin. The seat across the aisle and the two in the forward row were empty.

As the craft took off, he opened his attaché case and plugged the computer power and transmission cables into outlets in the back wall of the cabin. He divorced the cellular telephone from the workstation and put it on the seat across the aisle. He no longer needed it. Instead, he was using the chopper’s communications system. A phone keypad appeared right on the display screen. After putting a call through to Mama in Virginia, he identified himself as “Pooh,” provided a thumbprint, and accessed the satellite-surveillance center in the Las Vegas branch of the agency.

A miniature version of the scene on the surveillance-center wall screen appeared on Roy’s VDT. The Range Rover was moving at reckless speeds, which strongly indicated that the woman was behind the wheel. It was past Panaca, Nevada, bulleting toward the Utah border.

“Something like this agency was bound to come along sooner or later,” she said as they approached the Utah border. “By insisting on a perfect world, we’ve opened the door to fascism.”

“I’m not sure I follow that.” He wasn’t certain that he wanted to follow it, either. She spoke with unsettling conviction.

“There’ve been so many laws written by so many idealists with competing visions of Utopia that nobody can get through a single day without inadvertently and unknowingly breaking a score of them.”

“Cops are asked to enforce tens of thousands of laws,” Spencer agreed, “more than they can keep track of.”

“So they tend to lose a true sense of their mission. They lose focus. You saw it happening when you were a cop, didn’t you?”

“Sure. There’s been some controversy, several times, about LAPD intelligence operations that targeted legitimate citizens’ groups.”

“Because those particular groups at that particular time were on the ‘wrong’ side of sensitive issues. Government has politicized every aspect of life, including law-enforcement agencies, and all of us are going to suffer for it, regardless of our political views.”

“Most cops are good guys.”

“I know that. But tell me something: These days, the cops who rise to the top in the system…are they usually the best, or are they more often the ones who’re politically astute, the great schmoozers. Are they ass kissers who know how to handle a senator, a congressman, a mayor, a city councilman, and political activists of all stripes?”

“Maybe it’s always been that way.”

“No. We’ll probably never again see men like Elliot Ness in charge of anything — but there used to be a lot like him. Cops used to respect the brass they served. Is it always that way now?”

Spencer didn’t even have to answer that one.

Valerie said, “Now it’s the politicized cops who set agendas, allocate resources. It’s worst at the federal level. Fortunes are spent chasing violators of vaguely written laws against hate crimes, pornography, pollution, product mislabeling, sexual harassment. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see the world rid of every bigot, pornographer, polluter, snake-oil peddler, every jerk who harasses a woman. But at the same time, we’re living with the highest rates of murder, rape, and robbery of any society in history.”

The more passionately Valerie spoke, the faster she drove.

Spencer winced every time he looked away from her face to the road over which they hurtled. If she lost control, if they spun out and flew off the blacktop into those towering spruces, they wouldn’t have to worry about hit squads coming in from Las Vegas.

Behind them, however, Rocky was exuberant.

She said, “The streets aren’t safe. Some places, people aren’t even safe in their own homes. Federal law-enforcement agencies have lost focus. When they lose focus, they make mistakes and need to be bailed out of scandals to save politicians’ hides — cop politicians, as well as the appointed and elected kind.”

“Which is where this agency without a name comes in.”

“To sweep up the dirt, hide it under the rug — so no politicians have to put their fingerprints on the broom,” she said bitterly.

They crossed into Utah.

They were still over the outskirts of North Las Vegas, only a few minutes into the flight, when the copilot came to the rear of the passenger compartment. He was carrying a security phone with a built-in scrambler, which he plugged in and handed to Roy.

The phone had a headset, leaving Roy’s hands free. The cabin was heavily insulated, and the saucer-size earphones were of such high quality that he could hear no engine or rotor noise, although he could feel the separate vibrations of both through his seat.

Gary Duvall — the agent in northern California who had been assigned to look into the matter of Ethel and George Porth — was calling. But not from California. He was now in Denver, Colorado.

The assumption had been made that the Porths had already been living in San Francisco when their daughter had died and when their grandson had first come to live with them. That assumption had turned out to be false.

Duvall had finally located one of the Porths’ former neighbors in San Francisco, who had remembered that Ethel and George had moved there from Denver. By then their daughter had been dead a long time, and their grandson, Spencer, was sixteen.

“A long time?” Roy said doubtfully. “But I thought the boy lost his mother when he was fourteen, in the same car accident where he got his scar. That’s just two years earlier.”

“No. Not just two years. Not a car accident.”

Duvall had unearthed a secret, and he was clearly one of those people who relished being in possession of secrets. The childish I-know-something-that-you-don’t-know tone of his voice indicated that he would parcel out his treasured information in order to savor each little revelation.

Sighing, Roy leaned back in his seat. “Tell me.”

“I flew to Denver,” Duvall said, “to see if maybe the Porths had sold a house here the same year they bought one in San Francisco. They had. So I tried to find some Denver neighbors who remembered them. No problem. I found several. People don’t move as often here as in California. And they recalled the Porths and the boy because it was such sensational stuff, what happened to them.”

Sighing again, Roy opened the manila envelope in which he was still carrying some of the photographs that he had found in the shoe box in Spencer Grant’s Malibu cabin.

“The mother, Jennifer, she died when the boy was eight,” Duvall said. “And it wasn’t in any accident.”

Roy slid the four photos out of the envelope. The topmost was the snapshot taken when the woman was perhaps twenty. She was wearing a simple summer dress, dappled in sun and shadow, standing by a tree that was dripping clusters of white flowers.

“Jenny was a horsewoman,” Duvall said, and Roy remembered the other pictures with horses. “Rode them, bred them. The night she died, she went to a meeting of the county breeder’s association.”

“This was in Denver, somewhere around Denver?”

“No, that’s where her parents lived. Jenny’s home was in Vail, on a small ranch just outside Vail, Colorado. She showed up at that meeting of the breeder’s association, but she never came home again.”

The second photograph was of Jennifer and her son at the picnic table. She was hugging the boy. His baseball cap was askew.

Duvall said, “Her car was found abandoned. There was a manhunt for her. But she wasn’t anywhere near home. A week later, someone finally discovered her body in a ditch, eighty miles from Vail.”

As when he’d sat at the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin on Friday morning and had sorted through the photographs for the first time, Roy was overcome by a haunting sense that the woman’s face was familiar. Every word that Duvall spoke brought Roy closer to the enlightenment that had eluded him three mornings ago.

Duvall’s voice now came through the headphones with a strange, seductive softness: “She was found naked. Tortured, molested. Back then, it was the most savage murder anyone had ever seen. Even these days, when we’ve seen it all, the details would give you nightmares.”

The third snapshot showed Jennifer and the boy at poolside. She held one hand behind her son’s head, making horns with two fingers. The barn loomed in the background.

“Every indication was…she’d fallen victim to some transient,” said Duvall, pouring out the details in ever smaller drops as his flask of secrets slowly emptied. “A sociopath. Some guy with a car but no permanent address, roaming the interstate highways. It was a relatively new syndrome then, twenty-two years ago, but police had started to see it often enough to recognize it: the footloose serial killer, no ties to family or community, a shark out of his school.”

The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.

“The crime wasn’t solved for a while. For six years, in fact.”

The vibrations from the helicopter engine and rotors traveled through the frame of the craft, up Roy’s seat, into his bones, and carried with them a chill. A not unpleasant chill.

“The boy and his father continued to live on the ranch,” Duvall said. “There was a father.”

The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.

Roy turned up the fourth and final photograph.

The man in the shadows. That piercing stare.

“The boy’s name wasn’t Spencer. Michael,” Gary Duvall revealed.

The black-and-white studio photograph of the man in his middle thirties was moody: a fine study in contrasts, sunlight and darkness. Peculiar shadows, cast by unidentifiable objects beyond the frame, appeared to swarm across the wall, drawn by the subject, as if this were a man who commanded the night and all its powers.

“The boy’s name was Michael—”

“Ackblom.” Roy was at last able to recognize the subject in spite of the shadows that hid at least half the face. “Michael Ackblom. His father was Steven Ackblom, the painter. The murderer.”

“That’s right,” Duvall said, sounding disappointed that he had not been able to hold off that secret for another second or two.

“Refresh my memory. How many bodies did they eventually find?”

“Forty-one,” Duvall said. “And they’ve always thought there were more somewhere else.”

“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy quoted.

“You remember that?” Duvall said in surprise.

“It’s the only thing Ackblom said in court.”

“It’s just about the only thing he said to the cops or his lawyer or anyone. He didn’t feel that he’d done anything so wrong, but he acknowledged as how he understood why society thought he had. So he pleaded guilty, confessed, and accepted sentencing.”

“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy whispered.

As the Rover raced through the Utah morning, sunshine angled among the needled branches of the evergreens, flaring and flickering across the windshield. To Spencer, the swift play of bright light and shadow was as frenetic and disorienting as the pulsing of a stroboscopic lamp in a dark nightclub.

Even as he closed his eyes against that assault, he realized that he was bothered more by the association that each white flare triggered in his memory than he was by the sunshine itself. To his mind’s eye, every lambent glint and glimmer was the flash of hard, cold steel out of catacomb gloom.

He never ceased to be amazed and distressed by how completely the past remained alive in the present and by how the struggle to forget was an inducement to memory.

Tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand, he said, “Give me an example. Tell me about one of the scandals this nameless agency smoothed over.”

She hesitated. “David Koresh. The Branch Davidian compound. Waco, Texas.”

Her words startled him into opening his eyes even in the bright steel blades of sunshine and the dark-blood shadows. He stared at her in disbelief. “Koresh was a maniac!”

“No argument from me. He was four different kinds of maniac, as far as I know, and I sure wouldn’t disagree that the world is better off with him out of it.”

“Me neither.”

“But if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wanted him on weapons charges, they could’ve collared him at a bar in Waco, where he often went to hear a band he liked — and then they could’ve entered the compound, with him out of the way. Instead of storming his place with a SWAT team. There were children in there, for God’s sake.”

“Endangered children,” he reminded her.

“They sure were. They were burned to death.”

“Low blow,” he said accusingly, playing devil’s advocate.

“The government never produced any illegal weapons. At the trial they claimed to’ve found guns converted to full automatic fire, but there are lots of discrepancies. The Texas Rangers recovered only two guns for each sect member — all legal. Texas is a big gun state. Seventeen million people, over sixty million guns — four per resident. People in the sect had half the guns in the average Texas household.”

“Okay, this was in the newspapers. And the child-abuse stories turned out to have no apparent substance. That’s been reported — even if not widely. It’s a tragedy, for those dead kids and for the ATF. But what exactly did this nameless agency cover up? It was an ugly, very public mess for the government. Seems like they did a bad job making the ATF look good in this.”

“Oh, but they were brilliant at concealing the most explosive aspect of the case. An element in ATF loyal to Tom Summerton instead of to the current director intended to use Koresh as a test case for applying asset-forfeiture laws to religious organizations.”

As Utah rolled under their wheels and they drew nearer to Modena, Spencer continued to finger his scar while he thought about what she had revealed.

The trees had thinned out. The pines and spruces were too far from the highway to cast shadows across the pavement, and the sword dance of sunlight had ended. Yet Spencer noted that Valerie squinted at the road ahead and flinched slightly from time to time, as though she was threatened by her own blades of memory.

Behind them, Rocky seemed oblivious of the sobering weight of their conversation. Whatever its drawbacks, there were also many advantages to the canine condition.

At last Spencer said, “Targeting religious groups for asset seizure, even fringe figures like Koresh — that’s a major bombshell if it’s true. It shows utter contempt for the Constitution.”

“There are lots of cults and splinter sects these days, with millions in assets. That Korean minister — Reverend Moon? I’ll bet his church has hundreds of millions on U.S. soil. If any religious organization is involved in criminal activity, its tax-free status is revoked. Then if the ATF or FBI has a lien for asset forfeiture, it’ll be first in line, even ahead of the IRS, to grab everything.”

“A steady cash flow to buy more toys and better office furniture for the bureaus involved,” he said ruminatively. “And help to keep this nameless agency afloat. Even make it grow. While lots of local police forces — the guys who have to deal with real hard-core crime, street gangs, murder, rape — they’re all so starved for funds they can’t have pay raises or buy new equipment.”

As Modena passed by in four blinks of an eye, Valerie said, “And the accountability provisions of federal and state forfeiture laws are dismal. Seized assets are inadequately tracked — so a percentage just vanishes into the pockets of some of the officials involved.”

“Legalized theft.”

“No one’s ever caught, so it might as well be legal. Anyway, Summerton’s element in ATF planned to plant drugs, phony records of major drug sales, and lots of illegal weapons in the Mount Carmel Center — Koresh’s compound — after the success of the initial assault.”

“But the initial assault failed.”

“Koresh was more unstable than they realized. So innocent ATF agents were killed. And innocent children. It became a media circus. With everyone watching, Summerton’s goons couldn’t plant the drugs and guns. The operation was abandoned. But by then there was a paper trail inside ATF: secret memos, reports, files. All that had to be eliminated quickly. A couple of people were also eliminated, people who knew too much and might squeal.”

“And you’re saying this nameless agency cleaned up that mess.”

“I’m not saying they did. They really did.”

“How do you fit into all this? How do you know Summerton?”

She chewed on her lower lip and seemed to be thinking hard about how much she should reveal.

He said, “Who are you, Valerie Keene? Who are you, Hannah Rainey? Who are you, Bess Baer?”

“Who are you, Spencer Grant?” she asked angrily, but her anger was false.

“Unless I’m mistaken, I told you a name, a real and true name, when I was out of my head, last night or the night before.”

She hesitated, nodded, but kept her eyes on the road.

He found his voice diminishing to a softness barely louder than a murmur, and though he was unable to force himself to speak louder, he knew that she heard every word he said. “Michael Ackblom. It’s a name I’ve hated for more than half my life. It hasn’t even been my legal name for fourteen years, not since my grandparents helped me apply to a court to have it changed. And since the day the judge granted that change, it’s a name I’ve never spoken, not once in all that time. Until I told you.”

He fell into a silence.

She didn’t speak, as though in spite of the silence, she knew that he wasn’t finished.

The things that Spencer needed to say to her were more easily said in a liberating delirium like the one in which he’d made his previous revelations. Now he was inhibited by a reserve that resulted less from shyness than from an acute awareness that he was a damaged man and that she deserved someone finer than he could ever be.

“And even if I hadn’t been delirious,” he continued, “I would’ve told you anyway, sooner or later. Because I don’t want to keep any secrets from you.”

How difficult it sometimes could be to say the things that most deeply and urgently needed to be said. If given a choice, he wouldn’t have selected either that time or that place to say any of it: on a lonely Utah highway, watched and pursued, hurtling toward likely death or toward an unexpected gift of freedom — and in either case toward the unknown. Life chose its consequential moments, however, without the consultation of those who lived them. And the pain of speaking from the heart was always, in the end, more endurable than the suffering that was the price of silence.

He took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say to you…it’s so presumptuous. Worse than that. Foolish, ridiculous. For God’s sake, I can’t even describe what I feel for you because I don’t have the words. There might not even be words for it. All I know is that what I feel is wonderful, strange, different from anything I ever expected to feel, different from anything people are supposed to feel.”

She kept her attention on the highway, which allowed Spencer to look at her as he spoke. The sheen of her dark hair, the delicacy of her profile, and the strength of her beautiful sun-browned hands on the steering wheel encouraged him to continue. If she had met his eyes at that moment, however, he might have been too intimidated to express the rest of what he longed to say.

“Crazier still, I can’t tell you why I feel this way about you. It’s just there. Inside me. It’s a feeling that just sprang up. Not there one moment…but there the next, as if it had always been there. As if you’d always been there, or as if I’d spent my life waiting for you to be there.”

The more words that tumbled from him and the faster they came, the more he feared that he would never be able to find the right words. At least she seemed to know that she should not respond or, worse, encourage him. He was balanced so precariously on the high wire of revelation that the slightest blow, although unintended, would knock him off.

“I don’t know. I’m so awkward at this. The problem is I’m just fourteen years old when it comes to this, when it comes to emotion, frozen back there in adolescence, as inarticulate as a boy about this sort of thing. And if I can’t explain what I feel or why I feel it — then how can I expect you ever to feel anything in return? Jesus. I was right: ‘Presumptuous’ is the wrong word. ‘Foolish’ is better.”

He retreated to the safety of silence again. But he didn’t dare linger in silence, because he would soon lose the will to break it.

“Foolish or not, I’ve got hope now, and I’m going to hold onto it until you tell me to let go. I’ll tell you all about Michael Ackblom, the boy who used to be. I’ll tell you everything you want to know, everything you can bear to hear. But I want the same thing from you. I want to know all there is to know. No secrets. This is an end to secrets. Here, now, from this moment on, no secrets. Whatever we can have together — if we can have anything at all — has to be honest, true, clean, shining, like nothing I’ve known before.”

The speed of the Rover had fallen while he talked.

His latest silence was not just another pause between painful attempts to express himself, and she seemed to be aware of its new quality. She looked at him. Her lovely, dark eyes shone with the warmth and kindness to which he had responded in The Red Door less than a week ago, when he’d first met her.

When the warmth threatened to well into tears, she turned her attention to the road once more.

Since encountering her again in the arroyo on Friday night, he had not until now seen quite that same exceptionally kind and open spirit; of necessity, it had been masked by doubt, by caution. She hadn’t trusted him anymore, after he’d followed her home from work. Her life had taught her to be cynical and suspicious of others, as surely as his life had taught him to be afraid of what he might one day find crouched and waiting within himself.

She became aware that she’d let their speed fall. She tramped on the accelerator, and the Rover surged forward.

Spencer waited.

Trees crowded close to the highway again. Filleting blades of light flashed across the glass, spattering quick sprays of shadows behind them.

“My name,” she said, “is Eleanor. People used to call me Ellie. Ellie Summerton.”

“Not…his daughter?”

“No. Thank God, no. His daughter-in-law. My maiden name was Golding. Eleanor Golding. I was married to Tom’s son, only child. Danny Summerton. Danny’s dead now. Been dead for fourteen months.” Her voice was pulled between anger and sadness, and often the balance in the contest shifted in the middle of a word, stretching it and distorting it. “Some days it seems he’s only been gone a week or so, and some days it feels like he’s been gone forever. Danny knew too much. And he was going to talk. He was killed to shut him up.”

“Summerton…killed his own son?”

Her voice became so cold that anger seemed to have won forever against the insistent pull of sadness. “He’s even worse than that. He ordered someone else to do it. My mom and dad were killed too…just because they happened to be in the way when the agency men came for Danny.”

Her voice was colder than ever, and she was whiter than pale. During his days as a policeman, Spencer had seen a few faces as white as Ellie’s was at that moment — but they had all been faces in one morgue or another.

“I was there. I escaped,” she said. “I was lucky. That’s what I’ve been telling myself ever since. Lucky.”

“…but Michael had no peace, even once he’d gone to Denver to live with his grandparents, the Porths,” Gary Duvall said. “Every kid in school knew the name Ackblom. An unusual name. And the father was a famous artist even before he became a famous murderer, killed his wife and forty-one others. Besides, the kid’s picture had been in all the papers. Boy hero. He was an object of unending curiosity. Everyone stared. And every time it seemed the media would leave him alone, there would be another flare-up of interest, and they’d be hounding him again, even though he was just a kid, for God’s sake.”

“Journalists,” Roy said scornfully. “You know what they’re like. Cold bastards. Only the story matters. They have no compassion.”

“The kid had been through a similar hell, unwanted notoriety, when he’d been eight years old, after his mother’s body was found in that ditch. This time it was tearing him apart. The grandparents were retired, could live anywhere, so after almost two years they decided to get Michael out of Colorado altogether. A new city, new state, new start. That’s what they told neighbors — but they wouldn’t tell anyone where they were going. They uprooted themselves and left their friends for the sake of the boy. They must’ve figured that was the only way he’d have a chance to make a normal life for himself.”

“New city, new state, new start — and even a new name,” Roy said. “They legally changed it, didn’t they?”

“Right here in Denver, before they moved away. Given the circumstances, the court record of the change is sealed, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But I’ve reviewed it. Michael Steven Ackblom became Spencer Grant, no middle name or even initial. An odd choice. It seems to have been a name the boy came up with himself, but I don’t know where he got it.”

“From old movies he liked.”

“Huh?”

“Good work. Thanks, Gary.”

Roy disconnected with the touch of a button, but he didn’t take off the telephone headset.

He stared at the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The man in the shadows.

Engines, rotors, powerful desires, and sympathy for the devil vibrated in Roy’s bones. He shivered with a not unpleasant chill.

They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died.

Here and there in the gloom beneath the trees, where shadows held back the sun through most or all of the day, patches of white snow shone like bone in the carcass of the earth.

The true desert was behind them. Winter had come to this area, had been driven back by an early thaw, and would no doubt come again before true spring. But now the sky was blue, on a day when Spencer would have welcomed bitterly cold wind and dense swirls of snow to blind all eyes above.

“Danny was a brilliant software designer,” Ellie said. “He’d been a computer nerd since junior high. Me too. Since the eighth grade, I’ve lived and breathed computers. We met in college. My being a hacker, deep into that world, which is mostly guys — that’s what drew Danny to me.”

Spencer remembered how Ellie had looked as she’d sat on desert sand; at the edge of the morning sun, bent over a computer, up-linking to satellites, dazzling in her expertise, her limpid eyes alight with the pleasure that she got from being so skillful at the task, with a curve of hair like a raven’s wing against her cheek.

Whatever she might believe, her status as a hacker had not been the only thing that had drawn Danny to her. She was compelling for many reasons, but most of all because she seemed, at all times, more alive than most other people.

Her attention was on the highway, but she was clearly having difficulty treating the past with detachment and was struggling not to become lost in it. “After graduate school, Danny had job offers, but his father was relentless about him coming to work at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Back then, years before he went to the Department of Justice, Tom Summerton was Director of the ATF.”

“But that was in a different administration.”

“Oh, in Tom’s case, it doesn’t matter much who’s in power in Washington, either party, left or right. He’s always appointed to an important position in what they laughingly call ‘public service.’ Twenty years ago, he inherited over one billion dollars, which is now probably two, and he gives huge amounts to both parties. He’s clever enough to position himself as nonpartisan, a statesman rather than a politician, a man who knows how to get things done, no ideological axe to grind, only wants to make a better world.”

“That’s a hard act to pull off,” Spencer said.

“Easy for him. Because he believes in nothing. Except himself. And power. Power is his food, drink, love, sex. Using power is the thrill, not forwarding the ideals it serves. In Washington, a lust for power keeps the devil busy buying souls, but Tom is so ambitious he must have collected a record price for his.”

Responding to the simmering fury in the undertone of her voice, Spencer said, “Did you always hate him?”

“Yes,” Ellie said forthrightly. “Quietly despised the stinking sonofabitch. I didn’t want Danny to work at ATF, because he was too innocent, naive, too easily taken in by his old man.”

“What did he do there?”

“Developed Mama. The computer system, the software to run it — which they later called Mama. It was supposed to be the biggest, baddest anticrime data resource in the world, a system that could process billions of bytes at record speeds, link together federal and state and local law enforcement with ease, eliminate duplication of effort, and finally give the good guys an edge.”

“Very stirring.”

“Isn’t it? And Mama turned out awesome. But Tom never intended her to serve any legit branch of government. He used ATF resources to develop her, yeah, but his intention all along was to make Mama the core of this nameless agency.”

“So Danny realized it had gone sour?”

“Maybe he knew but didn’t want to admit. He stayed with it.”

“How long?”

“Too long,” she said sadly. “Until his dad had left the ATF and moved to the Department of Justice, a full year after Mama and the agency were in place. But eventually he accepted that Mama’s entire purpose was to make it possible for the government to commit crimes and not be caught. He was eaten alive with anger, self-disgust.”

“And when he wanted out, they wouldn’t let him go.”

“We didn’t realize there was no leaving. I mean, Tom is a piece of walking shit, but he was still Danny’s father. And Danny was his only child. Danny’s mother died when he was young. Cancer. So it seemed like Danny was all Tom had.”

Following the violent death of his own mother, Spencer and his father also were drawn closer in the aftermath. Or so it had seemed. Until a certain night in July.

Ellie said, “Then it became obvious — this work with the agency was mandatory lifetime employment.”

“Like being the personal attorney to a Mafia don.”

“The only way out was to go public, blow the whole dirty business wide open. Secretly Danny prepared his own file of Mama’s software and a history of the cover-ups the agency was involved with.”

“You realized the danger?”

“On one level. But deep down inside, I think both of us, to different degrees, had trouble believing Tom would have Danny killed. We were twenty-eight, for God’s sake. Death was an abstract concept to us. At twenty-eight, who really believes he’s ever going to die?”

“And then the hit men showed up.”

“No SWAT team. More subtle. Three men on Thanksgiving evening. The year before last. My folks’ place in Connecticut. My dad is…was a doctor. A doctor’s life, especially in a small town, isn’t his own. Even on Thanksgiving. So…near the end of dinner, I was in the kitchen…getting the pumpkin pie…when the doorbell rang….”

For once, Spencer didn’t want to look at her lovely face. He closed his eyes.

Ellie took a deep breath and went on: “The kitchen was at the end of the hall from the foyer. I pushed the swinging door aside to see who our visitor was, just as my mother opened…just as she opened the front door.”

Spencer waited for her to tell it at her own pace. If he had made the correct assumptions about the sequence of events since that door had been opened, fourteen months in the past, this was the first time that she had described those murders to anyone. Between then and now, she had been on the run, unable to fully trust another human being and unwilling to risk the lives of innocent people by involving them in her personal tragedy.

“Two men at the front door. Nothing special about them. Could have been Dad’s patients, for all I knew. First one was wearing a red-plaid hunting jacket. He said something to Mom, then came inside, pushing her back, a gun in his hand. Never heard a shot. Silencer. But I saw…a spray of blood…the back of her head blowing out.”

With his eyes closed against the sight of Ellie’s face, Spencer could clearly visualize that Connecticut foyer and the horror that she described.

“Dad and Danny were in the dining room. I screamed, ‘Run, get away.’ I knew it was the agency. I didn’t go out the rear door. Instinct, maybe. I’d have been killed on the back porch. Ran into the laundry room off the kitchen, then into the garage and out the side garage door. The house is on two acres, lots of lawn, but I got to the fence between our place and the Doyle house. I was going over it, almost over it, when a bullet ricocheted off the wrought iron. Somebody shooting from behind our house. Another silencer. No sound but the slug smacking iron. I was frantic, ran across the Doyles’ yard. Nobody home, away at their kids’ place for the holiday, windows dark. I ran through a gate, into St. George’s Wood. Presbyterian church sits on six or eight acres, surrounded by woods — mostly pines, sycamores. Ran a ways. Stopped in the trees. Looked back. Thought one of them would be after me. But I was alone. I guess I’d been too fast or maybe they didn’t want to chase me in public, waving guns. And just then snow started falling, just then, big fat flakes….”

Behind his closed eyes, Spencer could see her on that distant night, in that faraway place: alone in darkness, without a coat, shivering, breathless, terrified. Abruptly, torrents of white flakes spiraled through the bare limbs of the sycamores, and the timing made the snow seem more than merely a sudden change of weather, gave it the significance of an omen.

“There was something uncanny about it…sort of eerie…,” Ellie said, confirming what Spencer sensed that she had felt and what he himself might have felt under those circumstances. “I don’t know…can’t explain it…the snow was like a curtain coming down, a stage curtain, the end of an act, end of something. I knew then they were all dead. Not just my mother. Dad and Danny too.”

Her voice trembled with grief. Talking for the first time about those killings, she had reopened the scabs that had formed over her raw pain, as he had known she would.

Reluctantly he opened his eyes and looked at her.

She was beyond pale now. Ashen. Tears shimmered in her eyes, but her cheeks were still dry.

“Want me to drive?” he asked.

“No. Better if I do. Keeps me focused here and now…instead of too much back then.”

A roadside sign indicated that they were eight miles from the town of Newcastle.

Spencer stared out the side window at a landscape that seemed barren in spite of the many trees and murky in spite of the sunshine.

Ellie said, “Then in the street, beyond the trees, a car roared by, really moving. It went under a streetlamp, and I was close enough to see the man in the front passenger seat. Red hunting jacket. The driver, one more in the backseat — three altogether. After they went past, I ran through the trees, toward the street, going to shout for help, for the police, but I stopped before I got there. I knew who’d done it…the agency, Tom. But no proof.”

“What about Danny’s files?”

“Back in Washington. A set of diskettes hidden in our apartment, another set in a bank safe-deposit box. And I knew Tom must already have both sets, or he wouldn’t have been so…bold. If I went to the cops, if I surfaced anywhere, Tom would get me. Sooner or later. It would look like an accident or suicide. So I went back to the house. Back through St. George’s Wood, the gate at the Doyle house, over the iron fence. At our house, I almost couldn’t force myself through the kitchen…the hall…to Mom in the foyer. Even after all this time, when I try to picture my mother’s face, I can’t see it without the wound, the blood, the bone structure distorted by the bullets. Those bastards haven’t even left me with a clean memory of my mother’s face…just that awful, bloody thing.”

For a while she couldn’t go on.

Aware of Ellie’s anguish, Rocky mewled softly. He was no longer bobbing and grinning. He huddled in his narrow space, head down, both ears limp. His love of speed was outweighed by his sensitivity to the woman’s pain.

Two miles from Newcastle, Ellie at last continued: “And in the dining room, Danny and Dad were dead, shot repeatedly in the head, not to be sure they were dead…just for the sheer savagery. I had to…to touch the bodies, take the money out of their wallets. I was going to need every dollar I could get. Raided Mom’s purse, jewelry box. Opened the safe in Dad’s den, took his coin collection. Jesus, I felt like a thief, worse than a thief…a grave robber. I didn’t pack my suitcase, just left with what I was wearing, partly because I started to get spooked that the killers would come back. But also because…it was so silent in that house, just me and the bodies and the snow falling past the windows, so quiet, as if not only Mom and Dad and Danny were dead, but as if the whole world had died, the end of everything, and I was the last one left, alone.”

Newcastle was a repeat of Modena. Small. Isolated. It offered no place to hide from people who could look down on the whole world as if they were gods.

Ellie said, “I left the house in our Honda, Danny’s and mine, but I knew I had to get rid of it in a few hours. When Tom realized I hadn’t gone to the cops, the whole agency would be looking for me, and they’d have a description of the car, the plate number.”

He looked at her again. Her eyes were no longer watery. She had repressed her grief with a fierce weight of anger.

He said, “What do the police think happened in that house, to Danny and your folks? Where do they think you are? Not Summerton’s people. I mean the real police.”

“I suspect Tom intended to make it look as if a well-organized group of terrorists wasted us as a way of punishing him. Oh, he could’ve milked that for sympathy! And used the sympathy to weasel more power for himself inside the Department of Justice.”

“But with you gone, they couldn’t plant their phony evidence, because you might show up to refute it.”

“Yeah. Later, the media decided that Danny and my folks…well, you know, it was one of those deplorable acts of senseless violence we see so often, blah-blah-blah. Terrible, sick, blah-blah-blah, but only a three-day story. As for me…obviously I’d been taken away, raped and murdered, my body left where it might never be found.”

“That was fourteen months ago?” he asked. “And the agency’s still this hot to get you?”

“I have some significant codes they don’t know I have, things Danny and I memorized…a lot of knowledge. I don’t have hard proof against them. But I know everything about them, which makes me dangerous enough. Tom will never stop looking, as long as he lives.”

Like a great black wasp, the helicopter droned across the Nevada badlands.

Roy was still wearing the telephone headset with the saucer-size earphones, blocking out the engine and rotor noise to concentrate on the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The loudest sound in his private realm was the slow, heavy thudding of his heart.

When Ackblom’s secret work had been exposed, Roy had been only sixteen years old and still confused about the meaning of life and about his own place in the world. He was drawn to beautiful things: the paintings of Childe Hassam and so many others, classical music, antique French furniture, Chinese porcelain, lyrical poetry. He was always a happy boy when alone in his room, with Beethoven or Bach on the stereo, gazing at the color photographs in a book about Fabergé eggs, Paul Storr silver, or Sung Dynasty porcelains. Likewise, he was happy when he was wandering alone through an art museum. He was seldom happy around people, however, although he wanted desperately to have friends and to be liked. In his expansive but guarded heart, young Roy was convinced that he had been born to make an important contribution to the world, and he knew that when he discovered what his contribution would be, he then would become widely admired and loved. Nevertheless, at sixteen and bedeviled by the impatience of youth, he was enormously frustrated by the need to wait for his purpose and his destiny to be revealed to him.

He had been fascinated by the newspaper accounts of the Ackblom tragedy, because in the mystery of the artist’s double life, he had sensed a resolution to his own deep confusion. He acquired two books with color plates of Ackblom’s art — and responded powerfully to the work. Though Ackblom’s pictures were beautiful, even ennobling, Roy’s enthusiasm wasn’t aroused only by the paintings themselves. He was also affected by the artist’s inner struggle, which he inferred from the paintings and which he believed to be similar to his own.

Basically, Steven Ackblom was preoccupied with two subjects and produced two types of paintings.

Although only in his mid-thirties, he had been obsessed enough to produce an enormous body of work, consisting half of exceptionally beautiful still lifes. Fruit, vegetables, stones, flowers, pebbles, the contents of a sewing box, buttons, tools, plates, a collection of old bottles, bottle caps — humble and exalted objects alike were rendered in remarkable detail, so realistic that they seemed three-dimensional. In fact, each item attained a hyperreality, appeared to be more real than the object that had served as the model for it, and possessed an eerie beauty. Ackblom never resorted to the forced beauty of sentimentality or unrestrained romanticism; his vision was always convincing, moving, and sometimes breathtaking.

The subjects of the remainder of the paintings were people: portraits of individuals and of groups containing three to seven subjects. More frequently, they were faces rather than full figures, but when they were figures, they were invariably nudes. Sometimes Ackblom’s men, women, and children were ethereally beautiful on the surface, though their comeliness was always tainted by a subtle but terrible pressure within them, as if some monstrous possessing spirit might explode from their fragile flesh at any moment. This pressure distorted a feature here and there, not dramatically but just enough to rob them of perfect beauty. And sometimes the artist portrayed ugly — even grotesque — individuals, within whom there was also fearful pressure, though its effect was to force a feature here and there to conform to an ideal of beauty. Their malformed countenances were all the more chilling for being, in some aspects, lightly touched by grace. As a consequence of the conflict between inner and outer realities, the people in both types of portraits were enormously expressive, although their expressions were more mysterious and haunting than any that enlivened the faces of real human beings.

Seizing on those portraits, the news media had been quick to make the most obvious interpretation. They claimed that the artist — himself a handsome man — had been painting his own demon within, crying out for help or issuing a warning regarding his true nature.

Although he was only sixteen, Roy Miro understood that Ackblom’s paintings were not about the artist himself, but about the world as he perceived it. Ackblom had no need to cry out for help or to warn anyone, for he didn’t see himself as demonic. Taken as a whole, what his art said was that no human being could ever achieve the perfect beauty of even the humblest object in the inanimate world.

Ackblom’s great paintings helped young Roy to understand why he was delighted to be alone with the artistic works of human beings, yet was often unhappy in the company of human beings themselves. No work of art could be flawless, because an imperfect human being had created it. Yet art was the distillation of the best in humanity. Therefore, works of art were closer to perfection than those who created them.

Favoring the inanimate over the animate was all right. It was acceptable to value art above people.

That was the first lesson he learned from Steven Ackblom.

Wanting to know more about the man, Roy had discovered that the artist was, not surprisingly, extremely private and seldom spoke to anyone for publication. Roy managed to find two interviews. In one, Ackblom held forth with great feeling and compassion about the misery of the human condition. One quotation seemed to leap from the text: “Love is the most human of all emotions because love is messy. And of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.”

Ackblom had pleaded guilty to the murders of his wife and forty-one others, rather than face a lengthy trial that he couldn’t win. In the courtroom, entering his plea, the painter had disgusted and angered the judge by saying, of his forty-two victims: “They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died.”

Roy began to understand what Ackblom had been doing in those rooms under the barn. In subjecting his victims to torture, the artist was trying to focus them toward a moment of perfection, when they would briefly shine — even though still alive — with a beauty equal to that of inanimate objects.

Purity and beauty were the same thing. Pure lines, pure forms, pure light, pure color, pure sound, pure emotion, pure thought, pure faith, pure ideals. However, human beings were capable of achieving purity, in any thought or endeavor, only rarely and only in extreme circumstances — which made the human condition pitiable.

That was the second lesson he learned from Steven Ackblom.

For a few years, Roy’s heartfelt pity for humanity intensified and matured. One day shortly after his twentieth birthday, as a bud suddenly blossoms into a full-blown rose, his pity became compassion. He considered the latter to be a purer emotion than the former. Pity often entailed a subtle element of disgust for the object of pity or a sense of superiority on the part of the person who felt pity for another. But compassion was an unpolluted, crystalline, piercing empathy for other people, a perfect understanding of their suffering.

Guided by compassion, acting on frequent opportunities to make the world a better place, confident of the purity of his motivation, Roy had then become a more enlightened man than Steven Ackblom. He had found his destiny.

Now, thirteen years later, sitting in the back of the executive helicopter as it carried him toward Utah, Roy smiled at the photograph of the artist in swarming shadows.

Funny how everything in life seemed connected to everything else. A forgotten moment or half-remembered face from the past could suddenly become important again.

The artist had never been so central a figure in Roy’s life that he could have been called a mentor or even an inspiration. Roy had never believed that Ackblom was a madman — as the media had portrayed him — but saw him as merely misguided. The best answer to the hopelessness of the human condition was not to grant one moment of pure beauty to each imperfect soul by the elevating effect of severe pain. That was a pathetically transient triumph. The better answer was to identify those most in need of release — then, with dignity and compassion and merciful speed, set them free of their imperfect human condition.

Nevertheless, at a crucial time, the artist had unknowingly taught a few vital truths to a confused boy. Though Steven Ackblom was a misguided and tragic figure, Roy owed him a debt.

It was ironic — and an intriguing example of cosmic justice — that Roy should be the one to rid the world of the troubled and thankless son who had betrayed Ackblom. The artist’s quest for human perfection had been misguided but, in Roy’s view, well meaning. Their sorry world would inch closer to an ideal state with Michael (now Spencer) removed from it. And pure justice seemed to require that Spencer be removed only subsequent to being subjected to prolonged and severe pain, in a manner that would adequately honor his visionary father.

As Roy took off the telephone headset, he heard the pilot making an announcement on the public-address system. “…according to Vegas control, allowing for the target’s current speed, we’re approximately sixteen minutes from rendezvous. Sixteen minutes to the target.”

A sky like blue glass.

Seventeen miles to Cedar City.

They began to encounter more traffic on the two-lane highway. Ellie used the horn to encourage slow vehicles to get out of her way. When the drivers were stubborn, she took nail-biting risks to get around them in no-passing zones or even passed them to the right when the shoulder of the highway was wide enough.

Their speed dropped because of the interference that the traffic posed, but the need for increased recklessness made it seem as though they were actually going faster than ever. Spencer held on to one edge of his seat. In the back, Rocky was bobbing his head again.

“Even without proof,” Spencer suggested, “you could go to the press. You could point them in the right direction, put Summerton on the defensive—”

“Tried that twice. First a New York Times reporter. Contacted her on her office computer, had an on-line dialogue and set up a meeting at an Indian restaurant. Made it clear if she told anyone, anyone at all, my life and hers wouldn’t be worth spit. I got there four hours early, watched the place with binoculars from the roof of a building across the street, to be sure she came alone and there wasn’t any obvious stakeout. I figured I’d make her wait, go in half an hour late, take the extra time to watch the street. But fifteen minutes after she arrived…the restaurant blew up. Gas explosion, so the police said.”

“The reporter?”

“Dead. Along with fourteen other people in there.”

“Dear God.”

“Then, a week later, a guy from the Washington Post was supposed to meet me in a public park. I actually set it up with a cellular phone from another rooftop overlooking that site, but not obvious enough to be seen. Made it for six hours later. About an hour and a half go by, and then a water department truck pulls up near the park. The work crew opens a manhole, sets out some safety cones and sawhorses with flashers on them.”

“But they weren’t really city workers.”

“I had a battery-powered multiband scanner with me on that roof. Picked up the frequency they were using to coordinate the phony work crew with a phony lunch wagon on the other side of the park.”

“You are something else,” he said admiringly.

“Three agents in the park, too, one pretending he’s a panhandler, two pretending to be park-service employees doing maintenance. Then the time comes and the reporter shows up, walks to the monument where I told him we’d meet — and the sonofabitch is wired too! I hear him muttering to them that he doesn’t see me anywhere, what should he do. And they’re calming him, telling him it’s cool, he should just wait. The little weasel must’ve been in Tom Summerton’s pocket, called him up right after talking to me.”

Ten miles west of Cedar City, they pulled behind a Dodge pickup that was doing ten miles per hour under the legal limit. At the rear window of the cab, two rifles hung in a rack.

The pickup driver let Ellie pound on the horn for a while, mule-stubborn about pulling over to let her by.

“What’s wrong with this jerk?” she fumed. She gave him more horn, but he played deaf. “As far as he knows, we have someone dying in here, needs a doctor fast.”

“Hell, these days, we could be a couple of lunatic dopers just spoiling for a shootout.”

The man in the pickup was moved by neither compassion nor fear. Finally he responded to the horn by putting his arm out the window and flipping Ellie the finger.

Passing to the left was impossible at the moment. Visibility was limited, and what highway they could see was occupied by a steady stream of oncoming traffic.

Spencer looked at his watch. They had only fifteen minutes left from the two-hour safety margin that Ellie had estimated.

The man in the pickup, however, seemed to have all the time in the world.

“Jackass,” she said, and whipped the Rover to the right, trying to get around the slow vehicle by using the shoulder of the highway.

When she pulled even with the Dodge, it accelerated to match her speed. Twice Ellie pumped more juice to the Rover, twice it leaped forward, and twice the pickup matched her new pace.

The other driver repeatedly glanced away from the road to glare at them. He was in his forties. Under a baseball cap, his face revealed all the intelligence of a shovel.

Clearly, he intended to pace Ellie until the shoulder narrowed and she was forced to fall in behind him again.

Shovelface didn’t know what kind of woman he was dealing with, of course, but Ellie promptly showed him. She pulled the Rover to the left, bashing the pickup hard enough to startle the driver into shifting his foot off the accelerator. The pickup lost speed. The Rover shot ahead. Shovelface jammed the pedal again, but he was too late: Ellie swung the Rover onto the pavement, in front of the Dodge.

As the Rover lurched left then right, Rocky yelped with surprise and fell onto his side. He scrambled into a sitting position again and snorted in what might have been either embarrassment or delight.

Spencer looked at his watch. “You think they’ll hook up with local cops before they come after us?”

“No. They’ll try to keep locals out of it.”

“Then what should we be looking for?”

“If they fly in from Vegas — or anywhere else — I think they’ll be in a chopper. More maneuverability, flexibility. With satellite tracking, they can pinpoint the Rover, come right in over us, and blow us off the highway, if they get a chance.”

Leaning forward, Spencer peered through the windshield at the threatening blue sky.

A horn blared behind them.

“Damn,” Ellie said, glancing at her side mirror.

Checking the mirror on his side, Spencer saw that the Dodge had caught up with them. The angry driver was pounding his horn as Ellie had pounded hers earlier.

“We don’t need this right now,” she worried.

“Okay,” Spencer said, “so let’s see if he’ll take a rain check on a shootout. If we survive the agency, then we’ll come back and give him a fair whack at us.”

“Think he’d go for that?”

“Seems like a reasonable man.”

Pressing the Rover as hard as ever, Ellie managed to glance at Spencer and smile. “You’re getting the attitude.”

“It’s contagious.”

Here and there, scattered along both sides of the highway, were businesses, houses. This wasn’t quite yet Cedar City, but they were definitely back in civilization.

The slug in the Dodge pickup pounded on the horn with such enthusiasm that every blast must have been sending a thrill through his groin.

On the display screen in the open attaché case, relayed from Las Vegas, was the view from Earthguard, enormously magnified and enhanced, looking down on the state highway just west of Cedar City.

The Range Rover was pulling one reckless stunt after another. Sitting in the back of the chopper, with the open case on his lap, Roy was riveted by the performance, which was like something out of an action movie, though seen from one monotonous angle.

No one drove that fast, weaving lane to lane, sometimes facing down oncoming traffic, unless he was drunk or being pursued. This driver wasn’t drunk. There was nothing sloppy about the way the Rover was being handled. It was rash, daredevil driving, but it was also skillful. And from all appearances, the Rover was not being chased.

Roy was finally convinced that the woman was behind the wheel of that vehicle. After being alarmed by the satellite trace-back to her computer, she would never take comfort from the fact that no pursuit car was racing up her tailpipe. She knew that they either would be waiting ahead for her at a roadblock or would take her out from the air. Before either of those things happened, she was trying to get into a town, where she could blend into a busy flow of traffic and use whatever architecture of the urban landscape might help her to escape their eyes.

Cedar City wasn’t nearly large enough, of course, to provide her with the opportunities she needed. Evidently she underestimated the power and clarity of surveillance from orbit.

At the front of the chopper’s passenger compartment, the four strike force officers were checking their weapons. They distributed spare magazines of ammunition in their pockets.

Civilian clothing was the uniform for this mission. They wanted to get in, nail the woman, capture Grant, and get out before Cedar City law enforcement showed up. If they became involved with the locals, they would only have to deceive them, and deception involved the risk of making mistakes and being unmasked — especially when they had no idea how much Grant knew and what he might say if the cops insisted on talking to him. Besides, dealing with locals also took too much damn time. Both choppers were marked with phony registration numbers to mislead observers. As long as the men wore no identifying clothing or gear, witnesses would have little or nothing useful to tell the police later.

Every member of the strike force, including Roy, was protected by a bullet-resistant body vest under his clothes and was carrying Drug Enforcement Administration ID that could be produced quickly to placate the local authorities if necessary. If they were lucky, however, they would be back in the air three minutes after touching down, with Spencer Grant in custody, with the woman’s body, but with no wounded of their own.

The woman was finished. She was still breathing, still had a heartbeat, but in fact she was already stone dead.

On the computer in Roy’s lap, Earthguard 3 showed the target drastically slowing. Then the Rover passed another vehicle, perhaps a pickup, on the shoulder of the highway. The pickup increased its speed, too, and suddenly a drag race seemed to be under way.

Frowning, Roy squinted at the display screen.

The pilot announced that they were five minutes from the target.

Cedar City.

There was too much traffic to facilitate their escape, and too little to allow them to blend in and confuse Earthguard. She was also hindered by being on streets with gutters instead of on open highways with wide shoulders. And traffic lights. And that stupid pickup jockey insistently pounding, pounding, pounding his horn.

Ellie turned right at an intersection, frantically surveying both sides of the street. Fast-food restaurants. Service stations. Convenience stores. She had no idea exactly what she was looking for. She only knew that she would recognize it when she saw it: a place or situation that they could turn to their advantage.

She had hoped for time to scout the territory and find a way to get the Rover under cover: a grove of evergreens with a dense canopy of branches, a large parking garage, any place in which they might evade the eyes in the sky and leave the Rover without being spotted. Then they could either buy or heist new wheels, and from orbit they would again be indistinguishable from other vehicles on the highway.

She supposed she would earn a bed of nails in Hades for sure if she killed the creep in the Dodge pickup — but the satisfaction might be worth the price. He hammered on the horn as if he were a confused and angry ape determined to beat the damned thing until it stopped bleating at him.

He also tried to get around them during every break in oncoming traffic, but Ellie swerved to block him. The passenger side of the pickup was badly scraped and crumpled from when she had bashed into it with the Rover, so the guy probably figured that he had nothing to lose by pulling alongside and forcing her to the curb.

She couldn’t let him do that. They were quickly running out of time. Having to deal with the ape would consume precious minutes.

“Tell me it’s not,” Spencer shouted above the blaring horn.

“Not what?”

Then she realized that he was pointing through the windshield. Something in the sky. To the southwest. Two large executive-style helicopters. One behind and to the left of the other. Both black. The polished hulls and windows glistened as if sheathed with ice, and the morning sun shimmered off the whirling rotors. The two craft were like huge insects out of an apocalyptic 1950s science fiction movie about the dangers of nuclear radiation. Less than two miles away.

She saw a U-shaped strip shopping center ahead on the left. Skating on the fragile ice of instinct, she accelerated, hung a hard left through a gap in traffic, and drove into a short access road that served the big parking lot.

Near her right ear, the dog was panting with excitement, and it sounded uncannily like soft laughter: Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!

Spencer still had to shout, because the horn-blower remained close behind them: “What’re we doing?”

“Got to get new wheels.”

“Out in the open?”

“Only choice.”

“They’ll see us make the switch.”

“Create a diversion.”

“How?”

“I’m thinking,” she said.

“I was afraid of that.”

With only the lightest application of the brakes, she turned right and then sped southward across the blacktop lot, instead of approaching the stores to the east.

The pickup stayed close behind them.

In the southwest sky, the two helicopters were no more than one mile away. They had altered course to follow the Range Rover. They were descending as they approached.

The anchor store in the U-shaped complex was a supermarket in the center of the middle wing. Beyond the glass front and glass doors, the cavernous interior was filled with hard fluorescent light. Flanking that store were smaller businesses, selling clothing and books and records and health foods. Other small stores filled the two end wings.

The hour was still so early that most of the shops had just opened. Only the supermarket had been doing business for any length of time, and there were few parked cars other than the twenty or thirty clustered in front of that central enterprise.

“Gimme the pistol,” she said urgently. “Put it on my lap.”

Spencer gave the SIG to her, and then he picked up the Micro Uzi from the floor between his feet.

No obvious opportunity for creating a diversion awaited her toward the south. She did a hard, fishtailing U-turn and headed back north toward the center of the parking lot.

That maneuver so surprised the ape that he put his pickup into a slide and almost rolled it in his eagerness to stay behind her. While regaining control, at least, he stopped blowing his horn.

The dog was still panting: Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!

She continued to parallel the street on which they had been traveling when she had spotted the shopping center, staying away from the stores.

She said, “Anything you want to take with you?”

“Just my suitcase.”

“You don’t need it. I already took the money out.”

“You what?”

“The fifty thousand in the false bottom,” she said.

“You found my money?” He seemed astonished.

“I found it.”

“You took it out of the case?”

“It’s right there in the canvas bag behind my seat. With my laptop and some other stuff.”

“You found my money?” he repeated disbelievingly.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“Bet on it.”

The ape in the Dodge was on her case again, blowing his horn, but he was not as close as he had been.

To the southwest, the choppers were less than half a mile away and only about a hundred feet off the ground, angling down.

She said, “You see the bag I mean?”

He looked behind her seat. “Yeah. There past Rocky.”

After clashing with the Dodge, she wasn’t sure if her door would open easily. She didn’t want to have to wrestle with the bag and the door at the same time. “Take it with you when we come to a stop.”

“Are we coming to a stop?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

A final turn. Hard right. She swung into one of the center aisles in the parking lot. It led directly east, to the front of the supermarket. As she approached the building, she put her hand on the horn and held it there, making even more noise than the ape was making behind her.

“Oh, no,” Spencer said, with dawning awareness.

“Diversion!” Ellie shouted.

“This is nuts!”

“No choice!”

“It’s still nuts!”

Across the face of the market, sales banners were taped to the big sections of plate glass, advertising Coke and potatoes and toilet tissue and rock salt for home water softeners. Most were along the top half of those tall panes; through the glass, below and between the signs, Ellie could see the checkout stations. In the fluorescent light, a few clerks and customers were looking out, alerted by the strident horns. As she shot toward them, the small ovals of their faces were as luminously white as the painted masks of harlequins. One woman ran, which startled the others into scattering for safety.

She hoped to God they would all manage to get out of the way in time. She didn’t want to hurt any innocent bystanders. But she didn’t want to be gunned down by the men who would pour out of those helicopters, either.

Do or die.

The Rover was moving fast but not flat-out. The trick was to have enough speed to jump the curb onto the wide promenade in front of the market and get through the glass wall and all the merchandise that was stacked waist-high beyond it. But at too high a speed, she would crash into the checkout stations with deadly impact.

“Gonna make it!” Then she remembered never to lie to the dog. “Probably!”

Over the horns and the sound of the engines, she suddenly heard the chuda-chuda-chuda of the choppers. Or maybe she felt more than heard the pressure waves cast off by their rotors. They must be directly over the parking lot.

The front tires rammed the curb, the Range Rover leaped, Rocky yelped, and Ellie simultaneously released the horn and took her foot off the accelerator. She tramped on the brakes as the tires slammed into the concrete. The promenade didn’t seem so wide when the Rover was skidding across it at thirty or forty miles an hour, with the scared-pig squeal of hot rubber on pavement, not so very wide at all, hell, not nearly wide enough. Her sudden awareness of the Rover’s oncoming reflection was followed instantly by cascades of glass, ringing down like shattered icicles. They plowed through big wooden pallets, on which were stacked fifty-pound bags of potatoes or some damn thing, and finally took a header into the end of a checkout station. Panels of fiberboard popped apart, the stainless steel grocery chute buckled like gift-wrapping foil, the rubber conveyor belt snapped in two and spun off its rollers and rippled into the air as if it were a giant black flatworm, and the cash register almost toppled to the floor. The impact wasn’t as hard as Ellie had feared, and as if to celebrate their safe landing, gay foulards of translucent plastic bags blossomed briefly, with a flourish, in midair, from the pockets of an invisible magician.

“Okay?” she asked, releasing the buckle on her safety harness.

He said, “Next time, I drive.”

She tried her door. It protested, screeching and grinding, but neither the brush with the Dodge nor the explosive entry into the market had jammed the latch. Grabbing the SIG 9mm that was trapped between her thighs, she clambered out of the Range Rover.

Spencer had already gotten out of the other side.

The morning was filled with the clatter of helicopters.

The two choppers appeared on the computer screen because they had entered the boundaries of Earthguard’s two-hundred-foot look-down. Roy sat in the second of the craft, studying the top of that very machine as it was photographed from orbit, marveling at the strange possibilities of the modern world.

Because the pilot was making a straight-on approach to the target, neither the porthole on the left nor the one on the right gave Roy any view. He stayed with the computer to watch the Range Rover as it strove to elude the pickup truck by weaving back and forth across the shopping-center parking lot. As the pickup tried to get back up to speed after making a bad U-turn, the Rover swung toward the central building in the complex — which was, judging by its size, a supermarket or a discount store like Wal-Mart or Target.

Only at the last moment did Roy realize that the Rover was going to ram the place. When it hit, he expected to see it rebound in a mass of flattened and tangled metal. But it disappeared, merged with the building. With horror, he realized that it had driven through an entrance or a glass wall and that the occupants had survived.

He lifted the open attaché case off his lap, put it on the cabin deck, in the aisle beside his seat, and bolted to his feet in alarm. He did not pause to go through the back-out security procedures with Mama, didn’t disconnect, didn’t unplug, but stepped over the computer and hurried toward the pilot’s cabin.

From what he’d seen on the display, he knew that both choppers had crossed over the power lines at the street. They were above the parking lot, easing toward touchdown, making a forward speed of only two or three miles an hour, all but hovering. They were so close to the damn woman, but now she was out of sight.

Once out of sight, she might quickly be out of reach as well. Gone again. No. Intolerable.

Armed and ready for action, the four strike force agents had gotten to their feet and were blocking the aisle near the exit.

“Clear the way, clear the way!”

Roy struggled through the assembled hulks to the head of the aisle, jerked open a door, and leaned into the cramped cockpit.

The pilot’s attention was focused on avoiding the parking lot lampposts and the parked cars as he gentled the JetRanger toward the blacktop. But the second man, who was both copilot and navigator, turned in his seat to look at Roy as the door opened.

“She drove into the damned building,” Roy said, looking out through the windshield at the shattered glass along the front of the supermarket.

“Wild, huh?” the copilot agreed, grinning.

Too many cars were spread out across the blacktop to allow either chopper to put down directly in front of the market. They were angling toward opposite ends of the building, one to the north and the other to the south.

Pointing at the first craft, with its full complement of eight strike force agents, Roy said, “No, no. Tell him I want him over the building, in back, not here, in back, all eight of his men deployed in back, stopping everyone on foot.”

Their pilot was already in radio contact with the pilot of the other craft. While he hovered twenty feet over the parking lot, he repeated Roy’s orders into the mouthpiece of his headset.

“They’ll try to go through the market and out the back,” Roy said, striving to rein in his anger and remain calm. Deep breaths. In with the pale-peach vapor of blessed tranquility. Out with the bile-green mist of anger, tension, stress.

Their chopper was hovering too low for Roy to be able to see over the roof of the market. From the Earthguard look-down on his computer, however, he remembered what lay behind the shopping center: a wide service alley, a concrete-block wall, and then a housing development with numerous trees. Houses and trees. Too many places to hide, too many vehicles to steal.

North of them, just as the first JetRanger was about to touch down on the parking lot and disgorge its men, the pilot got Roy’s message. Rotor speed picked up, and the craft began to lift into the air again.

Peach in. Green out.

A carpet of brown nuggets had spilled from some of the torn fifty-pound bags, and they crunched under Spencer’s shoes as he got out of the Rover and ran between two checkout stations. He carried the canvas bag by its straps. In the other hand, he clutched the Uzi.

He glanced to his left. Ellie was paralleling him in the next checkout lane. The shopping aisles were long and ran front to back of the store. He met Ellie at the head of the nearest aisle.

“Out the back.” She hurried toward the rear of the supermarket.

Starting after her, he remembered Rocky. The mutt had gotten out of the Rover behind him. Where was Mr. Rocky Dog?

He stopped, spun around, ran back two steps, and saw the hapless canine in the checkout lane that he himself had used. Rocky was eating some of the brown nuggets that hadn’t been crushed under his master’s shoes. Dry dog food. Fifty pounds or more of it.

“Rocky!”

The mutt looked up and wagged his tail.

“Come on!”

Rocky didn’t even consider the command. He snatched up a few more nuggets, crunching them with delight.

“Rocky!”

The dog regarded him again, one ear up and one down, bushy tail banging against the side of the cashier’s counter.

In his sternest voice, Spencer said, “Mine!”

Regretful but obedient, a little ashamed, Rocky trotted away from the food. When he saw Ellie, who had stopped halfway down the long aisle to wait for them, he broke into a sprint. Ellie resumed her flight, and Rocky dashed exuberantly past her, unaware that they were running for their lives.

At the end of the aisle, three men rushed into sight from the left and halted when they saw Ellie, Spencer, the dog, the guns. Two were in white uniforms: names stitched on their shirt pockets, employees of the market. The third — in street clothes, with a loaf of French bread in one hand — must have been a customer.

With an alacrity and sinuosity more like that of a cat, Rocky transformed his headlong plunge into an immediate retreat. Eeling around on himself, tail between his legs, almost on his belly, he waddled back toward his master for protection.

The men were startled, not aggressive. But they froze, blocking the way.

“Back off!” Spencer shouted.

Aiming at the ceiling, he punctuated his demand with a short burst from the Uzi, blowing out a fluorescent strip and precipitating a shower of lightbulb glass and chopped-up acoustic tiles.

Terrified, the three men scattered.

A pair of swinging doors at the back of the market was recessed between dairy cases to the left and lunch-meat-and-cheese coolers to the right. Ellie slammed through the doors. Spencer followed with Rocky. They were in a short hallway, with rooms to both sides.

The sound of the helicopters was muffled there.

At the end of the hallway, they burst into a cavernous room that extended the width of the building: bare concrete walls, fluorescent lights, open rafters instead of a suspended ceiling. An area in the center of the chamber was open, but merchandise in shipping cartons was stacked sixteen feet high in aisles on both sides — additional stock of products from shampoo to fresh produce.

Spencer spotted a few stockroom employees watching warily from between the storage aisles.

Directly ahead, beyond the open work area, was an enormous metal roll-up door through which big trucks could be backed inside and unloaded. To the right of the shipping entrance was a man-size door. They ran to it, opened it, and went outside into the fifty-foot-wide service alley.

No one in sight.

A twenty-foot-deep overhang sprouted from the wall above the roll-up. It extended the length of the market, jutting nearly halfway across the alley, to allow additional trucks to pull under it and unload while protected from the elements. It was also protection from eyes in the sky.

The morning was surprisingly chilly. Though the market and stockroom had been cool, Spencer wasn’t prepared for the briskness of the outside air. The temperature must have been in the mid-forties. In more than two hours of breakneck travel, they had come from the edge of a desert into higher altitudes and a different climate.

He saw no point in following the service alley left or right. Both ways, they would only be going around the U-shaped structure to the parking lot out front.

On three sides of the shopping center, a nine-foot-high privacy wall separated it from its neighbors: concrete blocks, painted white, capped with bricks. If it had been six feet, they might have scaled it fast enough to escape. Nine feet, no way in hell. They could throw the canvas bag across, easy enough, but they couldn’t simply heave a seventy-pound dog to the other side and hope he landed well.

Out at the front of the supermarket, the pitch of engines from at least one of the helicopters changed. The clatter of its props grew louder. It was coming to the rear of the building.

Ellie dashed to the right, along the shaded back of the market. Spencer knew what she intended. They had one hope. He followed her.

She stopped at the limit of the overhang, which marked the end of the supermarket. Beyond was that portion of the back wall of the shopping center belonging to neighboring businesses.

Ellie glowered at Rocky. “Stay close to the building, tight against it,” she told him, as if he could understand.

Maybe he could. Ellie hurried out into the sunshine, heeding her own advice, and Rocky trotted between her and Spencer, staying close to the back wall of the shopping center.

Spencer didn’t know if satellite surveillance was acute enough to differentiate between them and the structure. He didn’t know if the two-foot overhang on the main roof, high above, provided cover. But even if Ellie’s strategy was smart, Spencer still felt watched.

The stuttering thunder of the chopper grew louder. Judging by the sound, it was up and out of the front parking lot, starting across the roof.

South of the supermarket, the first business was a dry cleaner. A small sign bearing the name of the shop was posted on the employee entrance. Locked.

The sky was full of apocalyptic sound.

Beyond the dry cleaner was a Hallmark card shop. The service door was unlocked. Ellie yanked it open.

Roy Miro leaned through the cockpit door to watch as the other chopper rose higher than the building, hovered for a moment, then angled across the roof toward the back of the supermarket.

Pointing to a clear area of blacktop just south of the market, for the benefit of his own pilot, Roy said, “There, smack in front of Hallmark, put us down right there.”

As the pilot took them down the last twenty feet and maneuvered to the desired landing point, Roy joined the four agents at the door in the passenger cabin. Breathing deeply. Peach in. Green out.

He pulled the Beretta from his shoulder holster. The silencer was still fitted to the weapon. He removed it and dropped it in an inside jacket pocket. This wasn’t a clandestine operation that required silencers, not with all the attention they were attracting. And the pistol would allow more accuracy without the trajectory distortion caused by a silencer.

They touched down.

One of the strike team agents slid the door out of the way, and they exited rapidly, one after the other, into the battering downdraft from the rotor blades.

As Spencer followed Ellie and Rocky through the door into the back room of the card shop, he glanced up into cannonades of sound. Silhouetted against the icy-blue sky, straight overhead, the outer edges of the rotors appeared first, chopping through the dry Utah air. Then the glide-slope antenna on the nose of the craft eased into view. As the leading edge of the downdraft hit him, he stepped inside and pulled the door shut, barely in time to avoid being seen.

The deadbolt had a brass thumb turn on the inside of the door. Although the hit squad would focus first on the back of the market, Spencer engaged the lock.

They were in a narrow, windowless storeroom that smelled of rose-scented air freshener. Ellie opened the next door before Spencer had closed the first. Beyond the storeroom was a small office with overhead fluorescents. Two desks. A computer. Files.

Two more doors led out of there. One stood half open to a tiny bathroom: toilet and sink. The other connected the office to the shop itself.

The long, narrow store was crowded with pyramidal island displays of cards, carousels of more cards, giftwrap, puzzles, stuffed toys, decorative candles, and novelties. The current promotion was for Valentine’s Day, and there was an abundance of overhead banners and decorative wall hangings, all hearts and flowers.

The festiveness of the place was an unsettling reminder that regardless of what happened to him and Ellie and Rocky in the next few minutes, the world would spin on, unheeding. If they were shot dead in Hallmark, their bodies would be hauled away, the blood would be expunged from the carpet, a rose-scented air freshener would be employed in generous sprays, a few more potpourri might be set out for sale, and the stream of lovers coming in to buy cards would continue all but unabated.

Two women, evidently employees, were at the glass storefront, backs turned. They stared out at the activity in the parking lot.

Ellie started toward them.

Following her, Spencer suddenly wondered if she intended to take hostages. He didn’t like that idea. Not at all. Jesus, no. These agency people, as she had described them and as he had seen them in action, wouldn’t hesitate to blow away a hostage, even a woman or a child, to get at their target — especially not early in an operation, when witnesses were the most confused and no reporters were yet on the scene with cameras.

He didn’t want innocent blood on his hands.

Of course, they couldn’t merely wait in Hallmark until the agency went away. When they weren’t found in the supermarket, the search would surely spread to adjacent stores.

Their best chance to escape was to slip out the front door of the card shop while the hit team’s attention remained focused on the supermarket, try to get to a parked car, and hotwire it. Not much of a chance. As thin as paper, as thin as hope itself. But it was all they had, better than hostages, so he clung to it.

With the chopper landing virtually at the back door, the card shop was so hammered by the screaming of engines and the pounding of rotor blades that it couldn’t have been noisier if it had been under an amusement-park roller coaster. The Valentine banners trembled overhead. Hundreds of novelty key rings jangled from the hooks of a display stand. A collection of small ornate picture frames rattled against the glass shelf on which they stood. Even the walls of the store seemed to thrum like drumheads.

The racket was so ungodly that he wondered about the shopping center. It must be cheapjack construction, the worst crap, if one chopper could set up such reverberations in its walls.

They were almost to the front of the store, fifteen feet from the women at the window, when the reason for the fearful tumult became obvious: The second helicopter settled down in front of the shop, beyond the covered promenade, in the parking lot. The store was bracketed by the machines, shaken by cross-vibrations.

Ellie halted at the sight of the chopper.

Rocky seemed less worried by the cacophony than by an unfurled poster of Beethoven — the movie-star Saint Bernard, not the composer of symphonies — and he shied from it, taking refuge behind Ellie’s legs.

The two women at the window were still unaware that they had company. They were side by side, chattering excitedly, and though their voices were raised above the clamor of the machines, their words were unintelligible to Spencer.

As he stepped to Ellie’s side, gazing at the chopper with dread, he saw a door slide open on the fuselage. Armed men jumped to the blacktop, one after the other. The first was carrying a submachine gun larger than Spencer’s Micro Uzi. The second had an automatic rifle. The third toted a pair of grenade-launching rifles, no doubt equipped with stun, sting, or gas payloads. The fourth man was armed with a submachine gun, and the fifth had only a pistol.

The fifth man was the last, and he was different from the four hulks who preceded him. Shorter, somewhat pudgy. He held his pistol to one side, aimed at the ground, and ran with less athletic grace than his companions.

None of the five approached the card shop. They raced toward the front of the supermarket, moving quickly out of view.

The chopper’s engine was idling. The blades were still turning, though at a slower speed. The hit team hoped to be in and out fast.

“Ladies,” Ellie said.

The women didn’t hear her over the still considerable noise of the helicopters and of their own excited conversation.

Ellie raised her voice: “Ladies, damn it!”

Startled, exclaiming, wide-eyed, they turned.

Ellie didn’t point the SIG 9mm at them, but she made sure they got a good look at it. “Get away from those windows, come here.”

They hesitated, glanced at each other, at the pistol.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Ellie was unmistakably sincere. “But I’ll do what I have to do if you don’t come here right now!”

The women stepped away from the storefront windows, one of them moving slower than the other. The slowpoke cast a furtive glance at the nearby entrance door.

“Don’t even think about it,” Ellie told her. “I’ll shoot you in the back, so help me God, and if you aren’t killed, you’ll be in a wheelchair forever. Okay, yeah, that’s better, come here.”

Spencer stepped aside — and Rocky hid behind him — as Ellie guided the frightened women along the aisle. Halfway through the store, she made them lie facedown, one behind the other, with their heads toward the back wall.

“If either of you looks up anytime in the next fifteen minutes, I’ll kill you both,” Ellie told them.

Spencer didn’t know if she was as sincere this time as when she had told them that she didn’t want to hurt them, but she sounded as though she were. If he had been one of the women, he wouldn’t have raised his head to look around until at least Easter.

Returning to him, Ellie said, “Pilot’s still in the chopper.”

He moved a few steps closer to the front of the store. Through the side window of the cockpit, one of the crew was visible, probably the copilot. “Two of them, I’m sure.”

“They don’t take part in the assault?” Ellie asked.

“No, of course not, they’re flyers, not gunmen.”

She went to the door and looked north toward the front of the supermarket. “Have to do it. No time to think about it. We just have to do it.”

Spencer didn’t even need to ask her what she was talking about. She was an instinctive survivor with fourteen hard months of combat experience under her belt, and he remembered most of what the United States Army Rangers had taught him about strategy and about thinking on his feet. They couldn’t go back the way they’d come. Couldn’t stay in the card shop, either. Eventually it would be searched. They could no longer hope to reach a car in the parking lot and hot-wire it, behind the backs of the gunmen, because all the cars were parked to the front of the chopper, requiring them to pass in full view of its crew. They were left with one option. One terrible, desperate option. It required boldness, courage — and either a dash of fatalism or an enormous measure of brainless self-confidence. They were both ready to do it.

“Take this,” he said, handing her the canvas bag, “this too,” and then gave her the Uzi.

As he took the SIG from her and tucked it under the waistband of his jeans, against his belly, she said, “I guess you have to.”

“It’s a three-second dash, at most, even less for him, but we can’t risk him freezing up.”

Spencer squatted, scooped up Rocky, and stood with the dog cradled like a child in his arms.

Rocky didn’t know whether to wag his tail or be afraid, whether they were having fun or were in big trouble. He was clearly on the brink of sensory overload. In that condition he customarily either went all limp and quivery — or flew into a frenzy of terror.

Ellie eased open the door to check the front of the supermarket.

Glancing at the two women on the floor, Spencer saw that they were obeying the instructions they’d been given.

“Now,” Ellie said, stepping outside, holding the door for him.

He went through sideways, so as not to bash Rocky’s head into the door frame. Stepping onto the covered shopping promenade, he glanced toward the market. All but one of the gunmen had gone inside. A thug with submachine guns remained outside, facing away from them.

In the chopper, the copilot was looking down at something on his lap, not out the side window of the cockpit.

Half convinced that Rocky weighed seven hundred rather than seventy pounds, Spencer sprinted to the open door in the helicopter fuselage. It was only a thirty-foot dash, even counting the ten-foot width of the promenade, but those were the longest thirty feet in the universe, a quirk of physics, an eerie scientific anomaly, a bizarre distortion in the fabric of creation, stretching ever longer in front of him as he ran — and then he was there, pushing the dog inside, scrambling up and into the craft himself.

Ellie was so close behind him that she might as well have been his backpack. She dropped the canvas bag the moment she was up and across the threshold, but she held on to the Uzi.

Unless someone was crouched behind one of the ten seats, the passenger compartment was deserted. Just to be safe, Ellie moved back down the aisle, checking left and right.

Spencer stepped to the nearby cockpit door, opened it. He was just in time to jam the muzzle of the pistol in the face of the copilot, who was starting to get up from his seat.

“Take us up,” Spencer told the pilot.

The two men appeared even more surprised than the women in the card shop.

“Take us up now—now! — or I’ll blow this asshole’s brains out through that window, then yours!” Spencer shouted so forcefully that he sprayed the crewmen with spittle and felt the veins in his temples popping up like those in a weight lifter’s biceps.

He thought he sounded every bit as frightening as Ellie.

Just inside the shattered glass wall of the supermarket, beside the wrecked Range Rover, in a drift of dog food, Roy and three agents stood with their weapons aimed at a tall man with a flat face, yellow teeth, and coal-black eyes as cold as a viper’s. The guy clutched a semiautomatic rifle in both hands, and although he wasn’t aiming it at anyone, he looked mean enough and angry enough to use it on the baby Jesus Himself.

He was the driver of the pickup. His Dodge stood abandoned in the parking lot, one door hanging wide open. He had come inside either to seek vengeance for whatever had happened on the highway or to play the hero.

“Drop the gun!” Roy repeated for the third time.

“Says who?”

“Says who?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you a moron? Am I talking to a blithering idiot here? You see four guys holding heavy weapons on you, and you don’t understand the logic of dropping that rifle?”

“You cops or what?” asked the viper-eyed man.

Roy wanted to kill him. No more formalities. The guy was too damn stupid to live. He’d be better off dead. A sad case. Society would be better off without him too. Cut him down, right there, right now, and then find the woman and Grant.

The only problem was that Roy’s dream of a three-minute mission, in and out and away before the nosy locals showed up, was no longer achievable. The operation had gone sour when the hateful woman had driven into the market, and it was getting more sour by the moment. Hell, it was past sour into bitter. They were going to have to deal with Cedar City cops, and that was going to be more difficult if one of the residents they were sworn to protect was lying dead on a mound of Purina Dog Chow.

If they were going to have to work with locals, he might as well show a badge to this fool. From an inner jacket pocket, he withdrew an ID wallet, flipped it open, and flashed his phony credentials. “Drug Enforcement Administration.”

“Well, sure,” the man said. “Now, that’s all right.”

He lowered the gun to the floor, let go of it. Then he actually put one hand to the bill of his baseball cap and tipped it at Roy with what seemed to be sincere respect.

Roy said, “You go sit in the back of your truck. Not inside. In the open, behind the cab. You wait there. You try to leave, that guy outside with a machine gun will cut your legs off at the knees.”

“Yes, sir.” With convincing solemnity, he tipped his cap again, and then he walked out through the damaged front wall of the store.

Roy almost turned and shot him in the back.

Peach in. Green out.

“Spread out across the front of the store,” he told his men, “and wait, keep alert.”

The team coming in from the back would search the supermarket exhaustively, flushing out Grant and the woman if they tried to hide anywhere inside. The fugitives would be driven forward and forced either to surrender or to die in a barrage of gunfire.

The woman, of course, would be shot to death whether she tried to surrender or not. They were taking no more chances with her.

“There’ll be employees and customers coming through,” he called out to his three men as they deployed across the store to both sides of him. “Don’t let anybody leave. Herd them over near the manager’s office. Even if you think they have no resemblance to the pair we’re looking for, hold them. Even if it’s the Pope, you hold him.”

Outside, the helicopter engine went from a low idle to a loud roar. The pilot revved it. Revved it again.

What the hell?

Frowning, Roy clambered through the debris and went outside to see what was happening.

The agent posted in front of the market was looking toward the Hallmark shop, where the chopper was lifting off.

“What’s he doing?” Roy asked.

“Taking off.”

“Why?”

“Must be going somewhere.”

Another moron. Stay calm. Peach in. Green out.

“Who told him to leave his position, who told him to take off?” Roy demanded.

As soon as the question was put, he knew the answer. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he knew why the chopper was taking off and who was in it.

He jammed the Beretta into his shoulder holster, wrenched the submachine gun out of the surprised agent’s hands, and charged toward the ascending aircraft. He intended to rupture its fuel tanks and bring it to the ground.

Raising the weapon, finger on the trigger, Roy realized there was no way he was ever going to be able to explain his actions to the satisfaction of a straight-arrow Utah cop with no appreciation for the moral ambiguity of federal law enforcement. Shooting at his own helicopter. Jeopardizing his pilot and copilot. Destroying a hugely expensive piece of government machinery. Perhaps causing it to crash into occupied stores. Great, fiery gouts of aviation fuel splashing everything and anyone in their path. Respected Cedar City merchants transformed into human torches, running in circles through the February morning, blazing and shrieking. It would all be colorful and exciting, and nailing the woman would be worth the lives of any number of bystanders, but explaining the catastrophe would be as hopeless as trying to explain the fine points of nuclear physics to the idiot sitting in the back of the Dodge pickup.

And there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the chief of police would be a clean-cut Mormon who had never tasted an alcoholic drink in his life, who had never smoked, and who would not be tuned in properly to the concepts of untaxable hush money and police-agency collusion. Bet on it. A Mormon.

Reluctantly, Roy lowered the submachine gun.

The chopper rose swiftly.

“Why Utah?” he shouted furiously at the fugitives that he could not see but that he knew were frustratingly close.

Peach in. Green out.

He had to calm down. Think cosmically.

The situation would be resolved in his favor. He still had the second chopper to use as a pursuit vehicle. And Earthguard 3 would find it easier to track the JetRanger than the Rover, because the chopper was larger than the truck and because it traveled above all sheltering vegetation and above the distracting movement of ground-level traffic.

Overhead, the hijacked aircraft swung east, across the roof of the card store.

In the passenger cabin, Ellie crouched beside the opening in the fuselage, leaned against the door frame, and looked down at the shopping center roof that passed under her. God, her heart was booming as loud as the rotor blades. She was terrified that the chopper would tip or lurch and that she would fall out.

During the past fourteen months, she had learned more about herself than in the entire previous twenty-eight years. For one thing, her love of life, her sheer joy in being alive, was greater than she had ever realized until the three people she had loved most had been taken from her in one brutal, bloody night. In the face of so much death, with her own existence in constant jeopardy, she now savored both the warmth of every sun-filled day and the chill wind of every raging storm, weeds as much as flowers, the bitter and the sweet. She had never been a fraction as aware of her love of freedom — her need for freedom — as when she had been forced to fight to keep it. And in those fourteen months, she had been amazed to learn that she had the guts to walk precipices, leap chasms, and grin in the devil’s face; amazed to discover that she was not capable of losing hope; amazed to find that she was but one of many fugitives from an imploding world, all of them perpetually on the rim of a black hole and resisting its God-crushing gravity; amazed by how much fear she could tolerate and still thrive.

One day, of course, she would amaze herself straight into a sudden death. Maybe today. Leaning against the frame of the open door in the fuselage. Finished by a bullet or by a long, hard fall.

They traversed the building and moved over the fifty-foot-wide service alley. The other helicopter was down there, parked behind Hallmark. No gunmen were in the immediate vicinity of the craft. Evidently, they had already bailed out and had moved in on the back of the supermarket, under the twenty-foot overhang.

With Spencer giving orders to their own pilot, they hovered in position long enough for Ellie to use the Micro Uzi on the tail assembly of the craft on the ground. The weapon had two magazines, welded at right angles to each other, with a capacity of forty rounds — minus the few that Spencer had fired into the supermarket ceiling. She emptied both magazines, slapped in spares, emptied those too. The bullets destroyed the horizontal stabilizer, damaged the tail rotor, and punched holes in the tail pylon, disabling the aircraft.

If her assault was answered by any return fire, she was unaware of it. The gunmen who had moved off to cover the back of the market were probably too surprised and confused to be sure what to do.

Besides, the entire attack on the grounded chopper had taken only twenty seconds. Then she put the Uzi on the cabin deck and slid the door shut. The pilot, at Spencer’s direction, immediately took them due north at high speed.

Rocky was crouched between two of the passenger seats, watching her intently. He was not as exuberant as he had been since they’d fled their camp in Nevada shortly after dawn. He had slipped into his more familiar suit of fretfulness and timidity.

“It’s okay, pooch.”

His disbelief was unconcealed.

“Well, it sure could be worse,” she said.

He whimpered.

“Poor baby.”

With both ears drooping, racked by shivers, Rocky was the essence of misery.

“How can I say anything that’ll make you feel better,” she asked the dog, “if I’m not allowed to lie to you.”

From the nearby cockpit door, Spencer said, “That’s a pretty grim assessment of our situation, considering we just slipped loose of a damned tight knot.”

“We’re not out of this mess yet.”

“Well, there’s something I tell Mr. Rocky Dog now and then, when he’s down in the dumps. It’s something that helps me a little, though I can’t say whether it works for him.”

“What?” Ellie asked.

“You’ve got to remember, whatever happens — it’s only life, we all get through it.”

THIRTEEN

Monday morning, after his bail had been posted, crossing the parking lot to his brother’s BMW, Harris Descoteaux stopped twice to turn his face to the sun. He basked in its warmth. He had once read that black people, even those as midnight-dark as he was, could get skin cancer from too much sun. Being black was no absolute guarantee against melanoma. Being black, of course, was no guarantee against any misfortune, quite the opposite, so melanoma would have to wait in line with all the other horrors that might befall him. After spending fifty-eight hours in jail, where direct sunlight was more difficult to get than a hit of heroin, he felt as if he wanted to stand in the sun until his skin blistered, until his bones melted, until he became one giant pulsing melanoma. Anything was better than being locked away in a sunless prison. He inhaled deeply, too, because the smog-tainted air of Los Angeles smelled so sweet. Like the juice of an exotic fruit. The scent of freedom. He wanted to stretch, run, leap, twirl, whoop, and holler — but there were some things that a man of forty-four simply did not do, regardless of how giddy with freedom he might be.

In the car, as Darius started the engine, Harris put a hand on his arm, staying him for a moment. “Darius, I’ll never forget this — what you’ve done for me, what you’re still doing.”

“Hey, it’s nothing.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“Well, you’d have done the same for me.”

“I think I would’ve. I hope I would’ve.”

“There you go again, working on sainthood, putting on those robes of modesty. Man, whatever I know about doing the right thing, I learned from you. So what I did here, it’s what you would do.”

Harris grinned and lightly punched Darius on the shoulder. “I love you, little brother.”

“Love you, big brother.”

Darius lived in Westwood, and from downtown, the drive could take as little as thirty minutes on a Monday morning, after the rush hour, or more than twice that long. It was always a crapshoot. They had a choice between using Wilshire Boulevard, all the way across the city, or the Santa Monica Freeway. Darius chose Wilshire, because some days the rush hour never ended and the freeway became Hell with talk radio.

For a while, Harris was all right, enjoying his freedom if not the thought of the legal nightmare that lay ahead; however, as they were approaching Fairfax Boulevard, he began to feel ill. The first symptom was a mild but disturbing dizziness, a strange conviction that the city was ever so slowly revolving around them even as they drove through it. The sensation came and went, but each time that it gripped him, he suffered a spell of tachycardia more frantic than the one before it. When his heart fluttered through more beats in a half-minute seizure than the heart of a frightened hummingbird, he was overcome by the peculiar worry that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. When he tried to breathe deeply, he found he could barely breathe at all.

At first he thought that the air in the car was stale. Stuffy, too warm. He didn’t want to reveal his distress to his brother — who was on the car phone, taking care of business — so he casually fiddled with the vent controls, until he got a draft of cool air directed at his face. Ventilation didn’t help. The air wasn’t stuffy but thick, like the heavy vapors of something odorless but toxic.

He endured the city revolving around the BMW, his heart bursting into fits of tachycardia, the air so syrup-thick that he could inhale only an inadequate drizzle, the oppressive intensity of light that forced him to squint against the sunshine that he had so recently enjoyed, the feeling that a crushing weight was hovering over him — but then he was enveloped by nausea so intense that he cried out for his brother to pull to the curb. They were crossing Robertson Boulevard. Darius engaged the emergency flashers, swung out of traffic just past the intersection, and stopped in a no-parking zone.

Harris flung open his door, leaned out, regurgitated violently. He had eaten none of the jailhouse breakfast that he’d been offered, so he was racked only by the dry heaves, although they were no less distressing or less exhausting because of that.

The siege passed. He slumped back in his seat, pulled the door shut, and closed his eyes. Shaking.

“Are you all right?” Darius asked worriedly. “Harris? Harris, what’s wrong?”

With the spell past, Harris knew he’d been stricken by nothing more — and nothing less — than an attack of prison claustrophobia. It had been infinitely worse, however, than any panic attacks that had plagued him when he had actually been behind bars.

“Harris? Talk to me.”

“I’m in prison, little brother.”

“We’re standing together on this, remember. Together, we’re stronger than anybody, always were and always will be.”

“I’m in prison,” Harris repeated.

“Listen, these charges are bullshit. You were set up. None of this will stick. You’re a Teflon defendant. You’re not going to spend another day in jail.”

Harris opened his eyes. The sunshine was no longer painfully bright. In fact, the February day seemed to have darkened with his mood.

He said, “Never stole a dime in my life. Never cheated on my taxes. Never cheated on my wife. Paid back every loan I ever took. Worked overtime most weeks since I’ve been a cop. Walked the straight and narrow — and let me tell you, little brother, it hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes I get tired, fed up, tempted to take an easier way. I’ve had bribe money in my hand, and it felt good, but I just couldn’t make my hand put it into my pocket. Close. Oh, yes, a lot closer than you ever want to know. And there’ve been some women…they would’ve been there for me, and I could’ve put Jessica way back in my mind while I was with them, and maybe I would’ve cheated on her if the opportunities had been just the littlest bit easier. I know it’s in me to do it—”

“Harris—”

“I’m telling you, I’ve got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don’t give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I’m no saint, the way you kid about. But I’ve always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It’s a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You’re always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don’t just step off and walk in the cool grass. But I’ve always wanted to be a man our mother could be proud of. I wanted to shine in your eyes too, little brother, in the eyes of my wife and kids. I love you all so damned much, I never wanted any of you to know about any of the ugliness in me.”

“The same ugliness that’s in all of us, Harris. All of us. So why are you going on like this, doing this to yourself?”

“If I’ve walked that line, hard as it is, and something like this can happen to me, then it can happen to anyone.”

Darius regarded him with stubborn perplexity. He was obviously struggling to understand Harris’s anguish but was only halfway there.

“Little brother, I’m sure you’ll clear me of the charges. No more nights in jail. But you explained the asset-forfeiture laws, and you did a damned good job, made it too clear. They have to prove I’m a drug dealer to put me back in jail, and they’ll never be able to do that because it’s all trumped up. But they don’t have to prove a damn thing to keep my house, my bank accounts. They only have to show ‘reasonable cause’ that maybe the house was the site of illegal activity, and they’ll say the planted drugs are reasonable cause even if the drugs don’t prove anything.”

“There’s that reform law in Congress—”

“Moving slowly.”

“Well, you never know. If some sort of reform passes, maybe it’ll even tie forfeiture to conviction.”

“Can you guarantee I’ll get my house back?”

“With your clean record, your years of service—”

Harris gently interrupted: “Darius, under the current law, can you guarantee I’ll get my house back?”

Darius stared at him in silence. A shimmer of tears blurred his eyes, and he looked away. He was an attorney, and it was his job to obtain justice for his big brother, and he was overwhelmed by the truth that he was all but powerless to assure even minimal fairness.

“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” Harris said. “It could happen to you next. It could happen to my kids someday. Darius…maybe I get something back from the bastards, say as much as eighty cents on the dollar once all my costs are deducted. And maybe I get my life on track, start to rebuild. But how do I know it won’t happen to me again, somewhere down the road?”

Having held back the tears, Darius looked at him again, shocked. “No, that’s not possible. This is outrageous, unusual—”

“Why can’t it happen again?” Harris persisted. “If it happened once, why not twice?”

Darius had no answer.

“If my house isn’t really my house, if my bank accounts aren’t really mine, if they can take what they want without proving a thing, what’s to keep them from coming back? Do you see? I’m in prison, little brother. Maybe I’ll never be behind bars again, but I’m in another kind of prison and never going to get free. The prison of expectations. The prison of fear. The prison of doubt, distrust.”

Darius put one hand to his forehead, pressed and pulled at his brow, as if he would like to extract from his mind the awareness that Harris had forced upon him.

The car’s emergency-flasher indicator blinked rhythmically, in time with a soft but penetrating sound, as if warning of the crisis in Harris Descoteaux’s life.

“When the realization began to hit me,” Harris said, “back there a few blocks ago, when I began to see what a box I’m in, what a box anyone could be in under these rules, I just was…overwhelmed…felt so claustrophobic that it made me sick to my stomach.”

Darius lowered the hand from his brow. He looked lost. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t think there’s anything anyone can say.”

For a while they just sat there, with Wilshire Boulevard traffic whizzing by them, with the city so bright and busy all around, with the true darkness of modern life not to be glimpsed in mere palm shadows and awning-shaded shop entrances.

“Let’s go home,” Harris said.

They drove the rest of the way to Westwood in silence.

Darius’s house was a handsome brick-and-clapboard Colonial with a columned portico. The spacious lot featured huge old ficus trees. The limbs were massive yet gracious in their all-encompassing spread, and the roots went back to the Los Angeles of Jean Harlow and Mae West and W. C. Fields, if not further.

It was a major achievement for Darius and Bonnie to have earned such a place in the world, considering how far down the ladder they had started their climb. Of the two Descoteaux brothers, Darius had enjoyed the greater financial success.

As the BMW pulled into the brick driveway, Harris was overcome by regret that his own troubles would inevitably taint the pride and well-earned pleasure that Darius took from that Westwood house and from everything else that he and Bonnie had acquired or achieved. What pride in their struggles and what pleasure in their attainments could survive, undiminished, after the realization that their position was maintained only at the sufferance of mad kings who might confiscate all for a royal purpose or dispatch a deputation of blackguards, under the protective heraldry of the monarch, to lay waste and burn? This beautiful house was only ashes waiting for the fire, and when Darius and Bonnie regarded their handsome residence henceforth, they would be troubled by the faintest scent of smoke, the bitter taste of burnt dreams.

Jessica met them at the door, hugged Harris fiercely, and wept against his shoulder. To have held her any tighter, he would have had to hurt her. She, the girls, his brother, and his sister-in-law were all that he had now. He was not merely without possessions but without his once strong belief in the system of law and justice that had inspired and sustained him during his entire adult life. From that moment on, he would trust in nothing except himself and the few people who were closest to him. Security, if it existed at all, could not be bought, but was a gift to be given only by family and friends.

Bonnie had taken Ondine and Willa to the mall to buy some new clothes for them.

“I should’ve gone along, but I just couldn’t,” Jessica said, wiping at the tears in the corners of her eyes. She seemed fragile in a way she had never been before. “I’m still…I’m shaking from all this. Harris, when they came on Saturday with…with the seizure notice, when they made us move out, we were only allowed to take one suitcase each, clothes and personal stuff, no jewelry, no…no anything.”

“It’s an outrageous abuse of legal process,” Darius said angrily and with palpable frustration.

“And they stood over us, watching what we packed,” Jessica told Harris. “Those men…just standing there, while the girls opened dresser drawers to get their underwear, bras…” That memory brought a snarl of outrage to her voice and, for the time being, chased off the emotional fragility that dismayed Harris and that was so unlike her. “It was disgusting! They were so arrogant, such bastards about it. I was just waiting for one of the sonsofbitches to touch me, to try to hurry me along with a little hand on the arm, anything like that, because I’d have kicked him in the balls so hard he’d have been wearing dresses and high heels the rest of his life.”

He was surprised to hear himself laugh.

Darius laughed too.

Jessica said, “Well, I would have.”

“I know,” Harris said. “I know you would.”

“I don’t see what’s so funny.”

“I don’t either, honey, but it is.”

“Maybe you’ve got to have balls to see the humor,” Darius said.

That made Harris laugh again.

Shaking her head in amazement at the inexplicable behavior of men in general and these two in particular, Jessica went to the kitchen, where she was preparing the ingredients for a pair of her justly renowned walnut-apple pies. They followed her.

Harris watched her peel an apple. Her hands were trembling.

He said, “Shouldn’t the girls be in school? They can wait till the weekend to buy clothes.”

Jessica and Darius exchanged a look, and Darius said, “We all felt it was better they stay out of school for a week. Until the press coverage isn’t so…fresh.”

That was something Harris hadn’t really thought about: his name and photograph in the newspapers, headlines about a drug-dealing cop, the television anchorpersons conducting their happy talk around lurid accounts of his alleged secret life of crime. Ondine and Willa would have to endure heavy humiliation whenever they returned to school, whether it was tomorrow or next week or a month from now. Hey, can your dad sell me an ounce of pure white? How much does your old man charge to fix a speeding ticket? Does your daddy just deal in drugs, or can he get a hooker for me? Dear God. This wound was separate from all others.

Whoever his mysterious enemies were, whoever had done this to him, they must have been aware that they were destroying not only him but his family as well. Though Harris knew nothing else about them, he knew they were utterly without pity and as merciless as snakes.

From the wall phone in the kitchen, he made a call that he had been dreading — to Carl Falkenberg, his boss at Parker Center. He was prepared to use accumulated personal days and vacation, in order not to return to work for three weeks, in the hope that the conspiracy against him would miraculously collapse during that time. But, as he had feared, they were suspending him from duty indefinitely, although with pay. Carl was supportive but uncharacteristically reserved, as if he were responding to every question by reading from a carefully worded selection of answers. Even if the charges against Harris were eventually dropped or if a trial resulted in a verdict of innocence, there would be a parallel investigation by the LAPD Internal Affairs Division, and if its findings discredited him, he would be discharged from duty regardless of the outcome in federal court. Consequently, Carl was keeping a safe professional distance.

Harris hung up, sat at the kitchen table, and quietly conveyed the essence of the conversation to Jessica and Darius. He was aware of an unnerving hollowness in his voice, but he couldn’t get rid of it.

“At least it’s suspension with pay,” Jessica said.

“They have to keep paying me or get in trouble with the union,” Harris explained. “It’s no gift.”

Darius brewed a pot of coffee, and while Jessica continued with her pie-making, he and Harris remained in the kitchen, so the three of them could discuss legal options and strategies. Although the situation was grim, it felt good to be talking about taking action, striking back.

But the hits just kept on coming.

Not even half an hour passed before Carl Falkenberg called to inform Harris that the Internal Revenue Service had served the LAPD with a legal order to garnishee his wages against “possible unpaid taxes from trafficking in illegal drugs.” Although his suspension was with pay, his weekly salary would have to be held in trust until the issue of his guilt or innocence was determined in court.

Walking back to the table and sitting opposite his brother again, Harris told them the latest. His voice was now as flat and emotionless as that of a talking machine.

Darius exploded off his chair, furious. “Damn it, this is not right, this does not wash, no way, I’ll be damned if it does! Nobody has proved anything. We’ll get this garnishment withdrawn. We’ll start on it right now. It might take a few days, but we’ll make them eat that piece of paper, Harris, I swear to you that we’ll make the bastards eat it.” He hurried out of the kitchen, evidently to his study and the telephone there.

For a long spiral of seconds, Harris and Jessica stared at each other. Neither of them spoke. They had been married so long that sometimes they didn’t have to speak to know what they would have said to each other.

She returned her attention to the dough in the pie pan, which she had been crimping along the edge with her thumb and forefinger. Ever since Harris had come home, Jessica’s hands had been trembling noticeably. Now the tremors were gone. Her hands were steady. He had the terrible feeling that her steadiness was the result of a bleak resignation to the unbeatable superiority of the unknown forces arrayed against them.

He looked out the window beside the table. Sunshine streamed through ficus branches. The flowers in the beds of English primrose were almost Day-Glo bright. The backyard was expansive, well and lushly landscaped, with a swimming pool in the center of a used-brick patio. To every dreamer living in deprivation, that backyard was a perfect symbol of success. A highly motivating image. But Harris Descoteaux knew what it really was. Just another room in the prison.

While the JetRanger flew due north, Ellie sat in one of the two seats in the last row of the passenger cabin. She held the open attaché case on her lap and worked with the computer that was built into it.

She was still marveling over her good fortune. When she had first boarded the chopper and had searched the cabin to be sure no agency men were hiding there, before they had even taken off, she had discovered the computer on the deck at the end of the aisle. She recognized it immediately as hardware developed for the agency, because she’d actually looked over Danny’s shoulder when he had been designing some of the critical software for it. She realized that it was plugged in and on-line, but she was too busy to check it out closely until after they got off the ground and disabled the second JetRanger. Safely in the air, northbound toward Salt Lake City, she returned to the computer and was astonished when she realized that the image on the display screen was the satellite look-down of the very shopping center from which they had just escaped. If the agency had temporarily hijacked Earthguard 3 from the EPA to search for her and Spencer, they could only have done so through their omnipotent home-office computer system in Virginia. Mama. Only Mama had such power. The workstation that had been abandoned in the chopper was on-line with Mama, the megabitch herself.

If she had found the computer unplugged, she wouldn’t have been able to get into Mama. A thumbprint was required to get on-line. Danny hadn’t designed the software, but he had seen a demonstration of it and had told her about it, as excited as a child who had been shown one of the best toys ever. Because her thumbprint was not one of the approved, the hardware would have been useless to her.

Spencer came back down the aisle, with Rocky padding along behind him, and Ellie glanced up from the VDT in surprise. “Shouldn’t you be keeping a gun on the crew?”

“I took their headsets away from them, so they can’t use the radio. They don’t have any weapons up there, and even if they had an arsenal, they might not use it. They’re flyboys, not murderous thugs. But they think we are murderous thugs, insane murderous thugs, and they’re nicely respectful.”

“Yeah, well, they also know we need them to fly this crate.”

As Ellie returned to her work on the computer, Spencer picked up the cellular phone that someone had abandoned on the last seat in the port-side row. He sat across the aisle from her.

“Well, see,” he said, “they think I can fly this eggbeater if anything happens to them.”

“Can you?” she asked, without shifting her attention from the video display, keeping her fingers busy on the keys.

“No. But when I was a Ranger, I learned a lot about choppers — mostly related to how you sabotage them, boobytrap them, and blow them up. I recognize all the flight instruments, know the names of them. I was real convincing. Fact is, they probably think the only reason I haven’t already killed them is because I don’t want to have to haul their bodies out of the cockpit and sit in their blood.”

“What if they lock the cockpit door?”

“I broke the lock. And they don’t have anything in there to wedge the door shut with.”

She said, “You’re pretty good at this.”

“Aw, shucks, not really. What’ve you got there?”

While Ellie worked, she told him about their good fortune.

“Everything’s coming up roses,” he said with only a half-note of sarcasm. “What’re you doing?”

“Through Mama, I’ve up-linked to Earthguard, the EPA satellite they’ve been using to track us. I’ve gotten into the core of its operating program. All the way to the program-management level.”

He whistled in appreciation. “Look, even Mr. Rocky Dog is impressed.”

She glanced up and saw that Rocky was grinning. His tail swished back and forth on the deck, thumping into the seats on both sides of the aisle.

“You’re going to screw up a hundred-million-dollar satellite, turn it into space junk?” Spencer asked.

“Only for a while. Freeze it up for six hours. By then they won’t have a clue where to look for us.”

“Ah, go ahead, have fun, screw it up permanently.”

“When the agency isn’t using it for crap like this, it might actually do some beneficial work.”

“So you’re a civic-minded individual after all.”

“Well, I was a Girl Scout once. It gets in your blood, like a disease.”

“Then you probably wouldn’t want to go out with me tonight, spraypaint some graffiti on highway overpasses.”

“There!” she said, and tapped the ENTER key. She studied the data that came up on the screen and smiled. “Earthguard just shut down for a six-hour nap. They’ve lost us — except for radar tracking. Are you sure we’re keeping due north and high enough for radar to pick us up, like I asked?”

“The boys up front promised me.”

“Perfect.”

“What did you do before all this?” he asked.

“Freelance software designer, specializing in video games.”

“You created video games?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, of course, you did.”

“I’m serious. I did.”

“No, you missed my inflection,” he said. “I meant, of course you did. It’s obvious. And now you’re in a real-life video game.”

“The way the world’s going, everyone’ll be living in one big video game eventually, and it’s sure as hell not going to be a nice one, not ‘Super Mario Brothers’ or anything that gentle. More like ‘Mortal Kombat.’”

“Now that you’ve disabled a hundred-million-dollar satellite, what next?”

As they had talked, Ellie had been focused on the VDT. She had retreated from Earthguard, back into Mama. She was calling up menus, one after the other, speed-reading them. “I’m looking around, seeing what’s the best damage I can do.”

“Mind doing something for me first?”

“Tell me what, while I nose around here.”

He told her about the trap that he had set for anyone who might break into his cabin while he was gone.

It was her turn to whistle appreciatively. “God, I’d like to’ve seen their faces when they figured out what was going down. And what happened to the digitized photographs when they left Malibu?”

“They were transmitted to the Pacific Bell central computer, preceded by a code that activated a program I’d previously designed and secretly buried there. That program allowed them to be received and then retransmitted to the Illinois Bell central computer, where I buried another little hidden program that came to life in response to the special access code, and it received them from Pacific Bell.”

“You think the agency didn’t track them that far?”

“Well, to Pacific Bell, sure. But after my little program sent them to Chicago, it erased all record of that call. Then it self-destructed.”

“Sometimes a self-destruct can be rebuilt and examined. Then they’d see the instructions about erasing the call to Illinois Bell.”

“Not in this case. This was a beautiful little self-destructed program that stayed beautifully self-destructed, I guarantee you. When it dismantled itself, it also took out a reasonably large block of the Pacific Bell system.”

Ellie interrupted her urgent search of Mama’s programs to look at him. “How large is reasonably large?”

“About thirty thousand people must’ve been without telephone service for two to three hours before they got backup systems on-line.”

“You were never a Girl Scout,” she said.

“Well, I was never given a chance.”

“You learned a lot in that computer-crime task force.”

“I was a diligent employee,” he admitted.

“More than you learned about helicopters, for sure. So you think those photos are still waiting in the Chicago Bell computer?”

“I’ll walk you through the routine, and we’ll find out. Might be useful to get a good look at the faces of some of these thugs — for future reference. Don’t you think?”

“I think. Tell me what to do.”

Three minutes later, the first of the photographs appeared on the video display of the computer in her lap. Spencer leaned across the narrow aisle from his seat, and she angled the attaché case so they both could see the screen.

“That’s my living room,” he said.

“You’re not deeply interested in decor, are you?”

“My favorite period style is Early Neat.”

“More like Late Monastery.”

Two men in riot gear were moving through the room quickly enough to be blurred in the still shot.

“Hit the space bar,” Spencer said.

She hit the bar, and the next photograph appeared on the screen. They went through the first ten shots in less than a minute. A few provided a clear image of a face or two. But it was difficult to get a sense of what a man looked like when he was wearing a riot helmet with a chin strap.

“Just shuffle through them until we see something new,” he said.

Ellie rapidly, repeatedly tapped the space bar, flipping through the photos, until they came to shot number thirty-one. A new man appeared, and he was not in riot gear.

“Sonofabitch,” Spencer said.

“I think so,” she agreed.

“Let’s see thirty-two.”

She tapped the space bar.

“Well.”

“Yeah.”

“Thirty-three.”

Tap.

“No doubt about it,” she said.

Tap. Thirty-four.

Tap. Thirty-five.

Tap. Thirty-six.

The same man was in shot after shot, moving around the living room of the cabin in Malibu. And he was the last of the five men they had seen getting out of this very helicopter in front of the Hallmark card store a short while ago.

“Weirdest thing of all,” Ellie said, “I’ll bet we’re looking at his picture on his computer.”

“You’re probably sitting in his seat.”

“In his helicopter.”

Spencer said, “My God, he must be pissed.”

Quickly they went through the rest of the photographs. That pudgy-faced, rather jolly-looking fellow was in every shot until he apparently spit on a piece of paper and pasted it to the camera lens.

“I won’t forget what he looks like,” Spencer said, “but I wish we had a printer, could get a copy of that.”

“There’s a printer built in,” she said, indicating a slot on the side of the attaché case. “I think there’s a supply of maybe fifty sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven bond paper. I sort of remember that’s what Danny told me about it.”

“All I need is one.”

“Two. One for me.”

They picked the clearest shot of their benign-looking enemy, and Ellie printed out twice.

“You’ve never seen him before, huh?” Spencer asked.

“Never.”

“Well, I suspect we’ll be seeing him again.”

Ellie closed out Illinois Bell and returned to Mama’s seemingly endless series of menus. The depth and breadth of the megabitch’s abilities really did make her seem omnipotent and omniscient.

Settling back into his seat, Spencer said, “Think you can give Mama a terminal stroke?”

She shook her head. “No. Too many redundancies built into her for that.”

“A bloody nose, then?”

“At least that much.”

She was aware of him staring at her for the better part of a minute, while she worked.

Finally he said, “Have you broken many?”

“Noses? Me?”

“Hearts.”

She was amazed to feel a blush rising in her cheeks. “Not me.”

“You could. Easy.”

She said nothing.

“The dog’s listening,” he said.

“What?”

“I can only speak the truth.”

“I’m no cover girl.”

“I love the way you look.”

“I’d like a better nose.”

“I’ll buy you a different one if you want.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“But it’s only going to be different. Not any better.”

“You’re a strange man.”

“Besides, I wasn’t talking about looks.”

She didn’t respond, just kept poring through Mama.

He said, “If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.”

When she was finally able to take a breath, she said, “As soon as they give up on Earthguard, they’ll try to get control of another satellite and find us again. So it’s time to drop below radar and change course. Better tell the flyboys.”

After a hesitation, which might have indicated disappointment in her failure to respond in any expected fashion to the way he had bared his feelings, he said, “Where are we going?”

“As near the Colorado border as this bucket will take us.”

“I’ll find out how much fuel we have. But why Colorado?”

“Because Denver is the nearest really major city. And if we can get to a major city, I can make contact with people who can help us.”

“Do we need help?”

“Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“I’ve got a history with Colorado,” he said, and an uneasiness marked his voice.

“I’m aware of that.”

“Quite a history.”

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe,” he said, and he was no longer romancing her. “I guess it shouldn’t. It’s just a place….”

She met his eyes. “The heat’s on us too high right now. We need to get to some people who can hide us out, let things cool off.”

“You know people like that?”

“Not until recently. I’ve always been on my own before. But lately…things have changed.”

“Who are they?”

“Good people. That’s all you need to know for now.”

“Then I guess we’re going to Denver,” he said.

Mormons, Mormons were everywhere, a plague of Mormons, Mormons in neatly pressed uniforms, clean-shaven, clear-eyed, too soft-spoken for cops, so excessively polite that Roy Miro wondered if it was all an act, Mormons to the left of him, Mormons to the right of him, both local and county authorities, and all of them too efficient and by-the-book either to flub their investigation or to let this whole mess be covered over with a wink and a slap on the back. What bothered Roy the most about these particular Mormons was that they robbed him of his usual advantage, because in their company, his affable manner was nothing unusual. His politeness paled in comparison to theirs. His quick and easy smile was only one in a blizzard of smiles full of teeth remarkably whiter than his own. They swarmed through the shopping center and the supermarket, these Mormons, asking their oh-so-polite questions, armed with their small notebooks and Bic pens and direct Mormon stares, and Roy could never be sure that they were buying any part of his cover story or that they were convinced by his impeccable phony credentials.

Hard as he tried, he couldn’t figure out how to schmooze with Mormon cops. He wondered if they would respond well and open up to him if he told them how very much he liked their tabernacle choir. He didn’t actually like or dislike their choir, however, and he had a feeling that they would know he was lying just to warm them up. The same was true of the Osmonds, the premier Mormon show-business family. He neither liked nor disliked their singing and dancing; they were undeniably talented, but they just weren’t to his taste. Marie Osmond had perfect legs, legs that he could have spent hours kissing and stroking, legs against which he wished that he could crush handfuls of soft red roses — but he was pretty sure that these Mormons were not the type of cops who would enthusiastically join in on a conversation about that sort of thing.

He was certain that not all of the cops were Mormons. The equal-opportunity laws ensured a diverse police force. If he could find those who weren’t Mormons, he might be able to establish the degree of rapport necessary to grease the wheels of their investigation, one way or another, and get the hell out of there. But the non-Mormons were indistinguishable from the Mormons because they’d adopted Mormon ways, manners, and mannerisms. The non-Mormons — whoever the cunning bastards might be — were all polite, pressed, well groomed, sober, with infuriatingly well-scrubbed teeth that were free of all telltale nicotine stains. One of the officers was a black man named Hargrave, and Roy was positive that he’d found at least one cop to whom the teachings of Brigham Young were no more important than those of Kali, the malevolent form of the Hindu Mother Goddess, but Hargrave turned out to be perhaps the most Mormon of all Mormons who had ever walked the Mormon Way. Hargrave had a walletful of pictures of his wife and nine children, including two sons who were currently on religious missions in squalid corners of Brazil and Tonga.

Eventually the situation spooked Roy as much as it frustrated him. He felt as if he were in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Before the city and county patrol cars had begun to arrive — all well polished and in excellent repair — Roy had used the secure phone in the disabled helicopter to order two more customized JetRangers out of Las Vegas, but the agency had only one more at that office to send him. “Jesus,” Ken Hyckman had said, “you’re going through choppers like they’re Kleenex.” Roy would be continuing the pursuit of the woman and Grant with only nine of his twelve men, which was the maximum number that could be packed into the one new craft.

Although the disabled JetRanger wouldn’t be repaired and able to take off from behind the Hallmark store for at least thirty-six hours, the new chopper was already out of Vegas and on its way to Cedar City. Earthguard was being retargeted to track the stolen aircraft. They had suffered a setback, no argument about that, but the situation was by no means an unmitigated disaster. One battle lost — even one more battle lost — didn’t mean they would lose the war.

He wasn’t calmed by inhaling the pale-peach vapor of tranquility and exhaling the bile-green vapor of rage and frustration. He found no comfort in any of the other meditative techniques that for years had worked so reliably. Only one thing kept his counterproductive anger in check: thinking about Eve Jammer in all her glorious sixty-percent perfection. Nude. Oiled. Writhing. Blond splendor on black rubber.

The new helicopter wouldn’t reach Cedar City until past noon, but Roy was confident of being able to tough out the Mormons until then. Under their watchful eyes, he wandered among them, answered their questions again and again, examined the contents of the Rover, tagged everything in the vehicle for impoundment, and all the while his head was filled with images of Eve pleasuring herself with her perfect hands and with a variety of devices that had been designed by sexually obsessed inventors whose creative genius exceeded that of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein combined.

As he was standing at a supermarket checkout counter, examining the computer and the file box of twenty software diskettes that had been removed from the back of the Range Rover, Roy remembered Mama. For one frantic moment of denial, he tried to delude himself into remembering that he had switched off or unplugged the attaché case computer before he had departed the chopper. No good. He could see the video display as it had been when he’d put the workstation on the deck beside his seat before he had hurried to the cockpit: the satellite look-down on the shopping center.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed, and every Mormon cop within hearing twitched as one.

Roy raced to the back of the supermarket, through the stockroom, out the rear door, through the milling strike force agents and cops, to the damaged helicopter, where he could use the secure phone with its scrambling device.

He called Las Vegas and reached Ken Hyckman in the satellite-surveillance center. “We’ve got trouble—”

Even as Roy started to explain, Hyckman talked over him with pompous ex-anchorman solemnity: “We have trouble here. Earthguard’s onboard computer crashed. It inexplicably went off the air. We’re working on it, but we—”

Roy interrupted, because he knew the woman must have used his VDT to take out Earthguard. “Ken, listen, my field computer was in that stolen chopper, and it was on-line with Mama.”

“Holy shit!” Ken Hyckman said, but in the satellite-surveillance center, there were no Mormon cops to twitch.

“Get on with Mama, have her cut off my unit and block it from ever reaccessing her. Ever.”

The JetRanger chattered eastward across Utah, flying as low as one hundred feet above ground level where possible, to avoid radar detection.

Rocky remained with Ellie after Spencer went forward to oversee the crew again. She was too intensely focused on learning as much as she could about Mama’s capabilities to be able to pet the pooch or even talk at him a little. His unrewarded company seemed to be a touching and welcome indication that he had come to trust and approve of her.

She might as well have smashed the VDT and spent the time giving the dog a good scratch behind the ears, because before she was able to accomplish anything, the data on the video display vanished and was replaced by a blue field. A question flashed at her in red letters against the blue: WHO GOES THERE?

This development was no surprise. She had expected to be cut off long before she could do any damage to Mama. The system was designed with elaborate redundancies, protections against hacker penetrations, and virus vaccines. Finding a route into Mama’s deep program-management level, where major destruction could be wrought, would require not merely hours of diligent probing but days. Ellie had been fortunate to have the time necessary to take out Earthguard, for she could never have achieved such total control of the satellite without Mama’s assistance. To attempt not merely to use Mama but to bloody her nose had been overreaching. Nevertheless, doomed as the effort was, Ellie had been obliged to try.

When she had no answer for the red-letter question, the screen went blank and changed from blue to gray. It looked dead. She knew there was no point in trying to reacquire Mama.

She unplugged the computer, put it in the aisle beside her seat, and reached for the dog. He wiggled to her, lashing his tail. As she bent forward to pet him, she noticed a manila envelope on the deck, half under her seat.

After petting and scratching the pooch for a minute or two, Ellie retrieved the envelope from under the seat. It contained four photographs.

She recognized Spencer in spite of how very young he was in the snapshots. Although the man was visible in the boy, he had lost more than youth since the days when those pictures had been taken. More than innocence. More than the effervescent spirit that seemed evident in the smile and body language of the child. Life also had stolen an ineffable quality from him, and the loss was no less apparent for being inexpressible.

Ellie studied the woman’s face in the two pictures that showed her with Spencer, and was convinced that they were mother and son. If appearances didn’t deceive — and in this instance she sensed that they did not — Spencer’s mother had been gentle, kind, soft-spoken, with a girlish sense of fun.

In a third photo, the mother was younger than in the two with Spencer, perhaps twenty, standing alone in front of a tree laden with white flowers. She appeared to be radiantly innocent, not naive but unspoiled and without cynicism. Maybe Ellie was reading too much into a photo, but she perceived in Spencer’s mother a vulnerability so poignant that suddenly tears welled in her eyes.

Squinting, biting her lower lip, determined not to weep, she was at last forced to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand. She wasn’t moved solely by Spencer’s loss. Staring at the woman in the summer dress, she thought of her own mother, taken from her so brutally.

Ellie stood on the shore of a warm sea of memories, but she couldn’t bathe in the comfort of them. Every wave of recollection, regardless of how innocent it seemed, broke on the same dark beach. Her mother’s face, in every recaptured moment of the past, was as it had been in death: bloodied, bullet-shattered, with a fixed gaze so full of horror that it seemed as if, at the penultimate moment, the dear woman had glimpsed what lay beyond this world and had seen only a cold, vast emptiness.

Shivering, Ellie turned her eyes away from the snapshot to the starboard porthole beside her seat. The blue sky was as forbidding as an icy sea, and close beneath the low-flying craft passed a meaningless blur of rock, vegetation, and human endeavor.

When she was certain that she was in control of her emotions, Ellie looked again at the woman in the summer dress — and then at the final of the four photographs. She had noted aspects of the mother in the son, but she saw a much greater resemblance between Spencer and the shadow-shrouded man in the fourth picture. She knew this had to be his father, even though she didn’t recognize the infamous artist.

The resemblance, however, was limited to the dark hair, darker eyes, the shape of the chin, and a few other features. In Spencer’s face, there was none of the arrogance and potential for cruelty that made his father appear to be so cold and forbidding.

Or perhaps she saw those things in Steven Ackblom only because she knew that she was gazing at a monster. If she had come upon the photo without reason to suspect who the man was — or if she had met him in life, at a party or on the street — she might have seen nothing about him that made him more ominous than Spencer or other men.

Ellie was immediately sorry that such a thought had occurred to her, for it encouraged her to wonder if the kind, good man she saw in Spencer was an illusion or, at best, only part of the truth. She realized, somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to doubt Spencer Grant. Instead, she was eager to believe in him, as she had not believed in anything or anyone for a long time.

If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.

Those words had been so sincere, such an uncalculated revelation of his feelings and his vulnerability, that she had been left briefly speechless. Yet she hadn’t possessed the courage to give him any reason to believe that she might be capable of reciprocating his feelings for her.

Danny had been dead only fourteen months, and that was, by her standards, far too short a time to grieve. To touch another man this soon, to care, to love — that seemed to be a betrayal of the man whom she had first loved and whom she would still love, to the exclusion of all others, were he alive.

On the other hand, fourteen months of loneliness was, by any measure, an eternity.

To be honest with herself, she had to admit that her reticence sprang from more than a concern about the propriety or impropriety of a fourteen-month period of mourning. As fine and loving as Danny had been, he never would have found it possible to bare his heart as directly or as completely as Spencer had done repeatedly since she’d driven him out of that dry wash in the desert. Danny had not been unromantic, but he had expressed his feelings less directly, with thoughtful gifts and kindnesses, rather than with words, as if to say “I love you” would have been to cast a curse upon their relationship. She was unaccustomed to the rough poetry of a man like Spencer, when he spoke from his heart, and she was not sure what she thought of it.

That was a lie. She liked it. More than liked it. In her hardened heart, she was surprised to find a tender place that wasn’t merely responsive to Spencer’s forthright expressions of love but that longed for more. That longing was like the profound thirst of a desert traveler, and she now realized it was a thirst that had been in need of slaking all her life.

She was reluctant to respond to Spencer not primarily because she might have grieved too short a time for Danny but because she sensed that the first love of her life might eventually prove not to be the greatest. Finding the capacity to love again seemed like a betrayal of Danny. But it was far worse — cruel rejection — to love another more than she had loved her murdered husband.

Perhaps that would never happen. If she opened herself to this still mysterious man, perhaps she would ultimately discover that the room he occupied in her heart would never be as large or warm as the one in which Danny had lived and would always live.

In carrying her loyalty to Danny’s memory so far, she supposed that she was allowing honest sentiment to degenerate into a sugary pudding of sentimentality. Surely no one was born to love but once and never again, even if fate carried that first love to an early grave. If creation operated on rules that stern, God had built a cold, bleak universe. Surely love — and all emotions — were in one regard like muscles: growing stronger with exercise, withering when not used. Loving Danny might have given her the emotional strength, in the wake of his passing, to love Spencer more.

And to be fair to Danny, he had been raised by a soulless father — and a brittle, socialite mother — in whose icy embrace he’d learned to be self-contained and guarded. He had given her all that he could give, and she had been fortunate and happy in his arms. So happy, in fact, that suddenly she could no longer imagine going through the rest of her life without seeking, from someone else, the gift that Danny had been the first to give her.

How many women had ever affected a man so strongly that he had, after one evening of conversation, given up a comfortable existence and put his life in extreme jeopardy to be with her? She was more than merely mystified and flattered by Spencer’s commitment. She felt special, foolish, girlish, reckless. She was reluctantly enchanted.

Frowning, she studied Steven Ackblom’s photograph again.

She knew that Spencer’s commitment to her — and all that he had done to find her — might be seen as less the result of love than of obsession. In the son of a savage serial killer, any sign of obsession might reasonably be viewed as a cause for alarm, as a reflection of the father’s madness.

Ellie returned all four photographs to the envelope. She closed it with its small metal clasp.

She believed Spencer was, in all ways that mattered, not his father’s son. He was no more dangerous to her than was Mr. Rocky Dog. For three nights in the desert, as she had listened to him murmuring in delirium, between his periodic ascensions to a shaky state of consciousness, she had heard nothing to make her suspect that he was the bad seed of a bad seed.

In reality, even if Spencer was a danger to her, he was no match for the agency when it came to being a threat. The agency was still out there, hunting for them.

What Ellie really needed to worry about was whether she could avoid the agency’s goons long enough to discover and enjoy whatever emotional connections might evolve between her and this complex and enigmatic man. By Spencer’s own admission, he had secrets that were still unrevealed. More for his sake than hers, those secrets would have to be aired before any future they might have together could be discussed or even discerned; because until he settled his debts with the past, he would never know the peace of mind or the self-respect needed for love to flourish.

She looked out at the sky again.

They flew across Utah in their sleek black machine, strangers in their own land, putting the sun behind them, heading eastward toward the horizon from which, several hours hence, the night would come.

Harris Descoteaux showered in the gray and maroon guest bathroom of his brother’s Westwood home, but the scent of the jailhouse, which he believed he could detect on himself, was ineradicable. Jessica had packed three changes of clothes for him on Saturday, prior to being evicted from their house in Burbank. From that meager wardrobe, he selected Nikes, gray cords, and a long-sleeve, dark-green knit shirt.

When he told his wife that he was going for a walk, she wanted him to wait until the pies could be taken from the oven, so she could go with him. Darius, busy on the telephone in his study, suggested that he delay leaving for half an hour, so they could walk together. Harris sensed that they were concerned about his despondency. They felt he should not be alone.

He reassured them that he had no intention of throwing himself in front of a truck, that he needed to exercise after a weekend in a cell, and that he wanted to be alone to think. He borrowed one of Darius’s leather jackets from the foyer closet and went into the cool February morning.

The residential streets of Westwood were hilly. Within a few blocks, he realized that a weekend spent sitting in a cell actually had left his muscles cramped and in need of stretching.

He hadn’t been telling the truth when he had said that he wanted to be alone to think. Actually, he wanted to stop thinking. Ever since the assault on his house on Friday night, his mind had been spinning ceaselessly. And thinking had gotten him nowhere but into bleaker places within himself.

Even what little sleep he had gotten had been no surcease from worry, for he had dreamed about faceless men in black uniforms and shiny black jackboots. In the nightmares, they buckled Ondine, Willa, and Jessica into collars and leashes, as if dealing with dogs instead of with people, and led them away, leaving Harris alone.

As there was no escape from worry in his sleep, there was none in the company of Jessica or Darius. His brother was ceaselessly working on the case or brooding aloud about offensive and defensive legal strategies. And Jessica was — as Ondine and Willa would be, when they returned from the mall — a constant reminder that he had failed his family. None of them would say anything of that kind, of course, and he knew that the thought would never actually cross their minds. He had done nothing to earn the catastrophe that had befallen them. Yet, though he was blameless, he blamed himself. Somewhere, sometime, someplace, he’d made an enemy whose retribution was psychotically in excess of whatever offense Harris unwittingly had committed. If only he had done one thing differently, avoided one offending statement or act, perhaps none of this would have happened. Every time he thought of Jessica or his daughters, his inadvertent and unavoidable culpability seemed to be a greater sin.

The men in jackboots, though only creatures from his dream, had in a very real sense begun to deny him the comfort of his family without the need to buckle them in leashes and lead them away. His anger and frustration at his powerlessness and his self-inflicted guilt, as surely as bricks and mortar, had become the components of a wall between him and those he loved; and this barrier was likely to become wider and higher with time.

Alone, therefore, he walked the winding streets and the hills of Westwood. Many palms, ficuses, and pines kept the neighborhood California-green in February, but there were also numerous sycamores and maples and birches that were bare-limbed in winter. Harris focused largely on the interesting patterns of sunlight and tree shadows that alternately swagged and filigreed the sidewalk ahead. He tried to use them to induce a state of self-imposed hypnosis, in which all thought was banished except for an awareness of the need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

He had some success at that game. In a half trance, he was only peripherally aware of the sapphire-blue Toyota that passed him and, abruptly chugging and stalling out, pulled to the curb and stopped nearly a block ahead. A man got out of the car and opened the hood, but Harris remained focused on the tapestry of sun and shade on which he trod.

As Harris passed the front of the Toyota, the stranger turned from his examination of the engine and said, “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”

Harris continued a couple of steps before he realized that the man was speaking to him. Halting, turning, rising from his self-induced hypnosis, he said, “Excuse me?”

The stranger was a tall black man in his late twenties. He was as skinny as a fourteen-year-old, with the somber and intense manner of an elderly man who had seen too much and carried too great a grief all his life. Dressed in black slacks, a black turtleneck sweater, and a black jacket, he seemed to want to project an ominous image. But if that was his intention, it was defeated by his large, bottle-thick glasses, his thinness, and a voice which, while deep, was as velvety and appealing as that of Mel Torme.

“May I give you something to think about?” he asked again, and then he continued without waiting for a response. “What’s happened to you couldn’t happen to a United States Representative or Senator.”

The street was uncannily quiet for being in such a metropolitan area. The sunlight seemed different from what it had been a moment ago. The glimmer that it laid along the curved surfaces of the blue Toyota struck Harris as unnatural.

“Most people are unaware of it,” said the stranger, “but for decades, politicians have exempted current and future members of the U.S. Congress from most of the laws they pass. Asset forfeiture, for one. If cops nail a senator peddling cocaine out of his Cadillac by a schoolyard, his car can’t be seized the way your house was.”

Harris had the peculiar feeling that he had hypnotized himself so well that this tall man in black was an apparition in a trance-state dream.

“You might be able to prosecute him for drug dealing and get a conviction — unless his fellow politicians just censor him or expel him from Congress and, at the same time, arrange his immunity from prosecution. But you couldn’t seize his assets for drug dealing or any of the other two hundred offenses for which they seize yours.”

Harris said, “Who are you?”

Ignoring the question, the stranger went on in that soft voice: “Politicians pay no Social Security taxes. They have their own retirement fund. And they don’t rob it to finance other programs, the way they drain Social Security. Their pensions are safe.”

Harris looked anxiously around the street to see who might be watching, what other vehicles and men might have accompanied this man. Although the stranger wasn’t threatening, the situation itself suddenly seemed ominous. He felt that he was being set up, as if the point of the encounter was to tease from him some seditious statement for which he could be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned.

That was an absurd fear. Free speech was still well guaranteed. No citizens of the world were as openly and heatedly opinionated as his countrymen. Recent events obviously had inspired a paranoia over which he needed to gain control.

Yet he remained afraid to speak.

The stranger said, “They exempt themselves from healthcare plans they intend to force on you, so someday you’ll have to wait months for things like gallbladder surgery, but they’ll get the care they need on demand. Somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by the greediest and most envious among us.”

Harris found the nerve to speak again, but only to repeat the question he had already asked and to add another. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I only want to give you something to think about until the next time,” said the stranger. Then he turned and slammed shut the hood of the blue Toyota.

Emboldened when the other’s back was to him, Harris stepped off the curb and grabbed the man by the arm. “Look here—”

“I have to go,” the stranger said. “As far as I know, we’re not being watched. The chances are a thousand to one. But with today’s technology, you can’t be a hundred percent sure anymore. Until now, to anyone observing us, you just seem to’ve struck up a conversation with a guy who has car trouble, offered some assistance. But if we stand here talking any longer, and if someone is watching, they’ll come in for a closer look and turn on their directional microphones.”

He went to the driver’s door of his Toyota.

Bewildered, Harris said, “But what was this all about?”

“Be patient, Mr. Descoteaux. Just go with the flow, just ride the wave, and you’ll find out.”

“What wave?”

Opening the driver’s door, the stranger cracked his first smile since he had spoken. “Well, I guess…the microwave, the light wave, the waves of the future.”

He got in the car, started the engine, and drove away, leaving Harris more bewildered than ever.

The microwave. The light wave. The waves of the future.

What the hell had just happened?

Harris Descoteaux turned in a circle, studying the neighborhood, and for the most part it seemed unremarkable. Sky and earth. Houses and trees. Lawns and sidewalks. Sunlight and shadows. But in the fabric of the day, glimmering darkly in the deep warp and woof, were threads of mystery that had not been there earlier.

He walked on. Periodically, however, as he had not done before, he glanced over his shoulder.

Roy Miro in the Empire of the Mormons. After dealing with the Cedar City Police and the county sheriff’s deputies for nearly two hours, Roy had experienced enough niceness to last him until at least the first of July. He understood the value of a smile, courtesy, and unfailing friendliness, because he used a disarming approach in his own work. But these Mormon cops carried it to extremes. He began to long for the cool indifference of Los Angeles, the hard selfishness of Las Vegas, even the surliness and insanity of New York.

His mood was not enhanced by the news of Earthguard’s shutdown. He had been further rattled by subsequently learning that the stolen helicopter had descended to such a low altitude that two military facilities tracking it (in response to urgent agency requests that they believed had come from the Drug Enforcement Administration) had lost the craft. They hadn’t been able to reacquire it. The fugitives were gone, and only God and a couple of kidnapped pilots knew where.

Roy dreaded having to make his report to Tom Summerton.

The replacement JetRanger was due from Las Vegas in less than twenty minutes, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with it. Park it in the shopping-center lot and sit in it, waiting for someone to sight the fugitives? He might still be there when the time rolled around to do Christmas shopping again. Besides, these Mormon cops would undoubtedly keep bringing him coffee and doughnuts, and they would hang around to help him pass the time.

He was spared all the horrors of continued niceness when Gary Duvall telephoned again from Colorado and put the investigation back on track. The call came through on the scrambler-equipped security phone in the disabled chopper.

Roy sat in the back of the cabin and put on the headset.

“You’re not easy to track down,” Duvall told him.

“Complications here,” Roy said succinctly. “You’re still in Colorado? I thought you’d be on your way back to San Francisco by this time.”

“I got interested in this Ackblom angle. Always been fascinated by these serial killers. Dahmer, Bundy, that Ed Gein fellow a lot of years ago. Weird stuff. Got me to wondering what in hell the son of a serial killer is doing mixed up with this woman.”

“We’re all wondering,” Roy assured him.

As before, Duvall was going to pay out whatever he had learned in small installments.

“While I was so close, I decide to hop over from Denver to Vail, have a look at the ranch where it happened. It’s a quick flight. Almost took longer to board and disembark than it took to get there.”

“You’re there now?”

“At the ranch? No. I just got back from there. But I’m still in Vail. And wait’ll you hear what I discovered.”

“I guess I’ll have to.”

“Huh?”

“Wait,” Roy said.

Either missing the sarcasm or ignoring it, Duvall said, “I’ve got two tasty enchiladas of information to feed you. Enchilada number one — what do you think happened to the ranch after they took all of the bodies out of there and Ackblom went to prison for life?”

“It became a retreat for Carmelite nuns,” Roy said.

“Where’d you hear that?” Duvall asked, unaware that Roy’s answer had been intended to be humorous. “Aren’t any nuns anywhere around the place. There’s this couple lives on the ranch, Paul and Anita Dresmund. Been there for years. Fifteen years. Everyone around Vail thinks they own the place, and they don’t let on any different. They’re only about fifty-five now, but they have the look and style of people who might’ve been able to retire at forty — which is what they claimed — or never worked at all, lived on inheritance. They’re perfect for the job.”

“What job?”

“Caretakers.”

“Who does own it?”

“That’s the creepy part.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Part of the Dresmunds’ job is to pretend ownership and not reveal they’re paid caretakers. They like to ski, live the easy life, and it doesn’t bother them to be living in a place with that reputation, so keeping their mouths shut has been easy.”

“But they opened up to you?”

“Well, you know, people take FBI credentials and a few threats of criminal charges a lot more seriously than they should,” Duvall said. “Anyway, until about a year and a half ago, they were paid by an attorney in Denver.”

“You’ve got his name?”

“Bentley Lingerhold. But I don’t think we’ll need to bother with him. Until a year and a half ago, the Dresmunds’ checks were issued from a trust fund, the Vail Memorial Trust, overseen by this attorney. I had my field computer with me, got on-line with Mama, had her track it down. It’s a defunct entity, but there’s still a record of it. Actually, it was managed by another trust that still exists — the Spencer Grant Living Trust.”

“Good God,” Roy said.

“Stunning, huh?”

“The son still owns that property?”

“Yeah, through other entities he controls. A year and a half ago, ownership was transferred from the Vail Memorial Trust, which was essentially owned by the son, to an offshore corporation on Grand Cayman Island. That’s a tax-shelter haven in the Caribbean that—”

“Yes, I know. Go on.”

“Since then, the Dresmunds have been getting their checks from something called Vanishment International. Through Mama, I got into the Grand Cayman bank where the account is located. I wasn’t able to learn its value or call up any transaction records, but I was able to find out that Vanishment is controlled by a Swiss-based holding company: Amelia Earhart Enterprises.”

Roy fidgeted in his seat, wishing that he’d brought a pen and notebook to keep all these details straight.

Duvall said, “The grandparents, George and Ethel Porth, formed the Vail Memorial Trust well over fifteen years ago, about six months after the Ackblom story exploded. They used it to manage the property at a one-step remove, to keep their names disassociated from it.”

“Why didn’t they sell the place?”

“Haven’t a clue. Anyway, a year later they set up the Spencer Grant Living Trust for the boy, here in Denver, through this Bentley Lingerhold, just after the kid had his name legally changed. At the same time they put that trust in charge of the Vail Memorial Trust. But Vanishment International came into existence just a year and a half ago, long after both grandparents were dead, so you’ve got to figure that Grant himself set it up and that he’s moved most of his assets out of the United States.”

“Starting at about the same time he began to eliminate his name from most public records,” Roy mused. “Okay, tell me something…when you’re talking trusts and offshore corporations, you’re talking about big money, aren’t you?”

“Big,” Duvall confirmed.

“Where’d it come from? I mean, I know the father was famous….”

“After the old man pleaded guilty to all those murders, you know what happened to him?”

“Tell me.”

“He accepted a sentence of life imprisonment in an institution for the criminally insane. No possibility of parole. He made no arguments, no appeals. The guy was absolutely serene from the moment he was arrested, all the way through the final proceeding. Not one outburst, no expressions of regret.”

“No point. He knew he didn’t have any defense. He wasn’t crazy.”

“He wasn’t?” Duvall said, surprised.

“Well, not irrational, not babbling or raving or anything like that. He knew he couldn’t get off. He was just being realistic.”

“I guess so. Anyway, then the grandparents moved to have the son declared the legal owner of Ackblom’s assets. In fact, at the Porths’ request, the court ultimately divided the liquidated assets — minus the ranch — between the boy and the immediate families of the victims, in those cases where any spouses or children survived them. Want to guess how much they split?”

“No,” Roy said. He glanced out the porthole and saw a pair of local cops walking alongside the aircraft, looking it over.

Duvall didn’t even hesitate at Roy’s “no,” but poured out more details: “Well, the money came from selling paintings from Ackblom’s personal collection of other artists’ work, but mainly from the sale of some of his own paintings that he’d never been willing to put on the market. It totaled a little more than twenty-nine million dollars.”

“After taxes?”

“See, the value of his paintings soared with the notoriety. Seems funny, doesn’t it, that anyone would want to hang his work in their homes, knowing what the artist did. You’d think the value of his stuff would just collapse. But there was a frenzy in the art market. Values went through the roof.”

Roy remembered the color plates of Ackblom’s work that he had studied as a boy, at the time the story broke, and he couldn’t quite understand Duvall’s point. Ackblom’s art was exquisite. If Roy could have afforded to buy them, he would have decorated his own home with dozens of the artist’s canvases.

Duvall said, “Prices have continued to climb all these years, though more slowly than in the first year after. The family would have been better off holding onto some of the art. Anyway, the boy ended up with fourteen and a half million after taxes. Unless he lives high on the hog, that ought to have grown into an even more substantial fortune over all these years.”

Roy thought of the cabin in Malibu, the cheap furniture and walls without any artwork. “No high living.”

“Really? Well, you know, his old man didn’t live nearly as high as he could have, either. He refused to have a bigger house, didn’t want any live-in servants. Just a day maid and a property foreman who went home at five o’clock. Ackblom said he needed to keep his life as simple as possible to preserve his creative energy.” Gary Duvall laughed. “Of course he really just didn’t want anyone around at night to catch him at his games under the barn.”

Wandering back along the side of the chopper again, the Mormon cops looked up at Roy, where he was watching them from the porthole.

He waved.

They waved and smiled.

“Still,” Duvall said, “it’s a wonder the wife didn’t tumble to it sooner. He’d been experimenting with his ‘performance’ art for four years before she got wise.”

“She wasn’t an artist.”

“What?”

“She didn’t have the vision to anticipate. Without the vision to anticipate…she wouldn’t become suspicious without good reason.”

“Can’t say I follow you. Four years, for heaven’s sake.”

Then six more until the boy had found out. Ten years, forty-two victims, slightly more than four a year.

The numbers, Roy decided, weren’t particularly impressive. The factors that made Steven Ackblom one for the record books were his fame before his secret life was discovered, his position of respect in his community, his status as a family man (most classic serial killers were loners), and his desire to apply his exceptional talent to the art of torture in order to help his subjects achieve a moment of perfect beauty.

“But why,” Roy wondered again, “would the son want to hold on to that property? With all its associations. He wanted to change his name. Why not rid himself of the ranch too?”

“Strange, huh?”

“And if not the son, why not the grandparents? Why didn’t they sell it off when they were his legal guardians, make that decision for him? After their daughter was killed there…why would they want to have anything to do with the place?”

“There’s something there,” Duvall said.

“What do you mean?”

“Some explanation. Some reason. Whatever it is, it’s weird.”

“This caretaker couple—”

“Paul and Anita Dresmund.”

“—did they say whether Grant ever comes around?”

“He doesn’t. At least, they’ve never seen anybody with a scar like he’s got.”

“So who oversees them?”

“Until a year and a half ago, they only ever saw two people related to the Vail Memorial Trust. This lawyer, Lingerhold, or one of his partners would come by twice a year, just to check that the ranch was being maintained, that the Dresmunds were earning their salary and spending the upkeep fund on genuinely needed maintenance.”

“And for the past year and a half?”

“Since Vanishment International has owned the place, nobody’s come around at all,” Duvall said. “God, I’d love to find out how much he’s got stashed away in Amelia Earhart Enterprises, but you know we’re never going to pry that out of the Swiss.”

In recent years, Switzerland had grown alarmed by the large number of cases in which U.S. authorities had sought to seize the Swiss accounts of American citizens by invoking asset-forfeiture statutes without proof of criminal activity. The Swiss increasingly viewed such laws as blunt tools of political repression. Every month they retreated further from their traditional cooperation in criminal cases.

“What’s the other taco?” Roy asked.

“Huh?”

“The second taco. You said you had two tacos to feed me.”

“Enchiladas,” Duvall said. “Two enchiladas of information.”

“Well, I’m hungry,” Roy said pleasantly. He was proud of his patience, after all the tests to which the Mormon cops had put it. “So why don’t you heat up that second enchilada?”

Gary Duvall served it to him, and it was as tasty as promised.

The moment he hung up on Duvall, Roy called the Vegas office and spoke to Ken Hyckman, who would soon conclude his shift as the morning duty officer. “Ken, where’s that JetRanger?”

“Ten minutes from you.”

“I’m going to send it back with most of the men here.”

“You’re giving up?”

“You know we’ve lost radar contact on them.”

“Right.”

“They’re gone, and we’re not going to reconnect with them that way. But I have another lead, a good one, and I’m jumping on it. I need a jet.”

“Jesus.”

“I didn’t say I needed to hear a little profanity.”

“Sorry.”

“What about the Lear I came in on Friday night?”

“It’s still here. Serviced and ready.”

“Is there anywhere in my vicinity it can land, any military base where I could meet it?”

“Let me check,” Hyckman said, and he put Roy on hold.

While he waited, Roy thought about Eve Jammer. He would not be able to return to Las Vegas that evening. He wondered what his blond sweetness would do to remember him and to keep him in her heart. She had said that it would be something special. He assumed she would practice new positions, if there were any, and try out erotic aids that she had never used before, in order to prepare an experience for him that, a night or two hence, would leave him shuddering and breathless as never before. When he attempted to imagine what those erotic aids might be, his mind spun. And his mouth went as dry as sand — which was perfect.

Ken Hyckman came back on the line. “We can put the Lear down right there in Cedar City.”

“This burg can take a Lear?”

“Brian Head is just twenty-nine miles east of there.”

“Who?”

“Not who. What. First-rate ski resort, lots of pricey homes up on the mountain. Lots of rich people and corporations own condos in Brian Head, bring their jets in to Cedar City and drive up from there. It doesn’t have anything like O’Hare or LAX, no bars and newsstands and baggage carousels, but the airfield can handle long landing requirements.”

“Is a crew standing by with the Lear?”

“Absolutely. We can get them out of McCarran and to you by one o’clock.”

“Terrific. I’ll ask one of the grinning gendarmes to drive me to the airfield.”

“Who?”

“One of the courteous constables,” Roy said. He was in a fine mood again.

“I’m not sure this scrambler is giving me what you’re saying.”

“One of the Mormon marshals.”

Either getting the point or deciding that he didn’t need to understand, Hyckman said, “They’ll have to file a flight plan here. Where are you going from Cedar City?”

“Denver,” Roy said.

Slumped in the last seat in the starboard aisle, Ellie dozed on and off for a couple of hours. In fourteen months as a fugitive, she had learned to put aside her fears and worries, sleeping whenever she had a chance.

Shortly after she woke, while she was stretching and yawning, Spencer returned from an extended visit with the two-man crew. He sat across from her.

As Rocky curled up in the aisle at his feet, Spencer said, “More good news. According to the boys, this is an extensively customized eggbeater. For one thing, they have jumped-up engines on this baby, so we can carry an extra-heavy load, which allows them to saddle her with big auxiliary fuel tanks. She’s got a lot more range than the standard model. They’re sure they can get us all the way across the border and past Grand Junction before there’s any danger of the tanks running dry, if we want to go that far.”

“The farther the better,” she said. “But not right in or around Grand Junction. We don’t want to be seen by a lot of curious people. Better out somewhere, but not so far out that we can’t find wheels nearby.”

“We won’t make it to the Grand Junction area until half an hour or so before twilight. Right now it’s only ten past two o’clock. Well, three o’clock in the Mountain Time Zone. Still plenty of time to look at a map and pick a general area to put down.”

She pointed to the canvas duffel bag on the seat in front of hers. “Listen, about your fifty thousand dollars—”

He held up one hand to silence her. “I was just startled that you found it, that’s all. You had every right and reason to search my luggage after you located me in the desert. You didn’t know why the hell I was trying to track you down. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you still weren’t entirely clear on that.”

“You always carry that kind of pocket change?”

“About a year and a half ago,” he said, “I started salting cash and gold coins in safe-deposit boxes in California, Nevada, Arizona. Also opened savings accounts in various cities, under false names and Social Security numbers. Shifted everything else out of the country.”

“Why?”

“So I could move fast.”

“You expected to be on the run like this?”

“No. I just didn’t like what I saw happening on that computer-crime task force. They taught me all about computers, including that access to information is the essence of freedom. And yet what they ultimately wanted to do was restrict that access in as many instances as possible and to the greatest extent possible.”

Playing devil’s advocate, Ellie said, “I thought the idea was just to prevent criminal hackers from using computers to steal and maybe to stop them from vandalizing data banks.”

“And I’m all for that kind of crime control. But they want to keep a thumb on everybody. Most authorities these days…they violate privacy all the time, fishing both openly and secretly in data banks. Everyone from the IRS to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Even the Bureau of Land Management, for God’s sake. They were all helping to fund this regional task force with grants, and they all gave me the creeps.”

“You see a new world coming—”

“—like a runaway freight train—”

“—and you don’t like the shape of it—”

“—don’t think I want to be a part of it.”

“Do you see yourself as a cyberpunk, an on-line outlaw?”

“No. Just a survivor.”

“Is that why you’ve been erasing yourself from public record — a little survival insurance?”

No shadow fell across him, but his features seemed to darken. He had looked haggard to begin with, which was understandable after the ordeal of the past few days. But now he was sunken-eyed, gaunt, and older than his years.

He said, “At first I was just…getting ready to go away.” He sighed and wiped a hand across his face. “This sounds strange maybe. But changing my name from Michael Ackblom to Spencer Grant wasn’t enough. Moving from Colorado, starting a new life…none of it was ever enough. I couldn’t forget who I was…whose son I was. So I decided to wipe myself out of existence, painstakingly, methodically, until there was no record in the world that I existed under any name. What I’d been learning about computers gave me that power.”

“And then? When you were erased?”

“That’s what I could never figure out. And then? What next? Wipe myself out for real? Suicide?”

“That’s not you.” She found her heart sinking at the thought.

“No, not me,” he agreed. “I never brooded about eating a shotgun barrel or anything like that. And I had an obligation to Rocky, to be here for him.”

Sprawled on the deck, the dog raised his head at the sound of his name. He swished his tail.

“Then, after a while,” he continued, “even though I didn’t know what I was going to do, I decided there was still virtue in becoming invisible. Just because, as you say, of this new world coming, this brave new high-tech world with all its blessings — and curses.”

“Why did you leave your DMV file and your military records partly intact? You could’ve wiped them out completely, long ago.”

He smiled. “Being too clever, maybe. I thought I’d just change my address on them, a few salient details, so they weren’t much use to anyone. But by leaving them in place, I could always go back to look at them and see if somebody was searching for me.”

“You booby-trapped them?”

“Sort of, yeah. I buried little programs in those computers, very deep, very subtle. Each time anyone goes into my DMV or military files without using a little code I implanted, the system adds one asterisk to the end of the last sentence in the file. The idea was that I’d check once or twice a week, and if I saw asterisks, saw that someone was investigating me…well, then maybe it would be time to walk away from the cabin in Malibu and just move on.”

“Move on where?”

“Anywhere. Just move on and keep moving.”

“Paranoid,” she said.

“Damned paranoid.”

She laughed quietly. So did he.

He said, “By the time I left that task force, I knew that the way the world’s changing, everybody’s going to have somebody looking for him sooner or later. And most people, most of the time, are going to wish they hadn’t been findable.”

Ellie checked her wristwatch. “Maybe we should take a look at that map now.”

“They have a slew of maps up front,” he said.

She watched him walk forward to the cockpit door. His shoulders were slumped. He moved with evident weariness, and he still appeared to be somewhat stiff from his days of immobility.

Suddenly Ellie was chilled by a feeling that Spencer Grant was not going to make it through this with her, that he was going to die somewhere in the night ahead. The foreboding was perhaps not strong enough to be called an explicit premonition, but it was more powerful than a mere hunch.

The possibility of losing him left her half sick with dread. She knew then that she cared for him even more than she had been able to admit.

When he returned with the map, he said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Just tired,” she lied. “And starved.”

“I can do something about the starved part.” As he sat in the seat across the aisle again, he produced four candy bars from the pockets of his fleece-lined denim jacket.

“Where’d you get these?”

“The boys up front have a snack box. They were happy to share. They’re really a couple of swell guys.”

“Especially with a gun to their heads.”

“Especially then,” he agreed.

Rocky sat up and cocked his good ear with keen interest when he smelled the candy bars.

“Ours,” Spencer said firmly. “When we’re out of the air and on the road again, we’ll stop and get some real food for you, something healthier than this.”

The dog licked his chops.

“Look, pal,” Spencer said, “I didn’t stop in the supermarket to graze on the wreckage, like you did. I need every bite of these, or I’ll collapse on my face. Now you just lie down and forget it. Okay?”

Rocky yawned, looked around with pretended disinterest, and stretched out on the deck again.

“You two have an incredible rapport,” she said.

“Yeah, we’re Siamese twins, separated at birth. You couldn’t know that, of course, because he’s had a lot of plastic surgery.”

She could not take her eyes off his face. More than weariness was visible in it. She could see the certain shadow of death.

Disconcertingly perceptive and alert to her mood, Spencer said, “What?”

“Thanks for the candy.”

“It would’ve been filet mignon if I could’ve swung it.”

He unfolded the map. They held it between their seats, studying the territory around Grand Junction, Colorado.

Twice she dared to look at him, and each glimpse made her heart race with fear. She could too clearly see the skull beneath the skin, the promise of the grave that was usually so well concealed by the mask of life.

She felt ignorant, silly, superstitious, like a foolish child. There were other explanations besides omens and portents and psychic images of tragedy to come. Perhaps, after the Thanksgiving night when Danny and her parents had been snatched away forever, this fear would plague her every time that she crossed the line between caring for people and loving them.

Roy landed at Stapleton International Airport in Denver, aboard the Learjet, after twenty-five minutes in a holding pattern. The local office of the agency had assigned two operatives to work with him, as he had requested on the scrambler phone while in flight. Both men — Burt Rink and Oliver Fordyce — were waiting in the parking bay as the Lear taxied into it. They were in their early thirties, tall, clean-shaven. They wore black topcoats, dark-blue suits, dark ties, white shirts, and black Oxfords with rubber rather than leather soles. All that was also as Roy had requested.

Rink and Fordyce had new clothes for Roy that were virtually identical to their own outfits. Having shaved and showered aboard the jet during the trip from Cedar City, Roy needed only to change clothes before they could switch from the plane to the black Chrysler super-stretch limousine that was waiting at the foot of the portable stairs.

The day was bone-freezing. The sky was as clear as an arctic sea and deeper than time. Icicles hung along the eaves of building roofs, and banks of snow marked the far limits of runways.

Stapleton was on the northeastern edge of the city, and their appointment with Dr. Sabrina Palma was beyond the southwest suburbs. Roy would have insisted on a police escort, under one pretense or another, except that he didn’t want to call any more attention to themselves than absolutely necessary.

“It’s a four-thirty appointment,” Fordyce said as he and Rink settled into the back of the limousine, facing to the rear, where Roy sat facing forward. “We’ll make it with a few minutes to spare.”

The driver had been instructed not to dawdle. They accelerated away from the Learjet as if they did have a police escort.

Rink passed a nine-by-twelve white envelope to Roy. “These are all the documents you required.”

“You have your Secret Service credentials?” Roy asked.

From suit-coat pockets, Rink and Fordyce withdrew their ID wallets and flipped them open to reveal holographic identification cards with their photographs and authentic SS badges. Rink’s name for the upcoming meeting was Sidney Eugene Tarkenton. Fordyce was Lawrence Albert Olmeyer.

Roy extracted his own ID wallet from among the documents in the white envelope. He was J. Robert Cotter.

“Let’s all remember who we are. Be sure to call one another by these names,” Roy said. “I don’t expect you’ll need to say much — or even anything at all. I’ll do the talking. You’re there primarily to lend the whole thing an air of realism. You’ll enter Dr. Palma’s office behind me and post yourselves to the left and the right of the door. Stand with your feet about eighteen inches apart, arms down in front of you, one hand clasped over the other. When I introduce you to her, you’ll say ‘Doctor’ and nod or ‘Pleased to meet you’ and nod. Stoic at all times. About as expressionless as a Buckingham Palace guard. Eyes straight ahead. No fidgeting. If you’re asked to sit down, you’ll politely say ‘No, thank you, Doctor.’ Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous, but this is how people are used to seeing Secret Service agents in the movies, so any indication that you’re a real human being will ring false to her. Is that understood, Sidney?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that understood, Lawrence?”

“I prefer Larry,” said Oliver Fordyce.

“Is that understood, Larry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Roy withdrew the other documents from the envelope, examined them, and was satisfied.

He was taking one of the greatest risks of his career, but he was remarkably calm. He was not even assigning agents to seek the fugitives in Salt Lake City or anywhere else directly north of Cedar City, because he was confident that their flight in that direction had been a ruse. They had altered course immediately after dropping under the radar floor. He doubted that they would go west, back into Nevada, because that state’s empty vastness provided too little cover. Which left south and east. After the two enchiladas of information from Gary Duvall, Roy had reviewed everything he knew about Spencer Grant and had decided that he could accurately predict in which direction the man — and, with luck, the woman — would proceed. East-northeast. Moreover, he had divined exactly where Grant would impact at the end of that east-northeast trajectory, even more confidently than he could have plotted the line of a bullet from the barrel of a rifle. Roy was calm not solely because he trusted in his well-exercised powers of deductive reasoning but also because, in this special instance, destiny walked with him as surely as blood flowed in his veins.

“Can I assume that the team I asked for earlier today is on its way to Vail?” he asked.

“Twelve men,” said Fordyce.

Glancing at his watch, Rink said, “They should be meeting Duvall there just about now.”

For sixteen years, Michael Ackblom — aka “Spencer Grant”—had been denying the deep desire to return to that place, repressing the need, resisting the powerful magnet of the past. Nevertheless, either consciously or unconsciously, he had always known that he must pay a visit to those old haunts sooner or later. Otherwise, he would have sold the property to be rid of that tangible reminder of a time he wanted to forget, just as he had sloughed off his old name for a new one. He retained ownership for the same reason that he’d never sought surgery to have his facial scar minimized. He’s punishing himself with the scar, Dr. Nero Mondello had said, in his white-on-white office in Beverly Hills. Reminding himself of something he would like to forget but feels obligated to remember. As long as Grant had lived in California and had followed a pressure-free daily routine, perhaps he could have indefinitely resisted the call of that killing ground in Colorado. But now he was running for his life and under tremendous pressure, and he had come near enough to his old home to ensure that the siren song of the past would be irresistible. Roy was betting everything that the son of the serial killer would return to the marrow of the nightmare, from which all the blood had sprung.

Spencer Grant had unfinished business at the ranch outside Vail. And only two people in the world knew what it was.

Beyond the heavily tinted windows of the speeding limousine, in the rapidly dwindling winter afternoon, the modern city of Denver appeared to be smoky and as vaguely defined at the edges as piles of ancient ruins entwined with ivy and shrouded with moss.

West of Grand Junction, inside the Colorado National Monument, the JetRanger landed in an eroded basin between one parenthesis of red rock formations and another of low hills mantled with junipers and pinyon pines. A skin of dry snow, less than half an inch thick, was flayed into crystalline clouds by the downdraft.

A hundred feet away, a green-black screen of trees served as backdrop to the bright silhouette of a white Ford Bronco. A man in a green ski suit stood at the open tailgate, watching the helicopter.

Spencer stayed with the crew while Ellie went outside to have a word with the man at the truck. With the JetRanger engine off and the rotor blades dead, the rock-and tree-rimmed basin was as silent as a deserted cathedral. She could hear nothing but the squeak and crunch of her own footsteps on the snow-filmed, frozen earth.

As she drew close to the Bronco, she saw a tripod with a camera on it. Related gear was spread across the lowered tailgate.

The photographer, bearded and furious, was spouting steam from his nostrils as if about to explode. “You ruined my shot. That pristine swath of snow curving up to that thrusting, fiery rock. Such contrast, such drama. And now ruined.”

She glanced back at the rock formations beyond the helicopter. They were still fiery, a luminous stained-glass red in the beams of the westering sun, and they were still thrusting. But he was right about the snow: It wasn’t pristine any longer.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he said sharply.

She studied the snow in the vicinity of the Bronco. As far as she could tell, his were the only footprints in it. He was alone.

“What the hell are you doing out here anyway?” the photographer demanded. “There are sound restrictions here, nothing as noisy as that allowed. This is a wildlife preserve.”

“Then cooperate and preserve your own,” she said, drawing the SIG 9mm from under her leather jacket.

In the JetRanger again, while Ellie held the pistol and the Micro Uzi, Spencer cut strips out of the upholstery. He used those lengths of leather to bind the wrists of each of the three men to the arms of the passenger seats in which he’d made them sit.

“I won’t gag you,” he told them. “Nobody’s likely to hear you shouting anyway.”

“We’ll freeze to death,” the pilot fretted.

“You’ll work your arms loose in half an hour at most. Another half an hour or forty-five minutes to walk out to the highway we crossed over when we flew in. Not nearly enough time to freeze.”

“Just to be safe,” Ellie assured them, “as soon as we get to a town, we’ll call the police and tell them where you are.”

Twilight had arrived. Stars were beginning to appear in the deep purple of the eastern sky as it curved down to the horizon.

While Spencer drove the Bronco, Rocky panted in Ellie’s ear from the cargo area behind her seat. They found the way overland toward the highway with no difficulty. The route was clearly marked by the tire tracks in the snow that the truck had made on its trip into the picturesque basin.

“Why’d you tell them we’d call the police?” Spencer wondered.

“You want them to freeze?”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

“I won’t risk it.”

“Yeah, but these days, it’s possible — maybe not likely, but possible — that any call you make to a police department is going to be received on a caller-ID line, not just if you punch nine-one-one. Fact is, a smaller city like Grand Junction, with not so much street crime or so many demands on resources, is a lot more likely to have money to spend on fancy communications systems with all the bells and whistles. You call them, then they know right away the address you’re phoning from. It comes up on the screen in front of the police operator. And then they’ll know what direction we went, what road we left Grand Junction on.”

“I know. But we’re not going to make it that simple for them,” she said, and explained what she had in mind.

“I like it,” he said.

The Rocky Mountain Prison for the Criminally Insane had been constructed in the Great Depression, under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration, and it looked as solid and formidable as the Rockies themselves. It was a squat, rambling building with small, deep-set, barred windows even in the administration wing. The walls were faced with iron-gray granite. An even darker granite had been used for lintels, window stools, door and window surrounds, coins, and carved cornices. The whole pile slumped under a gabled attic and a black slate roof.

The general effect, Roy Miro felt, was as depressing as it was ominous. Without hyperbole, the structure could be said to brood high upon its hillside, as if it were a living creature. In the late-afternoon shadows of the steep slopes that rose behind the prison, its windows were filled with a sour-yellow light that might have been reflected through connecting corridors from the dungeons of some mountain demon who lived deeper in the Rockies.

Approaching the prison in the limousine, standing before it, and walking its public corridors to Dr. Palma’s office, Roy was overcome with compassion for the poor souls locked away in that heap of stone. He grieved as well for the equally suffering warders who, in looking after the deranged, were forced to spend so much of their lives in such circumstances. If it had been within his authority to do so, he would have sealed up every last window and vent, with all the inmates and attendants inside, and put them out of their misery with a gentle-acting but lethal gas.

Dr. Sabrina Palma’s reception lounge and office were so warmly and luxuriously furnished that, by contrast with the building that surrounded them, they seemed to belong not only in another and more exalted place — a New York penthouse, a Palm Beach bayside mansion — but in another age than the 1930s, a time warp in which the rest of the prison seemed still to exist. Sofas and chairs were recognizably by J. Robert Scott, upholstered in platinum and gold silks. Tables and mirror frames and side chairs were also by J. Robert Scott, done in a variety of exotic woods with bold grains, all either bleached or whitewashed. The deeply sculpted, beige-on-beige carpet might have been from Edward Fields. At the center of the inner office was a massive Monteverde & Young desk, in a crescent-moon shape, that must have cost forty thousand dollars.

Roy had never seen an office of any public official to equal those two rooms, not even in the highest circles of official Washington. He knew at once what to make of it, and he knew that he had a sword to hold over Dr. Palma if she gave him any resistance.

Sabrina Palma was the director of the prison medical staff. By virtue of its being as much hospital as prison, she was also the equivalent of a warden in any ordinary correctional facility. And she was as striking as her office. Raven-black hair. Green eyes. Skin as pale and smooth as pooled milk. Early forties, tall, svelte but shapely. She wore a black knit suit with a white silk blouse.

After identifying himself, Roy introduced her to Agent Olmeyer—

“Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

— and Agent Tarkenton.

“Doctor.”

She invited them all to sit down.

“No, thank you, Doctor,” said Olmeyer, and took up a position to the right of the door that connected the inner and outer offices.

“No, thank you, Doctor,” said Tarkenton, and took up a position to the left of the same door.

Roy proceeded to one of three exquisite chairs in front of Dr. Palma’s desk as she circled to the plush leather throne behind it. She sat in a cascade of indirect, amber light that made her pale skin glow as if with inner fire.

“I’m here on a matter of the utmost importance,” Roy told her in as gracious a tone as he could command. “We believe — no, we are certain — that the son of one of your inmates is currently stalking the President of the United States and intends to assassinate him.”

When she heard the name of the would-be assassin and knew the identity of his father, Sabrina Palma raised her eyebrows. After she examined the documents that Roy withdrew from the white envelope and after she learned what he expected of her, she excused herself and went to the outer office to make several urgent telephone calls.

Roy waited in his chair.

Beyond the three narrow windows, spread out across the night below the prison, the lights of Denver gleamed and glittered.

He looked at his watch. By now, on the far side of the Rockies, Duvall and his twelve men ought to have settled inconspicuously into the creeping night. They wanted to be ready, in case the travelers arrived far earlier than anticipated.

The hood of night had fully covered the face of twilight by the time they reached the outskirts of Grand Junction.

With a population of over thirty-five thousand, the city was big enough to delay them. But Ellie had a penlight and the map that she had taken from the helicopter, and she found the simplest route.

Two-thirds of the way around the city, at a multiplex cinema, they stopped to go shopping for a new vehicle. Apparently, none of the shows was either letting out or about to begin, for no moviegoers were arriving or leaving. The sprawling parking lot was full of cars but devoid of people.

“Get an Explorer or a Jeep if you can,” she said as he opened the door of the Bronco, letting in a frigid draft. “Something like that. It’s more convenient.”

“Thieves can’t be choosers,” he said.

“They have to be.” As he got out, she shifted over behind the steering wheel. “Hey, if you’re not choosy, then you’re not a thief, you’re a trash collector.”

While Ellie drifted along one aisle, pacing him, Spencer moved boldly from vehicle to vehicle, trying the doors. Each time that he found one unlocked, he leaned inside long enough to check for keys in the ignition, behind the sun visor, and under the driver’s seat.

Watching his master through the side windows of the Bronco, Rocky whined as though with concern.

“Dangerous, yes,” Ellie said. “I can’t lie to the dog. But not half as dangerous as driving through the front of a supermarket with helicopters full of thugs on your tail. You’ve just got to keep this in perspective.”

The fourteenth set of wheels that Spencer tried was a big black Chevy pickup with an extended cab that provided both front and back seats. He climbed into it, pulled the door shut, started the engine, and reversed out of the parking slot.

Ellie parked the Bronco in the space that the Chevy had vacated. They needed only fifteen seconds to transfer the guns, the duffel bag, and the dog to the pickup. Then they were on their way again.

On the east side of the city, they started looking for any motel that appeared to have been recently constructed. The rooms in most older establishments were not computer friendly.

At a self-described “motor lodge” that looked new enough to have held its ribbon-cutting ceremony just hours ago, Ellie left Spencer and Rocky in the pickup while she went into the front office to ask the desk clerk if their accommodations would allow her to use her modem. “I have a report due at my office in Cleveland by morning.” In fact, all rooms were properly wired for her needs. Using her Bess Baer ID for the first time, she took a double with a queen-size bed and paid cash in advance.

“How soon can we be on the road again?” Spencer asked as they parked in front of their unit.

“Forty-five minutes tops, probably half an hour,” she promised.

“We’re miles from where we took the pickup, but I have a bad feeling about hanging around here too long.”

“You aren’t the only one.”

She couldn’t help but notice the decor of the room even as she took Spencer’s laptop computer out of the duffel bag, put it on the desk next to an arrangement of accessible plugs and phone jacks, and concentrated on getting it ready for business. Blue-and-black-speckled carpet. Blue-and-yellow-striped draperies. Green-and-blue-checkered bedspread. Blue and gold and silver wallpaper in a pale ameboid pattern. It looked like army camouflage for an alien planet.

“While you’re working on that,” Spencer said, “I’ll take Rocky out to do his business. He must be ready to burst.”

“Doesn’t seem in distress.”

“He’d be too embarrassed to let on.” At the door, he turned to her again and said, “I saw fast-food places across the street. I’ll walk over there and get us some burgers and stuff too, if that sounds like it would hit the spot.”

“Just buy plenty,” she said.

While Spencer and the pooch were gone, Ellie accessed the AT&T central computer, which she had penetrated a long time ago and had explored in depth. Through AT&T’s nationwide linkages, she had been able, in the past, to finesse her way into the computers of several regional phone companies at all ends of the country, although she’d never before tried to slide into the Colorado system. For a hacker as for a concert pianist or an Olympic gymnast, however, training and practice were the keys to success, and she was extremely well trained and well practiced.

When Spencer and Rocky returned after only twenty-five minutes, Ellie was already deep inside the regional system, scrolling rapidly down a dauntingly long list of pay-phone numbers with corresponding addresses that were arranged county by county. She settled on a phone at a service station in Montrose, Colorado, sixty-six miles south of Grand Junction.

Manipulating the main switching system in the regional phone company, she rang the Grand Junction Police while routing the call from their motel room through the service-station pay phone down in Montrose. She called the emergency number, rather than the main police number, just to be sure that the source address would appear onscreen in front of the operator.

“Grand Junction Police.”

Ellie began without any preamble: “We hijacked a Bell JetRanger helicopter in Cedar City, Utah, earlier today—” When the police operator attempted to interrupt with questions that would encourage a standard-format report, Ellie shouted the woman down: “Shut up, shut up! I’m only going to say this once, so you better listen, or people will die!” She grinned at Spencer, who was opening bags of wonderfully fragrant food on the dinette table. “The chopper is now on the ground in the Colorado National Monument, with the crew aboard. They’re unhurt but tied up. If they have to spend the night out there, they’ll freeze to death. I’ll describe the landing site just once, and you better get the details right if you want to save their lives.”

She gave succinct directions and disconnected.

Two things had been achieved. The three men in the JetRanger would be found soon. And the Grand Junction Police Department had an address in Montrose, sixty-six miles to the south, from which the emergency call had been made, indicating that Ellie and Spencer were either about to flee east on Federal Highway 50, toward Pueblo, or continue south on Federal Highway 550 toward Durango. Several state routes branched off those main arteries as well, providing enough possibilities to keep agency search teams fully occupied. Meanwhile, she and Spencer and Mr. Rocky Dog would be headed to Denver on Interstate 70.

Dr. Sabrina Palma was being difficult, which was no surprise to Roy. Before arriving at the prison, he had expected objections to his plans, based on medical, security, and political grounds. The moment he had seen her office, he had known that vital financial considerations would weigh more heavily against him than all the genuinely ethical arguments that she might have pursued.

“I can’t conceive of any circumstances, related to the threat against the President, that would require Steven Ackblom’s removal from this facility,” she said crisply. Though she had returned to the formidable leather chair, she no longer relaxed in it but sat forward on the edge, arms on her crescent desk. Her manicured hands were alternately fisted on her blotter or busy with various pieces of Lalique crystal — small animals, colorful fishes — that were arranged to one side of her blotter. “He’s an extremely dangerous individual, an arrogant and utterly selfish man who would never cooperate with you even if there was something he could do to help you find his son — though I can’t imagine what that would be.”

As pleasant as he ever was, Roy said, “Dr. Palma, with all due respect, it isn’t for you to imagine or be told how he could help us or how we expect to win his cooperation. This is an urgent matter of national security. I am not permitted to share any details with you, regardless of how much I might want to.”

“This man is evil, Mr. Cotter.”

“Yes, I’m aware of his history.”

“You aren’t understanding me—”

Roy gently interrupted, pointing to one of the documents on her desk. “You have read the judicial order, signed by a justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, conveying Steven Ackblom into my temporary custody.”

“Yes, but—”

“I assume that when you left the room to make telephone calls, one of them was to confirm that signature?”

“Yes, and it’s legitimate. He was still in his office, and he confirmed it personally.”

In fact, it was a real signature. That particular justice lived in the agency’s pocket.

Sabrina Palma was not satisfied. “But what does your judge know about evil like this? What experience does he have with this particular man?”

Pointing to another document on the desk, Roy said, “And may I assume that you’ve confirmed the genuineness of the letter from my boss, the secretary of the Treasury? You called Washington?”

“I didn’t speak with him, no, of course not.”

“He’s a busy man. But there must have been an assistant….”

“Yes,” the doctor admitted grudgingly. “I spoke with one of his assistants, who verified the request.”

The signature of the secretary of the Treasury had been forged. The assistant, one of a swarm of minions, was an agency sympathizer. He was no doubt still standing by in the secretary’s office, after hours, to field another call on the private number that Roy had given to Sabrina Palma, just in case she called again.

Pointing to a third document on her desk, Roy said, “And this request from the first deputy attorney general?”

“Yes, I called him.”

“I understand you’ve actually met Mr. Summerton.”

“Yes, at a conference on the insanity plea and its effect on the health of the judicial system. About six months ago.”

“I trust Mr. Summerton was persuasive.”

“Quite. Look, Mr. Cotter, I have a call in to the governor’s office, and if we can just wait until—”

“I’m afraid we’ve no time to wait. As I’ve told you, the life of the President of the United States is at stake.”

“This is a prisoner of exceptional—”

“Dr. Palma,” Roy said. His voice now had a steely edge, though he continued to smile. “You do not have to worry about losing your golden goose. I swear to you that he will be back in your care within twenty-four hours.”

Her green eyes fixed him with an angry stare, but she did not respond.

“I hadn’t heard that Steven Ackblom has continued to paint since his incarceration,” Roy said.

Dr. Palma’s gaze flicked to the two men at the door, who were in convincingly rigid Secret Service postures, then returned to Roy. “He produces a little work, yes. Not much. Two or three pieces a year.”

“Worth millions at the current rate.”

“There is nothing unethical going on here, Mr. Cotter.”

“I didn’t imagine there was,” Roy said innocently.

“Of his own free will, without coercion of any sort, Mr. Ackblom assigns all rights to each of his new paintings to this institution — after he tires of it hanging in his cell. The proceeds from their sale are used entirely to supplement the funds that are budgeted to us by the State of Colorado. And these days, in this economy, the state generally underfunds prison operations of all kinds, as if the institutionalized don’t deserve adequate care.”

Roy slid one hand lightly, appreciatively, lovingly along the glass-smooth, radius edge of the forty-thousand-dollar desk. “Yes, I’m sure that without the lagniappe of Ackblom’s art, things here would be grim indeed.”

She was silent again.

“Tell me, Doctor, in addition to the two or three major pieces that Ackblom produces each year, as he just sort of dabbles in his art to pass his entombed days, are there perhaps sketches, pencil studies, scraps of scrawlings that aren’t worth the bother for him to assign to this institution? You know what I mean: insignificant doodlings, preliminaries, worth hardly ten or twenty thousand each, which one might take home to hang on one’s bathroom walls? Or even simply incinerate along with the rest of the garbage?”

Her hatred for him was so intense that he would not have been surprised if the blush that rose in her face had been hot enough to make her cotton-white skin explode into flames, as if it were not skin at all but magicians’ flashpaper.

“I adore your watch,” he said, indicating the Piaget on her slender wrist. The rim of the face was enhanced by alternating diamonds and emeralds.

The fourth document on the desk was a transferral order that acknowledged Roy’s legal authority — by direction of the Colorado Supreme Court — to receive Ackblom into his temporary custody. Roy had already signed it in the limousine. Now Dr. Palma signed it too.

Delighted, Roy said, “Is Ackblom on any medications, any antipsychotics, that we should continue to give him?”

She met his eyes again, and her anger was watered down with concern. “No antipsychotics. He doesn’t need them. He isn’t psychotic by any current psychological definition of the term. Mr. Cotter, I’m trying my best to make you understand this man exhibits none of the classic signs of psychosis. He is that most imprecisely defined creature — a sociopath, yes. But a sociopath by his actions only, by what we know him to have done, not by anything that he says or can be shown to believe. Administer any psychological test you want, and he comes through with flying colors, a perfectly normal guy, well adjusted, balanced, not even markedly neurotic—”

“I understand he’s been a model prisoner these sixteen years.”

“That means nothing. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Look, I’m a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. But over the years, from observation and experience, I’ve lost all faith in psychiatry. Freud and Jung — they were both full of shit.” That crude word had shocking power, coming from a woman as elegant as she. “Their theories of how the human mind works are worthless, exercises in self-justification, philosophies devised only to excuse their own desires. No one knows how the mind works. Even when we can administer a drug and correct a mental condition, we only know that the drug is effective, not why. And in Ackblom’s case, his behavior isn’t based in a physiological problem any more than it is in a psychological problem.”

“You have no compassion for him?”

She leaned across her desk, focusing intently on him. “I tell you, Mr. Cotter, there is evil in the world. Evil that exists without cause, without rationalization. Evil that doesn’t arise from trauma or abuse or deprivation. Steven Ackblom is, in my judgment, a prime example of evil. He is sane, utterly sane. He clearly knows the difference between right and wrong. He chose to do monstrous things, knowing they were monstrous, and even though he felt no psychological compulsion to do them.”

“You have no compassion for your patient?” Roy asked again.

“He isn’t my patient, Mr. Cotter. He’s my prisoner.”

“However you choose to look at him, doesn’t he deserve some compassion — a man who’s fallen from such heights?”

“He deserves to be shot in the head and buried in an unmarked grave,” she said bluntly. She was not attractive anymore. She looked like a witch, raven-haired and pale, with eyes as green as those of certain cats. “But because Mr. Ackblom entered a guilty plea, and because it was easiest to commit him to this facility, the state supported the fiction that he was a sick man.”

Of all the people Roy had met in his busy life, he had disliked few and had hated fewer still. For nearly everyone that he had ever met, he had found compassion in his heart, regardless of their shortcomings or personalities. But he flatly despised Dr. Sabrina Palma.

When he found time in his busy schedule, he would give her a comeuppance that would make what he’d done to Harris Descoteaux seem merciful.

“Even if you can’t find some compassion for the Steven Ackblom who killed those people,” Roy said, rising from his chair, “I would think you could find some for the Steven Ackblom who has been so generous to you.”

“He is evil.” She was unrelenting. “He deserves no compassion. Just use him however you must, then return him.”

“Well, maybe you do know a thing or two about evil, Doctor.”

“The advantage I’ve taken of the arrangement here,” she said coolly, “is a sin, Mr. Cotter. I know that. And one way or another, I’ll pay for the sin. But there’s a difference between a sinful act, which springs from weakness, and one that’s pure evil. I am able to recognize that difference.”

“How handy for you,” he said, and began to gather up the papers from her desk.

They sat on the motel bed, chowing down on Burger King burgers, french fries, and chocolate-chip cookies. Rocky ate off a torn paper bag on the floor.

That morning in the desert, now hardly twelve hours behind them, seemed to be an eternity in the past. Ellie and Spencer had learned so much about each other that they could eat in silence, enjoying the food, without feeling the least awkward together.

He surprised her, however, when, toward the end of their hurried meal, he expressed the desire to stop at the ranch outside Vail, on their way to Denver. And “surprised” was not the word for it when he told her that he still owned the place.

“Maybe I’ve always known that I’d have to go back eventually,” he said, unable to look at her.

He put the last of his dinner aside, appetite lost. Sitting lotus-fashion on the bed, he folded his hands on his right knee and stared at them as if they were more mysterious than artifacts from lost Atlantis.

“In the beginning,” he continued, “my grandparents held on to the place because they didn’t want anyone to buy it and maybe make some god-awful tourist attraction out of it. Or let the news media into those underground rooms for more morbid stories. The bodies had been removed, everything cleaned out, but it was still the place, could still attract media interest. After I went into therapy, which I stayed with for about a year, the therapist felt we should keep the property until I was ready to go back.”

“Why?” Ellie wondered. “Why ever go back?”

He hesitated. Then: “Because part of that night is a blank to me. I’ve never been able to remember what happened toward the end, after I shot him….”

“What do you mean? You shot him, and you ran for help, and that was the end of it.”

“No.”

“What?”

He shook his head. Still staring at his hands. Very still hands. Like hands of carved marble, resting on his knee.

Finally he said, “That’s what I’ve got to find out. I’ve got to go back there, back down there, and find out. Because if I don’t, I’m never going to be…right with myself…or any good for you.”

“You can’t go back there, not with the agency after you.”

“They wouldn’t look for us there. They can’t have found out who I was. Who I really am. Michael. They can’t know that.”

“They might,” she said.

She went to the duffel bag and got the envelope of photographs that she had found on the deck of the JetRanger, half under her seat. She presented them to him.

“They found these in a shoe box in my cabin,” he said. “They probably just took them for reference. You wouldn’t recognize…my father. No one would. Not from this shot.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Anyway, I don’t own the property under any identity they would associate with me, even if somehow they got into sealed court records and found out I’d changed my name from Ackblom. I hold it through an offshore corporation.”

“The agency is damned resourceful, Spencer.”

Looking up from his hands, he met her eyes. “All right, I’m willing to believe they’re resourceful enough to uncover all of it — given enough time. But surely not this quickly. That just means I’ve got more reason than ever to go there tonight. When am I going to have a chance again, after we go to Denver and to wherever we’ll go after that? By the time I can return to Vail again, maybe they will have discovered I still own the ranch. Then I’ll never be able to go back and finish this. We pass right by Vail on the way to Denver. It’s off Interstate Seventy.”

“I know,” she said shakily, remembering that moment in the helicopter, somewhere over Utah, when she had sensed that he might not live through the night to share the morning with her.

He said, “If you don’t want to go there with me, we can work that out too. But…even if I could be sure the agency would never learn about the place, I’d have to go back tonight. Ellie, if I don’t go back now, when I have the guts to face it, I might never work up the courage later. It’s taken sixteen years this time.”

She sat for a while, staring at her own hands. Then she got up and went to the laptop, which was still plugged in and connected to the modem. She switched it on.

He followed her to the desk. “What’re you doing?”

“What’s the address of the ranch?” she asked.

It was a rural address, rather than a street number. He gave it to her, then again after she asked him to repeat it. “But why? What’s this about?”

“What’s the name of the offshore company?”

“Vanishment International.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“And that’s the name on the deed now — Vanishment International? That’s how it would show on the tax records?”

“Yeah.” Spencer pulled up another chair beside hers and sat on it as Rocky came sniffing around to see if they had more food. “Ellie, will you open up?”

“I’m going to try to crack into public land records out there,” she said. “I need to call up a parcel map if I can get one. I’ve got to figure out the exact geographic coordinates of the place.”

“Is all that supposed to mean something?”

“By God, if we’re going in there, if we’re taking a risk like that, then we’re going to be as heavily armed as possible.” She was talking to herself more than to him. “We’re going to be ready to defend ourselves against anything.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Too complicated. Later. Now I need some silence.”

Her quick hands worked magic on the keyboard. Spencer watched the screen as Ellie moved from Grand Junction to the courthouse computer in Vail. Then she peeled the county’s data-system onion one layer at a time.

Wearing a slightly large suit of clothes provided by the agency and a topcoat identical to those of his three companions, in shackles and handcuffs, the famous and infamous Steven Ackblom sat beside Roy in the back of the limousine.

The artist was fifty-three but appeared to be only a few years older than when he had been on the front pages of newspapers, where the sensation mongers had variously dubbed him the Vampire of Vail, the Madman of the Mountains, and the Psycho Michelangelo. Although a trace of gray had appeared at his temples, his hair was otherwise black and glossy and not in the least receding. His handsome face was remarkably smooth and youthful, and his brow was unmarked. A soft smile line curved downward from the outer flare of each nostril, and fans of fine crinkles spread at the outer corners of his eyes: None of that aged him whatsoever; in fact, it gave the impression that he suffered few troubles but enjoyed many sources of amusement.

As in the photograph that Roy had found in the Malibu cabin and as in all the pictures that had appeared in newspapers and magazines sixteen years ago, Steven Ackblom’s eyes were his most commanding feature. Nevertheless, the arrogance that Roy had perceived even in the shadowy publicity still was not there now, if it ever had been; in its place was a quiet self-confidence. Likewise, the menace that could be read into any photograph, when one knew the accomplishments of the man, was not in the least visible in person. His gaze was direct and clear, but not threatening. Roy had been surprised and not displeased to discover an uncommon gentleness in Ackblom’s eyes, and a poignant empathy as well, from which it was easy to infer that he was a person of considerable wisdom, whose understanding of the human condition was deep, complete.

Even in the limousine’s odd and inadequate illumination, which came from the recessed lights under the heel-kicks of the car seats and from the low-wattage sconces in the doorposts, Ackblom was a presence to be reckoned with — although in no way that the press, in its sensation seeking, had begun to touch upon. He was quiet, but his taciturnity had no quality of inarticulateness or distraction. Quite the opposite: His silences spoke more than other men’s most polished flights of oratory, and he was always and unmistakably observant and alert. He moved little, never fidgeted. Occasionally, when he accompanied a comment with a gesture, the movement of his cuffed hands was so economical that the chain between his wrists clinked softly if at all. His stillness was not rigid but relaxed, not limp but full of quiescent power. It was impossible to sit at his side and be unaware that he possessed tremendous intelligence: He all but hummed with it, as if his mind was a dynamic machine of such omnipotence that it could move worlds and alter the cosmos.

In his entire thirty-three years, Roy Miro had met only two people whose mere physical presence had engendered in him an approximation of love. The first had been Eve Marie Jammer. The second was Steven Ackblom. Both in the same week. In this wondrous February, destiny had become, indeed, his cloak and his companion. He sat at Steven Ackblom’s side, discreetly enthralled. He wanted desperately to make the artist aware that he, Roy Miro, was a person of profound insights and exceptional accomplishments.

Rink and Fordyce (Tarkenton and Olmeyer had ceased to exist upon leaving Dr. Palma’s office) seemed not to be as charmed by Ackblom as Roy was — or charmed at all. Sitting in the rear-facing seats, they appeared uninterested in what the artist had to say. Fordyce closed his eyes for long periods of time, as though meditating. Rink stared out the window, although he could have seen nothing whatsoever of the night through the darkly tinted glass. On those rare occasions when a gesture of Ackblom’s rang a soft clink from his cuffs, and on those even rarer occasions when he shifted his feet enough to rattle the shackles that connected his ankles, Fordyce’s eyes popped open like the counterbalanced eyes of a doll, and Rink’s head snapped from the unseen night to the artist. Otherwise they seemed to pay no attention to him.

Depressingly, Rink and Fordyce clearly had formed their opinions of Ackblom based on what drivel they had gleaned from the media, not from what they could observe for themselves. Their denseness was no surprise, of course. Rink and Fordyce were men not of ideas but of action, not of passion but of crude desire. The agency had need of their type, although they were sadly without vision, pitiable creatures of woeful limitations who would one day inch the world closer to perfection by departing it.

“At the time, I was quite young, only two years older than your son,” Roy said, “but I understood what you were trying to achieve.”

“And what was that?” Ackblom asked. His voice was in the lower tenor range, mellow, with a timbre that suggested he might have had a career as a singer if he’d wished.

Roy explained his theories about the artist’s work: that those eerie and compelling portraits weren’t about people’s hateful desires building like boiler pressure beneath their beautiful surfaces, but were meant to be viewed with the still lifes and, together, were a statement about the human desire — and struggle — for perfection. “And if your work with living subjects resulted in their attainment of a perfect beauty, even for a brief time before they died, then your crimes weren’t crimes at all but acts of charity, acts of profound compassion, because too few people in this world will ever know any moment of perfection in their entire lives. Through torture, you gave those forty-one — your wife as well, I assume — a transcendent experience. Had they lived, they might eventually have thanked you.”

Roy was speaking sincerely, although previously he had believed that Ackblom had been misguided in the means by which he had pursued the grail of perfection. That was before he had met the man. Now, he felt ashamed of his woeful underestimation of the artist’s talent and keen perception.

In the rear-facing seats, neither Rink nor Fordyce evinced any surprise or interest in anything that Roy said. In their service with the agency, they had heard so many outrageous lies, all so well and sincerely delivered, that they undoubtedly believed their boss was only playing with Ackblom, cleverly manipulating a madman into the degree of cooperation required from him to ensure the success of the current operation. Roy was in the singular and thrilling position of being able to express his deepest feelings, with the knowledge that Ackblom would fully comprehend him even while Rink and Fordyce would think he was engaged only in Machiavellian games.

Roy did not go so far as to reveal his personal commitment to compassionate treatment of the sadder cases that he met in his many travels. Stories like those about the Bettonfields in Beverly Hills, Chester and Guinevere in Burbank, and the paraplegic and his wife outside the restaurant in Vegas might strike even Rink and Fordyce as too specific in detail to be impromptu fabrications invented to win the artist’s confidence.

“The world would be an infinitely better place,” Roy opined, restricting his observations to safely general concepts, “if the breeding stock of humanity was thinned out. Eliminate the most imperfect specimens first. Always working up from the bottom. Until those permitted to survive are the people who most closely meet the standards for the ideal citizens needed to build a gentler and more enlightened society. Don’t you agree?”

“The process would certainly be fascinating,” Ackblom replied.

Roy took the comment to be approving. “Yes, wouldn’t it?”

“Always supposing that one was on the committee of eliminators,” the artist said, “and not among those to be judged.”

“Well, of course, that’s a given.”

Ackblom favored him with a smile. “Then what fun.”

They were driving over the mountains on Interstate 70, rather than flying to Vail. The trip would require less than two hours by car. Returning across Denver from the prison to Stapleton, waiting for flight clearance, and making the journey by air would actually have taken longer. Besides, the limousine was more intimate and quieter than the jet. Roy was able to spend more quality time with the artist than he would have been able to enjoy in the Lear.

Gradually, mile by mile, Roy Miro came to understand why Steven Ackblom affected him as powerfully as Eve had affected him. Although the artist was a handsome man, nothing about his physical appearance could qualify as a perfect feature. Yet in some way, he was perfect. Roy sensed it. A radiance. A subtle harmony. Soothing vibrations. In some aspect of his being, Ackblom was without the slightest flaw. For the time being, the artist’s perfect quality or virtue remained tan-talizingly mysterious, but Roy was confident of discovering it by the time they arrived at the ranch outside Vail.

The limousine cruised into ever higher mountains, through vast primeval forests encrusted with snow, upward into silvery moonlight — all of which the tinted windows reduced to a smoky blur. The tires hummed.

While Spencer drove the stolen black pickup east on Interstate 70 out of Grand Junction, Ellie slumped in her seat and worked feverishly on the laptop, which she had plugged into the cigarette lighter. The computer was elevated on a pillow that they had filched from the motel. Periodically she consulted a printout of the parcel map and other information that she had obtained about the ranch.

“What’re you doing?” he asked again.

“Calculations.”

“What calculations?”

“Ssshhhhh. Rocky’s sleeping on the backseat.”

From her duffel bag, she had produced diskettes of software which she’d installed in the machine. Evidently they were programs of her own design, adapted to his laptop while he had lingered in delirium for more than two days in the Mojave. When he had asked her why she had backed up her own computer — now gone with the Rover — with his quite different system, she had said, “Former Girl Scout. Remember? We always like to be prepared.”

He had no idea what her software allowed her to do. Across the screen flickered formulas and graphs. Holographic globes of the earth revolved at her command, and from them she extracted areas for enlargement and closer examination.

Vail was only three hours away. Spencer wished that they could use the time to talk, to discover more about each other. Three hours was such a short time — especially if it proved to be the last three hours they ever had together.

FOURTEEN

When he returned to his brother’s house from his walk through the hilly streets of Westwood, Harris Descoteaux did not mention the encounter with the tall man in the blue Toyota. For one thing, it seemed half like a dream. Improbable. Besides, he hadn’t been able to make up his mind whether that stranger had been a friend or an enemy. He didn’t want to alarm Darius or Jessica.

Late that afternoon, after Ondine and Willa returned from the mall with their aunt and after Darius and Bonnie’s son, Martin, came home from school, Darius decided that they needed to have a little fun. He insisted on packing everyone — the seven of them — into the VW Microbus, which he had so lovingly restored with his own hands, to go to a movie and then to dinner at Hamlet Gardens.

Neither Harris nor Jessica wanted to go to movies and dinners in restaurants when every dollar spent was a dollar that they were mooching. Not even Ondine and Willa, as resilient as any teenagers, had yet bounced back from the trauma of the SWAT attack on Friday or from having been put out of their own home by federal marshals.

Darius was adamant that a movie and dinner at Hamlet Gardens were precisely the right medicines for what ailed them. And his persistence was one of the qualities that made him an exceptional attorney.

That was how, at six-fifteen Monday evening, Harris came to be in a theater with a boisterous crowd, unable to grasp the humor in scenes that everyone else found hilarious, and succumbing to another attack of claustrophobia. The darkness. So many people in one room. The body heat of the crowd. He was afflicted, first, by an inability to draw a deep breath and then by a mild dizziness. He feared that worse would swiftly follow. He whispered to Jessica that he had to use the bathroom. When worry crossed her face, he patted her arm and smiled reassuringly, and then he got the hell out of there.

The men’s room was deserted. At one of the four sinks, Harris turned on the cold water. He bent over the bowl and splashed his face repeatedly, trying to cool down from the overheated theater and chase away the dizziness.

The noise of the running water prevented him from hearing the other man enter. When he looked up, he was no longer alone.

About thirty, Asian, wearing loafers and jeans and a dark-blue sweater with prancing red reindeer, the stranger stood two sinks away. He was combing his hair. He met Harris’s eyes in the mirror, and he smiled. “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”

Harris recognized the question as the very one with which the tall man in the blue Toyota had initially addressed him. Startled, he backed away from the sink so fast that he crashed against the swinging door at one of the toilet stalls. He tottered, almost fell, but caught the hingeless side of the jamb to keep his balance.

“For a while the Japanese economy was so hot that it gave the world the idea that maybe big government and big business must work hand in glove.”

“Who are you?” Harris asked, quicker off the mark with this man than he had been with the first.

Ignoring the question, the smiling stranger said, “So now we hear about national industrial policies. Big business and government strike deals every day. Push my social programs and enhance my power, says the politician, and I’ll guarantee your profit.”

“What does any of this matter to me?”

“Be patient, Mr. Descoteaux.”

“But—”

“Union members get screwed because government conspires with their bosses. Small businessmen get screwed, everyone too little to play in the hundred-billion-dollar league. Now the secretary of defense wants to use the military as an arm of economic policy.”

Harris returned to the sink, where he had left the cold water running. He turned it off.

“A business-government alliance, enforced by the military and domestic police — once, this was called fascism. Will we see fascism in our time, Mr. Descoteaux? Or is this something new, not to worry?”

Harris was trembling. He realized that his face and hands were dripping, and he yanked paper towels from the dispenser.

“And if it’s something new, Mr. Descoteaux, is it going to be something good? Maybe. Maybe we’ll go through a time of adjustment, and thereafter everything will be delightful.” He nodded, smiling, as if considering that possibility. “Or maybe this new thing will turn out to be a new kind of hell.”

“I don’t care about any of this,” Harris said angrily. “I’m not political.”

“You don’t need to be. To protect yourself, you need only to be informed.”

“Look, whoever you are, I just want my house back. I want my life like it was. I want to go on just the way everything was.”

“That will never transpire, Mr. Descoteaux.”

“Why is this happening to me?”

“Have you read the novels of Philip K. Dick, Mr. Descoteaux?”

“Who? No.”

Harris felt more than ever as if he had crossed into White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat territory.

The stranger shook his head with dismay. “The futuristic world Mr. Dick wrote about is the world we’re sliding into. It’s a scary place, this Dicksian world. More than ever, a person needs friends.”

“Are you a friend?” Harris demanded. “Who are you people?”

“Be patient and consider what I’ve said.”

The man started for the door.

Harris reached out to stop him but decided against it. A moment later he was alone.

His bowels were suddenly in turmoil. He hadn’t lied to Jessica after all: He really did need to use the bathroom.

Approaching Vail, high in the western Rockies, Roy Miro used the phone in the limousine to call the number of the cellular unit that Gary Duvall had given him earlier.

“Clear?” he asked.

“No sign of them yet,” Duvall said.

“We’re almost there.”

“You really think they’re going to show?”

The stolen JetRanger and its crew had been found in the Colorado National Monument. A call from the woman to the Grand Junction police had been traced to Montrose, indicating that she and Spencer Grant were fleeing south toward Durango. Roy didn’t believe it. He knew that telephone calls could be deceptively routed with the assistance of a computer. He trusted not in a traced call but in the power of the past; where the past and the present met, he would find the fugitives.

“They’ll show,” Roy said. “Cosmic forces are with us tonight.”

“Cosmic forces?” Duvall said, as if playing into a joke, waiting for the punch line.

“They’ll show,” Roy repeated, and he disconnected.

Beside Roy, Steven Ackblom sat silent and serene.

“We’ll be there in just a few minutes,” Roy told him.

Ackblom smiled. “There’s no place like home.”

Spencer had been driving for nearly an hour and a half before Ellie switched off the computer and unplugged it from the cigarette lighter. A dew of perspiration beaded her forehead, although the interior of the truck was not overheated.

“God knows if I’m mounting a good defense or planning a double suicide,” she said. “Could go either way. But now it’s there for us to use if we have to.”

“Use what?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said bluntly. “It’ll take too much time. Besides, you’d try to talk me out of it. Which would be a waste of time. I know the arguments against it, and I’ve already rejected them.”

“And this makes an argument so much easier — when you handle both sides of it.”

She remained somber. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll have no choice but to use it, no matter how insane that seems.”

Rocky had awakened in the backseat a short while ago, and to him, Spencer said, “Pal, you’re not confused back there, are you?”

“Ask me anything else but not about that,” Ellie said. “If I talk about it, if I even think too much about it, then I’ll be too damn scared to do it when the time comes, if the time comes. I hope to God we don’t need it.”

Spencer had never heard her babble before. She usually kept tight control of herself. Now she was spooking him.

Panting, Rocky poked his head between the front seats. One ear up, one down: refreshed and interested.

“I didn’t think you were confused,” Spencer told him. “Me, I’m twice as befuddled as a lightning bug bashing itself to bits to get out of an old mayonnaise jar. But I suppose that higher forms of intelligence, like the canine species, would have no trouble figuring out what she’s ranting about.”

Ellie stared at the road ahead, rubbing absentmindedly at her chin with the knuckles of her right hand.

She had said that he could ask her about anything except that, whatever that might be, so he took her up on it. “Where was ‘Bess Baer’ going to settle down before I mucked things up? Where were you going to take that Rover and make a new life?”

“Wasn’t going to settle again,” she said, proving that she was listening. “I gave up on that. Sooner or later, they find me if I stay in one place too long. I spent a lot of the money I had…and some from friends…to buy that Rover and the gear in it. With that, I figured I could keep moving and go just about anywhere.”

“I’ll pay for the Rover.”

“That’s not what I was after.”

“I know. But what’s mine is yours anyway.”

“Oh? When did that happen?”

“No strings attached,” he said.

“I like to pay my own way.”

“No point discussing it.”

“What you say is final, huh?”

“No. What the dog says is final.”

“This was Rocky’s decision?”

“He takes care of all my finances.”

Rocky grinned. He liked hearing his name.

“Because it’s Rocky’s idea,” she said, “I’ll keep an open mind.”

Spencer said, “Why do you call Summerton a cockroach? Why does that annoy him particularly?”

“Tom’s got a phobia about insects. All kinds of insects. Even a housefly can make him squirm. But he’s especially uptight about cockroaches. When he sees one — and they used to have an infestation at the ATF when he was there — he goes off the deep end. It’s almost comic. Like in a cartoon when an elephant spots a mouse. Anyway, a few weeks after…after Danny and my folks were killed, and after I gave up trying to approach reporters with what I knew, I called old Tom at his office in the Department of Justice, just rang him up from a pay phone in midtown Chicago.”

“Good grief.”

“The most private of his private lines, the one he picks up himself. Surprised him. He tried to play innocent, keep me talking until he could have me whacked right at that pay phone. I told him he shouldn’t be so afraid of cockroaches, since he was one himself. Told him that someday I’ll stomp him flat, kill him. And I meant what I said. Someday, somehow, I’ll send him straight to Hell.”

Spencer glanced at her. She was staring at the night ahead, still brooding. Slender, so pleasing to the eye, in some ways as delicate as any flower, she was nevertheless as fierce and tough as any special-forces soldier that Spencer had ever known.

He loved her beyond all reason, without reservation, without qualification, with a passion immeasurable, loved every aspect of her face, loved the sound of her voice, loved her singular vitality, loved the kindness of her heart and the agility of her mind, loved her so purely and intensely that sometimes when he looked at her, a hush seemed to fall across the world. He prayed that she was a favored child of fate, destined to have a long life, because if she died before he did, there would be no hope for him, no hope at all.

He drove east into the night, past Rifle and Silt and New Castle and Glenwood Springs. The interstate highway frequently followed the bottoms of deep, narrow canyons with sheer walls of seamed stone. In daylight, it was some of the most breathtaking scenery on the planet. In February darkness, those soaring ramparts of rock pressed close, black monoliths that denied him the choice of going left or right and that funneled him toward higher places, toward dire confrontations so inevitable that they seemed to have been waiting to unfold since before the universe had exploded into existence. From the floor of that crevasse, only a ribbon of sky was visible, sprinkled with a meagerness of stars, as though Heaven could accommodate no more souls and would soon close its gates forever.

Roy touched a button in the armrest. Beside him, the car window purred down. “Is it as you remember?” he asked the artist.

As they turned off the two-lane country road, Ackblom leaned past Roy to look outside.

Toward the front of the property, untrammeled snow mantled the paddocks that surrounded the stables. No horses had been boarded there in twenty-two years, since Jennifer’s death, because horses had been her love, not her husband’s. The fencing was well maintained and so white that it was only dimly visible against the frosted fields.

The bare driveway was flanked by waist-high walls of snow that had been pushed there by a plow. Its course was serpentine.

At Steven Ackblom’s request, the driver stopped at the house rather than proceeding directly to the barn.

Roy put up the window while Fordyce removed the shackles from the artist’s ankles. Then the handcuffs. Roy did not want his guest to suffer the further indignity of those bonds.

In their journey across the mountains, he and the artist had achieved a rapport deeper than he would have thought possible in such a short acquaintance. More than handcuffs and shackles, the mutual respect between them was certain to guarantee Ackblom’s fullest cooperation.

He and the artist got out of the limousine, leaving Rink and Fordyce and the driver to wait for them. No wind carved the night, but the air was frigid.

As the fenced fields had been, the lawns were white and softly luminous in the platinum light of the partial moon. The evergreen shrubs were encrusted with snow. Its limbs jacketed in ice, a winter-shorn maple cast a faint moonshadow upon the yard.

The two-story Victorian farmhouse was white with green shutters. A deep front porch extended from corner to corner, and the embracing balustrade had white balusters under a green handrail. A gingerbread cornice marked the transition from the walls to the dormered roof, and a fringe of small icicles overhung the eaves.

The windows were all dark. The Dresmunds had cooperated with Duvall. For the night, they were staying in Vail, perhaps curious about events at the ranch but selling their forgetfulness for the price of dinner in a four-star restaurant, champagne, hot-house strawberries dipped in chocolate, and a restful night in a luxury hotel suite. Later, with Grant dead and no caretaker job to be filled, they would regret making such a bad bargain.

Duvall and the twelve men under his supervision were scattered with utmost discretion across the property. Roy couldn’t discern where a single man was concealed.

“It’s lovely here in the spring,” said Steven Ackblom, speaking not with audible regret but as if remembering May mornings full of sun, mild evenings full of stars and cricket songs.

“It’s lovely now too,” Roy said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” With a smile that might have been melancholy, Ackblom turned to survey the entire property. “I was happy here.”

“It’s easy to see why,” Roy said.

The artist sighed. “‘Pleasure is oft a visitant, but pain clings cruelly to us.’”

“Excuse me?”

“Keats,” Ackblom explained.

“Ah. I’m sorry if being here depresses you.”

“No, no. Don’t trouble yourself about that. It doesn’t in the least depress me. By nature, I’m depression-proof. And seeing this place again…it’s a sweet pain, one well worth experiencing.”

They got into the limousine and were driven to the barn behind the house.

In the small town of Eagle, west of Vail, they stopped for gasoline. In a minimart adjacent to the service station, Ellie was able to purchase two tubes of Super Glue, the store’s entire supply.

“Why Super Glue?” Spencer asked when she returned to the pumps, where he was counting out cash to the attendant.

“Because it’s a lot harder to find welding tools and supplies.”

“Well, of course it is,” he said, as though he knew what she was talking about.

She remained solemn. Her fund of smiles had been depleted. “I hope it’s not too cold for this stuff to bond.”

“What’re you going to do with your Super Glue, if I may ask?”

“Glue something.”

“Well, of course you are.”

Ellie got into the backseat with Rocky.

At her direction, Spencer drove the pickup past the service bays of the repair garage to the edge of the station property. He parked beside a ten-foot-high ridge of plowed snow.

Fending off the mutt’s friendly tongue, Ellie unlatched the small sliding window between the cab and the cargo bed. She slid the movable half open only an inch.

From the canvas duffel bag, she removed the last of the major items that she had chosen to salvage when the signal trace-back from Earthguard had made it necessary to abandon the Range Rover. A long orange utility cord. An adapter that transformed any car or truck cigarette lighter into two electrical sockets from which current could be drawn when the engine was running. Finally, there was the compact satellite up-link with automated tracking arm and collapsible Frisbee-like receiving dish.

Outside again, Spencer put down the tailgate, and they climbed into the empty bed of the pickup. Ellie used most of the Super Glue to fix the microwave transceiver to the painted-metal cargo bed.

“You know,” he said, “a drop or two usually does the trick.”

“Got to be sure it doesn’t pop loose at the worst moment and start sliding around. It has to remain stationary.”

“After that much glue, you’ll probably need a small nuclear device to get it off.”

Head cocked in curiosity, Rocky watched them through the back window of the cab.

The adhesive required longer than usual to bond, either because Ellie used too much or because of the cold. In ten minutes, however, the microwave transceiver was fixed securely to the truck bed.

She opened the collapsible receiving dish to its full eighteen-inch extension. She plugged one end of the utility cord into the base of the transceiver. Then she hooked her fingers into the narrow gap that she had left in the rear window of the cab, slid the pane farther open, and fed the electrical cord into the backseat.

Rocky pushed his snout through the window and licked Ellie’s hands as she worked.

When the cord between the transceiver and the window was taut but not stretched tight, she pushed Rocky’s snout out of the way and slid the window as tightly shut as the cord would allow.

“We’re going to track somebody by satellite?” Spencer asked as they jumped off the back of the truck.

“Information is power,” she said.

Putting up the tailgate, he said, “Well, of course it is.”

“And I have some heavy-duty knowledge.”

“I wouldn’t dispute that for a moment.”

They returned to the cab of the pickup.

She pulled the utility cord from the backseat and plugged it into one of the two sockets in the cigarette-lighter adapter. She plugged the laptop into the second socket.

“All right,” she said grimly, “next stop — Vail.”

He started the engine.

Almost too excited to drive, Eve Jammer cruised the Vegas night, searching for an opportunity to become the completely fulfilled woman that Roy had shown her how to be.

Cruising past a seedy bar where flashing neon signs advertised topless dancers, Eve saw a sorry-looking, middle-aged guy step out the front door. He was bald, maybe forty pounds overweight, with facial skin folds to rival those of any SharPei. His shoulders were slumped under a yoke of weariness. Hands in his coat pockets, head hung low, he schlepped toward the half-full parking lot beside the bar.

She drove past him into the lot and parked in an empty stall. Through her side window, she watched him approaching. He shuffled as if too beaten down by the world to fight gravity any more than he absolutely had to.

She could imagine how it was for him. Too old, too unattractive, too fat, too socially awkward, too poor to win the favors of a girl like those he so much desired. He was on his way home after a few beers, bound for a lonely bed, having passed a few hours watching gorgeous, big-breasted, long-legged, firm-bodied young women whom he could never possess. Frustrated, depressed. Achingly lonely.

Eve felt so sorry for that man, to whom life had been grossly unfair.

She got out of her car and approached him as he reached his ten-year-old, unwashed Pontiac. “Excuse me,” she said.

He turned, and his eyes widened at the sight of her.

“You were here the other night,” she guessed, making it sound like a statement.

“Well…yeah, last week,” he said. He couldn’t restrain himself from looking her over. He was probably unaware of licking his lips.

“I saw you then,” she said, pretending shyness. “I…I didn’t have the nerve to say hello.”

He gaped at her in disbelief. And he was slightly wary, unable to believe a woman like her would be coming on to him.

“The thing is,” she said, “you look exactly like my dad.” Which was a lie.

“I do?”

He was less wary now that she had mentioned her dad, but there was also less pathetic hope in his eyes.

“Oh, exactly like him,” she said. “And…and the thing is…the thing is that…I hope you won’t think I’m weird…but the thing is…the only men I can do it with, go to bed with and be really wild with…are men who look like my father.”

As he realized that he had stumbled into a bed of good fortune more exciting than any in his most testosterone-flooded fantasies, the jowled and dewlapped Romeo straightened his shoulders. His chest lifted. A smile of sheer delight made him look ten years younger, though no less like a SharPei.

In that transcendent moment, when the poor man no doubt felt more alive and happier than he’d been in weeks, months, perhaps even years, Eve drew the silencer-fitted Beretta from her big handbag and shot him three times.

She also had a Polaroid in the handbag. Although worried that a car might pull into the lot and that other patrons might leave the bar momentarily, she took three snapshots of the dead man as he lay on the blacktop beside his Pontiac.

Driving home, she thought about what a fine thing she had done: helping that dear man to find a way out of his imperfect life, giving him his freedom from rejection, depression, loneliness, and despair. Tears melted from her eyes. She didn’t sob or become too emotional to be dangerous behind the wheel. She wept quietly, quietly, though the compassion in her heart was powerful and profound.

She wept all the way home, into the garage, through the house, into her bedroom, where she arranged the Polaroids on the nightstand for Roy to see when he returned from Colorado in a day or two — and then a funny thing happened. As deeply moved as she was by what she had done, as copious and genuine as her tears had been, nevertheless, she was abruptly dry-eyed and incredibly horny.

At the window with the artist, Roy watched the limousine as it headed back to the county road and away. It would return for them after the drama of the night had been played out.

They were standing in the front room of the converted barn. The darkness was relieved only by the moonlight that sifted through the windows and by the green glow of the security-panel readout next to the front door. With numbers that Gary Duvall had obtained from the Dresmunds, Roy had disengaged the alarm when they’d come in, then had reset it. There were no motion detectors, only magnetic contacts at each door and window, so he and the artist could move about freely without triggering the system.

This large first-floor room had once been a private gallery where Steven had exhibited the paintings that he favored among all those that he had produced. Now the chamber was vacant, and every faint sound echoed hollowly off the cold walls. Sixteen years had passed since the great man’s art had adorned the place.

Roy knew this was a moment he would remember with exceptional clarity for the rest of his life, as he would remember the precise expression of wonder on Eve’s face when he had granted peace to that man and woman in the restaurant parking lot. Although the degree of humanity’s imperfection ensured that the ongoing human drama would always be a tragedy, there were moments of transcendent experience, like this, that made life worth living.

Sadly, most people were too timid to seize the day and discover what such transcendence felt like. Timidity, however, had never been one of Roy’s shortcomings.

Revelation of his compassionate crusade had earned Roy all the glories of Eve’s bedroom, and he had decided that revelation was called for again. Journeying across the mountains, he had realized that Steven was perfect in some way few people ever were — although the nature of his perfection was more subtle than Eve’s devastating beauty, more sensed than seen, intriguing, mysterious. Instinctively Roy knew that Steven and he were simpatico to an even greater extent than were he and Eve. True friendship might be forged between them if he revealed himself to the artist as forthrightly as he’d revealed himself to the dear heart in Las Vegas.

Standing by the moonlit window, in the dark and empty gallery, Roy Miro began to explain, with tasteful humility, how he had put his ideals into practice in ways that even the agency, for all its willingness to be bold, would have been too timid to endorse. As the artist listened, Roy almost hoped that the fugitives would not come that night or the next, not until he and Steven were granted sufficient time together to build a foundation for the friendship that surely was destined to enrich their lives.

Outside Hamlet Gardens in Westwood, the uniformed valet brought Darius’s VW Microbus from the narrow lot beside the building, drove it into the street, and swung it to the curb at the front entrance, where the two Descoteaux families waited, fresh from dinner.

Harris was at the rear of their group, and as he was about to step into the Microbus, a woman touched his shoulder. “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”

He wasn’t surprised. He didn’t back off, as he had done in the men’s room at the theater. Turning, he saw an attractive redhead in high heels, an ankle-length coat in a shade of green complementary to her complexion, and a stylishly wide-brimmed hat worn at a rakish angle. She appeared to be on her way to a party or a nightclub.

“If the new world order turns out to be peace, prosperity, and democracy, how wonderful for us all,” she said. “But perhaps it will be less appealing, more like the Dark Ages if the Dark Ages had had all these wonderful new forms of high-tech entertainment to make them tolerable. But I think you’d agree…being able to get the latest movies on video doesn’t fully compensate for enslavement.”

“What do you want from me?”

“To help you,” she said. “But you have to want the help, have to know you need it, and have to be ready to do what needs done.”

From inside the Microbus, his family was staring at him with curiosity and concern.

“I’m no bomb-throwing revolutionary,” he told the woman in the green coat.

“Nor are we,” she said. “Bombs and guns are the instruments of last resort. Knowledge should be the first and foremost weapon in any resistance.”

“What knowledge do I have that you could want?”

“To begin with,” she said, “the knowledge of how fragile your freedom is in the current scheme of things. That gives you a degree of commitment that we value.”

The valet, though standing just out of earshot, was staring at them oddly.

From a coat pocket, the woman extracted a piece of paper and showed it to Harris. He saw a telephone number and three words.

When he tried to take the paper from her, she held it tightly. “No, Mr. Descoteaux. I would prefer that you memorize it.”

The number was designed to be memorable, and the three words gave him no difficulty, either.

As Harris stared at the paper, the woman said, “The man who has done this to you is named Roy Miro.”

He remembered the name but not where he had heard it before.

“He came to you pretending to be an FBI agent,” she said.

“The guy asking about Spence!” he said, looking up from the paper. He was suddenly furious, now that he had a face to put on the enemy who had thus far been faceless. “But what in the hell did I do to him? We had the mildest disagreement over an officer who once served under me. That’s all!” Then he heard the other part of what she had said, and he frowned. “Pretended to be with the FBI? But he was. I checked him out between the time he made the appointment and when he came to the office.”

“They are seldom what they seem to be,” the redhead said.

“They? Who are they?”

“Who they have always been, through the ages,” she said, and smiled. “Sorry. No time to be other than inscrutable.”

“I’m going to get my house back,” he said adamantly, although he did not feel as confident as he sounded.

“But you won’t. And even if the public outcry was loud enough to have these laws rescinded, they’d just pass new laws giving them other ways to ruin people they want to ruin. The problem’s not one law. These are power fanatics who want to tell everyone how they should live, what they should think, read, say, feel.”

“How do I get at Miro?”

“You can’t. He’s too deep-cover to be easily exposed.”

“But—”

“I’m not here to tell you how to get Roy Miro. I’m here to warn you that you must not go back to your brother’s tonight.”

A chill shimmered through the chambers of fluid in his spine, working up his back to the base of his neck with a queer, methodical progression like no chill he had ever felt before.

He said, “What’s going to happen now?”

“Your ordeal isn’t over. It isn’t ever going to be over if you let them have their way. You’ll be arrested for the murder of two drug dealers, the wife of one, the girlfriend of the other, and three young children. Your fingerprints have been found on objects in the house where they were shot to death.”

“I never killed anyone!”

The valet heard enough of that exclamation to scowl.

Darius was getting out of the Microbus to see what was wrong.

“The objects with your prints on them were taken from your home and planted at the scene of the murders. The story will probably be that you disposed of two competitors who tried to muscle in on your territory, and you wiped out the wife, girlfriend, and kids just to teach other dealers a hard lesson.”

Harris’s heart was pounding so fiercely that he would not have been surprised to see his breast shuddering visibly with each hard beat. Instead of pumping warm blood, it seemed to be circulating liquid Freon through his body. He was colder than a dead man.

Fear regressed him to the vulnerability and helplessness of childhood. He heard himself seeking solace in the faith of his beloved, gospel-singing mother, a faith from which he had slipped away through the years but to which he now suddenly reached out with a sincerity that surprised him: “Jesus, dear sweet Jesus, help me.”

“Perhaps He will,” the woman said as Darius approached them. “But in the meantime, we’re ready to help as well. If you’re smart, you’ll call that number, use those passwords, and get on with your life — instead of getting on with your death.”

As Darius joined them, he said, “What’s up, Harris?”

The redhead returned the slip of paper to her coat pocket.

Harris said, “But that’s just it. How can I ever get on with my life after what’s happened to me?”

“You can,” she said, “though you won’t be Harris Descoteaux anymore.”

She smiled and nodded at Darius, and she walked away.

Harris watched her go, overcome by that here-we-are-in-the-magic-kingdom-of-Oz feeling again.

Long ago those acres had been beautiful. As a boy with another name, Spencer had been especially fond of the ranch in wintertime, swaddled in white. By day, it was a bright empire of snow forts, tunnels, and sled runs that had been tamped down with great care and patience. On clear nights, the Rocky Mountain sky was deeper than eternity, deeper even than the mind could imagine, and starlight sparkled in the icicles.

Returning after his own eternity in exile, he found nothing that was pleasing to the eye. Each slope and curve of land, each building, each tree was the same as it had been in that distant age, but for the fact that the pines and maples and birches were taller than before. Changeless though it might be, the ranch now impressed him as the ugliest place that he had ever seen, even when flattered by its winter dress. They were harsh acres, and the stark geometry of those fields and hills was designed, at every turn, to offend the eye, like the architecture of Hell. The trees were only ordinary specimens, but they looked to him as though they were malformed and gnarled by disease, nurtured on horrors that had leached into the soil and into their roots from the nearby catacombs. The buildings — stables, house, barn — were all graceless hulks, looming and haunted, the windows as black and menacing as open graves.

Spencer parked at the house. His heart was pounding. His mouth was so dry and his throat was so tight that he could hardly swallow. The door of the pickup opened with the resistance of a massive portal on a bank vault.

Ellie remained in the truck, with the computer on her lap. If trouble came, she was on-line and ready for whatever strange purpose she had prepared. Through the microwave transceiver, she had linked to a satellite and from there into a computer system that she hadn’t identified to Spencer and that could be anywhere on the surface of the earth. Information might be power, as she had said, but Spencer couldn’t imagine how information would shield them from bullets, if the agency was nearby and lying in wait for them.

As though he were a deep-sea diver, encased in a cumbersome pressure suit and steel helmet, burdened by an incalculable tonnage of water, he walked to the front steps, crossed the porch, and stood at the door. He rang the bell.

He heard the chimes inside, the same five notes that had marked a visitor’s arrival when he’d lived there as a boy, and even as they rang out, he had to struggle against an urge to turn and run. He was a grown man, and the hobgoblins that terrorized children should have had no power over him. Irrationally, however, he was afraid that the chimes would be answered by his mother, dead but walking, as naked as she’d been found in that ditch, all her wounds revealed.

He found the willpower to censor the mental image of the corpse. He rang the bell again.

The night was so hushed that he felt as though he would be able to hear the earthworms deep in the ground, below the frost line, if only he could clear his mind and listen for their telltale writhing.

When no one responded to the bell the second time, Spencer retrieved the spare key from the hiding place atop the door head. The Dresmunds had been instructed to leave it there, in the event that it was ever needed by the owner. The deadbolt locks of the house and barn were keyed the same. With that freezing bit of brass half sticking to his fingers, he hurried back to the black pickup.

The driveway forked. One lane led past the front of the barn and the other behind it. He took the second route.

“I should go inside the same way I went that night,” he told Ellie. “By the back door. Re-create the moment.”

They parked where the van with the rainbow mural had stood in a long-ago darkness. That vehicle had been his father’s. He’d seen it for the first time that night because it had always been garaged off the property and registered under a false name. It was the hunting wagon in which Steven Ackblom had traveled to various distant places to stalk and capture the women and the girls who were destined to become permanent residents of his catacombs. For the most part, he’d driven it onto the property only when his wife and son had been away, visiting her parents or at horse shows — though also on rare occasions when his darker desires became stronger than his caution.

Ellie wanted to stay in the pickup truck, leave the engine running, and keep the computer on her lap, with her fingers poised over the keys, ready to respond to any provocation.

Spencer couldn’t imagine anything that she could possibly do, while actually under attack, to force a call-back of the agency thugs. But she was dead serious, and he knew her well enough to trust that her plan, however peculiar, was not frivolous.

“They’re not here,” he told her. “No one’s waiting for us. If they were here, they’d have been all over us by now.”

“I don’t know….”

“To remember what happened in those missing minutes, I’m going to have to go down…into that place. Rocky isn’t company enough. I don’t have the courage to go alone, and I’m not ashamed to say so.”

Ellie nodded. “You shouldn’t be. If I were you, I’d never have been able to come this far. I’d have driven by, never looked back.” She surveyed the moon-dappled fields and hills behind the barn.

“No one,” he said.

“All right.” Her fingers tapped across the laptop keyboard, and she pulled back from whatever computer she had invaded. The display screen went dark. “Let’s go.”

Spencer doused the headlights. He switched off the engine.

He took the pistol. Ellie had the Micro Uzi.

When they got out of the truck, Rocky insisted on scrambling out with them. He was shaking, saturated by his master’s mood, afraid to go with them but equally afraid to stay behind.

Shivering more violently than the dog. Spencer peered into the sky. It was as clear and star-spattered as it had been on that July night. This time, however, the cataracts of moonlight revealed neither an owl nor an angel.

In the dark gallery, where Roy had spoken of many things and the artist had listened with increasing interest and gratifying respect, the grumble of the approaching truck brought a temporary halt to the sharing of intimacies.

To avoid the risk of being seen, they took one step back from the window. They still had a view of the driveway.

Instead of stopping in front of the barn, the pickup continued around to the back of the building.

“I brought you here,” Roy said, “because I have to know how your son’s involved with this woman. He’s a wild card. We can’t figure him. There’s a feeling of organization about his involvement. That disturbs us. For some time, we’ve suspected there may be a loosely woven organization out to undo our work or, failing that, cause us as many headaches as it can. He might be involved with such a group. If it exists. Maybe they’re assisting the woman. Anyway, considering Spencer’s…I’m sorry. Considering Michael’s military training and his obvious Spartan mind-set, I don’t think he’ll crack under the usual methods of interrogation, no matter how much pain is involved.”

“He’s a strong-willed boy,” Steven acknowledged.

“But if you interrogate him, he’ll break wide open.”

“You might be right,” Steven said. “Quite perceptive.”

“And this also gives me a chance to help right a wrong.”

“What wrong would that be?”

“Well, of course, it’s wrong for a son to betray his father.”

“Ah. And in addition to being able to avenge that betrayal, may I have the woman?” Steven asked.

Roy thought of those lovely eyes, so direct and challenging. He had coveted them for fourteen months. He would be willing to relinquish his claim, however, in return for the opportunity to witness what a creative genius of Steven Ackblom’s stature could achieve when permitted to work in the medium of living flesh.

In anticipation of visitors, they now spoke in whispers:

“Yes, that seems only fair,” Roy said. “But I want to watch.”

“You understand that what I’ll do to her will be…extreme.”

“The timid never know transcendence.”

“That’s very true,” Steven agreed.

“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy quoted.

“And you want to see that brief, perfect beauty,” Ackblom said.

“Yes.”

From the far end of the building came the scrape and clack of a lock bolt. A hesitation. Then the faint creak of door hinges.

Darius braked at the stop sign. He was traveling east, and he lived two and a half blocks north of where he had stopped, but he didn’t put on the turn signal.

Facing the Microbus from across the intersection were four television-news vans with elaborate microwave dishes on the roofs. Two were parked to the left, two to the right, bathed in the sodium-yellow light-fall from the streetlamps. One was from KNBC, the local affiliate of the national network, and another was marked KTLA, which was Channel 5, the independent station with the highest news ratings in the Los Angeles market. Harris couldn’t make out the call letters on the other vans, but he figured they would be from the ABC and CBS affiliate stations in Los Angeles. Behind them were a few cars, and in addition to the people in all those vehicles, half a dozen others were milling around, talking.

Darius’s voice was colored by both heavy sarcasm and anger: “Must be a breaking story.”

“Not quite yet,” Harris said grimly. “Best to drive straight through, right by them, and not so fast that they pay any attention to us.”

Instead of turning left, toward home, Darius did as his brother asked.

Passing the media, Harris leaned forward, as if fiddling with the radio, averting his face from the windows. “They’ve been tipped off, asked to stay a few blocks away until it goes down. Somebody wants to ensure there’ll be plenty of film of me being taken out of the house in handcuffs. If they go as far as using a SWAT team, then just before the bastards break down the door, these TV vans will get the word to come on up.”

Behind Harris, from the middle of three rows of seats, Ondine leaned forward. “Daddy, you mean they’re all here to film you?”

“I’d bet on it, honey.”

“The bastards,” she fumed.

“Just newsmen doing their job.”

Willa, more emotionally fragile than her sister, began to cry again.

“Ondine’s right,” Bonnie agreed. “Stinking bastards.”

From the very back of the Microbus, Martin said, “Man, this is wild. Uncle Harris, they’re going after you like you were Michael Jackson or someone.”

“Okay, we’re past them,” Darius said, so Harris could sit up straight again.

Bonnie said, “The police must think we’re home, ’cause of the way the security system handles the lights when no one’s there.”

“It’s programmed with a dozen scenarios,” Darius explained. “It cycles through a different one every night no one’s there, switching off lamps in one room, on in another, switching radios and TVs on and off, imitating realistic patterns of activity. Supposed to convince burglars. Never expected I’d be happy about it convincing cops.”

Bonnie asked, “What now?”

“Let’s just drive for a while.” Harris put his hands in front of the heater vents, in the jets of hot air. He couldn’t get warm. “Just drive while I think about this.”

Already they had spent fifteen minutes cruising through Bel Air while he’d told them about the man who had approached him during his walk, the second stranger in the theater men’s room, and the redhead in the green coat. Even before seeing the TV-news vans, they had all regarded the woman’s warning as seriously as the events of the past few days argued that they should. But it had seemed feasible to drive by the house, quickly leave off Bonnie and Martin, then return ten minutes later and pick them up, along with the clothes that Ondine and Willa had gotten at the mall and with the pathetically few belongings that Jessica and the girls had been able to remove from their own home during the eviction on Saturday. However, their aimless cruising had resulted in an indirect approach to the house, a chance encounter with the TV-news vans, and the realization that the warning had been even more urgent than they had thought.

Darius drove to Wilshire Boulevard and headed west, toward Santa Monica and the sea.

“When I’m charged with the premeditated murder of seven people, including three children,” Harris thought aloud, “the prosecutor is going to go for ‘first-degree murder, special circumstances,’ sure as God made little green apples.”

Darius said, “Bail’s out of the question. Won’t be any. They’ll say you’re a flight risk.”

From her seat at the back, beside Martin, Jessica said, “Even if there was bail, we have no way to raise the money to post it.”

“Court calendars are clogged,” Darius noted. “So many laws these days, seventy thousand pages out of Congress last year. All those defendants, all those appeals. Most cases move like glaciers. Jesus, Harris, you’ll be in jail a year, maybe two, just waiting for a day in court, getting through the trial—”

“That’s time lost forever,” Jessica said angrily, “even if the jury finds him innocent.”

Ondine began to cry again, with Willa.

Harris vividly recalled each of his incapacitating attacks of jailhouse claustrophobia. “I’d never make it six months, not a chance, maybe not even a month.”

Circling through the city, where the millions of bright lights were inadequate to hold back the darkness, they discussed options. In the end, they realized that there were no options. He had no choice but to run. Yet without money or ID, he wouldn’t get far before he was chased down and apprehended. His only hope, therefore, was the mysterious group to which the redhead in the green coat and the other two strangers belonged, although Harris knew too little about them to feel comfortable putting his future in their hands.

Jessica, Ondine, and Willa were adamantly opposed to being separated from him. They feared that any separation was going to be permanent, so they ruled out the option of his going on the run alone. He was sure they were right. Besides, he didn’t want to be apart from them, because he suspected that they would remain targets in his absence.

Looking back through the shadow-filled Microbus, past the dark faces of his children and his sister-in-law, Harris met the eyes of his wife, where she sat next to Martin. “It can’t have come to this.”

“All that matters is that we’re together.”

“Everything we’ve worked so hard for—”

“Gone already.”

“—to start over at forty-four—”

“Better than dying at forty-four,” said Jessica.

“You’re a trooper,” he said lovingly.

Jessica smiled. “Well, it could’ve been an earthquake, the house gone, and all of us besides.”

Harris turned his attention to Ondine and Willa. They were done with tears, shaky but with a new light of defiance in their eyes.

He said, “All the friends you’ve made in school—”

“Oh, they’re just kids.” Ondine strove to be airy about losing all her pals and confidants, which to a teenager would be the hardest thing about such an abrupt change. “Just a bunch of kids, silly kids, that’s all.”

“And,” Willa said, “you’re our dad.”

For the first time since the nightmare had begun, Harris was moved to quiet tears of his own.

“It’s settled then,” Jessica announced. “Darius, start looking for a pay phone.”

They found one at the end of a strip shopping center, in front of a pizza parlor.

Harris had to ask Darius for change. Then he got out of the Microbus and went to the telephone alone.

Through the windows of the pizza parlor, he saw people eating, drinking beer, talking. A group at one large table was having an especially good time; he could hear their laughter above the music from the jukebox. None of them seemed to be aware that the world had recently turned upside down and inside out.

Harris was gripped by an envy so intense that he wanted to smash the windows, burst into the restaurant, overturn the tables, knock the food and the mugs of beer out of those people’s hands, shout at them and shake them until their illusions of safety and normalcy were shattered into as many pieces as his own had been. He was so bitter that he might have done it—would have done it — if he hadn’t had a wife and two daughters to think about, if he had been facing his frightening new life alone. It wasn’t even their happiness that he envied; it was their blessed ignorance that he longed to regain for himself, though he knew that no knowledge could ever be unlearned.

He lifted the handset from the pay phone and deposited coins. For a blood-freezing moment, he listened to the dial tone, unable to remember the number that had been on the paper in the redhead’s hand. Then it came to him, and he punched the buttons on the keypad, his hand shaking so badly that he half expected to discover that he had not entered the number correctly.

On the third ring, a man answered with a simple, “Hello?”

“I need help,” Harris said, and realized that he hadn’t even identified himself. “I’m sorry. I’m…my name is…Descoteaux. Harris Descoteaux. One of your people, whoever you are, she said to call this number, that you could help me, that you were ready to help.”

After a hesitation, the man at the other end of the line said, “If you had this number, and if you got it legitimately, then you must be aware there’s a certain protocol.”

“Protocol?”

There was no response.

For a moment, Harris panicked that the man was going to hang up and walk away from that phone and be forever thereafter unreachable. He couldn’t understand what was expected of him — until he remembered the three passwords that had been printed on the piece of paper below the telephone number. The redhead had told him that he must memorize those too. He said, “Pheasants and dragons.”

At the security keypad, in the short hallway at the back of the barn, Spencer entered the series of numbers that disarmed the alarm. The Dresmunds had been instructed not to alter the codes, in order to make access easy for the owner if he ever returned when they were gone. When Spencer punched in the last digit, the luminous readout changed from ARMED AND SECURE to the less bright READY TO ARM.

He had brought a flashlight from the pickup. He directed the beam along the left-hand wall. “Half bath, just a toilet and sink,” he told Ellie. Beyond the first door, a second: “That’s a small storage room.” At the end of the hall, the light found a third door. “He had a gallery that way, open only to the wealthiest collectors. And from the gallery, there’s a staircase up to what used to be his studio on the second floor.” He swung the beam to the right side of the corridor, where only one door waited. It was ajar. “That used to be the file room.”

He could have switched on the overhead fluorescent panels. Sixteen years ago, however, he had entered in gloom, guided only by the radiance of the green letters on the security-system readout. Intuitively, he knew that his best hope of remembering what he had repressed for so long was to re-create the circumstances of that night insofar as he was able. The barn had been air-conditioned then, and now the heat was turned low, so the February chill in the air was nearly right. The harsh glare of overhead fluorescent bulbs would too drastically alter the mood. If he were striving for a roughly authentic recreation, even a flashlight was too reassuring, but he didn’t have the nerve to proceed in the same depth of darkness into which he had gone when he was fourteen.

Rocky whined and scratched at the back door, which Ellie had closed behind them. He was shivering and miserable.

For the most part and for reasons that Spencer would never be able to determine, Rocky’s argument with darkness was limited to that in the outside world. He usually functioned well enough indoors, in the dark, although sometimes he required a night-light to banish an especially bad case of the willies.

“Poor thing,” Ellie said.

The flashlight was brighter than any night-light. Rocky should have been sufficiently comforted by it. Instead, he quaked so hard that it seemed as if his ribs ought to make xylophone music against one another.

“It’s okay, pal,” Spencer told the dog. “What you sense is something in the past, over and done with a long time ago. Nothing here and now is worth being scared of.”

The dog scratched at the door, unconvinced.

“Should I let him out?” Ellie wondered.

“No. He’ll just realize it’s night outside and start scratching to get back in.”

Again directing the flashlight at the file-room door, Spencer knew that his own inner turmoil must be the source of the dog’s fear. Rocky was always acutely sensitive to his moods. Spencer strove to calm himself. After all, what he had said to the dog was true: The aura of evil that clung to these walls was the residue of a horror from the past, and there was nothing here and now to fear.

On the other hand, what was true for the dog was not as true for Spencer. He still lived partly in the past, held fast by the dark asphalt of memory. In fact, he was gripped even more fiercely by what he could not quite remember than by what he could recall so clearly; his self-denied recollections formed the deepest tar pit of all. The events of sixteen years ago could not harm Rocky, but for Spencer, they had the real potential to snare, engulf, and destroy him.

He began to tell Ellie about the night of the owl, the rainbow, and the knife. The sound of his own voice scared him. Each word seemed like a link in one of those chain drives by which any roller coaster was hauled inexorably up the first hill on its track and by which a gondola with a gargoyle masthead was pulled into the ghost-filled darkness of a fun house. Chain drives worked only in one direction, and once the journey had begun, even if a section of track had collapsed ahead or an all-consuming fire had broken out in the deepest chamber of the fun house, there was no backing up.

“That summer, and for many summers before it, I slept without air-conditioning in my bedroom. The house had a hot-water, radiant-heat system that was quiet in the winter, and that was okay. But I was bothered by the hiss and whistle of cold air being forced through the vanes in the vent grille, the hum of the compressor echoing along the ductwork…. No, ‘bothered’ isn’t the word. It scared me. I was afraid that the noise of the air conditioner would mask some sound in the night…a sound that I’d better be able to hear and respond to…or die.”

“What sound?” Ellie asked.

“I didn’t know. It was just a fear, a childish thing. Or so I thought at the time. I was embarrassed by it. But that’s why my window was open, why I heard the cry. I tried to tell myself it was only an owl or an owl’s prey, far off in the night. But…it was so desperate, so thin and full of fear…so human…”

More swiftly than when he had been confessing to strangers in barrooms and to the dog, he recounted his journey on that July night: out of the silent house, across the summer lawn with its faux frost of moonlight, to the corner of the barn and the visitation of the owl, to the van where the stench of urine rose from the open back door, and into the hall where they now stood together.

“And then I opened the door to the file room,” he said.

He opened it once more and crossed the threshold.

Ellie followed him.

In the dark hallway from which the two of them had come, Rocky still whined and scratched at the back door, trying to get out.

Spencer played the beam of the flashlight around the file room. The long worktable was gone, as were the two chairs. The row of file cabinets had been removed as well.

The knotty-pine cupboards still filled the far end of the room from floor to ceiling and corner to corner. They featured three pairs of tall, narrow doors.

He pointed the beam of light at the center doors and said, “They were standing open, and a strange faint light was coming out of them from inside the cabinet, where there weren’t any lights.” He heard a new note of strain in his voice. “My heart was knocking so hard it shook my arms. I fisted my hands and held them at my sides, struggling to control myself. I wanted to run, just turn and run back to bed and forget it all.”

He was talking about how he had felt then, in the long ago, but he could as easily have been speaking of the present.

He opened the center pair of knotty-pine doors. The unused hinges squeaked. He shone the light into the cabinet and panned it across empty shelves.

“Four latches hold the back wall in place,” he told her.

His father had concealed the latches behind clever strips of flip-up molding. Spencer found all four: one to the left at the back of the bottom shelf, one to the right; one to the left at the back of the second-highest shelf, one to the right.

Behind him, Rocky padded into the file room, claws ticking on the polished-pine floor.

Ellie said, “That’s right, pooch, you stay with us.”

After handing the flashlight to Ellie, Spencer pushed on the shelves. The guts of the cabinet rolled backward into darkness. Small wheels creaked along old metal tracks.

He stepped over the base frame of the unit, into the space that had been vacated by the shelves. Standing inside the cupboard, he pushed the back wall all the way into the hidden vestibule beyond.

His palms were damp. He blotted them on his jeans.

Retrieving the flashlight from Ellie, he went into the six-foot-square room behind the cupboard. A chain dangled from the bare bulb in the ceiling socket. He tugged on it and was rewarded with light as sulfurous as he remembered it from that night.

Concrete floor. Concrete-block walls. As in his dreams.

After Ellie shut the knotty-pine doors, closing herself in the cabinet, she and Rocky followed him into the cramped room beyond.

“That night, I stood out there in the file room, looking in through the back of the cupboard, toward this yellow light, and I wanted to run away so badly. I thought I had started to run…but the next thing I knew, I was in the cupboard. I said to myself, ‘Run, run, get the hell out of here.’ But then I was all the way through the cupboard and in this vestibule, without any awareness of having taken a step. It was like…like I was drawn…in a trance…couldn’t go back no matter how much I wanted to.”

“It’s a yellow bug light,” she said, “like you use outdoors during the summer.” She seemed to find that curious.

“Sure. To keep mosquitoes away. They never work that well. And I don’t know why he used it here, instead of an ordinary bulb.”

“Well, maybe it was the only one handy at the time.”

“No. Never. Not him. He must have felt there was something more aesthetic about the yellow light, more suited to his purpose. He lived a carefully considered life. Everything he did was done with the aesthetics well worked out in his mind. From the clothes he wore to the way he prepared a sandwich. That’s one thing that makes what he did under this place so horrible…the long and careful consideration.”

He realized that he was tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand while holding the flashlight in his left. He lowered his hand to the SIG 9mm pistol that was still jammed under his belt, against his belly, but he didn’t draw it.

“How could your mother not know about this place?” Ellie asked, gazing up and around at the vestibule.

“He owned the ranch before they were married. Remodeled the barn before she saw it. This used to be part of the area that became the file room. He added those pine cabinets out there himself, to close off this space, after the contractors left, so they wouldn’t know he’d concealed the access to the basement. Last of all, he brought in a guy to lay pine floors through the rest of the place.”

The Micro Uzi was equipped with a carrying strap. Ellie slung it over her shoulder, apparently so she could hug herself with both arms. “He was planning what he did planning it before he even married your mother, before you were born?”

Her disgust was as heavy as the chill in the air. Spencer only hoped that she was able to absorb all the revelations that lay ahead without letting her repulsion transfer in any degree from the father to the son. He desperately prayed that he would remain clean in her eyes, untainted.

In his own eyes he regarded himself with disgust every time he saw even an innocent aspect of his father in himself. Sometimes, meeting his reflection in a mirror, Spencer would remember his father’s equally dark eyes, and he would look away, shuddering and sick to his stomach.

He said, “Maybe he didn’t know exactly why he wanted a secret place then. I hope that’s true. I hope he married my mother and conceived me with her before he’d ever had any desires like…like those he satisfied here. However, I suspect he knew why he needed the rooms below. He just wasn’t ready to use them. Like when he was struck by an idea for a painting, sometimes he’d think about it for years before the work began.”

She looked yellow in the glow of the bug light, but he sensed that she was as pale as bleached bone. She stared at the closed door that led from the vestibule to the basement stairs. Nodding at it, she said, “He considered that, down there, to be part of his work?”

“Nobody knows for sure. That’s what he seemed to imply. But he might have been playing games with the cops, the psychiatrists, just having his fun. He was an extremely intelligent man. He was able to manipulate people so easily. He enjoyed doing that. Who knows what was going through his mind…really?”

“But when did he start this…this work?”

“Five years after they married. When I was only four years old. And it was another four years before she discovered it…and had to die. The police figured it out by identifying the…remains of the earliest victims.”

Rocky had slipped around them to the basement entrance. He was sniffing pensively and unhappily along the narrow crack between the door and the threshold.

“Sometimes,” Spencer said, “in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, I think of how he held me on his lap, wrestled with me on the floor when I was five or six, smoothed my hair….” His voice choked with emotion. He took a deep breath and forced himself to continue, for he had come here to continue to the end, to be finished with it at last. “Touching me…with those hands, those hands, after those same hands had…under the barn…doing those terrible things.”

“Oh,” Ellie said softly, as if stricken by a small stab of pain.

Spencer hoped that what he saw in her eyes was an understanding of what he’d carried with him all these years and a compassion for him — not a deepening of her revulsion.

He said, “Makes me sick…that my own father ever touched me. Worse…I think about how he might have left a fresh corpse down in the darkness, a dead woman, how he might have come out of his catacombs with the scent of her blood still in his memory, up from that place and into the house…upstairs into my mother’s bed…into her arms…touching her….”

“Oh, my God,” Ellie said.

She closed her eyes as though she couldn’t bear to look at him.

He knew he was part of the horror, even if he had been innocent. He was so inextricably associated with the monstrous brutality of his father that others couldn’t know his name and look at him without seeing, in their mind’s eye, young Michael himself standing in the corruption of the slaughterhouse. Through the chambers of his heart, despair and blood were pumped in equal measure.

Then she opened her eyes. Tears glimmered in her lashes. She put her hand to his scar, touching him as tenderly as he had ever been touched. With five words she made clear to him that in her eyes he was free of all stain: “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

Even if he were to live one hundred years, Spencer knew he could never love her more than he loved her then. Her caring touch, at that moment of all moments, was the greatest act of kindness that he had ever known.

He only wished that he was as sure of his utter innocence as Ellie was. He must recapture the missing moments of memory that he had come there again to find. But he prayed to God and to his own lost mother for mercy, because he was afraid he would discover that he was, in all ways, the son of his father.

Ellie had given him the strength for whatever waited ahead. Before that courage could fade, he turned to the basement door.

Rocky looked up at him and whimpered. He reached down, stroked the dog’s head.

The door was streaked with more grime than it had been when last he’d seen it. Paint had peeled off in places.

“It was closed, but it was different from this,” he said, going back to that far July. “Someone must have scrubbed away the stains, the hands.”

“Hands?”

He raised his hand from the dog to the door. “Arcing from the knob across the upper part…ten or twelve overlapping prints made by a woman’s hands, fingers spread…like the wings of birds…in fresh blood, still wet, so red.”

As Spencer moved his own hand across the cold wood, he saw the bloody prints reappear, glistening. They seemed as real as they had been on the long-ago night, but he knew that they were only birds of memory taking flight again in his own mind, visible to him but not to Ellie.

“I’m hypnotized by them, can’t take my eyes off them, because they convey an unbearable sense of the woman’s terror…desperation…frantic resistance to being forced out of this vestibule and into the secret…the secret world below.”

He realized that he had placed his hand on the doorknob. It was cold against his palm.

A tremor shook years off his voice, until he sounded younger to himself: “Staring at the blood…knowing that she needs help…needs my help…but I can’t go forward. Can’t. Jesus. Won’t. I’m just a boy, for God’s sake. Barefoot, unarmed, afraid, not ready for the truth. But somehow, standing here as scared as I am…somehow I finally open the red door….”

Ellie gasped. “Spencer.”

Her sound of surprise and the weight she gave to his name caused Spencer to pull back from the past and turn to her, alarmed, but they were still alone.

“Last Tuesday night,” she said, “when you were looking for a bar…why did you happen to stop in the place where I worked?”

“It was the first one I noticed.”

“That’s all?”

“And I’d never been there before. It always has to be a new place.”

“But the name.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending.

She said, “The Red Door.”

“Good God.”

The connection had escaped him until she made it.

“You called this the red door,” she said.

“Because…all the blood, the bloody handprints.”

For sixteen years, he had been seeking the courage to return to the living nightmare beyond the red door. When he had seen the cocktail lounge on that rainy night in Santa Monica, with the red-painted entrance and the name spelled out above it in neon — THE RED DOOR — he could not possibly have driven past. The opportunity to open a symbolic door, at a time when he had not yet found the strength to return to Colorado and open the other — and only important — red door, had been irresistible to his subconscious mind even while he remained safely oblivious to the implications on a conscious level. And by passing through that symbolic door, he’d arrived in this vestibule behind the pine cabinet, where he must turn the cold brass knob that remained unwarmed by his hand, open the real door, and descend into the catacombs, where he had left a part of himself more than sixteen years ago.

His life was a speeding train on parallel rails of free choice and destiny. Though destiny seemed to have bent the rail of choice to bring him to this place at this time, he needed to believe that choice would bend the rail of destiny tonight and carry him off to a future not in a rigorous line with his past. Otherwise, he would discover that he was fundamentally the son of his father. And that was a fate with which he could not live: end of the line.

He turned the knob.

Rocky edged back, out of the way.

Spencer opened the door.

The yellow light from the vestibule revealed the first few treads of concrete stairs that led down into darkness.

Reaching through the doorway and to the right, he found the switch and clicked on the cellar light. It was blue. He didn’t know why blue had been chosen. His inability to think in harmony with his father and to understand such curious details seemed to confirm that he was not like that hateful man in any way that mattered.

Going down the steep stairs to the cellar, he switched off the flashlight. From now on, the way would be lighted as it had been on a certain July and in all the July-spawned dreams that he had since endured.

Rocky followed, then Ellie.

That subterranean chamber was not the full size of the barn above, only about twelve by twenty feet. The furnace and hot-water heater were in a closet upstairs, and the room was utterly vacant. In the blue light, the concrete walls and floor looked strangely like steel.

“Here?” Ellie asked.

“No. Here he kept files of photographs and videotapes.”

“Not…”

“Yes. Of them…of the way they died. Of what he did to them, step by step.”

“Dear God.”

Spencer moved around the cellar, seeing it as he had seen it on that night of the red door. “The files and a compact photographer’s development lab were behind a black curtain at that end of the room. There was a TV set on a plain black metal stand. And a VCR. Facing the television was a single chair. Right here. Not comfortable. All straight lines, wood, painted sour-apple green, unpadded. And a small round table stood beside the chair, where he could put a glass of whatever he was drinking. Table was painted purple. The chair was a flat green, but the table was glossy, highly lacquered. The glass that he drank from was actually a piece of fine cut-crystal, and the blue light sparkled in all its bevels.”

“Where did he…” Ellie spotted the door, which was flush with the wall and painted to match. It reflected the blue light precisely as the concrete reflected it, becoming all but invisible. “There?”

“Yes.” His voice was even softer and more distant than the cry that had awakened him from July sleep.

Half a minute didn’t so much pass as crumble away like unstable ground beneath him.

Ellie came to his side. She took his right hand and held it tightly. “Let’s do what you’ve come to do, then get the hell out of this place.”

He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

He let go of her hand and opened the heavy gray door. There was no lock on their side of it, only on the far side.

That July night, when Spencer had reached this point, his father had not yet returned from chaining the woman in the abattoir, so the door had been unlocked. No doubt, once the victim had been secured, the artist would have retraced his path to the vestibule above, to close the knotty-pine doors from within the cabinet; then from the secret vestibule, he would have rolled the back of the cupboard into place; he would have locked the upper door from the cellar stairs, would have locked this gray door from inside. Then he would have returned to his captive in the abattoir, confident that no screams, regardless of how piercing, could penetrate to the barn above or to the world beyond.

Spencer crossed the raised concrete sill. An exposed switch box was fixed to the rough masonry of a brick-and-plaster wall. A length of flexible metal conduit rose from it into shadows. He snapped the switch, and a series of small lights winked on. They were suspended from a looped cord along the center of the ceiling, leading out of sight around a curved passageway.

Ellie whispered, “Spencer, wait!”

When he looked back into the first basement, he saw that Rocky had returned to the foot of the stairs. The dog trembled visibly, gazing up toward the vestibule behind the file-room cupboards. One ear drooped, as always, but the other stood straight up. His tail was not tucked between his legs, but held low to the floor, and it wasn’t wagging.

Spencer stepped back into the cellar. He pulled the pistol from under his belt.

Shrugging the Micro Uzi off her shoulder, taking a two-hand grip on the weapon, Ellie eased past the dog, onto the steep stairs. She climbed slowly, listening.

Spencer moved with equal care to Rocky’s side.

In the vestibule, the artist had stood to the side of the open door, and Roy had stood next to him, both with their backs pressed to the wall, listening to the couple in the cellar below. The stairwell added a hollow note to the voices as it funneled them upward, but the words were nonetheless clear.

Roy had hoped to hear something that would explain the man’s connection with the woman, at least a crumb of information about the suspected conspiracy against the agency and the shadowy organization that he had mentioned to Steven in the gallery a few minutes ago. But they spoke only of the famous night sixteen years in the past.

Steven seemed amused to be eavesdropping on that of all possible conversations. He turned his head twice to smile at Roy, and once he raised one finger to his lips as if warning Roy to be quiet.

There was something of an imp in the artist, a playfulness that made him a good companion. Roy wished he didn’t have to return Steven to prison. But he could think of no way, in the currently delicate political climate of the country, to free the artist either openly or clandestinely. Dr. Sabrina Palma would again have her benefactor. The best Roy could hope for was that he would find other credible reasons to visit Steven from time to time or even to obtain temporary custody again for consultation in other field operations.

When the woman had whispered urgently to Grant—“Spencer, wait!”—Roy had known that the dog must have sensed their presence. They had made no telltale noise, so it could only be the damned dog.

Roy considered easing past the artist to the edge of the open door. He could try a shot to the head of the first person who came out of the stairwell.

But it might be Grant. He didn’t want to waste Grant until he had some answers from him. And if it was the woman who was shot dead on the spot, Steven wouldn’t be as motivated to help extract information from his son as he would be if he knew that he could look forward to bringing her to a state of angelic beauty.

Peach in. Green out.

Worse: Assuming that the pair below were still armed with the submachine gun they had used to destroy the stabilizer of the chopper in Cedar City, and assuming that the first one across the threshold would be armed with that piece, the risk of a confrontation at this juncture was too great. If Roy missed with his attempted head shot, the burst of return fire from the Micro Uzi would chop him and Steven to pieces.

Discretion seemed wise.

Roy touched the artist on the shoulder and gestured for him to follow. They could not quickly reach the open back of the cupboard and then slip through the pine cabinet doors into the room beyond, because to get there they would have to cross in front of the cellar stairs. Even if neither of the pair below was far enough up the stairs to see them, their passage through the center of the room, directly under the yellow light, would ensure that their darting shadows betrayed them. Instead, staying flat against the concrete blocks to avoid casting shadows into the room, they sidled away from the door to the wall directly opposite the entrance from the cupboard. They squeezed into the narrow space behind the displaced back wall of the cupboard, which Grant or the woman had rolled into the vestibule on a set of sliding-door tracks. That movable section was seven feet high and more than four feet wide. There was an eighteen-inch-wide hiding space between it and the concrete wall. Standing at an angle between them and the cellar door, it provided just enough cover.

If Grant or the woman or both of them came into the vestibule and crept to the gaping hole in the back wall of the cupboard, Roy could lean out from concealment and shoot one or both of them in the back, disabling rather than killing them.

If they came instead to look into the narrow space behind the dislocated guts of the cabinet, he would still have to try for a head shot before they opened fire.

Peach in. Green out.

He listened intently. Pistol in his right hand. Muzzle aimed at the ceiling.

He heard the stealthy scrape of a shoe on concrete. Someone had reached the top of the stairs.

Spencer remained at the bottom of the stairs. He wished that Ellie had given him a chance to go up there in her place.

Three steps from the top, she paused for perhaps half a minute, listening, then proceeded to the landing at the head of the stairs. She stood for a moment, silhouetted in the rectangle of yellow light from the upper room, framed in the blue light of the lower room, like a stark figure in a modernistic painting.

Spencer realized that Rocky had lost interest in the room above and had slipped away from his side. The dog was at the other side of the cellar, at the open gray door.

Above, Ellie crossed the threshold and stopped just inside the vestibule. She looked left and right, listening.

In the cellar, Spencer glanced at Rocky again. One ear pricked, head cocked, trembling, the dog peered warily into the passageway that led to the catacombs and on to the heart of the horror.

Speaking to Ellie, Spencer said, “Looks like fur face is just having a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.”

From the vestibule, she glanced down at him.

Behind him, Rocky whined.

“Now he’s at the other door, ready to make a puddle if I don’t keep looking at him.”

“Seems to be okay up here,” she said, and she descended the stairs again.

“The whole place spooks him, that’s all,” Spencer said. “My friend here is easily frightened by most new places. This time, of course, it’s with damned good reason.”

He engaged the safety on the pistol and again tucked it under the waistband of his jeans.

“He’s not the only one spooked,” Ellie said, shouldering the Uzi. “Let’s finish this.”

Spencer crossed the threshold again, from the cellar into the world beyond. With each step forward, he moved backward in time.

They left the VW Microbus on the street to which the man on the phone had directed Harris. Darius, Bonnie, and Martin walked with Harris, Jessica, and the girls across the adjacent park toward the beach a hundred and fifty yards away.

No one could be seen within the discs of light beneath the tall lampposts, but bursts of eerie laughter issued from the surrounding darkness. Above the rumble and slosh of the surf, Harris heard voices, fragmentary and strange, on all sides, near and far. A woman who sounded blitzed on something: “You’re a real catman, baby, really a catman, you are.” A man’s high-pitched laughter trilled through the night, from a place far to the north of the unseen woman. To the south, another man, old by the sound of him, sobbed with grief. Yet another unspottable man, with a pure young voice, kept repeating the same three words, as if chanting a mantra: “Eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues…” It seemed to Harris that he was shepherding his family across an openair Bedlam, through a madhouse with no roof other than palm fronds and night sky.

Homeless winos and crackheads lived in some of the lusher stands of shrubbery, in concealed cardboard boxes insulated with newspapers and old blankets. In the sunlight, the beach crowd moved in and the day was filled with well-tanned skaters and surfers and seekers of false dreams. Then the true residents wandered to the streets to make the rounds of trash bins, to panhandle, and to shamble on quests that only they could understand. But at night, the park belonged to them again, and the green lawns and the benches and the handball courts were as dangerous as any places on earth. In darkness, the deranged souls then ventured forth from the undergrowth to prey on one another. They were likely to prey, as well, on unwary visitors who incorrectly assumed that a park was public domain at any hour of the day.

It was no place for women and girls — unsafe for armed men, in fact — but it was the only quick route to the sand and to the foot of the old pier. At the pier stairs, they were to be met by someone who would take them on from there to the new life that they were so blindly embracing.

They had expected to wait. But even as they approached the dark structure, a man walked out of the shadows between those pilings that were still above the tide line. He joined them at the foot of the stairs.

Even with no lamppost nearby, with only the ambient light of the great city that hugged the shoreline, Harris recognized the man who had come for them. It was the Asian in the reindeer sweater, whom he had first encountered in the theater men’s room in Westwood earlier in the evening.

“Pheasants and dragons,” the man said, as though he was not sure that Harris could tell one Asian from another.

“Yes, I know you,” Harris said.

“You were told to come alone,” the contact admonished, but not angrily.

“We wanted to say good-bye,” Darius told him. “And we didn’t know…We wanted to know — how will we contact them where they’re going?”

“You won’t,” said the man in the reindeer sweater. “Hard as it may be, you’ve got to accept that you will probably never see them again.”

In the Microbus, both before Harris had made the phone call from the pizza parlor and after, as they had found their way to the park, they had discussed the likelihood of a permanent separation. For a moment, no one could speak. They stared at one another, in a state of denial that approached paralysis.

The man in the reindeer sweater backed off a few yards to give them privacy, but he said, “We have little time.”

Although Harris had lost his house, his bank accounts, his job, and everything but the clothes on his back, those losses now seemed inconsequential. Property rights, he had learned from bitter experience, were the essence of all civil rights, but the theft of every dime of his property did not have one tenth — not one hundredth—the impact of losing these beloved people. The theft of their home and savings was a blow, but this loss was an inner wound, as if a piece of his heart had been cut out. The pain was of an immeasurably greater magnitude and of a quality inexpressible.

They said good-bye with fewer words than Harris would ever have imagined possible — because no words were adequate. They hugged one another fiercely, acknowledging that they were most likely parting until they met again on whatever shore lay beyond the grave. Their mother had believed in that far and better shore. Since childhood they had drifted away from the belief that she had instilled in them, but they were for this terrible moment, in this place, fully in the faith again. Harris held Bonnie tightly, then Martin, and came at last to his brother, who was separating tearfully from Jessica. He hugged Darius and kissed his cheek. He had not kissed his brother for more years than he could recall, because for so long they had both been too adult for that. Now he wondered at the silly rules that had constituted his sense of mature behavior, for in a single kiss, all was said that needed to be said.

The incoming waves crashed through the pier pilings behind them with a roar hardly louder than the pounding of Harris’s own heart, as at last he stepped back from Darius. Wishing there were more light in the gloom, he studied his brother’s face for the last time in this life, desperate to freeze it in memory, for he was leaving without even a photograph.

“Must go,” said the man in the reindeer sweater.

“Maybe everything won’t fall over the brink,” Darius said.

“We can hope.”

“Maybe the world will come to its senses.”

“You be careful going back through that park,” Harris said.

“We’re safe,” Darius said. “Nobody back there’s more dangerous than me. I’m an attorney, remember?”

Harris’s laugh was perilously close to a sob.

Instead of good-bye, he simply said, “Little brother.”

Darius nodded. For a moment it seemed that he wouldn’t be able to say anything more. But then: “Big brother.”

Jessica and Bonnie turned away from each other, both of them with Kleenex pressed to their eyes.

The girls and Martin parted.

The man in the reindeer sweater led one Descoteaux family south along the beach while the other Descoteaux family stood by the foot of the pier, watching. The sward was as pale as a path in a dream. The phosphorescent foam from the breakers dissolved on the sand with a whispery sizzle like urgent voices delivering incomprehensible warnings from out of the shadows in a nightmare.

Three times, Harris glanced at the other Descoteaux family over his shoulder, but then he could not bear to look back again.

They continued south on the beach, even after they reached the end of the park. They passed a few restaurants, all closed on that Monday night, then a hotel, a few condominiums, and warmly lighted beachfront houses in which lives were still lived without awareness of the hovering darkness.

After a mile and a half, perhaps even two miles, they came to another restaurant. Lights were on in that establishment, but the big windows were too high above the beach for Harris to see any diners at the view tables. The man in the reindeer sweater led them off the sward, alongside the restaurant, into the parking lot in front of the place. They went to a green-and-white motor home that dwarfed the cars around it.

“Why couldn’t my brother have brought us directly here?” Harris asked.

Their escort said, “It wouldn’t be a good idea for him to know this vehicle or its license number. For his own sake.”

They followed the stranger into the motor home through a side door, just aft of the open cockpit, and into the kitchen. He stepped aside and directed them farther back into the vehicle.

An Asian woman in her early or middle fifties, in a black pants suit and a Chinese-red blouse, was standing at the dining table, beyond the kitchen, waiting for them. Her face was uncommonly gentle, and her smile was warm.

“So pleased that you could come,” she said, as if they were paying her a social visit. “The dining nook seats seven altogether, plenty of room for the five of us. We’ll be able to talk on the way, and we’ve so much to discuss.”

They slid around the horseshoe-shaped booth, until the five of them encircled the table.

The man in the reindeer sweater had gotten behind the steering wheel. He started the engine.

“You may call me Mary,” said the Asian woman, “because it’s best that you don’t know my name.”

Harris considered keeping his silence, but he had no talent for deception. “I’m afraid that I recognize you, and I’m sure that my wife does as well.”

“Yes,” Jessica confirmed.

“We’ve eaten in your restaurant several times,” Harris said, “up in West Hollywood. On most of those occasions, either you or your husband was greeting guests at the front door.”

She nodded and smiled. “I’m flattered that you would recognize me out of…shall we say, out of context.”

“You and your husband are so charming,” Jessica said. “Not easy to forget.”

“How was dinner when you had it with us?”

“Always wonderful.”

“Thank you. So kind of you to say so. We do try. But now I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your lovely daughters,” said the restaurateur, “although I know their names.” She reached across the table to take each girl’s hand. “Ondine, Willa, my name is Mae Lee. It’s a pleasure to meet you both, and I want you to be unafraid. You are in good hands now.”

The motor home pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, into the street, and away.

“Where are we going?” Willa asked.

“First, out of California,” said Mae Lee. “To Las Vegas. Many motor homes crowd the highway between here and Vegas. We’re just one more. At that point, I leave you, and you go on with someone else. Your father’s picture will be all over the news for a time, and while they’re telling their lies about him, you will all be in a safe and quiet place. You will change your looks as much as possible and learn what you will be able to do to help others like yourselves. You will have new names, first and middle and last. New hairstyles. Mr. Descoteaux, you might grow a beard, and you will certainly work with a good voice coach to lose your Caribbean accent, pleasant as it is to the ear. Oh, there will be many changes, and more fun than you imagine there could be now. And meaningful work. The world has not ended, Ondine. It has not ended, Willa. It’s only passing through one edge of a dark cloud. There are things to be done to be sure that the cloud does not swallow us entirely. Which, I promise you, it will not. Now, before we begin, may I serve anyone tea, coffee, wine, beer, or a soft drink perhaps?”

…bare-chested and barefoot, colder even than I was in the hot July night, I stand in the room of blue light, past the green chair and purple table, before the open door, determined to abandon this strange quest and race back up into the summer night, where a boy might become a boy again, where the truth which I don’t know that I know can remain unknown forever.

Between one blink and another, however, as though transported by the power of a magical incantation, I’ve left the blue room and have arrived in what must be the basement of an earlier barn that stood on a site adjacent to that which the current barn occupies. While the old barn above ground was torn down and the land was smoothed over and planted with grass, the cellars were left intact and were connected to the deepest chamber of the new barn.

I’m again being drawn forward against my will. Or think that I am. But although I shudder in fear of some dark force that draws me, it’s my own deeper need to know, my true will, that draws me. I’ve repressed it since the night my mother died.

I’m in a curving corridor, six feet wide. A looping electrical cord runs along the center of the rounded ceiling. Low-wattage bulbs, like those on a Christmas tree, are spaced a foot apart. The walls are rough red-black brick, sloppily mortared. The bricks are overlaid in places with patches and veins of stained white plaster as smooth and greasy as the marbling fat in a slab of meat.

I pause in the curved passage, listening to my rampaging heart, listening to the unseen rooms ahead for a clue as to what might lie in wait for me, listening to the rooms behind for a voice to call me back to the safe world above. But there’s no sound ahead or behind, only my heart, and even though I don’t want to listen to the things it tells me, I sense that my heart has all the answers. In my heart I know that the truth about my precious mother lies ahead and that what lies behind is a world which will never be the same for me again, a world which changed forever and for the worse when I walked out of it.

The floor is stone. It might as well be ice beneath my feet. It slopes steeply but in a wide loop that would make it possible to push a wheelbarrow up without becoming exhausted or roll one down without losing control of it.

Across that icy stone, I walk barefoot and afraid, around the curve and into a room that’s thirty feet long and twelve wide. The floor is flat here, the descent complete. A low, flat ceiling. The frosted-white, low-wattage Christmas bulbs on the looping cord continue to provide the only light. This might have been a fruit cellar in the days before electrical service was brought to the ranch, stacked full of August potatoes and September apples, deep enough to be cool in summer and above freezing in winter. There might have been shelves of home-canned fruits and vegetables stored here as well, enough to last three seasons, although the shelves are long gone.

Whatever the room might once have been, it is something very different now, and I am suddenly frozen to the floor, unable to move. One entire long wall and half the other are occupied by tableaux of life-size human figures carved in white plaster and surrounded by plaster, forming out of a plaster background, as if trying to force their way out of the wall. Grown women but also girls as young as ten or twelve. Twenty, thirty, maybe even forty of them. All naked. Some in their own niches, others in groups of two and three, face beside face, here and there with arms overlapping. He has mockingly arranged a few so they are holding hands for comfort in their terror. Their expressions are unbearable to look upon. Screaming, pleading, agonized, wrenched and suffering, warped by fear beyond measure and by unimaginable pain. Without exception, their bodies are humbled. Often their hands are raised defensively or extended beseechingly or crossed over breasts, over genitals. Here a woman peers between the spread fingers of hands that she’s clasped defensively across her face. Imploring, praying, they would be a horror unendurable if they were only what they seem to be at first glance, only sculpture, only the twisted expression of a deranged mind. But they’re worse, and even in the cloistering shadows, their blank white stares transfix me, freeze me to the stone floor. The face of the Medusa was so hideous it transformed those who saw it to stone, but these faces aren’t like that. These are petrifying because they are all women who might have been mothers like my mother, young girls who might have been my sisters if I’d been fortunate enough to have sisters, all people who were loved by someone and who loved, who had felt the sun on their faces and the coolness of rain, who’d laughed and dreamed of the future and worried and hoped. They turn me to stone because of the common humanity that I share with them, because I can feel their terror and be moved by it. Their tortured expressions are so poignant that their pain is my pain, their deaths my death. And their sense of being abandoned and fearfully alone in their final hours is the abandonment and isolation that I feel now.

The sight of them is unendurable. Yet I’m compelled to look, because even though I am only fourteen, only fourteen, I know that what they’ve suffered demands witnessing and pity and anger, these mothers who might have been mine, these sisters who might have been my sisters, these victims like me.

The medium appears to be molded, sculpted plaster. But the plaster is only the preserving material that records their tormented expressions and beseeching postures — which aren’t their true postures and expressions at death but cruel arrangements he made after. Even in the merciful shadows and cold arcs of frosty light, I see places where the plaster has been discolored by unthinkable substances seeping from within: gray and rust and yellowish green, a biological patina by which it’s possible to date the figures in the tableaux.

The smell is indescribable, less because of its vileness than because of its complexity, though it is repulsive enough to make me ill. Later, it became known that he had used a sorcerer’s brew of chemicals in an attempt to preserve the bodies within the plaster sarcophaguses. To a considerable extent he had been successful, though some decomposition occurred. The underlying stink is that of the world below cemetery lawns. The ghastliness of caskets long after living people have looked into them and closed the lids. But it is masked by scents as pungent as that of ammonia and as fresh as that of lemons. It is bitter and sour and sweet — and so strange that the cloying stench alone, without the ghostly figures, could make my heart pound and my blood run as icy as January rivers.

In the unfinished wall, there’s a niche already prepared for a new body. He has chiseled out the bricks and stacked them to one side of the hole. He has scooped out a cavity in the earth beyond the wall and has carried that soil away. Lined up near the cavity are fifty-pound bags of dry plaster mix, a long wooden mixing trough lined with steel, two cans of tar-based sealant, both the tools of a mason and those of a sculptor, a stack of wooden pegs, coils of wire, and other items that I can’t quite see.

He is ready. He needs only the woman who will become the next figure in the tableau. But he has her too, of course, for it is she who lost control of her bladder in the back of the rainbow van. Her hands have made the flock of bloody birds across the vestibule door.

Something moves, quick and furtive, out of the new hole in the wall, among the tools and supplies, through shadows and patches of light as pale as snow. It freezes at the sight of me as I have frozen before the martyred women in the walls. It’s a rat, but no rat like any other. Its skull is deformed, one eye lower than the other, mouth twisted in a permanent lopsided grin. Another scurries after the first and also goes rigid when it sees me, though not before it rises on hind feet. It too is a creature like no other, encumbered by strange excrescences of bone or cartilage different from anything the first rat exhibits, and with a nose that spreads too wide across its narrow face. These are members of the small family of vermin that survives within the catacombs, tunneling behind the tableaux, nourished in part on that which has been saturated with toxic chemical preservatives. Each year a new generation of their kind produces more mutant forms than was produced the year before. Now they break their paralysis, as I can’t yet break mine, and they scurry back into the hole from which they came.

Sixteen years later, that long chamber was not entirely as it had been on the night of owls and rats. The plaster had been torn down and hauled away. The victims had been removed from the niches in the walls. Between the columns of red-black brick that Spencer’s father had left as supports, the dark earth was exposed. Police and forensic pathologists, who labored for weeks within that room, had added vertical four-by-four beams between some brick columns, as if they hadn’t trusted solely to the supports that Steven Ackblom had thought sufficient.

The cool, dry air now smelled faintly of stone and earth, but it was a clean smell. The pungent miasma of chemicals and the stink of biological decay were gone.

Standing in that low-ceilinged space again, with Ellie and the dog, Spencer vividly recalled the fright that had nearly crippled him when he was fourteen. However, fear was the least of what he felt — which surprised him. Horror and disgust were part of it, but not as great as a diamond-hard anger. Sorrow for the dead. Compassion for those who had loved them. Guilt for having failed to save anyone.

He knew regret, as well, for the life he might have had but had never known. And now never could.

Above all, what overcame him was an unexpected reverence, as he might have felt at any place where the innocent had perished: from Calvary to Dachau, to Babi Yar, to the unnamed fields where Stalin buried millions, to rooms where Jeffrey Dahmer dwelt, to the torture chambers of the Inquisition.

The soil of any killing ground isn’t sanctified by the murderers who practice there. Though they often think themselves exalted, they are as the maggots that live in dung, and no maggots can transform one square centimeter of earth into holy ground.

Sacred, instead, are the victims, for each dies in the place of someone whom fate allows to live. And though many may unwittingly or unwillingly die in the place of others, the sacrifice is no less sacred for the fact that fate chose those who would make it.

If there had been votive candles in those cleansed catacombs, Spencer would have wanted to light them and gaze into their flames until they blinded him. Had there been an altar, he would have prayed at the foot of it. If by offering his own life he could have brought back the forty-one and his mother, or any one of them, he would not have hesitated to rid himself of this world in hope of waking in another.

All he could do, however, was quietly honor the dead by never forgetting the details of their final passage through this place. His duty was to be witness. By shunning memory, he would dishonor those who had died here in his place. The price of forgetfulness would be his soul.

Describing those catacombs as they had been in that long-ago time, coming at last to the woman’s cry that had roused him from his paralytic terror, he was suddenly unable to go on. He continued to speak, or thought he did, but then he realized that no more words would come. His mouth worked, but his voice was only a silence that he cast into the silence of the room.

Finally a thin, high, brief, childlike cry of anguish came from him. It was not unlike the one cry that had jolted him from his bed on that July night or the one that, later, had broken his paralysis. He buried his face in his hands and stood, shaking with grief too intense for tears or sobbing, waiting for the seizure to pass.

Ellie was aware that no word or touch could console him.

In glorious canine innocence, Rocky believed any sadness could be relieved by a wagging tail, a cuddle, an affectionate warm lick. He rubbed his flank against his master’s legs and swished his tail — and padded away in confusion when none of his tricks worked.

Spencer found himself speaking again almost as unexpectedly as he had found himself unable to speak a minute or two ago. “I heard the woman’s cry again. From down there at the end of the catacombs. Hardly loud enough to be a scream. More a wail to God.”

He started toward the last door, at the end of the catacombs. Ellie and Rocky stayed with him.

“Even as I moved past the dead women in these walls, I was remembering something from six years before, when I’d been eight years old — another cry. My mother’s. That spring night, I woke hungry, got out of bed for a snack. There were fresh chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen jar. I’d been dreaming about them. Went downstairs. The lights were on in some rooms. I thought I’d find my mom or dad along the way. But I didn’t see them.”

Spencer stopped at the painted black door at the end of the catacombs. Catacombs they were and always would be to him, even with the bodies all disinterred and taken away.

Ellie and Rocky stopped at his side.

“The kitchen was dark. I was going to take as many cookies as I could carry, more than I would ever be allowed to have at one time. I was opening the jar when I heard a scream. Outside. Behind the house. Went to the window by the table. Parted the curtain. My mom was on the lawn. Running back to the house from the barn. He…he was behind her. He caught her on the patio. Beside the pool. Swung her around. Hit her. In the face. She screamed again. He hit her. Hit and hit. And again. So fast. My mom. Hitting her with his fist. She fell. He kicked her in the head. He kicked my mom in the head. She was quiet. So fast. All over so fast. He looked toward the house. He couldn’t see me in the dark kitchen, at the narrow gap in the curtains. He picked her up. Carried her to the barn. I stood at the window awhile. Then I put the cookies back in the jar. Put the lid on. Went back upstairs. Got into bed. Pulled up the covers.”

“And didn’t remember any of it for six years?” Ellie asked.

Spencer shook his head. “Buried it. That’s why I couldn’t sleep with the air conditioner running. Deep down where I didn’t realize it, I was afraid he would come for me in the night, and I wouldn’t hear him because of the air conditioner.”

“And then that night, all those years later, your window open, another cry—”

“It reached me deeper than I could understand, drew me out of bed, out to the barn, down here. And when I was walking toward this black door, toward the scream…”

Ellie reached to the lever-action knob on the door, to open it, but he stayed her hand.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m not ready to go in there again yet.”

…barefoot on icy stone, I approach the black door, filled with the fear of what I have seen tonight but also with the fear of what I saw on that spring night when I was eight, which has been repressed since then but all at once comes bursting up from within me. I’m in a state beyond mere terror. No word is adequate for what I feel. I’m at the black door, touching the black door, so black, glossy, like a moonless night sky reflected in the blind face of a pond. I’m nearly as confused as I am terrified, for it seems to me that I’m both eight and fourteen, that I’m opening the door to save not merely the woman who made bloody birds on the vestibule door but to save my mother as well. Time past and time present melt together, and all is one, and I enter the slaughterhouse.

I step into deep space, infinite night around me. The ceiling is ink-black to match the walls, the walls to match the floor, the floor like a chute to Hell. A naked woman, half conscious, lips split and bleeding, rolling her head in listless denial, is manacled to a burnished-steel slab, which seems to float in blackness because its supports also are black. A single light. Directly over the table. In a black fixture. It floats in the void, pin-spotting the steel, like a celestial object or the cruel beam of a godlike inquisitor. My father’s wearing black. Only his face and hands are visible, as if severed but alive in their own right, as if he’s an apparition struggling toward completion. He’s extracting a gleaming hypodermic syringe from thin air — actually from a drawer beneath the steel slab, a drawer invisible in its blackness-upon-blackness.

I shout, “No, no, no,” as I plunge at him, surprising him, so the syringe drops back into the thin air from which it came, and I drive him backward, backward, past the table, out of the focused light, into blackest infinity, until we crash into the wall at the end of the universe. I’m screaming, punching, but I’m fourteen and slender, and he’s in his prime, muscular, powerful. I kick him, but I’m barefoot. He lifts me effortlessly, turns with me, floating in space, slams me back-first into the hard blackness, knocking the wind out of me, slams me again. Pain along my spine. Another blackness rises inside me, deeper than the abyss all around. But the woman cries out again, and her voice helps me resist the inner darkness, even if I can’t resist my father’s far greater strength.

Then he presses me to the wall with his body, holding me off the floor with his hands, his face looming before mine, locks of black hair falling across his forehead, eyes so dark that they seem to be holes through which I’m seeing the blackness behind him. “Don’t be afraid, don’t, don’t be afraid, boy. Baby boy, I won’t hurt you. You’re my blood, my seed, my creation, my baby. I’d never hurt you. Okay? You understand? You hear me, son, sweet boy, my sweet little Mikey, you hear me? I’m glad you’re here. It had to happen sooner or later. Sooner the better. Sweet boy, my boy. I know why you’re here, I know why you’ve come.”

I’m dazed and disoriented because of the perfect blackness of that room, because of the horrors in the catacombs, because of being lifted bodily and pounded against the wall. In my condition, his voice is as lulling as fearsome, strangely seductive, and I’m nearly convinced he won’t harm me. Somehow I must have misunderstood the things I’ve seen. He continues speaking in that hypnotic way, words pouring out, giving me no chance to think, Jesus, my mind spinning, him pressing me to the wall, face like a great moon over me.

“I know why you’ve come. I know what you are. I know why you’re here. You’re my blood, my seed, my son, no different from me than my reflection in a mirror. Do you hear me, Mikey, sweet baby boy, hear me? I know what you are, why you’ve come, why you’re here, what you need. What you need. I know, I know. You know it too. You knew it when you came through the door and saw her on the table, saw her breasts, saw between her spread legs. You knew, oh, yes, oh, you knew, you wanted it, you knew, you knew what you wanted, what you need, what you are. And it’s all right, Mikey, it’s all right, baby boy. It’s all right what you are, what I am. It’s how we were born, each of us, it’s what we were meant to be.”

Then we’re standing at the table, and I’m not sure how we got there, the woman lying in front of me and my father pressing against my back, pinning me to the table. He has a vicious grip on my right wrist, pushes my hand onto her breasts, slides it along her naked body. She’s half conscious. Opens her eyes. I’m staring into her eyes, begging her to understand, as he forces my hand everywhere, all the time talking, talking, telling me that I can do anything to her I want, it’s right, it’s what I was born to do, she’s only here to be what I need her to be.

I come far enough out of a daze to struggle briefly, fiercely. Too brief, not fierce enough. His arm’s around my throat, choking me, jamming me against the table with his body, choking with his left arm, choking, the taste of blood in my mouth, until I’m weak again. He knows when to release the pressure, before I pass out, because he doesn’t want me to pass out. He has other plans. I sag against him, crying now, tears dropping onto the bare skin of the manacled woman.

He lets go of my right hand. I hardly have strength to lift it from the woman. Clink and rattle. Down at my side. I look. One of his disembodied hands. Sorting through the silvery instruments that are floating in the void. He plucks a scalpel from the weightless array of clamps and forceps and needles and blades. Seizes my hand, presses the scalpel into it, folds his hand over mine, grinding my knuckles, forcing me to grip the blade. Below us the woman sees our hands and the shining steel, and she begs us not to hurt her.

“I know what you are,” he says, “I know what you are, sweet boy, my baby boy. Just be what you are, just let go and be what you are. You think she’s beautiful now? You think she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Oh, just wait until we’ve shown her how to be more beautiful. Let Daddy show you what you are, what you need, what you like. Let me show you what fun it is to be what you are. Listen, Mikey, listen now, the same dark river runs through your heart and mine. Listen, and you can hear it, that deep dark river, roaring along, swift and powerful, roaring along. With me now, with me, just let the river carry you along. Be with me now and lift the blade high. See how it shines? Let her see it, see how she sees it, how she has eyes for nothing else. Shining and high in your hand and mine. Feel the power we have over her, over all the weak and foolish ones who can never understand. Be with me, lift it high—”

He has one arm loosely around my throat, my right hand gripped by his, so my left arm is free. Instead of reaching back for him or trying to jam my elbow into him, which won’t work, I plant my hand against the stainless steel. Unendurable horror and desperation empower me. With that hand and my whole body, I shove away from the table. Then with my legs. Then my feet. Kicking against the table with both feet. Raging backward into the bastard, unbalancing him. He stumbles, still grinding the hand in which I’ve got the scalpel, trying to tighten the arm at my throat. But then he falls backward, me atop him. The scalpel clinks away in darkness. My falling weight drives the breath out of him. I’m free. Free. Scramble across the black floor. The door. My right hand aching. No hope of helping the woman. But I can bring help. Police. Someone. She can still be saved. Through the door, onto my feet, tottering, flailing to keep my balance, out into the catacombs, running, running past all the frozen white women, trying to shout. Throat bleeding inside. Raw and raspy. Voice a whisper. No one on the ranch to hear me anyway. Just me, him, the naked woman. But I’m running, running, screaming in a whisper when there’s no one to hear.

The expression on Ellie’s face cut through Spencer’s heart.

He said, “I shouldn’t have brought you here, shouldn’t have put you through this.”

She was gray in the light of the frost-white bulbs. “No, it’s what you had to do. If I had any doubts, I have none now. You can’t have gone on forever…with all of this.”

“But that’s what I’ll have to do. Go on forever with it. And I don’t know now why I thought I could find a life. I don’t have any right to make you carry this weight with me.”

“You can go on with it and have a life…as long as you remember it all. And I think now I know what it is you can’t remember, where those lost minutes come in.”

Spencer couldn’t bear to meet her eyes. He looked at Rocky, where the dog sat in deep despondency: head lowered, ears drooping, shivering.

Then he turned his eyes to the black door. Whatever he found beyond it would decide whether he had a future with or without Ellie. He might have neither.

“I didn’t try to run back to the house,” he said, returning in his mind to that distant night. “He would have caught me before I’d gotten there, before I could use a telephone. Instead, I went up to the vestibule, out of the cupboard, through the file room, and turned right toward the front of the building, into the gallery. By the time I was on the stairs to his studio, I could hear him coming through the darkness behind me. I knew he kept a gun in the lower left-hand drawer of his desk. I’d seen it once when he’d sent me there to get something. Entering the studio, I hit the light switch, ran past his easels, supply cabinets, to the far corner. The desk was L-shaped. I vaulted over it, crashed into the chair, clawed at the drawer, got it open. The gun was there. I didn’t know how to use it, whether it had a safety. My right hand was throbbing. I could hardly hold the damn thing, even in both hands. He was off the stairs, into the studio, coming for me, so I pointed and pulled the trigger. It was a revolver. No safety. The recoil about knocked me on my ass.”

“And you shot him.”

“Not yet. I must’ve pulled up hard on it when I squeezed the trigger, pulled off target, so the bullet took a chunk out of the ceiling. But I held on to the gun, and he stopped coming. At least he didn’t come as fast, not pell-mell anymore. But he was so calm, Ellie, so calm. As if nothing had happened, just my dad, good old dad, a little perturbed with me, you know, but telling me everything was going to be all right, romancing me with that sweet talk like in the black room. So sincere. So hypnotic. And so sure that he could make it work if I only gave him time.”

Ellie said, “But he didn’t know that you’d seen him beat your mother and carry her back to the barn six years before. He might have thought you would put together her death and his secret rooms when you came down from your panic — but until then he thought he had time to bring you around.”

Spencer stared at the black door.

“Yeah, maybe that’s what he thought. I don’t know. He told me that to be like him was to know what life was all about, the true fullness of life without limits or rules. He said I’d enjoy what he could show me how to do. He said I’d already started to enjoy it back in that black room, that I’d been afraid of enjoying it, but that I’d learn it was all right to have that kind of fun.”

“But you didn’t enjoy it. You were repulsed.”

“He said that I did, that he could see I did. His genes ran through me like a river, he said again, through my heart just like a river. Our shared river of destiny, the dark river of our hearts. When he got to the desk, so close I couldn’t miss again, I shot him. He flew backward from the impact. The spray of blood was horrible. It seemed for sure that I’d killed him, but then I hadn’t seen much blood until that night, and a little looked like a lot. He hit the floor, rolled facedown, and lay there, very still. I ran out of the studio, back down here….”

The black door waited.

She didn’t speak for a while. He couldn’t.

Then Ellie said, “And in that room with the woman…those are the minutes you can’t remember.”

The door. He should have had the old cellars collapsed with explosives. Filled in with dirt. Sealed forever. He shouldn’t have left that black door to be opened again.

“Coming back here,” he said with difficulty, “I had to carry the revolver in my left hand because of how he’d clenched my right so hard in his, grinding my knuckles together. It was throbbing, full of pain. But the thing is…it wasn’t just pain I felt in it.”

He looked at that hand now. He could see it smaller, younger, the hand of a fourteen-year-old boy.

“I could still feel…the smoothness of the woman’s skin, from when he’d forced my hand over her body. Feel the roundness of her breasts. The resiliency and fullness of them. The flatness of her belly. The crispness of pubic hair…the heat of her. All those feelings were in my hand, still in my hand, as real as the pain.”

“You were only a boy,” she said without any evidence of disgust. “It was the first time you’d ever seen a woman undressed, the first time you’d ever touched a woman. My God, Spencer, in supercharged circumstances like that, not just terrifying but so emotional in every way, so confusing, such a damned primal moment — touching her was bound to reach you on every level, all at the same time. Your father knew that. He was a clever sonofabitch. He tried to use your turmoil to manipulate you. But it didn’t mean anything.”

She was too understanding and forgiving. In this blighted world, those who were too forgiving paid a cruel price for a Christian bent.

“So, I came back through the catacombs, with the dead all around me in the walls, with the memory of my father’s blood, and still with the feel of her breasts in my hand. The vivid memory of how rubbery her nipples had felt against my palm—”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“Never lie to the dog,” Spencer said, with no humor this time, but with a bitterness and rage that frightened him.

A fury welled in his heart, blacker than the door before him. He was no more able to shake it off than he had been able, that July, to shake from his hand the remembered warmth and shapes and sensuous textures of the naked woman. His rage was undirected, and that was why it had been intensifying in his deep unconscious for sixteen years. He’d never been sure if it should be turned against his father or against himself. Lacking a target, he had denied the existence of that rage, repressed it. Now, condensed into a distillate of purest wrath, it was eating through him as corrosively as any acid.

“…with the vivid memory of how her nipples had felt against my palm,” he continued, but in a voice that shook equally with anger and with fear, “I came back here. To this door. Opened it. Went into the black room…. And the next thing I remember is walking away from here, the door falling shut behind me….”

…barefoot, walking back through the catacombs, with a void in my memory more perfectly black than the room behind me, not sure where I’ve just been, what’s just happened. Passing the women in the walls. Women. Girls. Mothers. Sisters. Their silent screams. Perpetual screams. Where is God? What does God care? Why has He abandoned them all here? Why has He abandoned me? A magnified spider shadow scurries across their plaster faces, along the looping shadow of the light cord. As I’m passing the new niche in the wall, the niche prepared for the woman in the black room, my father comes out of that hole, out of the dark earth, splattered with blood, staggering, wheezing in agony, but so fast, so fast, as fast as the spider. The hot flash of steel out of shadows. Knife. He sometimes paints still lifes of knives, making them glow as if they were holy relics. Flashing steel, flashing pain across my face. Drop the gun. Hands to my face. Flap of cheek hanging off my chin. My bare teeth against my fingers, a grin of teeth exposed along the whole side of my face. Tongue leaping against my fingers in the open side of my face. And he slashes again. Misses. Falls. He’s too weak to get up. Backing away from him, I pull my cheek in place, blood streaming between my fingers, running down my throat. I’m trying to hold my face together. Oh, God, trying to hold my face together and running, running. Behind me, he’s too weak to get off the floor but not too weak to call after me: “Did you kill her, did you kill her, baby boy, did you like it, did you kill her?”

Spencer still could not look directly at Ellie and might never be able to look directly at her again, not eye-to-eye. He could see her peripherally, and he knew that she was crying quietly. Crying for him, eyes flooded, face glistening.

He couldn’t cry for himself. He had never been able to let go and fully purge his pain, because he didn’t know if he was worthy of tears, of hers or his own or anyone’s tears.

All he could feel now was that rage, which was still without a target.

“The police found the woman dead in the black room,” he said.

“Spencer, he killed her.” Her voice trembled. “It must have been him. The police said it was him. You were the boy hero.”

Staring at the black door, he shook his head. “When did he kill her, Ellie? When? He dropped the scalpel when we both fell to the floor. Then I ran, and he ran after me.”

“But there were other scalpels, other sharp instruments in the drawer. You said so yourself. He grabbed one and killed her. It would only have taken seconds. Only a few seconds, Spencer. The bastard knew you couldn’t get far, that he’d catch up with you. And he was so excited after his struggle with you that he couldn’t wait, shaking with excitement, so he had to kill her then, hard and fast and brutally.”

“Later, he’s on the floor, after he slashed me, and I’m running away, and he’s calling after me, asking if I killed her, if I liked killing her.”

“Oh, he knew. He knew she was dead before you ever came back here to free her. Maybe he was insane and maybe he wasn’t, but he was sure as hell the purest evil that ever walked. Don’t you see? He hadn’t converted you to his way, and he hadn’t been able to kill you, either, so all that was left for him was to ruin your life if he could, to plant that seed of doubt in your mind. You were a boy, half blind with panic and terror, confused, and he knew your turmoil. He understood, and he used it against you, just for the sheer, sick fun of it.”

For more than half his lifetime, Spencer had tried to convince himself of the scenario that she had just painted for him. But the void in his memory remained. The continued amnesia seemed to argue that the truth was different from what he desperately wished had happened.

“Go,” he said thickly. “Run for the truck, drive away from here, go to Denver. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I can’t ask you to come any farther with me.”

“I’m here. I’m not leaving.”

“I mean it. Get out.”

“No way.”

“Get out. Take the dog.”

“No.”

Rocky was whining, shaking, huddling against a column of blood-dark brick, in torment as racking as any Spencer had ever seen.

“Take him. He likes you.”

“I’m not going.” Through tears, she said, “This is my decision, damn it, and you can’t make it for me!”

He turned on her, seized handfuls of her leather jacket, all but lifted her off the floor, frantically trying to force her to understand. In his rage and fear and self-loathing, he had managed, after all, to look her in the eyes one more time. “For Christ’s sake, after all you’ve seen and heard, don’t you get it? I left part of myself in that room, that abattoir where he did his butchering, left something there I couldn’t live with. What in the name of God could that be, huh? Something worse than the catacombs, worse than all the rest of it. It has to be worse because I remembered all the rest of it! If I go back in there and remember what I did to her, there’ll be no forgetting ever again, no hiding from it anymore. And this is a memory…like fire. It’s going to burn through me. Whatever’s left, whatever isn’t burned away, it won’t be me anymore, Ellie, not after I know what I did to her. And then who’re you going to be down here with, down here in this godforsaken place alone with?”

She raised one hand to his face and traced the line of his scar, though he tried to flinch away from her. She said, “If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.”

“Oh, Ellie, don’t.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Ellie, please.”

“No.”

He couldn’t direct his rage at her, either, especially not at her. He let go of her. Stood with his hands at his sides. Fourteen again. Weak with his outrage. Afraid. Lost.

She put her hand on the lever-action door handle.

“Wait.” He withdrew the SIG 9mm pistol from under the waistband of his blue jeans, disengaged the safety, jacked a bullet into the chamber, and held the piece out to her. “You should have both guns.” She started to object, but he cut her off. “Keep the pistol in your hand. Don’t get too close to me in there.”

“Spencer, whatever you remember, it’s not going to turn you into your father, not in an instant, no matter how terrible it is.”

“How do you know that? I’ve spent sixteen years picking at it, prying and poking, trying to dig it out of the darkness, but it won’t come. Now if it comes…”

She engaged the safety on the pistol.

“Ellie—”

“I don’t want it to go off accidentally.”

“My father wrestled on the floor with me and tickled me and made funny faces for me when I was little. Played ball with me. And when I wanted to develop my drawing ability, he patiently taught technique to me. But before and after…he came down here, that same man, and he tortured women, girls, hour after hour, for days in some cases. He moved with ease between this world and the one above.”

“I’m not going to keep a gun ready, point a gun at you, like I’m afraid you’re some kind of monster, when I know you’re not. Please, Spencer. Please don’t ask me to do that. Let’s just finish this.”

In the deep quiet at the end of the catacombs, he took a moment to prepare himself. Nothing moved anywhere in that long room. No rats, misshapen or otherwise, dwelt there anymore. The Dresmunds had been instructed to eradicate them with poison.

Spencer opened the black door.

He switched on the light.

He hesitated on the threshold, then went inside.

Miserable though the dog was, he padded into that room as well. Maybe he was afraid to be alone in the catacombs. Or maybe this time his misery was entirely a reaction to his master’s state of mind, in which case he knew that his company was needed. He stayed close to Spencer.

Ellie entered last, and the weighted door closed behind her.

The abattoir was nearly as disorienting now as it had been on that night of scalpels and knives. The stainless steel table was gone. The chamber was empty. The unrelieved blackness allowed no point of reference, so one moment the room appeared to be hardly larger than a casket, but in the next moment it seemed infinitely larger than it actually was. The only light was still the tightly focused bulb in the black ceiling fixture.

The Dresmunds had been instructed to keep all lights functional. They had not been told to clean the abattoir, yet only the thinnest film of dust veiled the walls, no doubt because the room was not ventilated and was always shut up tight.

It was a time capsule, sealed for sixteen years, containing not the memorabilia of bygone days but lost memories.

The place affected Spencer even more powerfully than he had expected. He could see the glimmer of the scalpel as if it hung in the air even now.

…barefoot, carrying the revolver in my left hand, I hurry down from the studio where I shot my father, through the back of the cupboard into a world not anything like the one behind the wardrobe in those books by C. S. Lewis, through the catacombs, not daring to look left or right, because those dead women seem to be straining to break out of their plaster. I have the crazy fear that they might pull loose as if the plaster is still wet, come for me, take me into one of the walls with them. I’m my father’s son and I deserve to choke on cold wet plaster, have it squeezed into my nostrils and poured down my throat, until I’m as one with the figures in the tableaux, unbreathing, a harbor for the rats. My heart’s knocking so hard that each beat makes my vision darken slightly, briefly, as if the surges in blood pressure will burst vessels in my eyes. I feel each beat in my right hand too. The pain in my knuckles throbs, lub-dub, three small hearts in every finger. But I love the pain. I want more pain. Back in the vestibule and descending the stairs into the room of blue light, I repeatedly rapped the swollen knuckles of that hand with the revolver that I held in the other. Now I rap them hard again in the catacombs, to drive out all feeling but pain. Because…because equal to the pain, dear Jesus God Almighty, I still have it on my hand, like a stain on my hand: the smoothness of the woman’s skin. The full curves and warm resiliency of her breasts, turgid nipples rubbing my palm. The flatness of belly, the tautness of muscles as she strains against the manacles. The lubricious heat into which he forces my fingers against all my resistance, against her terrible half-dazed protest. Her eyes were locked with mine. Pleading with her eyes. The misery of her eyes. But the traitor hand has its own sense memory, unshakable, and it makes me sick. All the feelings in my hand make me sick, and some of the feelings in my heart. I have such disgust, loathing, such fear of myself. But other feelings too — unclean emotions in harmony with the excitement of the hateful hand. And at the door to the black room I stop, lean against the wall, and vomit. Sweating. Shuddering with chills. When I turn away from the mess, with only my stomach purged, I force myself to grab the lever-action handle with my injured hand, making pain shoot up my forearm as I violently jerk open the door. And then I’m inside, into the black room again.

Don’t look at her. Don’t. Don’t! Don’t look at her naked. No right to look at her naked. This can be done with my eyes averted, edging to the table, aware of her only as a flesh-colored form out of the corner of my eye, floating in the darkness over there. “It’s okay,” I tell her, my voice so hoarse from the choking, “it’s okay, lady, he’s dead, lady, I shot him. I’ll let you loose, get you out of here, don’t be afraid.” And then I realize I haven’t any idea where to find the keys to the manacles. “Lady, I don’t have a key, no key, got to go for help, call the cops. But it’s okay, he’s dead.” No sound from her there, out of the corner of my eye. She’d been dazed from the blows to her head, only half conscious, and now she’s passed out. But I don’t want her to wake up after I’ve gone and be alone and afraid. I remember the look in her eyes — was it the same look in my mother’s eyes at the very end? — and I don’t want her to be so afraid when she wakes and thinks he’s coming back for her. That’s all, that’s all. I just don’t want her to be afraid, so I’m going to have to bring her around, shake her, wake her up, make her understand that he’s dead and that I’ll be back with help. I edge to the table, trying not to look at her body, going to look only at her face. A smell hits me. Terrible. Nauseating. The blackness is dizzying again. I put one hand out. Against the table. To steady myself. It’s the right hand, still remembering the curve of her breasts, and I put it down in a warm, viscous, slippery mass that wasn’t there before. I look at her face. Mouth open. Eyes. Dead blank eyes. He’s been at her. Two slashes. Vicious. Brutal. All of his great strength behind the blade. Her throat. Her abdomen. I spin away from the table, away from the woman, collide with the wall. Wiping my right hand on the black wall, calling for Jesus and for my mother, and saying “lady please lady please,” as if she could mend herself by an act of will if only she’d listen to my pleas. Wiping wiping wiping the hand, front and back, on the wall, not only wiping off what I’ve pressed it into but wiping off the way she felt when she was alive, wiping hard, harder, angrily, furiously, until my hand seems on fire, until there’s nothing in my hand but pain. And then I stand there awhile. Not quite sure where I am any longer. I know there’s a door. I go to it. Through it. Oh, yes. The catacombs.

Spencer stood in the center of the black room, his right hand in front of his face, staring at it in the hard projected light, as though it was not at all the same hand that had been at the end of his wrist for the past sixteen years.

Almost wonderingly, he said, “I would’ve saved her.”

“I know that,” Ellie said.

“But I couldn’t save anyone.”

“And that’s not your fault, either.”

For the first time since that ancient July, he thought he might have the capacity to accept, not soon but eventually, that he had no greater weight of guilt to carry than any other man. Darker memories, a more intimate experience of the human capacity for evil, knowledge that other people would never want forced on them as it had been forced on him — all of that, yes, but not a greater weight of guilt.

Rocky barked. Twice. Loud.

Startled, Spencer said, “He never barks.”

Slipping off the safety on the SIG, Ellie swung toward the door as it flew open. She wasn’t quick enough.

The genial-looking man — the same who had broken into the Malibu cabin — burst into the black room. He had a silencer-fitted Beretta in his right hand, and he was smiling and squeezing off a shot as he came.

Ellie took the round in her right shoulder, squealed in pain. Her hand spasmed and released the pistol, and she was slammed into the wall. She sagged against the blackness, gasping with the shock of being shot, realized the Micro Uzi was sliding off her shoulder, and made a grab for it with her left hand. It slipped through her fingers, hit the floor, and spun away from her.

The pistol was gone, clattering beyond reach across the floor toward the man with the Beretta. But Spencer went for the Uzi even as it was falling.

The smiling man fired again. The bullet sparked off the stone inches from Spencer’s reaching hand, forcing him to pull back, and it ricocheted around the room.

The shooter seemed unfazed by the whine of the bouncing slug, as if he led such a charmed life that his safety was a foregone conclusion.

“I’d prefer not to shoot you,” he said. “I didn’t want to shoot Ellie, either. I’ve other plans for both of you. But one more wrong move — and you’ll take away all my choices. Now kick the Uzi over here.”

Instead of doing what he had been told, Spencer went to Ellie. He touched her face and looked at her shoulder. “How bad?”

She was clutching her wound, trying not to reveal the extent of her pain, but the truth was in her eyes. “Okay, I’m okay, it’s nothing,” she said, yet Spencer saw her glance at the whimpering dog when she lied.

The heavy door to the abattoir hadn’t fallen shut. Someone was holding it open. The shooter stepped aside to let him enter. The second man was Steven Ackblom.

Roy was certain that this would be one of the most interesting nights of his life. It might even be as singular as the first night that he had spent with Eve, although he wouldn’t betray her even by hoping that it might be better. This was an incredible confluence of events: the capture of the woman at last; the chance to learn what Grant might know about any organized opposition to the agency, then the pleasure of putting that troubled man out of his misery; a unique opportunity to be with one of the great artists of the century as he turned his hand to the medium that had made him famous; and when it was done, perhaps even Eleanor’s perfect eyes would be salvageable. Cosmic forces were at work in the design of such a night.

When Steven entered the room, the expression on Spencer Grant’s face was worth the loss of at least two helicopters and a satellite. Anger darkened his face, twisted his features. It was a rage so pure that it possessed a fascinating beauty all its own. Enraged, Grant nonetheless shrank back with the woman.

“Hello, Mikey,” Steven said. “How’ve you been?”

The son — once Mikey, now Spencer — was unable to speak.

“I’ve been well but…in boring circumstances,” said the artist.

Spencer Grant remained silent. Roy was chilled by the expression in the ex-cop’s eyes.

Steven looked around at the black ceiling, walls, floor. “They blamed me for the woman you did here that night. I took the fall on that one too. For you, baby boy.”

“He never touched her,” Ellie Summerton said.

“Didn’t he?” the artist asked.

“We know he didn’t.”

Steven sighed with regret. “Well, no, he didn’t. But he was that close to doing her.” He held up his thumb and forefinger, only a quarter of an inch apart. “That close.”

“He was never close at all,” she said, but Grant remained unable to speak.

“Wasn’t he?” Steven said. “Well, I think he was. I think if I’d been a little smarter, if I’d encouraged him to drop his pants and climb on top of her first, then he would have been happy to take the scalpel afterward. He’d have been more in the spirit of things then, you see.”

“You’re not my father,” Grant said emptily.

“You’re wrong about that, my sweet boy. Your mother was a firm believer in marital vows. There was only ever me with her. I’m sure of that. In the end, here in this room, she was able to keep not the slightest secret from me.”

Roy thought that Grant was going to come across the room with all the fury of a bull, heedless of bullets.

“What a pathetic little dog,” Steven said. “Look at him shaking, hanging his head. Perfect pet for you, Mikey. He reminds me of the way you acted here that night. When I gave you the chance to transcend, you were too much of a pussy to seize it.”

The woman appeared to be furious too, perhaps even angrier than she was afraid, though both. Her eyes had never been more beautiful.

“How long ago that was, Mikey, and what a new world this is,” Steven said, taking a couple of steps toward his son and the woman, forcing them to shrink back farther. “I was so ahead of my time, so much deeper into the avant-garde than I ever fully realized. The newspapers called me insane. I ought to demand a retraction, don’t you think? Now, the streets are crawling with men more violent than I ever was. Gangs have gunfights anywhere they please, and babies get shot down on kindergarten playgrounds — and nobody does anything about it. The enlightened are too busy worrying that you’re going to eat a food additive that’ll shave three and a half days off your lifespan. Did you read about the FBI agents up in Idaho, where they shot an unarmed woman while she was holding her baby, and shot her fourteen-year-old son in the back when he tried to run from them? Killed them both. You see that in the papers, Mikey? And now men like Roy here hold very responsible positions in government. Why, I could be a fabulously successful politician these days. I’ve got everything it takes. I’m not insane, Mikey. Daddy’s not insane and never was. Evil, yes. I embrace that. From earliest childhood, I had it all in that regard. I’ve always liked to have fun. But I’m not crazy, baby boy. Roy here, guardian of public safety, protector of the republic — why, Mikey, he’s a raving lunatic.”

Roy smiled at Steven, wondering what joke he was setting up. The artist was endlessly amusing. But Steven had moved so far into the room that Roy couldn’t see his face, only the back of his head.

“Mikey, you should hear Roy rant on about compassion, about the poor quality of life that so many people live and shouldn’t have to, about reducing population by ninety percent to save the environment. He loves everybody. He understands their suffering. He weeps for them. And when he has a chance, he’ll blow them to kingdom come to make society a little nicer. It’s a hoot, Mikey. And they give him helicopters and limousines and all the cash he needs and flunkies with big guns in shoulder holsters. They let him run around making a better world. And this man, Mikey, I’m telling you, he’s got worms in his brain.”

Playing along with it, Roy said, “Worms in my brain, big old slimy worms in my brain.”

“See,” Steven said. “He’s a funny guy, Roy is. Only wants to be liked. Most people do like him too. Don’t they, Roy?”

Roy sensed that they were coming to the punch line. “Well, now, Steven, I don’t want to be bragging about myself—”

“See!” Steven said. “He’s a modest man too. Modest and kind and compassionate. Doesn’t everybody like you, Roy? Come on. Don’t be so bashful.”

“Well, yeah, most people like me,” Roy admitted, “but that’s because I treat everyone with respect.”

“That’s right!” Steven said. He laughed. “Roy treats everyone with the same solemn respect. Why, he’s an equal-opportunity killer. Evenhanded treatment for everyone from a presidential aide wasted in a Washington park and then made to look like a suicide…to an ordinary paraplegic shot down to spare him the daily struggle. Roy doesn’t understand that these things have to be done for fun. Only for fun. Otherwise, it’s insane, it really is, to do it for some noble purpose. He’s so solemn about it, thinks of himself as a dreamer, a man of ideals. But he does uphold his ideals — I’ll give him that much. He plays no favorites. He’s the least prejudiced, most egalitarian, foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic who ever lived. Don’t you agree, Mr. Rink?”

Rink? Roy didn’t want Rink or Fordyce hearing any of this, for God’s sake, seeing any of this. They were muscle, not true insiders. He turned to the door, wondering why he hadn’t heard it open — and saw that no one was there. Then he heard the scrape of the Micro Uzi against concrete as Steven Ackblom plucked it off the floor, and he knew what was happening.

Too late.

The Uzi chattered in Steven’s hands. Bullets tore into Roy. He fell, rolled, and tried to fire back. Though he was still holding the gun, he couldn’t make his finger squeeze the trigger. Paralyzed. He was paralyzed.

Over the zinging-whining ricochets, something snarled viciously: a sound out of a horror movie, echoing off the black walls with more blood-curdling effect than the bullets. For a second Roy couldn’t understand what it was, where it was coming from. He almost thought that it was Grant because of the fury in the scarred man’s face, but then he saw the beast exploding through the air toward Steven. The artist tried to swing around, away from Roy, and cut down the attack dog. But the hellish thing was already on him, driving him backward into the wall. It tore at his hands. He dropped the Uzi. Then it was climbing him, snapping at his face, at his throat.

Steven was screaming.

Roy wanted to tell him that the most dangerous people of all — and evidently the most dangerous dogs as well — were those who had been beaten down the hardest. When even their pride and hope had been taken from them, when they were driven into the last of all corners, then they had nothing to lose. To avoid producing such desperate men, applying compassion to the suffering as early as possible was the right thing to do for them, the moral thing to do — but also the wisest thing to do. He couldn’t tell the artist any of that, however, because in addition to being paralyzed, he found that he couldn’t speak either.

“Rocky, no! Off! Rocky, off!”

Spencer pulled the dog by the collar and struggled with him until at last Rocky obeyed.

The artist was sitting on the floor. His legs were drawn up defensively. His arms crossed over his face, and he was bleeding from his hands.

Ellie had picked up the Uzi. Spencer took it from her.

He saw that her left ear was bleeding. “You’ve been hit again.”

“Ricochet. Grazed,” she said, and this time she could have met the dog’s eyes forthrightly.

Spencer looked down at the thing that was his father.

The murderous bastard had lowered his arms from his face. He was infuriatingly calm. “They’ve got men posted from one end of the property to the other. Nobody here in the building, but once you step outside, you won’t get far. You can’t get away, Mikey.”

Ellie said, “They won’t have heard the gunfire. Not if no one above-ground ever heard the screams from this place. We still have a chance.”

The wife-killer shook his head. “Not unless you take me and the amazing Mr. Miro here.”

“He’s dead,” Ellie said.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s more useful dead. Never know what a man like him might do, so I’d be edgy if we had to carry him out of here while he was alive. We take him between us, baby boy, you and me. They’ll see he’s hurt, but they won’t know how badly. Maybe they value him highly enough to hold back.”

“I don’t want your help,” Spencer said.

“Of course you don’t, but you need it,” his father said. “They won’t have moved your truck. Their instructions were to stay back, at a distance, just maintain surveillance, until they heard from Roy. So we can move him to the truck, between us, and they won’t be sure what’s going on.” He rose painfully to his feet.

Spencer backed away from him, as he would have backed away from something that had appeared in a chalk pentagram in response to the summons of a sorcerer. Rocky retreated as well, growling.

Ellie was in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. She was out of the way, reasonably safe.

Spencer had the dog — what a dog! — and he had the gun. His father had no weapon, and he was hampered by his bitten hands. Yet Spencer was as afraid of him as he had ever been on that July night or since.

“Do we need him?” he asked Ellie.

“Hell, no.”

“You’re sure whatever you were doing with the computer, it’s going to work?”

“More sure of that than we could ever be sure of him.”

To his father, Spencer said, “What happens to you if I leave you to them?”

The artist examined his bitten hands with interest, studying the punctures not as though concerned about the damage but as though inspecting a flower or another beautiful object that he had never seen before. “What happens to me, Mikey? You mean when I go back to prison? I do a little reading to pass the time. I still paint some — did you know? I think I’ll paint a portrait of your little bitch there in the doorway, as I imagine she’d look with no clothes, and as I know she’d look if I’d ever had the chance to put her on a table here and make her realize her true potential. I see that disgusts you, baby boy. But really, it’s such a small pleasure to allow me, considering she’ll never have been more beautiful than on my canvas. My way of sharing in her with you.” He sighed and looked up from his hands, as if unperturbed by the pain. “What happens if you leave me to them, Mikey? You’ll be condemning me to a life that’s a waste of my talent and joie de vivre, a barren and tiny existence behind gray walls. That’s what happens to me, you ungrateful little snot.”

“You said they were worse than you.”

“Well, I know what I am.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Self-awareness is a virtue in which they’re lacking.”

“They let you out.”

“Temporarily. A consultation.”

“They’ll let you out again, won’t they?”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t take another sixteen years.” He smiled, as if his bleeding hands had suffered only paper cuts. “But, yes, we’re in an age that’s giving birth to a new breed of fascists, and I would hope that from time to time they might find my expertise useful to them.”

“You’re figuring you won’t even go back,” Spencer said. “You think you’ll get away from them tonight, don’t you?”

“Too many of them, Mikey. Big men with big guns in shoulder holsters. Big black Chrysler limousines. Helicopters whenever they want them. No, no, I’ll probably have to bide my time until another consultation.”

“Lying, mother-killing sonofabitch,” Spencer said.

“Oh, don’t try to frighten me,” his father said. “I remember sixteen years ago, this room. You were a little pussy then, Mikey, and you’re a little pussy now. That’s some scar you’ve got there, baby boy. How long did you have to recuperate before you could eat solid foods?”

“I saw you beat her to the ground by the swimming pool.”

“If confession makes you feel good, go right ahead.”

“I was in the kitchen for cookies, heard her scream.”

“Did you get your cookies?”

“When she was down, you kicked her in the head.”

“Don’t be tedious, Mikey. You were never the son I might have wished to have, but you were never tedious before.”

The man was unshakably calm, self-possessed. He had an aura of power that was daunting — but no look of madness whatsoever in his eyes. He could preach a sermon and be thought a priest. He claimed that he wasn’t mad, but evil.

Spencer wondered if that could be true.

“Mikey, you really owe me, you know. Without me, you wouldn’t exist. No matter what you think of me, I am your father.”

“Without you, I wouldn’t exist. Yeah. And that would be okay. That would be fine. But without my mother — I might have been exactly like you. It’s her I owe. Only her. She’s the one who gave me whatever salvation I can ever have.”

“Mikey, Mikey, you simply can’t make me feel guilty. You want me to put on a big sad face? Okay, I’ll put on a big sad face. But your mother was nothing to me. Nothing but useful cover for a while, a helpful deceit with nice knockers. But she was too curious. And when I had to bring her down here, she was just like all the others — although less exciting than most.”

“Well, just the same,” Spencer said, “this is for her.” He fired a short burst from the Uzi, blowing his father to Hell.

There were no ricochets to worry about. Every bullet found its mark, and the dead man carried them down to the floor with him, in a pool of the darkest blood that Spencer had ever seen.

Rocky leaped in surprise at the gunfire, then cocked his head and studied Steven Ackblom. He sniffed him as if the scent was far different from any he had encountered before. As Spencer stared down at his dead father, he was aware of Rocky gazing up curiously at him. Then the dog joined Ellie at the door.

When at last he went to the door too, Spencer was afraid to look at Ellie.

“I wondered if you would actually be able to do it,” she said. “If you hadn’t, I’d have had to, and the recoil would have hurt like hell with this arm.”

He met her eyes. She wasn’t trying to make him feel better about what he had done. She had meant what she’d said.

“I didn’t enjoy it,” he said.

“I would have.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Immensely.”

“I didn’t hate doing it, either.”

“Why should you? You have to stomp a cockroach when you get a chance.”

“How’s your shoulder?”

“Hurts like hell, but it’s not bleeding all that much.” She flexed her right hand, wincing. “I’ll still be able to work the computer keyboard with both hands. I just hope to God I can work it fast enough.”

The three of them hurried through the depopulated catacombs, toward the blue room, the yellow vestibule, and the strange world above.

Roy had no pain. In fact, he could feel nothing at all. Which made it easier for him to play dead. He feared that they would finish him off if they realized he was alive. Spencer Grant, aka Michael Ackblom, was indisputably as insane as his father and capable of any atrocity. Therefore, Roy closed his eyes and used his paralysis to his advantage.

After the singular opportunity that he had given the artist, Roy was disappointed in the man. Such blithe treachery.

More to the point, Roy was disappointed in himself. He had badly misjudged Steven Ackblom. The brilliance and sensitivity that he had perceived in the artist had been no illusion; however, he had allowed himself to be deceived into believing that what he saw was the whole story. He had never glimpsed the dark side.

Of course he was always so quick to like people, just as the artist had said. And he was acutely aware of everyone’s suffering, within moments of having met them. That was one of his virtues, and he would not have wanted to be a less tenderhearted person. He had been deeply moved by Ackblom’s plight: such a witty and talented man, locked in a cell for the rest of his life. Compassion had blinded Roy to the full truth.

He still had hope of coming out of this alive and seeing Eve again. He didn’t feel as though he were dying. Of course, he was unable to feel much of anything at all, below the neck.

He took comfort from the knowledge that if he were to die, he would go to the great cosmic party and be welcomed by so many friends whom he’d sent ahead of him with great tenderness. For Eve’s sake, he wanted to live, but to some extent he longed for that higher plane where there was a single sex, where everyone had the same radiant-blue skin color, where every person was perfectly beautiful in an androgynous blue way, where no one was dumb, no one too smart, where everyone had identical living quarters and wardrobes and footwear, where there was high-quality mineral water and fresh fruit for the asking. He would have to be introduced to everyone he had known in this world, because he wouldn’t recognize them in their new perfect, identical blue bodies. That seemed sad: not to see people as they had been. On the other hand, he wouldn’t want to spend eternity with his dear mother if he had to look at her face all bashed in as it had been just after he had sent her on to that better place.

He tried speaking and found that his voice had returned. “Are you dead, Steven, or are you faking?”

Across the black room, slumped against a black wall, the artist didn’t answer.

“I think they’re gone and won’t be coming back. So if you’re faking, it’s all clear now.”

No reply.

“Well, then you’ve gone over, and all the bad in you was left here. I’m sure you’re full of remorse now and wish you’d been more compassionate toward me. So if you could exert a little of your cosmic power, reach through the veil, and work a little miracle so I can walk again, I believe that would be appropriate.”

The room remained silent.

He still couldn’t feel anything below his neck.

“I hope I don’t need the services of a spirit channeler to get your attention,” Roy said. “That would be inconvenient.”

Silence. Stillness. Cold white light in a tight cone, blazing down through the center of that encapsulating blackness.

“I’ll just wait. I’m sure that reaching through the veil takes a lot of effort.”

Any moment now, a miracle.

Opening the driver’s door of the pickup, Spencer was suddenly afraid that he had lost the keys. They were in his jacket pocket.

By the time Spencer got behind the wheel and started the engine, Rocky was in the backseat, and Ellie was already in the other front seat. The motel pillow was across her thighs, the laptop was on the pillow, and she was waiting to power up the computer.

When the engine turned over and Ellie switched on the laptop, she said, “Don’t go anywhere yet.”

“We’re sitting ducks here.”

“I’ve got to get back into Godzilla.”

“Godzilla.”

“The system I was in before we got out of the truck.”

“What’s Godzilla?”

“As long as we’re just sitting here, they probably won’t do anything except watch us and wait. But as soon as we start to move, they’ll have to act, and I don’t want them coming at us until we’re ready for them.”

“What’s Godzilla?”

“Ssshhh. I have to concentrate.”

Spencer looked out his side window at the fields and hills. The snow didn’t glow as brightly as it had earlier, because the moon was waning. He had been trained to spot clandestine surveillance in both urban and rural settings, but he could see no signs of the agency observers, though he knew they were out there.

Ellie’s fingers were busy. Keys clicked. Data and diagrams played across the screen.

Focusing on the winterscape once more, Spencer remembered snow forts, castles, tunnels, carefully tamped sled runs. More important: In addition to the physical details of old playgrounds in the snow, he faintly recalled the joy of laboring on those projects and of setting out on those boyhood adventures. Recollections of innocent times. Childhood fantasies. Happiness. They were faint memories. Faint but perhaps recoverable with practice. For a long time, he hadn’t been able to remember even a single moment of his childhood with fondness. The events in that July not only had changed his life forever thereafter but had changed his perception of what his life had been like before the owl, the rats, the scalpel, and the knife.

Sometimes his mother had helped him build castles of snow. He remembered times when she’d gone sledding with him. They especially enjoyed going out after dusk. The night was so crisp, the world so mysterious in black and white. With billions of stars above, you could pretend that the sled was a rocket and you were off to other worlds.

He thought of his mother’s grave in Denver, and he suddenly wanted to go there for the first time since his grandparents had moved him to San Francisco. He wanted to sit on the ground beside her and reminisce about nights when they had gone sledding under a billion stars, when her laughter had carried like music across the white fields.

Rocky stood on the floor in back, paws planted on the front seat, and craned his head forward to lick affectionately at the side of Spencer’s face.

He turned and stroked the dog’s head and neck. “Mr. Rocky Dog, more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, terror of all cats and Dobermans. Where did that come from, hmmm?” He scratched behind the dog’s ears. Then with his fingertips, he gently explored the crushed cartilage that ensured the left ear would always droop. “Way back in the bad old days, did the person who did this to you look anything like the man back there in the black room? Or did you recognize a scent? Do the evil ones smell alike, pal?” Rocky luxuriated in the attention. “Mr. Rocky Dog, furry hero, ought to have his own comic book. Show us some teeth, give us a thrill.” Rocky just panted. “Come on, show us some teeth,” Spencer said, growling and skinning his lips back from his own teeth. Rocky liked the game, bared his own teeth, and they went grrrrrrr at each other, muzzle to muzzle.

“Ready,” Ellie said.

“Thank God,” he said, “I just ran out of things to do to keep from going nuts.”

“You’ve got to help me spot them,” she said. “I’ll be looking too, but I might not see one of them.”

Indicating the screen, he said, “That’s Godzilla?”

“No. This is the gameboard that Godzilla and I are both going to play with. It’s a grid of the five acres immediately around the house and barn. Each of these tiny grid blocks is six meters on a side. I just hope to God my entry data, those property maps and county records, were accurate enough. I know they’re not dead-on, not by a long shot, but let’s pray they’re close. See this green shape? That’s the house. See this? The barn. Here are the stables down toward the end of the driveway. This blinking dot — that’s us. See this line — that’s the county road, where we want to be.”

“Is this based on one of the video games you invented?”

“No, this is nasty reality,” she said. “And whatever happens, Spencer…I love you. I can’t imagine anything better than spending the rest of my life with you. I just hope it’s going to be more than five minutes.”

He had started to put the truck in gear. Her frank expression of her feelings made him hesitate, because he wanted to kiss her now, here, for the first time, in case it was the last time too.

Then he froze and stared at her in amazement as comprehension came. “Godzilla’s looking straight down at us right now, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a satellite? And you’ve hijacked it?”

“Been saving these codes for a day when I was in a really tight corner, no other way out, because I’ll never get a chance to use them again. When we’re out of here, when I let go of Godzilla, they’ll shut it down and reprogram.”

“What does it do besides look down?”

“Remember the movies?”

“Godzilla movies?”

“His white-hot, glowing breath?”

“You’re making this up.”

“He had halitosis that melted tanks.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Now or never,” she said.

“Now,” he said, putting the truck into reverse, wanting to get it over with before he had any more time to think about it.

He switched on the headlights, backed away from the barn, and headed around the building, retracing the route that they had taken from the county road.

“Not too fast,” she said. “It’ll pay to tiptoe out of here, believe me.”

Spencer let up on the accelerator.

Drifting along now. Easing past the front of the barn. The other branch of the driveway over there. The backyard to the right. The swimming pool.

A brilliant white searchlight fixed them from an open second-floor window of the house, sixty yards to their right and forty yards ahead. Spencer was blinded when he looked in that direction, and he could not see whether there were sharpshooters with rifles at any of the other windows.

Ellie’s fingers rattled the keys.

He glanced over and saw a yellow indicator line on the display screen. It represented a swath about two meters wide and twenty-four meters long, between them and the house.

Ellie pressed ENTER.

“Squint!” she said, and in the same moment Spencer shouted, “Rocky, down!”

Out of the stars came a blue-white incandescence. It was not as fierce as he had expected, marginally brighter than the spotlight from the house, but it was infinitely stranger than anything he had ever seen — above-ground. The beam was crisply defined along the edges, and it seemed not to be radiating light as much as containing it, holding an atomic fire within a skin as thin as the surface tension on a pond. A bone-vibrating hum accompanied it, like electronic feedback from huge stadium speakers, and a sudden turbulence of air. As the light moved on a course that Ellie had laid out for it (two meters wide, twenty-four meters long, between them and the house but approaching neither), a roar arose similar to the subterranean grumble of the few grinding-type earthquakes that Spencer had ridden out over the years, although this was far louder. The earth shook hard enough to rock the truck. In that two-meter-wide swath, the snow and the ground beneath it leaped into flames, turned molten in an instant, to what depth he didn’t know. The beam moved along, and the center of a big sycamore vanished in a flash; it didn’t merely burst into flame but disappeared as if it had never existed. The tree was instantly converted into light and into heat that was detectable even inside the truck with the windows closed, almost thirty yards from the beam itself. Numerous splintered branches, which had hung beyond the sharply defined edge of the beam, fell to the ground on both sides of the light, and they were on fire at the points of severance. The blue-white blade burned past the pickup, across the backyard, diagonally between them and the house, across one edge of the patio, vaporizing concrete, all the way to the end of the path that Ellie had set it upon — and then it winked out.

A two-meter-wide, twenty-four-meter length of earth glowed white-hot, boiling like a lava flow at its freshest, on the high slopes of a volcano. The magma churned brightly in the trench that contained it, bubbling and popping and spitting showers of red and white sparks into the air, casting a glow that reached even to the truck and colored the surviving snow red-orange.

During the event, if they had not been too stunned to speak, they would have had to shout at each other to be heard. Now the silence seemed as profound as that in the vacuum of deep space.

At the house, the agency men switched off the searchlight.

“Keep moving,” Ellie said urgently.

Spencer hadn’t realized that he’d braked to a complete stop.

They drifted forward again. Easy. Moving cautiously through the lion’s den. Easy. He risked a little more speed than before, because the lions had to be scared shitless right now.

“God bless America,” Spencer said shakily.

“Oh, Godzilla isn’t one of ours.”

“It isn’t?”

“Japanese.”

“The Japanese have a death-ray satellite?”

“Enhanced-laser technology. And they have eight satellites in the system.”

“I thought they were busy making better televisions.”

She was working diligently on the keyboard again, getting ready for the worst. “Damn it, my right hand’s cramping.”

He saw that she had targeted the house.

She said, “The U.S. has something similar, but I don’t have any codes that’ll get me into our system. The fools on our side call it the Hyperspace Hammer, which has nothing to do with what it is. It’s just a name they liked from a video game.”

“You invent the game?”

“Actually, yes.”

“They make an amusement park ride out of it?”

“Yes.”

“I saw one.”

Moving past the house now. Not even looking up at the windows. Not tempting fate.

“You can commandeer a secret Japanese defense satellite?”

“Through the DOD,” she said.

“Department of Defense.”

“The Japanese don’t know it, but the DOD can grab Godzilla’s brain any time they want. I’m just using the doorways that the DOD has already installed.”

He remembered something that she had said in the desert only that morning, when he had expressed surprise about the possibility of satellite surveillance. He quoted it back to her: “‘You’d be surprised what’s up there. “Surprised” is one word.’”

“The Israelis have their own system.”

“The Israelis!”

“Yeah, little Israel. They worry me less than anyone else who’s got it. Chinese. Think about that. Maybe the French. No more jokes about Paris cabdrivers. God knows who else has it.”

They were almost past the house.

A small round hole was punched through the side window behind Ellie, even as the sound of the shot cracked the night, and Spencer felt the round thud into the back of his seat. The velocity of the bullet was so great that the tempered glass crazed slightly but did not collapse inward. Thank God, Rocky was barking energetically instead of squealing in agony.

“Stupid bastards,” Ellie said as she pressed ENTER again.

Out of airless space, a lambent column of blue-white light shot down into the two-story Victorian farmhouse, instantly vaporizing a core two meters in diameter. The rest of the structure exploded. Flames filled the night. If anyone was left alive in that crumbling house, they would have to get out too fast to worry about holding on to their weapons and taking additional potshots at the pickup.

Ellie was shaken. “I couldn’t risk them hitting the up-link behind us. If that goes, we’re in deep trouble.”

“The Russians have this?”

“This and weirder stuff.”

“Weirder stuff?”

“That’s why most everyone else is desperate to get their version of Godzilla. Zhirinovsky. Heard of him?”

“Russian politician.”

Bending her head again to the VDT, entering new instructions, she said, “Him and the people associated with him, the whole network of them even after he’s gone — they’re old-fashioned communists who want to rule the world. Except this time they’re actually willing to blow it up if they don’t get their way. No more graceful defeats. And even if someone’s smart enough to wipe out the Zhirinovsky faction, there’s always some new power freak, somewhere, calling himself a politician.”

Forty yards ahead, on the right, a Ford Bronco erupted from concealment in a stand of trees and bushes. It pulled across the driveway, blocking their escape.

Spencer halted the pickup.

Though the driver of the Bronco stayed behind the wheel, two men with high-power rifles jumped out of the back and dropped into sharpshooter positions. They raised their weapons.

“Down!” Spencer said, and pushed Ellie’s head below window level even as he slid down in his seat.

“They aren’t,” she said in disbelief.

“They are.”

“Blocking the driveway?”

“Two sharpshooters and a Bronco.”

“Haven’t they been paying attention?”

“Stay down, Rocky,” he said.

The dog was standing again with his forepaws on the front seat, bobbing his head excitedly.

“Rocky, down!” Spencer said fiercely.

The dog whimpered as though his feelings had been hurt, but he dropped to the floor in back.

Ellie said, “How far are they?”

Spencer risked a quick peek, slid down again, and a bullet rang off the window post without shattering the windshield. “I’d say forty yards.”

She typed. On the screen appeared a yellow line to the right of the driveway. It was twelve meters long, angling over an open field toward the Bronco, but it stopped a meter or two from the edge of the pavement.

“Don’t want to score the driveway,” she said. “Tires would dissolve when we tried to get across the molten ground.”

“Can I press ENTER?” he asked.

“Be my guest.”

He pressed it and sat up, squinting, as the breath of Godzilla streamed down through the night again, scoring the land. The ground shook, and an apocalyptic thunder rose under them as if the planet was coming apart. The night air hummed deafeningly, and the merciless beam dazzled along the course that she’d assigned to it.

Before Godzilla had turned the earth into white-hot sludge along even half those twelve meters, the pair of sharpshooters dropped their weapons and leaped for the vehicle behind them. As they hung on to the sides of the Bronco, the driver careened off the blacktop, churned across a frozen field beyond, smashed through a white board fence, crossed a paddock, rammed through another fence, and passed the first of the stables. When Godzilla stopped short of the driveway and the night was suddenly dark and quiet again, the Bronco was still going, fast dwindling into the gloom, as though the driver might head overland until he ran out of gasoline.

Spencer drove to the county road. He stopped and looked both ways. No traffic. He turned right, toward Denver.

For a few miles, neither of them spoke.

Rocky stood with his forepaws on the back of the front seat, gazing ahead at the highway. In the two years that Spencer had known him, the dog had never liked to look back.

Ellie sat with her hand clamped to her wound. Spencer hoped that the people she knew in Denver could get her medical attention. The medications that she had finessed, by computer, out of various drug companies had been lost with the Range Rover.

Eventually, she said, “We’d better stop in Copper Mountain, see if we can find new wheels. This truck’s too recognizable.”

“Okay.”

She switched off the computer. Unplugged it.

The mountains were dark with evergreens and pale with snow.

The moon was setting behind the truck, and the night sky ahead was ablaze with stars.

FIFTEEN

Eve Jammer hated Washington, D.C., in August. Actually, she hated Washington through all seasons with equal passion. Admittedly, the city was pleasant for a short while, when the cherry blossoms were in bloom; during the rest of the year it sucked. Humid, crowded, noisy, dirty, crime-ridden. Full of boring, stupid, greedy politicians whose ideals were either in their pants or in their pants pockets. It was an inconvenient place for a capital, and sometimes she dreamed about moving the government elsewhere, when the time was right. Maybe to Las Vegas.

As she drove through the sweltering August heat, she had the air conditioner in her Chrysler Town Car turned nearly to its highest setting, with the fans on maximum blow. Freezing air blasted across her face and body and up her skirt, but she was still hot. Part of the heat, of course, had nothing to do with the day: She was so horny she could have won a headbutting duel with a ram.

She hated the Chrysler almost as much as she hated Washington. With all her money and position, she ought to have been able to drive a Mercedes, if not a Rolls-Royce. But a politician’s wife had to be careful of appearances — at least for a while yet. It was impolitic to drive a foreign-made car.

Eighteen months had passed since Eve Jammer had met Roy Miro and had learned the nature of her true destiny. For sixteen months, she had been married to the widely admired Senator E. Jackson Haynes, who would head the party’s national ticket in next year’s election. That wasn’t speculation. It had already been arranged, and all his rivals would screw up one way or another in the primaries, leaving him standing alone, a giant of a man on the world scene.

Personally, she loathed E. Jackson Haynes and wouldn’t let him touch her, except in public. Even then, there were several pages of rules that he’d been required to memorize, defining the acceptable limits relating to affectionate hugs, kisses on the cheek, and hand holding. The recordings that she had of him in his Vegas hideaway, engaged in sex with several different little girls and boys below the age of twelve, had ensured his prompt acceptance of her proposal of marriage and the strict terms of convenience under which their relationship would be conducted.

Jackson didn’t pout too much or too often about the arrangement. He was keen on the idea of being president. And without the library of recordings that Eve possessed, which incriminated all of his most serious political rivals, he wouldn’t have had a chance in hell of getting close to the White House.

For a while, she had worried that a few of the politicians and power brokers whose enmity she had earned would be too thickheaded to realize that the boxes in which she’d put them were inescapable. If they terminated her, they would all fall in the biggest, dirtiest series of political scandals in history. More than scandals. Many of these servants of the people had committed outrages appalling enough to cause riots in the streets, even if federal agents were dispatched with machine guns to quell them.

Some of the worst hard-asses hadn’t been convinced that she’d secreted copies of her recordings all over the world or that the contents of those laser discs were destined for the airwaves within hours of her death, from multiple — and, in many cases, automated — sources. The last of them had come around, however, when she had accessed their home television sets through satellite and cable facilities — while blocking all other customers — and had played for them, one by one, fragments of their recorded crimes. Sitting in their own bedrooms and dens, they had listened with astonishment, terrified that she was broadcasting those fragments to the world.

Computer technology was wonderful.

Many of the hard-asses had been with wives or mistresses when those unexpected, intensely personal broadcasts had appeared on their television screens. In most cases, their significant others were as guilty or as power mad as they were themselves, and eager to keep their mouths shut. However, one influential senator and a member of the president’s cabinet had been married to women who exhibited bizarre moral codes and who refused to keep secret what they had learned. Before divorce proceedings and public revelations could begin, both had been shot to death at different automatic-teller machines on the same night. That tragedy resulted in the lowering of the nation’s flag at all government buildings, citywide, for twenty-four hours — and in the introduction of a bill in Congress to require the posting of health warnings on all automated tellers.

Eve turned the air conditioner control to the highest setting. Just thinking about those women’s expressions when she’d put the gun to their heads made her hotter than ever.

She was still two miles from Cloverfield, and the Washington traffic was terrible. She wanted to blow her horn and flip a stiff finger at some of the insufferable morons who were causing the snarls at the intersections, but she had to be discreet. The next First Lady of the United States could not be seen flipping off anyone. Besides, she had learned from Roy that anger was a weakness. Anger should be controlled and transformed into that only truly ennobling emotion — compassion. These bad drivers didn’t want to tie up traffic; they were simply lacking in sufficient intellect to drive well. Their lives were probably blighted in many ways. They deserved not anger but compassionate release to a better world, whenever that release could be privately given.

She considered jotting down license numbers, to make it possible to find some of these poor souls later and, at her leisure, give them that gift of gifts. She was in too great a hurry, however, to be as compassionate as she would have liked.

She couldn’t wait to get to Cloverfield and share the good news about Daddy’s generosity. Through a complex chain of international trusts and corporations, her father — Thomas Summerton, First Deputy Attorney General of the United States — had transferred three hundred million dollars of his holdings to her, which provided her with as much freedom as did the laser-disc recordings from two years in that spider-infested Vegas bunker.

The smartest thing she had ever done, in a life of smart moves, was not to squeeze Daddy for money years ago, when she’d first gotten the goods on him. She had asked, instead, for a job with the agency. Daddy had believed that she’d wanted the bunker job because it was so easy: nothing to do down there but sit, read magazines, and collect a hundred thousand a year in salary. He’d made the mistake of thinking that she was a not-too-bright, small-time hustler.

Some men never seemed to stop thinking with their pants long enough to get wise. Tom Summerton was one of them.

Ages ago, when Eve’s mother had been Daddy’s mistress, he would have been wise to treat her better. But when she got pregnant and refused to abort the baby, he had dumped her. Hard. Even in those days, Daddy had been a rich young man and heir to even more, and although he hadn’t achieved much political power yet, he’d had great ambition. He easily could have afforded to treat Mama well. When she threatened to go public and ruin his reputation, however, he’d sent a couple of goons to beat her up, and she’d nearly had a miscarriage. Thereafter, poor Mama had been a bitter, frightened woman until the day she died.

Daddy had been thinking with his pants when he’d been stupid enough to keep a fifteen-year-old mistress like Mama. And later he’d been thinking with his pants pockets when he should have been thinking with his head or his heart.

He was thinking with his pants again when he’d allowed Eve to seduce him — though, of course, he hadn’t ever seen her before and hadn’t known that she was his daughter. By then, he had forgotten poor Mama as if she’d been a one-night stand, although he had been putting it to her for two years before he dumped her. And if Mama barely existed in his memory, the possibility of having fathered a child had been wiped off his mental slate completely.

Eve had not simply seduced him but had reduced him to a state of animal lust that, over a period of weeks, made him the easiest of marks. When she eventually suggested a little fantasy role-playing, wherein they would act like father and violated daughter in bed, he had been excited. Her pretend-resistance and pitiful cries of rape excited him to new feats of endurance. Preserved on high-resolution videotape. From four angles. Recorded on the finest audio equipment. She’d saved some of his ejaculate in order to have a genetic match done with a sample of her own blood, to convince him that she was, indeed, his darling child. The tape of their role-playing would unquestionably be viewed by authorities as nothing less than forcible incest.

Upon being presented with that package, Daddy had for once in his life thought with his brain. He was convinced that killing her would not save him, so he had been willing to pay whatever was necessary to buy her silence. He’d been surprised and pleased when she’d asked not for any of his money but for a secure, well-paid government job. He’d been less pleased when she’d wanted to know a lot more about the agency and the secret derring-do about which he’d bragged once or twice in bed. After a few difficult days, however, he had seen the wisdom of bringing her into the agency fold.

“You’re a cunning little bitch,” he said when they had reached agreement. He’d put an arm around her with genuine affection.

He had been disappointed, after giving her the job, to learn that they would not continue sleeping together, but he had gotten over that loss in time. He really had thought that “cunning” was the best word to describe her. Her ability to use her position in the bunker for her own ends didn’t become clear to him until he learned that she had married E. Jackson Haynes, after a whirlwind courtship of two days, and had managed to put most of the powerful politicians in the city under her thumb. Then she had gone to him to begin discussions regarding an inheritance — and Daddy had discovered that “cunning” might not be a sufficiently descriptive word.

Now she reached the end of the entrance drive to Cloverfield and parked at a red curb near the front door, beside a sign that stated NO PARKING ANYTIME. She put one of Jackson’s “Member of Congress” cards on the dashboard, relished the icy air of the Chrysler for one more moment, then stepped out into the August heat and humidity.

Cloverfield — all white columns and stately walls — was one of the finest institutions of its kind in the continental United States. A liveried doorman greeted her. The concierge at the main desk in the lounge was a distinguished-looking British gentleman named Danfield, though she didn’t know if that was his first or last name.

After Danfield signed her in and chatted pleasantly with her, Eve walked the familiar route through the hushed halls. Original paintings by famous American artists of previous centuries were well complemented by antique Persian runners on wine-dark mahogany floors polished to a watery sheen.

When she entered Roy’s suite, she found the dear man shuffling around in his walker, getting some exercise. With the attention of the finest specialists and therapists in the world, he had regained full use of his arms. Increasingly, he seemed certain to be able to walk on his own again within a few months — though with a limp.

She gave him a dry kiss on the cheek. He favored her with one even dryer.

“You’re more beautiful every time you visit,” he said.

“Well, men’s heads still turn,” she said, “but not like they used to, not when I have to wear clothes like these.”

A future First Lady of the United States couldn’t dress as would a former Las Vegas showgirl who’d gotten a thrill out of driving men insane. These days she even wore a bra that spread her breasts out and restrained them, to make her appear less amply endowed than she really was.

She had never been a showgirl anyway, and her surname had not been Jammer but Lincoln, as in Abraham. She had attended school in five different states and West Germany, because her father had been a career military man who’d been transferred from base to base. She had graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris and had spent a number of years teaching poor children in the Kingdom of Tonga, in the South Pacific. At least, that was what every data record would reveal to even the most industrious reporter armed with the most powerful computer and the cleverest mind.

She and Roy sat side by side on a settee. Pots of hot tea, an array of pastries, clotted cream, and jam had been provided on a charming little Chippendale table.

While they sipped and munched, she told him about the three hundred million that her father had transferred to her. Roy was so happy for her that tears came to his eyes. He was a dear man.

They talked about the future.

The time when they could be together again, every night, without any subterfuge, seemed depressingly distant. E. Jackson Haynes would assume the office of president on January twentieth, seventeen months hence. He and the vice-president would be assassinated the following year — though Jackson was unaware of that detail. With the approval of constitutional scholars and the advice of the Supreme Court of the United States, both houses of Congress would take the unprecedented step of calling for a special election. Eve Marie Lincoln Haynes, widow of the martyred president, would run for the office, be elected by a landslide, and begin serving her first term.

“A year after that, I’ll have mourned a decent length of time,” she told Roy. “Don’t you think a year?”

“More than decent. Especially as the public will love you so much and want happiness for you.”

“And then I can marry the heroic FBI agent who tracked down and killed that escaped maniac, Steven Ackblom.”

“Four years until we’re together forever,” Roy said. “Not so long, really. I promise you, Eve, I’ll make you happy and do honor to my position as First Gentleman.”

“I know you will, darling,” she said.

“And by then, anyone who doesn’t like anything you do—”

“—we shall treat with utmost compassion.”

“Exactly.”

“Now let’s not talk anymore about how long we have to wait. Let’s discuss more of your wonderful ideas. Let’s make plans.”

For a long time they talked about uniforms for a variety of new federal organizations they wished to create, with a special focus on whether metal snaps and zippers were more exciting than traditional bone buttons.

SIXTEEN

In the broiling sun, hard-bodied young men and legions of strikingly attractive women in the briefest of bikinis soaked up the rays and casually struck poses for one another. Children built sand castles. Retirees sat under umbrellas, wearing straw hats, soaking up the shade. They were all happily oblivious of eyes in the sky and of the possibility that they could be instantaneously vaporized at the whim of politicians of various nationalities — or even by a demented-genius computer hacker, living in a cyberpunk fantasy, in Cleveland or London or Cape Town or Pittsburgh.

As he walked along the shore, near the tide line, with the huge hotels piled one beside the other to his right, he rubbed lightly at his face. His beard itched. He’d had it for six months, and it wasn’t a scruffy-looking beard. On the contrary, it was soft and full, and Ellie insisted that he was even more handsome with it than without it. Nevertheless, on a hot August day in Miami Beach, it itched as if he had fleas, and he longed to be clean-shaven.

Besides, he liked the appearance of his beardless face. During the eighteen months since the night on which Godzilla had attacked the ranch in Vail, a superb plastic surgeon in the private-pay sector of the British medical establishment had performed three separate procedures on the cicatrix. It had been reduced to a hairline scar that was virtually invisible even when he was tanned. Additional work had been done on his nose and chin.

He used scores of names these days, but neither Spencer Grant nor Michael Ackblom was one of them. Among his closest friends in the resistance, he was known as Phil Richards. Ellie had chosen to keep her first name and adopt Richards as her last. Rocky responded as well to “Killer” as he had to his previous name.

Phil turned his back to the ocean, made his way between the ranks of sunbathers, and entered the lushly landscaped grounds of one of the newer hotels. In sandals, white shorts, and a flamboyant Hawaiian shirt, he resembled countless other tourists.

The hotel swimming pool was bigger than a football field and as freeform as any tropical lagoon. Artificial-rock perimeter. Artificial-rock sunning islands in the center. A two-story waterfall spilling into one palm-shaded end.

In a grotto behind the cascading water, the poolside bar could be reached either on foot or by swimmers. It was a Polynesian-style pavilion with plenty of bamboo, dry palm fronds, and conch shells. The cocktail waitresses wore thongs, wraparound skirts made from a bright orchid-patterned fabric, and matching bikini tops; each had a fresh flower pinned in her hair.

The Padrakian family — Bob, Jean, and their eight-year-old son, Mark — were sitting at a small table near the grotto wall. Bob was drinking rum and Coke, Mark was having a root beer, and Jean was nervously shredding a cocktail napkin and chewing on her lower lip.

Phil approached the table and startled Jean — to whom he was a stranger — by loudly saying, “Hey, Sally, you look fabulous,” and by giving her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He ruffled Mark’s hair: “How you doing, Pete? I’m going to take you snorkeling later — what do you think of that?” Vigorously shaking hands with Bob, he said, “Better watch that gut, buddy, or you’re going to wind up looking like Uncle Morty.” Then he sat down with them and quietly said, “Pheasants and dragons.”

A few minutes later, after he had finished a piña colada and surreptitiously studied the other customers in the bar to be sure that none of them was unusually interested in the Padrakians, Phil paid for all their drinks with cash. He walked with them into the hotel, chatting about nonexistent mutual relatives. Through the frigid lobby. Out under the porte cochere, into the stifling heat and humidity. As far as he could tell, no one was trailing or watching them.

The Padrakians had followed telephone instructions well. They were dressed as sun-worshipping tourists from New Jersey, although Bob was pushing the disguise too far by wearing black loafers and black socks with Bermuda shorts.

A sightseeing van with large windows along the sides approached on the hotel entrance drive and stopped at the curb in front of them, under the porte cochere. The current magnetic-mat signs on each of its front doors declared CAPTAIN BLACKBEARD’S WATER ADVENTURES. Under that, above a picture of a grinning pirate, less bold letters explained GUIDED SCUBA TOURS, JET-SKI RENTALS, WATER-SKIING, DEEP-SEA FISHING.

The driver got out and came around the front of the van to open the sliding side door for them. He wore a stylishly wrinkled white linen shirt, lightweight white ducks, and bright pink canvas shoes with green laces. Even with dreadlocks and one silver earring, he managed to look as intellectual and dignified as he had ever been in a three-piece suit or in a police captain’s uniform, in the days when Phil had served under him in the West Los Angeles Division of the LAPD. His ink-black skin seemed even darker and glossier in the tropical heat of Miami than it had been in Los Angeles.

The Padrakians climbed into the back of the van, and Phil sat up front with the driver, who was now known to his friends as Ronald — Ron, for short — Truman. “Love the shoes,” Phil said.

“My daughters picked them out for me.”

“Yeah, but you like ’em.”

“Can’t lie. They’re cool gear.”

“You were half dancing, the way you came around the van, showing them off.”

Flashing a grin as he drove away from the hotel, Ron said, “You white men always envy our moves.”

Ron was speaking with a British accent so convincing that Phil could close his eyes and see Big Ben. In the course of losing his Caribbean lilt, Ron had discovered a talent for accents and dialects. He was now their man of a thousand voices.

“I gotta tell you,” Bob Padrakian said nervously from the seat behind them, “we’re scared out of our wits about this.”

“You’re all right now,” Phil said. He turned around in his seat to smile reassuringly at the three refugees.

“Nobody following us, unless it’s a look-down,” Ron said, though the Padrakians probably didn’t know what he meant. “And that’s not very likely.”

“I mean,” Padrakian said, “we don’t even know who the hell you people are.”

“We’re your friends,” Phil assured him. “In fact, if things work out for you folks anything like the way they worked out for me and for Ron and his family, then we’re going to be the best friends you’ve ever had.”

“More than friends, really,” Ron said. “Family.”

Bob and Jean looked dubious and scared. Mark was young enough to be unconcerned.

“Just sit tight for a little while and don’t worry,” Phil told them. “Everything’ll be explained real soon.”

At a huge shopping mall, they parked and went inside. They passed dozens of stores, entered one of the less busy wings, went through a door marked with international symbols for rest rooms and telephones, and were in a long service hallway. They passed the phones and the public facilities. A stairway at the end of the corridor led down to one of the mall’s big communal shipping rooms, where some smaller shops, without exterior truck docks, received incoming merchandise.

Two of the four roll-up, truck-bay doors were open, and delivery vehicles were backed up to them. Three uniformed employees from a store that sold cheese, cured meats, and gourmet foods were rapidly unloading the truck at bay number four. As they stacked cartons on handcarts and wheeled them to a freight elevator, they showed no interest in Phil, Ron, and the Padrakians. Many of the boxes were labeled PERISHABLE, KEEP REFRIGERATED, and time was of the essence.

At the truck in bay number one — a small model compared with the eighteen-wheeler in bay four — the driver appeared from out of the dark, sixteen-foot-deep cargo hold. As they approached, he jumped down to the floor. The five of them climbed inside, as though going for a ride in the back of a delivery truck was unremarkable. The driver closed the door after them, and a moment later they were on the road.

The cargo hold was empty except for piles of quilted shipping pads of the kind used by furniture movers. They sat on the pads in pitch blackness. They were unable to talk because of the engine noise and the hollow rattle of the metal walls around them.

Twenty minutes later, the truck stopped. The engine died. After five minutes, the rear door opened. The driver appeared in dazzling sunshine. “Quickly. Nobody’s in sight right now.”

When they disembarked from the truck, they were in a corner of a parking lot at a public beach. Sunlight flared off the windshields and chrome trim of the parked cars, and white gulls kited through the sky. Phil could smell sea salt in the air.

“Only a short walk now,” Ron told the Padrakians.

The campgrounds were less than a quarter of a mile from where they left the truck. The tan-and-black Road King motor home was large, but it was only one of many its size that were parked at utility hookups among the palms.

The trees lazily stirred in the humid on-shore breeze. A hundred yards away, at the edge of the breaking surf, two pelicans stalked stiffly back and forth through the fringe of foaming water, as if engaged in an ancient Egyptian dance.

Inside the Road King, Ellie was one of three people working at video-display terminals in the living room. She rose, smiling, to receive Phil’s embrace and kiss.

Rubbing her belly affectionately, he said, “Ron has new shoes.”

“I saw them earlier.”

“Tell him he really has nice moves in those shoes. Makes him feel good.”

“It does, huh?”

“Makes him feel black.”

“He is black.”

“Well, of course, he is.”

She and Phil joined Ron and the Padrakians in the horseshoe-shaped dining nook that seated seven.

Sitting beside Jean Padrakian, welcoming her to this new life, Ellie took the woman’s hand and held it, as if Jean were a sister whom she hadn’t seen for a while and whose touch was a comfort to her. She had a singular warmth that quickly put new people at ease.

Phil watched her with pride and love — and with not a little envy of her easy sociability.

Eventually, still clinging to a dim hope that he could someday return to his old life, unable to fully accept the new one that they were offering him, Bob Padrakian said, “But we’ve lost everything. Everything. Fine, okay, I get a new name and brand-new ID, a past history that no one can shake. But where do we go from here? How do I make a living?”

“We’d like you to work with us,” Phil said. “If you don’t want that…then we can set you up in a new place, with start-up capital to get you back on your feet. You can live entirely outside of the resistance. We can even see that you get a decent job.”

“But you’ll never know peace again,” Ron said, “because now you’re aware that no one’s safe in this brave new world order.”

“It was your — and Jean’s — terrific computer skills that got you into trouble with them,” Phil said. “And skills like yours are what we can never get enough of.”

Bob frowned. “What would we be doing — exactly?”

“Harassing them at every turn. Infiltrating their computers to learn who’s on their hit lists. Pull those targeted people out of harm’s way before the axe falls, whenever possible. Destroy illegal police files on innocent citizens who’re guilty of nothing more than having strong opinions. There’s a lot to do.”

Bob glanced around at the motor home, at the two people working at VDTs in the living room. “You seem to be well organized and well financed. Is foreign money involved here?” He looked meaningfully at Ron Truman. “No matter what’s happening in this country right now or for the foreseeable future, I still think of myself as an American, and I always will.”

Dropping the British accent in favor of a Louisiana bayou drawl, Ron said, “I’m as American as crawfish pie, Bob.” He switched to a heart-of-Virginia accent, “I can quote you any passage from the writings of Thomas Jefferson. I’ve memorized them all. A year and a half ago, I couldn’t have quoted one sentence. Now his collected works are my bible.”

“We get our financing by stealing from the thieves,” Ellie told Bob. “Manipulate their computer records, transfer funds from them to us in a lot of ways you’ll probably find ingenious. There’s so much unaccounted slush in their bookkeeping that half the time they aren’t even aware anything’s been stolen from them.”

“Stealing from thieves,” Bob said. “What thieves?”

“Politicians. Government agencies with ‘black funds’ that they spend on secret projects.”

The quick patter of four small feet signaled Killer’s arrival from the back bedroom, where he had been napping. He squirmed under the table, startling Jean Padrakian, lashing everyone’s legs with his tail. He pushed between the table and the booth, planting his forepaws on young Mark’s lap.

The boy giggled delightedly as he was subjected to a vigorous face licking. “What’s his name?”

“Killer,” Ellie said.

Jean was worried. “He’s not dangerous, is he?”

Phil and Ellie exchanged glances and smiles. He said, “Killer’s our ambassador of goodwill. We’ve never had a diplomatic crisis since he graciously accepted the post.”

For the past eighteen months, Killer had not looked himself. He wasn’t tan and brown and white and black, as in the days when he had been Rocky, but entirely black. An incognito canine. Rover on the run. A mutt in masquerade. Fugitive furball. Phil had already decided that when he shaved off his beard (soon), they would also allow Killer’s coat to change gradually back to its natural colors.

“Bob,” Ron said, returning to the issue at hand, “we’re living in a time when the highest of high technology makes it possible for a relative handful of totalitarians to subvert a democratic society and control large sections of its government, economy, and culture — with great subtlety. If they control too much of it for too long, unopposed, they’ll get bolder. They’ll want to control it all, every aspect of people’s lives. And by the time the general public wakes up to what’s happened, their ability to resist will have been leached away. The forces marshaled against them will be unchallengeable.”

“Then subtle control might be traded for the blatant exercise of raw power,” Ellie said. “That’s when they open the ‘reeducation’ camps to help us wayward souls learn the right path.”

Bob stared at her in shock. “You don’t really think it could ever happen here, something that extreme.”

Instead of replying, Ellie met his eyes, until he had time to think about what outrageous injustices had already been committed against him and his family to bring them to this place at this time in their lives.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and he gazed down thoughtfully at his folded hands on the table.

Jean looked at her son as the boy happily petted and scratched Killer, then glanced at Ellie’s swollen stomach. “Bob, this is where we belong. This is our future. It’s right. These people have hope, and we need hope badly.” She turned to Ellie. “When’s the baby due?”

“Two months.”

“Boy or girl?”

“We’re having a little girl.”

“You picked a name for her yet?”

“Jennifer Corrine.”

“That’s pretty,” Jean said.

Ellie smiled. “For Phil’s mother and mine.”

To Bob Padrakian, Phil said, “We do have hope. More than enough hope to have children and to get on with life even in the resistance. Because modern technology has its good side too. You know that. You love high technology as much as we do. The benefits to humanity far outweigh the problems. But there are always would-be Hitlers. So it’s fallen to us to fight a new kind of war, one that more often uses knowledge than guns to fight battles.”

“Though guns,” Ron said, “sometimes have their place.”

Bob considered Ellie’s swollen belly, then turned to his wife. “You’re sure?”

“They have hope,” Jean said simply.

Her husband nodded. “Then this is the future.”

Later, on the brink of twilight, Phil and Ellie and Killer went for a walk on the beach.

The sun was huge, low, and red. It quickly sank out of sight beyond the western horizon.

To the east, over the Atlantic, the sky became deep and vast and purple-black, and the stars came out to allow sailors to chart courses on the otherwise strange sea.

Phil and Ellie talked of Jennifer Corrine and of all the hopes that they had for her, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. They took turns throwing a ball, but Killer allowed no one to take turns chasing it.

Phil, who once had been Michael and the son of evil, who once had been Spencer and for so long imprisoned in one moment of a July night, put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Staring at the ever-shining stars, he knew that human lives were free of the chains of fate except in one regard: It was the human destiny to be free.

About the Author

DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.