The Golden City

37

Nathan Boone established his command post at the Shangri La Hotel in West Los Angeles. He was about ten minutes away from where Michael Corrigan was staying-a pretentious place on the beach called the El Dorado. Boone saw no benefit to living in the same hotel as the Traveler. It would only make it easier for Michael to interfere with the current operation.

Boone liked the bland décor of the rooms at the Shangri La. There were no bright colors-nothing that would agitate the mind. But the best feature of the building was that visitors could enter through the parking structure and avoid the desk clerk. Boone didn’t want someone like Martin Doyle sitting on a couch in the lobby.

At this moment, Doyle was watching television in the suite’s living room; he particularly enjoyed the news updates about the lost children. Carlo Ramirez, the Peruvian mercenary working as Doyle’s handler, sat beside the little table in Boone’s bedroom. He kept fidgeting and avoiding Boone’s eyes.

“It was only about five minutes, Mr. Boone. I swear to you-”

“I don’t care if it was only five seconds. As I told you several weeks ago, your main responsibility is to watch Doyle.” Boone scrawled a few words on a notepad, and Ramirez looked terrified. Perhaps he thought the notepad was some kind of death list.

“He’s got scars.”

“Excuse me?”

“Doyle has scars, here and here.” Ramirez touched his breast bone and the back of his hand. “If he’s got two tracer beads inside his body, you can hunt him down at any time.”

“Mr. Doyle is like a special kind of weapon that helps us achieve our objectives. But that doesn’t mean I want him roaming freely through this city. What are you going to do next time Doyle gets away from you?”

“I’ll find him and destroy him, sir.”

“Destroy him immediately.”

“I understand, Mr. Boone.”

“Good. Now send him in here.”

Still sweating, Ramirez left the room. Boone sipped ice tea and gazed out the window at the shoreline park on the other side of Ocean Avenue. During the last twenty years, winter storms had eroded the cliffs at the edge of the park. In certain places, sidewalks and flower beds had fallen down the slope to the coast highway. Boone was starting to think that everything around him was falling apart. A few days ago, Mrs. Brewster and her driver had gone off a cliff near the Portreath airport, and the authorities still hadn’t pulled the car out of the water.

Martin Doyle swaggered into the room and shut the door. Since leaving Thailand, he had lost his bloated appearance. Now he resembled an unemployed actor who worked part-time as a trainer at a gym. Doyle made a point of eating special meals that included fat-free cheese, pomegranate juice and steel-cut oatmeal. He was a walking refutation of the theory that a healthy diet led to a virtuous life.

“It looks like you tied up Ramirez and dunked him in the pool.” Doyle chuckled as he sat down. “Good for you, Boone. Guys like that need to be kept in line.”

“We were talking about you, Mr. Doyle. I learned that you wandered away from the rest of the team.”

“That was no big deal. Just a little mistake. Nothing to worry about.” Doyle leaned back in his chair. “So how we doing, Boone? Are people scared enough? Or should I scare them a little bit more?”

“I don’t want you to do anything for the next few days.”

“Maybe I should go out to the desert.”

“No.”

“What’s out in the desert is the only thing that can hurt us. I created a story for you. A fairy tale about a monster. But the story needs an ending.”

“Mr. Ramirez is taking you to a hotel in Culver City. Stay there until you receive instructions.”

“Does this new hotel have an exercise room?”

“I think so.”

“Good. I’m trying to get back in shape.” Doyle stood up, glanced at Boone’s open suitcase, and then sauntered back to the door. Suddenly, he turned, and there was a different expression in his eyes-that same mixture of shrewdness and hate that Boone had seen in Thailand.

“Are we doing what we’re supposed to do?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m following orders, being a good soldier. I just want to make sure that all of us are moving in the right direction.”

Instead of showing anger, Boone took off his steel-rimmed glasses and cleaned them with a tissue. “Do you remember when we hunted you down like a runaway pig? Remember how you lay on the dirt, screaming?”

Doyle’s hands clenched as the demon kicked and scratched inside his brain. “Yeah. I remember.”

“Good. That’s good, Mr. Doyle. Just checking.”

Boone didn’t relax until he heard Doyle and Ramirez leave the hotel suite. Then he went out to the living room, got a bottle of vodka from the mini-bar, and poured it into his glass of iced tea. Right now he was vulnerable. Doyle sensed that weakness. What’s out in the desert is the only thing that can hurt us. Well, that’s not exactly true, Boone thought. I’m the only person who is in danger. Even this hotel room wasn’t safe. If the police arrived, they would find a manila envelope that contained black-and-white photographs of the kidnapped children. It was painful to look at their frightened faces, but Boone didn’t have the strength to destroy the images.

His fingers touched the little bottles of liquor in the rack, and then he turned away from this temptation. For the first time in a great many years, he wanted to talk to someone about what was bothering him, but that was impossible. He didn’t have any friends; it was a mistake to reveal yourself to another person. Of course there were always a few people who already knew you well.

Boone returned to the bedroom, switched on his computer, and began to answer email. But certain memories pushed through his mind with such power that his fingers were frozen on the keyboard. Maybe he should go see her and confront the weakness that she represented. If you had an enemy, you should destroy that person, even if it was just another aspect of yourself.

Anthony Cannero and Myron Riles were the other two members of the team working in Los Angeles. Boone called both men and told them he was going to evaluate a site for a meeting. Then he left the hotel in his rental car and turned onto the coast highway. Route One marked the transition point between the continental United States and the blue-green expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Boone felt like he was passing through a borderland with surfboard shops and seaside villas. He drove a little faster as the morning fog burned away and patches of reflected sunlight appeared on the water.

Santa Barbara was two hours north of Los Angeles. It had once been a sleepy retirement town with strict construction codes that mandated red tile roofs for every downtown building. These days, the community was an odd mixture of wealth and beach style; it was the sort of place where the women shopping in expensive boutiques wore torn jeans and T-shirts.

North of downtown, the city planners had allowed strip malls and tract developments of flimsy-looking ranch houses with stucco walls. Boone had once lived in one of those houses, but that was a different life, a different reality. He felt like he was driving slowly into his past.

Ruth’s office was in a two-story office building near the freeway. After their separation, she started working for an insurance agency and was now a licensed broker. Boone entered a waiting room where a young woman answered the phone while destroying space monsters on her computer.

“May I help you?”

“Tell Ruth that Mr. Boone is here.”

“Oh.” The receptionist stared at him as she picked up the phone.

Footsteps on the staircase, then Ruth appeared, a practical-looking woman wearing a blue pants suit and black-framed glasses. “This is a surprise,” she said cautiously.

“I guess it’s been awhile.”

“Almost eight years.”

“Can we talk?”

Ruth hesitated and then nodded slightly. “I don’t have a lot of time, but we can have some coffee.”

Boone followed his wife out the door to a nearby coffee shop where the counter girl had sea shells braided into her hair. They took their paper cups and went outside to a patio next to the parking lot.

“So why are you here, Nathan? Do you finally want a divorce?”

“No. Unless you want one. I was in Los Angeles and thought I’d drive up the coast and see you.”

“There’s only one thing I know about you. One indisputable fact. You don’t do anything without a reason.”

Should I tell her about Michael Corrigan? Boone thought. He wasn’t sure. The problem with talking to other people was that they rarely followed the script that was in your mind. “So how are you, Ruth? What’s new in your life?”

“My income went up last year. I got a speeding ticket eight months ago. But, of course, you probably know all that.”

Boone didn’t object to her statement. After he joined the Brethren, he arranged to receive monthly reports on Ruth’s phone calls. The call sheet was cross-referenced with detailed information about whoever she spoke to more than three times in a six-day period. In addition, the Norm-All program constantly evaluated Ruth’s credit card activity and compared her liquor and prescription drug purchases with the regional norm.

“I’m not talking about the facts of our life. I just wanted to know how you are.”

Ruth stared at him and Boone felt like he was being interrogated. “I’m fine, Nathan. I have friends. I’ve gotten into bird watching. I’m trying to lead a productive life.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“What happened to us and the other parents was like a plane crash or a car accident. I still keep in touch with some of the people from the support group. Most of us have moved on with our lives, but we were all injured in a profound way. We wake up every morning, go to work, come home and make dinner-but we’ll never be completely healed.”

“I wasn’t injured,” Boone said. “The incident changed me. It made me see the world for what it is.”

“You have to accept the past and move on.”

“I have moved on,” Boone said. “I’m going to make sure that that kind of incident will never occur again.”

Ruth touched Boone’s hand, but let go when he flinched. “I don’t know what you’re doing with the Evergreen Foundation, but it’s not going to give you what you want.”

“And what’s that?”

“You know…”

“No, I don’t!” Boone realized that he was shouting. A young man glanced at them before he entered the coffee shop.

“You want Jennifer back. She was our angel. Our precious little girl.”

Boone stood up, took a deep breath, and regained his self control. “It’s been nice seeing you again. Incidentally, my insurance policy still has you down as a beneficiary. Everything is in your name.”

Ruth fumbled with her purse, pulled out a wad of tissue, and blew her nose. “I don’t want your money.”

“Then give it away,” Boone said, and marched back to his car.

When he was in his twenties, he had gone through a six-week army reconnaissance course on an island off the coast of South Carolina. At the end of the training period, you had to catch a wild boar with a snare, stab the squealing animal with your commando knife and butcher it on the spot. That was just a test, one more way to show that you could deal with any problem. Thirty years later, nothing had changed. He was compelled to take one last step to prove his strength and invulnerability.

Boone punched in the address on his GPS, but it wasn’t necessary. The moment he turned off La Cumbre Road, he remembered the way. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon when he arrived at his destination. School had been out for several hours; only a handful of cars were in the parking lot.

Valley Elementary School was over forty years old, but it still looked cheaply made and unsubstantial. Each of the six grades had their own brick building with an asphalt roof. Covered walkways connected the buildings. Everywhere you looked there were planters filled with ivy and the spiky orange flowers called Birds of Paradise.

Boone strolled past a classroom with drawings of rainbows taped to the windows. Some of the rainbows were scrawled across the construction paper while others displayed the different colors in distinct bands.

Jennifer drew rainbows and everything else with wild loops and curves. Her cows were red. Her horses were blue. When she drew her father, Boone became an assemblage of lines and circles with crooked eyeglasses and an up-turned grin.

The children ate lunch in a central quadrangle surrounded by the class buildings. A lost sweatshirt was on the ground and a thermos bottle with a unicorn had been left, sad and lonely, in the middle of a picnic table. This was where she sat. This was where she and others had died. There was no plaque or memorial statue to acknowledge what had happened here.

Boone was ready to test his toughness and his bravery, but his body betrayed him. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. It felt as if his head had exploded and a scream of sadness and pain had finally been released.