Mr. Murder

Five

1

Shortly after dawn, Marty woke Charlotte and Emily. “Got to get showered and hit the road, ladies. Lots to do this morning.”

Emily was fully awake in an instant. She scrambled out from under the covers and stood on the bed in her daffodil-yellow pajamas, which brought her almost to eye-level with him. She demanded a hug and a good-morning kiss. “I had a super dream last night.”

“Let me guess. You dreamed you were old enough to date Tom Cruise, drive a sports car, smoke cigars, get drunk, and puke your guts out.”

“Silly,” she said. “I dreamed, for breakfast, you went out to the vending machines and got us Mountain Dew and candy bars.”

“Sorry, but it wasn’t prophetic.”

“Daddy, don’t be a writer using big words.”

“I meant, your dream isn’t going to come true.”

“Well, I know that,” she said. “You and Mommy would blow a basket if we had candy for breakfast.”

“Gasket. Not basket.”

She wrinkled her face. “Does it really matter?”

“No, I guess not. Basket, gasket, whatever you say.”

Emily squirmed out of his arms and jumped down from the bed. “I’m going to the potty,” she announced.

“That’s a start. Then take a shower, brush your teeth, and get dressed.”

Charlotte was, as usual, slower to come fully awake. By the time Emily was closing the bathroom door, Charlotte had only managed to push back the blankets and sit on the edge of her bed. She was scowling down at her bare feet.

Marty sat beside her. “They’re called ‘toes.’ ”

“Mmmm,” she said.

“You need them to fill out the ends of your socks.”

She yawned.

Marty said, “You’ll need them a lot more if you’re going to be a ballet dancer. But for most other professions, however, they’re not essential. So if you aren’t going to be a ballet dancer, then you could have them surgically removed, just the biggest ones or all ten, that’s entirely up to you.”

She cocked her head and gave him a Daddy’s-being-cute -so-let’s-humor-him look. “I think I’ll keep them.”

“Whatever you want,” he said, and kissed her forehead.

“My teeth feel furry,” she complained. “So does my tongue.”

“Maybe during the night you ate a cat.”

She was awake enough to giggle.

In the bathroom the toilet flushed, and a second later the door opened. Emily said, “Charlotte, you want privacy for the potty, or can I shower now?”

“Go ahead and shower,” Charlotte said. “You smell.”

“Yeah? Well, you stink.”

“You reek.”

“That’s because I want to,” Emily said, probably because she couldn’t think of a comeback word for “reek.”

“My gracious young daughters, such little ladies.”

As Emily disappeared back into the bathroom and began to fiddle with the shower controls, Charlotte said, “Gotta get this fuzz off my teeth.” She got up and went to the open door. At the threshold she turned to Marty. “Daddy, do we have to go to school today?”

“Not today.”

“I didn’t think so.” She hesitated. “Tomorrow?”

“I don’t know, honey. Probably not.”

Another hesitation. “Will we be going to school again ever?”

“Well, sure, of course.”

She stared at him for too long, then nodded and went into the bathroom.

Her question rattled Marty. He wasn’t sure if she was merely fantasizing about a life without school, as most kids did now and then, or whether she was expressing a more genuine concern about the depth of the trouble that had rolled over them.

He had heard the television come on in the other room while he had been sitting on the edge of the bed with Charlotte, so he knew Paige was awake. He got up to go say good morning to her.

As he was approaching the connecting door, Paige called to him. “Marty, quick, look at this.”

When he hurried into the other room, he saw her standing in front of the TV. She was watching an early-morning news program.

“It’s about us,” she said.

He recognized their own home on the screen. A woman reporter was standing in the street, her back to the house, facing the camera.

Marty squatted in front of the television and turned up the sound.

“. . . so the mystery remains, and the police would very much like to talk to Martin Stillwater this morning . . .”

“Oh, this morning they want to talk,” he said disgustedly.

Paige shushed him.

“. . . an irresponsible hoax by a writer too eager to advance his career, or something far more sinister? Now that the police laboratory has confirmed the large amount of blood in the Stillwater house is indeed of human origin, the need for the authorities to answer that question has overnight become more urgent.”

That was the end of the piece. As the reporter gave her name and location, Marty registered the word “LIVE” in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the importance of them hadn’t registered immediately.

“Live?” Marty said. “They don’t send reporters out live unless the story’s ongoing.”

“It is ongoing,” Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, frowning down at the television. “The lunatic is still out there somewhere.”

“I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house for visuals. It’s not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too expensive and no excitement.”

The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the anchorman wasn’t one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early-morning program, but a well-known network face.

Astonished, Marty said, “This is national. Since when does a breaking-and-entry report rate national news?”

“You were assaulted too,” Paige said.

“So what? These days, there’s a worse crime than this every ten seconds somewhere in the country.”

“But you’re a celebrity.”

“The hell I am.”

“You may not like it, but you are.”

“I’m not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of their chat segments, as an invited guest?” He rapped a knuckle against the face of the anchorman on the screen. “Harder than getting an invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a publicist who’d sold his soul to the devil, he couldn’t get me on this program, Paige. I’m just not big enough. I’m a nobody to them.”

“So . . . what’re you saying?”

He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore breezes.

Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own world but which was, below its deceptive surface, infinitely strange and inimical to human life.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that the police would ordinarily have completed their tests on those blood samples so quickly, and I know it’s not standard practice to release crime-lab results so casually to the media.” He let the draperies fall into place and turned to Paige, whose brow was furrowed with worry. “National news? Live, on the scene? I don’t know what the hell is happening, Paige, but it’s even stranger than I thought it was last night.”

While Paige showered, Marty pulled up a chair in front of the television and channel-hopped, searching for other news programs. He caught the end of a second story about himself on a local channel—and then a third piece, complete, on a national show.

He was trying to guard against paranoia, but he had the distinct impression that both stories suggested, without making accusations, that the falsity of his statement to the Mission Viejo Police was a foregone conclusion and that his real motive was either to sell more books or something darker and weirder than mere career-pumping. Both programs made use of the photograph from the current issue of People, in which he resembled a movie zombie with glowing eyes, lurching out of shadows, violent and demented. And both pointedly mentioned the three guns of which he’d been relieved by the police, as if he might be a suburban survivalist living atop a bunker packed solid with arms and ammunition. Toward the end of the third report, he thought an implication was made to the effect that he might even be dangerous, although it was so smooth and so subtly inserted that it was more a matter of the reporter’s tone of voice and expressions than any words in the script.

Rattled, he switched off the television.

For a while he stared at the blank screen. The gray of the dead monitor matched his mood.

After everyone was showered and dressed, the girls got in the back seat of the BMW and dutifully put on their seatbelts while their parents stowed the luggage in the trunk.

When Marty slammed the trunk lid and locked it, Paige spoke to him quietly, so Charlotte and Emily couldn’t hear. “You really think we have to go this far, do these things, it’s really that bad?”

“I don’t know. Like I told you, I’ve been brooding about this ever since I woke up, since three o’clock this morning, and I still don’t know if I’m over-reacting.”

“These are serious steps to take, even risky.”

“It’s just that . . . as strange as this already is, with The Other and everything he said to me, whatever underlies it all is stranger still. More dangerous than one lunatic with a gun. Deadlier and a lot bigger than that. Something so big it’ll crush us if we try to stand up to it. That’s how I felt in the middle of the night, afraid, more scared even than when he had the kids in his car. And after what I saw on TV this morning, I’m more—not less—inclined to go with my gut feelings.”

He realized that his expression of dread was extreme, with an unmistakable flavor of paranoia. But he was no alarmist, and he was confident that his instincts could be trusted. Events had dissolved all of his doubts about his mental well-being.

He wished he could identify an enemy other than the improbable dead-ringer, for he knew intuitively that there was another enemy, and it would be comforting to have it defined. The Mafia, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, consortiums of evil bankers, the board of directors of some ferociously greedy international conglomerate, right-wing generals intent on establishing a military dictatorship, a cabal of insane Mideastern zealots, mad scientists intent on blowing the world to smithereens for the sheer hell of it, or Satan himself in all his horned splendor—any of the standard villains of television dramas and countless novels, regardless of how unlikely and clichéd, would be preferable to an adversary without face or form or name.

Chewing her lower lip, lost in thought, Paige let her gaze travel across the breeze-ruffled trees, other parked cars, and the front of the motel, before tilting her head back and looking up at three shrieking sea gulls that wheeled across the mostly blue and uncaring azure sky.

“You sense it too,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Oppressive. We’re not being watched, but the feeling is almost the same.”

“More than that,” she said. “Different. The world has changed—or the way I look at it.”

“Me too.”

“Something’s been . . . lost.”

And we’ll never find it again, he thought.

2

The Ritz-Carlton was a remarkable hotel, exquisitely tasteful, with generous applications of marble, limestone, granite, quality art, and antiques throughout its public areas. The enormous flower arrangements, on display wherever one turned, were the most artfully fashioned that Oslett had ever seen. Attired in subdued uniforms, courteous, omnipresent, the staff seemed to outnumber the guests. All in all, it reminded Oslett of home, the Connecticut estate on which he had been raised, although the family mansion was larger than the Ritz-Carlton, was furnished with antiques only of museum quality, had a staff-to-family ratio of six to one, and featured a landing pad large enough to accommodate the military helicopters in which the President of the United States and his retinue sometimes traveled.

The two-bedroom suite with spacious living room, in which Drew Oslett and Clocker were quartered, offered every amenity from a fully stocked bar to marble shower stalls so spacious that it would have been possible for a visiting ballet dancer to practice entrechats during his morning ablutions. The towels were not by Pratesi, as were those he had used all his life, but they were good Egyptian cotton, soft and absorbent.

By 7:50 Tuesday morning, Oslett had dressed in a white cotton shirt with whalebone buttons by Theophilus Shirtmakers of London, a navy-blue cashmere blazer crafted with sublime attention to detail by his personal tailor in Rome, gray wool slacks, black oxfords (an eccentric touch) handmade by an Italian cobbler living in Paris, and a club tie in stripes of navy, maroon, and gold. The color of his silk pocket handkerchief precisely matched the gold in his tie.

Thus attired, his mood elevated by his sartorial perfection, he went looking for Clocker. He didn’t desire the big man’s company, of course; he just preferred, for his own peace of mind, to know what Clocker was up to at all times. And he nurtured the hope that one blessed day he would discover Karl Clocker dead, felled by a massive cardiac infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, or an alien death ray like those about which the big man was always reading.

Clocker was in a patio chair on the balcony off the living room, ignoring a breathtaking view of the Pacific, his nose stuck in the last chapter of Shape-Changing Gynecologists of the Dark Galaxy, or whatever the hell it was called. He was wearing the same hat with the duck feather, tweed sportcoat, and Hush Puppies, although he had on new purple socks, fresh slacks, and a clean white shirt. He’d changed into a different harlequin-pattern sweater-vest, as well, this one in blue, pink, yellow, and gray. Though he was not sporting a tie, so much black hair bristled from the open neck of his shirt that, at a glance, he appeared to be wearing a cravat.

After failing to respond to Oslett’s first “good morning, ” Clocker replied to the repetition of those words with the improbable split-finger greeting that characters gave each other on Star Trek, his attention still riveted to the paperback. If Oslett had possessed a chainsaw or cleaver, he would have severed Clocker’s hand at the wrist and tossed it into the ocean. He wondered if room service would send up a suitably sharp instrument from the chef’s collection of kitchen cutlery.

The day was warmish, already seventy. Blue skies and balmy breezes were a welcome change from the chill of the previous night.

Promptly at eight o’clock—barely in time to prevent Oslett from being driven mad by the lulling cries of sea gulls, the tranquilizing rumble of the incoming combers, and the faint laughter of the early surfers paddling their boards out to sea—the Network representative arrived to brief them on developments. He was a far different item from the hulking advance man who’d driven them from the airport to the Ritz-Carlton several hours earlier. Savile Row suit. Club tie. Good Bally wingtips. One look at him was all Oslett needed to be certain that he owned no article of clothing on which was printed a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared.

He said his name was Peter Waxhill, and he was probably telling the truth. He was high enough in the organization to know Oslett’s and Clocker’s real names—although he had booked them into the hotel as John Galbraith and John Maynard Keynes—so there was no reason for him to conceal his own.

Waxhill appeared to be in his early forties, ten years older than Oslett, but the razor-cut hair at his temples was feathered with gray. At six feet, he was tall but not overbearing; he was slim but fit, handsome but not dauntingly so, charming but not familiar. He handled himself not merely as if he had been a diplomat for decades but as if he had been genetically engineered for that career.

After introducing himself and commenting on the weather, Waxhill said, “I took the liberty of inquiring with room service if you’d had breakfast, and as they said you hadn’t, I’m afraid I took the further liberty of ordering for the three of us, so we can breakfast and discuss business simultaneously. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Oslett said, impressed by the man’s suave-ness and efficiency.

No sooner had he responded than the suite doorbell rang, and Waxhill ushered in two waiters pushing a serving cart covered with a white tablecloth and stacked with dishes. In the center of the living room, the waiters raised hidden leaves on the cart, converting it into a round table, and distributed chargers-plates-napkins -cups-saucers-glassware-flatware with the grace and speed of magicians manipulating playing cards. Together they caused to appear a variety of serving dishes from bottomless compartments under the table, until suddenly breakfast appeared as if from thin air: scrambled eggs with red peppers, bacon, sausages, kippers, toast, croissants, hot-house strawberries accompanied by brown sugar and small pitchers of heavy cream, fresh orange juice, and a silver-plated thermos-pot of coffee.

Waxhill complimented the waiters, thanked them, tipped them, and signed for the bill, remaining in motion the whole time, so that he was returning the room-service ticket and hotel pen to them as they were crossing the threshold into the corridor.

When Waxhill closed the door and returned to the table, Oslett said, “Harvard or Yale?”

“Yale. And you?”

“Princeton. Then Harvard.”

“In my case, Yale and then Oxford.”

“The President went to Oxford,” Oslett noted.

“Did he indeed,” Waxhill said, raising his eyebrows, pretending this was news. “Well, Oxford endures, you know.”

Apparently having finished the final chapter of Planet of the Gastrointestinal Parasites, Karl Clocker entered from the balcony, a walking embarrassment as far as Oslett was concerned. Waxhill allowed himself to be introduced to the Trekker, shook hands, and gave every impression he was not choking on revulsion or hilarity.

They pulled up three straight-backed occasional chairs and sat down to breakfast. Clocker didn’t take off his hat.

As they transferred food from the serving dishes to their plates, Waxhill said, “Overnight, we’ve picked up a few interesting bits of background on Martin Stillwater, the most important of which relates to his oldest daughter’s hospitalization five years ago.”

“What was wrong with her?” Oslett asked.

“They didn’t have a clue at first. Based on the symptoms, they suspected cancer. Charlotte—that’s the daughter, she was four years old at the time—was in rather desperate shape for a while, but it eventually proved to be an unusual blood-chemistry imbalance, quite treatable.”

“Good for her,” Oslett said, though he didn’t care whether the Stillwater girl had lived or died.

“Yes, it was,” Waxhill said, “but at her lowest point, when the doctors were edging toward a more terminal diagnosis, her father and mother underwent bone-marrow aspiration. Extraction of bone marrow with a special aspirating needle.”

“Sounds painful.”

“No doubt. Doctors required samples to determine which parent would be the best donor in case a marrow transplant was required. Charlotte’s marrow was producing little new blood, and indications were that malignancy was inhibiting blood-cell formation.”

Oslett took a bite of the eggs. There was basil in them, and they were marvelous. “I fail to see where Charlotte’s illness could have any relationship to our current problem.”

After pausing for effect, Waxhill said, “She was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.”

Oslett froze with a second forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth.

“Five years ago,” Waxhill repeated for emphasis.

“What month?”

“December.”

“What day did Stillwater give the marrow sample?”

“The sixteenth. December sixteenth.”

“Damn. But we had a blood sample as well, a backup—”

“Stillwater also gave blood samples. One of them would have been packaged with each marrow sample for lab work.”

Oslett conveyed the forkful of eggs to his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, and said, “How could our people screw up like this?”

“We’ll probably never know. Anyway, the ‘how’ doesn’t matter as much as the fact they did screw up, and we have to live with it.”

“So we never started where we thought we did.”

“Or with whom we thought we started,” Waxhill rephrased.

Clocker was eating like a horse without a feed bag. Oslett wanted to throw a towel over the big man’s head to spare Waxhill the unpleasant sight of such vigorous mastication. At least the Trekker had not yet punctuated the conversation with inscrutable commentary.

“Exceptional kippers,” Waxhill said.

Oslett said, “I’ll have to try one.”

After sipping orange juice and patting his mouth with his napkin, Waxhill said, “As to how your Alfie knew Stillwater existed and was able to find him . . . there are two theories at the moment.”

Oslett noticed the “your Alfie” instead of “our Alfie,” which might mean nothing—or might indicate an effort was already under way to shift the blame to him in spite of the incontrovertible fact that the disaster was directly the result of sloppy scientific procedures and had nothing whatsoever to do with how the boy had been handled during his fourteen months of service.

“First,” Waxhill said, “there’s a faction that thinks Alfie must have come across a book with Stillwater’s picture on the jacket.”

“It can’t be anything that simple.”

“I agree. Though, of course, the about-the-author paragraph on the flap of his last two books says he lives in Mission Viejo, which would have given Alfie a good lead.”

Oslett said, “Anybody, seeing a picture of an identical twin he never knew he had, would be curious enough to look into it—except Alfie. Whereas an ordinary person has the freedom to pursue a thing like that, Alfie doesn’t. He’s tightly focused.”

“Aimed like a bullet.”

“Exactly. He broke training here, which required a monumental trauma. Hell, it’s more than training. That’s a euphemism. It’s indoctrination, brainwashing—”

“He’s programmed.”

“Yes. Programmed. He’s the next thing to a machine, and just seeing a photograph of Stillwater wouldn’t send him spinning out of control any more than the personal computer in your office would start producing sperm and grow hair on its back just because you scanned a photograph of Marilyn Monroe onto its hard disk.”

Waxhill laughed softly. “I like the analogy. I think I’ll use it to change some minds, though of course I’ll credit it to you.”

Oslett was pleased by Waxhill’s approval.

“Excellent bacon,” said Waxhill.

“Yes, isn’t it.”

Clocker just kept eating.

“The second and smaller faction,” Waxhill continued, “proposes a more exotic—but, at least to me, more credible—hypothesis to the effect that Alfie has a secret ability of which we’re not aware and which he may not fully understand or control himself.”

“Secret ability?”

“Rudimentary psychic perception perhaps. Very primitive . . . but strong enough to make a connection between him and Stillwater, draw them together because of . . . well, because of all they share.”

“Isn’t that a bit far out?”

Waxhill smiled and nodded. “I’ll admit it sounds like something out of a Star Trek movie—”

Oslett cringed and glanced at Clocker, but the big man’s eyes didn’t shift from the food heaped on his plate.

“—though the whole project smacks of science fiction, doesn’t it?” Waxhill concluded.

“I guess so,” Oslett conceded.

“The fact is, the genetic engineers have given Alfie some truly exceptional abilities. Intentionally. So doesn’t it seem possible they’ve unintentionally, inadvertently given him other superhuman qualities?”

“Even inhuman qualities,” Clocker said.

“Well, now, you’ve just shown me a more unpleasant way to look at it,” Waxhill said, regarding Karl Clocker soberly, “and all too possibly a more accurate view.” Turning to Oslett: “Some psychic link, some strange mental connection, might have shattered Alfie’s conditioning, erased his program or caused him to override it.”

“Our boy was in Kansas City, and Stillwater was in southern California, for God’s sake.”

Waxhill shrugged. “A TV broadcast goes on forever, to the end of the universe. Beam a laser from Chicago toward the far end of the galaxy, and that light will get there someday, thousands of years from now, after Chicago is dust—and it’ll keep on going. So maybe distance is meaningless when you’re dealing with thought waves, too, or whatever it was that connected Alfie to this writer.”

Oslett had lost his appetite.

Clocker seemed to have found it and added it to his own.

Pointing to the basket of croissants, Waxhill said, “These are excellent—and in case you didn’t realize, there are two kinds here, some plain and some with almond paste inside.”

“Almond croissants are my favorite,” Oslett said, but didn’t reach for one.

Waxhill said, “The best croissants in the world—”

“—are in Paris,” Oslett interjected, “in a quaint café less than a block off—”

“—the Champs Elysées,” Waxhill finished, surprising Oslett.

“The proprietor, Alfonse—”

“—and his wife, Mirielle—”

“—are culinary geniuses and hosts without equal.”

“Charming people,” Waxhill agreed.

They smiled at each other.

Clocker served himself more sausages, and Oslett wanted to knock that stupid hat off his head.

“If there’s any chance that our boy has extraordinary powers, however feeble, which we never intended to give him,” Waxhill said, “then we must consider the possibility that some qualities we did intend to give him didn’t turn out quite as we thought they did.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Oslett said.

“Essentially, I’m talking about sex.”

Oslett was surprised. “He has no interest in it.”

“We’re sure of that, are we?”

“He’s apparently male, of course, but he’s impotent.”

Waxhill said nothing.

“He was engineered to be impotent,” Oslett stressed.

“A man can be impotent yet have a keen interest in sex. Indeed, one might make a good argument for the case that his very inability to attain an erection frustrates him, and that his frustration leads him to be obsessed with sex, with what he cannot have.”

Oslett had been shaking his head the entire time Waxhill had been speaking. “No. Again, it’s not that simple. He’s not only impotent. He’s received hundreds of hours of intense psychological conditioning to eliminate sexual interest, some of it when he’s been in deep hypnosis, some under the influence of drugs that make the subconscious susceptible to any suggestion, some through virtual-reality subliminal feeds during sedative-induced sleep. To this boy, the primary difference between men and women is the way they dress.”

Unimpressed with Oslett’s argument, spreading orange marmalade on a slice of toast, Waxhill said, “Brainwashing, even at its most sophisticated, can fail. Would you agree with that?”

“Yes, but with an ordinary subject, you have problems because you’ve got to counter a lifetime of experience to install a new attitude or false memory. But Alfie was different. He was a blank slate, a beautiful blank slate, so there wasn’t any resistance to whatever attitudes, memories, or feelings we wanted to stuff in his nice empty head. There was nothing in his brain to wash out first.”

“Maybe mind-control failed with Alfie precisely because we were so confident that he was an easy mark.”

“The mind is its own control,” Clocker said.

Waxhill gave him an odd look.

“I don’t think it failed,” Oslett insisted. “Anyway, there’s still the little matter of his engineered impotence to get around.”

Waxhill took time to chew and swallow a bite of toast, and then washed it down with coffee. “Maybe his body got around it for him.”

“Say again?”

“His incredible body with its superhuman recuperative powers.”

Oslett twitched as if the idea had pierced like a pin. “Wait a minute, now. His wounds heal exceptionally fast, yes. Punctures, gashes, broken bones. Once damaged, his body can restore itself to its original engineered condition in miraculously short order. But that’s the key. To its original engineered condition. It can’t start to remake itself on any fundamental level, can’t mutate, for God’s sake.”

“We’re sure of that, are we?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Well . . . because . . . otherwise . . . it’s unthinkable. ”

“Imagine,” Waxhill said, “if Alfie is potent. And interested in sex. The boy’s been engineered to have a tremendous potential for violence, a biological killing machine, without compunctions or remorse, capable of any savagery. Imagine that bestiality coupled with a sex drive, and consider how sexual compulsions and violent impulses can feed on each other and amplify each other when they’re not tempered by a civilized and moral spirit.”

Oslett pushed his plate aside. The sight of food was beginning to sicken him. “It has been considered. That’s why so damned many precautions were taken.”

“As with the Hindenburg.”

As with the Titanic, Oslett thought grimly.

Waxhill pushed his plate aside, too, and folded his hands around his coffee cup. “So now Alfie has found Stillwater, and he wants the writer’s family. He’s a complete man now, at least physically, and thoughts of sex lead eventually to thoughts of procreation. A wife. Children. God knows what strange, twisted understanding he has of the meaning and purpose of a family. But here’s a ready-made family. He wants it. Wants it badly. Evidently he feels it belongs to him.”

3

The bank offered extensive hours as part of its competitive edge. Marty and Paige intended to be at the doors, with Charlotte and Emily, when the manager unlocked for business at eight o’clock Tuesday morning.

He disliked returning to Mission Viejo, but he felt they would be able to effect their transactions with the least difficulty at the particular branch where they maintained their accounts. It was only eight or nine blocks from their house. Many of the tellers would recognize him and Paige.

The bank was in a free-standing brick building in the northwest corner of a shopping-center parking lot, nicely landscaped and shaded by pine trees, flanked on two sides by streets and on the other two sides by acres of blacktop. At the far end of the parking lot, to the south and east, was an L-shaped series of connected buildings that housed thirty to forty businesses, including a supermarket.

Marty parked on the south side. The short walk from the BMW to the bank door, with the kids between him and Paige, was unnerving because they had to leave their guns in the car. He felt vulnerable.

He could imagine no way in which they might secretly bring a shotgun inside with them, even a compact pistol-grip model like the Mossberg. He didn’t want to risk carrying the Beretta under his ski jacket because he wasn’t sure whether some bank-security systems included the ability to detect a hidden handgun on anyone who walked through the door. If a bank employee mistook him for a holdup man and the police were summoned by a silent alarm, the cops would never give him the benefit of the doubt—not considering the reputation he had with them after last night.

While Marty went directly to one of the teller’s windows, Paige took Charlotte and Emily to an arrangement of two short sofas and two armchairs at one end of the long room, where patrons waited when they had appointments with loan officers. The bank was not a cavernous marble-lined monument to money with massive Doric columns and vaulted ceiling, but a comparatively small place with an acoustic-tile ceiling and all-weather green carpet. Though Paige and the kids were only sixty feet from him, clearly visible any time he chose to glance their way, he didn’t like being separated from them by even that much distance.

The teller was a young woman—Lorraine Arakadian, according to the nameplate at her window—whose round tortoise-shell glasses gave her an owlish look. When Marty told her that he wanted to make a withdrawal of seventy thousand dollars from their savings account—which had a balance of more than seventy-four—she misunderstood, thinking he meant to transfer that amount to checking. When she put the applicable form in front of him to effect the transaction, he corrected her misapprehension and asked for the entire amount in hundred-dollar bills if possible.

She said, “Oh. I see. Well . . . that’s a larger transaction than I can make on my own authority, sir. I’ll have to get permission from the head teller or assistant manager.”

“Of course,” he said unconcernedly, as if he made large cash withdrawals every week. “I understand.”

She went to the far end of the long teller’s cage to speak to an older woman who was examining documents in one drawer of a large bank of files. Marty recognized her—Elaine Higgens, assistant manager. Mrs. Higgens and Lorraine Arakadian glanced at Marty, then put their heads together to confer again.

While he waited for them, Marty monitored both the south and east entrances to the lobby, trying to look nonchalant even though he expected The Other to walk through one door or another at any moment, this time armed with an Uzi.

A writer’s imagination. Maybe it wasn’t a curse, after all. At least not entirely. Maybe sometimes it was a survival tool. One thing for sure: even the most fanciful writer’s imagination had trouble keeping up with reality these days.

He needs more time than he expected to find plates to swap for those on the stolen Toyota Camry. He slept too late and took far too long to make himself presentable. Now the world is coming awake, and he hasn’t the advantage of the dead-of-night privacy that would make the switch easy. Large garden-apartment complexes, with shadowy carports and a plenitude of vehicles, offer the ideal shopping for what he requires, but as he tries one after another of these, he discovers too many residents out and about, on their way to work.

Eventually his diligent search is rewarded in the parking lot behind a church. A morning service is in progress. He can hear organ music. Parishioners have left fourteen cars from which he can select, not a large turnout for the Lord but adequate for his own purposes.

He leaves the engine of the Camry running while he looks for a car in which the owner has left the keys. In the third one, a green Pontiac, a full set dangles from the ignition.

He unlocks the trunk of the Pontiac, hoping it will contain at least an emergency tool kit with a screwdriver. Because he hot-wired the Camry, he doesn’t have keys to its trunk. Again, he is in luck: a complete road-emergency kit with flares, first-aid items, and a tool packet that includes four screwdrivers of different types.

God is with him.

In a few minutes he exchanges the Camry’s plates for those on the Pontiac. He returns the tool kit to the trunk of the Pontiac and the keys to the ignition.

As he’s walking to the Camry, the church organ launches into a hymn with which he is not familiar. That he doesn’t know the name of the hymn is not surprising, since he has only been to church three times that he can recall. In two instances, he had gone to church to kill time until movie theaters opened. On the third occasion he had been following a woman he’d seen on the street and with whom he would have liked to share sex and the special intimacy of death.

The music stirs him. He stands in the mild morning breeze, swaying dreamily, eyes closed. He is moved by the hymn. Perhaps he has musical talent. He should find out. Maybe playing an instrument of some kind and composing songs would be easier than writing novels.

When the song ends, he gets in the Camry and leaves.

Marty exchanged pleasantries with Mrs. Higgens when she returned with the teller. Evidently no one at the bank had seen the news about him, as neither woman mentioned the assault. His crew-neck sweater and button-down shirt concealed livid bruises around his neck. His voice was mildly hoarse but not sufficiently so to cause comment.

Mrs. Higgens observed that the cash withdrawal he wished to make was unusually large, phrasing her comment to induce him to explain why he would risk carrying so much money around. He merely agreed it was, indeed, unusually large and expressed the hope that he wasn’t putting them to much trouble. Unflagging affability was probably essential to completing the transaction as swiftly as possible.

“I’m not sure we can pay it entirely in hundreds,” Mrs. Higgens said. She spoke softly, discreetly, though there were only two other customers in the bank and neither of them nearby. “I’ll have to check our supply of bills in that denomination.”

“Some twenties, fifties are okay,” Marty assured her. “I’m just trying to prevent it from getting too bulky.”

Though both the assistant manager and the teller were smiling and polite, Marty was aware of their curiosity and concern. They were in the money business, after all, and they knew there weren’t many legitimate—and fewer sensible—reasons for anyone to carry seventy thousand in cash.

Even if he had felt comfortable leaving Paige and the kids in the car, Marty would not have done so. The first suspicion to cross a banker’s mind would be that the cash was needed to meet a ransom payment, and prudence would require a call to the police. With the entire family present, kidnapping could be ruled out.

Marty’s teller began to consult with other tellers, tabulating the number of hundreds contained in all their drawers, while Mrs. Higgens disappeared through the open door of the vault at the back of the cage.

He glanced at Paige and the girls. East entrance. South. His watch. Smiling, smiling all the while, smiling like an idiot.

We’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, he told himself. Maybe as few as ten. Out of here and on our way and safe.

The dark wave hit him.

At a Denny’s, he uses the men’s room, then selects a booth by the windows and orders an enormous breakfast.

His waitress is a cute brunette named Gayle. She makes jokes about his appetite. She is coming on to him. He considers trying to make a date with her. She has a lovely body, slender legs.

Having sex with Gayle would be adultery because he is married to Paige. He wonders if it would still be adultery if, after having sex with Gayle, he killed her.

He leaves her a good tip and decides to return within a week or two and ask her for a date. She has a pert nose, sensuous lips.

In the Camry again, before he starts the engine, he closes his eyes, clears his mind, and imagines he is magnetized, likewise the false father, opposite poles toward each other. He seeks attraction.

This time he is pulled into the orbit of the other man quicker than he was when he tried to make a connection in the middle of the night, and the adducent power is immeasurably greater than before. Indeed, the pull is so strong, so instant, he grunts in surprise and locks his hands around the steering wheel, as if he is in real danger of being yanked out of the Toyota through the windshield and shooting like a bullet straight to the heart of the false father.

His enemy is immediately aware of the contact. The man is frightened, threatened.

East.

And south.

That will lead him back in the general direction of Mission Viejo, though he doubts the imposter feels safe enough to have returned home already.

A pressure wave, as from an enormous explosion, smashed into Marty and nearly rocked him off his feet. With both hands he clutched the countertop in front of the teller’s window to keep his balance. He leaned into the counter, bracing himself against it.

The sensation was entirely subjective. The air seemed compressed to the point of liquefaction, but nothing disintegrated, cracked, or fell over. He appeared to be the only person affected.

After the initial shock of the wave, Marty felt as if he’d been buried under an avalanche. Weighed down by immeasurable megatons of snow. Breathless. Paralyzed. Cold.

He suspected that his face had turned pale, waxy. He knew for certain that he would be unable to speak if spoken to. Were anyone to return to the teller’s window while the seizure gripped him, the fear beneath his casual pose would be revealed. He would be exposed as a man in desperate trouble, and they would be reluctant to hand so much cash to someone who was so clearly either ill or deranged.

He grew dramatically colder when he experienced a mental caress from the same malignant, ghostly presence that he’d sensed yesterday in the garage as he’d been trying to leave for the doctor’s office. The icy “hand” of the spirit pressed against the raw surface of his brain, as if reading his location by fingering data that was Brailled into the convoluted tissues of his cerebral cortex. He now understood that the spirit was actually the look-alike, whose uncanny powers were not limited to spontaneous recovery from mortal chest wounds.

He breaks the magnetic connection.

He drives out of the restaurant parking lot.

He turns on the radio. Michael Bolton is singing about love.

The song is touching. He is deeply moved by it, almost to tears. Now that he finally is somebody, now that a wife waits for him and two young children need his guidance, he knows the meaning and value of love. He wonders how he could have lived this long without it.

He heads south. And east.

Destiny calls.

Abruptly, the spectral hand lifted from Marty.

The crushing pressure was released, and the world snapped back to normal—if there was such a thing as normality any more.

He was relieved that the attack had lasted only five or ten seconds. None of the bank employees had been aware anything was wrong with him.

However, the need to obtain the cash and get out of there was urgent. He looked at Paige and the kids in the open lounge at the far end of the room. He shifted his gaze worriedly to the east entrance, the south entrance, east again.

The Other knew where they were. In minutes, at most, their mysterious and implacable enemy would be upon them.

4

The scrambled eggs on Oslett’s abandoned plate acquired a faint grayish cast as they cooled and congealed. The salty aroma of bacon, previously so appealing, induced in him a vague nausea.

Stunned by the consideration that Alfie might have developed into a creature with sexual urges and with the ability to satisfy them, Oslett was nonetheless determined not to appear concerned, at least not in front of Peter Waxhill. “Well, all of this still amounts to nothing but conjecture.”

“Yes,” said Waxhill, “but we’re checking the past to see if the theory holds water.”

“What past?”

“Police records in every city where Alfie has been on assignment in the past fourteen months. Rapes and rape-murders during the hours he wasn’t actually working.”

Oslett’s mouth was dry. His heart was thudding.

He didn’t care what happened to the Stillwater family. Hell, they were only Klingons.

He didn’t care, either, if the Network collapsed and all of its grand ambitions went unfulfilled. Eventually an organization similar to it would be formed, and the dream would be renewed.

But if their bad boy proved impossible to recapture or stop, the potential was here for a stain to spread deep into the Oslett family, jeopardizing its wealth and seriously diminishing its political power for decades to come. Above all, Drew Oslett demanded respect. The ultimate guarantor of respect had always been family, bloodline. The prospect of the Oslett name becoming an object of ridicule and scorn, target of public outrage, brunt of every TV comedian’s puerile jokes, and the subject of embarrassing stories in papers as diverse as the New York Times and the National Enquirer was soul-shaking.

“Didn’t you ever wonder,” Waxhill asked, “what your boy did with his free time, between assignments?”

“We monitored him closely, of course, for the first six weeks. He went to movies, restaurants, parks, watched television, did all the things that people do to kill time—just as we wanted him to act outside a controlled environment. Nothing strange. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing to do with women.”

“He would have been on his best behavior, naturally, if he was aware that he was being watched.”

“He wasn’t aware. Couldn’t be. He never made our surveillance men. No way. They’re the best.” Oslett realized he was protesting too much. Nevertheless, he couldn’t keep from adding, “No way.”

“Maybe he was aware of them the same way he became aware of this Martin Stillwater. Some low-key psychic perception.”

Oslett was beginning to dislike Waxhill. The man was a hopeless pessimist.

Picking up the thermos-pot and pouring more coffee for all of them, Waxhill said, “Even if he was only going to movies, watching television—didn’t that worry you?”

“Look, he’s supposed to be the perfect assassin. Programmed. No remorse, no second thoughts. Hard to catch, harder to kill. And if something does go wrong, he can never be traced to his handlers. He doesn’t know who we are or why we want these people terminated, so he can’t turn state’s evidence. He’s nothing, a shell, a totally hollow man. But he’s got to function in society, be inconspicuous, act like an ordinary Joe, do things real people do in their spare time. If we had him sitting around hotel rooms staring at walls, maids would comment to one another, think he’s weird, remember him. Besides, what’s the harm in a movie, some television?”

“Cultural influences. They could change him somehow. ”

“It’s nature that matters, how he was engineered, not what he did with his Saturday afternoon.” Oslett leaned back in his chair, feeling guardedly better, having convinced himself to some degree, if not Waxhill. “Check into the past. But you won’t find anything.”

“Maybe we already have. A prostitute in Kansas City. Strangled in a cheap motel across the street from a bar called the Blue Life Lounge. Two different bartenders at the lounge gave the Kansas City Police a description of the man she left with. Sounds like Alfie.”

Oslett had perceived a bond of class and experience between himself and Peter Waxhill. He had even entertained the prospect of friendship. Now he had the uneasy feeling that Waxhill was taking pleasure from being the bearer of all this bad news.

Waxhill said, “One of our contacts managed to get us a sample of the sperm that the Kansas City Police Scientific Investigation Division recovered from the prostitute’s vagina. It’s being flown to our New York lab now. If it’s Alfie’s sperm, we’ll know.”

“He can’t produce sperm. He was engineered—”

“Well, if it’s his, we’ll know. We have his genetic structure mapped, we know it better than Rand McNally knows the world. And it’s unique. More individual than fingerprints.”

Yale men. They were all alike. Smug, self-satisfied bastards.

Clocker picked up a plump hot-house strawberry between thumb and forefinger. Examining it closely, as if he had excruciatingly high standards for comestibles and would not eat anything that failed to pass his demanding inspection, he said, “If Alfie’s drawn to Martin Stillwater, then what we need to know is where we can find Stillwater now.” He popped the entire berry, half as large as a lemon, onto his tongue and into his mouth, in the manner of a toad taking a fly.

“Last night we sent a man into their house for a look around,” Waxhill said. “Indications are, they packed in a hurry. Bureau drawers left open, clothes scattered around, a few empty suitcases left out after they decided not to use them. Judging by appearances, they don’t intend to return home within the next few days, but we’re having the place watched just in case.”

“And you have no idea in hell where to find them,” Oslett said, taking perverse pleasure in putting Waxhill on the defensive.

Unruffled, Waxhill said, “We can’t say where they are at this moment, no—”

“Ah.”

“—but we think we can predict one place we can get a lead on them. Stillwater’s parents live in Mammoth Lakes. He has no other relatives on the West Coast, and unless there’s a close friend we don’t know about, he’s almost certain to call his father and mother, if not go there.”

“What about the wife’s parents?”

“When she was sixteen, her father shot her mother in the face and then killed himself.”

“Interesting.” What Oslett meant was that the tawdriness of the average person’s life never ceased to amaze him.

“It is interesting, actually,” Waxhill said, perhaps meaning something different from what Oslett meant. “Paige came home from school and found their bodies. For a few months, she was under the guardianship of an aunt. But she didn’t like the woman, and she filed a petition with the court to have herself declared a legal adult.”

“At sixteen?”

“The judge was sufficiently impressed with her to rule in her favor. It’s rare but it does happen.”

“She must’ve had one hell of an attorney.”

“I suppose she did. She studied the applicable statutes and precedents, then represented herself.”

The situation was bleaker all the time. Even if he’d been lucky, Martin Stillwater had gotten the better of Alfie, which meant he was a more formidable man than the jerk in People. Now it was beginning to seem as if his wife had more than a common measure of fortitude, as well, and would make a worthy adversary.

Oslett said, “To push Stillwater to get in touch with his folks, we should use Network affiliates in the media to hype the incidents at his house last night onto the front page.”

“We are,” Peter Waxhill said infuriatingly. He framed imaginary headlines with his hands: “ ‘Bestselling Author Shoots Intruder. Hoax or Real Threat? Author and Family Missing. Hiding from Killer or Avoiding Police Scrutiny?’ That sort of thing. When Stillwater sees a newspaper or TV news program, he’s going to call his parents right then because he’ll know they’ve seen the news and they’re worried.”

“We’ve tapped their phone?”

“Yes. We have caller-ID equipment on the line. The moment the connection is made, we’ll have a number where Stillwater’s staying.”

“What do we do in the meantime?” Oslett asked. “Just sit around here having manicures, eating strawberries?”

At the rate Clocker was eating strawberries, the hotel supply would be gone shortly, and soon thereafter the entire hot-house crop in California and adjacent states would also be exhausted.

Waxhill looked at his gold Rolex.

Drew Oslett tried to detect some indication of ostentation in the way Waxhill consulted the expensive timepiece. He would have been pleased to note any revelatory action that might expose a gauche pretender under the veneer of grace and sophistication.

But Waxhill seemed to regard the wristwatch as Oslett did his own gold Rolex: as though it was no different from a Timex purchased at K-Mart. “In fact, you’ll be flying up to Mammoth Lakes later this morning.”

“But we can’t be certain Stillwater’s going to show up there.”

“It’s a reasonable expectation,” Waxhill said. “If he does, then there’s a good chance Alfie will follow. You’ll be in position to collect our boy. And if Stillwater doesn’t go there, just calls his dear mater and pater, you can fly out or drive out at once to wherever he called from.”

Reluctant to sit a moment longer, for fear that Waxhill would use the time to deliver more bad news, Oslett put his napkin on the table and pushed his chair back. “Then let’s get moving. The longer our boy’s on the loose, the greater the chance someone’s going to see him and Stillwater at the same time. When that happens, the police are going to start believing his story.”

Remaining in his chair, picking up his coffee cup, Waxhill said, “One more thing.”

Oslett had risen. He was loath to sit again because it would appear as if Waxhill controlled the moment. Waxhill did control the moment, in fact, but only because he possessed needed information, not because he was Oslett’s superior in rank or in any other sense. At worst, they held equal power in the organization; and more likely, Oslett was the heavyweight of the two. He remained standing beside the table, gazing down at the Yale man.

Although he was finally finished eating, Clocker stayed in his chair. Oslett didn’t know whether his partner’s behavior was a minor betrayal or only evidence that the Trekker’s mind was off with Spock and the gang in some distant corner of the universe.

After a sip of coffee, Waxhill said, “If you have to terminate our boy, that’s regrettable but acceptable. If you can bring him back into the fold, at least until he can be gotten into a secure facility and restrained, even better. However it goes . . . Stillwater, his wife, and his kids have to be eliminated.”

“No problem.”

5

The branch manager, Mrs. Takuda, visited Marty while he waited at the teller’s window, shortly after the dark wave slammed into him and washed away. If he had been confronted by his reflection, he would have expected to see that he was still tight-lipped and pale, with an animal wildness in his eyes; however, if Mrs. Takuda noticed anything strange in his appearance, she was too polite to mention it. Primarily she was concerned that he might be withdrawing the majority of his savings because something about the bank displeased him.

He was surprised he could summon a convincing smile and enough charm to assure her that he had no quarrel with the bank and to set her mind at rest. He was chilled and shaking deep inside, but none of the tremors reached the surface or affected his voice.

When Mrs. Takuda went to assist Elaine Higgens in the vault, Marty looked at Paige and the kids, the east door, the south door, and his Timex. The sight of the red sweep hand cleaning the seconds off the dial made sweat break out on his brow. The Other was coming. How long? Ten minutes, two minutes, five seconds?

Another wave hit him.

Cruising a wide boulevard. Morning sun flaring off the chrome of passing cars. Phil Collins on the radio, singing about betrayal.

Sympathizing with Collins, he again imagines magnetism. Click. Contact. He feels an irresistible pull farther east and south, so he is still heading in the right direction.

He breaks contact seconds after establishing it, hoping to get another fix on the false father without revealing himself. But even during that brief linkage, the enemy senses the intrusion.

Though the second wave was of shorter duration than the first, it was no less powerful. Marty felt as if he had been hit in the chest with a hammer.

With Mrs. Higgens, the teller returned to the window. She had loose cash and banded packets of both hundred- and twenty-dollar bills. It amounted to two stacks of approximately three inches each.

The teller started to count out the seventy thousand.

“That’s all right,” Marty said. “Just put it in a couple of manila envelopes.”

Surprised, Mrs. Higgens said, “Oh, but Mr. Stillwater, you’ve signed the withdrawal order, we ought to count it in front of you.”

“No, I’m sure you’ve already counted correctly.”

“But bank procedure—”

“I trust you, Mrs. Higgens.”

“Well, thank you, but I really think—”

“Please.”

6

Merely by remaining seated at the room-service table while Drew Oslett stood impatiently beside it, Waxhill exerted control. Oslett disliked him and grudgingly admired him simultaneously.

“It’s almost certain,” Waxhill said, “that the wife and children saw Alfie in that second incident last night. They know very little about what’s going on, but if they know Stillwater was telling the truth when he talked about a look-alike, then they know too much.”

“I said, no problem,” Oslett reminded him impatiently.

Waxhill nodded. “Yes, all right, but the home office wants it done in a certain way.”

Sighing, Oslett gave up and sat down. “Which is?”

“Make it look as if Stillwater went off the deep end.”

“Murder-suicide?”

“Yes, but not just any murder-suicide. The home office would be pleased if it could be made to appear as if Stillwater was acting out a particular psychopathic delusion. ”

“Whatever.”

“The wife must be shot in each breast and in the mouth.”

“And the daughters?”

“First, make them undress. Tie their wrists behind them. Tie their ankles together. Nice and tight. There’s a particular brand of braided wire we’d like you to use. It’ll be provided. Then shoot each girl twice. Once in her ... private parts, then between the eyes. Stillwater must appear to have shot himself once through the roof of his mouth. Will you remember all of that?”

“Of course.”

“It’s important that you do everything precisely that way, no deviations from the script.”

“What’s the story we’re trying to tell?” Oslett asked.

“Didn’t you read the article in People?”

“Not all the way through,” Oslett admitted. “Stillwater seemed like such a jerk—and a boring jerk, at that.”

Waxhill said, “A few years ago, in Maryland, a man killed his wife and two daughters in exactly this fashion. He was a pillar of the community, so it shocked everybody. Tragic story. Everyone was left wondering why. It seemed so meaningless, so out of character. Stillwater was intrigued by the crime and considered writing a novel based on it, to explore the possible motivation behind it. But after he’d done a lot of research, he dropped the project. In People, he says it just depressed him too much. Says that fiction, his kind of fiction, needs to make sense of things, bring order to chaos, but he just couldn’t find any meaning in what happened in Maryland.”

Oslett sat in silence for a moment, trying to hate Waxhill but finding that his dislike for the man was fading rapidly. “I must say . . . this is very nice.”

Waxhill smiled almost shyly and shrugged.

“This was your idea?” Oslett asked.

“Mine, yes. I proposed it to the home office, and they went for it right away.”

“It’s ingenious,” Oslett said with genuine admiration.

“Thank you.”

“Very neat. Martin Stillwater kills his family the same way the guy did in Maryland, and it looks as if the real reason he couldn’t write a novel about the original case was because it struck too close to home, because it was what he secretly wanted to do to his family.”

“Exactly.”

“And it’s been preying on his mind ever since.”

“Haunts his dreams.”

“This psychotic urge to symbolically rape—”

“—and literally kill—”

“—his daughters—”

“—kill his wife, too, the woman who—”

“—nurtured them,” Oslett finished.

They were smiling at each other again, as they had smiled when discussing that lovely café off the Champs Elysées.

Waxhill said, “No one will ever be able to figure out what killing his family had to do with his crazy report of a look-alike intruder, but they’ll figure the look-alike was somehow part of his delusion, too.”

“I just realized, samples of Alfie’s blood taken from the house in Mission Viejo are going to appear to be Stillwater’s blood.”

“Yes. Was he periodically exsanguinating himself, saving his own blood for the hoax? And why? A great many theories are sure to be put forth, and in the end it’ll be a mystery of less interest than what he did to his family. No one will ever untangle the truth from all that.”

Oslett was beginning to hope they might recover Alfie, salvage the Network, and keep their reputations intact after all.

Turning to Clocker, Waxhill said, “What about you, Karl? Do you have a problem with any of this?”

Though he was sitting at the table, Clocker appeared distant in spirit. He pulled his attention back to them as if his thoughts had been with the Enterprise crew on a hostile planet in the Crab nebula. “There are five billion people on earth,” he said, “so we think it’s crowded, but for every one of us, the universe contains countless thousands of stars, an infinity of stars for each of us.”

Waxhill stared at Clocker, waiting for elucidation. When he realized that Clocker had nothing more to say, he turned to Oslett.

“I believe what Karl means,” Oslett said, “is that . . . Well, in the vast scheme of things, what does it matter if a few people die a little sooner than they would have in the natural course of events?”

7

The sun is high over the distant mountains, where the loftiest peaks are capped with snow. It seems odd to have a view of winter from this springlike December morning full of palm trees and flowers.

He drives south and east into Mission Viejo. He is vengeance on wheels. Justice on wheels. Rolling, rolling.

He considers locating a gun shop and buying a shotgun or hunting rifle, some weapon for which there is no waiting period prior to the right of purchase. His adversary is armed, but he is not.

However, he doesn’t want to delay his pursuit of the kidnapper who has stolen his family. If the enemy is kept off balance and on the move, he is more likely to make mistakes. Unrelenting pressure is a better weapon than any gun.

Besides, he is vengeance, justice, and virtue. He is the hero of this movie, and heroes do not die. They can be shot, clubbed, run off the road in high-speed car chases, slashed with a knife, pushed from a cliff, locked in a dungeon filled with poisonous snakes, and endure an endlessly imaginative series of abuses without perishing. With Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, Wesley Snipes, and so many other heroes, he shares the invincibility of virtue and high noble purpose.

He realizes why his initial assault on the false father, in his house yesterday, was doomed to fail in spite of his being a hero. He’d been drawn westward by the powerful attraction between him and his double; to the same degree that he had been aware of something pulling him, the double had been aware of something approaching all day Sunday and Monday. By the time they encountered each other in the upstairs study, the false father had been alerted and had prepared for battle.

Now he understands that he can initiate and terminate the connection between them at will. Like the electrical current in any household circuit, it can be controlled by an ON-OFF switch. Instead of leaving the switch in the ON position all the time, he can open the pathway for brief moments, just long enough to feel the pull of the false father and take a fix on him.

Logic suggests he also can modify the power flowing along the psychic wire. By imagining the psychic control is a dimmer switch—a rheostat—he should be able to adjust downward the amperage of the current in the circuit, making the contact more subtle than it has been to date. After all, by using a rheostatic switch, the light of a chandelier can be reduced smoothly by degrees until there is barely a visible glow. Likewise, imagining the psychic switch as another rheostat, he might be able to open the connection at such a low amperage that he can track the false father without that adversary being alerted to the fact he’s being sought.

Stopping at a red traffic light in the heart of Mission Viejo, he imagines a dial-type dimmer switch with a three-hundred-sixty-degree brightness range. He turns it only ninety degrees, and at once feels the pull of the false father, slightly farther east and now somewhat to the north.

Outside of the bank, halfway to the BMW, Marty suddenly felt another wave of pressure—and behind it, the crushing Juggernaut of his dreams. The sensation was not as strong as the experiences in the bank, but it caught him in mid-step and threw him off balance. He staggered, stumbled, and fell. The two manila envelopes full of cash flew out of his hands and slid across the blacktop.

Charlotte and Emily scampered after the envelopes, and Paige helped Marty to his feet.

As the wave passed and Marty stood shakily, he said, “Here, take my keys, you better drive. He’s hunting me. He’s coming.”

She looked around the bank lot in panic.

Marty said, “No, he’s not here yet. It’s like before. This sense of being in the path of something very powerful and fast.”

Two blocks. Maybe not that far.

Driving slowly. Scanning the street ahead, left and right. Looking for them.

A car horn toots behind him. The driver is impatient.

Slow, slow, squinting left and right, checking people on the sidewalks as well as in passing cars.

The horn behind him. He gestures obscenely, which seems to spook the guy into silence.

Slow, slow.

No sight of them.

Try the mental rheostat again. A sixty-degree turn this time. Still a strong contact, an urgent and irresistible pull.

Ahead. On the left. Shopping center.

As Marty got into the front passenger seat and shut the door, holding the envelopes of cash that the kids had retrieved for him, he was shaken again by contact with The Other. Although the impact of the probe was less disturbing than ever before, he took no solace from the diminishment of its power.

“Get us the hell out of here,” he urged Paige, as he retrieved the loaded Beretta from under the seat.

Paige started the engine, and Marty turned to the kids. They were buckling their seatbelts.

As Paige slammed the BMW into reverse and backed out of the parking space, the girls met Marty’s eyes. They were scared.

He had too much respect for their perceptiveness to lie to them. Rather than pretend everything was going to be all right, he said, “Hang on. Your Mom’s gonna try to drive like I do.”

Popping the car out of reverse, Paige asked, “Where’s he coming from?”

“I don’t know. Just don’t go out the same way we came in. I feel uneasy about that. Use the other street.”

He is drawn to the bank rather than the shopping center itself, and he parks near the east entrance.

As he switches the engine off, he hears a brief shriek of tires. From the corner of his eye, he is aware of a car driving away fast from the south end of the building. Turning, he sees a white BMW eighty to a hundred feet away. It streaks toward the shopping center, past him in a flash.

He catches sight of only a portion of the driver’s face—one cheekbone, jaw line, curve of chin. And a shimmer of golden hair.

Sometimes it’s possible to identify a favorite song by only three notes, because the melody has left an indelible impression on the mind. Likewise, from that partial profile, glimpsed in a flicker of shadow and light, in a blur of motion, he recognizes his precious wife. Unknown people have eradicated his memories of her, but the photograph he discovered yesterday is imprinted on his heart.

He whispers, “Paige.”

He starts the Camry, backs out of the parking space, and turns toward the shopping center.

Acres of blacktop are empty at that early hour, for only the supermarket, a doughnut shop, and an office-supply store are open for business. The BMW races across the parking lot, swinging wide of the few clusters of cars, to the service road that fronts the stores. It turns left and heads toward the north end of the center.

He follows but not aggressively. If he loses them, locating them again is an easy matter because of the mysterious but reliable link between him and the hateful man who has usurped his life.

The BMW reaches the north exit and turns right into the street. By the time he arrives at that same intersection, the BMW is already two blocks away, stopped at a red traffic signal and barely in sight.

For more than an hour, he follows them discreetly along surface streets, north on the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways, then east on the Riverside Freeway, staying well back from them. Tucked in among the heavy morning commuter traffic, his small Camry is as good as invisible.

On the Riverside Freeway, west of Corona, he imagines switching on the psychic current between himself and the false father. He pictures the rheostat and turns it five degrees out of a possible three hundred and sixty. That is sufficient for him to sense the presence of the false father ahead in traffic, although it gives him no precise fix. Six degrees, seven, eight. Eight is too much. Seven. Seven is ideal. With the switch open only seven degrees, the attraction is powerful enough to serve as a beacon to him without alerting the enemy that the link has been re-established. In the BMW, the imposter rides east toward Riverside, tense and watchful but unaware of being monitored.

Yet, in the hunter’s mind, the signal of the prey registers like a blinking red light on an electronic map.

Having mastered control of this strange adducent power, he may be able to strike at the false father with some degree of surprise.

Though the man in the BMW is expecting an attack and is on the run to avoid it, he’s also accustomed to being forewarned of assault. When enough time passes without a disturbance in the ether, when he feels no unnerving probes, he’ll regain confidence. With a return of confidence, his caution will diminish, and he’ll become vulnerable.

The hunter needs only to stay on the trail, follow the spoor, bide his time, and wait for the ideal moment to strike.

As they pass through Riverside, morning traffic thins out around them. He drops back farther, until the BMW is a distant, colorless dot that sometimes vanishes temporarily, miragelike, in a shimmer of sunlight or swirl of dust.

Onward and north. Through San Bernardino. Onto Interstate 15. Into the northern end of the San Bernardino Mountains. Through the El Cajon Pass at forty-three hundred feet.

Soon thereafter, south of the town of Hesperia, the BMW departs the interstate and heads directly north on U.S. Highway 395, into the westernmost reaches of the forbidding Mojave Desert. He follows, continuing to remain at such a distance that they can’t possibly realize the dark speck in their rearview mirror is the same car that has trailed them now through three counties.

Within a couple of miles, he passes a road sign indicating the mileage to Ridgecrest, Lone Pine, Bishop, and Mammoth Lakes. Mammoth is the farthest—two hundred and eighty-two miles.

The name of the town has an instant association for him. He has an eidetic memory. He can see the words on the dedication page of one of the mystery novels he has written and which he keeps on the shelves in his home office in Mission Viejo:

This opus is for my mother and father, Jim and Alice Stillwater, who taught me to be an honest man—and who can’t be blamed if I am able to think like a criminal.

He recalls, as well, the Rolodex card with their names and address. They live in Mammoth Lakes.

Again, he is poignantly aware of what he has lost. Even if he can reclaim his life from the imposter who wears his name, perhaps he will never regain the memories that have been stolen from him. His childhood. His adolescence. His first date. His high school experiences. He has no recollection of his mother’s or his father’s love, and it seems outrageous, monstrous, that he could be robbed of those most essential and enduringly supportive memories.

For more than sixty miles, he alternates between despair at the estrangement which is the primary quality of his existence and joy at the prospect of reclaiming his destiny.

He desperately longs to be with his father, his mother, to see their dear faces (which have been erased from the tablets of his memory), to embrace them and re-establish the profound bond between himself and the two people to whom he owes his existence. From the movies he has seen, he knows parents can be a curse—the maniacal mother who was dead before the opening scene of Psycho, the selfish mother and father who warped poor Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides—but he believes his parents to be of a finer variety, compassionate and true, like Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life.

The highway is flanked by dry lakes as white as salt, sudden battlements of red rock, wind-sculpted oceans of sand, scrub, boron flats, distant escarpments of dark stone. Everywhere lies evidence of geological upheavals and lava flows from distant millennia.

At the town of Red Mountain, the BMW leaves the highway. It stops at a service station to refuel.

He follows until he is certain of their intention, but passes the service station without stopping. They have guns. He does not. A better moment will be found to kill the impersonator.

Re-entering Highway 395, he drives north a short distance to Johannesburg, which sits west of the Lava Mountains. He exits again and tanks up the Camry at another service station. He buys crackers, candy bars, and peanuts from the vending machines to sustain him during the long drive ahead.

Perhaps because Charlotte and Emily had to use the restrooms back at the Red Mountain stop, he is on the highway ahead of the BMW, but that doesn’t matter because he no longer needs to follow them. He knows where they are going.

Mammoth Lakes, California.

Jim and Alice Stillwater. Who taught him to be an honest man. Who can’t be blamed if he is able to think like a criminal. To whom he dedicated a novel. Beloved. Cherished. Stolen from him but soon to be reclaimed.

He is eager to enlist them in his crusade to regain his family and his destiny. Perhaps the false father can deceive his children, and perhaps even Paige can be fooled into accepting the imposter as the real Martin Stillwater. But his parents will recognize their true son, blood of their blood, and will not be misled by the cunning mimicry of that family-stealing fraud.

Since turning onto Highway 395, where traffic is light, the BMW had maintained a steady sixty to sixty-five miles an hour, though the road made greater speed possible in many areas. Now, he pushes the Camry north at seventy-five and eighty. He should be able to reach Mammoth Lakes between two o’clock and two-fifteen, half an hour to forty-five minutes ahead of the imposter, which will give him time to alert his mother and father to the evil intentions of the creature that masquerades as their son.

The highway angles northwest across Indian Wells Valley, with the El Paso Mountains to the south. Mile by mile, his heart swells with emotion at the prospect of being reunited with his mom and dad, from whom he has been cruelly separated. He aches with the need to embrace them and bask in their love, their unquestioning love, their undying and perfect love.

8

The Bell JetRanger executive helicopter that conveyed Oslett and Clocker to Mammoth Lakes belonged to a motion-picture studio that was a Network affiliate. With black calfskin seats, brass fixtures, and cabin walls plushly upholstered in emerald-green lizard skin, the ambiance was even more luxurious than in the passenger compartment of the Lear. The chopper also offered a more entertaining collection of reading matter than had been available in the jet, including that day’s editions of The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety plus the most recent issues of Premiere, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Forbes, Fortune, GQ, Spy, The Ecological Watch Society Journal, and Bon Appétit.

To occupy his time during the flight, Clocker produced another Star Trek novel, which he had purchased in the gift shop at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel before they checked out. Oslett was convinced that the spread of such fantastical literature into the tastefully appointed and elegantly managed shops of a five-star resort—formerly the kind of place that catered to the cultured and powerful, not merely the rich—was as alarming a sign of society’s imminent collapse as could be found, on a par with heavily armed crack-cocaine dealers selling their wares in schoolyards.

As the JetRanger cruised north through Sequoia National Park, King’s Canyon National Park, along the western flank of the Sierra Nevadas, and eventually directly into those magnificent mountains, Oslett kept moving from one side of the helicopter to the other, determined not to miss any of the stunning scenery. The vastnesses beneath him were so sparsely populated, they might have been expected to trigger his nearly agoraphobic aversion to open spaces and rural landscapes. But the terrain changed by the minute, presenting new marvels and ever-more-splendid vistas at a sufficiently swift pace to entertain him.

Furthermore, the JetRanger flew at a much lower altitude than the Lear, giving Oslett a sense of headlong forward motion. The interior of the helicopter was noisier and shaken by more vibrations than the passenger compartment of the jet, which he also liked.

Twice he called Clocker’s attention to the natural wonders just beyond the windows. Both times the big man merely glanced at the scenery for a second or two, and then without comment returned his attention to Six-Breasted Amazon Women of the Slime Planet.

“What’s so damned interesting in that book?” Oslett finally demanded, dropping into the seat directly opposite Clocker.

Finishing the paragraph he was reading before looking up, Clocker said, “I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because even after I told you what I find interesting in this book, it wouldn’t be interesting to you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Clocker shrugged. “I don’t think you’d like it.”

“I hate novels, always have, especially science fiction and crap like that.”

“There you go.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you’ve confirmed what I said—you don’t like this sort of thing.”

“Of course I don’t.”

Clocker shrugged again. “There you go.”

Oslett glared at him. Gesturing at the book, he said, “How can you like that trash?”

“We exist in parallel universes,” Clocker said.

“What?”

“In yours, Johannes Gutenberg invented the pinball machine.”

“Who?”

“In yours, perhaps the most famous guy named Faulkner was a virtuoso on the banjo.”

Scowling, Oslett said, “None of this crap is making any sense to me.”

“There you go,” Clocker said, and returned his attention to Kirk and Spock in Love, or whatever the epic was titled.

Oslett wanted to kill him. This time, in Karl Clocker’s cryptic patter, he detected a subtly expressed but deeply felt disrespect. He wanted to snatch off the big man’s stupid hat and set fire to it, duck feather and all, grab the paperback out of his hands and tear it to pieces, and pump maybe a thousand rounds of hollow-point 9mm ammo into him at extreme close range.

Instead, he turned to the window to be soothed by the majesty of mountain peaks and forests seen at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

Above them, clouds were moving in from the northwest. Plump and gray, they settled like fleets of dirigibles toward the mountaintops.

At 1:10 Tuesday afternoon, at an airfield outside of Mammoth Lakes, they were met by a Network representative named Alec Spicer. He was waiting on the blacktop near the concrete-block and corrugated-steel hangar where they set down.

Though he knew their real names and was, therefore, at least of a rank equal to Peter Waxhill’s, he was not as impeccably attired, suave, or well-spoken as that gentleman who had briefed them over breakfast. And unlike the muscular Jim Lomax at John Wayne Airport in Orange County last night, he let them carry their own luggage to the green Ford Explorer that stood at their disposal in the parking area behind the hangar.

Spicer was about fifty years old, five feet ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, with brush-cut iron-gray hair. His face was all hard planes, and his eyes were hidden behind sunglasses even though the sky was overcast. He wore combat boots, khaki slacks, khaki shirt, and a battered leather flight jacket with numerous zippered pockets. His erect posture, disciplined manner, and clipped speech pegged him for a retired—perhaps cashiered—army officer who was unwilling to change the attitudes, habits, or wardrobe of a military careerist.

“You’re not dressed properly for Mammoth,” Spicer said sharply as they walked to the Explorer, his breath streaming from his mouth in white plumes.

“I didn’t realize it would be quite so cold here,” Oslett said, shuddering uncontrollably.

“Sierra Nevadas,” Spicer said. “Almost eight thousand feet above sea level where we stand. December. Can’t expect palm trees, hula skirts, and piña coladas.”

“I knew it would be cold, just not this cold.”

“You’ll freeze your ass off,” Spicer said curtly.

“This jacket’s warm,” Oslett said defensively. “It’s cashmere.”

“Good for you,” Spicer said.

He raised the hatch on the back of the Explorer and stood aside to let them load their luggage into the cargo space.

Spicer got behind the wheel. Oslett sat up front. In the back seat, Clocker resumed reading The Flatulent Ferocity from Ganymede.

Driving away from the airfield into town, Spicer was silent for a while. Then: “Expecting our first snow of the season later today.”

“Winter’s my favorite time of the year,” Oslett said.

“Might not like it so much with snow up to your ass and those nice oxfords turning hard as a Dutchman’s wooden shoes.”

“Do you know who I am?” Oslett asked impatiently.

“Yes, sir,” Spicer said, clipping his words even more than usual but inclining his head slightly in a subtle acknowledgment of his inferior position.

“Good,” Oslett said.

In places, tall evergreens crowded both sides of the roadway. Many of the motels, restaurants, and roadside bars boasted ersatz alpine architecture, and in some cases their names incorporated words that called to mind images from movies as diverse as The Sound of Music and Clint Eastwood vehicles: Bavarian this, Swiss that, Eiger, Matterhorn, Geneva, Hofbrau.

Oslett said, “Where’s the Stillwater house?”

“We’re going to your motel.”

“I understood there was a surveillance unit staking out the Stillwater house,” Oslett persisted.

“Yes, sir. Across the street in a van with tinted windows. ”

“I want to join them.”

“Not a good idea. This is a small town. Not even five thousand people, when you don’t count tourists. Lot of people going in and out of a parked van on a residential street—that’s going to draw unwanted attention.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“Phone the surveillance team, let them know where to reach you. Then wait at the motel. The minute Martin Stillwater calls his folks or shows up at their door—you’ll be notified.”

“He hasn’t called them yet?”

“Their phone’s rung several times in the past few hours, but they aren’t home to answer it, so we don’t know if it’s their son or not.”

Oslett was incredulous. “They don’t have an answering machine?”

“Pace of life up here doesn’t exactly require one.”

“Amazing. Well, if they’re not at home, where are they?”

“They went shopping this morning, and not long ago they stopped for a late lunch at a restaurant out on Route 203. They should be home in another hour or so.”

“They’re being followed?”

“Of course.”

In anticipation of the predicted storm, skiers were already arriving in town with loaded ski racks on their cars. Oslett saw a bumper sticker that read MY LIFE IS ALL DOWNHILL—AND I LOVE IT!

As they stopped at a red traffic light behind a station wagon that seemed to be stuffed full of enough young blond women in ski sweaters to populate half a dozen beer or lip-balm commercials, Spicer said, “Hear about the hooker in Kansas City?”

“Strangled,” Oslett said. “But there’s no proof our boy did it, even if someone resembling him did leave that lounge with her.”

“Then you don’t know the latest. Sperm sample arrived in New York. Been studied. It’s our boy.”

“They’re sure?”

“Positive.”

The tops of the mountains were disappearing into the lowering sky. The color of the clouds had deepened from the shade of abraded steel to a mottled ash-gray and cinder-black.

Oslett’s mood grew darker as well.

The traffic signal changed to green.

Following the carful of blondes through the intersection, Alec Spicer said, “So he’s fully capable of having sex.”

“But he was engineered to be . . .” Oslett couldn’t even finish the sentence. He no longer had any faith in the work of the genetic engineers.

“So far,” Spicer said, “through police contacts, the home office has compiled a list of fifteen homicides involving sexual assault that might be attributable to our boy. Unsolved cases. Young and attractive women. In cities he visited, at the times he was there. Similar M.O. in every case, including extreme violence after the victim was knocked unconscious, sometimes with a blow to the head but generally with a punch in the face . . . evidently to ensure silence during the actual killing.”

“Fifteen,” Oslett said numbly.

“Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.” Spicer glanced away from the road and looked at Oslett. His eyes were not only unreadable but entirely hidden behind the heavily tinted sunglasses. “And we better hope to God he killed every woman he screwed.”

“What do you mean?”

Looking at the road again, Spicer said, “He’s got a high sperm count. And the sperm are active. He’s fertile.”

Though he couldn’t have admitted it to himself until Spicer had said it aloud, Oslett had been aware this bad news was coming.

“You know what this means?” Spicer asked.

From the back seat, Clocker said, “The first operative Alpha-generation human clone is a renegade, mutating in ways we might not understand, and capable of infecting the human gene pool with genetic material that could spawn a new and thoroughly hostile race of nearly invulnerable super beings.”

For a moment Oslett thought Clocker had read a line from his current Star Trek novel, then realized that he had succinctly summed up the nature of the crisis.

Spicer said, “If our boy didn’t waste every bimbo he took a tumble with, if he made a few babies and for some reason they weren’t aborted—even one baby—we’re in deep shit. Not just the three of us, not just the Network, but the entire human race.”

9

Heading north through the Owens Valley, with the Inyo Mountains to the east and the towering Sierra Nevadas to the west, Marty found that the cellular phone would not always function as intended because the dramatic topography interfered with microwave transmissions. And on those occasions when he was able to place a call to his parents’ house in Mammoth, their phone rang and rang without being answered.

After sixteen rings, he pushed the END button, terminating the call, and said, “Still not home.”

His dad was sixty-six, his mom sixty-five. They had been schoolteachers, and both had retired last year. They were still young by modern standards, healthy and vigorous, in love with life, so it was no surprise they were out and about rather than spending the day at home in a couple of armchairs, watching television game shows and soap operas.

“How long are we staying with Grandma and Grandpa? ” Charlotte asked from the back seat. “Long enough for her to teach me to play the guitar as good as she does? I’m getting pretty good on the piano, but I think I’d like the guitar, too, and if I’m going to be a famous musician, which I think I might be interested in being—I’m still keeping my options open—then it would be a lot easier to take my music with me everywhere, since you can’t exactly carry a piano around on your back.”

“We aren’t staying with Grandma and Grandpa,” Marty said. “In fact, we aren’t even stopping there.”

Charlotte and Emily groaned with disappointment.

Paige said, “We might visit them later, in a few days. We’ll see. Right now we’re going to the cabin.”

“Yeah!” Emily said, and “All right!” Charlotte said.

Marty heard them smack their hands together in a high-five.

The cabin, which his mom and dad had owned since Marty was a boy, was nestled in the mountains a few miles outside of Mammoth Lakes, between the town and the lakes themselves, not far from the even smaller settlement of Lake Mary. It was a charming place, on which his father had done extensive work over the years, sheltered by hundred-foot pines and firs. To the girls, who had been raised in the suburban maze of Orange County, the cabin was as special as any enchanted cottage in a fairy tale.

Marty needed a few days to think before making any decisions about what to do next. He wanted to study the news and see how the story about him continued to be played; in the media’s handling of it, he might be able to assess the power if not the identity of his true enemies, who certainly were not limited to the eerie and deranged look-alike who had invaded their home.

They could not stay at his parents’ house. It was too accessible to reporters if the story continued to snowball. It was accessible, as well, to the unknown conspirators behind the look-alike, who had seen to it that a small news item about an assault had gotten major media coverage, painting him as a man of doubtful stability.

Besides, he didn’t want to put his mom and dad at risk by taking shelter with them. In fact, when he managed to get a call through, he was going to insist they immediately pack up their motorhome and get out of Mammoth Lakes for a few weeks, a month, maybe longer. While they were traveling, changing campgrounds every night or two, no one could try to get at him through them.

Since the attempted contact at the bank in Mission Viejo, Marty had been subjected to no more of The Other’s probes. He was hopeful that the haste and decisiveness with which they’d fled north had bought them safety. Even clairvoyance or telepathy—or whatever the hell it was—must have its limits. Otherwise, they were not merely up against a fantastic mental power but flat-out magic; while Marty could be driven, by experience, to credit the possibility of psychic ability, he simply could not believe in magic. Having put hundreds of miles between themselves and The Other, they were most likely beyond the range of his questing sixth sense. The mountains, which periodically interfered with the operation of the cellular telephone, might further insulate them from telepathic detection.

Perhaps it would have been safer to stay away from Mammoth Lakes and hide out in a town to which he had no connections. However, he opted for the cabin because even those who might target his parents’ house as a possible refuge for him would not be aware of the mountain retreat and would be unlikely to learn of it casually. Besides, two of his former high school buddies had been Mammoth County deputy sheriffs for a decade, and the cabin was close to the town in which he had been raised and where he was still well known. As a hometown boy who had never been a hell-raiser in his youth, he could expect to be taken seriously by the authorities and given greater protection if The Other did try to contact him again. In a strange place, however, he would be an outsider and regarded with more suspicion even than Detective Cyrus Lowbock had exhibited. Around Mammoth Lakes, if worse came to worst, he would not feel so isolated and alienated as he was certain to be virtually anywhere else.

“Might be bad weather ahead,” Paige said.

The sky was largely blue to the east, but masses of dark clouds were surging across the peaks and through the passes of the Sierra Nevadas to the west.

“Better stop at a service station in Bishop,” Marty said, “find out if the Highway Patrol’s requiring chains to go up into Mammoth.”

Maybe he should have welcomed a heavy snowfall. It would further isolate the cabin and make them less accessible to whatever enemies were hunting them. But he felt only uneasiness at the prospect of a storm. If luck was not with them, the moment might come when they needed to get out of Mammoth Lakes in a hurry. Roads drifted shut by a blizzard could cause a delay long enough to be the death of them.

Charlotte and Emily wanted to play Look Who’s the Monkey Now, a word game Marty had invented a couple of years ago to entertain them on long car trips. They had already played twice since leaving Mission Viejo. Paige declined to join them, pleading the need to focus her attention on driving, and Marty ended up being the monkey more frequently than usual because he was distracted by worry.

The higher reaches of the Sierras disappeared in mist. The clouds blackened steadily, as if the fires of the hidden sun were burning to extinction and leaving only charry ruin in the heavens.

10

The motel owners referred to their establishment as a lodge. The buildings were embraced by the boughs of hundred-foot Douglas firs, smaller pines, and tamaracks. The design was studiedly rustic.

The rooms couldn’t compare with those at the Ritz-Carlton, of course, and the interior designer’s attempt to call to mind Bavaria with knotty-pine paneling and chunky wood-frame furniture was jejune, but Drew Oslett found the accommodations pleasant nonetheless. A sizable stone fireplace, in which logs and starter material already had been arranged, was especially appealing; within minutes of their arrival, a fire was blazing.

Alec Spicer telephoned the surveillance team stationed in a van across the street from the Stillwater house. In language every bit as cryptic as some of Clocker’s statements, he informed them that Alfie’s handlers were now in town and could be reached at the motel.

“Nothing new,” Spicer said when he hung up the phone. “Jim and Alice Stillwater aren’t home yet. The son and his family haven’t shown up, either, and there’s no sign of our boy, of course.”

Spicer turned on every light in the room and opened the drapes because he was still wearing his sunglasses, though he had taken off his leather flight jacket. Oslett suspected that Alec Spicer didn’t remove his shades to have sex—and perhaps not even when he went to bed at night.

The three of them settled into swiveling barrel chairs around a herringbone-pine dinette table off the compact kitchenette. The nearby mullioned window offered a view of the wooded slope behind the motel.

From a black leather briefcase, Spicer produced several items Oslett and Clocker would need to stage the murders of the Stillwater family in the fashion that the home office desired.

“Two coils of braided wire,” he said, putting a pair of plastic-wrapped spools on the table. “Bind the daughters’ wrists and ankles with it. Not loosely. Tight enough to hurt. That’s how it was in the Maryland case.”

“All right,” Oslett said.

“Don’t cut the wire,” Spicer instructed. “After binding the wrists, run the same strand to the ankles. One spool for each girl. That’s also like Maryland.”

The next article produced from the briefcase was a pistol.

“It’s a SIG nine-millimeter,” Spicer said. “Designed by the Swiss maker but actually manufactured by Sauer in Germany. A very good piece.”

Accepting the SIG, Oslett said, “This is what we do the wife and kids with?”

Spicer nodded. “Then Stillwater himself.”

Oslett familiarized himself with the gun while Spicer withdrew a box of 9mm ammunition from the briefcase. “Is this the same weapon the father used in Maryland?”

“Exactly,” Spicer said. “Records will show it was bought by Martin Stillwater three weeks ago at the same gun shop where he’s purchased other weapons. There’s a clerk who’s been paid to remember selling it to him.”

“Very nice.”

“The box this gun came in and the sales receipt have already been planted in the back of one of the desk drawers in Stillwater’s home office, down in the house in Mission Viejo.”

Smiling, filled with genuine admiration, beginning to believe they were going to salvage the Network, Oslett said, “Superb attention to detail.”

“Always,” Spicer said.

The Machiavellian complexity of the plan delighted Oslett the way Wile E. Coyote’s elaborate schemes in Road Runner cartoons had thrilled him as a child—except that, in this case, the coyotes were the inevitable winners. He glanced at Karl Clocker, expecting him to be likewise enthralled.

The Trekker was cleaning under his fingernails with the blade of a penknife. His expression was somber. From every indication, his mind was at least four parsecs and two dimensions from Mammoth Lakes, California.

From the briefcase, Spicer produced a Ziploc plastic bag that contained a folded sheet of paper. “This is a suicide note. Forged. But so well done, any graphologist would be convinced it was written by Stillwater’s own hand.”

“What’s it say?” Oslett asked.

Quoting from memory, Spicer said, “ ‘There’s a worm. Burrowing inside. All of us contaminated. Enslaved. Parasites within. Can’t live this way. Can’t live.’ ”

“That’s from the Maryland case?” Oslett asked.

“Word for word.”

“The guy was creepy.”

“Won’t argue with you on that.”

“We leave it by the body?”

“Yeah. Handle it only with gloves. And press Stillwater’s fingers all over it after you’ve killed him. The paper’s got a hard, smooth finish. Should take prints well.”

Spicer reached into the briefcase once more and withdrew another Ziploc bag containing a black pen.

“Pentel Rolling Writer,” Spicer said. “Taken from a box of them in a drawer of Stillwater’s desk.”

“This is what the suicide note was written with?”

“Yeah. Leave it somewhere in the vicinity of his body, with the cap off.”

Smiling, Oslett reviewed the array of items on the table. “This is really going to be fun.”

While they waited for an alert from the surveillance team that was staking out the elder Stillwaters’ house, Oslett risked a walk to a ski shop in a cluster of stores and restaurants across the street from the motel. The air seemed to have grown more bitter in the short time they had been in the room, and the sky looked bruised.

The merchandise in the shop was first-rate. He was quickly able to outfit himself in well-made thermal underwear imported from Sweden and a black Hard Corps Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit. The suit had a reflective silver lining, foldaway hood, anatomically shaped knees, ballistic nylon scuff guards, insulated snowcuffs with rubberized strippers, and enough pockets to satisfy a magician. Over this he wore a purple U.S. Freestyle Team vest with Thermoloft insulation, reflective lining, elasticized gussets, and reinforced shoulders. He bought gloves too—Italian leather and nylon, almost as flexible as a second skin. He considered buying high-quality goggles but decided to settle for a good pair of sunglasses, since he wasn’t actually intending to hit the slopes. His awesome ski boots looked like something a robot Terminator would wear to kick his way through concrete-block walls.

He felt incredibly tough.

As it was necessary to try on every item of clothing, he used the opportunity to change out of the clothes in which he’d entered the shop. The clerk obligingly folded the garments into a shopping bag, which Oslett carried with him when he set out on the return walk to the motel in his new gear.

By the minute, he was more optimistic about their prospects. Nothing lifted the spirits like a shopping spree.

When he returned to the room, though he had been gone half an hour, there had been no news.

Spicer was sitting in an armchair, still wearing sunglasses, watching a talk show. A heavyset black woman with big hair was interviewing four male cross-dressers who had attempted to enlist, as women, in the United States Marine Corps, and had been rejected, though they seemed to believe the President intended to intervene on their behalf.

Clocker, of course, was sitting at the table by the window, in the fall of silvery pre-storm light, reading Huckleberry Kirk and the Oozing Whores of Alpha Centauri, or

whatever the damn book was called. His only concession to the Sierra weather had been to change from a harlequin-pattern sweater-vest into a fully sleeved cashmere sweater in a stomach-curdling shade of orange.

Oslett carried the black briefcase into one of the two bedrooms that flanked the living room. He emptied the contents on one of the queen-size beds, sat cross-legged on the mattress, took off his new sunglasses, and examined the clever props that would ensure Martin Stillwater’s postmortem conviction of multiple murder and suicide.

He had a number of problems to work out, including how to kill all these people with the least amount of noise. He wasn’t concerned about the gunfire, which could be muffled one way or another. It was the screaming that worried him. Depending on where the hit went down, there might be neighbors. If alerted, neighbors would call the police.

After a couple of minutes, he put on his sunglasses and went out to the living room. He interrupted Spicer’s television viewing: “We waste them, then what police agency’s going to be dealing with it?”

“If it happens here,” Spicer said, “probably the Mammoth County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Do we have a friend there?”

“Not now, but I’m sure we could have.”

“Coroner?”

“Out here in the boondocks—probably just a local mortician. ”

“No special forensic skills?”

Spicer said, “He’ll know a bullet hole from an asshole, but that’s about it.”

“So if we terminated the wife and Stillwater first, nobody’s going to be sophisticated enough to detect the order of homicides?”

“Big-city forensic lab would have a hard time doing that if the difference was, say, less than an hour.”

Oslett said, “What I’m thinking is . . . if we try to deal with the kids first, we’ll have a problem with Stillwater and his wife.”

“How so?”

“Either Clocker or I can cover the parents while the other one takes the kids into a different room. But stripping the girls, wiring their hands and ankles—it’ll take ten, fifteen minutes to do right, like in Maryland. Even with one of us covering Stillwater and his wife with a gun, they aren’t going to sit still for that. They’ll both rush me or Clocker, whoever’s guarding them, and together they might get the upper hand.”

“I doubt it,” Spicer said.

“How can you be sure?”

“People are gutless these days.”

“Stillwater fought off Alfie.”

“True,” Spicer admitted.

“When she was sixteen, the wife found her father and mother dead. The old man killed the mother, then himself—”

Spicer smiled. “Nice tie-in with our scenario.”

Oslett hadn’t thought about that. “Good point. Might also explain why Stillwater couldn’t write the novel based on the case in Maryland. Anyway, three months later she petitioned the court to free her from her guardian and declare her a legal adult.”

“Tough bitch.”

“The court agreed. It granted her petition.”

“So blow away the parents first,” Spicer advised, shifting in the armchair as if his butt had begun to go numb.

“That’s what we’ll do,” Oslett agreed.

Spicer said, “This is fucking crazy.”

For a moment Oslett thought Spicer was commenting on their plans for the Stillwaters. But he was referring to the television program, to which his attention drifted again.

On the talk show, the host with big hair had ushered off the cross-dressers and introduced a new group of guests. There were four angry-looking women seated on the stage. All of them were wearing strange hats.

As Oslett left the room, he saw Clocker out of the corner of his eye. The Trekker was still at the table by the window, riveted by the book, but Oslett refused to let the big man spoil his mood.

In the bedroom he sat on the bed again, amidst his toys, took off his sunglasses, and happily enacted and re-enacted the homicides in his mind, planning for every contingency.

Outside, the wind picked up. It sounded like wolves.

11

He stops at a service station to ask directions to the address he remembers from the Rolodex card. The young attendant is able to help him.

By 2:10 he enters the neighborhood in which he was evidently raised. The lots are large with numerous winter-bare birches and a wide variety of evergreens.

His mom and dad’s house is in the middle of the block. It’s a modest, two-story, white clapboard structure with forest-green shutters. The deep front porch has heavy white balusters, a green handrail, and decoratively scalloped fasciae along the eaves.

The place looks warm and welcoming. It is like a house in an old movie. Jimmy Stewart might live here. You know at a glance that a loving family resides within, decent people with much to share, much to give.

He cannot remember anything in the block, least of all the house in which he apparently spent his childhood and adolescence. It might as well be the residence of utter strangers in a town which he has never seen until this very day.

He is infuriated by the extent to which he has been brainwashed and relieved of precious memories. The lost years haunt him. The total separation from those he loves is so cruel and devastating that he finds himself on the verge of tears.

However, he suppresses his anger and grief. He cannot afford to be emotional while his situation remains precarious.

The only thing he does recognize in the neighborhood is a van parked across the street from his parents’ house. He has never seen this particular van, but he knows the type. The sight of it alarms him.

It is a recreational vehicle. Candy-apple red. An extended wheel-base provides a roomier interior. Oval camper dome on the roof. Large mud flaps with chrome letters: FUN TRUCK. The rear bumper is papered with overlapping rectangular, round, and triangular stickers memorializing visits to Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone, the annual Calgary Rodeo, Las Vegas, Boulder Dam, and other tourist attractions. Decorative, parallel green and black stripes undulate along the side, interrupted by a pair of mirrored view windows.

Perhaps the van is only what it appears to be, but at first sight he’s convinced it’s a surveillance post. For one thing, it seems too aggressively recreational, flamboyant. With his training in surveillance techniques, he knows that sometimes such vans seek to declare their harmlessness by calling attention to themselves, because potential subjects of surveillance expect a stakeout vehicle to be discreet and would never imagine they were being watched from, say, a circus wagon. Then there’s the matter of the mirrored windows on the side, which allow the people within to see without being seen, providing privacy that any vacationer might prefer but that is also ideal for undercover operatives.

He does not slow as he approaches his parents’ house, and he strives to show no interest in either the residence or the candy-apple red van. Scratching his forehead with his right hand, he also manages to cover his face as he passes those reflective view windows.

The occupants of the van, if any, must be employed by the unknown people who manipulated him so ruthlessly until Kansas City. They are a link to his mysterious superiors. He is as interested in them as in re-establishing contact with his beloved mother and father.

Two blocks later, he turns right at the corner and heads back toward a shopping area near the center of town, where earlier he passed a sporting-goods store. Lacking a firearm and, in any event, unable to buy one with a silencer, he needs to obtain a couple of simple weapons.

At 2:20, the motel-room telephone rang.

Oslett put on his sunglasses, hopped off the bed, and went to the living-room doorway.

Spicer answered the phone, listened, mumbled a word that might have been “good,” and hung up. Turning to Oslett, he said, “Jim and Alice Stillwater just came home from lunch.”

“Let’s hope Marty gives them a ring now.”

“He will,” Spicer said confidently.

Looking up from his book at last, Clocker said, “Speaking of lunch, we’re overdue.”

“The refrigerator in the kitchenette is loaded with stuff from the deli,” Spicer said. “Cold cuts, potato salad, macaroni salad, cheesecake. We won’t starve.”

“Nothing for me,” Oslett said. He was too excited to eat.

By the time he returns to the neighborhood where his parents live, it is 2:45, half an hour after he left. He is acutely aware of the minutes ticking away. The false father, Paige, and the kids could arrive at any time. Even if they made another bathroom stop after Red Mountain or haven’t maintained quite as high a speed as when he’d been following them, they are virtually certain to arrive in no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

He desperately wants to see his parents before the treacherous imposter gets to them. He needs to prepare them for what has happened and enlist their aid in his battle to reclaim his wife and daughters. He is uneasy about the pretender getting to them first. If that creature could insinuate itself so thoroughly with Paige, Charlotte, and Emily, perhaps there is a risk, however small, that it will win over Mom and Dad as well.

When he turns the corner onto the block where he spent his unremembered childhood, he is no longer driving the Camry that he stole in Laguna Hills at dawn. He is in a florist’s delivery van, a lucky acquisition he made by force after leaving the sporting-goods store.

He has accomplished a great deal in half an hour. Nevertheless, time is running out.

Though the day is increasingly dreary, he drives with the sun visor down. He is wearing a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead and a fleece-lined varsity jacket that belong to the young man who actually delivers for Murchison’s Flowers. Masked by the sun visor and the cap, he will be unidentifiable to anyone observing him behind the wheel.

He pulls to the curb and parks directly behind the recreational van in which he suspects a stakeout team is ensconced. He gets out of his own vehicle and walks quickly to the back of it, giving them no time to observe him.

It has a single rear door. The hinges need lubrication; they squeak.

The dead deliveryman is lying on his back on the floor of the cargo hold. His hands are folded on his chest, and he is surrounded by flowers, as if he is already embalmed and available for viewing by mourners.

From a plastic bag beside the cadaver, he removes the ice axe that he purchased from an extensive display of climbing gear in the sporting-goods store. The one-piece steel tool has a rubber grip around the handle. One head on the business end is the shape and the size of a tack hammer, while the other head is wickedly pointed. He tucks the handle under the waistband of his jeans.

From the same plastic bag he removes an aerosol can of deicing chemical. If sprayed on existing ice, it will melt through in swift order. If applied to car glass, locks, and windshield wipers prior to a freeze, it is guaranteed to prevent an ice build-up. At least that is what the label promises. He doesn’t really care whether it works for its intended purpose or not.

He removes the cap from this pressurized can, exposing the nozzle. There are two settings: SPRAY and STREAM. He sets it on STREAM, then slips it into one pocket of his varsity jacket.

Between the legs of the corpse is a huge arrangement of roses, carnations, delicate baby’s breath, and ferns in a celadon container. He slides it out of the van and, holding it in both hands, pushes the door shut with one shoulder.

Carrying the arrangement in an entirely natural fashion that nonetheless shields his face from the observers in the red van, he walks to the door of the house in front of which both vehicles are parked. The flowers are not meant for anyone at this address. He hopes no one is home. If someone answers the door, he will pretend to discover that he has the wrong house, so he can return to the street with the arrangement still held in front of him.

He is in luck. No one responds to the doorbell. He rings it several times and, through body language, exhibits impatience.

He turns away from the door. He follows the front walk to the street.

Looking through the spray of flowers and greenery that he holds in front of himself, he sees this side of the red van also sports two mirrored windows on the rear compartment. Considering how deserted and quiet the street is, he knows they are watching him, for want of anything better to do.

That’s okay. He’s just a florist’s frustrated deliveryman. They will see no reason to fear him. Better that they watch him, dismiss him, and turn their attention again to the white clapboard house.

He angles past the side of the surveillance vehicle. However, instead of following the cracked and hoved sidewalk to the back of the florist’s van, he steps off the curb in front of it and behind the red “fun truck.”

There is a smaller mirrored porthole in the back door of the surveillance vehicle, and in case they are still watching, he fakes an accident. He stumbles, lets the arrangement slip out of his hands, and sputters in anger as it smashes to ruin on the blacktop. “Oh, shit! Son of a bitch. Nice, real nice. Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

Even as the expletives are flying from him, he’s dropping below the rear porthole and pulling the can of deicing chemical out of his jacket pocket. With his left hand, he grasps the door handle.

If the door is locked, he will have revealed his intentions by the attempt to open it. Failing, he will be in deep trouble because they will probably have guns.

They have no reason to expect an attack, however, and he assumes the door will be unlocked. He assumes correctly. The lever handle moves smoothly.

He does not check to see if anyone has come out on the street and is watching him. Looking over his shoulder would only make him appear more suspicious.

He jerks the door open. Clambering up into the comparatively dark interior of the van, before he is sure anyone’s inside, he jams his index finger down on the nozzle of the aerosol can, sweeping it back and forth.

A lot of electronic equipment fills the vehicle. Dimly lit control boards. Two swivel chairs bolted to the floor. Two men on the surveillance team.

The nearest man appears to have gotten out of his chair and turned to the rear door a split second ago, intending to look through the porthole. He is startled as it flies open.

The thick stream of deicing chemical splashes across his face, blinding him. He inhales it, burning his throat, lungs. His breath is choked off before he can cry out.

Blur of motion now. Like a machine. Programmed. In high gear.

Ice axe. Freed from his waistband. Smooth, powerful arc. Swung with great force. To the right temple. A crunch. The guy drops hard. Jerk the weapon loose.

Second man. Second chair. Wearing earphones. Sitting at a bank of equipment behind the cab, his back to the door. Headset muffles his partner’s wheezing. Senses commotion. Feels the van rock when first operative goes down. Swivels around. Surprised, reaching too late for gun in shoulder holster. Makeshift Mace showers his face.

Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.

First man on the floor, spasming helplessly. Step on him, over him, keep moving, moving, a blur, straight at the second man.

Axe. Again. Axe. Axe.

Silence. Stillness.

The body on the floor is no longer spasming.

That went nicely. No screams, no shouts, no gunfire.

He knows he is a hero, and the hero always wins. Nevertheless, it’s a relief when triumph is achieved rather than just anticipated.

He is more relaxed than he has been all day.

Returning to the rear door, he leans out and looks around the street. No one is in sight. Everything is quiet.

He pulls the door shut, drops the ice axe on the floor, and regards the dead men with gratitude. He feels so close to them because of what they have shared. “Thank you,” he says tenderly.

He searches both bodies. Although they have identification in their wallets, he assumes it’s phony. He finds nothing of interest except seventy-six dollars in cash, which he takes.

A quick examination of the van turns up no files, notebooks, memo pads, or other papers that might identify the organization that owns the vehicle. They run a tight, clean operation.

A shoulder holster and revolver hang from the back of the chair in which the first operative had been sitting. It’s a Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special.

He strips out of his varsity jacket, puts on the holster over his cranberry sweater, adjusts it until he is comfortable, and dons the jacket once more. He draws the revolver and breaks open the cylinder. Case heads gleam. Fully loaded. He snaps the cylinder shut and holsters the weapon again.

The dead man on the floor has a leather pouch on his belt. It contains two speedloaders.

He takes this and affixes it to his own belt, which gives him more ammunition than he should need merely to deal with the false father. However, his faceless superiors seem to have caught up with him, and he cannot guess what troubles he may encounter before he has regained his name, his family, and the life stolen from him.

The second dead man, slumped in his chair, chin on his chest, never managed to draw the gun he was reaching for. It remains in the holster.

He removes it. Another Chief’s Special. Because of the short barrel, it fits in the relatively roomy pocket of the varsity jacket.

Acutely aware that he is running out of time, he leaves the van and closes the door behind him.

The first snowflakes of the storm spiral out of the northwest sky on a chill breeze. They are few in number, at first, but large and lacy.

As he crosses the street toward the white clapboard house with green shutters, he sticks out his tongue to catch some of the flakes. He probably had done the same thing when, as a boy living on this street, he had delighted in the first snow of the season.

He has no memories of snowmen, snowball battles with other kids, or sledding. Though he must have done those things, they have been expunged along with so much else, and he has been denied the sweet joy of nostalgic recollection.

A flagstone walkway traverses the winter-brown front lawn.

He climbs three steps and crosses the deep porch.

At the door, he is paralyzed by fear. His past lies on the other side of this threshold. The future as well. Since his sudden self-awareness and desperate break for freedom, he has come so far. This may be the most important moment of his campaign for justice. The turning point. Parents can be staunch allies in times of trouble. Their faith. Their trust. Their undying love. He is afraid he will do something, on the brink of success, to alienate them and destroy his chances for regaining his life. So much is at stake if he dares to ring the bell.

Daunted, he turns to look at the street and is enchanted by the scene, for snow is falling much faster than when he approached the house. The flakes are still huge and fluffy, millions of them, whirling in the mild northwest wind. They are so intensely white that they seem luminous, each lacy crystalline form filled with a soft inner light, and the day is no longer dreary. The world is so silent and serene—two qualities rare in his experience—that it no longer seems quite real, either, as if he has been transported by some magic spell into one of those glass globes that contain a diorama of a quaint winter scene and that will fill with an eternal flaky torrent as long as it is periodically shaken.

That fantasy is appealing. A part of him yearns for the stasis of a world under glass, a benign prison, timeless and unchanging, at peace, clean, without fear and struggle, without loss, where the heart is never troubled.

Beautiful, beautiful, the falling snow, whitening the sky before the land below, an effervescence in the air. It’s so lovely, touches him so profoundly, that tears brim in his eyes.

He is keenly sensitive. Sometimes the most mundane experiences are so poignant. Sensitivity can be a curse in an abrasive world.

Summoning all his courage, he turns again to the house. He rings the bell, waits only a few seconds, and rings it again.

His mother opens the door.

He has no memory of her, but he knows intuitively that this is the woman who gave him life. Her face is slightly plump, relatively unlined for her age, and the very essence of kindness. His features are an echo of hers. She has the same shade of blue eyes that he sees when he looks into a mirror, though her eyes seem, to him, to be windows on a soul far purer than his own.

“Marty!” she says with surprise and a quick warm smile, opening her arms to him.

Touched by her instant acceptance, he crosses the threshold, into her embrace, and holds fast to her as if to let go would be to drown.

“Honey, what is it? What’s wrong?” she asks.

Only then does he realize that he is sobbing. He is so moved by her love, so grateful to have found a place where he belongs and is welcome, that he cannot control his emotions.

He presses his face into her white hair, which smells faintly of shampoo. She seems so warm, warmer than other people, and he wonders if that is how a mother always feels.

She calls to his father: “Jim! Jim, come here quick!”

He tries to speak, tries to tell her that he loves her, but his voice breaks before he can form a single word.

Then his father appears in the hallway, hurrying toward them.

Distorting tears can’t prevent his recognition of his dad. They resemble each other to a greater extent than do he and his mother.

“Marty, son, what’s happened?”

He trades one embrace for the other, inexpressibly thankful for his father’s open arms, lonely no more, living now in a world under glass, appreciated and loved, loved.

“Where’s Paige?” his mother asks, looking through the open door into the snow-filled day. “Where are the girls?”

“We were having lunch at the diner,” his father says, “and Janey Torreson said you were on the news, something about you shot someone but maybe it’s a hoax. Didn’t make any sense.”

He is still choked with emotion, unable to reply.

His father says, “We tried to call you as soon as we walked in the door, but we got the answering machine, so I left a message.”

Again his mother asks about Paige, Charlotte, Emily.

He must gain control of himself because the false father might arrive at any minute. “Mom, Dad, we’re in bad trouble,” he tells them. “You’ve got to help us, please, my God, you’ve got to help.”

His mother closes the door on the cold December air, and they lead him into the living room, one on each side of him, surrounding him with their love, touching him, their faces filled with concern and compassion. He is home. He is finally home.

He does not remember the living room any more than he remembers his mother, his father, or the snows of his youth. The pegged-oak floor is more than half covered by a Persian-style carpet in shades of peach and green. The furniture is upholstered in a teal fabric, and visible wood is a dark red-brown cherry. On the mantel, flanked by a pair of vases on which are depicted Chinese temple scenes, a clock ticks solemnly.

As she leads him to the sofa, his mother says, “Honey, whose jacket are you wearing?”

“Mine,” he says.

“But that’s the new style varsity jacket.”

“Are Paige and the kids all right?” Dad asks.

“Yes, they’re okay, they haven’t been hurt,” he says.

Fingering the jacket, his mother says, “The school only adopted this style two years ago.”

“It’s mine,” he repeats. He takes off the baseball cap before she can notice that it is slightly too large for him.

On one wall is an arrangement of photographs of him, Paige, Charlotte, and Emily at different ages. He averts his eyes from that gallery, for it affects him too deeply and threatens to wring more tears from him.

He must recover and maintain control of his emotions in order to convey the essentials of this complex and mysterious situation to his parents. The three of them have little time to devise a plan of action before the imposter arrives.

His mother sits beside him on the sofa. She holds his right hand in both of hers, squeezing gently, encouragingly.

To his left, his father perches on the edge of an armchair, leaning forward, attentive, frowning with worry.

He has so much to tell them and does not know where to begin. He hesitates. For a moment he is afraid he’ll never find the right first word, fall mute, oppressed by a psychological block even worse than the one that afflicted him when he sat at the computer in his office and attempted to write the first sentence of a new novel.

When he suddenly begins to talk, however, the words gush from him as storm waters might explode through a bursting barricade. “A man, there’s a man, he looks like me, exactly like me, even I can’t see any difference, and he’s stolen my life. Paige and the girls think he’s me, but he’s not me, I don’t know who he is or how he fools Paige. He took my memories, left me with nothing, and I just don’t know how, don’t know how, how he managed to steal so much from me and leave me so empty.”

His father appears startled, and well might he be startled by these terrifying revelations. But there’s something wrong with Dad’s startlement, some subtle quality that eludes definition.

Mom’s hands tighten on his right hand in a way that seems more reflexive than conscious. He dares not look at her.

He hurries on, aware that they are confused, eager to make them understand. “Talks like me, moves and stands like me, seems to be me, so I’ve thought hard about it, trying to understand who he could be, where he could’ve come from, and I keep going back to the same explanation, even if it seems incredible, but it must be like in the movies, you know, like with Kevin McCarthy, or Donald Sutherland in the remake, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, something not human, not of this world, something that can imitate us perfectly and bleed away our memories, become us, except somehow he failed to kill me and get rid of my body after he took what was in my mind.”

Breathless, he pauses.

For a moment, neither of his parents speak.

A look passes between them. He does not like that look. He does not like it at all.

“Marty,” Dad says, “maybe you better go back to the beginning, slow down, tell us exactly what’s happened, step by step.”

“I’m trying to tell you,” he says exasperatedly. “I know it’s incredible, hard to believe, but I am telling you, Dad.”

“I want to help you, Marty. I want to believe. So just calm down, tell me everything from the beginning, give me a chance to understand.”

“We don’t have much time. Don’t you understand? Paige and the girls are coming here with this . . . this creature, this inhuman thing. I’ve got to get them away from it. With your help I’ve got to kill it somehow and get my family back before it’s too late.”

His mother is pale, biting her lip. Her eyes blur with nascent tears. Her hands have closed so tightly over his that she is almost hurting him. He dares to hope that she grasps the urgency and dire nature of the threat.

He says, “It’ll be all right, Mom. Somehow we’ll handle it. Together, we have a chance.”

He glances at the front windows. He expects to see the BMW arriving in the snowy street, pulling into the driveway. Not yet. They still have time, perhaps only minutes, seconds, but time.

Dad clears his throat and says, “Marty, I don’t know what’s happening here—”

“I told you what’s happening!” he shouts. “Damn it, Dad, you don’t know what I’ve been going through.” Tears well up again, and he struggles to repress them. “I’ve been in such pain, I’ve been so afraid, for as long as I can remember, so afraid and alone and trying to understand.”

His father reaches out, puts a hand on his knee. Dad is troubled but not in a way that he should be. He isn’t visibly angry that some alien entity has stolen his son’s life, isn’t as frightened as he ought to be by the news that an inhuman presence now walks the earth, passing for human. Rather, he seems merely worried and . . . sad. There is an unmistakable and inappropriate sadness in his face and voice. “You’re not alone, son. We’re always here for you. Surely you know that.”

“We’ll stand beside you,” Mom says. “We’ll get you whatever help you need.”

“If Paige is coming, like you say,” his father adds, “we’ll sit down together when she gets here, talk this out, try to understand what’s happening.”

Their voices are vaguely patronizing, as if they are talking to an intelligent and perceptive child but a child nonetheless.

“Shut up! Just shut up!” He pulls his hand free of his mother’s grasp and leaps up from the sofa, shaking with frustration.

The window. Falling snow. The street. No BMW. But soon.

He turns away from the window, faces his parents.

His mother sits on the edge of the sofa, her face buried in her hands, shoulders hunched, in a posture of grief or despair.

He needs to make them understand. He is consumed by that need and frustrated by his inability to get even the fundamentals of the situation across to them.

His father rises from the chair. Stands indecisively. Arms at his sides. “Marty, you came to us for help, and we want to help, God knows we do, but we can’t help if you won’t let us.”

Lowering her hands from her face, with tears on her cheeks now, his mother says, “Please, Marty. Please.”

“Everyone makes mistakes now and then,” his father says.

“If it’s drugs,” his mother says, through tears, speaking as much to his father as to him, “we can cope with that, honey, we can handle that, we can find treatment for that.”

His glass-encased world—beautiful, peaceful, time-less—in which he’s been living during the precious minutes since his mother opened her arms to him at the front door, now abruptly fractures. An ugly, jagged crack scars the smooth curve of crystal. The sweet, clean atmosphere of that brief paradise escapes with a whoosh, admitting the poisonous air of the hateful world in which existence requires an unending struggle against hopelessness, loneliness, rejection.

“Don’t do this to me,” he pleads. “Don’t betray me. How can you do this to me? How can you turn against me? I am your child.” Frustration turns to anger. “Your only child.” Anger turns to hatred. “I need. I need. Can’t you see?” He is trembling with rage. “Don’t you care? Are you heartless? How can you be so awful to me, so cruel? How could you let it come to this?”

12

At a service station in Bishop, they stopped long enough to buy snow chains and to pay extra to have them buckled to the wheels of the BMW. The California Highway Patrol was recommending but not yet requiring that all vehicles heading into the Sierra Nevadas be equipped with chains.

Route 395 became a divided highway west of Bishop, and in spite of the dramatically rising elevation, they made good time past Rovanna and Crowley Lake, past McGee Creek and Convict Lake, exiting 395 onto Route 203 slightly south of Casa Diablo Hot Springs.

Casa Diablo. House of the Devil.

The meaning of the name had never impinged upon Marty before.

Now everything was an omen.

Snow began falling before they reached Mammoth Lakes.

The fat flakes were almost as loosely woven as cheap lace. They fell in such plenitude that it seemed more than half the volume of the air between land and sky was occupied by snow. It immediately began to stick, trimming the landscape in faux ermine.

Paige drove through Mammoth Lakes without stopping and turned south toward Lake Mary. In the back seat, Charlotte and Emily were so entranced by the snowfall that, for the time being, they did not need to be entertained.

East of the mountains, the sky had been gray-black and churning. Here, in the wintry heart of the Sierras, it was like a Cyclopean eye sheathed in a milky cataract.

The turn-off from Route 203 was marked by a copse of pines in which the tallest specimen bore scars from a decade-old lightning strike. The bolt had not merely damaged the pine but had encouraged it into mutant patterns of growth, until it had become a gnarled and malignant tower.

The snowflakes were smaller than before, falling harder, driven by the northwest wind. After a playful debut, the storm was turning serious.

Cutting through mountain meadows and forests—increasingly more of the latter and fewer of the former—the upsloping road eventually passed a chain-link encircled property of over a hundred acres on the right. This plot had been purchased eleven years ago by the Prophetic Church of the Rapture, a cult that had followed the teachings of the Reverend Jonathan Caine and had believed that the faithful would soon be levitated from the earth, leaving only the unbaptized and truly wicked to endure a thousand years of grueling war and hell on earth before final Judgment came to pass.

As it turned out, Caine had been a child molester who videotaped his abuse of cult members’ children. He had gone to prison, his two thousand followers had dispersed on the winds of disillusionment and betrayal, and the property with all its buildings had been tied up by litigation for almost five years.

Some fantasies were destructive.

The chain-link fence, topped with coils of dangerous razor wire, was broken down in places. In the distance the spire of their church soared high above the trees. Beneath it were the sloped roofs of a warren of buildings in which the faithful had slept, taken their meals, and waited to be lifted heavenward by the right hand of the Lord Almighty. The spire stood untouched. But the buildings under it were missing many doors and windows, home to rats and possums and raccoons, shorn of glory and hairy with decay. Sometimes the vandals had been human. But wind and ice and snow had done the better part of the damage, as if God, through weather warped to His whim, had passed a judgment on the Church of the Rapture that He had not yet been ready to pass on the rest of humankind.

The cabin was also to the right of the narrow county road, the next property after the huge tract owned by the defunct cult. Set back three hundred yards from the pavement, at the end of a dirt lane, it was one of many similar retreats spread through the surrounding hills, most of them on an acre of land or more.

It was a one-story structure with weather-silvered cedar siding, slate roof, screened front porch, and river-rock foundation. Over the years his father and mother had expanded the original building until it contained two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and two baths.

They parked in front of the cabin and got out of the BMW. The surrounding firs, sugar pines, and ponderosa pines were ancient and huge, and the crisp air was sweet with the scent of them. Drifts of dead needles and scores of pinecones littered the property. Snow reached the ground only between the trees and through the occasional interstices of their thatched boughs.

Marty went to the woodshed behind the cabin. The door was held shut with a hasp and peg. Inside, to the right of the entrance, against the wall, a spare key was wrapped tightly in plastic and buried half an inch under the dirt floor.

When Marty returned to the front of the cabin, Emily was circling one of the larger trees in a crouch, closely examining the cones that had fallen from it. Charlotte was performing a wildly exaggerated ballet in an open space between trees, where a wide shaft of snow fell like a spotlight on a stage.

“I am the Snow Queen!” Charlotte announced breathlessly as she twirled and leaped. “I have dominion over winter! I can command the snow to fall! I can make the world shiny and white and beautiful!”

As Emily began to gather up an armload of cones, Paige said, “Honey, you’re not bringing those in the house.”

“I’m going to make some art.”

“They’re dirty.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“They’re beautiful and dirty,” Paige said.

“I’ll make art out here.”

“Snow fall! Snow blow! Snow swirl and whirl and caper!” commanded the dancing Snow Queen as Marty climbed the wooden steps and opened the screen door on the porch.

That morning the girls had dressed in jeans and wool sweaters, to be ready for the Sierras, and they were wearing heavily insulated nylon jackets as well as cloth gloves.

They wanted to stay outside and play. Even if they’d had boots, however, the outdoors would have been off limits. This time, the cabin was not simply a vacation getaway but a cloistered retreat which they might have to transform into a fortress, and the surrounding woods might eventually harbor something far more dangerous than wolves.

Inside, the place had a faint musty smell. It actually seemed colder than the snowy day beyond its walls.

Logs were stacked in the fireplace, and additional wood was piled high on one side of the broad, deep hearth. Later they would light a fire. To warm the cabin quickly, Paige went room to room, switching on the electric space heaters set in the walls.

Standing by one of the front windows, looking through the screened porch and down the dirt lane toward the county road, Marty used the cellular phone, which he’d brought in from the car, to try yet again to reach his folks back in Mammoth Lakes.

“Daddy,” Charlotte said as he punched in the number, “I just thought—who’s going to feed Sheldon and Bob and Fred and the other guys back home while we’re not there?”

“I already arranged with Mrs. Sanchez to take care of that,” he lied, for he hadn’t yet found the courage to tell her that all of her pets had been killed.

“Oh, okay. Then it’s a good thing it wasn’t Mrs. Sanchez who went totally berserk.”

“Who you calling, Daddy?” Emily asked as the first ring sounded at the far end of the line.

“Grandma and Grandpa.”

“Tell them I’m gonna make a cone sculpture for them.”

“Boy,” Charlotte said, “that’ll thrill the puke out of ’em.”

The phone rang a third time.

“They like my art,” Emily insisted.

Charlotte said, “They have to—they’re your grand-parents. ”

Four rings.

“Yeah, well, you’re not the Snow Queen, either,” Emily said.

“I am too.”

Five.

“No, you’re the Snow Troll.”

“You’re the Snow Toad,” Charlotte countered.

Six.

“Snow Worm.”

“Snow Maggot.”

“Snow Snot.”

“Snow Puke.”

Marty gave them a warning look, which put a stop to the name-calling competition, though they stuck their tongues out at each other.

After the seventh ring, he put his finger on the END button. Before he could push it, however, the connection was made.

Whoever picked up the receiver didn’t say anything.

“Hello?” Marty said. “Mom? Dad?”

Managing to sound both angry and sad, the man on the other end of the line said, “How did you win them over?”

Marty felt as if ice had formed in his veins and marrow, not because of the penetrating cold in the cabin but because the voice that responded to him was a perfect imitation of his own.

“Why would they love you more than me?” The Other demanded, his voice tremulous with emotion.

A mantle of dread settled on Marty, and a sense of unreality as disorienting as any nightmare. He seemed to be dreaming while awake.

He said, “Don’t touch them, you son of a bitch. Don’t you lay one finger on them.”

“They betrayed me.”

“I want to talk to my mother and father,” Marty demanded.

“My mother and father,” The Other said.

“Put them on the phone.”

“So you can tell them more lies?”

“Put them on the phone now,” Marty said between clenched teeth.

“They can’t listen to any more of your lies.”

“What have you done?”

“They’re finished listening to you.”

“What have you done?”

“They wouldn’t give me what I needed.”

With understanding, dread became grief. For a moment Marty could not find his voice.

The Other said, “All I needed was to be loved.”

“What have you done?” He was shouting. “Who are you, what are you, damn it, what are you, what have you done?”

Ignoring the questions, answering them with questions of its own, The Other said, “Have you turned Paige against me? My Paige, my Charlotte, my sweet little Emily? Do I have any hope of getting them back or will I have to kill them too?” The voice cracked with emotion. “Oh God, is there even blood in their veins any more, are they human any more, or have you made them into something else?”

Marty realized they could not conduct a conversation. It was madness to try. However much they might look and sound alike, they were without any common ground. In fundamental ways, they were as unlike each other as if they had been members of different species.

Marty pushed the END button.

His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the phone.

When he turned from the window, he saw the girls were standing together, holding hands. They were staring, pale and frightened.

His shouting into the telephone had brought Paige out of one of the bedrooms where she had been adjusting the electric heater.

Images of his parents’ faces and treasured memories of a life of love crowded into his mind, but he resolutely repressed them. If he gave in to grief now, wasted precious time in tears, he would be condemning Paige and the girls to certain death.

“He’s here,” Marty said, “he’s coming, and we don’t have much time.”