Stone Junction

Three: WATER

Sensitive Chaos.

—Novalis

In its unbounded state, it's water's nature to seek a spherical

from. That's why rivers meander.

—Schwenk

Gurry Debritto started with the CIA when he was twelve years old. His father, a marine colonel, served as a CIA liaison officer. When they needed a young boy to pose as the son of a female agent, the colonel suggested Gurry.

Gurry trained all winter at Norfolk with Claudia Lord, the woman agent who would be posing as a bitter war widow and Department of Defense secretary with a child to raise and some information to sell. They were hoping to flush a Russian agent.

It went down in a Baltimore hotel. Claudia fumbled pulling her gun. She’d just flipped off the safety when the Russian shot her. He stepped up quickly as she slumped to the floor and shot her again to make sure. Then he turned the gun on Gurry and pulled the trigger, but Gurry was diving over Claudia’s body and the bullet grazed his calf. Gurry picked up Claudia’s gun and kept rolling as three more slugs tore chunks from the carpet. As the Russian bolted for the door, Gurry came up kneeling, the gun held steady with both hands. He shot the Russian in the neck. Hearing his father’s war stories, he’d wondered what it would feel like to kill someone. Now he knew. It felt good.

With his father’s blessings, the CIA put him on salary. His training was thorough, his teachers the best. At sixteen, he performed his first solo hit, a Dayton reporter about to reveal some bad news about cash movements in the Cayman Islands – not that Gurry cared why. But when he was twenty he did ask himself why he was killing people for a loutish bureaucracy he had come to despise for the monthly pittance of sixteen thousand dollars.

Gurry declared himself independent. The agency graciously gave him his leave, sending two men to kill him. When their bodies were found mummy-wrapped in scarlet ribbon at the bottom of a dumpster two blocks from the director’s house, a truce was negotiated: Gurry would continue to take on special assignments for them at a reasonable wage, but could accept or reject assignments as he chose.

Gurry Debritto’s career wasn’t limited to assassination – he did security work and general demolition as well – but assassination, he often said, was ‘the biggest buck for the bang.’ His fees grew in direct proportion to the narrow legend he became. The most he’d received was twenty million dollars for poisoning Jack Ruby. The least was the twenty thousand for killing Annalee Pearse. That one still pissed him off. It wasn’t his fault it was botched.

‘We’re drunk in a Motel 6 in Stockton, California. You didn’t find Miss Rainbow Moonbeam Brigit Fifth Bardo or whatever the fuck her name is, but we know enough already, don’t we? Other people at the party said she wandered back around dawn and announced – it was the sort of thing people remember – ‘I just went around the block to the Horsehead Nebula and sucked a boy’s dick till his skull caved in.’ That boy had to be Daniel, and we know he must have told her – bragging, probably – about Livermore. Or maybe she gave him drugs. Or found something in the house. Or convinced him it was wrong and he should call the cops. But maybe he called Volta. Annalee said they’d been given a number to call if they saw us. But we don’t need all the pieces to solve the puzzle. We can feel the truth. We can feel Daniel’s fear and hatred, and Volta’s cold, neutral touch. You were right to advise our independent investigation, right to sense their dissembling. Volta is brilliant. To suggest – after coaching Daniel – that it wasn’t an accident. The best lie is always the truth. He’s worthy of us.’

Shamus Malloy was talking to his horribly burned hand. He always took the white glove off now as soon as they were alone. He had the thumb tucked under his index and middle finger, making an opening like a mouth. Above it, on the knuckle joining the index finger to the hand, stray splatters of molten silver had left pocked scar-tissue that resembled two blank eyes. Shamus looked into them. ‘You have to help me. What should we do now? What should we do about Daniel and Volta?’

His hand said, ‘Destroy them.’

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Time to ID down to a bottom line: you got the DJ, the Direct Jolt, wired to fire some juice in your ear, and if you got the DJ, you know you have KUSH fuckin’ rollin’ ray-dee-ooo, natural as a six and five, and where you are is where it’s at, and who I am’s a mystery to me too.

Let’s run that bunny down to an illogical conclusion. I mean, come on people! Why are you covering me up with this deluge of cards and letters asking, ‘Hey, who are you, and what’s going down, and is this for real, and wow, who pays for your folly and where can I get me some?’ Asking, ‘What does DJ really stand for?’ Asking, ‘What does it all mean?’

My marketing consultants must be taking drugs. They must think demographics are some kind of visual aid. Who am I? Hey, who are you? And who are we if we’re turning the table together? Why is it wise to question all answers and stupid to answer all questions? Face it: Sometimes you have to beg for an answer. I mean get right down on your bony little knees and beg your heart dry.

But friends and countrymen of the roaring night, you don’t have to beg me. Answers I don’t know are my specialty. So, let me take your questions from the top:

My real name is Doe John. I was born of gypsy spawn and motion is my home. I am the Voice of the Blur and the Breath of Song. Hang on, honey – I got the pedal to the metal and I won’t be long.

Everything is going down, unless it’s rising or signed a short-term contract with equilibrium.

It’s for real and for sure. A true fucking story, friend. You can bet it with both hands.

When you lose the bet, AMO shoots some vig my way, keeping me on the air like some alternative PBS for the sorely bored and seriously demented. In the long run, I come out of your pocket when you’re asleep at night and tell you all the good ways to be bad.

DJ stands for disc jockey, as in I’m riding the wheel just like you and I guess we’ll just have to see for ourselves where it stops. If it does. If it’s moving to start with. Because if wishes were wings we’d all be risen, and if cream was butter we wouldn’t have to churn.

Don’t mean shit.

Churn on that.

And next time send me some tough ones.

This has been the Devout Jester whispering sweet nothings in your ear.

Three days after Daniel’s first disappearance, he came in for breakfast, sat down, squared his shoulders, shut his eyes, and instantly vanished.

Volta, who’d been chopping tomatoes for salsa to accompany his renowned huevos rancheros, laid the knife on the cutting board and applauded, murmuring, ‘Bravo.’ Then he went back to chopping.

He was aware of Daniel’s presence but tried mightily to ignore him. He was glad to get rid of him, if only for a few minutes. From the moment Daniel had reappeared and stumbled toward the porch, he’d showered Volta with questions. The only one Volta could answer with certainty had been the first.

‘What did you put the poison in, the wheatcakes or the ham?’

‘Daniel! I take pride in my wheatcakes, and I would never insult Tick Hathaway’s ham.’

‘Where?’

Volta couldn’t tell if Daniel was demanding or pleading. ‘I injected it in the apple in your portion of the fruit salad. I was in a Christian mood.’

‘What? Christian?’

‘The Tree of Knowledge. Forbidden fruit. Temptation and the Fall and all of that. Some tastes of the forbidden are rapturous; some make you sick.’

‘What’s sick,’ Daniel gasped, ‘is dosing somebody. And what’s really sick is mixing speed with it.’

‘I’ve offered the apology of necessity. I can only repeat it. And please – it wasn’t poison. It was a virus that took Charmaine weeks of intense work.’

‘She hates me,’ Daniel said.

Volta noted with surprise the disconsolate edge in his tone. ‘No, she doesn’t. She highly recommends you, as a matter of fact; and as you undoubtedly noticed, she is extremely aware and uncommonly insightful.’

Daniel doggedly shook his head.

After that first question, Volta had no certain answers. This uncertainty seemed to provoke Daniel into fusillades of more questions, as if answers simply awaited the right inquiry.

‘Why do your clothes vanish with you? And your fillings? Why don’t they just fall on the floor?’

‘I don’t know,’ Volta patiently replied, a reply he would often repeat. ‘I can only tell you, based on my own limited experience, that anything in intimate connection with your force field for longer than thirty to forty hours will disappear with you and reappear when you do – depending on its own strength of field and its harmony with your own.’

‘What do you mean exactly by this force field? Your body?’

‘Daniel, I can only speculate. I think of it as the sum of vitality – flesh, soul, psyche, or anything else you consider a constituent of being.’

‘Wait a minute now. Let’s take a practical example. Say my pocketknife disappears with me and I walk outside and set it on a rock and then go back inside and reappear, the knife would still be in my pocket?’

‘No, not in my experience. It would reappear on the rock, right where you left it.’

‘Why? It wouldn’t be in my force field anymore.’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps there’s some principle of dimensional or field exclusivity. Or as Smiling Jack is fond of saying, “You can’t be in two places at once if you’re not anywhere at all.”’

‘Wait a minute. How can you see? You don’t have eyes. How can you hear when your ears have vanished? It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘That’s because it’s impossible, Daniel. If the impossible made sense, it wouldn’t be impossible. I assure you I made long and serious inquiries – discreetly, of course – from physicists to shamans. The only conclusion among those few who would even entertain the notion was that sensory integrity is not limited to somatic existence. Think of it this way: You briefly turn into your ghost.’

‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Don’t tell me. Tell your ghost.’

‘All right, all right. So what you’re saying is that the physical self turns into spirit.’

‘I don’t know. What I’m suggesting, if anything, is that we’re born to be amazed.’

‘But I wonder …’ and Daniel would ricochet off on another line of questions.

To spare himself, Volta added another four hours of solitary meditation to Daniel’s daily post-graduate regimen. It didn’t matter. There were still as many questions; Daniel just asked them faster.

‘Why did you experience the ecstasy as contraction while I felt it as expansion?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps we were experiencing different things, or the same things differently.’

‘And that’s why I didn’t go through that still, empty, stop-time sensation you did when you vanished?’

‘So I assume, yes.’

‘But some things we experienced were the same. Why some in common, some unique?’

‘I don’t know. To make it more interesting?’

But the interrogative reversal didn’t work. Daniel ignored the question and bored on with his own until Volta said pointedly, ‘Daniel, ask yourself. You know as much about it as I do, and I have no doubts that soon you will surpass my meager understanding.’

Volta wiped the cutting board. Daniel had been vanished far longer than his program prescribed. Volta resisted an impulse to check the clock. Daniel was beyond him. He must have simply imagined a mirror, making a leap that Volta had never considered. That didn’t surprise him, for he’d felt from the beginning that Daniel wanted to dance on the threshold. Thus far Daniel had displayed discipline and respect, but his passion to understand what was essentially a mystery could easily fuse into obsession, and that worried Volta. As he cracked eggs, he decided to relinquish his position on the Star. He was weary of constant decisions, weary of questions he couldn’t answer or had already answered too many times. If they stole the Diamond, he would have found what he’d sought. Then he could spend his remaining years watching the wind blow, visiting friends, tending the garden, savoring a cup of afternoon tea, standing in the Diamond’s center.

Volta glanced at the clock. Serenity would have to wait. Daniel had vanished fifteen minutes ago, clearly ignoring Volta’s suggestion that he limit disappearances to under ten minutes. He tried to sense Daniel’s presence in the room. He felt, but only faintly, that Daniel was still at the table. Just as Volta was about to abandon nonchalance and yell at Daniel to return, Daniel reappeared, still seated at the table. He showed no evidence of disorientation. His smile was almost indecent with triumph.

‘Forgive the theatrics,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve been around you too long.’

‘Indeed,’ Volta said, his throat tight. He could feel his anxiety collapse through relief into anger. Anger was pointless.

‘Not bad for a beginner, wouldn’t you say?’ When Volta said nothing, Daniel added, ‘It’s all in the imagination, and a million mirrors.’

Volta walked over to Daniel. ‘No it’s not,’ he said evenly. Before Daniel could react, Volta slapped him hard across the face. ‘It’s a dance, and you better watch your step or you’ll fall through one of those mirrors and keep on going.’

Daniel touched his numb cheek and lifted his eyes to Volta’s. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

Volta swung but his open hand never touched flesh. Daniel had vanished.

Swiftly but without apparent urgency, Volta moved to the center of the kitchen. He rolled up the sleeves on his faded denim shirt and waited, trying to sense Daniel’s whereabouts. Before he could bring his concentration to the necessary point, Daniel appeared behind him, locking his hands behind Volta’s neck and pushing his head forward and down, virtually immobilizing him with a full nelson. Applying just a bit of pressure for emphasis, Daniel grunted, ‘Well my, my – imagine that. I mean, who would have even imagined the possibility, or ever imagined it would come to this? Do you imagine I’ll accept your apology?’

Volta started laughing. Daniel increased the pressure but then he began laughing too and eased off slightly. The instant the pressure relaxed, Volta shot his arms straight up as he pushed backward, neatly slipping the hold and knocking Daniel off balance. Before Daniel could react, Volta produced a deck of cards and tossed them fluttering at Daniel’s face, who instinctively raised his arms to protect his eyes.

‘Dharma combat!’ Volta shouted joyously. ‘Real magic!’ He tickled Daniel along his exposed ribs.

Daniel brought his elbows down to pin Volta’s hands, simultaneously shifting into position for a Tao Do Chaung shin-kick. Volta escaped him and tossed a fine gray gritty powder in Daniel’s face that instantly blinded him and set his sinuses ablaze. Pawing at his face, Daniel staggered helplessly while Volta followed close behind, almost yelling, ‘It’s really all in the imagination? Come on, is that for real?’ He timed his words between Daniel’s vicious sneezes, but found little pleasure in Daniel’s discomfort. He put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder and guided him to the sink.

‘You win, Daniel.’ He pushed Daniel’s head down tenderly and turned on the cold water so Daniel could rinse his eyes.

Daniel burbled, ‘Jealous.’

‘Wrong,’ Volta said softly, but with such conviction that Daniel shut up and gave himself to the soothing water.

Volta patted him on the back. ‘I don’t want you pouting about this. I applaud your abilities, but I won’t be taunted or demeaned. We have important work to do together. Obviously, and to your credit, you’ve surpassed my abilities at vanishing, have done in a week what took me years. I readily admit you may well have a genius for it. However, I am responsible for sharing the secret, and I wouldn’t have assumed that responsibility if I hadn’t thought you would grant me some rights in the matter, some control, some respect.’

He quit patting Daniel’s back, and leaned down to whisper in his wet ear, ‘I can feel your hunger, Daniel. I can feel how you want to lose yourself. I felt it too. Expanding, contracting – it makes no difference. Vanishing is not the way out. There is no way out, Daniel, no final, astonishing escape. That’s the cold, magical fact.’

Daniel nodded almost imperceptibly.

‘Good,’ Volta said. He paused a moment, his hand still on Daniel’s shoulder. ‘And don’t ask me any more questions today. Practice your right to remain silent. If the theft fails, you may need it.’

Over the huevos rancheros, Volta briefed Daniel as usual on the previous night’s radio transmissions regarding the Diamond.

‘Last night’s only news was that we can expect some real news this morning. We know the Diamond is in New Mexico, probably the White Sands Proving Grounds – or that’s my guess.’

‘No progress,’ Daniel translated.

‘If I’m reading correctly between the lines, it means someone’s gotten in close. Probably Jean or Ellison Deeds. I don’t think you’ve met Ellison, but he’s as accomplished as Jean in his own right. Patience is crucial, Daniel. You’ve been with us long enough to know how highly we value quality information. Lacking guns and numbers, intelligence is our most important weapon. And as I’m sure you appreciate, the closer one gets to the source, the more reliable the information. If you don’t appreciate it, you should – your life may depend on it.’

‘I didn’t say no progress was unsatisfactory,’ Daniel said primly, a tone at odds with his damp hair and red eyes, which gave him the look of a half-drowned gargoyle at the end of a bad drug binge.

Volta nodded, pleased that Daniel, if a little testy, seemed willing to regard their recent clash as a mode of clarification. ‘We’re just at one of those plateaus,’ Volta said. ‘After all, we’ve learned about where it is, though not exactly – White Sands is a large installation. But the exact location and the security arrangements will likely come as a single breakthrough, so it could all coalesce very quickly.’

‘You said White Sands was a military testing ground for bombs and other weapons, right?’

‘Correct.’

‘You think they’re going to nuke it?’

‘Who knows? A national government is bad enough, but this administration is the largest collection of scoundrels and morons in recent memory, perhaps ever. I wouldn’t even guess what they might do. However, I’m not convinced they could destroy it, even with a nuclear device.’

‘You still think it’s the diamond you saw in your vision.’

‘I hope so,’ Volta said, noting Daniel had replaced bald questions with tentative assertions.

‘Well, you want to see it for your own purposes. It would seem you’re being greedy too.’

Volta smiled. ‘Of course I’m being greedy, but my greed is pure: I want to see it, not possess it. I think it’s not real greed if you don’t think anyone should have it, including yourself.’

‘You should run for president,’ Daniel said.

‘I’m already a president of sorts, and serving the Star seems to have exhausted my ambition as well as my strength.’

‘That still leaves you your wisdom and charm,’ Daniel smiled thinly, lifting a salsa-drenched forkful of the huevos rancheros in salute.

‘Plus, I can cook,’ Volta said.

And precisely at that moment a solo harmonica began the opening strains of ‘Amazing Grace.’

Daniel slowly lowered the fork to his plate. ‘How did you do that?’

‘I didn’t. Coincidence did. It’s a signal that an EU transmission – Essential and Urgent – will follow in fifteen minutes. Why don’t you let the dishes wait and come down to the barn with me. You haven’t seen the communications center yet, and this is probably the information we’ve been waiting on.’

As a monotone voice recited numbers and letters in clusters of three – ‘A-O-seven – Niner-Double L – Zone-four’ – Volta wrote them down. Daniel noticed Volta was taping the message, or at least had the record button pushed down on a tape deck jacked into the radio. ‘B-eight-N – G-O-Niner – I-two-Zero …’ The code fascinated Daniel. It sounded like Bingo on mescaline.

As the voice settled into a drone, Daniel glanced around the barn, nearly half of which was a communications center – phones, CBs, shortwave radios, tape decks, two computer stations, a row of locked filing cabinets, and a long worktable. A huge bank of solar-charged nickel-cadmium batteries lined the far wall.

The transmission abruptly ended and Volta sent a brief response, also in code. When he clicked off the shortwave, the tape deck stopped.

‘That must be a secret channel,’ Daniel said, avoiding a direct question.

‘No,’ Volta said, ‘we use legal frequencies: 21.000 to 26.450 Megahertz in the daytime, 7.000 to 7.300 at night. The CIA has computerized scanners that monitor unauthorized frequencies. If it picks up an illegal signal, it can easily triangulate the point of origin.’

‘But if it’s on a legal frequency, anyone can listen.’

Volta shrugged. ‘Let them. All they’ll hear is the code, and code is fairly common on the air – smugglers, amateur cryptographers, paramilitary groups. We use what’s known as a shift-cipher code, which means it shifts from one code set to another – we use nine – at intervals that can also be changed. It’s extremely difficult to crack it by frequency-of-occurrence methods. We use one set of nine for a year, and to our knowledge we’ve never been cracked or compromised. And besides, the band we use has over a thousand frequencies available. So first someone would have to find it, monitor it continuously, and then break the code. And they still might not understand the message. Here, let me show you.’

Daniel watched as Volta transcribed: OBJAY THIRTY K CARROT C CRUSH ZROW GLO DFORM U HIRNOW XTR CBR 1BLT T GO CECIL.

‘I don’t get it all, but I think I caught the important part.’

Volta read it aloud, explaining the shorthand: ‘The object is a thirty-thousand-carat diamond – “C Crush” being crushed carbon – a zero being round or, in our case, a sphere. This one glows. However, DFORM is our standard phrase for “the defense is formidable,” so I should go there and confer – “you here and now.” XTR is again standard, meaning further information – usually nothing more than where to meet – is available through the CBR station, which it might please you to know is the City of Baton Rouge. And that’s basically it.’

‘What about the “1BLT to go Cecil.”’

‘That’s Smiling Jack’s signature. In the unlikely case the code gets broken, a signature phrase makes it far more difficult for the codebreaker to transmit disinformation back to us. Everybody has a signature phrase; the names are nulls, dummies. So a transmission with a name but no signature phrase indicates the code has been compromised in some way. Even so, it probably would have been judicious to switch to a new set for this project. We’ve been using this set almost eleven months. I just hate to make the change at a critical juncture, since it takes a while to get fluent in the new set.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ Daniel said. ‘You just got it confirmed that it is a large spherical diamond that glows – exactly like your vision. Right on the money. You should be pleased, or grateful, or at least vaguely happy.’

‘I am,’ Volta said. ‘I’m also worried.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when I’m not having visions confirmed, I have to make decisions, the right ones I hope. And when you have to be hopeful, you should be worried.’

‘What do you have to decide right now that couldn’t wait on a few minutes of satisfaction?’

‘Whether to leave you here to practice by yourself or take you to New Mexico for the meeting.’

‘Take me. I can practice anywhere.’

‘At this point, only one other person knows you’ll be involved – that’s Smiling Jack. If you attend the meeting, six more will know.’

‘But they’re trustworthy, right?’

‘Daniel, it’s not a question of the knowledge being safe with them, but of them being safe with the knowledge.’ Volta paused, then added more forcefully, ‘You do understand the Feds are going to want it back?’

‘I haven’t been dwelling on it.’

‘You stay,’ Volta decided. ‘I’ll be taking the truck, so you’ll be without a vehicle. Unless, of course, you can imagine one. Now, if you’d do me the favor of cleaning up the kitchen, I’ll send some routing messages and gather my gear.’

Daniel was rinsing out the sink when Volta called him into the living room. He was standing near the door, looking at himself in the oak-framed mirror under the cuckoo clock. A Bulgarian anarchist had given Volta the clock for helping him during an illegal stay in the U.S. It kept excellent time, but the cuckoo appeared randomly.

Daniel thought Volta was referring to the cuckoo clock when he said, ‘I should have warned you about this earlier.’ But he took the mirror down, tapped the exposed nailhead as if it were a telegraph key, then pulled outward and up, lifting a veneered panel out of the wall. The panel was about half the size of the mirror that had concealed it. There was a narrow vault behind the panel.

Daniel had never seen a safe so skinny, six inches wide and two feet high. Nor did it appear to have a lock. ‘What’s the point of a safe without a lock,’ he said.

‘The lock’s inside.’

‘Well, that’s certainly a provocative approach to security.’

Volta opened the safe door and removed a small black cubical box with a short aerial mounted on one side.

Volta held it up for Daniel’s inspection. ‘The lock. A radio-controlled nerve-gas canister. You noticed my tapping the nail. I was sending a coded radio sequence to deactivate it; otherwise it fires automatically when the door is opened. Solar trigger. Fires at the faintest hint of light. The gas isn’t lethal, but it’s instantly incapacitating and makes your recent bout with the flu seem like a Tahitian cruise in comparison.’

‘Another of Aunt Charmaine’s concoctions from the concrete bunker?’ Daniel said with distaste.

Ah ha, Volta thought, Charmaine’s really got a hook in Daniel. He wasn’t surprised. Charmaine could make you feel like she knew you better than you would ever know yourself, a feeling that simultaneously attracted and repelled. Nodding as much to himself as to Daniel’s question, Volta said, ‘Yes, Charmaine. But I trust you appreciate that Charmaine’s genius for synergistic associations extends beyond mere potions.’

‘But probably also includes that powder you threw in my face this morning.’

‘No, I’ll take credit for that. It’s the inner bark of a species of Peruvian pepperbush that is dried to parchment, then finely ground.’

‘Where did that and the cards come from anyway? I saw you roll up your sleeves.’

‘I’m a magician, Daniel, remember? When a magician rolls up his sleeves, it should arouse your suspicions, not lull them.’

‘I’ll watch that,’ Daniel said.

‘Do.’ Volta removed three flat black plastic boxes from a stack inside the safe.

Daniel said lightheartedly, ‘You don’t trust me alone with the family jewels?’

‘Actually, two boxes are the family crystals – we use them to modify our CBs. The other is a taped transmission to Ellison from a group in Canada.’

‘What sort of transmission?’

‘Confidential.’

‘To me, but not Ellison.’

‘You weren’t included in the confidence.’

‘I see.’

Volta closed the safe door and turned to Daniel. ‘I honor confidences. Sometimes it seems silly, given the information. Sometimes it’s literally torture – not physically, or not yet anyway, but heart and soul. But we can’t live without secrets and the trust that bears them. You’ve asked that your ability to vanish be held in confidence. It will be. Our Canadian friends requested their information be kept confidential. It will be. How could you possibly expect me to keep your confidence if I betray theirs?’

‘I didn’t, not really. Ever since I’ve been vanishing, I seem to want to know everything that’s going on, and act against what’s expected. In a weird way it’s made me sort of playfully impulsive.’

‘I thought that might be what was going on,’ Volta said. ‘But you’re fortunate. Your reactions – curiosity, perversity, and goofiness – are much sweeter than mine, which were fits of morbidity and crushing doubt.’

‘Another difference.’

‘Yes. You’re innocent, and I’m experienced.’

‘This morning we were equals.’

‘And so we are. And so are innocence and experience. As are space and time. But as much as I enjoy our little metaphysical chats, I must go explore possibilities for practical application in circumstances we do not control.’

‘And I stay here, working to improve our control and the possibilities for imaginative application. Any instructions?’

Volta said, ‘Walk down to the river and back every morning.’

Daniel waited for a moment before asking, ‘That’s it?’

‘Yes. Beyond that, proceed as you deem wise or as you damn well please or any combination thereof. You take responsibility now. It’s yours to do or fail. Just don’t mistake your abilities for the truth. Don’t worry about the transmissions coming in; they’ll be shuttled. I’ll be back within a week. Don’t run amok. Don’t delude yourself. We need you.’

Volta drove slowly down the mountain. Red Freddie, flying in from Big Sur, wouldn’t arrive at the airstrip till dark. Volta had left early to get away from Daniel and radios and his own weariness. He planned to wait down by the river at the airstrip. Just sit in the sunlight and watch it flow. The summons to New Mexico meant everything was going to start moving fast. He didn’t think Daniel was ready and he wasn’t sure he was either. He hoped the daily trek to the North Fork and back would slow Daniel down. Daniel was too enthralled with the power of vanishing. Certainly Daniel seemed to have the gift for it, if not always the necessary understanding. That was the trouble with youth: power without point. And Daniel still didn’t trust him. Volta smiled behind the wheel. Daniel would trust him even less if he knew that nerve-gas canister was actually one of Mott’s polyresin sculptures from his True Cubism period, a birthday present from ten years ago. But that was the good thing about youth: it was gullible.

It was a steep two-hour scramble down to the North Fork and a tough four-hour pull back up. Daniel had expected to see the river gliding smooth and bright along a wide plain; instead, high with the late winter runoff, it was brawling through a narrow, boulder-strewn gorge. The roar of the coffee-colored water was so loud he didn’t hear the bear crashing through the thin screen of stunted willows toward him. Fortunately, he saw it. He threw a piece of handy driftwood at the bear, and in the same moment vanished. He moved behind the willows, reappeared, and watched. The bear was standing motionless, peering at the stick Daniel had thrown, occasionally wriggling his nose along its length. He touched it with a paw. When it didn’t leap at him, he picked it up in his jaws. Daniel was astonished when the bear shambled down to the river’s edge and almost delicately released the stick into the swift current.

Going to the river each morning was Daniel’s favorite part of the program he developed for himself. Food was a close second. The fresh air and exercise, coupled with a full recovery from Charmaine’s flu, unleashed a tremendous hunger. He ate a huge pre-dawn breakfast before he left for the river. When he returned at noon, it took at least two hours to prepare and demolish lunch. From two to five he read from Volta’s small but excellent library, followed by three hours of dinner. That left eight to nine for vanishing practice. He wasn’t sure if it was perversity or respect, but he followed Volta’s program, vanishing once a day for an additional minute each time. He did this with an ease that quickly became boring. Though Volta hadn’t seemed overly impressed, Daniel felt he’d found the secret – imagining himself invisible by recreating his state of mind, bypassing the mirror, the fall, the fear, leaping the wall instead of drilling through it. If he didn’t have to fight his way through, the energy saved could be used to sustain his stay in invisibility. Daniel was confident he could vanish for an hour easily. The twenty minutes he’d done to impress Volta hadn’t even strained him.

Jump out.

Jump back.

Simple.

Returning from his seventh trip to the river, wondering how much longer Volta would be gone, Daniel spotted a huge deer browsing in a clearing across the draw. It was the biggest deer he’d ever seen. His intuition told him it was a buck, but he couldn’t see any horns. It moved like a buck. Chagrined, he remembered it was late March and the antlers shed in mid-winter would have barely started growing back. He decided to take a closer look. The draw between them was choked with brush, but was no obstacle to those with powers. Daniel vanished, and instead of walking through it, walked it through him.

Daniel’s odor evidently vanished with him since the deer continued feeding, apparently oblivious, as he approached. Daniel noted the swollen, velvety knobs where the new antlers were forming and congratulated his intuition. He thought, If nothing else, this invisibility gets you in close, lets you see the world without the influence of your presence. Yet the closeness was wrong somehow – a voyeur’s intimacy, hollow because it wasn’t reciprocated, sterile because it lacked permission.

Daniel spread his arms out wide and reappeared, announcing cheerfully, ‘Good morning, fellow creature!’

The deer replied by leaping twenty feet straight up, executing a ninety-degree turn in the air. It was already running before it landed. A rear hoof nailed Daniel squarely in the center of his forehead, dropping him to his knees. Hands covering his face, fingertips pressed to the wound as if to hold back the pain, he listened to the buck crash loudly downhill through the brush.

Daniel was examining his forehead in the living room mirror when Volta walked in. Daniel jumped as high as the deer.

‘Pardon me,’ Volta said, ‘I didn’t know you were back.’

‘Me either,’ Daniel yammered. ‘That you were.’

Volta narrowed his gaze. ‘What happened?’

‘I hit my head.’

Volta stepped closer, took Daniel’s head firmly in his hands, and tilted it toward the light. ‘It looks like you were hit with a cloven hoof.’

Daniel twisted his head free and stepped back out of reach.

Volta shot his right arm out, pointing a trembling finger inches from the wound. He bellowed, ‘You bear the mark of Satan! I leave you for one week and you’re claimed among his hellish clan, flesh for his flames, fuel for his sick desires!’

‘All right, goddammit,’ Daniel snapped, ‘a deer kicked me in the head.’ He waited, expecting Volta’s laughter.

Instead, Volta said wearily, ‘Well, are you all right?’

‘Yeah, fine,’ Daniel grunted. He looked at Volta more closely. His eyes were raw and glazed with exhaustion, his face haggard. ‘I’m fine,’ Daniel repeated, ‘but you don’t look so good.’

‘I shouldn’t. It’s been seven long days of nervous waiting for bad news. I’ll give you the grim details after dinner, and we’ll consider possible approaches.’

‘Is it really that grim?’

‘Look at it this way, Daniel: you are the only break we’re getting.’

Daniel wasn’t sure what that was supposed to reveal. He was still considering when Volta said, ‘How’s the deer’s hoof?’

‘It bounded away nicely, thank you.’

‘That deer must have been truly startled – as if you appeared right in front of him, out of nowhere.’

Daniel wanted to discuss more successful applications of invisibility. ‘Vanishing saved me from a bear.’

‘I wasn’t being critical, Daniel. I’m glad to see it wasn’t all work and no play in my absence.’

‘Other than the bear – which was necessity – and the deer – which was convenience and curiosity – I stuck exactly to your program.’

‘Thank you. Was that out of perversity or respect?’

‘I’m not sure. Probably some of each.’

‘I appreciate your candor. I would also appreciate it if you would cook dinner this evening and not disturb me till it’s ready. I’ve been up thirty hours and have spent the last three on the radio making thousands of tiny, interlinked decisions, some of which may prove crucial to our success. It has lately been forced on my reluctant attention that I’m getting old. No complaints – I am ready to be old – but I can no longer go two days without sleep. I’m tired, Daniel. I’m going to bed.’

‘Dinner around six?’ Daniel said.

Volta nodded in gratitude. ‘Bless you.’

While he was mashing potatoes, Daniel thought of a foolproof way to steal the Diamond. He could hardly wait to cheer up Volta. But when Daniel announced at dinner that he’d thought of a way to steal the Diamond, Volta brusquely said, ‘It can wait. Let’s devote our dinner conversation to a subject appropriate to the season, the erotic unfurling of Spring. Let’s talk about blow jobs.’

Daniel nearly dropped his fork. ‘What?’

‘Blow jobs. Cock-sucking. Fellatio. Let’s talk in particular about two blow jobs: the one you received the night before your mother died and one I was forced to witness while in jail.’

Daniel said, stunned, ‘You sent that girl, didn’t you?’

‘Daniel, think. I absolutely lack the imagination or style to garner information through sexual duplicity, sweet though it might have been. I’m convinced you didn’t tell this Miss Bardo anything that might have compromised the plutonium theft or jeopardized your mother, otherwise you wouldn’t have told me that you thought your mother’s death wasn’t accidental. But that doesn’t mean Miss Bardo couldn’t have found something – a note, a diary – or, acting as an agent for others, placed a bug in the house, or planted an electronic locator in a pocket of your lowered pants.’

Daniel was shaking his head. ‘How do you know she was there if you didn’t send her?’

‘I didn’t until you just confirmed it. Shamus talked to a McKinley Street neighbor of yours who had hosted the party from which your young ladyfriend wandered. The same young lady who announced, upon returning, that she’d just “come back from the Horsehead Nebula down the street” where she’d “sucked a young boy’s dick till his brain tore loose,” or words to that effect.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Dolly Varden. Shamus called to use her as a go-between again.’

‘Between who?’

‘I’m not sure. I think he just wants you to know he knows, see how you respond.’

‘So he thinks I told Brigit, or that she was an agent. An agent for who?’

‘I have no idea how he’s thinking, Daniel. Dolly says he’s gone insane – not obviously, but she has an unerring sense for madness. He’s evidently been drinking hard for the past year, and the whiskey, grief, and guilt have dragged him over the edge. It wouldn’t surprise me if he thinks I’m somehow implicated, having brought you into AMO and favored you as a student, or for any number of demented reasons.’

‘I have no response,’ Daniel said, ‘except to say I didn’t tell her anything. We hardly talked. She was stoned. Really stoned. And if she was an agent, she wouldn’t have gone back to the party and announced it.’

‘I think that’s a fair and measured reply for the circumstances. You can talk to Dolly directly if you want, or I can just radio your answer.’

‘Go ahead. I have other things to concentrate on.’

‘Indeed. The second blow job, for instance.’ And Volta proceeded to recount the sergeant’s savage humiliation of the young boy, and how he’d been tempted to vanish and intervene, and why he hadn’t, and then seeing the Diamond in the mirror.

Daniel listened, sickened, slowly coming to understand the Diamond’s importance to Volta. ‘I think I get it,’ he said when Volta concluded. ‘If the Diamond is like the one you saw in the mirror, then it in some way confirms your decision not to vanish and try to stop it?’

‘Or rewards it. But something like that, yes.’

‘I think I would have tried to stop it. I’m not judging you, though, or no more than I’m judging myself.’

‘Of course you are. Not that you can. I was at a point with vanishing – a point you haven’t reached, and perhaps won’t – where I felt certain that if I disappeared even once more, I would not come back. Which meant I could have only borne invisible witness to that boy’s degradation, just as helpless as I was locked in my cell. If and when you come to that point yourself, see how you judge me then.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Daniel said. ‘You sound defensive.’

‘Perhaps you’ve mistaken it for my annoyance at your glib judgments.’

‘Nope, I know that tone well. And really, I wasn’t criticizing your decision so much as …’ Daniel let the thought trail off, having realized Volta’s defensive tone had nothing to do with the decision he’d made in the cell.

Volta cocked his head. ‘Yes?’

‘The sergeant. Whatever happened to him?’

Volta nodded slightly and gave Daniel a weary smile. ‘I’m not sure if I should commend your insight or lament my transparency.’

Daniel waited for an answer.

Volta pushed his plate back. ‘The sergeant crawled under his bed, put his service revolver in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. This was four years later.’

‘Why?’ Daniel said.

‘Because I poured terror on his guilt.’

Daniel remembered Wild Bill’s mention of Ravens. ‘How did you do it?’

‘Slowly,’ Volta said. ‘It was almost a hundred days before he snapped, a hundred days believing that the kid’s ghost had sent me to exact revenge, a hundred days of raw fear to convince him justice would not be denied.’

‘I wouldn’t argue about the justice,’ Daniel said, ‘but it’s still murder.’

‘I won’t dispute your judgment – except to say AMO has been debating the fine moral points of the issue for centuries, and to no conclusion.’

Daniel was shaking his head. ‘No, not the fine points, just the fact: You drove him to do it. I can understand that. But why torment him? That’s different. That’s cruel. Why not just walk up and shoot him? A hundred days… that’s what I don’t understand. I just can’t believe you could do that.’

‘Could you, Daniel? Suppose your mother was set up, with cold premeditation, to be killed in that alley. What would you do?’

‘Try to find out who did it.’

‘Assumed. And when you were certain who’d done it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel sighed. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘I didn’t either,’ Volta said, ‘till I found out. Let me tell you what I learned. I didn’t enjoy it. I’m not proud of it. I’m not ashamed. I never did it again. And I want you to know you’re the only person I’ve ever told. It wasn’t sanctioned by the Alliance; it was personal business. I obviously trust you’ll honor it as a strict confidence.’

Daniel said with a flash of anger, ‘Yes, sure, you know I will. But why are you telling me all this stuff about Shamus and the girl and that poor kid and killing the sergeant? Now, of all times? When I need to keep focused on the work?’

‘Because you’re the only other person who has vanished, and thus might be capable of understanding the particular nature of my decision and the state of mind in which it was made. And I’m telling you now because you’re going to see the Diamond, and perhaps be forced to make some impossible decisions, and I want you to know you’re not alone. Our ability to vanish changes nothing but our form. While it gives us a rare perspective, it offers no exemptions. It doesn’t make us wise or powerful or compassionate. And what understanding and compassion we do earn from our efforts only makes some decisions more painful – though perhaps we suffer them more gladly.’

‘Then what’s the point? A finer appreciation of inescapable suffering?’

‘No. The point is life. Its facts and meanings and mysteries.’

‘Okay,’ Daniel said breezily, ‘tell me the facts of life.’

‘I can offer a condensed version of the first statement of principles in the Emerald Tablet, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos, the protoalchemist. “As below, so above. As above, so below. It is thus to accomplish the miracles of one thing.”’

‘“Miracles of one thing?” Shouldn’t that be “miracle”?’

Volta looked at Daniel and shook his head. ‘I wish that deer had kicked you harder; I really do. Maybe seeing the Diamond will help. Perhaps we should abandon our metaphysical inquiries and turn our attention to the more mundane task of stealing it.’

When the dishes were done, Volta spread a large map on the table. He used his pencil for a pointer. ‘As we now know, the Diamond is being kept at the White Sands Proving Ground. More exactly, right here, in the Tularosa Valley, roughly between the San Andres and Capitan Mountains in the old lands of the Mescalero Apache. The closest towns are Tularosa, Mescalero, High Rolls, and Bent. However, we have allies on the Mescalero reservation, so we’ll use that area for staging the raid, with our field headquarters in El Paso. So far, no problem.’

Volta replaced the map with an aerial photo of what appeared to be a volcano rising from a plain. Daniel interrupted: ‘It might save us time and explanation if you want to hear how I think I can steal the Diamond, whatever the defenses.’

‘I think it would be more efficient if I describe the security and you listen, judging its effects on your approach. You’ll have to know it anyway. Tell me when your plan is compromised, if it is.’ He pointed at the volcanic cone. ‘This is Sunrise Mountain, a cinder cone as you no doubt see, and though it appears taller, its elevation is five hundred forty-five feet – which would hardly qualify as a knoll around here, but then we aren’t surrounded by alkali flats.’ His pencil moved to a dark rectangular speck at the base of the mountain. ‘This is where the bad news begins. That speck you see is the entrance to a horizontal shaft that runs to the center of the mountain. It’s approximately seven hundred yards long, with a five-degree declination from entrance to center. At the end of the shaft is a large vault. The Diamond is in the vault.

‘What sort of lock?’

‘We’ll get to that. First, let’s go down the shaft, which has four separate checkpoints, each manned by a marine machine-gun crew. The guns are in concrete bunkers built into the tunnel. The watch changes every six hours, but the old shift stays in place until the new one occupies its positions, so the changing of the guards, traditionally a vulnerable moment in all security arrangements, is well covered.’

‘I’m beginning to see what was meant by “formidable defenses,” but none of that affects my plan.’

‘Keep looking.’ Volta slid a diagram of the shaft over the aerial photo. ‘There are four alarm systems in the tunnel, one at each checkpoint, each on an independent circuit, each monitored at Holloman Air Force Base twenty miles to the south, where, at any alarm, a squadron of F-15s and an entire company of marines in helicopter transports can be airborne within fifteen minutes – the jets perhaps sooner.’

Daniel said, ‘I don’t like that at all – not that it hurts my plan.’

‘Just on general principles then?’

‘Right. Especially the principle that a mistake could really be punished.’

Volta nodded. ‘Also, the airspace above Tularosa Valley is under routine radar surveillance from the air base, but only above five hundred feet, so a small plane or helicopter could come in under it, though again the margin for error is substantially narrowed.

‘Back to the shaft for a moment. It has tracks for electric carts to carry people and supplies. There’s been a lot of activity lately, technicians shuttling back and forth with equipment, and we’re concerned our information may already be outdated. I’m sure you understand the difficulty of close scrutiny, since there’s no concealed vantage point on the flats. So let me tell you for the first time now what you will hear from me a hundred times more: If you encounter anything that is different than expected, don’t try to improvise. Retreat; report; and we’ll revise the plan.’

‘Assuming mine wouldn’t work. I still haven’t heard anything that would prevent it.’

‘Well, we haven’t got to the bad part yet: the vault. It was custom built for the CIA by Seabrook Security. It’s a perfect cube, thirteen feet on a side, each wall composed of a two-foot slab of stainless steel.’

‘Great,’ Daniel said. ‘It’ll give me more room to work in.’

‘There’s more,’ Volta cautioned. ‘Each wall, except the door and the floor, is wired on the outside with an electrical sensor grid that can detect a pressure change of five hundred pounds per square inch and a temperature change of thirty degrees Centigrade. The door and floor are sensitive to changes inside the vault of five pounds p.s.i. and ten degrees Centigrade. Makes it difficult to blast or drill your way in. The grids are independently wired to each checkpoint, air base security, and a nearby CIA installation – and of course it’s a doubled system, sounding when it is broached as well as when it’s shut down by any other means than a coded sequence, which changes every day.’ Volta smiled at Daniel. ‘And how does your plan look now?’

‘Fucked,’ Daniel said disgustedly.

‘I’d have to infer you were planning to stay in the vault with the Diamond long enough that it would vanish with you.’

‘You got it. I figured I’d just walk into the vault and hang around for the thirty to forty hours you said it takes to capture an object in my force field, or whatever you call it. I guess you’d already considered that possibility.’

‘It crossed my mind, yes, but I rejected it even before I learned of the pressure-sensitive floor.’

‘Why?’

‘You risk yourself too much. Suppose you were in the vault when they came – as they often do – to take the Diamond to the CIA lab nearby?’

‘I’d vanish.’

‘And how long can you vanish for?’

‘Well, you saw me do twenty minutes, and I think I could do more.’

‘What if they stayed an hour? You’d be forced to reappear.’

‘But,’ Daniel countered, ‘not necessarily in the vault. I could go right out through the mountain, reappear, wait till they were gone, and vanish back into the vault.’

‘You might be spotted outside, since there’s virtually no cover. Besides, you’d have to break field congruence with the Diamond, forcing you to start over. It could be months before you had forty uninterrupted hours with the Diamond, and I assure you you’d be exhausted long before then. All assuming, of course, that forty hours would be sufficient to enmesh the Diamond in your force field. That forty-hour figure, as well as my purely speculative notions of intimate force fields and their powers, are based on my limited experience with ordinary objects. The Diamond, clearly, is not an ordinary object. You might well be taken into its field – a glowing six-pound spherical diamond likely exerts a considerable force.

‘Six pounds!’

Volta raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, you can check my calculations, but thirty thousand carats at two hundred milligrams per carat is roughly six pounds, or about the size of a bowling ball.’

Daniel said carefully, ‘This glowing – do you know the source?’

‘None of our people has seen it, and the information they’ve been able to gather is extremely sketchy. All we know is that light emanates from the Diamond. Very few people have actually seen it so far, and I gather they’re still having a difficult time believing it. Even the spooks are spooked. They seem to be divided into two equal factions. One faction thinks it’s some weird KGB espionage ploy. The second faction of U.S. Intelligence, if you’ll excuse the oxymoron, thinks the Diamond is from outer space, likely placed here as some monitoring device, though there’s some sentiment that it’s an artifact from a lost civilization, Atlantis being the leading candidate. In short, they know what the Diamond is made of, but they don’t know what it is, what it means, or how it can be real.

‘There’ve been some hard swallows and weak smiles in the intelligence hierarchy the last few weeks. Nobody is eager to assume responsibility. You know how bureaucracies function – their most compelling concerns are always “Who else knows?” and “How can we cover our asses?” Which right now works to our advantage, though we should act soon.’

‘How soon?’

Volta smiled. ‘I think the Hour of the Wolf on April Fools’ Day would be both propitious and appropriate.’

‘Not to mention whimsical.’

‘Appropriate,’ Volta repeated firmly. ‘But you’re entitled to your opinion, however misguided.’

‘I have to admit I don’t know what the Hour of the Wolf is, though it sounds good.’

‘It comes from the late Paleolithic, the Great Spirit tradition. It’s the hour before dawn, a time of particular magic for the hunter, a heightening of psychic powers. It’s also the time when other creatures, whether asleep or tired from a night’s feeding, are most vulnerable.’

‘I’ve sort of lost track of time here, but April First couldn’t be much more than a week away.’

‘A week from tomorrow.’

‘But,’ Daniel said innocently, ‘we don’t have a plan.’

Volta feigned dismay. ‘Daniel, you couldn’t possibly believe that I, the Great Volta, wouldn’t have a plan? Plans are my specialty. My delight. I’ll outline it. You listen for flaws.

‘From the drop-off point – as yet unselected among four possibilities – you hike seven to nine miles, packing all necessary equipment, across the alkali flats to the base of Sunrise Mountain.

‘You vanish and enter the shaft, moving directly down to the vault, reconnoitering as you go.

‘Inside the vault, you reappear. As you do, you leap in the air and attach yourself to the ceiling. Remember, all the pressure/temperature alarm grids are on the outside of the vault, with the exception of the floor and door.’

‘I remember that,’ Daniel broke in, ‘but what I don’t remember is how I attach myself to ceilings.’

‘A suction cup the size of a dinner plate will hold eight hundred twenty pounds.’

Daniel wrinkled his nose. ‘You mean like a toilet plunger?’

‘In form, but of superior design and materials. We have allies who can engineer the unusual on short notice. I brought it with me, in fact, so you would have ample opportunity to practice.’

‘Okay,’ Daniel said, ‘so I’m stuck to the ceiling with a suction cup.’

‘Actually, it’s attached to a harness; you’ll be in the harness.’

‘Like a spider dangling on a silken thread. I like that. So, what next?’

‘You gently attach a charge of plastique to the inside of the locking mechanism – it’s both combination and double-key – and set the timer, depending on this variable: the position and protection of the Diamond. If it doesn’t seem adquately protected – I’ll give you some guidelines later – you pick it up with another suction cup, this one double, molded back to back, and you attach it to a predetermined position on the ceiling, where, based on the calculations of our physicists, the blast will have the least chance of damaging it.

‘When the Diamond is secured, you vanish again, go back into the tunnel outside the vault, reappear, don a protective mask, and shoot two small canisters of nerve gas up the tunnel. It should deeply reassure you that Charmaine considers the gas among her finest work. A single whiff almost instantly paralyzes the voluntary nervous system, immobilizing the victim. It is also odorless and disperses quickly and evenly. Moreover, it penetrates every known gas mask. Yours, of course, is fitted with neutralizing filters. One thing I admire about Charmaine is her policy of never releasing a toxin until she develops a neutralizing agent. By the way, she calls this nerve gas Medusa Seven.’

‘That’s nice,’ Daniel said. His tone was decidedly neutral.

‘It will take about thirty seconds for the gas to incapacitate all guards. Immediately after you fire the gas, you disappear. The charge should detonate within four minutes, blowing the door. You step inside the vault, reappear, grab the Diamond, and run up the shaft and around to the west side of the mountain. There, Eddie LaRue will pick you up in his helicopter, fly you to a waiting car on a nearby county road, and you’ll drive away to meet me in El Paso, where you and I alone will decide what to do with the Diamond. After examining it, of course.’

Daniel said, ‘I have questions.’

‘You should.’

‘Why not knock out the guards before I go down the tunnel? That way if I come unsuctioned or drop the Diamond or something and set off an alarm, the guards are already incapacitated?’

‘A number of reasons,’ Volta said. ‘First, if you find something awry and have to abandon the mission, we don’t want it known that an attempt was made. Secondly, because of the tunnel’s pitch and the fact that heat rises, there’s a noticeable upward draft, which would substantially slow or possibly prevent the nerve gas from reaching the third or fourth checkpoints. This way, if you do set off any alarm, you can simply vanish and walk through the mountain to your pickup site.’

Chastened that he’d missed those points, Daniel said less aggressively, ‘But the charge will set off the alarm regardless, right?’

‘There is no way to remove the Diamond from the vault without opening the vault, and no way to open it without setting off the alarms – short of defeating the alarm system itself, which is virtually impossible. Though we may attempt it if all else fails.’

‘And when the alarm sounds, there’ll be jet fighters and a horde of marines on our ass in fifteen minutes. You have to expect roadblocks.’

‘If the timing goes right, you have an excellent chance of getting away undetected. All they have is an alarm. They have to cover every direction, while you know exactly where you’re going. Further, the truck will have a place to hide the Diamond, and you’ll be provided an identity and an alibi. So will Eddie in the helicopter, who will be attached to an actual film crew, a second unit shooting sunrises for Axel Koch’s newest epic, Roper Man.’

‘Is this Eddie LaRue the Low-Riding Eddie I’ve met?’

‘Yes. My apologies – I assumed you knew.’

‘Don’t you have doubts about my abilities to deal with explosives after what happened to my mother? Maybe I’ll break down, choke.’

‘The way to conquer fear is by facing it. I obviously have confidence in your courage or I wouldn’t have introduced you to vanishing.’

‘But you did consider it?’

‘Naturally.’

‘What about the fact that they’ll know the vault was blown from inside?’

Volta smiled. ‘That’s my favorite part, Daniel. All loss should be instructive. In this case, perhaps we’ll help expand their rather narrow conception of reality.’

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Hello, baby. I bet you were just twirling along, looking for a solution for these springtime, no-bang blues, and you got this paradoxical precipitate instead, the DJ himself, the ol’ Dharma Jewel, and now you can’t decide if I’m the Real Dazzling Item or just another Rhinestone Cowboy jacking his jaws to soothe the circling coyotes and keep the moon afloat on the dark waters of the human soul. All day you faced, the barren waste, without the taste, of water: cool – clear – water. Parched. Shrunk to the nut. Well, you’ve made it to the Last Mirage; welcome to the waterhole. Drink deep and sail on refreshed, real as the diamonds on your grandmother’s wedding ring, real as the ineluctable weirdness that whips us all around the circle, real as a sun-ripened grape about to get pressed. I’ll stay with you till I’m gone,’ cause you got mow-beel radio babbling in your ear, shaking it down to separate the gold from the dross, and you’re finding it all right here on KRMA, just another station on the cross.

Shamus’s scar-twisted hand was angry. The tucked-thumb jaw was almost a blur as it yelled in his ear, ‘Annalee told him, you idiot – he was her son, she loved and trusted him. She did everything but admit it that night in Richmond when she mentioned Daniel was beginning to suspect something. She’d already told him. If you hadn’t been so love-blind you’d have known right then. But you can’t blame her. She couldn’t distinguish between love and trust. Daniel is the maggot in your heart. Daniel and Volta. Quit looking for this stoned girl who sucked him off. He’s probably telling the truth when he says he didn’t tell her anything, because he’d already told Volta the minute he’d found out what you were planning, and Volta, that jealous, jealous man, arranged for it to go wrong; maybe even talked Daniel into going along to make it look good. Then Daniel almost got killed, so Volta, with his perverted sense of honor, took the lad under his wing. Daniel is the Judas, but Volta is the devil. It doesn’t need proof. I can taste it, I can smell it, I can feel their darkness burning in my bones, hear their treachery in every word, see them through my scars. If you get Daniel, you’ll get Volta. Do you hear me? Quit crying, goddammit! Do you hear me? Get them soon. Soon.’ THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNALS OF JENNIFER RAINE: MARCH 24

My name is Jennifer Raine, Judy Snow, Emily Dickinson, Amelia Empty, Wanda Zero, Clara Belle. I live in room 28, Apan Hospital, Valley of the Moon, California. Apan is a mental care facility. I am here under the care of Dr Putney, who suggested I keep a journal since it’s good to express your feelings. But actually, except for being bored shitless, I feel fine.

The court committed me because I have an imaginary daughter named Mia. Dr Putney keeps referring to her as my invisible daughter. Of course she’s invisible: She’s imaginary. But Doc Putney isn’t too hot on the obvious. Except for the logically obvious, that is, like how can I be 23 and have a daughter who’s 11, and why can Mia laugh and cry but not speak. Because, Doc, I imagined her the way I need her. Someone I can talk to without words. An ally. A witness.

I try to make Dr Putney understand that since I imagine her, since I am her mother, I have a responsibility to her. So when that Safeway clerk caught me stealing food for her, I was absolutely justified in destroying three aisles of bottles and cans allegedly containing food. I’m not crazy, Dr Putney, I’m hurt, and one reason I’m hurt is exactly because there is no food in the food stores. Too much telly, not enough vision. It’s not crazy to know that. I am not crazy. I have scars to prove it. I’m hurt, that’s all, and Mia is helping me heal.

The moonlight glittered on the alkali flats as the Hour of the Wolf approached. Daniel checked his watch and trudged on toward Sunrise Mountain. He felt anxious, giddy, ridiculous, and absurdly serene, as if such wildly mixed emotions were exactly what he should be feeling while on his way to steal a six-pound spherical diamond from his government, equipped with nerve gas, plastique, and a large suction cup, armed only with his wits and the ability to disappear.

Practice had been a snap. Volta had set up a stainless-steel plate nine feet off the ground with a pad to break his fall. But he’d stuck the suction cup to the target on his first attempt and hadn’t missed in fifty subsequent tries. A rope between the brass ring on the back of his special harness-vest and the suction cup kept him from falling to the floor. At first he had trouble ‘controlling the dangle,’ as Volta said, but with a little practice, as Volta noted, he got the hang of it. Daniel found that by imagining himself as a spider swaying on its own silken thread, he didn’t feel quite as stupid.

At Coach Volta’s instructions, he’d practiced vanishing and reappearing at one-minute intervals. ‘Think of them as metaphysical windsprints,’ had been Volta’s advice. They hadn’t winded Daniel at all. He was sure he could vanish at fifteen-second intervals if he wanted and perhaps fast enough to strobe between the two states. He intended to explore the possibility after the attempt on the Diamond.

He’d also practiced his new identity, which he would inherit from Jean Bluer, who was now driving across Texas as Isaiah Kharome, freelance preacher and editor-publisher of God Shots, a religious magazine. Jean had sent a set of photos and a tape of the voice; the proper makeup and documents would be waiting in the getaway truck, which also served as the Reverend Kharome’s Mobile Temple. When Daniel mentioned that such an outlandish guise didn’t do much for his sense of seriousness, Volta said it wasn’t supposed to.

Various objects had taken different amounts of time to mesh with Daniel’s force field and vanish with him. The suction cup disappeared with him in less than twelve hours; the plastique had taken almost forty. Volta attributed the differences to field congruity, pointing out that Daniel’s field welcomed suction and resisted – understandably – explosives. Daniel wasn’t convinced, but had no explanation of his own – though again he intended to explore this after he’d stolen the Diamond.

But first he had to steal it. He looked at Sunrise Mountain looming in the moonlight, shifted the weight of his equipment-laden vest, lowered his head with a giggle that surprised him, and plunged onward.

Volta had just poured a modest shot of cognac to accompany his coffee when a call came in at 2.30 a.m. He answered immediately, ‘Allied Furnace Repair, night service.’

‘Mr Deeds did not go to Washington. He’s fresh from a Bent bar where he’s had about fifteen drinks with an engineer from Closed Circle Security Systems, a Pennsylvania company doing some local consulting work.’

It was Ellison Deeds. Volta sighed; it had to be bad news. ‘Changes?’

‘Additions, evidently. That’s all I could learn. The man could hold his liquor. He did talk a bit in general about his particular specialty, camera surveillance.’

‘I understand,’ Volta said softly. He paused a moment to consider, then added, ‘Well, our night man is out on call now. I’ll let you know as soon as he gets back.’

‘I’ll be at home,’ Ellison said.

Volta hung up the phone, leaned back in his swivel chair, thought a minute, then leaned forward and flipped on the radio. He sent the message in code. THINGS FALL APART. HAVE RIDE READY FOR EARLY DEPARTURE OR VERY LATE IN SCHEDULE. SEND IMMEDIATE WORD ON CONCLUSION. CHANGES POSSIBLE. STAND BY.

When the transmission was acknowledged, Volta sipped his cognac and watched steam wisp from the coffee cup. He hoped Daniel had the sense to call it off if they’d added cameras.

Daniel vanished. He waited a moment for the clank of any equipment that hadn’t gone with him, then started down the tunnel. The bunkered checkpoint was twenty feet from the opening. He was passing it when someone whispered, ‘Check.’

Daniel stopped. Then, realizing it couldn’t have been meant for him, he looked in the bunker. One of the guards was watching TV. The other two were bent over a board. Daniel stepped through the wall for a better look. Two guards, one thin and rangy, the other built like a stump, were playing chess. Stumpy, playing white, didn’t have a prayer.

‘Fuck it,’ Stumpy hissed, ‘my ass is grass. I tell ya, it’s that damn pill they’re making us take – fucks the shit out of my concentration.’

‘I took one, too,’ Rangy said. ‘All it is is atropine, and if you think it fucks up your concentration, someone lobs gas down here you’ll find out fast what fucked concentration is all about.’

‘Hey man, no way any dude’s gonna rain gas on us. I’ve been in the fucking Corps since ’Nam, and I’m telling you this is jacked-up, jerk-off duty. We don’t even know what the fuck we’re guarding. Whole duty, all we’ve seen is a little box go by once. Fucker’s probably empty.’

‘Right,’ the thin one said disparagingly, ‘that’s why the place is crawling with federal spooks. That’s why Keyes, the Region Supe, has been here himself for three weeks. It’s probably plutonium.’

‘That’s wonderful fucking news,’ Stumpy muttered. ‘Lay a little radiation on the Agent Orange I got in ’Nam and throw in this anti-nerve gas atropo-fucking-feen or whatever the hell it is and my balls will probably drop off.’

‘Don’t sweat it. From what I hear, Keyes knows his shit.’

‘Keyes is an asshole; asshole’s ’sposed to know shit.’

‘Hey,’ the guard watching TV hissed at the other two, ‘this is a silent watch, remember.’

‘Eat my dick, Orvis,’ Stumpy said, but he quit talking.

Daniel felt something missing in the silence. It took him a moment to realize there was no sound from the TV, and less than that to see it was a monitoring screen displaying a static view of the vault. Neither cameras nor the atropine were expected. The mission was canceled.

Daniel doubted that the atropine was any defense against Aunt Charmaine’s Medusa brew, but if he was wrong he was dead or in prison. And the camera cut at least five minutes on the getaway. He turned and started walking toward the tunnel mouth when he suddenly started laughing so hard he nearly lost his concentration and lurched back into visibility. Prison? How could they keep him in prison? How could they shoot him if he was invisible? If it fell apart he could always shoot a flare to warn Eddie off and use his invisibility to give him a big edge on pursuit. Volta was right, though – better to leave and try again. But he should look around for other security surprises. And see the Diamond. He turned and continued down the tunnel.

He reached the vault without incident. He spotted the camera quickly, but was so anxious to step into the vault that he almost missed the photoelectronic eyes. That’s what he assumed they were until he examined them more closely. Perhaps they were lasers. No difference – either way it was some sort of grid. He quickly noted their positions. He’d been vanished twelve minutes already. He could feel the edges of his concentration beginning to erode.

He examined the vault door impatiently and then stepped through into a room of unimaginable light. Bars of gold stacked along each wall bathed in the steady, dense, incorruptibly clear light from the spiral flame, slender as a thread, burning through the Diamond’s center. Daniel felt his concentration begin to dissolve, its force subsumed by the greater coherence of light. He grabbed the suction cup at his waist, desperately thrusting it upward as he leapt back into flesh. The suction held. Visible, he swayed above the Diamond, arms and legs reflexively outstretched to stabilize himself, like a man about to plummet down a well transfixed in midair. Dazed, he looked down into the the Diamond’s center. The spiral flame had vanished but the light’s unflickering clarity remained, neither terrifying nor serene, particle nor wave.

Daniel wanted to hold the Diamond. It was perched on a columnar pedestal in the center of the vault, just out of reach. He would have to vanish again and reposition himself. He didn’t know if he could muster the concentration to vanish in its field or, if he could, whether he could sustain the focus necessary to reappear as he leapt and slap the suction cup back on the ceiling. But he didn’t care. He had to touch it.

He closed his eyes but it was hopeless. He could not gather himself out of the light. Couldn’t separate his center from the Diamond’s. He kept his eyes shut and tried to imagine the Diamond in his hands. He could see the Diamond clearly in his mind, but not in his hands, not touching. He opened his eyes and looked into the center of the Diamond, surrendering his concentration, his will and desire. When he vanished, the Diamond vanished also, though its light remained constant. Daniel picked it up gently, slipped it into the velvet pouch he’d brought, and walked quickly through the gold bars and the western vault wall and through the mountain. Even inside the velvet pouch, which had a thin lead sheet between the doubled material, the light was undiminished. He lifted it to his face and looked deeply into the light. At its center was the spiral flame again, the Diamond in the raven’s beak, the open window, the mirror shattering, Annalee screaming, ‘Run, Daniel!’ And then he was staggering on the moonlit plain, the pouch heavy in his hand, the light gone. He opened the pouch and looked inside. The Diamond was still glowing, but he couldn’t see the spiral flame. He lifted his hand and touched a face, a face he couldn’t imagine as his own.

Daniel started running toward the setting moon. Before he’d taken three strides there was a roar above him and what seemed to be a huge locust descended, blocking his way. Daniel’s first thought was to vanish again but then he realized it was Low-Riding Eddie and that the locust was Lucille. Daniel ducked his head against the prop wash and stumbled toward the chopper, the pouch clutched to his chest.

Low-Riding Eddie reached across the cockpit and helped yank him aboard, gunned the chopper into the air, backed off the throttle for a second as it stabilized, then whipped into a 180-degree turn. He kept it wide open as they flew fifty feet above the alkali flats below.

They’d covered five miles before Eddie glanced over at him and yelled, ‘Hey, you all right?’

‘Yeah,’ Daniel said weakly. Realizing Eddie probably couldn’t hear him over the engine’s howl, he nodded.

‘Fuckin’ near landed on ya, man – you come outa nowhere.’

Daniel shouted, ‘Lots of room. No problem.’

‘Get the goods?’

Daniel pointed at the pouch on his lap, then raised his thumb.

The Low Rider grinned his merry approval, his eyes sparkling like the silver studs on his leather jacket. ‘What kinda jump we got on the heat?’

Daniel was dreamily watching the flats slip by. He looked over at Eddie and shook his head.

Eddie assumed he hadn’t heard the question and yelled it again.

Daniel leaned closer and shouted, ‘No problems. I got by the alarms.’

‘Fuckin’ A-Okay!’ Eddie bellowed, pounding him on the shoulder.

Daniel leaned back smiling, his hands on the pouch. He could feel the Diamond’s warmth through the velvet. He remembered then that he hadn’t checked the inside of the vault for a camera. But he figured he would have noticed one, and recalled that the checkpoint monitoring screens had shown only the outside of the vault. ‘Clean,’ he murmured to himself, then turned his attention to the fading stars. A few minutes later Low-Riding Eddie set him down along a county road and was gone again, it seemed to Daniel, before his feet touched the ground.

The Chevy pickup with camper was where it was supposed to be, keys taped under the dash, a small toolbox on the front seat. The sight cleared Daniel’s head. There was work to do in the logical world. He opened the toolbox and found, on top, already snapped together, a ratchet, extension, and a half-inch socket.

The bolts on the front differential were loose. Lying on his side, he spun them off, then lifted the cover. The empty differential had been lined with mink. Daniel stared, then started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. Finally, choking, he had to crawl out from under the truck and get up on his hands and knees. It took a minute to catch his breath, and when he shimmied back under the truck with the pouch he tried to ignore the mink lining and concentrate on the task at hand. He took the Diamond from the pouch, marveling again at its light, noticing that the spiral flame wasn’t visible. Now he felt certain he could only see the spiral flame in his vanished state, and was tempted to check his theory. Instead he lifted the Diamond gently into the differential casing. It fit perfectly. He replaced the cover and cinched the bolts down tight. He returned the ratchet to the toolbox and picked up his harness-vest from where he’d left it on the floorboard.

The white flag was exactly where Volta had diagrammed it, forty yards down a shallow drainage gully to the right of the road. The buried disposal drum was directly below it. He lifted the sand-covered lid without difficulty. The drum was half full of a clear, odorless liquid. He set the harness-vest on the ground, then stripped down to his gloves, dropping each piece of apparel into the vat. Shivering in the chill dawn air, he picked up the harness-vest, gave the attached suction cup an impulsive kiss, held it over the dark maw of the drum. He was about to let go when he remembered that the unused plastique and nerve gas were still in the vest’s special pockets. The disposal plan assumed he would have used them. He was deeply unsure about how they’d react with the chemicals in the drum, another product of Aunt Charmaine’s bunker industry. He removed the gas and plastique from their pockets and dropped the harness-vest into the solution. He buried the gas and plastique farther down the gully, threw his gloves and the white flag into the drum, and then repositioned the lid, smoothing sand over it till it was well concealed. Bent over, bare ass pointed at the rising sun, he shuffled backward toward the road, erasing his tracks as best he could.

Back at the truck, he climbed inside the camper. Most of the camper was piled with cardboard boxes of God Shots religious tracts. The small makeup table was just to the left of the door near the bed, the wardrobe on hangers suspended from a ceiling hook, the makeup case under the bench. Jean had been easy on him; the face was essentially Daniel’s own, with the addition of five more years and a scar on his neck. In ten minutes Daniel was Isaiah Kharome.

The only thing he didn’t like about Isaiah Kharome was his sense of sartorial style. He assumed it was Jean’s idea of an April Fools’ joke. The florid Hawaiian shirt, a tangle of scarlet and lime, fought the blue-and-white-checkered polyester slacks, and the wild-plum blazer clashed with them both, though he was forced to concede a subtle coordination between the white socks and white embossed lettering – MIGHTY SPIRIT TOUCHDOWN CLUB – that encircled his hand-tooled belt, the buckle of which was a large single star. He did approve of Isaiah’s wallet, chocked with credit cards and crisp twenty-dollar bills. He checked the briefcase of emergency funds stashed in the camper’s false top. He didn’t have time to count it but if it wasn’t the twenty-five thousand dollars Volta had promised, it was close enough.

The sun had cleared the horizon when Daniel reached the highway. He stopped and tried to make sense of the cluster of road signs: Denver, Phoenix, Kansas City, El Paso. An early morning thermal lifted a dust devil off to his right. ‘Dust to dust,’ Daniel said in Isaiah’s voice, ‘ashes to ashes.’

Phoenix sounded good. Daniel pulled out slowly and headed west.

Volta had difficulty adding the hours he’d gone without sleep. Forty? The last eighteen, waiting for Daniel’s call, should count double, he decided. Or triple. He took another sip of coffee, then reached for the blue phone.

Smiling Jack answered immediately.

‘Anything?’ Volta said.

‘Nothing you haven’t heard four times already.’

‘No sign of pursuit?’

‘Nada. The guard changed at six o’clock like another day at the office. Either that gas erases memory, or he didn’t use it. No alarms. No nothing. You want my opinion?’

‘Of course,’ Volta said.

‘Daniel didn’t get it. He caught the changes and canceled out.’

‘And he hasn’t called in because he saw the changes and thought we might be setting him up. Is that it?’

‘He should know better, but yeah, that’s how it looks to me, too.’

Volta said, ‘Don’t include me in that claim; I believe he got it. He told Eddie he did, and he had something the size and shape of the Diamond in the pouch. It wasn’t his lunch.’

‘It might have been sand. Eddie said he just pointed at it and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Eddie was flying balls-to-the-wall. He admits he just glanced at the pouch. I mean, maybe Daniel can’t admit that he missed, that he––’ Smiling Jack stopped. ‘Hang on, Volt, I got something on the red line.’

Volta waited, certain what it would be.

Smiling Jack returned. ‘Well goddamn, good thing we didn’t get to betting on it. There’s a shit-storm of commotion around the tunnel, and some jets just got off at the air base.’

‘They discovered it’s gone,’ Volta said.

After a long pause, Smiling Jack asked almost angrily, ‘So how the fuck did he do it? No gas, no charge – I mean, where was it, on a silver platter in front of the tunnel?’

‘No telling,’ Volta said. ‘He might have seen a way to get by the alarms. That only leaves the lock and the guards. Maybe they all fell asleep, or were in one place shooting dice or doing drugs. Daniel’s sharp and resourceful.’

‘So we’re back to why he hasn’t called.’

‘Full circle,’ Volta agreed.

‘Listen,’ Jack said earnestly, ‘you’re a lot closer to him than me. What do you think? Think we got burned?’

‘I think I’m going to wait till he calls.’

‘He might not. I have a couple of other bad thoughts.’

Volta said, ‘Let’s hear them all.’

‘They may have already nailed him. Quietly, of course.’

‘It’s possible. But they either don’t know what they have, or the sudden excitement around the tunnel is a ruse.’

‘Or maybe Shamus found him. If our information is good, he’s been looking.’

‘I know, but Shamus would’ve had to get extremely lucky, or one of us in close betrayed him.’

Smiling Jack sighed. ‘So, you wait for a call. What about the rest of us?’

‘Get some sleep. In the morning, pick up Jean in Alamogordo. Chisholm Smith and Davy will be with him. Try to find out what happened in the vault and what the CIA is going to do about it. I imagine whatever they do will be done quietly – no APBs or sweeps involving state and local law. Probably a few hundred of their own agents, all with no idea who they’re looking for. If nothing else, we’ll find out how they handle such a problem. You know where help is if you need it.’

‘And you’ll wait for him to call?’

‘He’ll call. We might not like what he has to say, but he’ll call.’

THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNALS OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL 1

My name is Jennifer Raine, Emily Snow, Wanda Zero, Zephyr Marx, April Fulsome, Annabelle Lee. I have a private unpadded room here with dull green walls, a radio, and all the Thorazine I can eat. I don’t like Thorazine. It makes me feel like a package of frozen broccoli in the supermarket. That’s why they put me here. Or perhaps I should say that’s way I took off my clothes in the Safeway and destroyed a few aisles of alleged food. I had to. I could have gone over into lightning. It’s all packaging, you see.

I do have to say this is the best of all the hospitals I’ve been in, especially since it’s for my own good.

Doc, you’ve got to learn to take a joke. It was an April Fools’ joke when I said in answer to your question, nothing particularly painful happened when I was eleven except maybe getting raped by the North Bay High football team right after my older brother hung himself in the garage wearing my panties. I expected you to laugh when I said April Fool. I didn’t realize you had all that repressed anger and hostility. Don’t you think I know that you can’t help me if I won’t help myself? Why else would I joke with you? Though I appreciate your efforts, I don’t need help. I need time. Time and space and a few breaks, Doc, that’s what I need.

But now you’ve got me feeling guilty. So I’ll tell you what happened when I was eleven, but I have to make this fast because I can only tell it on April Fools’ Day and it’s almost midnight now.

Twelve years and a month ago my father and I took our little aluminum boat and went rowing on Lake Pauline. A storm came up fast like they do in March, and Dad was rowing for shore when we got hit by lightning. He was rowing, rowing, rowing (not merrily, not gently) and suddenly everything was absolutely white and my spine was on fire. No sound at all. No rumble, crack, boom, or blast. Just that silent solid endless alabaster flash and then nothing at all.

When I came to, it was almost dark. My father was lying twisted facedown in the bow, his left hand trailing in the water. He was dead. I’d seen a film in Junior High Health and Hygiene on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and I tried, I tried so hard, breathing into him until I was exhausted. I can taste the tobacco and licorice in his mouth, smell his burnt hair, see Mia sitting where I had been, watching, struck dumb. Watching when I gave up and held his shock-white face to my breast as we drifted through the rain.

Do you understand why she’s like a daughter to me now? When I kiss her goodnight after another day of nursing the wind, setting the empty egg, I can taste the ashes on her lips. And I kiss her goodnight every night. It takes courage to do that, Doc. It takes love. I’m not crazy.

My name is Jennifer Raine. Waitress. Typist. Would-be poet. Clerk. I have an imaginary daughter named Mia. When we were eleven years old, God exploded in my heart.

April Fools, Doc. April Fucking Fools. APRIL 2 (12.04 a.m.)

No more joking now. My mother was there when they brought the boat in with Dad and me and Mia. For almost a month she just screamed, so they put her in a padded cell and finally she quit screaming and started begging. Begged them to bring her laundry. They finally had enough sense to bring her a big hamper of clean clothes. And that’s what Mom’s been doing for every waking moment of twelve years – sorting laundry. She sorts it into colors and then puts it back in the hamper and sorts it again. And every few minutes she stops and looks up with this happy expectancy and says, ‘Is that you, Philip?’ Every time I go to see her it’s the same. She’ll smile at me very sweetly and say, ‘No, I’m sorry, you couldn’t be my daughter because you haven’t been born yet.’

And I beg her to imagine me, please, imagine me. But she can’t.

At a roadside flea market near the New Mexico border, Daniel handed out a whole box of God Shots magazines and impulsively purchased a dark green bowling-ball bag, bowling shoes, and a bowling shirt. The shirt was the same verdant green as the bag. On the back, in yellow letters, it read ‘Thrice Construction.’ Small script above the front pocket spelled out ‘Herman.’

He stopped to rest several hours later. He pulled off on a dirt side road and slipped the Diamond out of the false differential into the bowling bag. He climbed in the camper. He stared into the center of the jewel for nearly ten minutes, concentrating, but couldn’t see the spiral thread of flame. He vanished. The diamond vanished with him. The spiral flame was immediately visible. He emptied his mind and focused on the Diamond-center flame. He felt himself filling with light, becoming light, and he used the light to fuel his concentration. When he reappeared, he felt amazingly refreshed. Not until he put the Diamond back in the bowling bag to ride up front with him and stepped from the camper did he realize the moon had risen. He’d vanished for at least three hours. ‘No limits,’ he shouted to the moon. ‘Hang on, honey, I’m coming to see you.’

Volta hung between trance and sleep. He could sense Daniel but not strongly enough to locate him. The only way Daniel could have taken the Diamond was to make it vanish with him, and he would have had to do it quickly. Perhaps he’d imagined it vanished with him. Perhaps the Diamond had been amenable. Or hungry. He couldn’t imagine Daniel looking into the Diamond. He wasn’t sure if the whisper of sense he felt emanated from Daniel or from some ghost-echo of his own fears that Daniel had been, at best, deranged, or, at worst, claimed by the Diamond. Daniel had powers. Indisputably had powers. But he was not as powerful as the Diamond.

Melvin Keyes, CIA Southwest Supervisor and a sharp-tongued man himself, would have enjoyed the sledgehammer wit of the director’s dressing-down if he hadn’t been its recipient. The director’s rage dwindled at last, and now, as they stood in the looted vault, the director was reduced to repeating the list of Keyes’s offences, less in anger than disbelief. ‘And you had the entire security forces of every intelligence office in this country at your inept disposal, on an unlimited budget, and they, or he, or she, or goddamn it – excuse me if I sputter – stroll right in and steal the diamond and walk right out. Pardon me, Mr Keyes, if I just can’t fucking believe it!’

Keyes, eyes averted, waited till he was sure the director had finished. ‘Sir, I share your distress, but consider the evidence: four checkpoints, cameras, laser detection grid, five-pound trip pressure alarm on the floor, double-key and coded lock untouched – it simply was not humanly possible to steal that diamond undetected. Therefore, I’m forced to conclude we’re dealing with an alien species, one whose technology far surpasses ours. Consider, too, that our scientists have never seen anything like this diamond. Geologists, physicists, they all agree the probability of its occurring naturally is incalculably small. I think it was an information-gathering device of some kind, and they simply took it back.’

‘They?’ the director curled his lip.

Keyes wasn’t anxious to say it again. He looked at the vault floor. ‘I think we’re dealing with alien beings, sir. Nonhumans.’

The director said icily, ‘I don’t believe in little green men. Nor does the president.’

Keyes gave up. ‘Well, if it was taken by humans,’ he said crisply, ‘they’ll be caught. We have two hundred agents in the field as of this moment, another fifty on their way, and a number of specialists working on forensics and interviewing the guards.’

‘Wonderful!’ the director said, his sarcasm so massive a D-8 Cat couldn’t have budged it. ‘The agents will remain under your questionable command for the time being. However, after my humiliating conference with the president and the NSC this morning, Dredneau has been called in to take charge of the investigation.’

Keyes was incredulous. ‘Paul-Paul Dredneau? Sir, the Diamond is classified as a Zero-Access Red-Line Secret! Dredneau is a Canadian –a French Canadian at that. Not to mention he’s crazy, a schemer, a fraud, a notoriously––’

‘As the president ordered,’ the director cut him cold, ‘Dredneau is in charge of the investigation. If you’d done your job, the president and NSC wouldn’t have required his services.’

‘With all due respect, sir, in my estimation the man is a show-boating fool, untrustworthy, and utterly incompetent.’

It was Dredneau himself, standing at the open vault door, who murmured, ‘Your estimations, Mr Keyes, have already proven their considerable poverty.’

Dredneau was dressed in early Alfred Noyes: a long claret duster, a spotless white shirt with a ruffle of lace at the chin, doeskin trousers, calf-length boots of Spanish leather, and silk gloves – also spotlessly white – that he ordered by the dozen from Paris. Barely an inch over five feet and slightly bow-legged, he looked less like a nineteenth-century highwayman than a jockey turned fop.

The director, momentarily taken aback, offered his hand in greeting. ‘Dredneau. I’ve looked forward to meeting you.’

Dredneau, ignoring the director’s extended hand, bowed. ‘Paul-Paul Dredneau at your service, sir. I understand’ – he glanced pointedly at Keyes – ‘that your security has failed, resulting in the regrettable loss of a most valuable gem.’

‘It was stolen sometime between noon of the thirty-first and 1 a.m. on April second. As you may have already been briefed, it was seemingly stolen from a locked vault without tripping or bypassing five separate and quite sophisticated alarm systems.’

‘How perplexing,’ Dredneau simpered. ‘Fortunately, I was in New York concluding a nasty case involving a planned terrorist attack on the city’s Easter Parade – now foiled, thank goodness – and I was able to respond with alacrity to your president’s urgent summons. But before I bring my faculties to bear on the case at hand, allow me to introduce Roshi Igor, my assistant, bodyguard, and valet.’

Neither the director nor Keyes had noticed Igor standing outside the vault door, a surprising oversight. On hearing his name, Igor entered. Four hundred pounds of dense muscle, he had wrists like mahogany four-by-fours protruding from his frayed coatsleeves and a neck like a redwood stump. Igor’s eyes, though, were more imposing than his bulk. Set close beneath the Neanderthal slope of his brow, they looked like the bore end of a sawed-off double-barreled twelve-gauge.

Dredneau said, ‘Igor only recognizes his name and a small number of commands, but he is extremely sensitive to any feelings of rejection, hostility, and – No!’ he barked, as the director offered his hand to Igor. ‘I don’t allow him to shake hands. He has no conception of his strength. I’ve seen him turn a baseball into a frisbee.’

Keyes laughed nervously. ‘Did you make him yourself or rent him from Hollywood?’

The director said quickly, ‘Hell, he looks real sharp to me.’

Dredneau smiled. ‘I’m sure you appreciate the relativity of intelligence’ – again glancing at Keyes.

Keyes said, ‘Perhaps we could discuss your friend’s infirmities sometime later and turn our attention to the investigation, which is already solidly underway.’

Igor began slapping his buttocks with his massive hands.

‘No!’ Dredneau commanded.

Igor immediately quit.

‘Jesus, what was that all about?’ the director said.

‘I’ve taught Igor to communicate his feelings to me through the use of gesture. He thinks Mr Keyes here is a rectum.’ Dredneau smiled at the director. ‘I believe you were sharing a similar perception as we arrived.’

Keyes took a step toward Dredneau and Igor took a step toward Keyes.

‘Stop!’ Dredneau ordered. They did. ‘Enough playful banter, even if it does mitigate a serious situation. To work, gentlemen, and my work is information and deduction. First, some information. Besides its obvious value as a gem, what is this diamond’s importance?’

‘The fact is,’ the director said, ‘we don’t know. We brought it here for tests. The diamond is perfectly spherical but, as far as we could determine, uncut or unworked in any way. And our scientists say the probability of natural occurrence is infinitesimal.’

Gazing upward as if into space, Dredneau said, ‘Have you entertained the possibility it might be from another part of the universe?’

‘Of course,’ Keyes said derisively. ‘Only an inhuman intelligence could have circumvented the security.’

Dredneau, still gazing upward, said softly, ‘You’re wrong of course, Mr Keyes.’ He pointed at a faint circle on the vault ceiling. ‘A member of an alien species with an advanced technology would not have found it necessary to hang from the ceiling on what appears to have been a common toilet plunger.’

‘Horseshit,’ Keyes said.

Dredneau ignored him. ‘Only two elements of this case truly interest me. The first, obviously, is the practical question of how our thief managed to open the vault door without sounding an alarm.’

‘We’re waiting,’ Keyes interrupted.

Dredneau continued to ignore him. ‘The second question is philosophical.’ Dredneau swept his arm grandly around the vault walls stacked with gold bars. ‘What sort of man, upon entering a vault full of gold, would have the presence to see beyond it?’

‘Yes indeed,’ Keyes said with mocking joviality, ‘that sure is some fascinating speculation, but we’re more concerned with things like who is the thief.’

Dredneau said wearily, ‘I’ve already deduced that.’

‘Good God, man,’ the director said, ‘tell us!’

‘He’s jacking us off, sir,’ Keyes said.

‘The thief ’s name’ – Dredneau paused – ‘is Isaiah Kharome. He was, and perhaps still is, driving a camper truck of some sort, posing as an itinerant preacher and the publisher of obscure religious tracts, but apparently affiliated with some ancient magical cult.’

Keyes said, ‘Just prestoed it right out of here, huh?’

‘Send it,’ the director ordered Keyes.

‘Sir,’ Keyes appealed, ‘you’re kidding?’

‘Now.’

Keyes turned to Dredneau. ‘How can you look at some dim circle on the ceiling here and not only detect it was left by a toilet plunger, but deduce the identity and disguise of the thief?’

‘Because I’m a genius,’ Dredneau said. ‘And now, I must refresh my faculties. If you find him, please notify me immediately at the Turquoise Hilton in Albuquerque, the only decent accommodations in miles. In the meantime, please send me a detailed outline of the security arrangements, as well as the vault blueprints. I’ll be available for further consultation. Good day, gentlemen.’ He turned on his heel and headed out the door, pausing to collect Igor.

Keyes said to the director, ‘You don’t really want me to put that Isaiah Kharome camper-truck bullshit on the wire, do you? Everybody looking for a phantom of Dredneau’s vanity?’

The director exploded, ‘Goddammit, yes! Send it. I’m not going to tangle assholes with the president over this. If you don’t like it, Mr Keyes – well, you fucked it up, you fix it.’

Melvin Keyes made three calls. The first was to issue the agency-only bulletin on Isaiah Kharome. Then he rang his staff assistant for complete record checks on Isaiah Kharome and Paul-Paul Dredneau, further instructing him to deliver the security system schematics to Dredneau, and to tell Dredneau a Seabrooke representative would be arriving within the day. The third call was to Gurry Debritto in California.

‘Yes?’ Debritto answered.

‘Keyes. Are you available? It’s for me only.’

‘If it’s interesting.’

‘It’s an interrogation. Somebody either knows more than he’s telling or I’m getting jerked around.’

‘That’s not interesting.’

‘A quarter of a million, with the possibility of more – say ten million – if you recover a certain object associated with the inquiry.’

‘What sort of object?’

‘I can’t discuss it until you agree.’

‘Two-five for an interrogation? He must be extremely reluctant, well protected, or dangerous.’

‘We can talk tonight at 8 p.m. in Albuquerque. Mama’s Cafe.’

‘Half in front, as usual. The Cayman account. You have the number.’

Keyes chuckled. ‘I’m always glad to see a man save for his retirement.’

‘I don’t save anything,’ Debritto said. He hung up.

The phone booth was freezing cold in the desert sunrise. By the time Daniel finished dialing, his breath had fogged the glass.

Volta answered after three rings.

‘Allied Furnace Repair.’

‘Hello,’ Daniel said, teeth nearly chattering.

Volta didn’t reply.

‘I got it,’ Daniel said.

‘Yes, so we heard,’ Volta said softly. ‘Good.’

‘There were complications.’

‘You knew there could be complications. There usually are.’

‘There still are,’ Daniel said. His voice sounded tight, jerky.

‘So I’d surmised,’ Volta said. ‘Their existence, not the specifics. What are they?’ Soft. Patient.

‘How did I do it?’ Daniel blurted. ‘You must know.’

‘No doubt you imagined it.’

‘No doubt? None? No, I have doubts. That should please you.’

Volta didn’t respond.

Daniel said, ‘I don’t know whether I imagined it or it imagined me.’

‘Come visit. Perhaps I could be of help in understanding the distinction.’

Daniel shuddered. ‘No. You don’t even understand what I’m saying. You don’t need to see it. I do. I need to see it. It’s my responsibility now. I’ve seen inside it and I need to see more because it wants me to.’

‘I never considered the Diamond my responsibility,’ Volta said. ‘I considered it my due. We have both earned rights in this matter. I only ask that you honor mine.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to do, don’t you understand?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Volta said.

‘You’d have to vanish with it to see inside, to see what you want to see, to even know if you want to see it.’

‘I respect your judgment, Daniel, and I truly thank you for your concern, but I have to reserve that decision for myself.’

With his fingertip Daniel drew ragged circles on the fogged glass.

‘Come see me,’ Volta said gently. ‘Take your time. They just discovered it’s missing. As far as we know, you’re clear. If it’s too complicated, I can always come to you. Tell me where and when.’

Daniel said quickly, ‘I can’t think now. I’m freezing. I’ll call again later.’ He hung up.

Volta eased the receiver back into the cradle. He shut his eyes and inhaled slowly. ‘You lost him,’ he said. THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNALS OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL 2 (EVENING)

My name is Jennifer Raine, Malinche Cortez Rainbow, Sandra Dee, Emily X, Desiree Knott. Still crazy after all these years, huh girls?

This afternoon Doc Putney tried to be more aggressive with me. Wasn’t surprised. Men have one of two responses to me – flight or fight. I was telling him about the lightning-strike scar I got when my father was killed. It’s right at the base of my spine, shaped just like a lightning bolt. I was telling him I wasn’t killed too because when the lightning hit my brain and shot down my spine, the small of my back was touching the boat, and pulled out just enough juice to save me. I mean, I don’t blame the lightning. It just wants to get to the bottom of the lake. If it doesn’t connect, it can’t go home.

Anyway, Doc Putney challenged me about the scar, but he did it all wrong. He said, ‘You don’t have a scar, Jennifer.’

So I stood up and turned around and lifted the grey smock over my head. I wasn’t wearing anything else. I like my body close. Nakedness is one of my highest powers. I don’t mean the foxy chick-trick of turning slowly, arms crossed, lifting with a little wriggle and then dropping a dress on the floor. I’m not good at being sexy. But I know how to be naked, so naked you can’t even see my body.

Doc Putney must have almost swallowed the pencil he’s always chewing on because he kind of croaked, ‘Jennifer, put on your clothes.’

I told him, ‘Look at my scar.’ I reached back with my right hand and touched it so he’d know where to look.

The Doc got agitated. ‘There is no scar,’ he said, hitting every word like he was talking to a child. I don’t even talk to Mia like that.

I stood there so naked I could feel the scar begin to glow. Finally he came around his desk and picked up my smock and handed it to me. He looked in my eyes – with more courage than I thought he had – and said with real gentleness, ‘There is no scar. Put on your dress now. Please.’

The ‘please’ intimated what a glance at his crotch confirmed – he had a serious hard-on.

‘I showed my scar,’ I told him. ‘Let me see your cock. Let’s play, Doctor.’

I couldn’t resist. Scared him though – reminded him he was a doctor. Compromising Situation with a Female Patient.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This session is over.’ And he walked out. It was more of a controlled bolt. At the door he turned and said, ‘You should write about your feelings toward men.’

Depends on the man, Doc. And me.

Before he even opened his eyes, Volta could tell by the ring that the call was the inside line. Probably Smiling Jack or Ellison. He picked up the receiver without enthusiasm. ‘Allied Furnace Repair.’

‘Glad you gave it up and got some sleep.’ It was Jack.

‘I didn’t give it up. He called.’

Smiling Jack waited. ‘And?’

‘I don’t know. More exactly, he doesn’t know. I think the Diamond overwhelmed him. He said he’d call back.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He didn’t say. Sounded like a phone booth, so I’m assuming he’s on the road and moving.’

Smiling Jack said nothing for a moment. ‘Since you didn’t call, I guess we’re playing him loose. Or letting him loose.’

‘I think it’s fair for now,’ Volta said. ‘Not that we have much choice.’

Jack sighed. He hated to deliver bad news. ‘We have a choice now. They’ve got his cover, everything but the truck’s make and license plate number.’

Volta sat up in the chair. ‘How?’

‘You’re not going to believe it.’

‘I believe everything that happens.’

‘The president himself – though rumor has it the pressure came from his wife, through her astrologer – insisted they call in that weirdo Dredneau. According to a reliable source, he fucking deduced it from the plunger mark on the ceiling.’

‘That’s an astonishing deduction.’

‘Yeah,’ Jack agreed, ‘I thought so. Of course, I don’t have much skinny on this Dredneau, except he dresses out of the nineteenth century, has a certain dramatic flair, and evidently knows his shit. Sounds like your kind of guy.’

Volta was thinking. ‘That’s an impossible deduction. Change the code right now. Damn – I should have done it a month ago. Keep the frequency rotation, though.’

‘If we’re piped, might as well pour shit in their ear, huh?’

‘And I think we should have a go-between ready with Daniel. He hasn’t said so directly, but he doesn’t trust me.’

‘Wild Bill.’

‘He’d be my choice, too, if we’d heard from him in the last five months.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Jack said. ‘Or Dolly.’

‘Thanks, Jack, but we need you for Dredneau, and Dolly for Shamus, though he seems to have broken contact. Let’s gamble. How about Charmaine? She has a hook in him somewhere.’

‘I thought you said a go-between, not a persuader.’

‘A go-between can take many roles. Not knowing which may prove appropriate, why not provide for diverse possibilities?’

‘Hey,’ Jack said, noting Volta’s testiness, ‘I’m convinced.’

‘I think I’m too old for this, Jack. And I think I’m glad.’

‘I second them emotions. Take me with you.’

‘Sure, if there’s anything left of us when this one’s done. Till then, I’ll wait for another phone call, you and whoever you need can surround our cryptographic Canadian, keep Jean open for assignment, and let Ellison handle the rest. I’m assuming the code was blown, but it might have been a hole in the cover. Run it backwards just in case. Put Ashley Bennington on that. And Lyle.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not that I can think of. You?’

‘Nothing to do,’ Jack said, ‘but there is something I’m curious about.’

Volta knew what it was. ‘Jack, you don’t have to be coy.’

‘Did Daniel happen to mention how he pulled it off?’

‘I inquired. He said, and I quote entirely, “I used my imagination.”’

‘I’m really looking forward to retiring with you. Just drifting in a boat on a good trout lake while I listen to you tell me all about magic and the secrets of the art.’

‘I’ll tell you everything I can.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Jack said. ‘And after that I’ll have to use my imagination?’

‘I’ll ask Daniel when he calls,’ Volta said.

Roshi Igor, whose real name was Roger Kingman, was eating pizza – a Navajo Jumbo, the specialty of the hotel: salami, pepperoni, anchovies, and sausage, smothered with thinly sliced garlic under a half-pound of blue cheese. Roshi Igor was enjoying it immensely. Dredneau, on the other side of the table, was not. He looked up from the security diagrams. ‘Really, Roger; my eyes are beginning to water.’

‘Sorry, boss,’ Igor grunted. He moved over to the couch.

Dredneau sipped his claret. He’d figured out how Isaiah Kharome had gotten by the guards. The nerve gas had evidently caused total amnesia as well as paralysis. He didn’t know how he’d negotiated the alarms, but Dredneau’s electronic specialists had assured him any alarm could be bypassed. That left the vault, and for that he needed more information. Keyes had said the Seabrooke designer would arrive by midnight. It was already nine minutes past. And his radio monitors hadn’t called, which meant dead air. If the code or frequencies had been rotated he’d need a compelling explanation for his sudden loss of deductive powers. He didn’t like that prospect. Irritably, he opened his gold-and-ivory snuffbox and inhaled a delicate pinch. The phone rang just as he sneezed into his pale silk handkerchief. He let it ring again before he answered, ‘Paul-Paul Dredneau.’

It was the desk clerk. The Seabrooke man was downstairs.

‘Indeed,’ Dredneau said. ‘He may ascend.’

‘The vault guy?’ Igor asked. He licked the last bit of sauce from his fingers.

‘He’ll be up in a moment. And Roger – do keep in mind there’s no reason to overplay your part.’

‘It’s boring being dumb.’

‘I’m sure. But persevere.’

Igor jerked his head at the knock. ‘You want me to get it?’

‘No. Intimidation serves no purpose here. Sit and listen.’

‘Paul-Paul Dredneau?’ Gurry Debritto smiled uncertainly, blinking behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

‘I am,’ Dredneau bowed. ‘And you must be the long-awaited Mr Sahlin.’

‘Yes sir. From Seabrooke.’ He lifted the black attaché case in his hand a few inches, as if offering proof.

Dredneau introduced Igor, offered refreshments, and suggested they work at the table. As he sat down, Dredneau said, ‘I assume you’ve examined the vault?’

‘Yes sir, a few hours ago.’ Debritto, still standing, set the attaché case on the table and worked the combination.

‘Any preliminary conclusions?’

‘I have my notes and some photographs, but it might be useful to match them with the blueprints you requested.’

‘Of course. Excuse my impatience, but the president expressed some urgency.’

Debritto opened the case lid, removed a thin folder, and handed it to Dredneau, explaining, ‘These are the bare structural blueprints and these’ – he reached into the case – ‘include the alarms.’

Dredneau flipped open the folder. Before he could react to the blank page, Debritto knocked him unconscious with a sharp chop to the neck.

Igor was still uncoiling from the couch when the slug from the silenced .357 shattered his skull. He swayed uncertainly for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to sit back down, then toppled backward onto the couch as another bullet tore into his chest. He was still trying to rise when Debritto quickly crossed the room and finished him off.

When Dredneau opened his eyes ten minutes later the first thing he saw was the attaché case turned to face him. Neatly strapped on the upraised lid was a gleaming row of instruments – scalpels, pliers, scissors, and long stainless-steel acupuncture needles. In the bottom of the case, beside an assortment of vials and syringes, was a small, compact meter with a wire running from it. Still dazed, he traced the wire to the electrode taped to the inside of his thigh. He was naked, he realized, his hands tied behind him on the chair, his feet pulled back and bound to the chair’s braces. He moaned, ‘Roger…’

‘Roger is indisposed,’ Debritto whispered in his ear. ‘If you make another sound, you will suffer. We’re professionals, Dredneau, you and I. I respect your intelligence enough to assume you know that you have lost. As you see, you are connected to a polygraph. You will answer my questions with the truth. If you refuse, or if you lie, I will remove a part of your body – a kneecap, say, or an eye, a testicle, a finger. Believe me when I say I know what I’m doing. I’ve kept men alive up to thirty hours as I’ve whittled them down to a head and torso. If you still refuse, it will make no difference, for in that case I’ll use pentothal – vulgarly known as truth serum. I’d prefer not to resort to an injection; while the information would be forthcoming, it is occasionally garbled. If you force me to use the pentothal, when I have the information I seek I will treat you accordingly. Further, if you once raise your voice above a civilized conversational tone – which would be futile considering the Hilton’s acoustical design – I will cut out your tongue and we will have to proceed with a primitive system of nods. Please, employ your legendary intelligence. You do understand that you’re faced not only with a choice between truth and falsehood, but life and death.’

Dredneau nodded.

‘The first question, then: Who stole the diamond?’

Dredneau, trembling, bit his lip.

Debritto mused, ‘He must not have heard me. I better check his eardrums.’ He reached past Dredneau and removed a long silver pin from the case.

Dredneau quavered, ‘You’re going to kill me anyway.’

‘You didn’t listen, sir. Professional? A professional never kills unless it’s absolutely necessary. In your case, it isn’t necessary. All I want is information pertinent to this diamond I’ve been engaged to find.’

Dredneau shook his head.

‘Of course,’ Debritto whispered. ‘Given your situation, why should you take my word? Please note the polygraph.’ Debritto tipped the case so Dredneau could see it clearly. ‘The machine is state-of-the-art. Watch the needle – the red area indicates a lie. Is your name Paul-Paul Dredneau?’

Dredneau licked his lips. ‘Yes.’

The needle didn’t move.

‘Have you ever killed a man?’

‘Yes.’

The needle jumped into the red zone.

Debritto chuckled softly. ‘I didn’t think so. Next question: Are you a homosexual?’

‘No.’

The needle wavered near the red zone.

‘Now see, this is interesting. You seem to possess some profound sexual ambiguity.’ He pointed the pin at Dredneau’s groin as if to indicate the locus of confusion. ‘Let me rephrase the question: Have you ever had sex with another male?’

‘No.’

The needle shot into the red.

Debritto giggled. ‘Ah-ha! How many?’

‘Two. When I was young.’

The machine verified it.

‘I could ask you about women, but truly I’m not interested in humiliating you, and I’m sure you understand by now the machine’s capacity to discriminate. So, to my point.’ Debritto set the pin down on the table and deftly jerked the electrode from Dredneau’s thigh and held it to his own wrist. ‘The inside of the wrist is actually more sensitive than the thigh, but since your hands must be bound, I’d no choice. Now watch the needle while I make my statement.’

He paused, then with a calm formality said, ‘If you tell me the truth, I will not kill you, nor will I harm you in any way. If you don’t, you will suffer unto death.’

The needle didn’t move.

‘You see? The truth.’ He retaped the electrode to Dredneau’s thigh and picked up the stainless-steel pin from the table, idly testing the point against his own index finger. ‘I repeat: Do you know who stole the diamond?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very good. The truth is always good, isn’t it? Now, who stole it?’

‘His name is Isaiah Kharome.’

The needle quivered at the red edge.

‘That appears to be a partial truth. I asked for the complete truth.’

Dredneau said thickly, ‘The name is an alias I think, a constructed identity.’

‘Go on.’

‘This is a guess.’

‘Okay.’

‘The man’s real name is Daniel Pearse.’

Debritto said, ‘The machine agrees, or at least that it’s a truthful guess. On what basis do you make that guess?’

Sweat trickled down Dredneau’s neck. ‘I broke a code, an extremely difficult code. From radio transmissions. It took me almost eight months. Cryptography is a useful talent for a detective. I pay listeners all over the world to monitor coded radio transmissions. Most of the codes are trifles, unraveled at a glance. This one was provocative – what’s called a shift-cipher. I had to amass a huge sample before I could establish any sort of frequency count, much less discern the operative principles; with that, the code sets followed.’

‘You’re doing well. My compliments on your work, one professional to another. So, what are these code sets?’

‘Partial panagrams – a complete set is in my valise in the bedroom.’

‘Excellent. Who does this Isaiah Kharome-Daniel Pearse work for?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a guess. Based on style and odd textual references. It’s a group of alchemists or magicians, I think.’

‘A secret society?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘No national, racial, political affiliations?’

‘Maybe anarchists.’

‘There have always been rumors about such a group.’

‘If the code’s difficulty is any indication, they’re very careful.’

‘We’ll see. Now Daniel Pearse – why is his name a guess?’

‘Because early transmissions referred to “Danny Boy” and then changed to “Kharome.” Playing around one night, I reversed “Kharome” – still in code sets – and came up with DPearse. Logically, given the earlier Danny Boy reference, the D was likely for Daniel. I ran Daniel Pearse and Isaiah Kharome through my information network, which stretches from Interpol to the local PD – and voilà! A Daniel Pearse, but no Isaiah Kharome. Or no Mr Kharome right away. He began to show up on DMV and credit card screens. Clearly, someone was constructing an identity.’

‘Tell me about this Daniel Pearse.’

‘His dossier is in my valise with the code sets and frequency charts. What little there is is rather provocative. When he was fourteen, his mother, Annalee Pearse, was killed and Daniel was severely injured planting a bomb. He was suddenly represented by expensive lawyers and placed under the guardianship of questionable relations. From there––’

‘Stop!’ Debritto said. ‘I hope you’re right about this, sir. I get to clean up a mess. I killed his mother.’

Dredneau said nervously, ‘My reports say a faulty bomb. Check them, please.’

Debritto ignored him. ‘It was a rush job. I wasn’t supposed to kill her; just stop her. Foil it. Those fools don’t want to punish. I mean, they didn’t even want the police to know. They didn’t say why, of course. But a bomb in a nowhere alley in Livermore? It had to be a diversion for a run on the lab. Going public would hurt nuclear interests. They didn’t even trust their own field agents to handle it. By the time I was called in, getting there in time, much less setting anything up, was going to be tight. I barely made it. I’d just gotten on the warehouse roof above the alley when here she comes, bomb in hand. She caught the movement when I pulled my piece. She turned to run, yelling to somebody. I aimed for her legs, but just as I squeezed it off she slipped on the wet pavement and the bullet hit the bomb. I lost seven percent of my hearing in my right ear.’

‘Sure,’ Dredneau said wearily. ‘CIA. Did Keyes set me up or does it go higher?’

‘Please, Mr Dredneau. I don’t take orders from anyone.’ Dredneau nodded. ‘I like it,’ Debritto continued. ‘You see, when they paid me off, they told me the kid was in a coma and probably wouldn’t make it. I tell you, this is something. Now I have a chance to finish the job. And so: Where is our Daniel Pearse, aka Kharome?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know anywhere he might be headed, any sense of a plan?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know where the diamond is?’

‘No.’

‘Your truths are boring me, sir. Surely if you had code access as the theft was being set up, you must at least have some idea of how he accomplished it.’

‘Some. They further disguise the code with their own idiom, but from what I gathered he was supposed to use a new nerve gas on the guards, blow the vault, and be picked up by helicopter flying under the radar. Those are the only elements of the plan – other than dates and names – I’m sure of.’

‘But he didn’t use the gas or explosive, right? So how did he do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you knew it was going to happen. My, my, Mr Dredneau, you might have warned us. But it’s much more fun to waltz in and grab some glory with stunning deductions – and no doubt grab a little money, too, while you’re at it.’

Dredneau said nothing.

Debritto smiled. ‘It makes you uncomfortable to realize how much alike we are. You want the ten million just like me. Otherwise, you would have given the CIA his real name, rather than Kharome, which he’s probably changed ten times by now. Meanwhile, you wait for another transmission to decode, then maybe you and your large buddy retrieve the diamond yourself. At least you get to make another brilliant deduction. And if they offer ten, we professionals know they’ll pay twenty. Isn’t that how you were thinking?’

‘Yes. Yes it was.’

‘Anyone else have this information?’

‘No.’

‘Are you withholding anything essential or pertinent?’

‘No,’ Dredneau moaned. ‘Please, it’s everything of value.’

‘I compliment you, sir. You’re a wise man. Not a single lie. You spared yourself some unnecessary pain. Just let me gather up my equipment and your valise, then I’ll be on my way.’

‘Yes,’ Dredneau begged, ‘it’s all there.’

‘I will have to gag you – I’m sure you see the wisdom in a silent departure.’

Debritto gagged him with a rubber handball, holding it in place with swatches of silver duct tape. Dredneau began to breathe rapidly through his nose. Debritto gently pulled the electrode loose and coiled it into the case. In the bedroom Debritto went through the contents of the valise carefully.

Satisfied, he returned to the living room, stopping behind Dredneau. ‘My goodness,’ he said, ‘I can actually hear your heart pounding. Relax.’ He put his left hand lightly on top of Dredneau’s head, leaning down to whisper, ‘I want you to know how I did it. Remember just before I held the electrode to my wrist, how I laid the pin down on the table? Did you notice it was touching the sensor? The pin is highly magnetized. It disrupted the electrical impulse on its way to the meter, and thus my lie went undetected. And you call yourself a detective.’ Dredneau shook his head wildly. Debritto dug his thumb and little finger into Dredneau’s neck. Dredneau exhaled sharply, straining. With a flick of his free arm, Debritto shook a long wood-butted needle from his sleeve. He pushed Dredneau’s head forward and drove the needle upward into the base of Dredneau’s skull. Dredneau stiffened as if hit by a cattle prod, bucked once against his bonds, then slumped.

Debritto patted his head reassuringly. ‘It’ll take a little while. The slower the brain, the slower the hemorrhage.’

He picked up his case and Dredneau’s valise and went to the door, pausing as he opened it to call back into the room, ‘Goodnight. I hope I’ve been helpful.’

Debritto turned right and headed for the stairs. An old man was pushing a narrow carpet sweeper across the top stair, a transistor plug in his ear. He jumped back against the balustrade when he saw Debritto waiting to pass, jabbering, ‘Sorry sir. Didn’t see you.’

Debritto smiled and nodded toward the radio. ‘Who’s winning the ballgame?’

The old man looked confused. ‘No one.’ He removed the transistor plug from his ear. ‘No games this time of night. Just listening to some music to ease the work. That’s my whole job, the stairs. Sweep ’em top to bottom, then polish the rails bottom to top. There’s an elevator, by the way, you know.’ He pointed.

Debritto smiled. ‘I need the exercise. Keeps the heart clean.’ He pointed at the old man. ‘Opera,’ he said. ‘I bet you were listening to opera. I’ve got an uncanny sense about people’s music. Now tell me: I got you, didn’t I?’

The old man turned the earphone toward Debritto. ‘No sir, no opera for me. Far as I’m concerned, only two kinds of music – country and western.’

Debritto caught the strains of Waylon and Willie – ‘Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…’ He grinned at the old man. ‘You’re just lucky.’ He shook his head and went on down the stairs.

Smiling Jack replaced the ear plug and returned to his sweeping. He gave it three minutes and then moved quickly to Dredneau’s door. When he heard the high nasal wheeze inside he took out his passkey.

Debritto called Keyes from a phone booth across town.

Keyes answered on the first ring.

‘Have you come yet, Melvin,’ Debritto asked.

‘What?’

‘He was jacking you off, Melvin. He “deduced” this Kharome character from some shit-brained psychic named Madam Woo. He had a serious mental defect according to my machine. I corrected the defect. Raised his friend’s IQ up to zero first.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I bagged his papers. If anything looks promising, I’ll call.’

‘You will? I believe I paid for them.’

‘Fine. I don’t care. I just thought since I’d conducted the interview I’d be better able to evaluate them. I’ll drop them off as we arranged.’

‘Tonight. He might have been loony, but he’d been getting some results.’

‘He used snitches, just like everybody else.’

‘Did he figure out I sent you?’

‘Of course. But I would have done him anyway. Fucking queer.’

‘All smooth? No sightseers?’

‘An old fart sweeping the stairs. Had a radio plugged in his ear. We chatted a moment. He’ll never know that music saved his life.’

‘I thought you didn’t save anything?’

‘I had fun with Dredneau. I was in a good mood.’

Volta had asked Smiling Jack to come to El Paso for a personal report and consultation, and had arranged a charter to deliver him. It wasn’t like Volta to duplicate effort. Jack couldn’t tell him more in person than he had on the phone. Smiling Jack thought perhaps Volta was doubting his own judgment. To Jack, who’d worked with him for twenty years, this only confirmed Volta’s judgment, for it took wisdom to understand that your heart’s entanglements might be affecting decisions. And courage to admit it.

Over cognac, Smiling Jack recounted what he’d heard through Dredneau’s door during the detective’s torture, and his encounter with the killer on the stairs. Volta listened intently until Jack concluded with the information that Dredneau was still alive when they loaded him in the ambulance.

‘He died on the way to the hospital,’ Volta said.

Jack nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said distantly, ‘no surprise.’

Volta poured them each another shot. He lifted his glass. ‘We’ve worked together what seems like forever, Jack, and you still astonish me with your good sense and clear judgment.’

‘Shit,’ Jack said, ‘coming from you that’s almost more praise than I can stand.’ He lifted his glass. ‘But I will drink to good sense wherever it shows up.’

‘As I told you, though you might have mistaken my seriousness, I intend to retire when this Diamond caper is resolved.’ Volta smiled wryly. ‘Assuming it can be resolved.’

‘You used to relish complications. You’re the one who claimed you found them inspiring.’

‘That’s when I was young and foolish.’

‘That was three years ago. In Montreal.’

‘When I was still young and foolish.’ Jack started to speak but Volta lifted a hand. ‘Let me finish before I dodder even further from my point. With your permission, I’m going to recommend you to replace me on the Star.’

‘Nope. I accept the honor and decline the nomination.’

Volta sighed. ‘Daniel won’t bring me the Diamond, Charmaine refuses to serve as a go-between, you won’t accept what you’ve earned – no wonder I’m doubting my judgment.’

‘Charmaine wouldn’t do it?’

‘She flatly refused. She said it was pointless. I quote, “Volta, it is not something between you and Daniel, but between Daniel and himself.” And she’s right.’

‘Now there’s my candidate to replace you on the Star when we retire.’

‘Her clarity is beyond question, but she needs to refine her compassion.’

‘You’re just miffed because she told you what you already knew.’

‘Exactly. As I said, she lacks compassion.’

Smiling Jack shook his head and smiled.

‘Speaking of which,’ Volta continued, ‘I’d like to ask you a question. Were you tempted to kill that CIA agent when you met on the stairs?’

‘No, but if he’d decided to look at the transistor, I might have had to try. I’m old and he was obviously good. If he kills me, we lose the information I just risked my ass to get – like confirmation that the code’s cracked, that they have Daniel’s real identity, that this guy killed Annalee. Another thing, too. This killer told Dredneau that he – the CIA, actually – was tipped about Annalee planting the bomb, and I figured he’s our best way of finding out who did it. I liked that girl a lot. I brought her into the Alliance. I know the attempt had nothing to do with us, that it wasn’t our action and was against our policy, but she was betrayed, and I’d like to know who snitched.’

‘I doubt he knows,’ Volta said. ‘He’s little more than a freelance assassin, and to judge by what you’ve told me, he wouldn’t even ask why. I think we can assume this is the elusive Debritto we’ve caught whispers about. The style’s right, and he’s supposed to work out of the Bay Area. Did you notice that he said his instructions were simply to foil the bomb being planted? And yet when Annalee saw him on the rooftop and began running – which indubitably foiled the diversionary bomb, and thus the attempt on the plutonium – he tried to shoot her, tried to shoot her knowing her son was in the car. He’ll be punished.’

‘Ah,’ Jack nodded, ‘now I understand why you wanted to see me. You have a personal problem.’

‘I’d like to think it was because I value your advice. My appreciation of your company is sharpened by the realization you came very close to being killed tonight merely because I feel I’ve earned the privilege of seeing this Diamond, though for no reason beyond my own personal satisfaction. When the Star Council found out about the Diamond, I’m the one who argued we should commit our full resources to wrest it from government control and return it to the elements. I argued that its possession, especially by a government, might be a disaster of the spirit. And that well might be the case. However, Daniel somehow managed to steal it, so in fact the mission has been accomplished. I never once mentioned to the Star that I personally wanted to see it. But I did tell Daniel. Daniel knew and understood that in exchange for my help in his training and the Alliance’s aid in resources and planning, he and I would return the Diamond together. You see––’

Smiling Jack held up his hands. ‘Stop. I see. You want to know if it’s honorable for you to trade his mother’s killer for the Diamond.’

‘Exactly,’ Volta sighed. ‘Except I wouldn’t have said honorable – I would have used fair. Is it fair?’

‘Yes,’ Smiling Jack said without hesitation. ‘More than that, if this Diamond has overwhelmed him somehow, it might bring him back to earth.’

Volta said, disgust and sorrow in his tone, ‘There are better reasons than revenge.’

Jack shrugged. ‘I would have used the word justice.’

‘Touché.’

‘Maybe just being forced to make the decision will bring him around.’

‘One hopes,’ Volta agreed.

‘We’ll hope together. But we should also be thinking about what we’ll do if he chooses to keep running with the Diamond.’

‘What can we do but let him go?’

‘I meant about Annalee’s killer, this Debritto.’

‘We’ll send a Raven to see him. Justice was your word, so you can set it up.’

‘Hey, be fair,’ Jack said. ‘You said punish.’

‘Precisely my point.’

Jack was distracted by another idea. ‘Volta, I got it. If Daniel doesn’t want to revenge his mother’s death, let’s offer it to Shamus. He’s crazy with grief, thinks you and Daniel conspired somehow to kill her. Who knows? Maybe justice would be cathartic.’

‘No. Shamus isn’t capable of the necessary judgment, either moral or strategic. Besides, like Daniel, Shamus really wants the traitor, the one who tipped the CIA.’

‘And you don’t think this Debritto guy knows?’

‘I’d bet on it. However, perhaps Mr Keyes can find out for us.’

‘You want me to call him and ask, or do you want to do it?’

‘You do it. Pay phones only, short conversations, and you always call him.’

Smiling Jack frowned. ‘Well yeah, I understand basic security, but should I just ask him to please tell me, or should I try pretty please with mustard on it?’

‘I wouldn’t say please at all until you’ve exhausted your leverage.’

‘That’s what I’m missing – leverage. If I tell him I was listening at the door they’ll know that we know the code was compromised, and then we can’t set them up for a dummy transmission. The way I see it, our strongest asset is their ignorance that we heard one word of what went on inside that room.’

‘True,’ Volta said. ‘But you might say you worked as a consultant to Dredneau, that he’d summoned you to the hotel for a briefing, and you just happened to see a man leaving with Dredneau’s valise. You hurried to the room to find Dredneau dying. His last act was to point to the room key that had fallen from his smoking jacket and to hold up two fingers. From which you finally deduced Keyes. Tape residue on Dredneau’s thigh led you to believe he’d been interrogated by polygraph. You ran a profile of the hit through your computer, and you’re fairly certain the assassin was Gurry Debritto. Explain that you’d come to detest Dredneau, because you and your computer wizardry did the real brainwork, while Dredneau hogged all the glory. Then trade your silence for the name of the informant on the Livermore plutonium attempt. Keyes will want to know why. Tell him you need the information to collect a large fee elsewhere. This is your test of his good faith in establishing what might be a mutually useful working relationship. If he refuses, intimate that Mr Debritto might make a more understanding partner. I assure you he doesn’t want Debritto to even suspect they’ve been linked, because Debritto’s only protection would be to remove Keyes from the chain of connection. On the informant, we want something concrete, verifiable – a taped call, a letter, or at least the name of the person who received the Livermore tip. They very well might not know who the informant was, but at least we’ll find that out.’

‘They can just say they don’t know,’ Jack said, ‘that it was an anonymous call just like mine.’

‘Perhaps. But it’s sometimes surprising how pressure elicits candor. And even if it was anonymous, maybe we can find out if the voice was male or female, adult or child.’

‘Uh-huh. I’m slow this morning. You’re afraid it was Daniel. Because when you tell him we’ve discovered his mother’s killer, he might figure if we have that, we have the snitch: him. And then he’d really run. And you’d go and find him if it took the rest of your life.’

Volta looked at Jack squarely. ‘No, I wouldn’t. A year ago, maybe. Not now. And I don’t believe he betrayed his mother, or only inadvertently if he did. Daniel’s in jeopardy. I intend to help him to the extent of my powers.’

‘And the Diamond? You don’t care about seeing it?’

‘Jack,’ Volta said passionately, ‘I can’t tell you how much I want to stand in its light. But it’s the nature of such things that you must let them go. I haven’t yet, but I’m trying.’

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Like wow, I just dropped down out of the Sierras tonight and cruised into the lovely Apan Valley. I don’t know what it is about coastal California – maybe that literally pacific ocean out there imposing its wavelength on mine – but every time I pass through on my spiraling circuit, I get this totally awesome feeling of cosmic mellowness. Blissed out, instead of my usual pissed off. Damn near tempts me to trade in this old funky-junk van and buy a Mercedes; maybe put a hot tub in the wine cellar. Viva est magnum, mama, especially if you’re holding the magnum, but I guess if you’re serious about racing the other rats, you want a comfortable ride.

You know who I’m talking to if I’m not talking to myself this sweet April night. Yea verily, you do know who I’m talking to, baby, vibing through silence into the whorls of your ear, but you don’t know why. Let me tell you: One perfect mind isn’t nearly as good as two imperfect minds.

Spin that around your cranium while I get down with some ID, though I haven’t got a cold fucking clue who, Miss Owl, who-who I am. But I can tell you that this is KAMO Mobile Radio, somewhere between snake-eyes and boxcars on them tumbling dice, and I’m rolling right along with it all, flying at you high and alive, done in and turned out. Yes! It’s the redoubtable DJ, and tonight he’s doubled up: Dream Joker and Diarrhea Jaws, too. So, if you don’t know what to believe, hey, stick with me. And if you don’t like what you hear, call the sheriff. Call the whole fucking posse, for all I care. Give the FCC a jingle while you’re at it. Ring up the National Guard, too, and the Air Force, and whoever else you think can save your poor doomed ass. But whatever you do, don’t touch the dial, because I just clocked the time and Mickey has both arms straight up, surrendering to the moon, which means it’s time to tuck you in with a bedtime story. Snuggle down while I light a pipe of killer to clear my golden throat.

Ahhhhh. Better. You all settled? Okay. The story is ‘The Snake.’ And before we begin, let me make it clear that the snake in this story is not symbolic. It’s not a phallus. It’s not the Tempting Serpent, the Wingless Dragon of Unspeakable Evil, the Devil’s Lariat, or an emblematic metaphor of any form but its own. The snake in this story is a garter snake, a small, brightly striped, harmless, viviparous member of the genus Thamnophis. A critter of reptilian cast. A discrete expression of being. A life. THE SNAKE

I was visiting friends on the northern California coast, two women I’d known since high school, Nell and Ivy. It was about this time of year.

Since I can’t stand cultivating anything except bad habits, I’d been assigned to peeling potatoes while Nell and Ivy worked in the garden. I was rinsing the spuds at the kitchen sink when Nell and Ivy came banging through the screen door, clearly upset, each holding half of a snake writhing in her hand. One of them had accidentally chopped the snake with her hoe.

They laid the snake’s thrashing parts on the table. Ivy looked at Nell. ‘What do you think?’ Her voice had that tightness you hear at the edge of a bad car wreck.

Nell said, ‘I don’t think we can stitch its insides together.’

Silently fretting, they watched the parts twitch on the table, barely glancing at me as I came over for a look. It didn’t look good.

‘How about tape?’ Ivy suggested.

‘Sure,’ Nell said, ‘we can try. Maybe it’ll regenerate.’

I told them, ‘Snakes don’t regenerate.’ I’m a realist. Nell and Ivy are usually realists too.

‘Maybe this one will,’ Nell said, at once angry, defiant, hopeful, sad.

They used shiny black electricians’ tape. I helped, holding the upper half still while Ivy carefully wrapped.

We stretched the snake out in a shaded redwood planter to recuperate. I promised to check on it occasionally so they wouldn’t have to hike up from the garden.

When I went out a half hour later, the snake was dead.

True story, folks. I dedicate it to all of you realists as a reminder that some gestures transcend failure. I buried the snake in the planter box, fuel for the flowers. Because if you draw your breath down to its tattered center, dance with your ghost through the moonlit mountain pass, hurl your heart in the forge and your soul in the river, you can feel that the stone is a living fountain that dissolves and coagulates, sunders and joins; and then you can imagine that snake slithering through the high spring grass like a phantom glimpse of flame, and you can follow it if you’re brave enough, crazy enough, foolish, desperate, daring, hungry, dumb. Enter your wounds. Heal. Escape.

And when you get loose, come join me. I’ll meet you at Jim Bridger’s grave as soon as you can get there. We’ll make music we can’t hear alone, celebrate beauty yet to be born, take the Devil by the fucking horns and wrestle him to the ground. We’ll shoot for the stars, sweetheart. We’ll waltz in the moonlit cemetery like fallen gods, stand revealed, naked as air, and kiss each other’s scars.

Till then, my invisible friend, this is the Dream Joker bidding you his tenderest toodeloo. Dream on. THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNALS OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL 3

Whhhhooooooooowweeeeeeeeee! And who, my goodness, is he? I’m in love! I can’t help it and don’t want to. The DJ done got to me.

I couldn’t sleep and was just lying there listening to Mia breathe, feeling our breath trapped in this room, how we just keep breathing ourselves, getting so down I had to get up. So I snapped on the radio and twirled the dial, looking for music or just another voice to get mine out of my head – and there he was, loud and clear. The boy can talk that talk, and it was like he was saying it straight to me. Magnificent gestures, the flame of snake flesh burning in petals, the stone river that sunders and joins… it was love at first flight.

Short flight, though – five minutes and he was gone. I listened to the spit-sizzle static on the blank channel for another hour before I let him go. I can’t feel whether I should follow or wait. He’s a bad-boy, which I like, and he does talk good. But sometimes wildness is only the fear of being held, and talking the talk isn’t walking the walk. I don’t feel he knows how lightning burns. I’m not sure he knows shit about birth, beauty, nakedness, or moonlight. But I love him anyway. I want to dream a real face for him. I want to feel him touch my scar. THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNALS OF JENNIFER RAINE TOO LATE THE SAME NIGHT

I never had a chance to dream. I woke as Clyde was crossing the room and before I could move he was on the bed, pinning me, trying to kiss me, he just wanted to kiss me, but I didn’t know that, how could I – rape, murder – how could I know? Jesus, I’m still shaking.

Clyde Hibbard, the retarded man I met my second day here. They’d loaded me with Thorazine when I’d been admitted, and Mia had wandered off. I was looking for her in the lounge. Clyde was the only one there, sitting on a beige vinyl couch, picking at the armrest as he stared at the IBM clock on the wall. He looked scared when he saw me; caught. I apologized, said I hadn’t meant to disturb him.

‘No-no, no-no, no-no,’ he stammered, ‘you didn’t, you’re not.’

I smiled to put him at ease because I hate to see people shrink up like that. Tried a little humor: ‘Guess I shouldn’t have said disturb, huh? Gotta be disturbed already to be here, right?’

It confused him. He tensed, like he was about to bolt, his jaw working for traction on something to say.

I barged right ahead. ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Mia. She’s eleven. Blond, blue eyes, wearing jeans, sneakers, navy sweatshirt with a hood. She’s imaginary, my daughter – wouldn’t think you could lose her, but they drenched me with so much fucking Thorazine I lost track.’

Clyde wrapped his arms around himself and shook his head vehemently. ‘No-no, never, I didn’t touch her, I didn’t, no-no, I wasn’t here.’

The chopped skidding language, the childlike exaggeration of gesture, that opaqueness in his eyes – it was plain as his face he was retarded. And from the why he’d collapsed into himself at the mention of Mia, I figured he was here instead of a ‘home’ because there’d been trouble with touching little girls. If I hadn’t been gauzed out, I would have seen it immediately. But I didn’t, and I felt like shit. I told him I was sure he hadn’t touched Mia, not to worry about it.

I started to walk away but he uncoiled out of himself and grabbed my hand with both of his – not hard, not snared – and said, ‘I’m Clyde. My name is Clyde Hibbard. Hi. Hi, how are you?’ He smiled uncertainly.

I let him hold my hand a moment, then gently slipped it free. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I said, ‘My name is Jennifer Raine, Goldie Hart, Serena del Rio, Belle Tinker, Annie Oakley, Lola Montez. Mia and I are new here. Just checked in. Glad to meet you, Clyde.’

He was nodding excitedly. ‘You-you-you are beautiful. You are. Just like the other men said. Beautiful.’

I tried to tell him as clearly as I could: ‘I’m not what anyone says, Clyde. Either are you. It’s complicated enough being who we are.’

It only bewildered him. He fastened his gaze back on the clock.

‘Nice talking to you, Clyde,’ I said. ‘I have to find my daughter now.’

He swung his eyes to mine, pleading a case I didn’t understand. ‘I’m thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three years old.’

‘Don’t watch the clock, Clyde,’ I said. ‘Clocks lie. Watch the sun and moon.’ I squeezed his shoulder quickly, and left him there.

And I didn’t see him again till he was on top of me tonight like some nightmare lover pecking my face with slobbery kisses. I think that’s all he really wanted to do, kiss me, because he had his clothes on and wasn’t choking me or anything, but just his weight had me pinned, my arms under the covers. But I didn’t know what he wanted, and I was terrified, so I yelled for Mia to crawl under the bed so she wouldn’t have to watch and then I tried to fight out from under him, twisting my face away from his mouth, finally squirming an arm loose, and when I turned to roll free my elbow caught him in the nose. The pain seemed to startle him, then scare him. He grabbed my bare shoulders hard, shaking his head as he looked at my face. ‘Please, please, please,’ he blubbered, each ragged breath spraying blood from his nose on my face, shoulders, breasts. He shut his eyes and lowered his head, moaning ‘Please, please, love, I love you, please.’

When he started sobbing he let go of my shoulders and I slapped him as hard as I could. He flinched and ducked as I swung again, and I know if I had a gun it would have meant nothing to me, nothing, to blow his stupid fucking brains out.

‘Love you,’ he cried, eyes closed, shaking his head.

‘No. You have to ask, Clyde. You need permission. This is rape, Clyde; you’re scaring me, hurting me.’

He opened his eyes then, looking at me, and his eyes just kept getting wider, as if he was trying to open them far enough to hold what he was seeing in my face. He worked his mouth, a gummy white string of spittle at the corner, a wet, strangled whimper rising from his throat.

I realized he was looking at his blood on my face. ‘You hurt me, Clyde,’ I hissed. ‘You did.’

He lifted his hands helplessly, beseechingly, his mouth trembling to speak what he found impossible to believe.

I helped him believe. ‘It hurts, goddamn you, Clyde, you motherfucker, it hurts!’

‘No,’ he begged me. ‘Love you. I do. I do. I do.’

It was too much pain and hopelessness and fear. I started crying.

‘I hurt you,’ Clyde said, amazed, destroyed, lost. He slid off me onto the floor and curled up in a ball, sobbing. I jumped naked from the bed, looking for something to club him with, or to scream for help, or run, but instead I knelt down beside him, stroked his shoulder, whispered it was all right, it was over.

I promised him I wouldn’t tell.

He promised he’d help me escape.

Daniel reappeared with the Diamond. He was sitting cross-legged, the Diamond before him, on a high desert somewhere in Arizona on a windless, starless night, with the moon close to the horizon. He was crying, but he couldn’t remember why. Not because he couldn’t see inside the Diamond-center flame. He would eventually. The Diamond needed to be seen as much as he needed to see it. He could feel the permission there, but not the way. He would just have to keep sitting at the gate, keep mapping the axis of light until it illuminated the way. He smiled at the memory of Wild Bill trying to hammer into him that the map was not the journey.

‘Okay, Wild Bill,’ he said aloud, ‘until it illuminates the territory.’

He looked at the Diamond in front of him and told Volta, ‘It’s not a metaphor. It’s not the seed of the next universe. It is not a beacon. I think the Diamond is an entrance, a door, a portal – into what, I don’t know, but I will find out. When I do, and if I can, I will bring it to you.’

Since the telephone call nearly a day ago, Daniel talked aloud to Volta to discover and rehearse what he wanted to say the next time he called. He’d been too rattled from the theft the first time, less certain. One part of Daniel’s new certainty was the understanding that the Diamond wouldn’t permit him full passage until he honored his agreement with Volta or could explain, to his satisfaction and Volta’s, why he couldn’t bring him the Diamond. Daniel’s failure to fulfill his part of the agreement upset him deeply. He wondered if that was why he was crying when he reappeared, or if it was because he’d had to return. He checked his watch: They’d been gone five hours.

He’d discovered that when the Diamond vanished with him in daylight, he couldn’t see the spiral flame inside. The flame either dissolved in the sunlight or fused with it. The spiral-flame center was only visible when he vanished at night, and Daniel was convinced the flame was the threshold he needed to cross to enter the sphere.

He wiped his tears. As he got to his feet, he was seized by a vision of two moons on the horizon, one setting, one rising to meet it in mirror image. For a spinning moment he thought the moon was setting over the ocean or a lake, but unless the desert had turned liquid this was physically impossible. But so, supposedly, was vanishing. He thought his tears might be refracting the light and wiped his eyes again, this time with his sleeve. When he looked up, the moons were almost touching, as if a ghost twin were rising to join the real moon. He watched them melt into one. The moon seemed to brighten as it set.

Daniel shook his head. ‘What do you say, Volta? Was that a vision, an optical illusion, a hallucination, or a nightly occurrence I just haven’t noticed before?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. He put the Diamond in the bowling bag and headed for his truck. When he pulled onto the highway five minutes later, he was laughing.

When Smiling Jack called Volta the next morning he had something besides his essential good humor to make him cheerful. ‘We have made Melvin Keyes “extremely uncomfortable.” That’s his description of how he felt about providing the identity of the Livermore snitch, but I thought his discomfort came from the idea that we were about to start running downhill with his nuts in our hand. I gambled that the guy was this Debritto shit, and it was. I could almost feel the phone trembling in poor Melvin’s hand. I told him I’d get back to him soon, and while I understood he could fabricate any name he pleased, dump it on anybody, I knew it was one of three people as sure as I knew Debritto did Dredneau – and I also mentioned that solid documentation brightened my disposition and excited my gratitude.’

‘Excellent,’ Volta said.

Jack’s smile broadened. ‘Let’s make it a roll – you give me some good news.’

‘He hasn’t called,’ Volta said. ‘However, the sun rose this morning.’

‘Now, you got it, Volt – look on the bright side.’

Daniel had driven an hour west, watching the mountains take form in the rising light, when he caught some words in the corner of his eye, a blink, subliminal, but enough to shatter his reverie. He hit the brakes and fishtailed to a stop, then slammed the truck in reverse and backed up the highway.

The sign was written in sun-bleached red paint on a piece of whitewashed plywood wired to a cactus:

TWO MOONS REST STOP

1 mi. right on dirt road

Cabins Food Pool TV

Daniel decided the two moons he’d seen earlier were a vision from the Diamond instructing him to rest. The last time he’d slept was before the theft. The last time he’d eaten, too. He’d been drawing energy from vanishing with the Diamond, and now maybe it wanted some back. He drove on slowly, turning right at a rutted dirt road marked with an arrow that lanced two circles.

A dusty mile farther on was a weather-beaten building with office vacancy lettered in peeling white paint. Behind the office, arranged in a ramshackle circle, were twelve cabins, none of which had been close to a paintbrush in the last decade. Daniel stiffly dismounted from the cab and looked around. If not for some tire tracks near the office, he would have thought the Two Moons Rest Stop had been abandoned. He knocked on the office door.

A short, strong-shouldered man wearing black cotton slippers with plastic soles, jeans, and a short-sleeved red-and-yellow checked shirt opened it immediately. Daniel thought he might be either American Indian or Mongolian: of all the faces Daniel had studied with Jean Bluer, this would have been the most difficult to duplicate. He judged the man to be in his early fifties, but realized he might be off twenty years on either side.

The man looked past Daniel. ‘Nice truck,’ he said. ‘That three-fifty’s a good engine.’ He turned his attention to Daniel. ‘You want a cabin?’

Daniel, about to slide into his Isaiah Kharome voice, looked into the man’s shrewd black eyes and decided to play it straight. ‘Yes, I do. I know it’s a little early to be checking in – wanted to make Phoenix, but I’m too tired to drive. Safer to stop.’

The man nodded. ‘Figured you were a guest. The bill collectors never drive campers. They like those compact foreign rigs. I’ll get you a key.’ He turned back into the office, saying over his shoulder, ‘Welcome to come in if you want.’

‘Thanks, but I could use some air.’ Daniel glanced around as he waited. The cabins didn’t look like much, but as long as they had a hot bath and a bed he didn’t care. He didn’t see the pool or the coffee shop.

The man, moving silently in his slippers, returned holding a large leather cup and a feather.

Daniel indicated the feather. ‘That from an owl?’

‘Great Horned. Found it on the door step the day after we bought the place.’ The man squatted on the porch and slowly swept the owl feather back and forth above the sun-bleached planks, shaking the cup and chanting softly to himself. Abruptly, he spilled the cup’s contents onto the decking: twelve small brass keys, various small bones and claws, a flat silver disc, a small gold nugget, obsidian shards of various shapes and transparencies, a pig tusk, and four dried seeds, each different, and none that Daniel recognized.

The man studied the arrangement a moment, then decisively picked up a key and gave it to Daniel. ‘Number Five.’ He pointed to the cabin. ‘That one there. Park in back.’

Daniel hefted the key in his palm. Hesitantly, he said, ‘I didn’t notice the coffee shop.’

The man looked up blankly. ‘Coffee shop?’

‘I mean, I just assumed – the sign down the road said food.’

The man tilted his head. ‘You hungry?’

‘A little.’

‘Got some jerky and half a loaf of pumpernickel bread in the house. I’ll bring it over as soon as I get the keys put away.’

‘Don’t bother yourself, really – I have some stuff in the truck.’

‘No bother. I’ll bring it over in a bit. You go ahead and get started on your rest.’

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said. He felt he should go, but stood there watching the man return the various items to the cup. ‘I’ve been told my curiosity often lapses into rudeness, but I can’t help asking how you can tell which key to select.’

The man dropped the last seed into the cup and rose to his feet, facing Daniel. ‘I don’t know how I do it. Kept trying, and after a while got a feel for it, I guess.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Daniel said, ‘I see. So it’s intuitive, right? I mean, there’s no method.’

‘No, no particular method. But there are traditions.’

Daniel plunged to the point: ‘Well, what exactly do you feel?’

The man cocked his head, sunlight catching his high, strong cheekbones. ‘What do I feel? I feel which key fits the guest.’

‘Ah ha,’ Daniel said, realizing no secrets were going to escape the tautology of the obvious, ‘sure – that makes sense. Thank you for indulging my curiosity.’

The man shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’

Daniel parked behind the cabin. As he came around to the front – there didn’t seem to be a back door – he saw the swimming pool set in the center of the encircling cabins. It appeared to be about six feet wide, and sloped dramatically from three feet deep to nine. There was no water in the pool. Weeds flourished in the long cracks where the cement had buckled and slipped.

The cabin wasn’t locked. The interior, though sparely furnished, seemed even smaller than the outside suggested. But it had four large windows and it was clean. A wood heater dominated the center of the room. The squat lines of the iron bedframe were softened by the sheen of its polyester cover. Half a cord of wood was stacked along one wall, and on the opposite side was a formica table with two straight-back chairs. A TV, a fat seventeen-inch Philco from the mid-sixties, occupied most of the tabletop, its rabbit-ears antenna giving it an odd sense of alertness. Daniel assumed the single door led to the bathroom, but found only a toilet and washbasin behind it. He pissed, then washed his hands and splashed cold water on his face. He soon discovered there were no towels.

Moderately annoyed, Daniel – face still dripping – was standing in front of the TV waiting for it to come on when the manager said from the open front door, ‘It’s not plugged in.’

‘Oh,’ Daniel said.

The man set plastic-wrapped jerky and slices of pumpernickel on top of the TV. ‘Actually,’ he said, looking at the screen, ‘it wouldn’t matter if it was plugged in, because we don’t have electricity. And if we did, they would probably turn it off after a couple of months and send some righteous, brutal men around to collect money. I don’t like to do business with such people. Their hearts are no bigger than mouse shit.’

‘Speaking of business practices, it seems to me that your sign out on the highway is sort of misleading.’

‘Maybe. We do have cabins, food, pool, and TV, but sometimes not all at once. Besides, did I ask you for money?’

‘No, you didn’t,’ Daniel acknowledged, surprised.

‘We don’t charge. It’s shameful to accept money from guests.’

Daniel didn’t know what to do with that information, so he said, ‘Why don’t you put free on your sign?’

‘Because nobody would be surprised when they got here.’

Daniel stared at him, then shook his head. ‘I’m sorry – I seem to be having comprehension difficulties. What’s your name? If I’m your guest, I should know who to thank for this hospitality.’

‘Wally Moon.’

‘Mine’s Daniel Pearse,’ Daniel told him, ignoring his cover. ‘If it’s not too personal, Wally, could I ask your nationality?’

‘My mother, Lao-Shi, was Chinese; my father was a full-blood Apache named Burning Moon.’

‘And may I ask why this place is called Two Moons? Did you have a vision?’

‘No, I took up with a woman. She is part Apache and part Seminole and some Cajun. She is not a relative, but her name is also Moon. It’s a common name.’

‘So: Two Moons.’

‘My wife likes it. Her name is Annie. She’s not here right now because she’s menstruating. She goes off to the mountains then. She doesn’t like being around me when she’s menstruating. Says I screw up the reception. Women are all a little strange, but Annie is really something. I love her.’

Daniel felt his face distort as he fought back tears. When he tried to speak his voice cracked so badly there was no point in trying to hide. He quit fighting.

He felt Wally Moon’s hand softly on his shoulder. ‘You just need rest, Daniel. There’s a sweathouse outside and a cold shower. The lamps and kerosene are on the closet shelf. Come over if there’s anything you want. You’re welcome to stay as long as you need.’

Daniel gathered himself and said, ‘Thank you.’ He tried to smile. ‘What is this, some halfway house for fools?’

‘No. Simply a place to rest.’

When Wally had left, Daniel brought in the bowling bag with the Diamond zipped inside. He laid down beside it on the bed. He tried to think about what he was doing or could do or should, but it whirled away like water down a drain and in moments he was asleep.

THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNAL OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL 5?

I numbed and dumbed it through the day, nibbled my mush, nodded through my half-hour with the Doc. He said I looked pensive and withdrawn. I told him Mia was sick. That’s when he chose to make his stunning-insight move, so contrived and dramatic you could tell he’d been saving it till I was weak: ‘Jenny, do you know that in Italian “mia” means “me”?’

I sank my fangs in Doctor Putney’s vanity and let it drip: ‘Doc, didn’t it ever cross your feeble mind that Mia is the acronym for Missing in Action? I named her after her father. It was a great marriage, Doc. We were both Soldiers of Fortune – the only man-wife team in the world – but his ’chute didn’t open on a jump over Borneo. No need to even look for his body in the jungle, but since there’s no body, he’s officially MIA. You get it, or you want pictures? How about some pictures of my pussy, Doc? Some mental spread shots?’ Cause this distressed little damsel do declare she don’t know what scares you worse, her mind or her cunt.’

I’ll say this for the Doc, he had the class to say, ‘I don’t know either.’

Ain’t that the truth. He suggested we take a week off to consider whether there was any point in trying to continue working together. He thought I might have better luck with a female Jungian.

Personally, I think I’m healing, and I’m doing it against a run of bad luck. What did that crazy gambler in Oakland always say? ‘Your luck’s bound to change if your chips hold out.’ And I might be digging for the last handful, but I’m still digging. Or as my new loverboy, the Dharma Joker, says on his radio show, ‘Dig it all, and when it’s all dug up, little darling, put it on the line.’ He didn’t actually say that yet, but he could the next time.

I didn’t tell the Doctor about Clyde. I promised Clyde I wouldn’t, and I’ve learned how strong it makes me to honor promises. I don’t feel Clyde will mess with other women, but he might, and her suffering will be marked on my soul. But I don’t feel guilty about my silence. I’ve learned about guilt. It’s an abscessed truth, rotting with denial. And I need every truth I can get if I want to get well. I need the responsibility for my silence and for what I say. I want the consequences of my judgment.

Maybe I shouldn’t have hidden Mia. I don’t know. She could feel my fear from under the bed, and since she has such a powerful imagination, that might have been worse. She cried most of the day, but is sleeping now. I’ll talk to her about it in the morning.

As we’d arranged, I met Clyde after therapy, under the big oak on the side lawn. It was difficult to make him tell me how he’d gotten into the women’s wing. He trembled the whole time, mumbled, wouldn’t look at me. I looked at him with revulsion, and sorrow, and pity, and love, and helplessness, until the feelings whirled and blurred together and I had to freeze myself to concentrate on making him tell me how he’d got in. He gave me ten dollars, two crumpled, clammy fives – he said it was all he had but he could try to steal some from the other men when they were asleep. Touched, touched almost to tears again, I told him ten was enough, and enough was plenty.

Clyde started snuffling then, spreading his arms out in misery as if I might hold him. When I stepped back, he dropped to his knees like a broken pilgrim, a doom-struck suitor of my violated affections. I thanked him for his help, repeated my promise not to tell, and turned and walked away, hating him for taking what can only be given, loathing his damaged, presumptuous greed, and loving him because his shame was greater than my forgiveness.

The moment I turned from Clyde and started walking away, the lightning scar at the base of my spine started burning like dry ice. I can still feel it as I write this, but it’s more like a numb warmth now. I feel an intense desire to open, to be known – I suppose it’s some sort of balancing response to Clyde. No wonder I’m locked up.

But Mia and me won’t be shut-ins much longer. I told her what we have to do before I sang her to sleep, and promised to wake her when it was time. Promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep, miles before we’re gone. Everything’s packed in a tight bundle, except this journal and the radio. I’m going to change the journal to a notebook. We’ll need the radio to beam in on the DJ. I’ve been running the dial from one end to the other, but either the DJ’s not sending or I’m not receiving. I need directions to the grave.

I’m leaving the Doc a note on my pillow: ‘Gone dancing with the DJ. Don’t wait up.’