Shadowfires

17 PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

Choppering in from Palm Springs, Anson Sharp had arrived before dawn at Geneplan's bacteriologically secure underground research laboratories near Riverside, where he had been greeted by a contingent of six Defense Security Agency operatives, four U.S. marshals, and eight of the marshals' deputies, who had arrived minutes before him. Under the pretense of a national defense emergency, fully supported by valid court orders and search warrants, they identified themselves to Geneplan's night security guards, entered the premises, applied seals to all research files and computers, and established an operations headquarters in the rather sumptuously appointed offices belonging to Dr. Vincent Baresco, chief of the research staff.

As dawn dispelled the night and as day took possession of the world above the subterranean laboratories, Anson Sharp slumped in Baresco's enormous leather chair, sipped black coffee, and received reports, by phone, from subordinates throughout southern California, to the effect that Eric Leben's coconspirators in the Wildcard Project were all under house arrest. In Orange County, Dr. Morgan Eugene Lewis, research coordinator of Wildcard, was being detained with his wife at his home in North Tustin. Dr. J. Felix Geffels was being held at his house right there in Riverside. Dr. Vincent Baresco, head of all research for Geneplan, had been found by DSA agents in Geneplan's Newport Beach headquarters, unconscious on the floor of Eric Leben's office, amidst indications of gunplay and a fierce struggle.

Rather than take Baresco to a public hospital and even partially relinquish control of him, Sharp's men transported the bald and burly scientist to the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, where he was seen by a Marine physician in the base infirmary. Having received two hard blows to the throat that made it impossible for him to speak, Baresco used a pen and notepad to tell DSA agents that he had been assaulted by Ben Shadway, Rachael Leben's lover, when he had caught them in the act of looting Eric's office safe. He was disgruntled when they refused to believe that was the whole story, and he was downright shocked to discover they knew about Wildcard and were aware of Eric Leben's return from the dead. Using pen and notepad again, Baresco had demanded to be transferred to a civilian hospital, demanded to know what possible charges they could lodge, demanded to see his lawyer. All three demands were, of course, ignored.

Rupert Knowls and Perry Seitz, the money men who had supplied the large amount of venture capital that had gotten Geneplan off the ground nearly a decade ago, were at Knowls's sprawling ten-acre estate, Havenhurst, in Palm Springs. Three Defense Security Agency operatives had arrived at the estate with arrest warrants for Knowls and Seitz and with a search warrant. They had found an illegally modified Uzi submachine gun, doubtless the weapon with which two Palm Springs policemen had been murdered only a couple of hours earlier.

Currently and indefinitely under detention at Havenhurst, neither Knowls nor Seitz was raising objections. They knew the score. They would receive an unattractive offer to convey to the government all research, rights, and title to the Wildcard enterprise, without a shred of compensation, and they would be required to remain forever silent about that undertaking and about Eric Leben's resurrection. They would also be required to sign murder confessions which could be used to keep them acquiescent the rest of their lives. Although the offer had no legal basis or force, although the DSA was violating every tenet of democracy and breaking innumerable laws, Knowls and Seitz would accept the terms. They were worldly men, and they knew that failure to cooperate — and especially any attempt to exercise their constitutional rights — would be the death of them.

Those five were sitting on a secret that was potentially the most powerful in history. The immortality process was currently imperfect, true, but eventually the problems would be solved. Then whoever controlled the secrets of Wildcard would control the world. With so much at stake, the government was not concerned about observing the thin line between moral and immoral behavior, and in this very special case, it had no interest whatsoever in the niceties of due process.

After receiving the report on Seitz and Knowls, Sharp put down the phone, got up from the leather chair, and paced the windowless subterranean office. He rolled his big shoulders, stretched, and tried to work a kink out of his thick, muscular neck.

He had begun with eight people to worry about, eight possible leaks to plug, and now five of those eight had been dealt with quickly and smoothly. He felt pretty good about things in general and about himself in particular. He was damned good at his job.

At times like this, he wished he had someone with whom to share his triumphs, an admiring assistant, but he could not afford to let anyone get close to him. He was the deputy director of the Defense Security Agency, the number two man in the whole outfit, and he was determined to become director by the time he was forty. He intended to secure that position by collecting sufficient damaging material about the current director — Jarrod McClain — to force him out and to blackmail McClain into writing a wholehearted recommendation that Anson Sharp replace him. McClain treated Sharp like a son, making him privy to every secret of the agency, and already Sharp possessed most of what he needed to destroy McClain. But, as he was a careful man, he would not move until there was no possibility whatsoever of his coup failing. And when he ascended to the director's chair, he would not make the mistake of taking a subordinate to his bosom, as McClain had embraced him. It would be lonely at the top, must be lonely if he were to survive up there a long time, so he made himself get used to loneliness now: though he had protégés, he did not have friends.

Having worked the stiffness out of his thick neck and immense shoulders, Sharp returned to the chair behind the desk, sat down, closed his eyes, and thought about the three people who remained on the loose and who must be apprehended. Eric Leben, Mrs. Leben, Ben Shadway. They would not be offered a deal, as the other five had been. If Leben could be taken “alive,” he would be locked away and studied as if he were a lab animal. Mrs. Leben and Shadway would simply be terminated and their deaths made to look accidental.

He had several reasons for wanting them dead. For one thing, they were both independent-minded, tough, and honest — a dangerous mixture, volatile. They might blow the Wildcard story wide open for the pure hell of it or out of misguided idealism, thus dealing Sharp a major setback on his climb to the top. The others — Lewis, Geffels, Baresco, Knowls, and Seitz — would knuckle under out of sheer self-interest, but Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway could not be counted on to put their own best interests first. Besides, neither had committed a criminal act, and neither had sold his soul to the government as the men of Geneplan had done, so no swords hung over their heads; there were no credible threats by which they could be controlled.

But most important of all, Sharp wanted Rachael Leben dead simply because she was Shadway's lover, because Shadway cared for her. He wanted to kill her first, in front of Ben Shadway. And he wanted Shadway dead because he had hated the man for almost seventeen years.

Alone in that underground office, eyes closed, Sharp smiled. He wondered what Ben Shadway would do if he knew that his old nemesis, Anson Sharp, was hunting for him. Sharp was almost painfully eager for the inevitable confrontation, eager to see the astonishment on Shadway's face, eager to waste the son of a bitch.

Jerry Peake, the young DSA agent assigned by Anson Sharp to find Sarah Kiel, carefully searched for a freshly dug grave on Eric Leben's walled property in Palm Springs. Using a high-intensity flashlight, being diligent and utterly thorough, Peake tramped through flower beds, struggled through shrubbery, getting his pant legs damp and his shoes muddy, but he found nothing suspicious.

He turned on the pool lights, half expecting to find a dead woman either floating there — or weighted to the blue bottom and peering up through chlorine-treated water. When the pool proved to be free of corpses, Peake decided he had been reading too many mystery novels; in mystery novels, swimming pools were always full of bodies, but never in real life.

A passionate fan of mystery fiction since he was twelve, Jerry Peake had never wanted to be anything other than a detective, and not just an ordinary detective but something special, like a CIA or FBI or DSA man, and not just an ordinary DSA man but an investigative genius of the sort that John Le Carré, William F. Buckley, or Frederick Forsythe might write about. Peake wanted to be a legend in his own time. He was only in his fifth year with the DSA, and his reputation as a whiz was nonexistent, but he was not worried. He had patience. No one became a legend in just five years. First, you had to spend a lot of hours doing dog's work — like tramping through flower beds, snagging your best suits on thorny shrubbery, and peering hopefully into swimming pools in the dead of night.

When he did not turn up Sarah Kiel's body on the Leben property, Peake made the rounds of the hospitals, hoping to find her name on a patient roster or on a list of recently treated outpatients. He had no luck at his first two stops. Worse, even though he had his DSA credentials, complete with photograph, the nurses and physicians with whom he spoke seemed to regard him with skepticism. They cooperated, but guardedly, as if they thought he might be an imposter with hidden — and none too admirable — intentions.

He knew he looked too young to be a DSA agent; he was cursed with a frustratingly fresh, open face. And he was less aggressive in his questioning than he should be. But this time, he was sure the problem was not his baby face or slightly hesitant manner. Instead, he was greeted with doubt because of his muddy shoes, which he had cleaned with paper towels but which remained smeary-looking. And because of his trouser legs: Having gotten wet, the material had dried baggy and wrinkled. You could not be taken seriously, be respected, or become a legend if you looked as if you'd just slopped pigs.

An hour after dawn, at the third hospital, Desert General, he hit pay dirt in spite of his sartorial inadequacies. Sarah Kiel had been admitted for treatment during the night. She was still a patient.

The head nurse, Alma Dunn, was a sturdy white-haired woman of about fifty-five, unimpressed with Peake's credentials and incapable of being intimidated. After checking on Sarah Kiel, she returned to the nurses' station, where she'd made Peake wait, and she said, “The poor girl's still sleeping. She was… sedated only a few hours ago, so I don't expect she'll be awake for another few hours.”

“Wake her, please. This is an urgent national security matter.”

“I'll do no such thing,” Nurse Dunn said. “The girl was hurt. She needs her rest. You'll have to wait.”

“Then I'll wait in her room.”

Nurse Dunn's jaw muscles bulged, and her merry blue eyes turned cold. “You certainly will not. You'll wait in the visitors' lounge.”

Peake knew he would get nowhere with Alma Dunn because she looked like Jane Marple, Agatha Christie's indomitable amateur detective, and no one who looked like Miss Marple would be intimidated. “Listen, if you're going to be uncooperative, I'll have to talk to your superior.”

“That's fine with me,” she said, glancing down disapprovingly at his shoes. “I'll get Dr. Werfell.”

Beneath the earth in Riverside, Anson Sharp slept for one hour on the Ultrasuede sofa in Vincent Baresco's office, showered in the small adjacent bathroom, and changed into a fresh suit of clothes from the suitcase that he had kept with him on every leg of his zigzagging route through southern California the previous night. He was blessed with the ability to fall asleep at will in a minute or less, without fail, and to feel rested and alert after only a nap. He could sleep anywhere he chose, regardless of background noise. He believed this ability was just one more proof that he was destined to climb to the top, where he longed to be, proof that he was superior to other men.

Refreshed, he made a few calls, speaking with agents guarding the Geneplan partners and research chiefs at various points in three counties. He also received reports from other men at the Geneplan offices in Newport Beach, Eric Leben's house in Villa Park, and Mrs. Leben's place in Placentia.

From the agents guarding Baresco at the U.S. Marine Air Station in El Toro, Sharp learned that Ben Shadway had taken a Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum off the scientist in the Geneplan office last night, and that the revolver could not be located anywhere in that building. Shadway had not left it behind, had not disposed of it in a nearby trash container or hallway, but apparently had chosen to hold on to it. Furthermore, agents in Placentia reported that a.32-caliber semiautomatic pistol, registered to Rachael Leben, could be found nowhere in her house, and the assumption was that she was carrying it, though she did not possess a permit to carry.

Sharp was delighted to learn that both Shadway and the woman were armed, for that contributed to the justification of an arrest warrant. And when he cornered them, he could shoot them down and claim, with a measure of credibility, that they had opened fire on him first.

As Jerry Peake waited at the nurses' station for Alma Dunn to return with Dr. Werfell, the hospital came alive for the day. The empty halls grew busy with nurses conveying medicines to patients, with orderlies transporting patients in wheelchairs and on gurneys to various departments and operating theaters, and with a few doctors making very early rounds. The pervading scent of pine disinfectant was increasingly overlaid with others — alcohol, clove oil, urine, vomit — as if the busily scurrying staff had stirred stagnant odors out of every corner of the building.

In ten minutes, Nurse Dunn returned with a tall man in a white lab coat. He had handsome hawkish features, thick salt-and-pepper hair, and a neat mustache. He seemed familiar, though Peake was not sure why. Alma Dunn introduced him as Dr. Hans Werfell, supervising physician of the morning shift.

Looking down at Peake's muddy shoes and badly wrinkled trousers, Dr. Werfell said, “Miss Kiel's physical condition is not grave by any means, and I suppose she'll be out of here today or tomorrow. But she suffered severe emotional trauma, so she needs to be allowed to rest when she can. And right now she's resting, sound asleep.”

Stop looking at my shoes, damn you, Peake thought. He said, “Doctor, I understand your concern for the patient, but this is an urgent matter of national security.”

Finally raising his gaze from Peake's shoes, Werfell frowned skeptically and said, “What on earth could a sixteen-year-old girl have to do with national security?”

“That's classified, strictly classified,” Peake said, trying to pull his baby face into a suitably serious and imposing expression that would convince Werfell of the gravity of the situation and gain his cooperation.

“No point waking her, anyway,” Werfell said. “She'd still be under the influence of the sedative, not in any condition to give accurate answers to your questions.”

“Couldn't you give her something to counteract the drug?”

With only a frown, Werfell registered severe disapproval. “Mr. Peake, this is a hospital. We exist to help people get well. We wouldn't be helping Miss Kiel to get well if we pumped her full of drugs for no other purpose than to counteract other drugs and please an impatient government agent.”

Peake felt his face flush. “I wasn't suggesting you violate medical principles.”

“Good.” Werfell's patrician face and manner were not conducive to debate. “Then you'll wait until she wakes naturally.”

Frustrated, still trying to think why Werfell looked familiar, Peake said, “But we think she can tell us where to find someone whom we desperately must find.”

“Well, I'm sure she'll cooperate when she's awake and alert.”

“And when will that be, Doctor?”

“Oh, I imagine… another four hours, maybe longer.”

“What? Why that long?”

“The night physician gave her a very mild sedative, which didn't suit her, and when he refused to give her anything stronger, she took one of her own.”

“One of her own?”

“We didn't realize until later that she had drugs in her purse: a few Benzedrine tablets wrapped in one small packet of foil—”

“Bennies, uppers?”

“Yes. And a few tranquilizers in another packet, and a couple of sedatives. Hers was much stronger than the one we gave her, so she's pretty deep under at the moment. We've confiscated her remaining drugs, of course.”

Peake said, “I'll wait in her room.”

“No,” Werfell said.

“Then I'll wait just outside her room.”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Then I'll wait right here.”

“You'll be in the way here,” Werfell said. “You'll wait in the visitors' lounge, and we'll call you when Miss Kiel is awake.”

“I'll wait here,” Peake insisted, scrunching his baby face into the sternest, toughest, most hard-boiled look he could manage.

“The visitors' lounge,” Werfell said ominously. “And if you do not proceed there immediately, I'll have hospital security men escort you.”

Peake hesitated, wishing to God he could be more aggressive. “All right, but you damn well better call me the minute she wakes up.”

Furious, he turned from Werfell and stalked down the hall in search of the visitors' lounge, too embarrassed to ask where it was. When he glanced back at Werfell, who was now in deep conversation with another physician, he realized the doctor was a dead ringer for Dashiell Hammett, the formidable Pinkerton detective and mystery novelist, which was why he had looked familiar to a dedicated reader like Peake. No wonder Werfell had such a tremendous air of authority. Dashiell Hammett, for God's sake. Peake felt a little better about having deferred to him.

They slept another two hours, woke within moments of each other, and made love again in the motel bed. For Rachael, it was even better this time than it had been before: slower, sweeter, with an even more graceful and fulfilling rhythm. She was sinewy, supple, taut, and she took enormous and intense pleasure in her superb physical condition, drew satisfaction from each flexing and gentle thrusting and soft lazy grinding of her body, not merely the usual pleasure of male and female organs mating, but the more subtle thrill of muscle and tendon and bone functioning with the perfect oiled smoothness that, like nothing else, made her feel young, healthy, alive.

With her special gift for fully experiencing the moment, she let her hands roam over Benny's body, marveling over his leanness, testing the rock-hard muscles of his shoulders and arms, kneading the bunched muscles of his back, glorying in the silken smoothness of his skin, the rocking motion of his hips against hers, pelvis to pelvis, the hot touch of his hands, the branding heat of his lips upon her cheeks, her mouth, her throat, her breasts.

Until this interlude with Benny, Rachael had not made love in almost fifteen months. And never in her life had she made love like this: never this good, this tender or exciting, never this satisfying. She felt as if she had been half dead heretofore and this was the hour of her resurrection.

Finally spent, they lay in each other's arms for a while, silent, at peace, but the soft afterglow of lovemaking slowly gave way to a curious disquiet. At first she was not certain what disturbed her, but soon she recognized it as that rare and peculiar feeling that someone had just walked over her grave, an irrational but convincingly instinctive sensation that brought a vague chill to her bare flesh and a colder shiver to her spine.

She looked at Benny's gentle smile, studied every much-loved line of his face, stared into his eyes — and had the shocking, unshakable feeling that she was going to lose him.

She tried to tell herself that her sudden apprehension was¹ the understandable reaction of a thirty-year-old woman who, having made one bad marriage, had at last miraculously found the right man. Call it the I-don't-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome. When life finally hands us a beautiful bouquet of flowers, we usually peer cautiously among the petals in expectation of a bee. Superstition — evinced especially in a distrust of good fortune — was perhaps the very core of human nature, and it was natural for her to fear losing him.

That was what she tried to tell herself, but she knew her sudden terror was something more than superstition, something darker. The chill along her spine deepened until she felt as if each vertebra had been transformed into a lump of ice. The cool breath that had touched her skin now penetrated deeper, down toward her bones.

She turned from him, swung her legs out of the bed, stood up, naked and shivering.

Benny said, “Rachael?”

“Let's get moving,” she said anxiously, heading toward the bathroom through the golden light and palm shadows that came through the single, undraped window.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“We're sitting ducks here. Or might be. We've got to keep moving. We've got to keep on the offensive. We've got to find him before he finds us — or before anyone else finds us.”

Benny got out of bed, stepped between her and the bathroom door, put his hands on her shoulders. “Everything's going to be all right.”

“Don't say that.”

“But it will.”

“Don't tempt fate.”

“We're strong together,” he said. “Nothing's stronger.”

“Don't,” she insisted, putting a hand to his lips to silence him. “Please. I… I couldn't bear losing you.”

“You won't lose me,” he said.

But when she looked at him, she had the terrible feeling that he was already lost, that death was very near to him, inevitable.

The I-don't-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome.

Or maybe a genuine premonition.

She had no way of knowing which it was.

The search for Dr. Eric Leben was getting nowhere.

The grim possibility of failure was, for Anson Sharp, like a great pressure pushing in on the walls of Geneplan's underground labs in Riverside, compressing the window-less rooms, until he felt as if he were being slowly crushed. He could not abide failure; he was a winner, always a winner, superior to all other men, and that was the only way he cared to think of himself, the only way he could bear to think of himself, as the sole member of a superior species, for that image of himself justified anything he wished to do, anything at all, and he was a man who simply could not live with the moral and ethical limitations of ordinary men.

Yet field agents were filing negative reports from every place that the walking dead man might have been expected to show up, and Sharp was getting angrier and more nervous by the hour. Perhaps their knowledge of Eric Leben was not quite as thorough as they thought. In anticipation of these events, perhaps the geneticist had prepared a place where he could go to ground, and had managed to keep it secret even from the DSA. If that were the case, the failure to apprehend Leben would be seen as Sharp's personal failure, for he had identified himself too closely with the operation in expectation of taking full credit for its success.

Then he got a break. Jerry Peake called to report that Sarah Kiel, Eric Leben's underage mistress, had been located in a Palm Springs hospital. “But the damn medical staff,” Peake explained in his earnest but frustratingly wimpy manner, “isn't cooperative.”

Sometimes Anson Sharp wondered if the advantages of surrounding himself with weaker — and therefore unthreatening — young agents were outweighed by the disadvantage of their inefficiency. Certainly none of them would pose a danger to him once he had ascended to the director's chair, but neither were they likely to do anything on their own hook that would reflect positively on him as their mentor.

Sharp said, “I'll be there before she shakes off the sedative.”

The investigation at the Geneplan labs could proceed without him for a while. The researchers and technicians had arrived for the day and had been sent home with orders not to report back until notified. Defense Security Agency computer mavens were seeking the Wildcard files hidden in the Geneplan data banks, but their work was so highly specialized that Sharp could neither supervise nor understand it.

He made a few telephone calls to several federal agencies in Washington, seeking — and obtaining — information about Desert General Hospital and Dr. Hans Werfell that might give him leverage with them, then boarded his waiting chopper and flew back across the desert to Palm Springs, pleased to be on the move again.

Rachael and Benny taxied to the Palm Springs airport, rented a clean new Ford from Hertz, and drove back into town in time to be the first customers at a clothing store that opened at nine-thirty. She bought tan jeans, a pale yellow blouse, thick white tube socks, and Adidas jogging shoes. Benny chose blue jeans, a white shirt, tube socks, and similar shoes, and they changed out of their badly rumpled clothes in the public rest rooms of a service station at the north end of Palm Canyon Drive. Unwilling to waste time stopping for breakfast, partly because they were afraid of being spotted, they grabbed Egg McMuffins and coffee at McDonald's, and ate as they drove.

Rachael had infected Benny with her premonition of oncoming death and her sudden — almost clairvoyant — sense that time was running out, which had first struck her at the motel, just after they had made love for the second time. Benny had attempted to reassure her, calm her, but instead he had grown more uneasy by the minute. They were like two animals independently and instinctively perceiving the advance of a terrible storm.

Wishing they could have gone back for her red Mercedes, which would have made better time than the rental Ford, Rachael slumped in the passenger's seat and nibbled at her take-out breakfast without enthusiasm, while Benny drove north on State Route 111, then west on Interstate 10. Although he squeezed as much speed out of the Ford as anyone could have, handling it with that startling combination of recklessness and ease that was so out of character for a real-estate salesman, they would not reach Eric's cabin, above Lake Arrowhead, until almost one o'clock in the afternoon.

She hoped to God that would be soon enough.

And she tried not to think about what Eric might be like when — and if — they found him.

18 ZOMBIE BLUES

The dark rage passed, and Eric Leben regained his senses — such as they were — in the debris-strewn bedroom of the cabin, where he had smashed nearly everything he could get his hands on. A hard, sharp pain pounded through his head, and a duller pain throbbed in all of his muscles. His joints felt swollen and stiff. His eyes were grainy, watery, hot. His teeth ached, and his mouth tasted of ashes.

Following each fit of mindless fury, Eric found himself, as now, in a gray mood, in a gray world, where colors were washed out, where sounds were muted, where the edges of objects were fuzzy, and where every light, regardless of the strength of its source, was murky and too thin to sufficiently illuminate anything. It was as if the fury had drained him, and as if he had been forced to power down until he could replenish his reserves of energy. He moved sluggishly, somewhat clumsily, and he had difficulty thinking clearly.

When he had finished healing, the periods of coma and the gray spells would surely cease. However, that knowledge did not lift his spirits, for his muddy thought processes made it difficult for him to think ahead to a better future. His condition was eerie, unpleasant, even frightening; he felt that he was not in control of his destiny and that, in fact, he was trapped within his own body, chained to this now-imperfect, half-dead flesh.

He staggered into the bathroom, slowly showered, brushed his teeth. He kept a complete wardrobe at the cabin, just as he did at the house in Palm Springs, so he would never need to pack a suitcase when visiting either place, and now he changed into khaki pants, a red plaid shirt, wool socks, and a pair of woodsman's boots. In his strange gray haze, that morning routine required more time than it should have: He had trouble adjusting the shower controls to get the right temperature; he kept dropping the toothbrush into the sink; he cursed his stiff fingers as they fumbled with the buttons on his shirt; when he tried to roll up his long sleeves, the material resisted him as if it possessed a will of its own; and he succeeded in lacing the boots only with monumental effort.

Eric was further distracted by the shadowfires.

Several times, at the periphery of his vision, ordinary shadows burst into flames. Just short-circuiting electrical impulses in his badly damaged — but healing — brain. Illusions born in sputtering cerebral synapses between neurons. Nothing more. However, when he turned to look directly at the fires, they never faded or winked out as mere mirages might have done, but grew even brighter.

Although they produced no smoke or heat, consumed no fuel, and had no real substance, he stared at those nonexistent flames with greater fear each time they appeared, partly because within them — or perhaps beyond them — he saw something mysterious, frightening; darkly shrouded and monstrous figures that beckoned through the leaping brightness. Although he knew the phantoms were only figments of his overwrought imagination, although he had no idea what they might represent to him or why he should be afraid of them, he was afraid. And at times, mesmerized by shadowfires, he heard himself whimpering as if he were a terrorized child.

Food. Although his genetically altered body was capable of miraculous regeneration and rapid recuperation, it still required proper nutrition — vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins — the building blocks with which to repair its damaged tissues. And for the first time since arising in the morgue, he was hungry.

He shuffled unsteadily into the kitchen, shambled to the big refrigerator.

He thought he saw something crawling out of the slots in a wall plug just at the edge of vision. Something long, thin. Insectile. Menacing. But he knew it was not real. He had seen things like it before. It was another symptom of his brain damage. He just had to ignore it, not let it frighten him, even though he heard its chitinous feet tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Tap-tap-tapping. He refused to look. Go away. He held on to the refrigerator. Tapping. He gritted his teeth. Go away. The sound faded. When he looked toward the wall plug, there was no strange insect, nothing out of the ordinary.

But now his uncle Barry, long dead, was sitting at the kitchen table, grinning at him. As a child, he had frequently been left with Uncle Barry Hampstead, who had abused him, and he had been too afraid to tell anyone. Hampstead had threatened to hurt him, to cut off his penis, if he told anyone, and those threats had been so vivid and hideous that Eric had not doubted them for a minute. Now Uncle Barry sat at the table, one hand in his lap, grinning, and said, “Come here, little sweetheart; let's have some fun,” and Eric could hear the voice as clearly as he'd heard it thirty-five years ago, though he knew that neither the man nor the voice was real, and he was as terrified of Barry Hampstead as he had been long ago, though he knew he was now far beyond his hated uncle's reach.

He closed his eyes and willed the illusion to go away. He must have stood there, shaking, for a minute or more, not wanting to open his eyes until he was certain the apparition would be gone. But then he began to think that Barry was there and was slipping closer to him while his eyes were closed and was going to grab him by the privates any second now, grab him and squeeze—

His eyes snapped open.

The phantom Barry Hampstead was gone.

Breathing easier, Eric got a package of Farmer John sausage-and-biscuit sandwiches from the freezer compartment and heated them on a tray in the oven, concentrating intently on the task to avoid burning himself. Fumblingly, patiently, he brewed a pot of Maxwell House. Sitting at the table, shoulders hunched, head held low, he washed the food down with cup after cup of the hot black coffee.

He had an insatiable appetite for a while, and the very act of eating made him feel more truly alive than anything he'd done since he'd been reborn. Biting, chewing, tasting, swallowing — by those simple actions, he was brought further back among the living than at any point since he'd stepped in the way of the garbage truck on Main Street. For a while, his spirits began to rise.

Then he slowly became aware that the taste of the sausage was neither as strong nor as pleasing as when he had been fully alive and able to appreciate it; and though he put his nose close to the hot, greasy meat and drew deep breaths, he was unable to smell its spicy aroma. He stared at his cool, ash-gray, clammy hands, which held the biscuit-wrapped sausage, and the wad of steaming pork looked more alive than his own flesh.

Suddenly the situation seemed uproariously funny to Eric: a dead man sitting at breakfast, chomping stolidly on Farmer John sausages, pouring hot Maxwell House down his cold gullet, desperately pretending to be one of the living, as if death could be reversed by pretense, as if life could be regained merely by the performance of enough mundane activities — showering, brushing his teeth, eating, drinking, crapping — and by the consumption of enough homely products. He must be alive, because they wouldn't have Farmer John sausages and Maxwell House in either heaven or hell. Would they? He must be alive, because he had used his Mr. Coffee machine and his General Electric oven, and over in the corner his Westinghouse refrigerator was humming softly, and although those manufacturers' wares were widely distributed, surely none of them would be found on the far shores of the river Styx, so he must be alive.

Black humor certainly, very black indeed, but he laughed out loud, laughed and laughed — until he heard his laughter. It sounded hard, coarse, cold, not really laughter but a poor imitation, rough and harsh, as if he were choking, or as if he had swallowed stones that now rattled and clattered against one another in his throat. Dismayed by the sound, he shuddered and began to weep. He dropped the sausage-stuffed biscuit, swept the food and dishes to the floor, and collapsed forward, folding his arms upon the table and resting his head in his arms. Great gasping sobs of grief escaped him, and for a while he was immersed in a deep pool of self-pity.

The mice, the mice, remember the mice bashing against the walls of their cages…

He still did not know the meaning of that thought, could not recall any mice, though he felt that he was closer to understanding than ever before. A memory of mice, white mice, hovered tantalizingly just beyond his grasp.

His gray mood darkened.

His dulled senses grew even duller.

After a while, he realized he was sinking into another coma, one of those periods of suspended animation during which his heart slowed dramatically and his respiration fell to a fraction of the normal rate, giving his body an opportunity to continue with repairs and accumulate new reserves of energy. He slipped from his chair to the kitchen floor and curled fetally beside the refrigerator.

Benny turned off Interstate 10 at Redlands and followed State Route 30 to 330. Lake Arrowhead lay only twenty-eight miles away.

The two-lane blacktop cut a twisty trail into the San Bernardino Mountains. The pavement was hoved and rough in some spots, slightly potholed in others, and frequently the shoulder was only a few inches wide, with a steep drop beyond the flimsy guardrails, leaving little leeway for mistakes. They were forced to slow considerably, though Benny piloted the Ford much faster than Rachael could have done.

Last night Rachael had spilled her secrets to Benny — the details of Wildcard and of Eric's obsessions — and she had expected him to divulge his in return, but he had said nothing that would explain the way he had dealt with Vincent Baresco, the uncanny way he could handle a car, or his knowledge of guns. Though her curiosity was great, she did not press him. She sensed that his secrets were of a far more personal nature than hers and that he had spent a long time building barriers around them, barriers that could not easily be torn down. She knew he would tell her everything when he felt the time was right.

They traveled only a mile on Route 330 and were still twenty miles from Running Springs when he apparently decided that, in fact, the time had come. As the road wound higher into the sharply angled mountains, more trees rose up on all sides — birches and gnarled oaks at first, then pines of many varieties, tamarack, even a few spruce — and soon the pavement was more often than not cloaked in the velvety shadows of those overhanging boughs. Even in the air-conditioned car, you could feel that the desert heat was being left behind, and it was as if the escape from those oppressive temperatures buoyed Benny and encouraged him to talk. In a darkish tunnel of pine shadows, he began to speak in a soft yet distinct voice.

“When I was eighteen, I joined the Marines, volunteered to fight in Vietnam. I wasn't antiwar like so many were, but I wasn't prowar either. I was just for my country, right or wrong. As it turned out, I had certain aptitudes, natural abilities, that made me a candidate for the Corps' elite cadre: Marine Reconnaissance, which is sort of the equivalent of the Army Rangers or Navy Seals. I was spotted early, approached about recon training, volunteered, and eventually they honed me into as deadly a soldier as any in the world. Put any weapon in my hands, I knew how to use it. Leave me empty-handed, and I could still kill you so quick and easy you wouldn't know I was coming at you until you felt your own neck snap. I went to Nam in a recon unit, guaranteed to see plenty of action, which is what I wanted — plenty of action — and for a few months I was totally gung ho, delighted to be in the thick of it.”

Benny still drove the car with consummate skill, but Rachael noticed that the speed began to drop slowly as his story took him deeper into the jungles of Southeast Asia.

He squinted as the sun found its way through holes in the tree shadows and as spangles of light cascaded across the windshield. “But if you spend several months knee-deep in blood, watching your buddies die, sidestepping death yourself again and again, seeing civilians caught repeatedly in the cross fire, villages burned, little children maimed… well, you're bound to start doubting. And I began to doubt.”

“Benny, my God, I'm sorry. I never suspected you'd been through anything like that, such horror—”

“No point feeling sorry for me. I came back alive and got on with my life. That's better than what happened to a lot of others.”

Oh, God, Rachael thought, what if you hadn't come back? I would have never met you, never loved you, never known what I'd missed.

“Anyway,” he said softly, “doubts set in, and for the rest of that year, I was in turmoil. I was fighting to preserve the elected government of South Vietnam, yet that government seemed hopelessly corrupt. I was fighting to preserve the Vietnamese culture from obliteration under communism, yet that very same culture was being obliterated by the tens of thousands of U.S. troops who were diligently Americanizing it.”

“We wanted freedom and peace for the Vietnamese,” Rachael said. “At least that's how I understood it.” She was not yet thirty, seven years younger than Benny; but those were seven crucial years, and it had not been her war. “There's nothing so wrong with fighting for freedom and peace.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice haunted now, “but we seemed to be intent on creating that peace by killing everyone and leveling the whole damn country, leaving no one to enjoy whatever freedom might follow. I had to wonder… Was my country misguided? Downright wrong? Even possibly… evil? Or was I just too young and too naive, in spite of my Marine training, to understand?” He was silent for a moment, pulling the car through a sharp right-hand turn, then left just as sharply when the mountainside angled again. “By the time my tour of duty ended, I'd answered none of those questions to my satisfaction… and so I volunteered for another tour.”

“You stayed in Nam when you could have gone home?” she asked, startled. “Even though you had such terrible doubts?”

“I had to work it out,” he said. “I just had to. I mean, I'd killed people, a lot of people, in what I thought was a just cause, and I had to know whether I'd been right or wrong. I couldn't walk away, put it out of my mind, get on with my life, and just forget about it. Hell, no. I had to work it out, decide if I was a good man or a killer, and then figure what accommodation I could reach with life, with my own conscience. And there was no better place to work it out, to analyze the problem, than right there in the middle of it. Besides, to understand why I stayed on for a second tour, you've got to understand me, the me that existed then: very young, idealistic, with patriotism as much a part of me as the color of my eyes. I loved my country, believed in my country, totally believed, and I couldn't just shed that belief like… well, like a snake sheds skin.”

They passed a road sign that said they were sixteen miles from Running Springs and twenty-three miles from Lake Arrowhead.

Rachael said, “So you stayed in Nam another whole year?”

He sighed wearily. “As it turned out… two years.”

In his cabin high above Lake Arrowhead, for a time that he could not measure, Eric Leben drifted in a peculiar twilight state, neither awake nor asleep, neither alive nor dead, while his genetically altered cells increased production of enzymes, proteins, and other substances that would contribute to the healing process. Brief dark dreams and unassociated nightmare images flickered through his mind, like hideous shadows leaping in the bloody light of tallow candles.

When at last he rose from his trancelike condition, full of energy again, he was acutely aware that he had to arm himself and be prepared for action. His mind was still not entirely clear, his memory threadbare in places, so he did not know exactly who might be coming after him, but instinct told him that he was being stalked.

Sure as hell, someone'll find this place through Sarah Kiel, he told himself.

That thought jolted him because he could not remember who Sarah Kiel was. He stood with one hand on a kitchen counter, swaying, straining to recall the face and identity that went with that name.

Sarah Kiel…

Suddenly he remembered, and he cursed himself for having brought the damn girl here. The cabin was supposed to be his secret retreat. He should never have told anyone. One of his problems was that he needed young women in order to feel young himself, and he always tried to impress them. Sarah had been impressed by the five-room cabin, outfitted as it was with all conveniences, the acres of private woods, and the spectacular view of the lake far below. They'd had good sex outside, on a blanket, under the boughs of an enormous pine, and he had felt wonderfully young. But now Sarah knew about his secret retreat, and through her others — the stalkers whose identities he could not quite fix upon — might learn of the place and come after him.

With new urgency, Eric pushed away from the counter and headed toward the door that opened from the kitchen into the garage. He moved less stiffly than before, with more energy, and his eyes were less bothered by bright light, and no phantom uncles or insects crept out of the corners to frighten him; the period of coma had apparently done him some good. But when he put his hand on the doorknob, he stopped, jolted by another thought:

Sarah can't tell anyone about this place because Sarah is dead, I killed her only a few hours ago…

A wave of horror washed over Eric, and he held fast to the doorknob as if to anchor himself and prevent the wave from sweeping him away into permanent darkness, madness. Suddenly he recalled going to the house in Palm Springs, remembered beating the girl, the naked girl, mercilessly hammering her with his fists. Images of her bruised and bleeding face, twisted in terror, flickered through his damaged memory like slides through a broken stereopticon. But had he actually killed her? No, no, surely not. He enjoyed playing rough with women, yes, he could admit that, enjoyed hitting them, liked nothing more than watching them cower before him, but he would never kill anyone, never had and never would, no, surely not, no, he was a law-abiding citizen, a social and economic winner, not a thug or psychopath. Yet he was abruptly assaulted by another unclear but fearful memory of nailing Sarah to the wall in Rachael's house in Placentia, nailing her naked above the bed as a warning to Rachael, and he shuddered, then realized it had not been Sarah but someone else nailed up on that wall, someone whose name he did not even know, a stranger who had vaguely resembled Rachael, but that was ridiculous, he had not killed two women, had not even killed one, but now he also recalled a garbage dumpster, a filthy alleyway, and yet another woman, a third woman, a pretty Latino, her throat slashed by a scalpel, and he had shoved her corpse into the dumpster..

No. My God, what have I made of myself? he wondered, nausea twisting his belly. I'm both researcher and subject, creator and creation, and that has to've been a mistake, a terrible mistake. Could I have become… my own Frankenstein monster?

For one dreadful moment, his thought processes cleared, and truth shone through to him as brightly as the morning sun piercing a freshly washed window.

He shook his head violently, pretending that he wanted to be rid of the last traces of the mist that had been clouding his mind, though in fact he was trying desperately to rid himself of his unwelcome and unbearable clarity. His badly injured brain and precarious physical condition made the rejection of the truth an easy matter. The violent shaking of his head was enough to make him dizzy, blur his vision, and bring the shrouding mists back to his memory, hindering his thought processes, leaving him confused and somewhat disoriented.

The dead women were false memories, yes, of course, yes, they could not be real, because he was incapable of cold-blooded murder. They were as unreal as his uncle Barry and the strange insects that he sometimes thought he saw.

Remember the mice, the mice, the frenzied, biting, angry mice…

What mice? What do angry mice have to do with it?

Forget the damn mice.

The important thing was that he could not possibly have murdered even one person, let alone three. Not him. Not Eric Leben. In the murkiness of his half-lit and turbulent memory, these nightmare images were surely nothing but illusions, just like the shadowfires that sprang from nowhere. They were merely the result of short-circuiting electrical impulses in his shattered brain tissue, and they would not stop plaguing him until that tissue was entirely healed. Meanwhile, he dared not dwell on them, for he would begin to doubt himself and his perceptions, and in his fragile mental condition, he did not have the energy for self-doubt.

Trembling, sweating, he pulled open the door, stepped into the garage, and switched on the light. His black Mercedes 560 SEL was parked where he had left it last night.

When he looked at the Mercedes, he was suddenly stricken by a memory of another car, an older and less elegant one, in the trunk of which he had stashed a dead woman—

No. False memories again. Illusions. Delusions.

He carefully placed one splayed hand against the wall, leaned for a moment, gathering strength and trying to clear his head. When at last he looked up, he could not recall why he was in the garage.

Gradually, however, he was once again filled with the instinctive sense that he was being stalked, that someone was coming to get him, and that he must arm himself. His muddied mind would not produce a clear picture of the people who might be pursuing him, but he knew he was in danger. He pushed away from the wall, moved past the car, and went to the workbench and tool rack at the front of the garage.

He wished that he'd had the foresight to keep a gun at the cabin. Now he had to settle for a wood ax, which he took down from the clips by which it was mounted on the wall, breaking a spider's web anchored to the handle. He had used the ax to split logs for the fireplace and to chop kindling. It was quite sharp, an excellent weapon.

Though he was incapable of cold-blooded murder, he knew he could kill in self-defense if necessary. No fault in protecting himself. Self-defense was far different from murder. It was justifiable.

He hefted the ax, testing its weight. Justifiable.

He took a practice swing with the weapon. It cut through the air with a whoosh. Justifiable.

Approximately nine miles from Running Springs and sixteen miles from Lake Arrowhead, Benny pulled off the road and parked on a scenic lay-by, which featured two picnic tables, a trash barrel, and lots of shade from several huge bristlecone pines. He switched off the engine and rolled down his window. The mountain air was forty degrees cooler than the air in the desert from which they had come; it was still warm but not stifling, and Rachael found the mild breeze refreshing as it washed through the car, scented by wildflowers and pine sap.

She did not ask why he was pulling off the road, for his reasons were obvious: It was vitally important to him that she understand the conclusions he had reached in

Vietnam and that she have no illusions about the kind of man that the war had made of him, and he did not trust himself to convey all of those things adequately while also negotiating the twisty mountain lane.

He told her about his second year of combat. It had begun in confusion and despair, with the awful realization that he was not involved in a clean war the way World War II had been clean, with well-delineated moral choices. Month by month, his recon unit's missions took him deeper into the war zone. Frequently they crossed the line of battle, striking into enemy territory on clandestine missions. Their purpose was not only to engage and destroy the enemy, but also to engage civilians in a peaceful capacity in hope of winning hearts and minds. Through those varied contacts, he saw the special savagery of the enemy, and he finally reached the conclusion that this unclean war forced participants to choose between degrees of immorality: On one hand, it was immoral to stay and fight, to be a part of death dealing and destruction; on the other hand, it was an even greater moral wrong to walk away, for the political mass murder that would follow a collapse of South Vietnam and Cambodia was certain to be many times worse than the casualties of continued warfare.

In a voice that made Rachael think of the dark confessionals in which she had knelt as a youth, Benny said, “In a sense, I realized that, bad as we were for Vietnam, after us there would be only worse. After us, a bloodbath. Millions executed or worked to death in slave-labor camps. After us… the deluge.”

He did not look at her but stared through the windshield at the forested slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains.

She waited.

At last he said, “No heroes. I wasn't yet even quite twenty-one years old, so it was a tough realization for me — that I was no hero, that I was essentially just the lesser of two evils. You're supposed to be an idealist at twenty-one, an optimist and an idealist, but I saw that maybe a lot of life was shaped by those kinds of choices, by choosing between evils and hoping always to choose the least of them.”

Benny took a deep breath of the mountain air coming through the open window, expelled it forcefully, as though he felt sullied just by talking about the war and as though the clean air of the mountains would, if drawn in deeply enough, expunge old stains from his soul.

Rachael said nothing, partly because she did not want to break the spell before he told her everything. But she was also rendered speechless by the discovery that he had been a professional soldier, for that revelation forced her to reevaluate him completely.

She'd thought of him as a wonderfully uncomplicated man, as an ordinary real-estate broker; his very plainness had been attractive. God knew, she'd had more than enough color and flamboyance with Eric. The image of simplicity which Benny projected was soothing; it implied equanimity, reliability, dependability. He was like a deep, cool, and placid stream, slow-moving, soothing. Until now, Benny's interest in trains and old novels and forties music had seemed merely to confirm that his life had been free of serious trauma, for it did not seem possible that a life-battered and complicated man could take such unalloyed pleasure from those simple things. When he was occupied with those pastimes, he was wrapped in childlike wonder and innocence of such purity that it was hard to believe he'd ever known disillusionment or profound anguish.

“My buddies died,” he said. “Not all of them but too damn many, blown away in firefights, cut down by snipers, hit by antipersonnel mines, and some got sent home crippled and maimed, faces disfigured, bodies and minds scarred forever. It was a high price to pay if we weren't fighting for a noble cause, if we were just fighting for the lesser of two evils, a damn high price. But it seemed to me the only alternative — just walking away — was an out only if you shut your eyes to the fact that there are degrees of evil, some worse than others.”

“So you volunteered for a third tour of duty,” Rachael said.

“Yes. Stayed, survived. Not happy, not proud. Just doing what had to be done. A lot of us made that commitment, which wasn't easy. And then… that was the year we pulled our troops out, which I'll never forgive or forget, because it wasn't just an abandonment of the Vietnamese, it was an abandonment of me. I understood the terms, and still I'd been willing to make the sacrifice. Then my country, in which I'd believed so deeply, forced me to walk away, to just let the greater evil win, as if I was supposed to find it easy to deny the complexity of the moral issues after I'd finally grasped the tangled nature of them, as if it had all been a fuckin' game or something!”

She had never before heard anger like this in his voice, anger as hard as steel and ice-cold, never imagined he had the capacity for it. It was a fully controlled, quiet rage — but profound and a little frightening.

He said, “It was a bad shock for a twenty-one-year-old kid to learn that life wasn't going to give him a chance to be a real pure hero, but it was even worse to learn that his own country could force him to do the wrong thing. After we left, the Cong and Khmer Rouge slaughtered three or four million in Cambodia and Vietnam, and another half million died trying to escape to the sea in pathetic, flimsy little boats. And… and in a way I can't quite convey, I feel those deaths are on my hands, on all our hands, and I feel the weight of them, sometimes so heavy I don't think I can hold up under it.”

“You're being too hard on yourself.”

“No. Never too hard.”

“One man can't carry the world on his shoulders,” she said.

But Benny would not allow that weight to be lifted from him, not even a fraction of it. “That's why I'm past-focused, I guess. I've learned that the worlds I have to live in — the present world and the world to come — aren't clean, never will be, and give us no choices between black and white. But there's always at least the illusion that things were a lot different in the past.”

Rachael had always admired his sense of responsibility and his unwavering honesty, but now she saw that those qualities ran far deeper in him than she had realized — perhaps too deep. Even virtues like responsibility and honesty could become obsessions. But, oh, what lovely obsessions compared with those of other men she had known.

At last he looked at her, met her gaze, and his eyes were full of a sorrow — almost a melancholy — that she had never seen in them before. But other emotions were evident in his eyes as well, a special warmth and tenderness, great affection, love.

He said, “Last night and this morning… after we made love… Well, for the first time since before the war, I saw an important choice that was strictly black and white, no grays whatsoever, and in that choice there's a sort of… a sort of salvation that I thought I'd never find.”

“What choice?” she asked.

“Whether to spend my life with you — or not,” he said. “To spend it with you is the right choice, entirely right, no ambiguities. And to let you slip away is wrong, all wrong; I've no doubt about that.”

For weeks, maybe months, Rachael had known she was in love with Benny. But she had reined in her emotions, had not spoken of the depth of her feelings for him, and had not permitted herself to think of a long-term commitment. Her childhood and adolescence had been colored by loneliness and shaped by the terrible perception that she was unloved, and those bleak years had engendered in her a craving for affection. That craving, that need to be wanted and loved, was what had made her such easy prey for Eric Leben and had led her into a bad marriage. Eric's obsession with youth in general and with her youth in particular had seemed like love to Rachael, for she had desperately wanted it to be love. She had spent the next seven years learning and accepting the grim and hurtful truth — that love had nothing to do with it. Now she was cautious, wary of being hurt again.

“I love you, Rachael.”

Heart pounding, wanting to believe that she could be loved by a man as good and sweet as Benny, but afraid to believe it, she tried to look away from his eyes because the longer she stared into them the closer she came to losing the control and cool detachment with which she armored herself. But she could not look away. She tried not to say anything that would make her vulnerable, but with a curious mixture of dismay, delight, and wild exhilaration, she said, “Is this what I think it is?”

“What do you think it is?”

“A proposal.”

“Hardly the time or place for a proposal, is it?” he said.

“Hardly.”

“Yet… that's what it is. I wish the circumstances were more romantic.”

“Well…”

“Champagne, candlelight, violins.”

She smiled.

“But,” he said, “when Baresco was holding that revolver on us, and when we were being chased down Palm Canyon Drive last night, the thing that scared me most wasn't that I might be killed… but that I might be killed before I'd let you know how I felt about you. So I'm letting you know. I want to be with you always, Rachael, always.”

More easily than she would have believed possible, the words came to her own lips. “I want to spend my life with you, too, Benny.”

He put a hand to her face.

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly.

“I love you,” he said.

“God, I love you.”

“If we get through this alive, you'll marry me?”

“Yes,” she said, seized by a sudden chill. “But damn it, Benny, why'd you have to bring the if part into it?”

“Forget I said it.”

But she could not forget. Earlier in the day, in the motel room in Palm Springs, just after they had made love the second time, she'd experienced a presentiment of death that had shaken her and had filled her with the need to move, as if a deadly weight would fall on them if they stayed in the same place any longer. That uncanny feeling returned. The mountain scenery, which had been fresh and alluring, acquired a somber and threatening aspect that chilled her even though she knew it was entirely a subjective change. The trees seemed to stretch into mutant shapes, their limbs bonier, their shadows darker.

“Let's go,” she said.

He nodded, apparently understanding her thoughts and perceiving the same change of mood that she felt.

He started the car, pulled onto the road. When they had rounded the next bend, they saw another sign: lake arrowhead—15 miles.

Eric looked over the other tools in the garage, seeking another instrument for his arsenal. He saw nothing useful.

He returned to the house. In the kitchen, he put the ax on the table and pulled open a few drawers until he located a set of knives. He chose two — a butcher's knife and a smaller, pointier blade.

With an ax and two knives, he was prepared for both arm's-length combat and close-in fighting. He still wished he had a gun, but at least he was no longer defenseless. If someone came looking for him, he would be able to take care of himself. He would do them serious damage before they brought him down, a prospect that gave him some satisfaction and that, somewhat to his surprise, brought a sudden grin to his face.

The mice, the mice, the biting, frenzied mice…

Damn. He shook his head.

The mice, mice, mice, maniacal, clawing, spitting…

That crazy thought, like a fragment of a demented nursery rhyme, spun through his mind again, frightening him, and when he tried to focus on it, tried to understand it, his thoughts grew muddy once more, and he simply could not grasp the meaning of the mice.

The mice, mice, bloody-eyed, bashing against cage walls…

When he continued to strain for the elusive memory of the mice, a throbbing white pain filled his head from crown to temples and burned across the bridge of his nose, but when he stopped trying to remember and attempted, instead, to put the mice out of his mind, the pain grew even worse, a sledgehammer striking rhythmically behind his eyes. He had to grit his teeth to endure it, broke out in a sweat, and with the sweat came anger duller than the pain but growing even as the pain grew, unfocused anger at first but not for long. He said, “Rachael, Rachael,” and clenched the butcher's knife. “Rachael…”

19 SHARP AND THE STONE

On arriving at the hospital in Palm Springs, Anson Sharp had done easily what Jerry Peake had been unable to do with mighty striving. In ten minutes, he turned Nurse Alma Dunn's stonefaced implacability to dust, and he shattered Dr. Werfell's authoritarian calm, reducing both of them to nervous, uncertain, respectful, cooperative citizens. Theirs was grudging cooperation, but it was cooperation nonetheless, and Peake was deeply impressed. Though Sarah Kiel was still under the influence of the sedatives that she had taken in the middle of the night, Werfell agreed to wake her by whatever means necessary.

As always, Peake watched Sharp closely, trying to learn how the deputy director achieved his effects, much as a young magician might study a master prestidigitator's every move upon the stage. For one thing, Sharp used his formidable size to intimidate; he stood close, towering over his adversaries, staring down ominously, huge shoulders drawn up, full of pent-up violence, a volatile man. Yet the threat never became overt, and in fact Sharp frequently smiled. Of course, the smile was a weapon, too, for it was too wide, too full of teeth, utterly humorless, and strange.

More important than Sharp's size was his use of every trick available to a highly placed government agent. Before leaving the Geneplan labs in Riverside, he had employed his Defense Security Agency authority to make several telephone calls to various federal regulatory agencies in Washington, from whose computer files he had obtained what information he could on Desert General Hospital and Dr. Hans Werfell, information that could be used to strong-arm them.

Desert General's record was virtually spotless. The very highest standards for staff physicians, nurses, and technicians were strictly enforced; nine years had passed since a malpractice suit had been filed against the hospital, and no suit had ever been successful; the patient-recovery rate for every illness and surgical procedure was higher than the normal average. In twenty years, the only stain on Desert General had been the Case of the Purloined Pills. That was what Peake named the affair when Sharp quickly briefed him on arrival, before confronting Dunn and Werfell; it was a name Peake did not share with Sharp, since Sharp was not a reader of mysteries as Peake was and did not have Peake's sense of adventure. Anyway, just last year, three nurses at Desert General had been caught altering purchase and dispensation records in the pharmacy, and upon investigation it was discovered they had been stealing drugs for years. Out of spite, the three had falsely implicated six of their superiors, including Nurse Dunn, though the police had eventually cleared Dunn and the others. Desert General was put on the Drug Enforcement Agency's “watch list” of medical institutions, and Alma Dunn, though cleared, was shaken by the experience and still felt her reputation endangered.

Sharp took advantage of that weak spot. In a discreet session with Alma Dunn in the nurses' lounge, with only Peake as a witness, Sharp subtly threatened the woman with a very public reopening of the original investigation, this time at the federal level, and not only solicited her cooperation but brought her almost to tears, a feat that Peake — who likened Alma Dunn to Agatha Christie's indomitable Miss Jane Marple — had thought impossible.

At first, it appeared as if Dr. Werfell would be more difficult to crack. His record as a physician was unblemished. He was highly regarded in the medical community, possessed an AMA Physician of the Year Award, contributed six hours a week of his time to a free clinic for the disadvantaged, and from every angle appeared to be a saint. Well… from every angle but one: He had been charged with income-tax evasion five years ago and had lost in court on a technicality. He had failed to comply precisely with IRS standards of record keeping, and though his failure was unintentional, a simple ignorance of the law, ignorance of the law was not an acceptable defense.

Cornering Werfell in a two-bed room currently unoccupied by patients, Sharp used the threat of a new IRS investigation to bring the doctor to his knees in about five minutes flat. Werfell seemed certain that his records would be found acceptable now and that he would be cleared, but he also knew how expensive and time-consuming it was to defend himself against an IRS probe, and he knew that his reputation would be tarnished even when he was cleared. He looked to Peake for sympathy a few times, knowing he would get none from Sharp, but Peake did his best to imitate Anson Sharp's air of granite resolution and indifference to others. Being an intelligent man, Werfell quickly determined that the prudent course would be to do as Sharp wished in order to avoid another tax-court nightmare, even if it meant bending his principles in the matter of Sarah Kiel.

“No reason to fault yourself or lose any sleep over a misguided concern about professional ethics, Doctor,” Sharp said, clapping one beefy hand on the physician's shoulder in a gesture of reassurance, suddenly friendly and empathetic now that Werfell had broken. “The welfare of our country comes before anything else. No one would dispute that or think you'd made the wrong decision.”

Dr. Werfell did not exactly recoil from Sharp's touch, but he looked sickened by it. His expression did not change when he looked from Sharp to Jerry Peake.

Peake winced.

Werfell led them out of the untenanted room, down the hospital corridor, past the nurses' station — where Alma Dunn watched them warily while pretending not to look — to the private room where Sarah Kiel remained sedated. As they went, Peake noticed that Werfell, who had previously seemed to resemble Dashiell Hammett and who had looked tremendously imposing, was now somewhat shrunken, diminished. His face was gray, and he seemed older than he had been just a short while ago.

Although Peake admired Anson Sharp's ability to command and to get things done, he did not see how he could adopt his boss's methods as his own. Peake wanted not only to be a successful agent but to be a legend, and you could be a legend only if you played fair and still got things done. Being infamous was not at all the same as being a legend, and in fact the two could not coexist. If he had learned nothing else from five thousand mystery novels, Peake had at least learned that much.

Sarah Kiel's room was silent except for her slow and slightly wheezy breathing, dark but for a single softly glowing lamp beside her bed and the few thin beams of bright desert sun that burned through at the edges of the heavy drapes drawn over the lone window.

The three men gathered around the bed, Dr. Werfell and Sharp on one side, Peake on the other.

“Sarah,” Werfell said quietly. “Sarah?” When she didn't respond, the physician repeated her name and gently shook her shoulder.

She snorted, murmured, but did not wake.

Werfell lifted one of the girl's eyelids, studied her pupil, then held her wrist and timed her pulse. “She won't wake naturally for… oh, perhaps another hour.”

“Then do what's necessary to wake her now,” Anson Sharp said impatiently. “We've already discussed this.”

“I'll administer an injection to counteract,” Werfell said, heading toward the closed door.

“Stay here,” Sharp said. He indicated the call button on the cord that was tied loosely to one of the bed rails. “Have a nurse bring what you need.”

“This is questionable treatment,” Werfell said. “I won't ask any nurse to be involved in it.” He went out, and the door sighed slowly shut behind him.

Looking down at the sleeping girl, Sharp said, “Scrumptious.”

Peake blinked in surprise.

“Tasty,” Sharp said, without raising his eyes from the girl.

Peake looked down at the unconscious teenager and tried to see something scrumptious and tasty about her, but it wasn't easy. Her blond hair was tangled and oily because she was perspiring in her drugged sleep, her limp and matted tresses were unappealingly sweat-pasted to forehead, cheeks, and neck. Her right eye was blackened and swollen shut, with several lines of dried and crusted blood radiating from it where the skin had been cracked and torn. Her right cheek was covered by a bruise from the corner of her swollen eye all the way to her jaw, and her upper lip was split and puffy. Sheets covered her almost to the neck, except for her thin right arm, which had to be exposed because one broken finger was in a cast; two fingernails had been cracked off at the cuticle, and the hand looked less like a hand than like a bird's long-toed, bony claw.

“Fifteen when she first moved in with Leben,” Sharp said softly. “Not much past sixteen now.”

Turning his attention from the sleeping girl to his boss, Jerry Peake studied Sharp as Sharp studied Sarah Kiel, and he was not merely struck by an incredible insight but whacked by it so hard he almost reeled backward. Anson Sharp, deputy director of the DSA, was both a pedophile and a sadist.

Perverse hungers were apparent in the man's hard green eyes and predatory expression. Clearly, he thought Sarah was scrumptious and tasty not because she looked so great right now but because she was only sixteen and badly battered. His rapturous gaze moved lovingly over her blackened eye and bruises, which obviously had as great an erotic impact upon him as breasts and buttocks might have upon a normal man. He was a tightly controlled sadist, yes, and a pedophile who kept his sick libido in check, a pervert who had redirected his mutant needs into wholly acceptable channels, into the aggressiveness and ambition that had swiftly carried him almost to the top of the agency, but a sadist and a pedophile nonetheless.

Peake was as astonished as he was appalled. And his astonishment arose not only from this terrible insight into Sharp's character but from the very fact that he'd had such an insight in the first place. Although he wanted to be a legend, Jerry Peake knew that, even for twenty-seven, he was naive and — especially for a DSA man — woefully prone to look only at the surfaces of people and events rather than down into more profound levels. Sometimes, in spite of his training and his important job, he felt as if he were still a boy, or at least as if the boy in him were still too much a part of his character. Now, staring at Anson Sharp as Sharp hungered for Sarah Kiel, absolutely walloped by this insight, Jerry Peake was suddenly exhilarated. He wondered if it was possible to finally begin to grow up even as late as twenty-seven.

Anson Sharp was staring at the girl's torn and broken hand, his green eyes radiant, a vague smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

With a thump and swish that startled Peake, the door to the room opened, and Dr. Werfell returned. Sharp blinked and shook himself as if coming out of a mild trance, stepped back, and watched as Werfell raised the bed, bared Sarah's left arm, and administered an injection to counteract the effect of the two sedatives she had taken.

In a couple of minutes, the girl was awake, relatively aware, but confused. She could not remember where she was, how she had gotten there, or why she was so battered and in pain. She kept asking who Werfell, Sharp, and Peake were, and Werfell patiently answered all her questions, but mostly he monitored her pulse and listened to her heart and peered into her eyes with a lighted instrument.

Anson Sharp grew impatient with the girl's slow ascension from her drugged haze. “Did you give her a large enough dose to counteract the sedative or did you hedge it, Doctor?”

“This takes time,” Werfell said coldly.

“We don't have time,” Sharp said.

A moment later, Sarah Kiel stopped asking questions, gasped in shock at the sudden return of her memory, and said, “Eric!”

Peake would not have imagined that her face could go paler than it was already, but it did. She began to shiver.

Sharp returned swiftly to the bed. “That'll be all, Doctor.”

Werfell frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean she's alert now, and we can question her, and you can get out and leave us to it. Clear?”

Dr. Werfell insisted he should stay with his patient in case she had a delayed reaction to the injection. Sharp became more adamant, invoking his federal authority. Werfell relented but moved toward the window to open the drapes first. Sharp told him to leave them closed, and Werfell went to the light switch for the overhead fluorescents, but Sharp told him to leave them off. “The bright light will hurt the poor girl's eyes,” Sharp said, though his sudden concern for Sarah was transparently insincere.

Peake had the uncomfortable feeling that Sharp intended to be hard on the girl, frighten her half to death, whether or not that approach was necessary. Even if she told them everything they wanted to know, the deputy director was going to terrorize her for the sheer fun of it. He probably viewed mental and emotional abuse as being at least partially satisfying and socially acceptable alternatives to the things he really wanted to do: beat her and fuck her. The bastard wanted to keep the room as dark as possible because shadows would contribute to the mood of menace that he intended to create.

When Werfell left the room, Sharp went to the girl's bed. He put down the railing on one side and sat on the edge of the mattress. He took her uninjured left hand, held it in both his hands, gave it a reassuring squeeze, smiled down at her, and as he spoke he began to slide one of his huge hands up and down her slender arm, even all the way up under the short sleeve of her hospital gown, slowly up and down, which was not at all reassuring but provocative.

Peake stepped back into a corner of the room, where shadows sheltered him, partly because he knew he would not be expected to ask questions of the girl, but also because he did not want Sharp to see his face. Although he had achieved the first startling insight of his life and was gripped by the heady feeling that he was not going to be the same man in a year that he was now, he had not yet changed so much that he could control his expressions or conceal his disgust.

“I can't talk about it,” Sarah Kiel told Sharp, watching him warily and shrinking back from him as far as she could. “Mrs. Leben told me not to tell anyone anything.”

Still holding her good hand in his left, he raised his right hand, with which he had been stroking her arm, and he gently rubbed his thick knuckles over her smooth, unblemished left cheek. It almost seemed like a gesture of sympathy or affection, but it was not.

He said, “Mrs. Leben is a wanted criminal, Sarah. There's a warrant for her arrest. I had it issued myself. She's wanted for serious violations of the Defense Security Act. She may have stolen defense secrets, may even intend to pass them to the Soviets. Surely you've no desire to protect someone like that. Hmmmmm?”

“She was nice to me,” Sarah said shakily.

Peake saw that the girl was trying to ease away from the hand that stroked her face but was plainly afraid of giving offense to Sharp. Evidently she was not yet certain that he was threatening her. She'd get the idea soon.

She continued: “Mrs. Leben's paying my hospital bills, gave me some money, called my folks. She… she was s-so nice, and she told me not to talk about this, so I won't break my promise to her.”

“How interesting,” Sharp said, putting his hand under her chin and lifting her head to make her look at him with her one good eye. “Interesting that even a little whore like you has some principles.”

Shocked, she said, “I'm no whore. I never—”

“Oh, yes,” Sharp said, gripping her chin now and preventing her from turning her head away. “Maybe you're too thickheaded to see the truth about yourself, or too drugged up, but that's what you are, a little whore, a slut in training, a piglet who's going to grow up to be a fine sweet pig.”

“You can't talk to me like this.”

“Honey, I talk to whores any way I want.”

“You're a cop, some kind of cop, you're a public servant,” she said, “you can't treat me—”

“Shut up, honey,” Sharp said. The light from the only lamp fell across his face at an angle, weirdly exaggerating some features while leaving others entirely in shadow, giving his face a deformed look, a demonic aspect. He grinned, and the effect was even more unnerving. “You shut your dirty little mouth and open it only when you're ready to tell me what I want to know.”

The girl gave out a thin, pathetic cry of pain, and tears burst from her eyes. Peake saw that Sharp was squeezing her left hand very hard and grinding the fingers together in his big mitt.

For a while, the girl talked to avoid the torture. She told them about Leben's visit last night, about the way his head was staved in, about how gray and cool his skin had felt.

But when Sharp wanted to know if she had any idea where Eric Leben had gone after leaving the house, she clammed up again, and he said, “Ah, you do have an idea,” and he began to grind her hand again.

Peake felt sick, and he wanted to do something to help the girl, but there was nothing he could do.

Sharp eased up on her hand, and she said, “Please, that was the thing… the thing Mrs. Leben most wanted me not to tell anyone.”

“Now, honey,” Sharp said, “it's stupid for a little whore like you to pretend to have scruples. I don't believe you have any, and you know you don't have any, so cut the act. Save us some time and save yourself a lot of trouble.” He started to grind her hand again, and his other hand slipped down to her throat and then to her breasts, which he touched through the thin material of her hospital gown.

In the shadowed corner, Peake was almost too shocked to breathe, and he wanted to be out of there. He certainly did not want to watch Sarah Kiel be abused and humiliated; however, he could not look away or close his eyes, because Sharp's unexpected behavior was the most morbidly, horrifyingly fascinating thing Peake had ever seen.

He was nowhere near coming to terms with his previous shattering insight, and already he was experiencing yet another major revelation. He'd always thought of policemen — which included DSA agents — as Good Guys with capital Gs, White Hats, Men on White Horses, valiant Knights of the Law, but that image of purity was suddenly unsustainable if a man like Sharp could be a highly regarded member in good standing of that noble fraternity. Oh, sure, Peake knew there were some bad cops, bad agents, but somehow he had always thought the bad ones were caught early in their careers and that they never had a chance of advancing to high positions, that they self-destructed, that slime like that got what was coming to them and got it pretty quickly, too. He believed only virtue was rewarded. Besides, he had always thought he'd be able to smell corruption in another cop, that it would be evident from the moment he laid eyes on the guy. And he had never imagined that a flat-out pervert could hide his sickness and have a successful career in law enforcement. Maybe most men were disabused of such naive ideas long before they were twenty-seven, but it was only now, watching the deputy director behave like a thug, like a regular damn barbarian, that Jerry Peake began to see that the world was painted more in shades of gray than in black and white, and this revelation was so powerful that he could no more have averted his eyes from Sharp's sick performance than he could have looked away from Jesus returning on a chariot of fire through an angel-bedecked sky.

Sharp continued to grind the girl's hand in his, which made her cry harder, and he had a hand on her breasts and was pushing her back hard against the bed, telling her to quiet down, so she was trying to please him now, choking back her tears, but still Sharp squeezed her hand, and Peake was on the verge of making a move, to hell with his career, to hell with his future in the DSA, he couldn't just stand by and watch this brutality, he even took a step toward the bed—

And that was when the door opened wide and The Stone entered the room as if borne on the shaft of light that speared in from the hospital corridor behind him. That was how Jerry Peake thought of the man from the moment he saw him: The Stone.

“What's goin' on here?” The Stone asked in a voice that was quiet, gentle, deep but not real deep, yet commanding.

The guy was not quite six feet tall, maybe five eleven, even five ten, which left him several inches shorter than Anson Sharp, and he was about a hundred and seventy pounds, a good fifty pounds lighter than Sharp. Yet when he stepped through the door, he seemed like the biggest man in the room, and he still seemed like the biggest even when Sharp let go of the girl and stood up from the edge of the bed and said, “Who the hell are you?”

The Stone switched on the overhead fluorescents and stepped farther into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. Peake pegged the guy as about forty, though his face looked older because it was full of wisdom. He had close-cut dark hair, sun-weathered skin, and solid features that looked as if they had been jackhammered out of granite. His intense blue eyes were the same shade as those of the girl in the bed but clearer, direct, piercing. When he turned those eyes briefly toward Jerry Peake, Peake wanted to crawl under a bed and hide. The Stone was compact and powerful, and though he was really smaller than Sharp, he appeared infinitely stronger, more formidable, as if he actually weighed every ounce as much as Sharp but had compressed his tissues into an unnatural density.

“Please leave the room and wait for me in the hall,” said The Stone quietly.

Astonished, Sharp took a couple of steps toward him, loomed over him, and said, “I asked you who the hell you are.”

The Stone's hands and wrists were much too large for the rest of him: long, thick fingers; big knuckles; every tendon and vein and sinew stood out sharply, as if they were hands carved in marble by a sculptor with an exaggerated appreciation for detail. Peake sensed that they were not quite the hands that The Stone had been born with, that they had grown larger and stronger in response to day after day of long, hard, manual labor. The Stone looked as if he thrived on the kind of heavy work that was done in a foundry or quarry or, considering his sun-darkened skin, a farm. But not one of those big, easy, modern farms with a thousand machines and an abundant supply of cheap field hands. No, if he had a farm, he had started it with little money, with bad rocky land, and he had endured lousy weather and sundry catastrophes to bring fruit from the reluctant earth, building a successful enterprise by the expenditure of much sweat, blood, time, hopes, and dreams, because the strength of all those successfully waged struggles was in his face and hands.

“I'm her father, Felsen Kiel,” The Stone told Sharp.

In a small voice devoid of fear and filled with wonder, Sarah Kiel said, “Daddy…”

The Stone started past Sharp, toward his daughter, who had sat up in bed and held out a hand toward him.

Sharp stepped in his way, leaned close to him, loomed over him, and said, “You can see her when we've finished the interrogation.”

The Stone looked up at Sharp with a placid expression that was the essence of equanimity and imperturbability, and Peake was not only gladdened but thrilled to see that Sharp was not going to intimidate this man. “Interrogate? What right have you to interrogate?”

Sharp withdrew his wallet from his jacket, opened it to his DSA credentials. “I'm a federal agent, and I am in the middle of an urgent investigation concerning a matter of national security. Your daughter has information that I've got to obtain as soon as possible, and she is being less than cooperative.”

“If you'll step into the hall,” The Stone said quietly, “I'll speak with her. I'm sure she isn't obstructin' you on purpose. She's a troubled girl, yes, and she's allowed herself to be misguided, but she's never been bad at heart or spiteful. I'll speak to her, find out what you need to know, then convey the information to you.”

“No,” Sharp said. “You'll go into the hall and wait.”

“Please move out of my way,” The Stone said.

“Listen, mister,” Sharp said, moving right up against The Stone, glaring down at him, “if you want trouble from me, you'll get it, more than you can deal with. You obstruct a federal agent, and you're just about giving him a license to come down on you as hard as he wants.”

Having read the name on the DSA credentials, The Stone said, “Mr. Sharp, last night I was awakened by a call from a Mrs. Leben, who said my daughter needed me. That's a message I've been waitin' a long time to hear. It's the growin' season, a busy time—”

The guy was a farmer, by God, which gave Peake new confidence in his powers of observation. In spit-polished city shoes, polyester pants, and starched white shirt, The Stone had the uncomfortable look specific to a simple country man who has been forced by circumstances to exchange his work clothes for unfamiliar duds.

“—a very busy season. But I got dressed the moment I hung up the phone, drove the pickup a hundred miles to Kansas City in the heart of the night, got the dawn flight out to Los Angeles, then the connector flight here to Palm Springs, a taxi—”

“Your travel journal doesn't interest me one damn bit,” Sharp said, still blocking The Stone.

“Mr. Sharp, I am plain bone-weary, which is the fact I'm tryin' to impress upon you, and I am most eager to see my girl, and from the looks of her she's been cryin', which upsets me mightily. Now, though I'm not an angry man by nature, or a trouble-makin' man, I don't know quite what I might do if you keep treatin' me high-handed and try to stop me from seein' what my girl's cryin' about.”

Sharp's face tightened with anger. He stepped back far enough to give himself room to plant one big hand on The Stone's chest.

Peake was not sure whether Sharp intended to guide the man out of the room and into the corridor or give him one hell of a shove back against the wall. He never found out which it was because The Stone put his own hand on Sharp's wrist and bore down and, without seeming to make any effort whatsoever, he removed Sharp's hand from his chest. In fact, he must have put as much painful pressure on Sharp's wrist as Sharp had applied to Sarah's fingers, for the deputy director went pale, the redness of anger draining right out of him, and a queer look passed through his eyes.

Letting go of Sharp's hand, The Stone said, “I know you're a federal agent, and I have the greatest respect for the law. I know you can see this as obstruction, which would give you a good excuse to knock me on my can and clap me in handcuffs. But I'm of the opinion that it wouldn't do you or your agency the least bit of good if you roughed me up, 'specially since I've told you I'll encourage my daughter to cooperate. What do you think?”

Peake wanted to applaud. He didn't.

Sharp stood there, breathing heavily, trembling, and gradually his rage-clouded eyes cleared, and he shook himself the way a bull sometimes will shake itself back to its senses after unsuccessfully charging a matador's cape. “Okay. I just want to get my information fast. I don't care how. Maybe you'll get it faster than I can.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sharp. Give me half an hour—”

“Five minutes!” Sharp said.

“Well, sir,” The Stone said quietly, “you've got to give me time to say hello to my daughter, time to hug her. I haven't seen her in almost eighteen months. And I need time to get the whole story from her, to find out what sort of trouble she's in. That's got to come first, 'fore I start throwin' questions at her.”

“Half an hour's too damn long,” Sharp said. “We're in pursuit of a man, a dangerous man, and we—”

“If I was to call an attorney to advise my daughter, which is her right as a citizen, it'd take him hours to get here—”

“Half an hour,” Sharp told The Stone, “and not one damn minute more. I'll be in the hall.”

Previously, Peake had discovered that the deputy director was a sadist and a pedophile, which was an important thing to know. Now he had made another discovery about Sharp: The son of a bitch was, at heart, a coward; he might shoot you in the back or sneak up on you and slit your throat, yes, those things seemed within his character, but in a face-to-face confrontation, he would chicken out if the stakes got high enough. And that was an even more important thing to know.

Peake stood for a moment, unable to move, as Sharp went to the door. He could not take his eyes off The Stone.

“Peake!” Sharp said as he pulled the door open.

Finally Peake followed, but he kept glancing back at Felsen Kiel, The Stone. Now there, by God, was a legend.

20 COPS ON SICK LEAVE

Detective Reese Hagerstrom went to bed at four o'clock Tuesday morning, after returning from Mrs. Leben's house in Placentia, and he woke at ten-thirty, unrested because the night had been full of terrible dreams. Glassy-eyed dead bodies in trash dumpsters. Dead women nailed to walls. Many of the nightmares had involved Janet, the wife Reese had lost. In the dreams, she was always clutching the door of the blue Chevy van, the infamous van, and crying, “They've got Esther, they've got Esther!” In every dream, one of the guys in the van shot her exactly as he had shot her in real life, point-blank, and the large-caliber slug pulverized her lovely face, blew it away…

Reese got out of bed and took a very hot shower. He wished that he could unhinge the top of his head and sluice out the hideous images that lingered from the nightmares.

Agnes, his sister, had taped a note on the refrigerator in the kitchen. She had taken Esther to the dentist for a scheduled checkup.

Standing by the sink, looking out the window at the big coral tree in the rear yard, Reese drank hot black coffee and ate a slightly stale doughnut. If Agnes could see the breakfast he made for himself, she would be upset. But his dreams had left him queasy, and he had no appetite for anything heavier. Even the doughnut was hard to swallow.

“Black coffee and greasy doughnuts,” Agnes would say if she knew. “One'll give you ulcers, other'll clog your arteries with cholesterol. Two slow methods of suicide. You want to commit suicide, I can tell you a hundred quicker and less painful ways to go about it.”

He thanked God for Agnes, in spite of her tendency, as his big sister, to nag him about everything from his eating habits to his taste in neckties. Without her, he might not have held himself together after Janet's death.

Agnes was unfortunately big-boned, stocky, plain-looking, with a deformed left hand, destined for spinsterhood, but she had a kind heart and a mothering instinct second to none. After Janet died, Agnes arrived with a suitcase and her favorite cookbook, announcing that she would take care of Reese and little Esther “just for the summer,” until they were able to cope on their own. As a fifth-grade teacher in Anaheim, she had the summer off and could devote long hours to the patient rebuilding of the shattered Hagerstrom household. She had been with them five years now, and without her, they'd be lost.

Reese even liked her good-natured nagging. When she encouraged him to eat well-balanced meals, he felt cared for and loved.

As he poured another cup of black coffee, he decided to bring Agnes a dozen roses and a box of chocolates when he came home today. He was not, by nature, given to frequent expressions of his feelings, so he tried to compensate now and then by surprising those he cared for with gifts. The smallest surprises thrilled Agnes, even coming from a brother. Big-boned, stocky, plain-faced women were not used to getting gifts when there was no occasion requiring them.

Life was not only unfair but sometimes decidedly cruel. That was not a new thought to Reese. It was not even inspired by Janet's untimely and brutal death — or by the fact that Agnes's warm, loving, generous nature was trapped forever inside a body that most men, too focused on appearances, could never love. As a policeman, frequently confronted by the worst in humankind, he had learned a long time ago that cruelty was the way of the world — and that the only defense against it was the love of one's family and a few close friends.

His closest friend, Julio Verdad, arrived as Reese was pouring a third cup of black coffee. Reese got another cup from the cabinet and filled it for Julio, and they sat at the kitchen table.

Julio looked as if he'd had little sleep, and in fact Reese was probably the only person capable of detecting the subtle signs of overwork in the lieutenant. As usual, Julio was well dressed: smartly tailored dark blue suit, crisp white shirt, perfectly knotted maroon-and-blue tie with gold chain, maroon pocket handkerchief, and oxblood Bally loafers. He was as neat and precise and alert as always, but vague sooty smudges were visible under his eyes, and his soft voice was surely if immeasurably softer than usual.

“Up all night?” Reese asked.

“I slept.”

“How long? An hour or two? That's what I thought. You worry me,” Reese said. “You'll wear yourself down to bone someday.”

“This is a special case.”

“They're all special cases to you.”

“I feel a special obligation to the victim, Ernestina.”

“This is the thousandth victim you've felt a special obligation toward,” Reese noted.

Julio shrugged and sipped his coffee. “Sharp wasn't bluffing.”

“About what?”

“About pulling this out of our hands. The names of the victims — Ernestina Hernandez and Rebecca Klienstad — are still in the files, but only the names. Plus a memorandum indicating that federal authorities requested the case be remanded to their jurisdiction for 'reasons of national security.' This morning, when I pushed Folbeck about letting you and me assist the feds, he came down hard. Said, 'Holy fuckin' Christ, Julio, stay out of it. That's an order.' His very words.”

Folbeck was chief of detectives, a devout Mormon who — could hold his own with the most foulmouthed men in the department but who never took the Lord's name in vain. That was where he drew the line. In spite of his vivid and frequent use of four-letter words, Nicholas Folbeck was capable of angrily lecturing any detective heard to mutter a blasphemy. In fact, he'd once told Reese, “Hagerstrom, please don't say 'goddamn' or 'holy Christ' or anything like that in my presence ever again. I purely hate that shit, and I won't fuckin' tolerate it.” If Nick Folbeck's warning to Julio had included blasphemy as well as mere trash talk, the pressure on the department to stay out of this case had come from higher authorities than Anson Sharp.

Reese said, “What about the file on the body-snatching case, Eric Leben's corpse?”

“Same thing,” Julio said. “Removed from our jurisdiction.”

Business talk had taken Reese's mind off last night's bloody dreams of Janet, and his appetite had returned a little. He got another doughnut from the breadbox. He offered one to Julio, but Julio declined. Reese said, “What else have you been up to?”

“For one thing… I went to the library when it opened and read everything I could find on Dr. Eric Leben.”

“Rich, a scientific genius, a business genius, ruthless, cold, too stupid to know he had a great wife — we already know about him.”

“He was also obsessed,” Julio said.

“I guess geniuses usually are, with one thing or another.”

“What obsessed him was immortality.”

Reese frowned. “Say what?”

“As a graduate student, and in the years immediately following his acquisition of a doctorate, when he was one of the brightest young geneticists doing recombinant DNA research anywhere in the world, he wrote articles for a lot of journals and published research papers dealing with various aspects of the extension of the human life span. A flood of articles; the man is driven.”

“Was driven. Remember that garbage truck,” Reese said.

“Even the driest, most technical of those pieces have a… well, a fire in them, a passion that grips you,” Julio said. He pulled a sheet of paper from one of his inside jacket pockets, unfolded it. “This is a line from an article that appeared in a popular science magazine, more colorful than the technical journal stuff: 'It may be possible, ultimately, for man to reshape himself genetically and thereby deny the claim of the grave, to live longer than Methuselah — and even to be both Jesus and Lazarus in one, raising himself up from the mortuary slab even as death lays him down upon it.”

Reese blinked. “Funny, huh? His body's stolen from the morgue, which is sort of being 'raised up,' though not the way he meant it.”

Julio's eyes were strange. “Maybe not funny. Maybe not stolen.”

Reese felt a strangeness coming into his own eyes. He said, “You don't mean… no, of course not.”

“He was a genius with unlimited resources, perhaps the brightest man ever to work in recombinant DNA research, and he was obsessed with staying young and avoiding death. So when he just seems to get up and walk away from a mortuary… is it so impossible to imagine that he did, in fact, get up and walk away?”

Reese felt his chest tightening, and he was surprised to feel a thrill of fear pass through him. “But is such a thing possible, after the injuries he suffered?”

“A few years ago, definitely impossible. But we're living in an age of miracles, or at least in an age of infinite possibilities.”

“But how?”

“That's part of what we'll have to find out. I called UCI and got in touch with Dr. Easton Solberg, whose work on aging is mentioned in Leben's articles. Turns out Leben knew Solberg, looked up to him as a mentor, and for a while they were fairly close. Solberg has great praise for Leben, says he isn't the least surprised that Leben made a fortune out of DNA research, but Solberg also says there was a dark side to Eric Leben. And he's willing to talk about it.”

“What dark side?”

“He wouldn't say on the phone. But we have an appointment with him at UC1 at one o'clock.”

As Julio pushed his chair back and got up, Reese said, “How can we keep digging into this and stay out of trouble with Nick Folbeck?”

“Sick leave,” Julio said. “As long as I'm on sick leave, I'm not officially investigating anything. Call it personal curiosity.”

“That won't hold up if we're caught at it. Cops aren't supposed to have personal curiosity in a situation like this.”

“No, but if I'm on sick leave, Folbeck's not going to be worrying about what I'm doing. It's less likely that anyone'll be looking over my shoulder. In fact, I sort of implied that I wanted nothing to do with anything this hot. Told Folbeck that, given the heat on this, it might be best for me to get away for a few days, in case the media pick up on it and want me to answer questions. He agreed.”

Reese got to his feet. “I better call in sick, too.”

“I already did it for you,” Julio said.

“Oh. Okay, then, let's go.”

“I mean, I thought it would be all right. But if you don't want to get involved in this—”

“Julio, I'm in.”

“Only if you're sure.”

“I'm in,” Reese said exasperatedly.

And he thought but did not say: You saved my Esther, my little girl, went right after those guys in the Chevy van and got her out of there alive, you were like a man possessed, they must've thought it was a demon on their tail, you put your own life on the line and saved Esther, and I loved you before that because you were my partner and a good one, but after that I loved you, you crazy little bastard, and as long as I live I'm going to be there when you need me, no matter what.

In spite of his natural difficulty expressing his most profound feelings, Reese wanted to say all of that to Julio, but he kept silent because Julio did not want effusive gratitude and would be embarrassed by it. All Julio wanted was the commitment of a friend and partner. Undying gratitude would, if openly expressed, impose a barrier between them by obviously placing Julio in a superior position, and ever afterward they would be awkward with each other.

In their daily working relationship, Julio always had been in the superior position, of course, deciding how to proceed at nearly every step of a homicide investigation, but his control was never blatant or obvious, which made all the difference. Reese would not have cared if Julio's dominance had been obvious; he did not mind deferring to Julio because in some ways Julio was the quicker and smarter of the two.

But Julio, having been born and raised in Mexico, having come to the States and made good, had a reverence and a passion for democracy, not only for democracy in the political arena but for democracy in all things, even in one-to-one relationships. He could assume the mantle of leadership and dominance if it were conveyed by mutual unspoken consent; but if his role were made overt, he would not be able to fulfill it, and the partnership would suffer.

“I'm in,” Reese repeated, rinsing their coffee cups in the sink. “We're just two cops on sick leave. So let's go recuperate together.”

21 ARROWHEAD

The sporting-goods store was near the lake. It was built in the form of a large log cabin, and a rustic wooden sign advertised bait, tackle, boat rentals, sporting goods. A Coors sign was in one window, a Miller Lite sign in another. Three cars, two pickup trucks, and one Jeep stood in the sunny part of the parking lot, the early-afternoon sun glinting off their chrome and silvering their windows.

“Guns,” Ben said when he saw the place. “They might sell guns.”

“We have guns,” Rachael said.

Ben drove to the back of the lot, off the macadamed area, onto gravel that crunched under the tires, then through a thick carpet of pine needles, finally parking in the concealing shade of one of the massive evergreens that encircled the property. He saw a slice of the lake beyond the trees, a few boats on the sun-dappled water, and a far shore rising up into steep wooded slopes.

“Your thirty-two isn't exactly a peashooter, but it's not particularly formidable, either,” Ben told her as he switched off the engine. “The.357 I took off Baresco is better, next thing to a cannon, in fact, but a shotgun would be perfect.”

“Shotgun? Sounds like overkill.”

“I always prefer to go for overkill when I'm tracking down a walking dead man,” Ben said, trying to make a joke of it but failing. Rachael's already haunted eyes were touched by a new bleak tint, and she shivered.

“Hey,” he said, “it'll be all right.”

They got out of the rental car and stood for a moment, breathing in the clean, sweet mountain air. The day was warm and undisturbed by even the mildest breeze. The trees stood motionless and silent, as if their boughs had turned to stone. No cars passed on the road, and no other people were in sight. No birds flew or sang. The stillness was deep, perfect, preternatural.

Ben sensed something ominous in the stillness. It almost seemed to be an omen, a warning to turn back from the high vastness of the mountains and retreat to more civilized places, where there was noise and movement and other people to turn to for help in an emergency.

Apparently stricken by the same uneasy feeling that gripped Ben, Rachael said, “Maybe this is nuts. Maybe we should just get out of here, go away somewhere.”

“And wait for Eric to recover from his injuries?”

“Maybe he won't recover enough to function well.”

“But if he does, he'll come looking for you.”

She sighed, nodded.

They crossed the parking lot and went into the store, hoping to buy a shotgun and some ammunition.

Something strange was happening to Eric, stranger even than his return from the dead. It started as another headache, one of the many intense migraines that had come and gone since his resurrection, and he did not immediately realize there was a difference about this one, a weirdness. He just squinted his eyes to block out some of the light that irritated him, and refused to succumb to the unrelenting and debilitating throbbing that filled his skull.

He pulled an armchair in front of the living-room window and took up a vigil, looking down through the sloping forest, along the dirt road that led up from the more heavily populated foothills nearer the lake. If enemies came for him, they would follow the lane at least part of the way up the slope before sneaking into the woods. As soon as he saw where they left the road, he would slip out of the cabin by the back door, move around through the trees, creep in behind the intruders, and take them by surprise.

He had hoped that the pounding in his head would subside a bit when he sat down and leaned back in the big comfortable chair. But it was getting much worse than anything he had experienced previously. He felt almost as if his skull were… soft as clay… and as if it were being hammered into a new shape by every fierce throb. He clenched his jaws tighter, determined to weather this new adversity.

Perhaps the headache was made worse by the concentration required to study the tree-shadowed road for advancing enemies. If it became unbearable, he would have to lie down, though he was loath to leave his post. He sensed danger approaching.

He kept the ax and the two knives on the floor beside the chair. Each time he glanced down at those sharp blades, he felt not only reassured but strangely exultant. When he put his fingertips to the handle of the ax, a dark and almost erotic thrill coursed through him.

Let them come, he thought. I'll show them Eric Leben is still a man to be reckoned with. Let them come.

Though he still had difficulty understanding who might be seeking him, he somehow knew that his fear was not unreasonable. Then names popped into his mind: Baresco, Seitz, Geffels, Knowls, Lewis. Yes, of course, his partners in Geneplan. They would know what he'd done. They would decide that he had to be found quickly and terminated in order to protect the secret of Wildcard. But they were not the only men he had to fear. There were others… shadowy figures he could not recall, men with more power than the partners in Geneplan.

For a moment he felt that he was about to break through a wall of mist into a clear place. He was on the verge of achieving a clarity of thought and a fullness of memory that he had not known since rising from the gurney in the morgue. He held his breath and leaned forward in his chair with tremulous anticipation. He almost had it, all of it: the identity of the other pursuers, the meaning of the mice, the meaning of the hideous image of the crucified woman that kept recurring to him…

Then the unremitting pain in his head knocked him back from the brink of enlightenment, into the mist again. Muddy currents invaded the clearing stream of his thoughts, and in a moment all was clouded as before. He let out a thin cry of frustration.

Outside, in the forest, movement caught his attention. Squinting his hot watery eyes, Eric slid forward to the chair's edge, leaned toward the large window, peered intently at the tree-covered slope and the shadow-dappled dirt lane. No one there. The movement was simply the work of a sudden breeze that had finally broken the summer stillness. Bushes stirred, and the evergreen boughs lifted slightly, drooped, lifted, drooped, as if the trees were fanning themselves.

He was about to ease farther back in the chair when a scintillant blast of pain, shooting across his forehead, virtually threw him back. For a moment he was in such horrendous agony that he could not move or cry out or breathe. When at last breath could be drawn, he screamed, though by then it was a scream of anger rather than pain, for the pain went as abruptly as it had come.

Afraid that the bright explosion of pain had signified a sudden turn for the worse, perhaps even a coming apart of his broken skull, Eric raised one shaky hand to his head. First he touched his damaged right ear, which had nearly been torn off yesterday morning but which was now firmly attached, lumpish and unusually gristly to the touch but no longer drooping and raw.

How could he heal so fast? The process was supposed to take a few weeks, not a few hours.

He slowly slipped his fingers upward and gingerly explored the deep depression along the right side of his skull, where he had made contact with the garbage truck. The depression was still there. But not as deep as he remembered it. And the concavity was solid. It had been slightly mushy before. Like bruised and rotting fruit. But no longer. He felt no tenderness in the flesh, either. Emboldened, he pressed his fingers harder into the wound, massaged, probed from one end of the indentation to the other, and everywhere he encountered healthy flesh and a firm shell of bone. The cracked and splintered skull had already knit up in less than a day, and the holes had filled in with new bone, which was flat-out impossible, damn it, impossible, but that was what had happened. The wound was healed, and his brain tissue was once more protected by a casing of unbroken bone.

He sat stupefied, unable to comprehend. He remembered that his genes had been edited to enhance the healing process and to promote cell rejuvenation, but damned if he remembered that it was supposed to happen this fast. Grievous wounds closing in mere hours? Flesh, arteries, and veins reconstituted at an almost visible rate? Extensive bone re-formation completed in less than a day? Christ, not even the most malignant cancer cells in their most furious stages of unchecked reproduction could match that pace!

For a moment he was exhilarated, certain that his experiment had proved a far greater success than he had hoped. Then he realized that his thoughts were still confused, that his memory was still tattered, even though his brain tissue must have healed as thoroughly as his skull had done. Did that mean that his intellect and clarity of mind would never be fully restored, even if his tissues were repaired? That prospect frightened him, especially as he again saw his uncle Barry Hampstead, long dead, standing over in the corner, beside a crackling pillar of shadowfire.

Perhaps, though he had come back from the land of the dead, he would always remain, in part, a dead man, regardless of his miraculous new genetic structure.

No. He did not want to believe that, for it would mean that all his labors, plans, and risks were for nothing.

In the corner, Uncle Barry grinned and said, “Come kiss me, Eric. Come show me that you love me.”

Perhaps death was more than the cessation of physical and mental activity. Perhaps some other quality was lost… a quality of spirit that could not be reanimated as successfully as flesh and blood and brain activity.

Almost of its own volition, his questing hand moved tremblingly from the side of his head to his brow, where the recent explosion of pain had been centered. He felt something odd. Something wrong. His forehead was no longer a smooth plate of bone. It was lumpy, knotted. Strange excrescences had arisen in an apparently random pattern.

He heard a mewling sound of pure terror, and at first he did not realize that he had made the noise himself.

The bone over each eye was far thicker than it should have been.

And a smooth knot of bone, almost an inch high, had appeared at his right temple.

How? My God, how?

As he explored the upper portion of his face in the manner of a blind man seeking an impression of a stranger's appearance, crystals of icy dread formed in him.

A narrow gnarled ridge of bone had appeared down the center of his forehead, extending to the bridge of his nose.

He felt thick, pulsing arteries along his hairline, where there should have been no such vessels.

He could not stop mewling, and hot tears sprang to his eyes.

Even in his clouded mind, the terrifying truth of the situation was evident. Technically, his genetically modified body had been killed by his brutal encounter with the garbage truck, but life of a kind had been maintained on a cellular level, and his edited genes, functioning on a mere trickle of life force, had sent urgent signals through his cooling tissues to command the amazingly rapid production of all substances needed for regeneration and rejuvenation. And now that repairs had been made, his altered genes were not switching off the frantic growth. Something was wrong. The genetic switches were staying open. His body was frenetically adding bone and flesh and blood, and though the new tissues were probably perfectly healthy, the process had become something like a cancer, though the rate of growth far outstripped that of even the most virulent cancer cells.

His body was re-forming itself.

But into what?

His heart was hammering, and he had broken into a cold sweat.

He pushed up from the armchair. He had to get to a mirror. He had to see his face.

He did not want to see it, was repelled by the thought of what he would find, was scared of discovering a grotesquely alien reflection in the mirror, but at the same time he urgently had to know what he was becoming.

In the sporting-goods store by the lake, Ben chose a Remington semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun with a five-round magazine. Properly handled, it could be a devastating weapon — and he knew how to handle it. He picked up two boxes of shells for the shotgun, plus one box of ammunition for the Smith & Wesson.357 Combat Magnum that he had taken off Baresco, and another box for Rachael's.32-caliber pistol.

They looked as if they were preparing for war.

Although no permit or waiting period was required when purchasing a shotgun — as was the case with a handgun — Ben had to fill out a form, divulging his name, address, and Social Security number, then provide the clerk with proof of identity, preferably a California driver's license with a laminated photograph. While Ben stood at the yellow Formica counter with Rachael, completing the form, the clerk—"Call me Sam,” he'd said, when he had shown them the shop's gun selection — excused himself and went to the north end of the room to assist a group of fishermen who had questions about several fly rods.

The second clerk was with another customer at the south end of the long room, carefully explaining the differences among types of sleeping bags.

Behind the counter, on a wall shelf, beside a large display of cellophane-wrapped packages of beef jerky, stood a radio tuned to a Los Angeles AM station. While Ben and Rachael had selected a shotgun and ammunition, only pop music and commercials had issued from the radio. But now the twelve-thirty news report was under way, and suddenly Ben heard his own name, and Rachael's, coming over the airwaves.

“… Shadway and Rachael Leben on a federal warrant. Mrs. Leben is the wife of the wealthy entrepreneur Eric Leben, who was killed in a traffic accident yesterday. According to a Justice Department spokesman, Shadway and Mrs. Leben are wanted in connection with the theft of highly sensitive, top-secret research files from several Geneplan Corporation projects funded by the Department of Defense, as well as for suspicion of murder in the case of two Palm Springs police officers killed last night in a brutal machine-gun attack.”

Rachael heard it too. “That's crazy!”

Putting one hand on her arm to quiet her, Ben glanced nervously at the two clerks, who were still busy elsewhere in the store, talking to other customers. The last thing Ben wanted was to draw their attention to the news report. The clerk named Sam had already seen Ben's driver's license before pulling a firearms information form from the file. He knew Ben's name, and if he heard it on the radio, he was almost certain to react to it.

Protestations of innocence would be of no use. Sam would call the cops. He might even have a gun behind the counter, under the cash register, and might try to use it to keep Ben and Rachael there until the police arrived, and Ben did not want to have to take a gun away from him and maybe hurt him in the process.

“Jarrod McClain, director of the Defense Security Agency, who is coordinating the investigation and the manhunt for Shadway and Mrs. Leben, issued a statement to the press in Washington within the past hour, calling the case 'a matter of grave concern that can reasonably be described as a national security crisis.' ”

Sam, over in the fishing-gear department, laughed at something a customer said — and started back toward the cash register. One of the fishermen was coming with him. They were talking animatedly, so if the news report was registering with them, it was getting through, at best, on only a subconscious level. But if they stopped talking before the report concluded…

“Though asserting that Shadway and Mrs. Leben have seriously damaged their country's security, neither McClain nor the Justice Department spokesman would specify the nature of the research being done by Geneplan for the Pentagon.” ”

The two approaching men were twenty feet away, still discussing the merits of various brands of fly rods and spinning reels.

Rachael was staring at them apprehensively, and Ben bumped lightly against her to distract her, lest her expression alert them to the significance of the news on the radio.

“… recombinant' DNA as Geneplan's sole business …”

Sam rounded the end of the sales counter. The customer's course paralleled that of the clerk, and they continued talking across the yellow Formica as they approached Rachael and Ben.

“Photographs and descriptions of Benjamin Shadway and Rachael Leben have gone out to all police agencies in California and most of the Southwest, along with a federal advisory that the fugitives are armed and dangerous.”

Sam and the fisherman reached the cash register, where Ben turned his attention back to the government form.

The newscaster had moved on to another story.

Ben was startled and delighted to hear Rachael launch smoothly into a line of bubbly patter, engaging the fisherman's attention. The guy was tall, burly, in his fifties, wearing a black T-shirt that exposed his beefy arms, both of which featured elaborate blue-and-red tattoos. Rachael professed to be simply fascinated by tattoos, and the angler, like most men, was flattered and pleased by the gushy attention of a beautiful young woman. Anyone listening to Rachael's charming and slightly witless chatter — for she assumed the attitude of a California beach girl airhead — would never have suspected that she had just listened to a radio reporter describe her as a fugitive wanted for murder.

The same slightly pompous-sounding reporter was currently talking about a terrorist bombing in the Mideast, and Sam, the clerk, clicked a knob on the radio, cutting him off in midsentence. “I'm plain sick of hearing about those damn A-rabs,” he said to Ben.

“Who isn't?” Ben said, completing the last line of the form.

“Far as I'm concerned,” Sam said, “if they give us any more grief, we should just nuke 'em and be done with it.”

“Nuke 'em,” Ben agreed. “Back to the Stone Age.”

The radio was part of the tape deck, and Sam switched that on, popped in a cassette. “Have to be farther back than the Stone Age. They're already living in the damn Stone Age.”

“Nuke 'em back to the Age of Dinosaurs,” Ben said as a song by the Oak Ridge Boys issued from the cassette player.

Rachael was making astonished and squeamish sounds as the fisherman told her how the tattoo needles embedded the ink way down beneath all three layers of skin.

“Age of the Dinosaurs,” Sam agreed. “Let 'em try their terrorist crap on a tyrannosaurus, huh?”

Ben laughed and handed over the completed form.

The purchases had already been charged to Ben's Visa card, so all Sam had to do was staple the charge slip and the cash-register tape to one copy of the firearms information form and put the paperwork in the bag that held the four boxes of ammunition. “Come see us again.”

“I'll sure do that,” Ben said.

Rachael said good-bye to the tattooed fisherman, and Ben said hello and good-bye to him, and they both said good-bye to Sam. Ben carried the box containing the shotgun, and Rachael carried the plastic sack that contained the boxes of ammunition, and they moved nonchalantly across the room toward the front door, past stacks of aluminum bait buckets with perforated Styrofoam liners, past furled minnow-seining nets and small landing nets that looked like tennis rackets with badly stretched strings, past ice chests and thermos bottles and colorful fishing hats.

Behind them, in a voice that he believed to be softer than it actually was, the tattooed fisherman said to Sam: “Quite a woman.”

You don' t know the half of it, Ben thought as he pushed open the door for Rachael and followed her outside.

Less than ten feet away, a San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy was getting out of a patrol car.

Fluorescent light bounced off the green and white ceramic tile, bright enough to reveal every hideous detail, too bright.

The bathroom mirror, framed in brass, was unmarred by spots or yellow streaks of age, and the reflections it presented were crisp and sharp and clear in every detail, too clear.

Eric Leben was not surprised by what he saw, for while sitting in the living-room armchair, he had already hesitantly used his hands to explore the startling changes in the upper portions of his face. But visual confirmation of what his disbelieving hands had told him was shocking, frightening, depressing — and more fascinating than anything else he'd seen in his entire life.

A year ago, he had subjected himself to the imperfect Wildcard program of genetic editing and augmentation. Since then, he had caught no colds, no flu, had been plagued by no mouth ulcers or headaches, not even acid indigestion. Week by week, he had gathered evidence supporting the contention that the treatment had wrought a desirable change in him without negative side effects.

Side effects.

He almost laughed. Almost.

Staring in horror at the mirror, as if it were a window onto hell, he raised one trembling hand to his forehead and touched, again, the narrow rippled ridge of bone that had risen from the bridge of his nose to his hairline.

The catastrophic injuries he had suffered yesterday had triggered his new healing abilities in a way and to a degree that invasive cold and flu viruses had not. Thrown into overdrive, his cells had begun to produce interferon, a wide spectrum of infection-fighting antibodies, and especially growth hormones and proteins, at an astonishing rate. For some reason, those substances were continuing to flood his system after the healing was complete, after the need for them was past. His body was no longer merely replacing damaged tissue but was adding new tissue at an alarming rate, tissue without apparent function.

“No,” he said softly, “no,” trying to deny what he saw before him. But it was true, and he felt its truth under his fingertips as he explored farther along the top of his head. The strange bony ridge was most prominent on his forehead, but it was on top of his head, as well, beneath his hair, and he even thought he could feel it growing as he traced its course toward the back of his skull.

His body was transforming itself either at random or to some purpose that he could not grasp, and there was no way of knowing when it would finally stop. It might never stop. He might go on growing, changing, reconstituting himself in myriad new images, endlessly. He was metamorphosing into a freak… or just possibly, ultimately, into something so utterly alien that it could no longer be called human.

The bony ridge tapered away at the back of his skull. He moved his hand forward again to the thickened shelf of bone above his eyes. It made him look vaguely like a Neanderthal, though Neanderthal man had not had a bony crest up the center of his head. Or a knob of bone at one temple. Nor had Neanderthals — or any other ancestors of humanity — ever featured the huge, swollen blood vessels where they shone darkly and pulsed disgustingly in his brow.

Even in his current degenerative mental condition, with every thought fuzzy at the edges and with his memory clouded, Eric grasped the full and horrible meaning of this development. He would never be able to reenter society in any acceptable capacity. Beyond a doubt, he was his own Frankenstein monster, and he had made — was continuously making — a hopeless and eternal outcast of himself.

His future was so bleak as to give new meaning to the word. He might be captured and survive in a laboratory somewhere, subjected to the stares and probes of countless fascinated scientists, who would surely devise endless tests that would seem like valid and justifiable experiments to them but would be pure and simple torture to him. Or he might flee into the wilderness and somehow make a pathetic life there, giving birth to legends of a new monster, until someday a hunter stumbled across him by accident and brought him down. But no matter which of many terrible fates awaited him, there would be two grim constants: unrelenting fear, not so much fear of what others would do to him, but fear of what his own body was doing to him; and loneliness, a profound and singular loneliness that no other man had ever known or ever would know, for he would be the only one of his kind on the face of the earth.

Yet his despair and terror were at least slightly ameliorated by curiosity, the same powerful curiosity that had made him a great scientist. Studying his hideous reflection, staring at this genetic catastrophe in the making, he was riveted, aware that he was seeing things no man had ever seen. Better yet: things that man had not been meant to see. That was an exhilarating feeling. It was what a man like him lived for. Every scientist, to some degree, seeks a glimpse of the great dark mysteries underlying life and hopes to understand what he sees if he is ever given that glimpse. This was more than a glimpse. This was a long, slow look into the enigma of human growth and development, as long a look as he cared to make it, its duration determined only by the extent of his courage.

The thought of suicide flickered only briefly through his mind and then was gone, for the opportunity presented to him was even more important than the certain physical, mental, and emotional anguish that he would endure henceforth. His future would be a strange landscape, shadowed by fear, lit by the lightning of pain, yet he was compelled to journey through it toward an unseen horizon. He had to find out what he would become.

Besides, his fear of death had by no means diminished due to these incredible developments. If anything, because he now seemed nearer the grave than at any time in his life, his necrophobia had an even tighter grip on him. No matter what form and quality of life lay ahead of him, he must go on; though his metamorphosis was deeply depressing and bloodcurdling, the alternative to life held even greater terror for him.

As he stared into the mirror, his headache returned.

He thought he saw something new in his eyes.

He leaned closer to the mirror.

Something about his eyes was definitely odd, different, but he could not quite identify the change.

The headache became rapidly more severe. The fluorescent lights bothered him, so he squinted to close out some of the white glare.

He looked away from his own eyes and let his gaze travel over the rest of his reflection. Suddenly he thought he perceived changes occurring along his right temple as well as in the zygomatic bone and zygomatic arch around and under his right eye.

Fear surged through him, purer than any fear he had known thus far, and his heart raced.

His headache now blazed throughout his skull and even down into a substantial portion of his face.

Abruptly he turned away from the mirror. It was difficult though possible to look upon the monstrous changes after they had occurred. But watching the flesh and bone transform itself before his eyes was a far more demanding task, and he possessed neither the fortitude nor the stomach for it.

Crazily he thought of Lon Chancy, Jr., in that old movie, The Wolfman, Chancy so appalled by the sight of his lupine metamorphosis that he was overcome by terror of — and pity for — himself. Eric looked at his own large hands, half expecting to see hair sprouting on them. That expectation made him laugh, though as before, his laugh was a harsh and cold and broken sound, utterly humorless, and it quickly turned into a series of wrenching sobs.

His entire head and face were filled with pain now — even his lips stung — and as he lurched out of the bathroom, bumping first into the sink, then colliding with the doorjamb, he made a thin high-pitched keening sound that was, in one note, a symphony of fear and suffering.

The San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy wore dark sunglasses that concealed his eyes and, therefore, his intentions. However, as the policeman got out of the patrol car, Ben saw no telltale tension in his body, no indications that he recognized them as the infamous betrayers of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, of whom the radio newsman had recently spoken.

Ben took Rachael's arm, and they kept moving.

Within the past few hours, their descriptions and photographs had been wired to all police agencies in California and the Southwest, but that did not mean they were every lawman's first priority.

The deputy seemed to be staring at them.

But not all cops were sufficiently conscientious to study the latest bulletins before hitting the road, and those who had gone on duty early this morning, as this man might have done, would have left before Ben's and Rachael's photographs had been posted.

“Excuse me,” the deputy said.

Ben stopped. Through the hand he had on Rachael's arm, he felt her stiffen. He tried to stay loose, smile. “Yes, sir?”

“That your Chevy pickup?”

Ben blinked. “Uh… no. Not mine.”

“Got a taillight busted out,” the deputy said, taking off his sunglasses, revealing eyes free of suspicion.

“We're driving that Ford,” Ben said.

“You know who owns the truck?”

“Nope. Probably one of the other customers in there.”

“Well, you folks have a nice day, enjoy our beautiful mountains,” the deputy said, moving past them and into the sporting-goods store.

Ben tried not to run straight to the car, and he sensed that Rachael was resisting a similar urge. Their measured stroll was almost too nonchalant.

The eerie stillness, so complete when they had arrived, was gone, and the day was full of movement. Out on the water, an outboard motor buzzed like a swarm of hornets. A breeze had sprung up, coming in off the blue lake, rustling the trees, stirring the grass and weeds and wildflowers. A few cars passed on the state route, rock and roll blaring through the open windows of one of them.

They reached the rental Ford in the cool shadows of the pines.

Rachael pulled her door shut, winced at the loud chunk it made, as if the sound would draw the deputy back. Her green eyes were wide with apprehension. “Let's get out of here.”

“You got it,” he said, starting the engine.

“We can find another place, more private, where you can unpack the shotgun and load it.”

They pulled out onto the two-lane blacktop that encircled the lake, heading north. Ben kept checking the rearview mirror. No one was following them; his fear that their pursuers were right on their tail was irrational, paranoid. He kept checking the mirror anyway.

The lake lay on their left and below them, glimmering, and the mountains rose on their right. In some areas, houses stood on large plots of forested land: Some were magnificent, almost country-style mansions, and others were neatly kept but humble summer cottages. In other places, the land was either government-owned or too steep to provide building sites, and the wilderness encroached in a weedy and brambled tangle of trees. A lot of dry brush had built up, too, and signs warned of the fire danger, an annual summer-autumn threat throughout southern California. The road snaked and rolled, climbed and fell, through alternating patches of shade and golden sunlight.

After a couple of minutes, Rachael said, “They can't really believe we stole defense secrets.”

“No,” Ben agreed.

“I mean, I didn't even know Geneplan had defense contracts.”

“That's not what they're worried about. It's a cover story.”

“Then why are they so eager to get their hands on us?”

“Because we know that Eric has… come back.”

“And you think the government knows, too?” she asked.

“You said the Wildcard project was a closely held secret. The only people who knew were Eric, his partners in Geneplan, and you.”

“That's right.”

“But if Geneplan had its hand in the Pentagon's pocket on other projects, then you can bet the Pentagon knew everything worth knowing about the owners of Geneplan and what they were up to. You can't accept lucrative top-secret research work and at the same time hold on to your privacy.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “But Eric might not have realized it. Eric believed he could have the best of everyone, all the time.”

A road sign warned of a dip in the pavement. Ben braked, and the Ford jolted over a rough patch, springs squeaking, frame rattling.

When they came through to smoother blacktop, he said, “So the Pentagon knew enough about Wildcard to realize what Eric had done to himself when his body disappeared from the morgue. And now they want to contain the story, keep the secret, because they see it as a weapon or, at least, as a source of tremendous power.”

“Power?”

“If perfected, the Wildcard process might mean immortality to those who undergo treatment. So the people who control Wildcard will decide who lives forever and who doesn't. Can you imagine any better weapon, any better tool with which to establish political control of the whole damn world?”

Rachael was silent awhile. Then she said softly, “Jesus, I've been so focused on the personal aspects of this, so intent on what it means to me, that I haven't looked at it from a broader perspective.”

“So they have to get hold of us,” Ben said.

“They don't want us blowing the secret till Wildcard's perfected. If it were blown first, they couldn't continue research unhampered.”

“Exactly. Since you're going to inherit the largest block of stock in Geneplan, the government might figure you can be persuaded to cooperate for the good of your country and for your own gain.”

She shook her head. “I couldn't be persuaded. Not about this. For one thing, if there's any hope at all of dramatically extending the human life span and promoting healing through genetic engineering, then the research should be done publicly, and the benefits should be available to everyone. It's immoral to handle it any other way.”

“I figured that's how you'd feel,” he said, pulling the Ford through a sharp right-hand turn, then sharply to the left again.

“Besides, I couldn't be persuaded to continue research along the same avenue the Wildcard group has been following, because I'm sure it's the wrong route.”

“I knew you'd say that,” Ben said approvingly.

“Admittedly, I know very little about genetics, but I can see there's just too much danger involved in the approach they're taking. Remember the mice I told you about. And remember… the blood in the trunk of the car at the house in Villa Park.”

He remembered, which was one reason he had wanted the shotgun.

She said, “If I took control of Geneplan, I might want to fund continued longevity research, but I'd insist on scrapping Wildcard and starting fresh from a new direction.”

“I knew you'd say that, too,” Ben told her, “and I figure the government also has a pretty good idea what you'd say. So I don't have much hope that they just want a chance to persuade you. If they know anything about you — and as Eric's wife, you've got to be in their files — then they know you couldn't be bribed or threatened into doing something you thought was really wrong, couldn't be corrupted. So they probably won't even bother trying.”

“It's my Catholic upbringing,” she said with a touch of irony. “A very stern, strict, religious family, you know.”

He didn't know. This was the first she had ever spoken of it.

Softly she said, “And very early, I was sent to a boarding school for girls, administrated by nuns. I grew to hate it… the endless Masses… the humiliation of the confessional, revealing my pathetic little sins. But I guess it shaped me for the better, huh? Might not be so all-fired incorruptible if I hadn't spent all those years in the hands of the good sisters.”

He sensed that these revelations were but a twig on an immense and perhaps ugly tree of grim experience.

He glanced away from the road for a second, wanting to see her expression. But he was foiled by the constantly, rapidly changing mosaic of tree shadows and sunlight that came through the windshield and dappled her countenance. There was an illusion of fire, and her face was only half revealed to him, half hidden beyond the shifting and shimmering curtain of those phantom flames.

Sighing, she said, “Okay, so if the government knows it can't persuade me, why's it issuing warrants on a bunch of trumped-up charges and putting so much manpower into the search for me?”

“They want to kill you,” Ben said bluntly.

“What?”

“They'd rather get you out of the picture and deal with Eric's partners, Knowls and Seitz and the others, because they already know those men are corruptible.”

She was shocked, and he was not surprised by her shock. She was not unworldly or terribly naive. But she was, by choice, a present-focused person who had given little thought to the complexities of the changing world around her, except when that world impinged upon her primary desire to wring as much pleasure as possible from the moment. She accepted a variety of myths as a matter of convenience, as a way of simplifying her life, and one myth was that her government would always have her best interests at heart, whether the issue was war, a reform of the justice system, increased taxation, or anything else. She was apolitical and saw no reason to be concerned about who might win — or usurp — the power flowing from the ballot box, for it was easy to believe in the benign intentions of those who so ardently desired to serve the public.

She gaped in astonishment at him. He did not even have to see that expression through the flickering light and shadow to know it held tenancy of her face, for he sensed it in the change in her breathing and in the greater tension that suddenly gripped her and caused her to sit up straighter.

“Kill me? No, no, Benny. The U.S. government just executing civilians as if this were some banana republic? No, surely not.”

“Not necessarily the whole government, Rachael. The House, Senate, president, and cabinet secretaries haven't held meetings to discuss the obstacle you pose, haven't conspired by the hundreds to terminate you. But someone in the Pentagon or the DS A or the CIA has determined that you're standing in the way of the national interest, that you pose a threat to the welfare of millions of citizens. When they weigh the welfare of millions against one or two little murders, the choice is clear to them, as it always is to collectivist thinkers. One or two little murders — tens of thousands of murders — are always justifiable when the welfare of the masses is at stake. At least, that's how they see it, even if they do pretend to believe in the sanctity of the individual. So they can order one or two little murders and even feel righteous about it.”

“Dear God,” she said with feeling. “What have I dragged you into, Benny?”

“You didn't drag me into anything,” he said. “I forced my way in. You couldn't keep me out of it. And I've no regrets.”

She seemed unable to speak.

Ahead, on the left, a branch road led down to the lake. A sign announced: lake approach — boat launching facilities.

Ben turned off the state route and followed the narrower gravel road down through a crowd of immense trees. In a quarter of a mile, he drove out of the trees, into a sixty-foot-wide, three-hundred-foot-long open area by the shore. Sequins of sunlight decorated the lake in some places, and serpentine streams of sunlight wriggled across the shifting surface in other places, and here and there brilliant shafts bounced off the waves and dazzled the eye.

More than a dozen cars, pickups, and campers were parked at the far end of the clearing, several with empty boat trailers behind them. A big recreational pickup — black with red and gray stripes, bedecked with gobs of sun-heated chrome — was backed up near the water's edge, and three men were launching a twenty-four-foot twin-engine Water King from their trailer. Several people were eating lunch at picnic tables near the shore, and an Irish setter was sniffing under a table in search of scraps, and two young boys were tossing a football back and forth, and eight or ten fishermen were tending their poles along the bank.

They all looked as if they were enjoying themselves. If any of them realized the world beyond this pleasant haven was turning dark and going mad, he was keeping it to himself.

Benny drove to the parking area but tucked the Ford in by the edge of the forest, as far from the other vehicles as he could get. He switched off the engine and rolled down his window. He put his seat back as far as it would go in order to give himself room to work, took the shotgun box on his lap, opened it, withdrew the gun, and threw the empty box into the back seat.

“Keep a watch out,” he told Rachael. “You see anybody coming, let me know. I'll get out and meet him. Don't want anybody to see the shotgun and be spooked. It's sure as hell not hunting season.”

“Benny, what're we going to do?”

“Just what we planned to do,” he said, using one of the car keys to slit the shrink-wrapped plastic in which the shotgun was encased. “Follow the directions Sarah Kiel gave you, find Eric's cabin, and see if he's there.”

“But the warrants for our arrest… people wanting to kill us… doesn't that change everything?”

“Not much.” He discarded the shredded plastic and looked the gun over. It came fully assembled, a nice piece of work, and it felt good and reliable in his hands. “Originally we wanted to get to Eric and finish him before he healed entirely and came looking to finish you. Now maybe what we'll have to do is capture him instead of kill him—”

“Take him alive?” Rachael said, alarmed by that suggestion.

“Well, he's not exactly alive, is he? But I think we're going to have to take him in whatever condition he's in, tie him up, drive him someplace like… well, someplace like the offices of the Los Angeles Times. Then we can hold a real shocker of a press conference.”

“Oh, Benny, no, no, we can't.” She shook her head adamantly. “That's crazy. He's going to be violent, extremely violent. I told you about the mice. You saw the blood in the trunk of the car, for God's sake. The destruction everywhere he's been, the knives in the wall of the Palm Springs house, the beating he gave Sarah. We can't risk getting close to him. He won't respect the gun, if that's what you're thinking. He won't have any fear of it at all. You get close enough to try to capture him, and he'll take your head off in spite of the gun. He might even have a gun of his own. No, no, if we see him, we've got to finish him right away, shoot him without any hesitation, shoot him again and again, do so much damage to him that he won't be able to come back again.”

A panicky note had entered her voice, and she had spoken faster and faster as she strove to convince Ben. Her skin was powder-white, and her lips had acquired a bluish tint. She was shivering.

Even considering their precarious situation and the admittedly hideous nature of their quarry, her fear seemed too great to Ben, and he wondered how much her reaction to Eric's resurrection was heightened by the ultrareligious childhood that had formed her. Without fully understanding her own feelings, perhaps she was afraid of Eric not merely because she knew his potential for violence, and not merely because he was a walking dead man, but because he had dared to seize the power of God by defeating death and thereby had become not simply a zombie but some hellborn creature returned from the realm of the damned.

Forgetting the shotgun for a moment, taking both her hands in his, he said, “Rachael, honey, I can handle him; I've handled worse than him, much worse—”

“Don't be so confident! That's what'll get you killed.”

“I'm trained for war, well trained to take care of myself—”

“Please!”

“And I've kept in top shape all these years because Nam taught me that the world can turn dark and mean overnight and that you can't count on anything but yourself and your closest friends. That was a nasty lesson about the modern world that I didn't want to admit I'd learned, which is why I've spent so much time immersed in the past. But the very fact that I've kept in shape and kept practicing my fighting skills is proof of the lesson. Tip-top shape, Rachael. And I'm well armed.” He hushed her when she tried to object. “We have no choice, Rachael. That's what it comes down to. No other choice. If we just kill him, blast the sucker with twenty or thirty rounds from the shotgun, kill him so bad he stays dead for good this time — then we have no proof of what he did to himself. We just have a corpse. Who could prove he'd been reanimated? It'd look as if we stole his body from the morgue, pumped it full of buckshot, and concocted this crazy story, maybe concocted it to cover the very crimes the government is accusing us of.”

“Lab tests of his cell structure would prove something,” Rachael said. “Examination of his genetic material—”

“That would take weeks. Before then, the government would've found a way to claim the body, eliminate us, and doctor the test results to show nothing out of the ordinary.”

She started to speak, hesitated, and stopped because she was obviously beginning to realize that he was right. She looked more forlorn than any woman he had ever seen.

He said, “Our only hope of getting the government off our backs is to get proof of Wildcard and break the story to the press. The only reason they want to kill us is to keep the secret, so when the secret is blown, we'll be safe. Since we didn't get the Wildcard file from Eric's office safe, Eric himself is the only proof we have a chance of putting our hands on. And we need him alive. They need to see him breathing, functioning, in spite of his staved-in head. They need to see the change in him that you suspect there'll be — the irrational rages, the sullen quality of the living dead.”

She swallowed hard. She nodded. “All right. Okay. But I'm so scared.”

“You can be strong; you have it in you.”

“I know I do. I know. But…”

He leaned forward and gave her a kiss.

Her lips were icy.

Eric groaned and opened his eyes.

Evidently he had descended once more into a short period of suspended animation, a minor but deep coma, for he slowly regained consciousness on the floor of the living room, sprawled among at least a hundred sheets of typing paper. His splitting headache was gone, although a peculiar burning sensation extended from the top of his — skull downward to his chin, all across his face, and in most of his muscles and joints as well, in shoulders and arms and legs. It was not an unpleasant burning, and not pleasant either, just a neutral sensation unlike anything he had felt before.

I'm like a candy man, made of chocolate, sitting on a sun-washed table, melting, melting, but melting from the inside.

For a while he just lay there, wondering where the weird thought had come from. He was disoriented, dizzy. His mind was a swamp in which unconnected thoughts burst like stinking bubbles on the watery surface. Gradually the water cleared a bit and the soupy mud of the swamp grew somewhat firmer.

Pushing up to a sitting position, he looked at the papers strewn around him and could not remember what they were. He picked up a few and tried to read them. The blurry letters would not at first resolve into words; then the words would not form coherent sentences. When at last he could read a bit, he could understand only a fraction of what he read, but he could grasp enough to realize that this was the third paper copy of the Wildcard file.

In addition to the project data stored in the Geneplan computers, there had been one hard-copy file in Riverside, one in his office safe at the headquarters in Newport Beach, and a third here. The cabin was his secret retreat, known only to him, and it had seemed prudent to keep a fully updated file in the hidden basement safe, as insurance against the day when Seitz and Knowls — the money men behind his work — tried to take the corporation away from him through clever financial maneuvering. That anticipated treachery was unlikely because they needed him, needed his genius, and would most likely still need him when Wildcard was perfected. But he was not a man who took chances. (Other than the one big chance, when he had injected himself with the devil's brew that was turning his body into pliable clay.) He had not wanted to risk being booted out of Geneplan and finding himself cut off from data crucial to the production of the immortality serum.

Evidently, after stumbling out of the bathroom, he had gone down to the basement, had opened the safe, and had brought the file up here for perusal. What had he been seeking? An explanation for what was happening to him? A way to undo the changes that had occurred — that were still occurring — in him?

That was pointless. These monstrous developments had been unanticipated. Nothing in the file would refer to the possibility of runaway growth or point the way to salvation. He must have been seized by delirium, for only in such a state would he have bothered to pursue a magic cure in this pile of Xeroxes.

He knelt in the scattered papers for a minute or two, preoccupied by the strange though painless burning sensation that filled his body, trying to understand its source and meaning. In some places — along his spine, across the top of his head, at the base of his throat, in his testicles — the heat was accompanied by an eerie tingle. He almost felt as if a billion fire ants had made their home within him and were moving by the millions through his veins and arteries and through a maze of tunnels they had burrowed in his flesh and bone.

Finally he got to his feet, and a fierce anger rose in him for no specific reason, and with no particular target. He kicked out furiously, stirring up a briefly airborne, noisy cloud of papers.

A frightening rage seethed under the surface of the mindswamp, and he was just perceptive enough to realize that it was in some way quite different from the previous rages to which he had succumbed. This one was… even more primal, less focused, less of a human rage, more like the irrationally churning fury of an animal. He felt as if some deeply buried racial memory were asserting itself, something crawling up out of the genetic pit, up from ten million years ago, up from the faraway time when men were only apes, or from a time even farther removed than that, from an unthinkably ancient age when men were as yet only amphibian creatures crawling painfully onto a volcanic shore and breathing air for the first time. It was a cold rage instead of hot like the ones before it, as cold — as the heart of the Arctic, a billion years of coldness… reptilian. Yes, that was the feel of it, an icy reptilian rage, and when he began to grasp its nature, he recoiled from further consideration of it and desperately hoped that he would be able to keep it under control.

The mirror.

He was certain that changes had taken place in him while he had been unconscious on the living-room floor, and he knew he should go into the bathroom and look at himself in the mirror. But suddenly he was shaken anew by fear of what he was becoming, and he could not find the courage to take even one step in that direction.

Instead, he decided to employ the Braille approach by which he had previously discovered the first alterations in his face. Feeling the differences before seeing them would prepare him somewhat for the shock of his appearance. Hesitantly he raised his hands to explore his face but did not get that far because he saw that his hands were changing, and he was arrested by the sight of them.

They were not radically different hands from what they had been, but they were unquestionably not his hands anymore, not the hands he had used all his life. The fingers were longer and thinner, perhaps a whole inch longer, with fleshier pads at the tips. The nails were different, too: thicker, harder, yellowish, more pointed than ordinary fingernails. They were nascent claws, damned if they weren't, and if the metamorphosis continued, they would probably develop into even more pointed, hooked, and razor-sharp talons. His knuckles were changing, too — larger, bonier, almost like arthritic knuckles.

He expected to find his hands stiff and less usable than they had been, but to his surprise the altered knuckles worked easily, fluidly, and proved superior to the knuckles out of which they had grown. He worked his hands experimentally and discovered that he was incredibly dexterous; his elongated fingers possessed a new suppleness and startling flexibility.

And he sensed that the changes were continuing unchecked, though not fast enough for him to actually see the bones growing and the flesh remaking itself. But by tomorrow his hands would surely be far more radically changed than they were now.

This was electrifyingly different from the apparent random, tumorlike excrescences of bone and tissue that had formed across his forehead. These hands were not just the result of an excess of growth hormones and proteins. This growth had purpose, direction. In fact, he suddenly noticed that on both hands, between thumb and forefinger, below the first knuckle of each digit, translucent webs had begun to fill in the empty space.

Reptilian. Like the cold rage that he knew would (if he let it) erupt in a frenzy of destruction. Reptilian.

He lowered his hands, afraid to look at them anymore.

He no longer had the courage to explore the contours of his face, not even by touch. The mere prospect of looking into a mirror filled him with dread.

His heart was hammering, and with each thunderous beat, it seemed to pound spikes of fear and loneliness into him.

For a moment he was utterly lost, confused, directionless. He turned left, then right, took a step in one direction, then in another, the Wildcard papers crunching like dead leaves under his feet. Not sure what to do or where to go, he stopped and stood with shoulders slumped, head hung low under a weight of despair—

— until suddenly the weird burning in his flesh and the eerie tingle along his spine were supplemented with a new sensation: hunger. His stomach growled, and his knees grew weak, and he started to shake with hunger. He began to work his mouth and to swallow continuously, involuntarily, hard swallows that almost hurt, as if his body were demanding to be fed. He headed toward the kitchen, his shakes getting worse with every step, his knees growing weaker. The sweat of need poured from him in streams, in rivers. A hunger unlike anything he had ever known before. Rabid hunger. Painful. Tearing at him. His vision clouded, and his thoughts funneled down toward one subject: food. The macabre changes taking place in him would require a great deal more fuel than usual, energy for tearing down old tissues, building blocks with which to construct new tissues — yes, of course — his metabolism was running wild, like a great furnace out of control, a raging fire, it had broken down and assimilated the Farmer John sausage-and-biscuit sandwiches that he had eaten earlier, and it needed more, much more, so by the time he opened the cupboard doors and began pulling cans of soup and stew from the shelves, he was wheezing and gasping, muttering wordlessly, grunting like a savage or a wild beast, sickened and repelled by his loss of control but too hungry to worry about it, frightened but hungry, despairing but so hungry, hungry, hungry…

Following the directions Sarah Kiel had given Rachael, Ben turned off the state route onto a narrow, poorly maintained macadam lane that climbed a steep slope. The lane led deeper into the forest, where the deciduous trees gave way entirely to evergreens, many of which were ancient and huge. They drove half a mile, passing widely separated driveways that served houses and summer cottages. A couple of structures were fully visible, though most could barely be seen between the trees or were entirely hidden by foliage and forest shadows.

The farther they went, the less the sun intruded upon the forest floor, and Rachael's mood darkened at the same rate as the landscape. She held the thirty-two pistol in her lap and peered anxiously ahead.

The pavement ended, but the road continued with a gravel surface for more than another quarter of a mile. They passed just two more driveways, plus two Dodge Chargers and a small motor home parked in a lay-by near one driveway, before coming to a closed gate. Made of steel pipe, painted sky blue, and padlocked, the gate was unattached to any fence and served only to limit vehicular access to the road beyond, which further declined in quality from gravel to dirt.

Wired securely to the center of the barrier, a black-and-red sign warned:

no trespassing

private property

“Just like Sarah told you,” Ben said.

Beyond the gate lay Eric Leben's property, his secret retreat. The cabin was not visible, for it was another quarter of a mile up the mountainside, entirely screened by trees from this angle.

“It's still not too late to turn back,” Rachael said.

“Yes, it is,” Ben said.

She bit her lip and nodded grimly. She carefully switched off the double safeties on her pistol.

Eric used the electric opener to take the lid off a large can of Progresso minestrone, realized he needed a pot in which to heat it, but was shaking too badly to wait any longer, so he just drank the cold soup out of the can, threw the can aside, wiping absentmindedly at the broth that dripped off his chin. He kept no fresh food in the cabin, only a few frozen things, mostly canned goods, so he opened a family-size Dinty Moore beef stew, and he ate that cold, too, all of it, so fast he kept choking on it.

He chewed the beef with something akin to manic glee, taking a strangely intense pleasure from the tearing and rending of the meat between his teeth. It was a pleasure unlike any he had experienced before — primal, savage — and it both delighted and frightened him.

Although the stew was fully cooked, requiring only reheating, and although it was laden with spices and preservatives, Eric could smell the traces of blood remaining in the beef. Though the blood content was minuscule and thoroughly cooked, Eric perceived it not merely as a vague scent but as a strong, nearly overpowering odor, a thrilling and thoroughly delicious organic incense, which caused him to shudder with excitement. He breathed deeply and was dizzied by the blood fragrance, and on his tongue it was ambrosian.

When he finished the cold beef stew, which took only a couple of minutes, he opened a can of chili and ate that even more quickly, then another can of soup, chicken noodle this time, and finally he began to take the sharp edge off his hunger. He unscrewed the lid from a jar of peanut butter, scooped some out with his fingers, and ate it. He did not like it as well as he liked the meat, but he knew it was good for him, rich in the nutrients that his racing metabolism required. He consumed more, cleaned out most of the jar, then threw it aside and stood for a moment, gasping for breath, exhausted from eating.

The queer, painless fire continued to burn in him, but the hunger had substantially abated.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his uncle Barry Hampstead sitting in a chair at the small kitchen table, grinning at him. This time, instead of ignoring the phantom, Eric turned toward it, took a couple of steps closer, and said, “What do you want here, you son of a bitch?” His voice was gravelly, not at all like it had once been. “What're you grinning at, you goddamn pervert? You get the hell out of here.”

Uncle Barry actually began to fade away, although that was not surprising: He was only an illusion born of degenerated brain cells.

Unreal flames, feeding on shadows, danced in the darkness beyond the cellar door, which Eric had evidently left open when he had come back upstairs with the Wildcard file. He watched the shadowfires. As before, he felt some mystery beckoning, and he was afraid. However, emboldened by his success in chasing away Barry Hampstead's shade, he started toward the flickering red and silver flames, figuring either to dispel them or to see, at last, what lay within them.

Then he remembered the armchair in the living room, the window, the lookout he had been keeping. He had been distracted from that important task by a chain of events: the unusually brutal headache, the changes he had felt in his face, the macabre reflection in the mirror, the Wildcard file, his sudden crippling hunger, Uncle Barry's apparition, and now the false fires beyond the cellar door. He could not concentrate on one thing for any length of time, and he cried out in frustration at this latest evidence of mental dysfunction.

He moved back across the kitchen, kicking aside an empty Dinty Moore beef stew can and a couple of soup cans, heading for the living room and his abandoned guardpost.

Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee… The one-note songs of the cicadas, monotonous to the human ear but most likely rich in meaning to other insects, echoed shrilly yet hollowly through the high forest.

Standing beside the rental car, keeping a wary eye on the woods around them, Ben distributed four extra shotgun shells and eight extra rounds for the Combat Magnum in the pockets of his jeans.

Rachael emptied out her purse and filled it with three boxes of ammunition, one for each of their guns. That was surely an excessive supply — but Ben did not suggest that she take any less.

He carried the shotgun under one arm. Given the slightest provocation, he could swing it up and fire in a fraction of a second.

Rachael carried the thirty-two pistol and the Combat Magnum, one in each hand. She wanted Ben to carry both the Remington and the.357, but he could not handle both efficiently, and he preferred the shotgun.

They moved off into the brush just far enough to slip around the padlocked gate, returning to the dirt track on the other side.

Ahead, the road rose under a canopy of pine limbs, flanked by rock-lined drainage ditches bristling with dead dry weeds that had sprung up during the rainy season and withered during the arid spring and summer. About two hundred yards above them, the lane took a sharp turn to the right and disappeared. According to Sarah Kiel, the lane ran straight and true beyond the bend, directly to the cabin, which was approximately another two hundred yards from that point.

“Do you think it's safe to approach right out on the road like this?” Rachael whispered, even though they were still so far from the cabin that their normal speaking voices could not possibly have carried to Eric.

Ben found himself whispering, too. “It'll be okay at least until we reach the bend. As long as we can't see him, he can't see us.”

She still looked worried.

He said, “If he's even up there.”

“He's up there,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“He's up there,” she insisted, pointing to vague tire tracks in the thin layer of dust that covered the hard-packed dirt road.

Ben nodded. He had seen the same thing.

“Waiting,” Rachael said.

“Not necessarily.”

“Waiting.”

“He could be recuperating.”

“No.”

“Incapacitated.”

“No. He's ready for us.”

She was probably right about that as well. He sensed the same thing she did: oncoming trouble.

Curiously, though they stood in the shadows of the trees, the nearly invisible scar along her jawline, where Eric had once cut her with a broken glass, was visible, more visible than it usually was in ordinary light. In fact, to Ben, it seemed to glow softly, as if the scar responded to the nearness of the one who had inflicted it, much the way that a man's arthritic joints might alert him to an oncoming storm. Imagination, of course. The scar was no more prominent now than it had been an hour ago. The illusion of prominence was just an indication of how much he feared losing her.

In the car, on the drive up from the lake, he had tried his best to persuade her to remain behind and let him handle Eric alone. She was opposed to that idea — possibly because she feared losing Ben as much as he feared losing her.

They started up the lane.

Ben looked nervously left and right as they went, uncomfortably aware that the heavily forested mountainside, gloomy even at midday, provided countless hiding places — ambush points — very close to them on both sides.

The air was heavily laced with the odor of evergreen sap, the crisp and appealing fragrance of dry pine needles, and the musty scent of some rotting deadwood.

Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee…

He had returned to the armchair with a pair of binoculars that he had remembered were in the bedroom closet. Only minutes after settling down at the window, before his dysfunctioning thought processes could take off on yet another tangent, he saw movement two hundred yards below, at the sharp bend in the road. He played with the focus knob, pulling the scene in clearer, and in spite of the depth of the shadows at that point along the lane, he saw the two people in perfect detail: Rachael and the bastard she had been sleeping with, Shadway.

He had not known whom he expected — other than Seitz, Knowls, and the men of Geneplan — but he had certainly not expected Rachael and Shadway. He was stunned and could not imagine how she had learned of this place, though he knew that the answer would be obvious to him if his mind had been functioning normally.

They were crouched along the bank that flanked the road down there, fairly well concealed. But they had to reveal a little of themselves in order to get a good look at the cabin, and what little they revealed was enough for Eric to identify them in the magnified field of the binoculars.

The sight of Rachael enraged him, for she had rejected him, the only woman in his adult life to reject him — the bitch, the ungrateful stinking bitch! — and she turned her back on his money, too. Even worse: in the miasmal swamp of his deranged mind, she was responsible for his death, had virtually killed him by angering him to distraction and then letting him rush out onto Main Street, into the path of the truck. He could believe she had actually planned his death in order to inherit the very fortune on which she'd claimed to have no designs. Yes, of course, why not? And now there she was with her lover, with the man she had been fucking behind his back, and she had clearly come to finish the job that the garbage truck had started.

They pulled back beyond the bend, but a few seconds later he saw movement in the brush, to the left of the road, and he caught a glimpse of them moving off into the trees. They were going to make a cautious indirect approach.

Eric dropped the binoculars and shoved up from the armchair, stood swaying, in the grip of a rage so great that he almost felt crushed by it. Steel bands tightened across his chest, and for a moment he could not draw his breath. Then the bands snapped, and he sucked in great lungsful of air. He said, “Oh, Rachael, Rachael,” in a voice that sounded as if it were echoing up from hell. He liked the sound of it, so he said her name again: “Rachael, Rachael…”

From the floor beside the chair, he plucked up the ax.

He realized that he could not handle the ax and both knives, so he chose the butcher's knife and left the other blade behind.

He would go out the back way. Circle around. Slip up on them through the woods. He had the cunning to do it. He felt as if he had been born to stalk and kill.

Hurrying across the living room toward the kitchen, Eric saw an image of himself in his mind's eye: He was ramming the knife deep into her guts, then ripping it upward, tearing open her flat young belly. He made a shrill sound of eagerness and almost fell over the empty soup and stew cans in his haste to reach the back door. He would cut her cut her cut. And when she dropped to the ground with the knife in her belly, he would go at her with the ax, use the blunt edge of it first, smashing her bones to splinters, breaking her arms and legs, and then he would turn the wondrous shiny instrument over in his hands — his strange and powerful new hands! — and use the sharp edge.

By the time he reached the rear door and yanked it open and went out of the house, he was in the grip of that reptilian fury that he had feared only a short while ago, a cold and calculating fury, called forth out of genetic memories of inhuman ancestors. Having at last surrendered to that primeval rage, he was surprised to discover that it felt good.

22 WAITING FOR THE STONE

Jerry Peake should have been asleep on his feet, for he had been up all night. But seeing Anson Sharp humiliated had revitalized him better than eight hours in the sheets could have. He felt marvelous.

He stood with Sharp in the corridor outside Sarah Kiel's hospital room, waiting for Felsen Kiel to come and tell them what they needed to know. Peake required considerable restraint to keep from laughing at his boss's vindictive grousing about the farmer from Kansas.

“If he wasn't a know-nothing shit-kicker, I'd come down so hard on him that his teeth would still be vibrating next Christmas,” Sharp said. “But what's the point, huh? He's just a thick-headed Kansas plowboy who doesn't know any better. No point talking to a brick wall, Peake. No point getting angry with a brick wall.”

“Right,” Peake said.

Pacing back and forth in front of Sarah's closed door, glowering at the nurses who passed in the corridor, Sharp said, “You know, those farm families way out there on the plains, they get strange 'cause they breed too much among themselves, cousin to cousin, that sort of thing, which makes them more stupid generation by generation. But not only stupid, Peake. That inbreeding makes them stubborn as mules.”

“Mr. Kiel sure does seem stubborn,” Peake said.

“Just a dim-witted shit-kicker, so what's the point of wasting energy breaking his butt? He wouldn't learn his lesson anyway.”

Peake could not risk an answer. He required almost superhuman determination to keep a grin off his face.

Six or eight times during the next half hour, Sharp said, “Besides, it's faster to let him get the information out of the girl. She's a dim bulb herself, a drugged-up little whore who's probably had syphilis and clap so often her brain's like oatmeal. I figured it'd take us hours to get anything out of her. But when that shit-kicker came into the room, and I heard the girl say 'Daddy' in that happy-shaky little voice, I knew he'd get out of her what we needed a lot faster than we could get it. Let him do our job for us, I thought.”

Jerry Peake marveled at the deputy director's boldness in trying to reshape Peake's perception of what had actually happened in Sarah's room. Then again, maybe Sharp was beginning to believe that he had not backed down and had cleverly manipulated The Stone, getting the best of him. He was fruitcake enough to buy his own lies.

Once, Sharp put a hand on Peake s shoulder, not in a comradely manner but to be sure of his subordinate's attention. “Listen, Peake, don't you get the wrong idea about the way I came on with that little whore. The foul language I used, the threats, the little bit of hurt I caused her when I squeezed her hand… the way I touched her… didn't mean a thing. Just a technique, you know. A good method for getting quick answers. If this wasn't a national security crisis, I'd never have tried that stuff. But sometimes, in special situations like this, we have to do things for our country that maybe neither we nor our country would ordinarily approve of. We understand each other?”

“Yes, sir. Of course.” Surprised by his own ability to fake naïveté and admiration, and to do it convincingly, Peake said, “I'm amazed you'd worry that I'd misunderstand. I'd never have thought of such an approach myself. But the moment you went to work on her… well, I knew what you were doing, and I admired your interrogation skills. I see this case as an opportunity, sir. I mean, the chance to work with you, which I figured would be a very valuable learning experience, which it has been — even more valuable than I'd hoped.”

For a moment Sharp's marble-hard green eyes fixed on Peake with evident suspicion. Then the deputy director decided to take him at his word, for he relaxed a bit and said, ''Good. I'm glad you feel that way, Peake. This is a nasty business sometimes. It can even make you feel dirty now and then, what you have to do, but it's for the country, and that's what we always have to keep in mind.”

“Yes, sir. I always keep that in mind.”

Sharp nodded and began to pace and grumble again.

But Peake knew that Sharp had enjoyed intimidating and hurting Sarah Kiel and had immensely enjoyed touching her. He knew that Sharp was a sadist and a pedophile, for he had seen those dark aspects of his boss surge clearly to the surface in that hospital room. No matter what lies Sharp told him, Jerry Peake was never going to forget what he had seen. Knowing these things about the deputy director gave Peake an enormous advantage — though, as yet, he had absolutely no idea how to benefit from what he had learned.

He had also learned that Sharp was, at heart, a coward. In spite of his bullying ways and impressive physical appearance, the deputy director would back down in a crunch, even against a smaller man like The Stone, as long as the smaller man stood up to him with conviction. Sharp had no compunctions about violence and would resort to it when he thought he was fully protected by his government position or when his adversary was sufficiently weak and unthreatening, but he would back off if he believed he faced the slightest chance of being hurt himself. Possessing that knowledge, Peake had another big advantage, but he did not yet see a way to use that one, either.

Nevertheless, he was confident he would eventually know how to apply the things he had learned. Making well-considered, fair, and effective use of such insights was precisely what a legend did best.

Unaware of having given Peake two good knives, Sharp paced back and forth with the impatience of a Caesar.

The Stone had demanded half an hour alone with his daughter. When thirty minutes had passed, Sharp began to look at his wristwatch more frequently.

After thirty-five minutes, he walked heavily to the door, put a hand against it, started to push inside, hesitated, and turned away. “Hell, give him another few minutes. Can't be easy getting anything coherent out of that spaced-out little whore.”

Peake murmured agreement.

The looks that Sharp cast at the closed door became increasingly murderous. Finally, forty minutes after they had left the room at The Stone's insistence, Sharp tried to cover his fear of confrontation with the farmer by saying, “I have to make a few important calls. I'll be at the public phones in the lobby.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharp started away, then looked back. “When the shit-kicker comes out of there, he's just going to have to wait for me no matter how long I take, and I don't give a damn how much that upsets him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It'll do him good to cool his heels awhile,” Sharp said, and he stalked off, head held high, rolling his big shoulders, looking like a very important man, evidently convinced that his dignity was intact.

Jerry Peake leaned against the wall of the corridor and watched the nurses go by, smiling at the pretty ones and engaging them in brief flirtatious conversation when they were not too busy.

Sharp stayed away for twenty minutes, giving The Stone a full hour with Sarah, but when he came back from making his important — probably nonexistent — phone calls, The Stone had still not appeared. Even a coward could explode if pushed too far, and Sharp was furious.

“That lousy dirt-humping hayseed. He can't come in here, reeking of pigshit, and screw up my investigation.”

He turned away from Peake and started toward Sarah's room.

Before Sharp took two steps, The Stone came out.

Peake had wondered whether Felsen Kiel would look as imposing on second encounter as he had appeared when stepping dramatically into Sarah's room and interrupting Anson Sharp in an act of molestation. To Peake's great satisfaction, The Stone was even more imposing than on the previous occasion. That strong, seamed, weathered face. Those oversized hands, work-gnarled knuckles. An air of unshakable self-possession and serenity. Peake watched with a sort of awe as the man crossed the hallway, as if he were a slab of granite come to life.

“Gentlemen, I'm sorry to keep you waitin'. But, as I'm sure you understand, my daughter and I had a lot of catchin' up to do.”

“And as you must understand, this is an urgent national security matter,” Sharp said, though more quietly than he had spoken earlier.

Unperturbed, The Stone said, “My daughter says you want to know if maybe she has some idea where a fella named Leben is hidin' out.”

“That's right,” Sharp said tightly.

“She said somethin' about him bein' a livin' dead man, which I can't quite get clear with her, but maybe that was just the drugs talkin' through her. You think?”

“Just the drugs,” Sharp said.

“Well, she knows of a certain place he might be,” The Stone said. “The fella owns a cabin above Lake Arrowhead, she says. It's a sort of secret retreat for him.” He took a folded paper from his shirt pocket. “I've written down these directions.” He handed the paper to Peake. To Peake, not to Anson Sharp.

Peake glanced at The Stone's precise, clear handwriting, then passed the paper to Sharp.

“You know,” The Stone said, “my Sarah was a good girl up until three years ago, a fine daughter in every way. Then she fell under the spell of a sick person who got her onto drugs, put twisted thoughts in her head. She was only thirteen then, impressionable, vulnerable, easy pickin'.”

“Mr. Kiel, we don't have time—”

The Stone pretended not to hear Sharp, even though he was looking directly at him. “My wife and I tried our best to find out who it was that had her spellbound, figured it had to be an older boy at school, but we could never identify him. Then one day, after a year durin' which hell moved right into our home, Sarah up and disappeared, ran off to California to 'live the good life.' That's what she wrote in the note to us, said she wanted to live the good life and that we were unsophisticated country people who didn't know anythin' about the world, said we were full of funny ideas. Like honesty, sobriety, and self-respect, I suppose. These days, lots of folks think those are funny ideas.”

“Mr. Kiel—”

“Anyway,” The Stone continued, “not long after that, I finally learned who it was corrupted her. A teacher. Can you credit that? A teacher, who's supposed to be a figure of respect. New young history teacher. I demanded the school board investigate him. Most of the other teachers rallied round him to fight any investigation 'cause these days a lot of 'em seem to think we exist just to keep our mouths shut and pay their salaries no matter what garbage they want to pump into our children's heads. Two-thirds of the teachers—”

“Mr. Kiel,” Sharp said more forcefully, “none of this is of any interest to us, and we—”

“Oh, it'll be of interest when you hear the whole story,” The Stone said. “I can assure you.”

Peake knew The Stone was not the kind of man who rambled, knew all of this had some purpose, and he was eager to see where it was going to wind up.

“As I was sayin',” The Stone continued, “two-thirds of the teachers and half the town were agin me, like I was the troublemaker. But in the end they turned up worse stuff about that history teacher, worse than givin' and sellin' drugs to some of his students, and by the time it was over, they were glad to be shed of him. Then, the day after he was canned, he showed up at the farm, wantin' to go man to man. He was a good-sized fella, but he was on somethin' even then, what you call pot-marijuana or maybe even stronger poison, and it wasn't so hard to handle him. I'm sorry to say I broke both his arms, which is worse than I intended.”

Jesus, Peake thought.

“But even that wasn't the end of it, 'cause it turned out he had an uncle was president of the biggest bank in our county, the very same bank has my farm loans. Now, any man who allows personal grudges to interfere with his business judgment is an idiot, but this banker fella was an idiot 'cause he tried to pull a fast one to teach me a lesson, tried to reinterpret one of the clauses in my biggest loan, hopin' to call it due and put me at risk of my land. The wife and I been fightin' back for a year, filed a lawsuit and everythin', and just last week the bank had to back down and settle our suit out of court for enough to pay off half my loans.”

The Stone was finished, and Peake understood the point, but Sharp said impatiently, “So? I still don't see what it has to do with me.”

“Oh, I think you do,” The Stone said quietly, and the eyes he turned on Sharp were so intense that the deputy director winced.

Sharp looked down at the directions on the piece of paper, read them, cleared his throat, looked up. “This is all we want. I don't believe we'll need to talk further with either you or your daughter.”

“I'm certainly relieved to hear that,” The Stone said. “We'll be goin' back to Kansas tomorrow, and I wouldn't want to think this will be followin' us there.”

Then The Stone smiled. At Peake, not at Sharp.

The deputy director turned sharply away and stalked down the hall. Peake returned The Stone's smile, then followed his boss.

23 THE DARK OF THE WOODS

Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee … At first the steam-whistle cries of the cicadas pleased Rachael because they were reminiscent of grade-school field trips to public parks, holiday picnics, and the hiking she had done while in college. However, she quickly grew irritated by the piercing noise. Neither the brush nor the heavy pine boughs softened the racket. Every molecule of the cool dry air seemed to reverberate with that grating sound, and soon her teeth and bones were reverberating with it, too.

Her reaction was, in part, a result of Benny's sudden conviction that he had heard something in the nearby brush that was not part of the ordinary background noises of a forest. She silently cursed the insects and willed them to shut up so she could hear any unnatural sounds — such as twigs snapping and underbrush rustling from the passage of something more substantial than the wind.

The Combat Magnum was in her purse, and she was holding only the thirty-two pistol. She had discovered she needed one hand to push aside tall weeds and to grab convenient branches to pull herself over steeper or more treacherous stretches of ground. She considered getting the.357 out of the bag, but the sound of the zipper would pinpoint their location to anyone who might be seeking them.

Anyone. That was a cowardly evasion. Surely, only one person might be seeking them out here. Eric.

She and Benny had been moving directly south across the face of the mountainside, catching brief glimpses of the cabin on the slope a couple of hundred yards above, being careful to interpose trees and brush and rock formations between themselves and the large picture windows that made her think of enormous, square eye sockets. When they had been about thirty yards past the cabin, they had turned east, which was upslope, and the way proved sufficiently steep that they had progressed at only half the speed they had been making previously. Benny's intention had been to circle the cabin and come in behind it. Then, when they had ascended only about a hundred yards — which put them still a hundred yards below and thirty south of the structure — Benny heard something, stopped, eased up against the protective cover of a spruce trunk that had a five-foot diameter, cocked his head, and raised the shotgun.

Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee…

In addition to the ceaseless cicada chorus — which had not fallen silent because of their presence and, therefore, would not fall silent to reveal anyone else's presence, either — there was the annoyance of a noisy wind. The breeze that had sprung up when they had come out of the sporting-goods store down by the lake, less than three-quarters of an hour ago, had evidently grown stronger. Not much of it reached as far as the sheltered forest floor, barely a soft breath. But the upper reaches of the massive trees stirred restlessly, and a hollow mournful moaning settled down from above as the wind wove through the interstices of the highest branches.

Rachael stayed close to Benny and pressed against the trunk of the spruce. The rough bark prickled even through her blouse.

She felt as if they remained frozen there, listening alertly and peering intently into the woods, for at least a quarter of an hour, though she knew it must have been less than a minute. Then, warily, Benny started uphill again, angling slightly to the right to follow a shallow dry wash that was mostly free of brush. She stayed close behind him. Sparse brown grass, crisp as paper, lightly stroked their legs. They had to take care to avoid stepping on some loose stones deposited by last spring's runoff of melting snow, but they made somewhat better progress than they had outside the wash.

The flanking walls of brush presented the only drawback to the easier new route. The growth was thick, some dry and brown, some dark green, and it pressed in at both sides of the shallow wash, with only a few widely separated gaps through which Benny and Rachael could look into the woods beyond. She half expected Eric to leap through the bushes and set upon them. She was encouraged only by the brambles tangled through a lot of the brush and by the wicked thorns she saw on some of the bushes themselves, which might give a would-be attacker second thoughts about striking from that direction.

On the other hand, having already returned from the dead, would Eric be concerned about such minor obstacles as thorns?

They went only ten or fifteen yards, before Benny froze again, half crouching to present a smaller target, and raised the shotgun.

This time, Rachael heard it, too: a clatter of dislodged pebbles.

Reeeeee, reeeeee…

A soft scrape as of shoe leather on stone.

She looked left and right, then up the slope, then down, but she saw no movement associated with the noise.

A whisper of something moving through brush more purposeful than mere wind.

Nothing more.

Ten seconds passed uneventfully.

Twenty.

As Benny scanned the bushes around them, he no longer retained any vestige of that deceptive I'm-just-an-ordinary-everyday-real-estate-salesman look. His pleasant but unexceptional face was now an arresting sight: The intensity of his concentration brought a new sharpness to his brow, cheekbones, and jaws; an instinctive sense of danger and an animal determination to survive were evident in his squint, in the flaring of his nostrils, and in the way his lips pulled back in a humorless, feral grin. He was spring-tense, acutely aware of every nuance of the forest, and just by looking at him, Rachael could tell that he had hair-trigger reflexes. This was the work he had been trained for — hunting and being hunted. His claim to being largely a past-focused man seemed like pretense or self-delusion, for there was no doubt whatsoever that he possessed an uncanny ability to focus entirely and powerfully on the present, which he was doing now.

The cicadas.

The wind in the attic of the forest.

The occasional trilling of a distant bird.

Nothing else.

Thirty seconds.

In these woods, at least, they were supposed to be the hunters, but suddenly they seemed to be the prey, and this reversal of roles frustrated Rachael as much as it frightened her. The need to remain silent was nerve-shredding, for she wanted to curse out loud, shout at Eric, challenge him. She wanted to scream.

Forty seconds.

Cautiously Benny and Rachael began moving uphill again.

They circled the large cabin until they came to the edge of the forest at the rear of it, and every step of the way they were stalked — or believed themselves to be stalked. Six more times, even after they left the dry wash and turned north through the woods, they stopped in response to unnatural sounds. Sometimes the snap of a twig or a not-quite-identifiable scraping noise would be so close to them that it seemed as if their nemesis must be only a few feet away and easily seen, yet they saw nothing.

Finally, forty feet in back of the cabin, just inside the tree line where they were still partially concealed by purple shadows, they crouched behind upthrusting blocks of granite that poked out of the earth like worn and slightly rotted teeth. Benny whispered, “Must be a lot of animals in these woods. That must've been what we heard.”

“What kind of animals?” she whispered.

In a voice so low that Rachael could barely hear it, Benny said, “Squirrels, foxes. This high up… maybe a wolf or two. Can't have been Eric. No way. He's not had the survival or combat training that'd make it possible to be that quiet or to stay hidden so well and so long. If it was Eric, we'd have spotted him. Besides, if it'd been Eric, and if he's as deranged as you think he might be, then he'd have tried to jump us somewhere along the way.”

“Animals,” she said doubtfully.

“Animals.”

With her back against the granite teeth, she looked at the woods through which they had come, studying every pocket of darkness and every peculiar shape.

Animals. Not a single, purposeful stalker. Just the sounds of several animals whose paths they had crossed. Animals.

Then why did she still feel as if something were back there in the woods, watching her, hungering for her?

“Animals,” Benny said. Satisfied with that explanation, he turned from the woods, got up from a squat to a crouch, and peered over the lichen-speckled granite formation, 'examining the rear of Eric's mountain retreat.

Rachael was not convinced that the only source of danger was the cabin, so she rose, leaned one hip and shoulder against the rock, and took a position that allowed her to shift her attention back and forth from the rustic building in front of them to the forest behind.

At the rear of the mountain house, which stood on a wide shelf of land between slopes, a forty-foot-wide area had been cleared to serve as a backyard, and the summer sun fell across the greater part of it. Rye grass had been planted but had grown only in patches, for the soil was stony. Besides, Eric apparently had not installed a sprinkler system, which meant even the patchy grass would be green only for a short while between the melting of the winter snow and the parching summer. Having died a couple of weeks ago, in fact, the grass was now mown to a short, brown, prickly stubble. But flower beds — evidently irrigated by a passive-drip system — ringed the wide stained-wood porch that extended the length of the house; a profusion of yellow, orange, fire-red, wine-red, pink, white, and blue blossoms trembled and swayed and dipped in the gusty breeze — zinnias, geraniums, daisies, baby chrysanthemums, and more.

The cabin was of notched-log-and-mortar construction, but it was not a cheap, unsophisticated structure. The workmanship looked first-rate; Eric must have spent a bundle on the place. It stood upon an elevated foundation of invisibly mortared stones, and it boasted large casement-style French windows, two of which were partway open to facilitate ventilation. A black slate roof discouraged dry-wood moths and the playful squirrels attracted to shake-shingle roofs, and there was even a satellite dish up there to assure good TV reception.

The back door was open even wider than the two casement windows, and, taken with the bright bobbing flowers, that should have given the place a welcoming look. Instead, to Rachael, the open door resembled the gaping lid of a trap, flung wide to disarm the sniffing prey that sought the scented bait.

Of course, they would go in anyway. That was why they had come here: to go in, to find Eric. But she didn't have to like it.

After studying the cabin, Benny whispered, “Can't sneak up on the place; there's no cover. Next-best thing is a fast approach, straight in at a run, and hunker down along the porch railing.”

“Okay.”

“Probably the smartest thing is for you to wait here, let me go first, and see if maybe he's got a gun and starts taking potshots at me. If there's no gunfire, you can come after me.”

“Stay here alone?”

“I'll never be far away.”

“Even ten feet is too far.”

“And we'll be separated only for a minute.”

“That's exactly sixty times longer than I could stand being alone here,” she said, looking back into the woods, where every deep pool of shadow and every unidentifiable form appeared to have crept closer while her attention was diverted. “No way, Jose. We go together.”

“I figured you'd say that.”

A tempest of warm wind whirled across the yard, stirring up dust, whipping the flowers, and lashing far enough into the perimeter of the forest to buffet Rachael's face.

Benny edged to the end of the granite formation, the shotgun held in both hands, peered around the corner, taking one last look at each of the rear windows to be sure no one was looking out of them.

The cicadas had stopped singing.

What did their sudden silence mean?

Before she could call that new development to Benny's attention, he flung himself forward, out of the concealment of the woods. He bolted across the patchy, dead brown lawn.

Propelled by the electrifying feeling that something murderous was bounding through the shadowed forest behind her — was reaching for her hair, was going to seize her, was going to drag her away into the dark of the woods — Rachael plunged after Benny, past the rocks, ' out of the trees, into the sun. She reached the back porch even as he was hunkering down beside the steps.

Breathless, she stopped beside him and looked back toward the forest. Nothing was pursuing her. She could hardly believe it.

Fast and light on his feet, Benny sprang up the porch steps, to the wall beside the open door, where he put his back to the logs and listened for movement inside the house. Evidently he heard nothing, for he pulled open the screen door and went inside, staying low, the shotgun aimed in front of him.

Rachael went after him, into a kitchen that was larger and better equipped than she expected. On the table, a plate held the remnants of an unfinished breakfast of sausages and biscuits. Soup cans and an empty jar of peanut butter littered the floor.

The cellar door was open. Benny cautiously, quietly pushed it shut, closing off the sight of steps descending into the gloom beyond.

Without being told what to do, Rachael hooked a kitchen chair with one hand, brought it to the door, tilted it under the knob, and wedged it into place, creating an effective barricade. They could not go into the cellar until they had searched the main living quarters of the cabin; for if Eric was in one of the ground-floor rooms, he might slip into the kitchen as soon as they went down the steps, might close the door and lock them in the dark basement. Conversely, if he was in the windowless basement already, he might creep upstairs while they were searching for him and sneak in behind them, a possibility they had just precluded by wedging that door shut.

She saw that Benny was pleased by the perception she'd shown when she'd put that chair under the knob. They made a good team.

She braced another door, which probably opened onto the garage, used a chair on that one, too. If Eric was in there, he could escape by rolling up the big outer door, of course, but they would hear it no matter where they were in the cabin and would have him pinpointed.

They stood in the kitchen for a moment, listening. Rachael could hear only the gusty breeze humming in the fine-mesh screen of the open kitchen window, sighing through the deep eaves under the overhanging slate roof.

Staying low and moving fast, Benny rushed through the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, looking left and right as he crossed the threshold. He signaled to Rachael that the way was clear, and she went after him.

In the ultramodern living room, the cabin's front door was open, though not as wide as the back door had been. A couple of hundred loose sheets of paper, two small ring-bound notebooks with black vinyl covers, and several manila file folders were scattered across the floor, some rumpled and torn.

Also on the floor, beside an armchair near the big front window, lay a medium-size knife with a serrated blade and a point tip. A couple of sunbeams, having pierced the forest outside, struck through the window, and one touched the steel blade, making its polished surface gleam, rippling lambently along its cutting edge.

Benny stared worriedly at the knife, then turned toward one of the three doors that, in addition to the kitchen archway, opened off the living room.

Rachael was about to pick up some of the papers to see what they were, but when Benny moved, she followed.

Two of the doors were closed tight, but the one Benny had chosen was ajar an inch. He pushed it open all the way with the barrel of the shotgun and went through with his customary caution.

Guarding the rear, Rachael remained in the living room, where she could see the open front door, the two closed doors, the kitchen arch, but where she also had a view of the room into which Benny had gone. It was a bedroom, wrecked in the same way that the bedroom in the Villa Park mansion and the kitchen in the Palm Springs house had been wrecked, proof that Eric had been here and that he had been seized by another demented rage.

In the bedroom, Benny gingerly rolled aside one of the large mirrored doors on a closet, looked warily inside, apparently found nothing of interest. He moved across the bedroom to the adjoining bath, where he passed out of Rachael's sight.

She glanced nervously at the front door, at the porch beyond, at the kitchen archway, at each of the other two closed doors.

Outside, the gusty breeze moaned softly under the overhanging roof and made a low, eager whining noise. The rustle of wind-stirred trees carried through the open front door.

Inside the cabin, the deep silence grew even deeper. Curiously enough, that stillness had the same effect on Rachael as a crescendo in a symphony: while it built, she became tenser, more convinced that events were hurtling toward an explosive climax.

Eric, damn it, where are you? Where are you, Eric?

Benny seemed to have been gone an ominously long time. She was on the verge of calling to him in panic, but finally he reappeared, unharmed, shaking his head to indicate that he had found no sign of Eric and nothing else of interest.

They discovered that the two closed doors opened onto two more bedrooms that shared a second bath between them, although Eric had furnished neither chamber with beds. Benny explored both rooms, closets, and the connecting bath, while Rachael stood in the living room by one doorway and then by the other, watching. She could see that the first room was a study with several bookshelves laden with thick volumes, a desk, and a computer; the second was empty, unused.

When it became clear that Benny was not going to find Eric in that part of the cabin, either, Rachael bent down, plucked up a few sheets of paper — Xerox copies, she noted — from the floor, and quickly scanned them. By the time Benny returned, she knew what she had found, and her heart was racing. “It's the Wildcard file,” she said sotto voce. “He must've kept another copy here.”

She started to gather up more of the scattered pages, but Benny stopped her. “We've got to find Eric first,” he whispered.

Nodding agreement, she reluctantly dropped the papers.

Benny went to the front door, eased open the creaky screen door with the least amount of noise he could manage, and satisfied himself that the plank-floored porch was deserted. Then Rachael followed him into the kitchen again.

She slipped the tilted chair out from under the knob of the basement door, pulled the door open, and backed quickly out of the way as Benny covered it with the shotgun.

Eric did not come roaring out of the darkness.

With tiny beads of sweat shimmering on his forehead, Benny went to the threshold, found the switch on the wall of the stairwell, and flicked on the lights below.

Rachael was also sweating. As was surely the case with Benny, her perspiration was not occasioned by the warm summer air.

It was still not advisable for Rachael to accompany Benny into the windowless chamber below. Eric might be outside, watching the house, and he might slip inside at the opportune moment; then, as they returned to the kitchen, they might be ambushed from above when they were in the middle of the stairs and most vulnerable. So she remained at the threshold, where she could look down the cellar steps and also have a clear view of the entire kitchen, including the archway to the living room and the open door to the rear porch.

Benny descended the plank stairs more quietly than seemed humanly possible, although some noise was unavoidable: a few creaks, a couple of scraping noises. At the bottom, he hesitated, then turned left, out of sight. For a moment Rachael saw his shadow on the wall down there, made large and twisted into an odd shape by the angle of the light, but as he moved farther into the cellar, the shadow dwindled and finally went with him.

She glanced at the archway. She could see a portion of the living room, which remained deserted and still.

In the opposite direction, at the porch door, a huge yellow butterfly clung to the screen, slowly working its wings.

A clatter sounded from below, nothing dramatic, as if Benny had bumped against something.

She looked down the steps. No Benny, no shadow.

The archway. Nothing.

The back door. Just the butterfly.

More noise below, quieter this time.

“Benny?” she said softly.

He did not answer her. Probably didn't hear her. She had spoken at barely more than a whisper, after all.

The archway, the back door…

The stairs: still no sign of Benny.

“Benny,” she repeated, then saw a shadow below. For a moment her heart twisted because the shadow looked so strange, but Benny appeared and started up toward her, and she sighed with relief.

“Nothing down there but an open wall safe tucked behind the water heater,” he said when he reached the kitchen. “It's empty, so maybe that's where he kept the files that're spread over the living room.”

Rachael wanted to put down her gun and throw her arms around him and hug him tight and kiss him all over his face just because he had come back from the cellar alive. She wanted him to know how happy she was to see him, but the garage still had to be explored.

By unspoken agreement, she removed the tilted chair from under the knob and opened the door, and Benny covered it with the shotgun. Again, there was no sign of Eric.

Benny stood on the threshold, fumbled for the switch, found it, but the lights in the garage were dim. Even with a small window high in one wall, the place remained shadowy. He tried another switch, which operated the big electric door. It rolled up with much humming-rumbling-creaking, and bright brassy sunlight flooded inside.

“That's better,” Benny said, stepping into the garage.

She followed him and saw the black Mercedes 560 SEL, additional proof that Eric had been there.

The rising door had stirred up some dust, motes of which drifted lazily through the in-slanting sunlight. Overhead in the rafters, spiders had been busy spinning ersatz silk.

Rachael and Benny circled the car warily, looked through the windows (saw the keys dangling in the ignition), and even peered underneath. But Eric was not to be found.

An elaborate workbench extended across the entire back of the garage. Above it was a peg board tool rack, and each tool hung in a painted outline of itself. Rachael noticed that no wood ax hung in the ax-shaped outline, but she did not even give the missing instrument a second thought because she was only looking for places where Eric could hide; she was not, after all, doing an inventory.

The garage provided no sheltered spaces large enough for a man to conceal himself, and when Benny spoke again, he no longer bothered to whisper. “I'm beginning to think maybe he's been here and gone.”

“But that's his Mercedes.”

“This is a two-car garage, so maybe he keeps a vehicle up here all the time, a Jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup good for scooting around these mountain roads. Maybe he knew there was a chance the feds would learn what he'd done to himself and would be after him, with an APB on the car, so he split in the Jeep or whatever it was.”

Rachael stared at the black Mercedes, which stood like a great sleeping beast. She looked up at the webs in the rafters. She stared at the sun-splashed dirt road that led away from the garage. The stillness of the mountain redoubt seemed less ominous than it had since their arrival; not peaceful and serene by any means, certainly not welcoming, either, but it was somewhat less threatening.

“Where would he go?” she asked.

Benny shrugged. “I don't know. But if I do a thorough search of the cabin, maybe I'll find something that'll point me in the right direction.”

“Do we have time for a search? I mean, when we left 'Sarah Kiel at the hospital last night, I didn't know the feds might be on this same trail. I told her not to talk about what had happened and not to tell anyone about this place. At worst, I thought maybe Eric's business partners would start sniffing around, trying to get something out of her, and I figured she'd be able to handle them. But she won't be able to stall the government. And if she believes we're traitors, she'll even think she's doing the right thing when she tells them about this place. So they'll be here sooner or later.”

“I agree,” Benny said, staring thoughtfully at the Mercedes.

“Then we've no time to worry about where Eric went. Besides, that's a copy of the Wildcard file in there on the living-room floor. All we have to do is pick it up and get out of here, and we'll have all the proof we need.”

He shook his head. “Having the file is important, maybe even crucial, but I'm not so sure it's enough.”

She paced agitatedly, the thirty-two pistol held with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling rather than down, for an accidentally triggered shot would ricochet off the concrete floor. “Listen, the whole story's right there in black and white. We just give it to the press—”

“For one thing,” Benny said, “the file is, I assume, a lot of highly technical stuff — lab results, formulae — and no reporter's going to understand it. He'll have to take it to a first-rate geneticist for review, for translation.”

“So?”

“So maybe the geneticist will be incompetent or just conservative in his assumption of what's possible in his field, and in either case he might disbelieve the whole thing; he might tell the reporter it's a fraud, a hoax.”

“We can deal with that kind of setback. We can keep looking until we find a geneticist who—”

Interrupting, Benny said, “Worse: Maybe the reporter will take it to a geneticist who does his own research for the government, for the Pentagon. And isn't it logical that federal agents have contacted a lot of scientists specializing in recombinant DNA research, warning them that media types might be bringing them certain stolen files of a highly classified nature, seeking analysis of the contents?”

“The feds can't know that's my intention.”

“But if they've got a file on you — and they do — then they know you well enough to suspect that'd be your plan.”

“All right, yes,” she admitted unhappily.

“So any Pentagon-supported scientist is going to be real eager to please the government and keep his own fat research grants, and he's sure as hell going to alert them the moment such a file comes into his hands. Certainly he's not going to risk losing his grants or being prosecuted for compromising defense secrets, so at best he'll tell the reporter to take his damn file and get lost, and he'll keep his mouth shut. At best. Most likely he'll give the reporter to the feds, and the reporter will give us to the feds. The file will be destroyed, and very likely we'll be destroyed, too.”

Rachael didn't want to believe what he said, but she knew there was truth in it.

Out in the woods, the cicadas were singing again!

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

Evidently Benny had been thinking hard about that question as they had gone through room after room of the cabin without finding Eric, for his answer was well prepared. “With both Eric and the file in our possession, we're in a lot stronger position. We wouldn't have just a bunch of cryptic research papers that only a handful of people could understand; we'd also have a walking dead man, his skull staved in, and by God, that's dramatic enough to guarantee that virtually any newspaper or television network will run an all-stops-pulled story before getting expert opinions on the file itself. Then there'll be no reason for the government or anyone else trying to shut us up. Once Eric's seen on TV news, his picture'll show up on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and the National Enquirer will have enough material for a decade, and David Letterman will be making zombie jokes every night, so silencing us won't achieve anything.”

He took a deep breath, and she had a hunch that he 'was going to propose something she would not like in the least.

When he continued, he confirmed her hunch. “All right, like I said, I need to search this place thoroughly to see if I can come up with any clue that'll tell us where Eric's gone. But the authorities may show up here soon. Now that we've got a copy of the Wildcard file, we can't risk having it taken away from us, so you've got to leave with the file while I—”

“You mean, split up?” she said. “Oh, no.”

“It's the only way, Rachael. We—”

“No.”

The thought of leaving him alone here was chilling.

The thought of being alone herself was almost too much to bear, and she realized with terrible poignancy how tight the bonds between them had become in just the past twenty-four hours.

She loved him. God, how she loved him.

He fixed her with his gentle, reassuring brown eyes. In a voice neither patronizing nor abrasively commanding but nevertheless full of authority and reason, a voice which brooked no debate — probably the tone he had learned to use in Vietnam, in crises, with soldiers of inferior rank — he said, “You'll take the Wildcard file out of here, get copies made, send some off to friends in widely separated places, and secrete a few others where you can get your hands on them with short notice. Then we won't have to worry about losing our only copy or having it taken away from us. We'll have real good insurance. Meanwhile, I'll thoroughly search the cabin here, see what I can turn up. If I find something that points us toward Eric, I'll meet up with you at a prearranged place, and we'll go after him together. If I don't get a lead on him, we'll meet up and hide out together, until we can decide what to do next.”

She did not want to split up and leave him alone here. Eric might still be around. Or the feds might show up. Either way Benny might be killed. But his arguments for splitting up were convincing; damn it, he was right.

Nevertheless, she said, “If I go alone and take the car, how will you get out of here?”

He glanced at his wristwatch not because he needed to know the time (she thought) but to impress upon her that time was running out. “You'll leave the rental Ford for me,” he said. “That's got to be ditched soon, anyway, because the cops might be onto it. You'll take this Mercedes, and I'll take the Ford just far enough to swap it for something else.”

“They'll be on the lookout for the Mercedes, too.”

“Oh, sure. But the APB will specify a black 560 SEL with this particular license number, driven by a man fitting Eric's description. You'll be driving, not Eric, and we'll switch license plates with one of those cars parked along the gravel road farther down the mountain, which ought to take care of things.”

“I'm not so sure.”

“I am.”

Hugging herself as if this were a day in November rather than a day in June, Rachael said, “But where would we meet up later?”

“Las Vegas,” he said.

The answer startled her. “Why there?”

“Southern California's too hot for us. I'm not confident we can hide out here. But if we hop over to Vegas, I have a place.”

“What place?”

“I own a motel on Tropicana Boulevard, west of the Strip.”

“You're a Vegas wheeler-dealer? Old-fashioned, conservative Benny Shadway is a Vegas wheeler-dealer?”

“My real-estate development company's been in and out of Vegas property several times, but I'm hardly a wheeler-dealer. It's small stuff by Vegas standards. In this case, it's an older motel with just twenty-eight rooms and a pool. And it's not in the best repair. In fact, it's closed up at the moment. I finished the purchase two weeks ago, and we're going to tear it down next month, put up a new place: sixty units, a restaurant. There's still electrical service. The manager's suite is pretty shabby, but it has a working bathroom, furniture, telephone — so we can hide out there if we have to, make plans. Or just wait for Eric to show up someplace very public and cause a sensation that the feds can't put a lid on. Anyway, if we can't get a lead on him, hiding out is all we can do.”

“I'm to drive to Vegas?” she asked.

“That' d be best. Depending on how badly the feds want us — and considering what's at stake, I think they want us real bad — they'll probably have men at the major airports. You can take the state route past Silverwood Lake, then pick up Interstate Fifteen, be in Vegas this evening. I'll follow in a couple of hours.”

“But if the cops show up—”

“Alone, without you to worry about, I can slip away from them.”

“You think they're going to be incompetent?” she asked sourly.

“No. I just know I'm more competent.”

“Because you were trained for this. But that was more than one and a half decades ago.”

He smiled thinly. “Seems like yesterday, that war.”

And he had kept in shape. She could not dispute that. What was it he'd said — that Nam had taught him to be prepared because the world had a way of turning dark and mean when you least expected it?

“Rachael?” he asked, looking at his watch again.

She realized that their best chance of surviving, of having a future together, was for her to do what he wanted.

“All right,” she said. “All right. We'll split. But it scares me, Benny. I guess I don't have the guts for this kind of thing, the right stuff. I'm sorry, but it really scares me.”

He came to her, kissed her. “Being scared isn't anything to be ashamed of. Only madmen have no fear.”

24 SPECIAL FEAR OF HELL

Dr. Easton Solberg had been more than fifteen minutes late for his one o'clock meeting with Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom. They had stood outside his locked office, and he had finally come hurrying along the wide hall, clutching an armload of books and manila folders, looking harried, more like a twenty-year-old student late to class than a sixty-year-old professor overdue for an appointment.

He was wearing a rumpled brown suit one size too large for him, a blue shirt, and a green-and-orange-striped tie that looked, to Julio, as if it had been sold exclusively in novelty shops as a joke gift. Even by a generous appraisal, Solberg was not an attractive man, not even plain. He was short and stocky. His moonish face featured a small flat nose that would have been called pug on some men but that was simply porcine on him, small close-set gray eyes that looked watery and myopic behind his smudged glasses, a mouth that was strangely wide considering the scale on which the rest of his visage was constructed, and a receding chin.

In the hall outside his office, apologizing effusively, he had insisted on shaking hands with the two detectives, in spite of the load in his arms; therefore, he kept dropping books, which Julio and Reese stooped to pick up.

Solberg's office was chaos. Books and scientific journals filled every shelf, spilled onto the floor, rose in teetering stacks in the corners, were piled every which way on top of furniture. On his big desk, file folders, index cards, and yellow legal-size tablets were heaped in apparent disorder. The professor shifted mounds of papers off two chairs to give Julio and Reese places to sit.

“Look at that lovely view!” Solberg said, stopping suddenly and gaping at the windows as he rounded his desk, as if noticing for the first time what lay beyond the walls of his office.

The Irvine campus of the University of California was blessed with many trees, rolling green lawns, and flower beds, for it sprawled over a large tract of prime Orange County land. Below Dr. Solberg's second-floor office, a walkway curved across manicured grass, past impatiens blazing with thousands of bright blossoms — coral, red, pink, purple — and vanished under the branches of jacarandas and eucalyptus.

“Gentlemen, we are among the most fortunate people on earth: to be here, in this beautiful land, under these temperate skies, in a nation of plenty and tolerance.” He stepped to the window and opened his stubby arms, as if to embrace all of southern California. “And the trees, especially the trees. There are some wonderful specimens on this campus. I love trees, I really do. That's my hobby: trees, the study of trees, the cultivation of unusual specimens. It makes for a welcome change from human biology and genetics. Trees are so majestic, so noble. Trees give and give to us — fruit, nuts, beauty, shade, lumber, oxygen — and take nothing in return. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd pray to return as a tree.” He glanced at Julio and Reese. “What about you? Don't you think it'd be grand to come back as a tree, living the long majestic life of an oak or giant spruce, giving of yourself the way orange and apple trees give, growing great strong limbs in which children could climb?” He blinked, surprised by his own monologue. “But of course you're not here to talk about trees and reincarnation, are you? You'll have to forgive me… but, well, that view, don't you know? Just captured me for a moment.”

In spite of his unfortunate porcine face, disheveled appearance, apparent disorganization, and evident tendency to be late, Dr. Easton Solberg had at least three things to recommend him: keen intelligence, enthusiasm for life, and optimism. In a world of doomsayers, where half the intelligentsia waited almost wistfully for Armageddon, Julio found Solberg refreshing. He liked the professor almost at once.

As Solberg went behind his desk, sat in a large leather chair, and half disappeared from view beyond his paperwork, Julio said, “On the phone you said there was a dark side to Eric Leben that you could discuss only in person—”

“And in strictest confidence,” Solberg said. “The information, if pertinent to your case, must go in a file somewhere, of course, but if it's not pertinent, I expect discretion.”

“I assure you of that,” Julio said. “But as I told you earlier, this is an extremely important investigation involving at least two murders and the possible leak of top-secret defense documents.”

“Do you mean Eric's death might not have been accidental?”

“No,” Julio said. “That was definitely an accident. But there are other deaths… the details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. And more people may die before this case is closed. So Detective Hagerstrom and I hope you'll give us full and immediate cooperation.”

“Oh, of course, of course,” Easton Solberg said, waving one pudgy hand to dismiss the very idea that he might be uncooperative. “And although I don't know for a certainty that Eric's emotional problems are related to your case, I expect — and fear — that they may be. As I said… he had a dark side.”

However, before Solberg got around to telling them of Leben's dark side, he spent a quarter of an hour praising the dead geneticist, apparently unable to speak ill of the man until he had first spoken highly of him. Eric was a genius. Eric was a hard worker. Eric was generous in support of colleagues. Eric had a fine sense of humor, an appreciation for art, good taste in most things, and he liked dogs.

Julio was beginning to think they ought to form a committee and solicit contributions to build a statue of Leben for display under a fittingly imposing rotunda in a major public building. He glanced at Reese and saw his partner was plainly amused by the bubbly Solberg.

Finally the professor said, “But he was a troubled man, I'm sorry to say. Deeply, deeply troubled. He had been my student for a while, though I quickly realized the student was going to outdistance the teacher. When we were no longer student-teacher but colleagues, we remained friendly. We weren't friends, just friendly, because Eric did not allow any relationship to become close enough to qualify as friendship. So, close as we were professionally, it was years before I learned about his… obsession with young girls.”

“How young?” Reese asked.

Solberg hesitated. “I feel as if I'm… betraying him.”

“We may already know much of what you've got to tell us,” Julio said. “You'll probably only be confirming what we know.”

“Really? Well… I knew of one girl who was fourteen. At the time, Eric was thirty-one.”

“This was before Geneplan?”

“Yes. Eric was at UCLA then. Not rich yet, but we could all see he would one day leave academia and take the real world by storm.”

“A respected professor wouldn't go around bragging about bedding fourteen-year-old girls,” Julio said. “How'd you find out?”

“It happened on a weekend,” Dr. Solberg said, “when his lawyer was out of town and he needed someone to post bail. He trusted no one but me to keep quiet about the ugly details of the arrest. I sort of resented that, too. He knew I'd feel a moral obligation to endorse any censure movement against a colleague involved in such sordid business, but he also knew I'd feel obligated to keep any confidences he imparted, and he counted on the second obligation being stronger than the first. Maybe, to my discredit, it was.”

Easton Solberg gradually settled deeper in his chair while he talked, as if trying to hide behind the mounds of papers on his desk, embarrassed by the sleazy tale he had to tell. That Saturday, eleven years ago, after receiving Leben's call, Dr. Solberg had gone to a police precinct house in Hollywood, where he had found an Eric Leben far different from the man he knew: nervous, uncertain of himself, ashamed, lost. The previous night, Eric had been arrested in a vice-squad raid at a hot-bed motel where Hollywood streetwalkers, many of them young runaways with drug problems, took their Johns. He was caught with a fourteen-year-old girl and charged with statutory rape, a mandatory count even when an underage girl admittedly solicits sex for pay.

Initially Leben told Easton Solberg that the girl had looked considerably older than fourteen, that he'd had no way of knowing she was a juvenile. Later, however, perhaps disarmed by Solberg's kindness and concern, Leben broke down and talked at length of his obsession with young girls. Solberg had not really wanted to know any of it, but he could not refuse Eric a sympathetic ear. He sensed that Eric — who was a distant and self-possessed loner, unlikely ever to have unburdened himself to anyone — desperately needed to confide his intimate feelings and fears to someone at that bleak, low point in his life. So Easton Solberg listened, filled with both disgust and pity.

“His was not just a lust for young girls,” Solberg told Julio and Reese. “It was an obsession, a compulsion, a terrible gnawing need.”

Only thirty-one then, Leben was nevertheless deeply frightened of growing old and dying. Already longevity research was the center of his career. But he did not approach the problem of aging only in a scientific spirit; privately, in his personal life, he dealt with it in an emotional and irrational manner. For one thing, he felt that he somehow absorbed the vital energies of youth from the girls he bedded. Although he knew that notion was ridiculous, almost superstitious, he was still compelled to pursue those girls. He was not really a child molester in the classic sense, did not force himself on mere children. He only went after those girls who were willing to cooperate, usually teenage runaways reduced to prostitution.

“And sometimes,” Easton Solberg said with soft dismay, “he liked to… slap them around. Not really beat them but rough them up. When he explained it to me, I had the feeling that he was explaining it to himself for the first time. These girls were so young that they were full of the special arrogance of youth, that arrogance born of the certainty they'd live forever; and Eric felt that, by hurting them, he was knocking the arrogance out of them, teaching them the fear of death. He was, as he put it, 'stealing their innocence, the energy of their youthful innocence,' and he felt that somehow this made him younger, that the stolen innocence and youth became his own.”

“A psychic vampire,” Julio said uneasily.

“Yes!” Solberg said. “Exactly. A psychic vampire who could stay young forever by draining away the youth of these girls. Yet at the same time, he knew it was a fantasy, knew the girls could not keep him young, but knowing and acknowledging it did nothing to loosen the grip of the fantasy. And though he knew he was sick — even mocked himself, called himself a degenerate — he couldn't break free of his obsession.”

“What happened to the charge of statutory rape?” Reese asked. “I'm not aware he was tried or convicted. He had no police record.”

“The girl was remanded to juvenile authorities,” Solberg said, “and put in a minimum-security facility. She slipped away, skipped town. She'd been carrying no identification, and the name she gave them proved false, so they had no way of tracking her. Without the girl, they had no case against Eric, and the charges were dropped.”

“You urged him to seek psychiatric help?” Julio asked.

“Yes. But he wouldn't. He was an extremely intelligent man, introspective, and he had already analyzed himself. He knew — or at least believed that he knew — the cause of his mental condition.”

Julio leaned forward in his chair. “And the cause as he saw it?”

Solberg cleared his throat, started to speak, shook his head as if to say that he needed a moment to decide how to proceed. He was obviously embarrassed by the conversation and was equally disturbed by his betrayal of Eric Leben's confidence even though Leben was now dead. The heaps of papers on the desk no longer provided adequate cover behind which to hide, so Solberg got up and went to the window because it afforded the opportunity to turn his back on Julio and Reese, thus concealing his face.

Solberg's dismay and self-reproach over revealing confidential information about a dead man — of whom he had been little more than an acquaintance — might have seemed excessive to some, yet Julio admired Solberg for it. In an age when few believed in moral absolutes, many would betray a friend without a qualm, and a moral dilemma of this nature would be beyond their understanding. Solberg's old-fashioned moral anguish seemed excessive only by current, decadent standards.

“Eric told me that, as a child, he was sexually molested by an uncle,” Solberg said to the window glass. “Hampstead was the man's name. The abuse started when Eric was four and continued till he was nine. He was terrified of this uncle but too ashamed to tell anyone what was happening. Ashamed because his family was so religious. That's important, as you'll see. The Leben family was devoutly, ardently religious. Nazarenes. Very strict. No music. No dancing. That cold, narrow religion that makes life a bleakness. Of course, Eric felt like a sinner because of what he'd done with his uncle, even though he was forced into it, and he was afraid to tell his parents.”

“It's a common pattern,” Julio said, “even in families that aren't religious. The child blames himself for the adult's crime.”

Solberg said, “His terror of Barry Hampstead — that was the first name, yes — grew greater month by month, week by week. And finally, when Eric was nine, he stabbed Hampstead to death.”

“Nine?” Reese said, appalled. “Good heavens.”

“Hampstead was asleep on the sofa,” Solberg continued, “and Eric killed him with a butcher's knife.”

Julio considered the effects of that trauma on a nine-year-old boy who was already emotionally disturbed from the ordeal of long-term physical abuse. In his mind's eye, he saw the knife clutched in the child's small hand, rising and falling, blood flying off the shining blade, and the boy's eyes fixed in horror upon his grisly handiwork, repelled by what he was doing, yet compelled to finish it.

Julio shivered.

“Though everyone then learned what had been going on,” Solberg said, “Eric's parents somehow, in their twisted way, saw him as both a fornicator and a murderer, and they began a fevered and very psychologically damaging campaign to save his soul from hell, praying over him day and night, disciplining him, forcing him to read and reread passages of the Bible aloud until his throat cracked and his voice faded to a hoarse whisper. Even after he got out of that dark and hateful house and got through college by working part-time jobs and winning scholarships, even after he'd piled up a mountain of academic achievements and had become a respected man of science, Eric continued to half believe in hell and in his own certain damnation. Maybe he even more than half believed.”

Suddenly Julio saw what was coming, and a chill as cold as any he had ever felt sneaked up the small of his back. He glanced at his partner and saw, in Reese's face, a look of horror that mirrored Julio's feelings.

Still staring out at the verdant campus, which was as thoroughly sun-splashed as before but which seemed to have grown darker, Easton Solberg said, “You already know of Eric' s deep and abiding commitment to longevity research and his dream of immortality achieved through genetic engineering. But now perhaps you see why he was so obsessed with achieving that unrealistic — some would call it irrational and impossible — goal. In spite of all his education, in spite of his ability to reason, he was illogical about this one thing: in his heart he believed that he would go to hell when he died, not merely because he had sinned with his uncle but because he had killed his uncle as well, and was both a fornicator and a murderer. He told me once that he was afraid he'd meet his uncle again in hell and that eternity would be, for him, total submission to Barry Hampstead's lust.”

“Dear God,” Julio said shakily, and he unconsciously made the sign of the cross, something he had not done outside of church since he was a child.

Turning away from the window and facing the detectives at last, the professor said, “So for Eric Leben, immortality on earth was a goal sought not only out of a love of life but out of a special fear of hell. I imagine you can see how, with such motivation, he was destined to be a driven man, obsessed.”

“Inevitably,” Julio said.

“Driven to young girls, driven to seek ways to extend the human life span, driven to cheat the devil,” Solberg said. “Year by year it became worse. We drifted apart after that weekend when he made his confessions, probably because he regretted that he'd told me his secrets. I doubt he even told his wife about his uncle and his childhood when he married her a few years later. I was probably the only one. But in spite of the growing distance between us, I heard from poor Eric often enough to know his fear of death and damnation became worse as he grew older. In fact, after forty, he was downright frantic. I'm sorry he died yesterday; he was a brilliant man, and he had the power to contribute so much to humanity. On the other hand, his was not a happy life. And perhaps his death was even a blessing in disguise because…”

“Yes?” Julio said.

Solberg sighed and wiped one hand over his moonish face, which had sagged somewhat with weariness. “Well, sometimes I worried about what Eric might do if he ever achieved a breakthrough in the kind of research he was pursuing. If he thought he had a means of editing his genetic structure to dramatically extend his life span, he might have been just foolish enough to experiment on himself with an unproven process. He would know the terrible risks of tampering with his own genetic makeup, but compared to his unrelenting dread of death and the afterlife, those risks might seem minor. And God knows what might have happened to him if he had used himself as a guinea pig.”

What would you say if you knew that his body disappeared from the morgue last night? Julio wondered.

25 ALONE

They did not attempt to put the Xerox of the Wildcard file in order, but scooped up all the loose papers from the cabin's living-room floor and dropped them in a plastic Hefty garbage bag that Benny got from a box in one of the kitchen drawers. He twisted the top of the bag and secured it with a plastic-coated wire tie, then placed it on the rear floor of the Mercedes, behind the driver's seat.

They drove down the dirt road to the gate, on the other side of which they had parked the Ford. As they had hoped, on the same ring with the car keys, they found a key that fit the padlock on the gate.

Benny brought the Ford inside, and as he edged past her, Rachael drove the Mercedes out through the gate and parked just beyond.

She waited nervously with the 560 SEL, her thirty-two in one hand and her gaze sweeping the surrounding forest.

Benny went down the road on foot, out of sight, to the three vehicles that were parked on the lay-by near one of the driveway entrances they had passed earlier on their way up the mountainside. He carried with him the two license plates from the Mercedes — plus a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. When he returned, he had the plates from one of the Dodge Chargers, which he attached to the Mercedes.

He got in the car with her and said, “When you get to Vegas, go to a public phone, look up the number for a guy named Whitney Gavis.”

“Who's he?”

“An old friend. And he works for me. He's watching over that rundown motel I told you about — the Golden Sand Inn. In fact, he found the property and turned me on to its potential. He's got keys. He can let you in. Tell him you need to stay in the manager's suite and that I'll be joining you tonight. Tell him as much as you want to tell him; he can keep his mouth shut, and if he's going to be dragged into it, he should know how serious this is.”

“What if he's heard about us on the radio or TV?”

“Won't matter to Whitney. He won't believe we're killers or Russian agents. He's got a good head on him, an excellent bullshit detector, and nobody has a better sense of loyalty than Whit. You can trust him.”

“If you say so.”

“There's a two-car garage behind the motel office. Make sure you put the Mercedes in there, out of sight, soon as you arrive.”

“I don't like this.”

“I'm not crazy about it, either,” Benny said. “But it's the right plan. We've already discussed it.” He leaned over and put one hand against her face, then kissed her.

The kiss was sweet, and when it ended she said, “As soon as you've searched the cabin, you'll leave? Whether or not you've found any clue to where Eric might've gone?”

“Yes. I want to get out before the feds show up.”

“And if you find a clue to where he's gone, you won't go after him alone?”

“What did I promise you?”

“I want to hear you say it again.”

“I'll come for you first,” Benny said. “I won't tackle Eric alone. We'll handle him together.”

She looked into his eyes and was not sure if he was telling the truth or lying. But even if he was lying, she could do nothing about it because time was running out. They could delay no longer.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, Benny. And if you get yourself killed, I'm never going to forgive you.”

He smiled. “You're some woman, Rachael. You could rouse a heartbeat in a rock, and you're all the motivation I need to come back alive. Don't you worry about that. Now, lock the doors when I get out — okay?”

He kissed her again, lightly this time. He got out of the car, slammed the door, waited until he saw the power-lock buttons sinking into their mountings, then waved her on.

She drove down the gravel lane, glancing repeatedly in the rearview mirror to keep Benny in sight as long as possible, but eventually the road turned, and he disappeared beyond the trees.

Ben drove the rental Ford up the dirt lane, parked in front of the cabin. A few big white clouds had appeared in the sky, and the shadow of one of them rippled across the log structure.

Holding the twelve-gauge in one hand and the Combat Magnum in the other — Rachael had taken only the thirty-two — he climbed the steps to the porch, wondering if Eric was watching him.

Ben had told Rachael that Eric had left, gone to some other hiding place. Perhaps that was true. Indeed, the odds were high that it was true. But a chance remained, however slim, that the dead man was still here, perhaps observing from some lookout in the forest.

Reeeeee, reeeeee…

He tucked the revolver into his belt, at his back, and entered the cabin cautiously by the front door, the shotgun ready. He went through the rooms again, looking for something that might tell him where Eric had established another hidey-hole comparable to the cabin.

He had not lied to Rachael; it really was necessary to conduct such a search, but he did not require an hour to do it, as he'd claimed. If he did not find anything useful in fifteen minutes, he would leave the cabin and prowl the perimeter of the lawn for some sign of a place where Eric had entered the woods — trampled brush, footprints in soft soil. If he found what he was looking for, he would pursue his quarry into the forest.

He had not told Rachael about that part of his plan because, if he had, she would never have gone to Vegas. But he could not enter those woods and track down his man with Rachael at his side. He had realized as much on the way up through the forest, on their first approach to the cabin. She was not as sure of herself in the wilds as Ben was, not as quick. If she went with him, he would worry about her, be distracted by her, which would give the advantage to Eric if the dead man was, in fact, out there somewhere.

Earlier, he had told Rachael that the odd sounds they had heard in the woods were caused by animals. Maybe. But when they had found the cabin abandoned, he had let those forest noises sound again in his memory, and he had begun to feel that he had been too quick to dismiss the possibility that Eric had been stalking them through the shadows, trees, and brush.

All the way down the narrow lane, from gravel to blacktop, until she reached the state route that rounded Lake Arrowhead, Rachael was more than half convinced that Eric was going to rush the car from the surrounding woods and fling himself at the door. With superhuman strength born of a demonic rage, he might even be able to put a fist through the closed window. But he did not appear.

On the state route, circling the lake, she worried less about Eric and more about police and federal agents.

Every vehicle she encountered looked, at first sight, like a patrol car.

Las Vegas seemed a thousand miles away.

And she felt as if she had deserted Benny.

When Peake and Sharp had arrived at the Palm Springs airport, directly from their meeting with The Stone, they had discovered that the helicopter, a Bell Jet Ranger, had developed engine trouble. The deputy director, full of pent-up anger that he had been unable to vent on The Stone, nearly took off the chopper pilot's head, as if the poor man not only flew the craft but was also responsible for its design, construction, and maintenance.

Peake winked at the pilot behind Sharp's back.

No other helicopter had been for hire, and the two choppers belonging to the county sheriff's substation had been engaged and unavailable for quick reassignment. Reluctantly Sharp had decided they had no choice but to drive from Palm Springs to Lake Arrowhead. The dark green government sedan came with a red emergency beacon that was usually kept in the trunk but which could be mounted to the roof beading with a thumbscrew clamp in less than a minute. They had a siren, too. They had used both the flashing beacon and the siren to clear traffic out of their way, hurtling north on Highway 111, then virtually flying west on I-10 toward the Redland exit. They had topped ninety miles an hour nearly all the way, the Chevy's engine roaring, the frame shimmying under them. Jerry Peake, behind the wheel, had worried about a blowout because if a tire blew at that speed they were dead men.

Sharp seemed unconcerned about a blowout, but he complained about the lack of air-conditioning and about the warm wind blowing into his face through the open windows. It was as if, certain of his destiny, he were incapable of imagining himself dying now, here, in a rolling car; as if he believed he was entitled to every comfort regardless of the circumstances — like a crown prince. In fact, Peake realized that was probably exactly how Sharp looked at it.

Now they were in the San Bernardino Mountains, on State Route 330, a few miles from Running Springs, forced by the twisting road to travel at safer speeds. Sharp was silent, brooding, as he had been ever since they had turned off I-10 at the Redland exit. His anger had subsided. He was calculating now, scheming. Peake could almost hear the clicking, whirring, ticking, and humming of the Machiavellian mechanism that was Anson Sharp's mind.

Finally, as alternating bursts of sunlight and forest shadows slapped the windshield and filled the car with flickering ghostly movement, Sharp said, “Peake, you may be wondering why only the two of us have come here, why I haven't alerted the police or brought more backup of my own.”

“Yes, sir. I was wondering,” Peake said.

Sharp studied him for a while. “Jerry, are you ambitious?”

Watch your ass, Jerry! Peake thought as soon as Sharp called him by his first name, for Sharp was not a man who would ever be chummy with a subordinate.

He said, “Well, sir, I want to do well, be a good agent, if that's what you mean.”

“I mean more than that. Do you hope for promotion, greater authority, the chance to be in charge of investigations?”

Peake suspected that Sharp would be suspicious of a junior agent with too much ambition, so he did not mention his dream of becoming a Defense Security Agency legend. Instead, he said disingenuously, “Well, I've always sort of dreamed of one day working my way up to assistant chief of the California office, where I could have some input on operations. But I've got a lot to learn first.”

“That's all?” Sharp asked. “You strike me as a bright, capable young man. I'd expect you to've set your sights on something higher.”

“Well, sir, thank you, but there are quite a few bright, capable guys in the agency about my age, and if I could make assistant chief of the district office with that competition, I'd be happy.”

Sharp was silent for a minute, but Peake knew the conversation was not over. They had to slow to make a sharp rightward curve, and around the bend a raccoon was crossing the road, so Peake eased down on the brake and slowed even further, letting the animal scurry out of the way. At last the deputy director said, “Jerry, I've been watching you closely, and I like what I see. You have what it takes to go far in the company. If you've a desire to go to Washington, I'm convinced you'd be an asset in various posts at headquarters.”

Jerry Peake was suddenly scared. Sharp's flattery was excessive, and his implied patronage too generous. The deputy director wanted something from Peake, and in return he wanted Peake to buy something from him, something with a high price tag, maybe a lot higher than Peake was willing to pay. But if he refused to accept the deal Sharp was leading to, he'd make a lifelong enemy of the deputy director.

Sharp said, “This is not public knowledge, Jerry, and I'd ask you to keep it to yourself, but within two years the director is going to retire and recommend that I take his place at the head of the agency.”

Peake believed that Sharp was sincere, but he also had the queer feeling that Jarrod McClain, director of the DSA, would be surprised to hear about his own pending retirement.

Sharp continued: “When that happens, I'll be getting rid of many of the men Jarrod has installed in high positions. I don't mean to be disrespectful of the director, but he's too much of the old school, and the men he's promoted are less company agents than bureaucrats. I'll be bringing in younger and more aggressive men — like you.”

“Sir, I don't know what to say,” Peake told him, which was as true as it was evasive.

As intently as Peake watched the road ahead, Sharp watched Peake. “But the men I'll have around me must be totally reliable, totally committed to my vision for the agency. They must be willing to take any risks, make any sacrifices, give whatever is required to further the cause of the agency and, of course, the welfare of the country. At times, rarely but predictably, they'll be in situations where they must bend the law a little or even break it altogether for the good of country and agency. When you're up against the scum we've got to deal with — terrorists, Soviet agents — you can't always play strictly within the rules, not if you want to win, and our government has created the agency to win, Jerry. You're young, but I'm sure you've been around long enough to know what I'm talking about. I'm sure you've bent the law a few times yourself.”

“Well, sir, yes, a little, maybe,” Peake said carefully, beginning to sweat under the collar of his white shirt.

They passed a sign: lake arrowhead—10 miles.

“All right, Jerry, I'm going to level with you and hope you're the solid, reliable man I think you are. I haven't brought a lot of backup with us because the word's come down from Washington that Mrs. Leben and Benjamin Shadway have to go. And if we're going to take care of them, we need to keep the party small, quiet, discreet.”

“Take care of them?”

“They're to be terminated, Jerry. If we find them at the cabin with Eric Leben, we try our best to take Leben prisoner so he can be studied under lab conditions, but Shadway and the woman have to be terminated, with prejudice. That would be difficult if not impossible with a lot of police present; we'd have to delay the terminations until we had Shadway and Mrs. Leben in our sole custody, then stage a fake escape attempt or something. And with too many of our own men present, there'd be a greater chance of the terminations leaking out to the media. In a way, it's sort of a blessing that you and I are getting a chance to handle this alone, because we'll be able to stage it just right before the police and media types are brought in.”

Terminate? The agency had no license to terminate civilians. This was mad. But Peake said, “Why terminate Shadway and Mrs. Leben?”

“I'm afraid that's classified, Jerry.”

“But the warrant that cites them for suspected espionage and for the police murders in Palm Springs… well, that's just a cover story, right? Just a way to get the local cops to help us in the search.”

“Yes,” Sharp said, “but there's a great deal about this case you don't know, Jerry. Information that's tightly held and that I can't share with you, not even though I'm asking you to assist me in what may appear, to you, to be a highly illegal and possibly even immoral undertaking. But as deputy director, I assure you, Shadway and Mrs. Leben are a mortal danger to this country, so dangerous that we dare not let them speak with the media or with local authorities.”

Bullshit, Peake thought, but he said nothing, just drove onward under felt-green and blue-green trees that arched over the road.

Sharp said, “The decision to terminate is not mine alone. It comes from Washington, Jerry. And not just from Jarrod McClain. Much higher than that, Jerry. Much higher. The very highest.”

Bullshit, Peake thought. Do you really expect me to believe the president ordered the cold-blooded killing of two hapless civilians who've gotten in over their heads by no real fault of their own?

Then he realized that, before the insights he had achieved at the hospital in Palm Springs a short while ago, he might well have been naive enough to believe every word of what Sharp was telling him. The new Jerry Peake, enlightened both by the way Sharp had treated Sarah Kiel and by the way he'd reacted to The Stone, was not quite so gullible as the old Jerry Peake, but Sharp had no way of knowing that.

“From the highest authority, Jerry.”

Somehow, Peake knew that Anson Sharp had his own reasons for wanting Shadway and Rachael Leben dead, that Washington knew nothing about Sharp's plans. He could not cite the reason for his certainty in this matter, but he had no doubt. Call it a hunch. Legends — and would-be legends — had to trust their hunches.

“They're armed, Jerry — and dangerous, I assure you. Though they aren't guilty of the crimes we've specified on the warrant, they are guilty of other crimes of which I can't speak because you don't have a high enough security clearance. But you can rest assured that we won't exactly be gunning down a pair of upstanding citizens.”

Peake was amazed by the tremendously increased sensitivity of his crap detector. Only yesterday, when he had been in awe of every superior agent, he might not have perceived the pure, unadulterated stink of Sharp's smooth line, but now the stench was overwhelming.

“But sir,” Peake said, “if they surrender, give up their guns? We still terminate… with prejudice?”

“Yes.”

“We're judge, jury, and executioner?”

A note of impatience entered Sharp's voice. “Jerry, damn it all, do you think I like this? I killed in the war, in Vietnam, when my country told me killing was necessary, and I didn't like that much, not even when it was a certifiable enemy, so I'm not exactly jumping with joy over the prospect of killing Shadway and Mrs. Leben, who on the surface would appear to deserve killing a whole hell of a lot less than the Vietcong did. However, I am privy to top-secret information that's convinced me they're a terrible threat to my country, and I am in receipt of orders from the highest authority to terminate them. If you want to know the truth, it makes me a little sick. Nobody likes to face the fact that sometimes an immoral act is the only right thing to be done, that the world is a place of moral grays, not just black and white. I don't like it, but I know my duty.”

Oh, you like it well enough, Peake thought. You like it so much that the mere prospect of blowing them away has you so excited you're ready to piss in your pants.

“Jerry? Do you know your duty, too? Can I count on you?”

In the living room of the cabin, Ben found something that he and Rachael had not noticed before: a pair of binoculars on the far side of the armchair near the window. Putting them to his eyes and looking out the window, he could clearly see the bend in the dirt road where he and Rachael had crouched to study the cabin. Had Eric been in the chair, watching them with the binoculars?

In less than fifteen minutes, Ben finished searching the living room and the three bedrooms. It was at the window of the last of these chambers that he saw the broken brush at the far edge of the lawn, at a point well removed from that place where he and Rachael had come out of the forest on their initial approach to the cabin. That was, he suspected, where Eric had gone into the woods just after spotting them with the binoculars. Increasingly, it appeared that the noises they heard in the forest had been the sounds of Eric stalking them.

Very likely Leben was still out there, watching.

The time had come to go after him.

Benny left the bedroom, crossed the living room. In the kitchen, as he pushed open the rear screen door, he saw the ax out of the corner of his eye: It was leaning against the side of the refrigerator.

Ax?

Turning away from the door, frowning, puzzled, he looked down at the sharp blade. He was certain it had not been there when he and Rachael had entered the cabin through the same door.

Something cold crawled through the hollow of his spine.

After he and Rachael had made the first circuit of the house, they had wound up in the garage, where they had discussed what they must do next. Then they had come back inside and had gone straight through the kitchen to the living room to gather up the Wildcard file. That done, they had returned to the garage, gotten into the Mercedes, and driven down to the gate. Neither time had they passed this side of the refrigerator. Had the ax been here then?

The icy entity inside Ben's spine had crept all the way up to the base of his skull.

Ben saw two explanations for the ax — only two. First, perhaps Eric had been in the kitchen while they'd been in the adjacent garage planning their next move. He could have been holding the weapon, waiting for them to return to the house, intending to catch them by surprise. They had been only feet away from Eric without realizing it, only moments away from the quick, biting agony of the ax. Then, for some reason, as Eric listened to them discuss strategy, he had decided against attacking, opted for some other course of action, and had put down the ax.

Or…

Or Eric had not been in the cabin then, had only entered later, after he saw them drive away in the Mercedes. He had discarded the ax, thinking they were gone for good, then had fled without it when he heard Benny returning in the Ford.

One or the other.

Which? The need to answer that question seemed urgent and all-important. Which?

If Eric had been here earlier, when Rachael and Ben were in the garage, why hadn't he attacked? What had changed his mind?

The cabin was almost as empty of sound as a vacuum. Listening, Ben tried to determine if the silence was one of expectation, shared by him and one other lurking presence, or a silence of solitude.

Solitude, he soon decided. The dead, hollow, empty stillness that you experienced only when you were utterly and unquestionably alone. Eric was not in the house.

Ben looked through the screen door at the woods that lay beyond the brown lawn. The forest appeared still, as well, and he had the unsettling feeling that Eric was not out there, either, that he would have the woods to himself if he searched for his prey among the trees.

“Eric?” he said softly but aloud, expecting and receiving no answer. “Where the hell have you gone, Eric?”

He lowered the shotgun, no longer bothering to hold it at the ready because he knew in his bones that he would not encounter Eric on this mountain.

More silence.

Heavy, oppressive, profound silence.

He sensed that he was teetering precariously on the edge of a horrible revelation. He had made a mistake. A deadly mistake. One that he could not correct. But what was it? What mistake? Where had he gone wrong? He looked hard at the discarded ax, desperately seeking understanding.

Then his breath caught in his throat.

“My God,” he whispered. “Rachael.”

lake arrowhead—3 miles.

Peake got behind a slow-moving camper in a no-passing zone, but Sharp did not seem bothered by the delay because he was busy seeking Peake's agreement to the double murder of Shadway and Mrs. Leben.

“Of course, Jerry, if you have the slightest qualms at all about participating, then you leave it to me. Naturally, I expect you to back me up in a pinch — that's part of your job, after all — but if we can disarm Shadway and the woman without trouble, then I'll handle the terminations myself.”

I'll still be an accessory to murder, Peake thought.

But he said, “Well, sir, I don't want to let you down.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that, Jerry. I would be disappointed if you didn't have the right stuff. I mean, I was so sure of your commitment and courage when I decided to bring you along on this assignment. And I can't stress strongly enough how grateful your country and the agency will be for your wholehearted cooperation.”

You psycho creep, you lying sack of shit, Peake thought.

But he said, “Sir, I don't want to do anything that would be opposed to the best interests of my country — or that would leave a black mark of any kind on my agency record.”

Sharp smiled, reading total capitulation in that statement.

Ben moved slowly around the kitchen, peering closely at the floor, where traces of broth from the discarded soup and stew cans glistened on the tile. He and Rachael had taken care to step over and around the spills when they had gone through the kitchen, and Ben had not previously noticed any of Eric's footprints in the mess, which was something he was certain he would have seen.

Now he found what had not been there earlier: almost a full footprint in a patch of thick gravy from the Dinty Moore can, and a heelprint in a gob of peanut butter. A man's boots, large ones, by the look of the tread.

Two more prints shone dully on the tile near the refrigerator, where Eric had tracked the gravy and peanut butter when he had gone over there to put down the ax and, of course, to hide. To hide. Jesus. When Ben and Rachael had entered the kitchen from the garage and had stepped into the living room to gather up the scattered pages of the Wildcard file, Eric had been crouched at the far side of the refrigerator, hiding.

Heart racing, Ben turned away from the prints and hurried to the door that connected with the garage.

lake arrowhead.

They had arrived.

The slow-moving camper pulled into the parking lot of a sporting-goods store, getting out of their way, and Peake accelerated.

Having consulted the directions that The Stone had written on a slip of paper, Sharp said, “You're headed the right way. Just follow the state route north around the lake. In four miles or so, look for a branch road on the right, with a cluster of ten mailboxes, one of them with a big red-and-white iron rooster on top of it.”

As Peake drove, he saw Sharp lift a black attaché case onto his lap and open it. Inside were two thirty-eight pistols. He put one on the seat between them.

Peake said, “What's that?”

“Your gun for this operation.”

“I've got my service revolver.”

“It's not hunting season. Can't have a lot of noisy gunfire, Jerry. That might bring neighbors poking around or even alert some sheriff's deputy who just happens to be in the area.” Sharp withdrew a silencer from the attaché case and began to screw it onto his own pistol. “You can't use a silencer on a revolver, and we sure don't want anybody interrupting us until it's over and we've had plenty of time to adjust the bodies to fit our scenario.”

What the hell am I going to do? Peake wondered as he piloted the sedan north along the lake, looking for a red-and-white iron rooster.

On another road, State Route 138, Rachael had left Lake Arrowhead behind. She was approaching Silverwood Lake, where the scenery of the high San Bernardinos was even more breathtaking — though she had no eye for scenery in her current state of mind.

From Silverwood, 138 led out of the mountains and almost due west until it connected with Interstate 15. There, she intended to stop for gasoline, then follow 15 north and east, all the way across the desert to Las Vegas. That was a drive of more than two hundred miles over some of the most starkly beautiful and utterly desolate land on the continent, and even under the best of circumstances, it could be a lonely journey.

Benny, she thought, I wish you were here.

She passed a lightning-blasted tree that reached toward the sky with dead black limbs.

The white clouds that had recently appeared were getting thicker. A few of them were not white.

In the empty garage, Ben saw a two-inch-by-four-inch patch of boot-tread pattern imprinted on the concrete floor in some oily fluid that glistened in the beams of intruding sunlight. He knelt and put his nose to the spot. He was certain that the vague smell of beef gravy was not an imaginary scent.

The tread mark must have been here when he and Rachael returned to the car with the Wildcard pages, but he had not noticed it.

He got up and moved farther into the garage, studying the floor closely, and in only a few seconds he saw a small moist brown glob about half the size of a pea. He touched his finger to it, brought the finger to his nose. Peanut butter. Carried here on the sole or heel of one of Eric Leben's boots while Ben and Rachael were in the living room, busily stuffing the Wildcard file into the garbage bag.

Returning here with Rachael and the file, Ben had been in a hurry because it had seemed to him that the most important thing was to get her out of the cabin and off the mountain before either Eric or the authorities showed up. So he had not looked down and had not noticed the tread mark or the peanut butter. And, of course, he'd seen no reason to search for signs of Eric in places he had searched only minutes earlier. He could not have anticipated this cleverness from a man with devastating brain injuries — a walking dead man who, if he followed at all in the pattern of the lab mice, should be somewhat disoriented, deranged, mentally and emotionally unstable. Therefore, Ben could not blame himself; no, he had done the right thing when he had sent Rachael off in the Mercedes, thinking he was sending her away all by herself, never realizing that she was not alone in the car. How could he have realized? It was the only thing he could have done. It was not at all his fault, this unforeseeable development was not his fault, not his fault — but he cursed himself vehemently.

Waiting in the kitchen with the ax, listening to them plan their next moves as they stood in the garage, Eric must have realized that he had a chance of getting Rachael alone, and evidently that prospect appealed to him so much that he was willing to forgo a whack at Ben. He'd hidden beside the refrigerator until they were in the living room, then crept into the garage, took the keys from the ignition, quietly opened the trunk, returned the keys to the ignition, climbed into the trunk, and pulled the lid shut behind himself.

If Rachael had a flat tire and opened the trunk…

Or if, on some quiet stretch of desert highway, Eric decided to kick the back seat of the car off its mountings and climb through from the trunk…

His heart pounding so hard that it shook him, Ben raced out of the garage toward the rental Ford in front of the cabin.

Jerry Peake spotted the red-and-white iron rooster mounted atop one mailbox of ten. He turned into a narrow branch road that led up a steep slope past widely separated driveways and past houses mostly hidden in the forest that encroached from both sides.

Sharp had finished screwing silencers on both thirty-eights. Now he took two fully loaded spare magazines from the attaché case, kept one for himself, and put the other beside the pistol that he had provided for Peake. “I'm glad you're with me on this one, Jerry.”

Peake had not actually said that he was with Sharp on this one, and in fact he could not see any way he could participate in cold-blooded murder and still live with himself. For sure, his dream of being a legend would be shattered.

On the other hand, if he crossed Sharp, he would destroy his career in the DSA.

“The macadam should turn to gravel,” Sharp said, consulting the directions The Stone had given him.

In spite of all his recent insights, in spite of the advantages those insights should have given him, Jerry Peake did not know what to do. He did not see a way out that would leave him with both his self-respect and his career. As he drove up the slope, deeper into the dark of the woods, a panic began to build in him, and for the first time in many hours he felt inadequate.

“Gravel,” Anson Sharp noted as they left the pavement.

Suddenly Peake saw that his predicament was even worse than he had realized because Sharp was likely to kill him, too. If Peake tried to stop Sharp from killing Shadway and the Leben woman, then Sharp would simply shoot Peake first and set it up to look as if the two fugitives had done it. That would even give Sharp an excuse to kill Shadway and Mrs. Leben: “They wasted poor damn Peake, so there was nothing else I could do.” Sharp might even come out of it a hero. On the other hand, Peake couldn't just step out of the way and let the deputy director cut them down, for that would not satisfy Sharp; if Peake did not participate in the killing with enthusiasm, Sharp would never really trust him and would most likely shoot him after Shadway and Mrs. Leben were dead, then claim one of them had done it. Jesus. To Peake (whose mind was working faster than it had ever worked in his life), it looked as if he had only two choices: join in the killing and thereby gain Sharp's total trust — or kill Sharp before Sharp could kill anyone else. But no, wait, that was no solution, either—

“Not much farther,” Sharp said, leaning forward in his seat, peering intently through the windshield. “Slow it to a crawl.”

— no solution at all, because if he shot Sharp, no one would ever believe that Sharp had intended to kill Shadway and Mrs. Leben — after all, what was the bastard's motive? — and Peake would wind up on trial for blowing away his superior. The courts were never ever easy on cop killers, even if the cop killer was another cop, so sure as hell he'd go to prison, where all those seven-foot-tall, no-neck criminal types would just delight in raping a former government agent. Which left — what? — one horrible choice and only one, which was to join in the killing, descend to Sharp's level, forget about being a legend and settle for being a goddamn Gestapo thug. This was crazy, being trapped in a situation with no right answers, only wrong answers, crazy and unfair, damn it, and Peake felt as if the top of his head were going to blow off from the strain of seeking a better answer.

“That's the gate she described,” Sharp said. “And it's open! Park this side of it.”

Jerry Peake stopped the car, switched off the engine.

Instead of the expected quietude of the forest, another sound came through the open windows the moment the sedan fell silent: a racing engine, another car, echoing through the trees.

“Someone's coming,” Sharp said, grabbing his silencer-equipped pistol and throwing open his door just as a blue Ford roared into view on the road above them, bearing down at high speed.

While the service-station attendant filled the Mercedes with Arco unleaded, Rachael got candy and a can of Coke from the vending machines. She leaned against the trunk, alternately sipping Coke and munching on a Mr. Goodbar, hoping that a big dose of refined sugar would lift her spirits and make the long drive ahead seem less lonely.

“Going to Vegas?” the attendant asked.

“That's right.”

“I 'spected so. I'm good at guessing where folks is headed. You got that Vegas look. Now listen, first thing you play when you get there is roulette. Number twenty-four, 'cause I have this hunch about it, just looking at you. Okay?”

“Okay. Twenty-four.”

He held her Coke while she got the cash from her wallet to pay him. “You win a fortune, I'll expect half, of course. But if you lose, it'll be the devil's work, not mine.”

He bent down and looked in her window just as she was about to drive away. “You be careful out there on the desert. It can be mean.”

“I know,” she said.

She drove onto I-15 and headed north-northeast toward distant Barstow, feeling very much alone.

26 A MAN GONE BAD

Ben swung the Ford around the bend and started to accelerate but saw the dark green sedan just beyond the open gate. He braked, and the Ford fishtailed on the dirt lane. The steering wheel jerked in his hands. But he did not lose control of the car, kept it out of the ditches on both sides, and slid to a halt in a roiling cloud of dust about fifty yards above the gate.

Below, two men in dark suits had already gotten out of the sedan. One of them was hanging back, although the other — and bigger — man was rushing straight up the hill, closing fast, like a too-eager marathon runner who had forgotten to change into his running shorts and shoes. The yellowish dust gave the illusion of marbled solidity as it whirled through veined patterns of shade and sunshine. But in spite of the dust and in spite of the thirty yards that separated Ben from the oncoming man, he could see the gun in the guy's hand. He could also see the silencer, which startled him.

No police or federal agents used silencers. And Eric's business partners had opened up with a submachine gun in the heart of Palm Springs, so it was unlikely they would suddenly turn discreet.

Then, only a fraction of a second after Ben saw the silencer, he got a good look at the grinning face of the oncoming man, and he was simultaneously astonished, confused, and afraid. Anson Sharp. It had been sixteen years since he had seen Anson Sharp in Nam, back in '72. Yet he had no doubt about the man's identity. Time had changed Sharp, but not much. During the spring and summer of '72, Ben had expected the big bastard to shoot him in the back or hire some Saigon hoodlum to do it — Sharp had been capable of anything — but Ben had been very careful, had not given Sharp the slightest opportunity. Now here was Sharp again, as if he'd stepped through a time warp.

What the hell had brought him here now, more than a decade and a half later? Ben had the crazy notion that Sharp had been looking for him all this time, anxious to settle the score, and just happened to track him down now, in the midst of all these other troubles. But of course that was unlikely — impossible — so somehow Sharp must be involved with the Wildcard mess.

Less than twenty yards away, Sharp took a shooter's spreadlegged stance on the road below and opened fire with the pistol. With a whap and a wet crackle of gummy safety glass, a slug punched through the windshield one foot to the right of Ben's face.

Throwing the car into reverse, he twisted around in his seat to see the road behind. Steering with one hand, he drove backward up the dirt lane as fast as he dared. He heard another bullet ricochet off the car, and it sounded very close. Then he was around the turn and out of Sharp's sight.

He reversed all the way to the cabin before he stopped. There he shifted the Ford into neutral, left the engine running, and engaged the handbrake, which was the only thing holding the car on the slope. He got out and quickly put the shotgun and the Combat Magnum on the dirt to one side. Leaning back in through the open door, he gripped the release lever for the handbrake and looked down the hill.

Two hundred yards below, the Chevy sedan came around the bend, moving fast, and started up toward him. They slowed when they saw him, but they did not stop, and he dared to wait a couple of seconds longer before he popped the handbrake and stepped back.

Succumbing to gravity, the Ford rolled down the lane, which was so narrow that the Chevy could not pull entirely out of the way. The Ford encountered a small bump, jolted over it, and veered toward one drainage ditch. For a moment Ben thought the car was going to run harmlessly off to the side, but it stuttered over other ruts that turned it back on course.

The driver of the Chevy stopped, began to reverse, but the Ford was picking up a lot of speed and was bearing down too fast to be avoided. The Ford hit another bump and angled somewhat toward the left again, so at the last second the Chevy swung hard to the right in an evasive maneuver, almost dropping into the ditch. Nevertheless, the two vehicles collided with a clang and crunch of metal, though the impact wasn't as direct or as devastating as Ben had hoped. The right front fender of the Ford hit the right front fender of the Chevy, then the Ford slid sideways to the left, as if it might come around a hundred and eighty degrees until it was sitting alongside the Chevy, both of them facing uphill. But when it had made only a quarter turn, the Ford's rear wheels slammed into the ditch, and it halted with a shudder, perpendicular to the road, effectively blocking it.

The stricken Chevy rolled erratically backward for maybe thirty feet, narrowly missing the other ditch, then came to a halt. Both front doors were flung open. Anson Sharp got out of one, and the driver got out of the other, and neither of them appeared to have been hurt, which was pretty much what Ben had expected when the Ford had not hit them head-on.

Ben grabbed the shotgun and the Combat Magnum, turned, and ran around the side of the cabin. He sprinted across the sun-browned backyard to the toothlike granite formations from which he and Rachael had observed the place earlier. He paused for a moment to scan the woods ahead, looking for the quickest cover, then moved off into the trees, toward the same brush-flanked dry wash that he and Rachael had used before.

Behind him, in the distance, Sharp was calling his name.

Still caught in the spiderweb of his moral dilemma, Jerry Peake hung back a little from Sharp and watched his boss warily.

The deputy director had lost his head the moment he had seen Shadway in the blue Ford. He had gone charging up the road, shooting from a disadvantageous position, when he had little or no chance of hitting his target. Besides, he could see that the woman was not in the car with Shadway, and if they did kill the man before asking questions, they might not be able to find out where she had gone. It was shockingly sloppy procedure, and Peake was appalled.

Now Sharp stalked the perimeter of the rear yard, breathing like an angry bull, in such a peculiar state of excitement and rage that he seemed oblivious of the danger of presenting such a high profile. At several places along the edge of the woods, he took a step or two into the knee-high weeds, peering down through the serried ranks of trees.

From three sides of the yard, the forested land fell away in a jumble of rocky slopes and narrow defiles that offered countless shadowed hiding places. They had lost Shadway for the moment. That much was obvious to Peake. They should call for backup now, because otherwise their man was going to slip entirely away from them through the wilderness.

But Sharp was determined to kill Shadway. He was not going to listen to reason.

Peake just watched and waited and said nothing.

Looking down into the woods, Sharp shouted: “United States government, Shadway. Defense Security Agency. You hear me? DSA. We want to talk to you, Shadway.”

An invocation of authority was not going to work, not now, not after Sharp had started shooting the moment he had seen Ben Shadway.

Peake wondered if the deputy director was undergoing a breakdown, which would explain his behavior with Sarah Kiel and his determination to kill Shadway and his ill-advised, irresponsible, blazing-gun charge up the road a couple of minutes ago.

Stomping along the edge of the woods, wading a few steps into the underbrush again, Sharp called out: “Shadway! Hey, it's me, Shadway. Anson Sharp. Do you remember me, Shadway? Do you remember?”

Jerry Peake took one step back and blinked as if someone had just slapped him in the face: Sharp and Shadway knew each other, for God's sake; knew each other, not merely in the abstract as the hunter and the hunted know each other, but personally. And it was clear — from Sharp's taunting manner, crimson face, bulging eyes, and stentorian breathing — that they were bitter adversaries. This was a grudge match of some kind, which eliminated any small doubt Peake might have had about the possibility that anyone above Sharp in the DSA had ordered Shadway and Mrs. Leben killed. Sharp had decided to terminate these fugitives, Sharp and no one else. Peake's instincts had been on the money. But it did not solve anything to know he had been right when he'd smelled deception in Sharp's story. Right or not, he was still left with the choice of either cooperating with the deputy director or pulling a gun on him, and neither course would leave him with both his career and his self-respect intact.

Sharp plunged deeper into the woods, started down a slope into the gloom beneath interlacing boughs of pine and spruce. He looked back, shouted at Peake to join in the chase, took several more steps into the brush, glanced back again and called out more insistently when he saw that Peake had not moved.

Reluctantly Peake followed. Some of the tall grass was so dry and brittle that it prickled through his socks. Burrs and bits of milkweed fluff adhered to his trousers. When he leaned against the trunk of a tree, his hand came away sticky with resin. Vines tried to trip him up. Brambles snagged his suit. His leather-soled shoes slipped treacherously on the stones, on patches of dry pine needles, on moss, on everything. Climbing over a fallen tree, he put his foot down in a teeming nest of ants; although he hurriedly moved out of their way and wiped them off his shoe, a few scaled his leg, and finally he had to pause, roll up his trousers, and brush the damn things off his badly bitten calf.

“We're not dressed for this,” he told Sharp when he caught up with him.

“Quiet,” Sharp said, easing under a low-hanging pine branch heavy with thorn-tipped cones.

Peake's feet almost skidded out from under him, and he grabbed desperately at a branch. Barely managing to stay on his feet, he said, “We're going to break our necks.”

“Quiet!” Sharp whispered furiously. Over his shoulder, he looked back angrily at Peake. His face was unnerving: eyes wide and wild, skin flushed, nostrils flared, teeth bared, jaw muscles taut, the arteries throbbing in his temples. That savage expression confirmed Peake's suspicion that since spotting Shadway the deputy director had been out of control, driven by an almost maniacal hatred and by sheer blood lust.

They pushed through a narrow gap in a wall of dense and bristly brush decorated with poisonous-looking orange berries. They stumbled into a shallow dry wash — and saw Shadway. The fugitive was fifteen yards farther along the channel, following it down through the forest. He was moving low and fast, carrying a shotgun.

Peake crouched and sidled against the wall of the channel to make as difficult a target of himself as possible.

But Sharp stood in full view, as if he thought he was Superman, bellowed Shadway's name, pulled off several shots with the silencer-equipped pistol. With a silencer, you traded range and accuracy for the quiet you gained, so considering the distance between Sharp and Shadway, virtually every shot was wasted. Either Sharp did not know the effective range of his weapon — which seemed unlikely — or he was so completely a captive of his hatred that he was no longer capable of rational action. The first shot tore bark off a tree at the edge of the dry wash, two yards to Shadway's left, and with a high thin whine, the second slug ricocheted off a boulder. Then Shadway disappeared where the runoff channel curved to the right, but Sharp fired three more shots, in spite of being unable to see his target.

Even the finest silencer quickly deteriorates with use, and the soft whump of Sharp's pistol grew noticeably louder with each round he expended. The fifth and final shot sounded like a wooden mallet striking a hard but rubbery surface, not thunderous by any means but loud enough to echo for a moment through the woods.

When the echo faded, Sharp listened intently for a few seconds, then bounded back across the dry wash toward the same gap in the brush through which they had entered the channel. “Come on, Peake. We'll get the bastard now.”

Following, Peake said, “But we can't chase him down in these woods. He's better dressed for it than we are.”

“We're getting out of the woods, damn it,” Sharp said, and indeed they were headed back the way they had come, up toward the yard behind the cabin. “All I wanted to do was make sure we got him moving, so he wouldn't just lie in here and wait us out. He's moving now, by God, and what he'll do is head straight down the mountain toward the lake road. He'll try to steal some transportation down there, and with any luck at all we'll nail the son of a bitch as he's trying to hot-wire some fisherman's car. Now come on.”

Sharp still had that savage, frenetic, half-sane look, but Peake realized that the deputy director was not, after all, as overwhelmed and as totally controlled by hatred as he had at first appeared. He was in a rage, yes, and not entirely rational, but he had not lost all of his cunning. He was still a dangerous man.

Ben was running for his own life, but he was in a panic about Rachael as well. She was heading to Nevada in the Mercedes, unaware that Eric was curled up in the trunk. Somehow Ben had to catch up with her, though minute by minute she was getting a greater lead on him, rapidly decreasing his hope of closing the gap. At the very least he had to find a telephone and get hold of Whitney Gavis, his man in Vegas, so when Rachael got there and called Whitney for the motel keys, he would be able to alert her to Eric's presence. Of course, Eric might break out of that trunk or be released from it long before Rachael arrived in Vegas, but that hideous possibility did not even bear contemplation.

Rachael alone on the darkening desert highway… a strange noise in the trunk… her cold dead husband suddenly kicking his way out of confinement, knocking the back seat off its hinge pins… clambering into the passenger compartment…

That monstrous picture shook Ben so badly that he dared not dwell on it. If he gave it too much thought, it would start to seem like an inevitable scenario, and he would be unable to go on.

So he resolutely refused to think the unthinkable, and he left the dry wash for a deer trail that offered a relatively easy descent for thirty yards before turning between two fir trees in a direction he did not wish to pursue. Thereafter, progress became considerably more difficult, the ground more treacherous: a wild blackberry patch, wickedly thorned, forced him to detour fifty yards out of his way; a long slope of rotten shale crumbled under his feet, obliging him to descend at an angle to avoid pitching headfirst to the bottom as the surface shifted beneath him; deadfalls of old trees and brush forced him either to go around or to climb over at the risk of a sprained ankle or broken leg. More than once, he wished that he were wearing a pair of woodsman's boots instead of Adidas running shoes, though his jeans and long-sleeve shirt provided some protection from burrs and scratchy branches. Regardless of the difficulty, he forged ahead because he knew that eventually he would reach the lower slopes where the houses below Eric Leben's cabin stood on less wild property; there he would find the going easier. Besides, he had no choice but to go on because he did not know if Anson Sharp was still on his tail.

Anson Sharp.

It was hard to believe.

During his second year in Nam, Ben had been a lieutenant in command of his own recon squad — serving under his platoon captain, Olin Ashborn — planning and executing a series of highly successful forays into enemy-held territory. His sergeant, George Mendoza, had been killed by machine-gun fire during a mission to free four U.S. prisoners of war being held at a temporary camp before transfer to Hanoi. Anson Sharp was the sergeant assigned to replace Mendoza.

From the moment he had met Sharp, Ben had not cared for him. It was just one of those instinctive reactions, for initially he had not seen anything seriously wrong with Sharp. The man was not a great sergeant, not Mendoza's equal, but he was competent, and he did not do either drugs or alcohol, which put him a notch above a lot of other soldiers in that miserable war. Perhaps he relished his authority a bit too much and came down too hard on the men under him. Perhaps his talk about women was colored by a disquieting disrespect for them, but at first it had seemed like the usual boring and only half-serious misogyny that you sometimes heard from a certain number of men in any large group; Ben had seen nothing evil about it — until later. And perhaps Sharp had been too quick to advise against contact when the enemy was sighted and too quick to encourage withdrawal once the enemy was engaged, but at first he could not have been accurately labeled a coward. Yet Ben had been wary of him and had felt somewhat guilty about it because he had no substantial reasons for distrusting his new sergeant.

One of the things he had disliked was Sharp's apparent lack of conviction in all things. Sharp seemed to have no opinions about politics, religion, capital punishment, abortion, or any of the other issues that interested his contemporaries. Sharp also had no strong feelings about the war, either pro or con. He didn't care who won, and he regarded the quasidemocratic South and the totalitarian North as moral equals — if he thought about it at all in moral terms. He had joined the Marines to avoid being drafted into the Army, and he felt none of that leatherneck pride or commitment that made the corps a home to most of the other men in it. He intended to have a military career, though what drew him to the service was not duty or pride but the hope of promotion to a position of real power, early retirement in just twenty years, and a generous pension; he could talk for hours about military pensions and benefits.

He had no special passion for music, art, books, sports, hunting, fishing, or anything else — except for himself. He himself was his own — and only — passion. Though not a hypochondriac, he was certainly obsessed with the state of his health and would talk at length about his digestion, his constipation or lack of it, and the appearance of his morning stool. Another man might simply say, “I have a splitting headache,” but Anson Sharp, plagued by a similar condition, would expend two hundred words describing the degree and nature of the agony in excruciating detail and would use a finger to trace the precise line of the pain across his brow. He spent a lot of time combing his hair, always managed to be clean-shaven even under battle conditions, had a narcissistic attraction to mirrors and other reflective surfaces, and made a virtual crusade of obtaining as many creature comforts as a soldier could manage in a war zone.

It was difficult to like a man who liked nothing but himself.

But if Anson Sharp had been neither a good nor an evil man when he had gone to Nam — just bland and self-centered — the war had worked upon the unformed clay of his personality and had gradually sculpted a monster. When Ben became aware of detailed and convincing rumors of Sharp's involvement in the black market, an investigation had turned up proof of an astonishing criminal career. Sharp had been involved in the hijacking of goods in transit to post exchanges and canteens, and he had negotiated the sale of those stolen supplies to buyers in the Saigon underworld. Additional information indicated that, while not a user or direct seller of drugs, Sharp facilitated the commerce in illegal substances between the Vietnamese Mafia and U.S. soldiers. Most shocking of all, Ben's sleuthing led to the discovery that Sharp used some profits from criminal activity to keep a pied-à-terre in Saigon's roughest nightclub district; there, with the assistance of an exceedingly vicious Vietnamese thug who served as a combination houseboy and dungeon master, Sharp maintained an eleven-year-old girl — Mai Van Trang — as a virtual slave, sexually abusing her whenever he had the opportunity, otherwise leaving her to the mercy of the thug.

The inevitable court-martial had not proceeded as predictably as Ben hoped. He wanted to put Sharp away for twenty years in a military prison. But before the case came to trial, potential witnesses began to die or disappear at an alarming pace. Two Army noncoms — pushers who'd agreed to testify against Sharp in return for lenient treatment — were found dead in Saigon alleyways, throats cut. A lieutenant was fragged in his sleep, blown to bits. The weasel-faced houseboy and poor Mai Van Trang disappeared, and Ben was sure that the former was alive somewhere and that the latter was just as certainly dead and buried in an unmarked grave, not a difficult disposal problem in a nation torn by war and undermined by unmarked graves. In custody awaiting trial, Sharp could effectively plead innocence to involvement in this series of convenient deaths and vanishings, though it was surely his influence with the Vietnamese underworld that provided for such favorable developments. By the start of the court-martial, all of the witnesses against Sharp were gone, and the case was essentially reduced to Ben's word — and that of his investigators — against Sharp's smug protestations of innocence. There wasn't sufficient concrete evidence to ensure his imprisonment but far too much circumstantial evidence to get him off the hook entirely. Consequently he was stripped of his sergeant's stripes, demoted to private, and dishonorably discharged.

Even that comparatively light sentence had been a blow to Sharp, whose deep and abiding self-love had not permitted him to entertain the prospect of any punishment whatsoever. His personal comfort and well-being were his central — perhaps only — concern, and he seemed to take it for granted that, as a favored child of the universe, he would always be assured of unrelieved good fortune. Before shipping out of Vietnam in disgrace, Sharp had used all of his remaining contacts to arrange a short surprise visit to Ben, too short to do any harm, but just long enough to convey a threat: “Listen, asshole, when you get stateside again, just remember I'll be there, waiting for you. I'll know when you're coming home, and I'll have a greeting ready for you.”

Ben had not taken the threat seriously. For one thing, well before the court-martial, Sharp's hesitancy on the battlefield had grown worse, so bad on some occasions that he had come perilously close to disobeying orders rather than risk his precious skin. If he had not been brought to court for theft, black-marketeering, drug dealing, and statutory rape, he very likely would have been arraigned on charges of desertion or other offenses related to his increasing cowardice. He might talk of stateside vengeance, but he would not have the guts for it. And for another thing, Ben was not worried about what would happen to him when he went home because, by then, for better or worse, he had committed himself to the war until the end of it; and that commitment gave him every reason to believe he would go home in a box, in no condition to give a damn whether or not Anson Sharp was waiting for him.

Now, descending through the shadowy forest and at last reaching the first of the half-cleared properties where houses were tucked in among the trees, Ben wondered how Anson Sharp, stripped of rank and dishonorably discharged, could have been accepted into training as a DSA agent. A man gone bad, like Sharp, usually continued skidding downward once his slide began. By now he should have been on his second or third term in prison for civilian crimes. At best, you could have expected to encounter him as a seedy grifter scratching out a dishonest living, so pathetically small-time that he did not draw the notice of the authorities. Even if he had cleaned up his act, he could not have wiped a dishonorable discharge off his record. And with that discredit, he would have been summarily rejected by any law-enforcement agency, especially by an organization with standards as high as those of the Defense Security Agency.

So how the hell did he swing it? Ben wondered.

He chewed on that question as he climbed over a split-rail fence and cautiously skirted a two-story brick and weathered-pine chalet, dashing from tree to tree and bush to bush, staying out of sight as much as possible. If someone looked out a window and saw a man with a shotgun in one hand and a big revolver tucked into the waistband at his back, a call to the county sheriff would be inevitable.

Assuming that Sharp wasn't lying when he had identified himself as a Defense Security Agency operative — and there seemed no point in lying about it — the next thing Ben had to wonder about was how far Sharp had risen in the DSA. After all, it seemed far too coincidental for Sharp to have been assigned, by mere chance, to an investigation involving Ben. More likely Sharp had arranged his assignment when he had read the Leben file and discovered that Ben, his old and perhaps mostly forgotten nemesis, had a relationship with Rachael. He'd seen a long-delayed chance for revenge and had seized it. But surely an ordinary agent could not choose assignments, which meant Sharp must be in a sufficiently high position to set his own work schedule. Worse than that: Sharp was of such formidable rank that he could open fire on Ben without provocation and expect to be able to cover up a murder committed in the plain sight of one of his fellow DSA operatives.

With the threat of Anson Sharp layered on top of all the other threats that he and Rachael faced, Ben began to feel as if he were caught up in a war again. In war, incoming fire usually started up when you least expected it, and from the most unlikely source and direction. Which was exactly what Anson Sharp's appearance was: surprise fire from the most unlikely source.

At the third mountainside house, Ben nearly walked in among four young boys who were engaged in their own stealthy game of war, alerted at the last minute when one of them sprang from cover and opened fire on another with a cap-loaded machine gun. For the first time in his life, Ben experienced a vivid flashback to the war, one of those mental traumas that the media ascribed to every veteran. He fell and rolled behind several low-growing dogwoods, where he lay listening to his pounding heart, stifling a scream for half a minute until the flashback passed.

None of the boys had seen him, and when he set out again, he crawled and belly-crawled from one point of cover to another. From the leafy dogwood to a clump of wild azaleas. From the azaleas to a low limestone formation, where the desiccated corpse of a ground squirrel lay as if in warning. Then over a small hill, through rough weeds that scratched his face, under another split-rail fence.

Five minutes later, almost forty minutes after setting out from the cabin, he bulled his way down a brush-covered slope and into a dry drainage ditch alongside the state route that circled the lake.

Forty minutes, for God's sake.

How far into the lonely desert had Rachael gotten in forty minutes?

Don't think about that. Just keep moving.

He crouched in the tall weeds for a moment, catching his breath, then stood up and looked both ways. No one was in sight. No traffic was coming or going on the two-lane blacktop.

Considering that he had no intention of throwing away either the shotgun or the Combat Magnum, which made him frightfully conspicuous, he was lucky to find himself here on a Tuesday and at this hour. The state route would not have been as lightly used at any other time. During the early morning, the road would be busy with boaters, fishermen, and campers on their way to the lake, and later many of them would be returning. But in the middle of the afternoon — it was 2:55—they were comfortably settled for the day. He was also fortunate it was not a weekend, for then the road would have been heavily traveled regardless of the hour.

Deciding that he would be able to hear oncoming traffic before it drew into sight — and would, therefore, have time to conceal himself — he climbed out of the ditch and headed north on the pavement, hoping to find a car to steal.

27 ON THE ROAD AGAIN

By 2:55, Rachael was through the El Cajon Pass, still ten miles south of Victorville and almost forty-five miles from Barstow.

This was the last stretch of the interstate on which indications of civilization could be seen with any frequency. Even here, except for Victorville itself and the isolated houses and businesses strung between it and Hesperia and Apple Valley, there was mostly just a vast emptiness of white sand, striated rock, seared desert scrub, Joshua trees and other cactuses. During the hundred and sixty miles between Barstow and Las Vegas, there would be virtually only two outposts — Calico, the ghost town (with a cluster of attendant restaurants, service stations, and a motel or two), and Baker, which was the gateway to Death Valley National Monument and which was little more than a pit stop that flashed by in a few seconds, gone so quickly that it almost seemed like a mirage. Halloran Springs, Cal Neva, and Stateline were out there, too, but none of them really qualified as a town, and in one case the population was fewer than fifty souls. Here, where the great Mojave Desert began, humankind had tested the wasteland's dominion, but after Barstow its rule remained undisputed.

If Rachael had not been so worried about Benny, she would have enjoyed the endless vistas, the power and responsiveness of the big Mercedes, and the sense of escape and release that always buoyed her during a trip across the Mojave. But she could not stop thinking about him, and she wished she had not left him alone, even though he had made a good argument for his plan and had given her little choice. She considered turning around and going back, but he might have left by the time she reached the cabin. She might even drive straight into the arms of the police if she returned to Arrowhead, so she kept the Mercedes moving at a steady sixty miles an hour toward Barstow.

Five miles south of Victorville, she was startled by a strange hollow thumping that seemed to come from underneath the car: four or five sharp knocks, then silence. She swore under her breath at the prospect of a breakdown. Letting the speed fall to fifty and then slowly to forty, she listened closely to the Mercedes for more than half a mile.

The hum of the tires on the pavement.

The purr of the engine.

The soft whisper of the air-conditioning.

No knocking.

When the unsettling sound did not recur, she accelerated to sixty again and continued to listen expectantly, figuring that the unknown trouble was something that occurred only at higher speeds. But when, after another mile, there was no noise, she decided she must have run over potholes in the pavement. She had not seen any potholes, and she could not recall that the car had been jolted simultaneously with the thumping sound, but she could think of no other explanation. The Mercedes's suspension system and heavy-duty shocks were superb, which would have minimized the jolt of a few minor bumps, and perhaps the strange sound itself had distracted her from whatever little vibration there had been.

For a few miles, Rachael remained edgy, not exactly waiting for the entire drive train to drop out with a great crash or for the engine to explode, but half expecting some trouble that would delay her. However, when the car continued to perform with its usual quiet reliability, she relaxed, and her thoughts drifted back to Benny.

The green Chevy sedan had been damaged in the collision with the blue Ford — bent grille, smashed headlight, crumpled fender — but its function had not been impaired. Peake had driven down the dirt road to gravel to macadam to the state route that circled the lake, with Sharp sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the woods around them, the silencer-equipped pistol in his lap. Sharp had been confident (he said) that Shadway had gone in another direction, well away from the lake, but he had been vigilant nonetheless.

Peake had expected a shotgun blast to hit the side window and take him out at any moment. But he got down to the state route alive.

They had cruised back and forth on the main road until they had found a line of six cars and pickups parked along the berm. Those vehicles probably belonged to anglers who had gone down through the woods to the nearby lake, to a favorite but hard-to-reach fishing hole. Sharp had decided that Shadway would come off the mountain to the south of the cars and, perhaps recalling having passed them on his way to the cabin turnoff, would come north on the state route — maybe using one of the drainage ditches for cover or even staying in the forest parallel to the road — with the intention of hot-wiring new wheels for himself. Peake had slipped the sedan behind the last vehicle in the line of six, a dirty and battered Dodge station wagon, pulling over just a bit farther than the cars in front, so Shadway would not be able to see the Chevy clearly when he walked in from the south.

Now Peake and Sharp slumped low in the front seat, sitting just high enough to see through the windshield and through the windows of the station wagon in front of them. They were ready to move fast at the first sign of anyone messing with one of the cars. Or at least Sharp was ready. Peake was still in a quandary.

The trees rustled in the gusty breeze.

A wicked-looking dragonfly swooped past the windshield on softly thrumming, iridescent wings.

The dashboard clock ticked faintly, and Peake had the weird but perhaps explicable feeling that they were sitting on a time bomb.

“He'll show up in the next five minutes,” Sharp said.

I hope not, Peake thought.

“We'll waste the bastard, all right,” Sharp said.

Not me, Peake thought.

“He'll be expecting us to keep cruising the road, back and forth, looking for him. He won't expect us to anticipate him and be lying in wait here. He'll walk right into us.”

God, I hope not, Peake thought. I hope he heads south instead of north. Or maybe goes over the top of the mountain and down the other side and never comes near this road. Or God, please, how about just letting him cross this road and go down to the lake and walk across the water and off onto the other shore?

Peake said, “Looks to me as if he's got more firepower than we do. I mean, I saw a shotgun. That's something to think about.”

“He won't use it on us,” Sharp said.

“Why not?”

“Because he's a prissy-assed moralist, that's why. A sensitive type. Worries about his goddamn soul too much. His type can justify killing only in the middle of a war — and only a war he believes in — or in some other situation where he has absolutely no other choice but to kill in order to save himself.”

“Yeah, well, but if we start shooting at him, he won't have any choice except to shoot back. Right?”

“You just don't understand him. In a situation like this — which isn't a damn war — if there's any place to run, if he's not backed into a tight corner, then he'll always choose to run instead of fighting. It's the morally superior choice, you see, and he likes to think of himself as a morally superior guy. Out here in these woods, he's got plenty of places to run. So if we shoot and hit him, it's over. But if we miss, he won't shoot back — not that pussy-faced hypocrite — he'll run, and we'll have another chance to track him down and take another whack at him, and he'll keep giving us chances until, sooner or later, he either shakes loose of us for good or we blow him away. Just for God's sake don't ever back him into a corner; always leave him an out. When he's running, we have a chance of shooting him in the back, which is the wisest thing we could do, because the guy was in Marine Recon, and he was good, better than most, the best — I have to give him that much — the best. And he seems to've stayed in condition. So if he had to do it, he could take your head off with his bare hands.”

Peake was unable to decide which of these new revelations was most appalling: that, to settle a grudge of Sharp's, they were going to kill not only an innocent man but a man with an unusually complex and faithfully observed moral code; or that they were going to shoot him in the back if they had the chance; or that their target would put his own life at extreme risk rather than casually waste them, though they were prepared to casually waste him; or that, if given no other choice, the guy had the ability to utterly destroy them without working up a sweat. Peake had last been to bed yesterday afternoon, almost twenty-two hours ago, and he badly needed sleep, but his grainy eyes were open wide and his mind was alert as he contemplated the wealth of bad news that he had just received.

Sharp leaned forward suddenly, as if he'd spotted Shadway coming up from the south, but it must have been nothing, for he leaned back in his seat again and let out his pent-up breath.

He's as scared as he is angry, Peake thought.

Peake steeled himself to ask a question that would most likely anger or at least irritate Sharp. “You know him, sir?”

“Yeah,” Sharp said sourly, unwilling to elaborate.

“From where?”

“Another place.”

“When?”

“Way back,” Sharp said in a tone of voice that made it clear there were to be no more questions.

From the beginning of this investigation yesterday evening, Peake had been surprised that someone as high as the deputy director would plunge right into the fieldwork, shoulder to shoulder with junior agents, instead of coordinating things from an office. This was an important case. But Peake had been involved in other important cases, and he had never seen any of the agency's titled officers actually getting their hands dirty. Now he understood: Sharp had chosen to wade into the muddy center of this one because he had discovered that his old enemy, Shadway, was involved, and because only in the field would he have an opportunity to kill Shadway and stage the shooting to look legitimate.

“Way back,” Sharp said, more to himself this time than to Jerry Peake. “Way back.”

The roomy interior of the Mercedes-Benz trunk was warm because it was heated by the sun. But Eric Leben, curled on his side in the darkness, felt another and greater warmth: the peculiar and almost pleasant fire that burned in his blood, flesh, and bones, a fire that seemed to be melting him down into… something other than a man.

The inner and outer heat, the darkness, the motion of the car, and the hypnotic humming of the tires had lulled him into a trancelike state. For a time he had forgotten who he was, where he was, and why he had put himself in this place. Thoughts eddied lazily through his mind, like opalescent films of oil drifting, rippling, intertwining, and forming slow-motion whirlpools on the surface of a lake. At times his thoughts were light and pleasant: the sweet body curves and skin textures of Rachael, Sarah, and other women with whom he had made love; the favorite teddy bear he had slept with as a child; fragments of movies he had seen; lines of favorite songs. But sometimes the mental images grew dark and frightening: Uncle Barry grinning and beckoning; an unknown dead woman in a dumpster; another woman nailed to a wall — naked, dead, staring; the hooded figure of Death looming out of shadows; a deformed face in a mirror; strange and monstrous hands somehow attached to his own wrists…

Once, the car stopped, and the cessation of movement caused him to float up from the trance. He quickly reoriented himself, and that icy reptilian rage flooded back into him. He eagerly flexed and unflexed his strong, elongated, sharp-nailed hands in anticipation of choking the life out of Rachael — she who had denied him, she who had rejected him, she who had sent him into the path of death. He almost burst out of the trunk, then heard a man's voice, hesitated. Judging by the bits of inane conversation he was able to overhear, and because of the noise of a gas-pump nozzle being inserted into the fuel tank, Eric realized that Rachael had stopped at a service station, where there were sure to be a few — and perhaps a lot of — people. He had to wait for a better opportunity.

Earlier, back at the cabin, when he had opened the trunk, he had immediately noted that the rear wall was a solid metal panel, making it impossible for him to simply kick the car's rear seat off its pins and clamber through into the passenger compartment. Furthermore, the latch mechanism was unreachable from within the trunk because of a metal cover plate fastened in place by several Phillips-head screws. Fortunately, Rachael and Shadway had been so busy gathering up the copy of the Wildcard file that Eric had been able to snatch a Phillips screwdriver off the tool rack, remove the latch plate, climb into the trunk, and close the lid. Even in the dark, he could find the bared latch, slip the blade of the screwdriver into the mechanism, and pop it open with no difficulty.

If he heard no voices the next time they stopped, he could be out of the trunk in a couple of seconds, fast enough to get his hands on her before she realized what was happening.

At the service station, as he waited silently and patiently within the trunk, he brought his hands to his face and thought he detected additional changes from those he had seen and felt at the cabin. Likewise, when he explored his neck, shoulders, and most of his body, he did not seem to be formed quite as he should have been.

He thought he felt a patch of… scales.

Revulsion made his teeth chatter.

He quickly stopped examining himself.

He wanted to know what he was becoming.

Yet he didn't want to know.

He needed to know.

And he couldn't bear knowing.

Dimly he suspected that, having intentionally edited a small portion of his own genetic material, he had created an imbalance in unknown — perhaps unknowable — life chemistries and life forces. The imbalance had not been severe until, upon his death, his altered cells had begun to perform as they had never been meant to perform, healing at a rate and to an extent that was unnatural. That activity — the overwhelming flood of growth hormones and proteins it produced — in some manner released the bonds of genetic stability, threw off the biological governor that ensured a slow, slow, measured pace for evolution. Now he was evolving at an alarming rate. More accurately, perhaps, he was devolving, his body seeking to re-create ancient forms still stored within the tens of millions of years of racial experience in his genes. He knew that he was fluctuating mentally between the familiar modern intellect of Eric Leben and the alien consciousnesses of several primitive states of the human race, and he was afraid of devolving both mentally and physically to some bizarre form so remote from human experience that he would cease to exist as Eric Leben, his personality dissolved forever in a prehistoric simian or reptilian consciousness.

She had done this to him — had killed him, thereby triggering the runaway response of his genetically altered cells. He wanted vengeance, wanted it so much he ached, wanted to rip the bitch open and slash her steaming guts, wanted to pull out her eyes and break open her head, wanted to claw off that pretty face, that smug and hateful face, chew off her tongue, then put his mouth down against her spurting arteries and drink, drink..

He shuddered again, but this time it was a shudder of primal need, a quiver of inhuman pleasure and excitement.

After the fuel tank was filled, Rachael returned to the highway, and Eric was lulled into his trancelike state once more. This time his thoughts were stranger, dreamier than those that had occupied him previously. He saw himself loping across a mist-shrouded landscape, barely half erect; distant mountains smoked on the horizon, and the sky was a purer and darker blue than he had ever seen it before, yet it was familiar, just as the glossy vegetation was different from anything he had ever encountered as Eric Leben but was nevertheless known to some other being buried deep within him. Then, in his half-dreams, he was no longer even partially erect, not the same creature at all, slithering now on his belly over warm wet earth, drawing himself up onto a spongy rotting log, clawing at it with long-toed feet, shredding the bark and mushy wood to reveal a huge nest of squirming maggots, into which he hungrily thrust his face…

Transported by a dark savage thrill, he drummed his feet against the sidewall of the trunk, an action that briefly roused him from the tenebrous images and thoughts that filled his mind. He realized that his drumming feet would alert Rachael, and he stopped after — he hoped — only a few hard kicks.

The car slowed, and he fumbled in the dark for the screwdriver in case he had to pop the latch and get out fast. But then the car accelerated again — Rachael had not understood what she had heard — and he fell back into the ooze of primordial memories and desires.

Now, mentally drifting in some far place, he continued to change physically. The dark trunk was like a womb in which an unimaginable mutant child formed and reformed and re-formed again. It was both something old and something new in the world. Its time had passed — and yet its time was still coming.

Ben figured they would expect him to remember the line of parked cars along the western shoulder of the state route and would be waiting for him to steal one. Furthermore, they would probably count on him making his way north on the road itself, using the ditch along the eastern berm for cover when he heard traffic coming. Or they might think he'd stay on the eastern slope, on the highland side of the road, cautiously following the blacktop north but using the trees and brush for cover. However, he did not think they would expect him to cross the road, enter the woods on the western side of it — the lake side — and then head north under the cover of those trees, eventually coming up on the parked cars from behind.

He figured correctly. When he had gone north some distance with the highway on his right and the lake on his left, he cut up the slope to the state route, cautiously crawled up the final embankment, peered over the top, and looked south toward the parked cars. He saw two men slumped in the front seat of the dark green Chevy sedan. They were tucked behind a Dodge station wagon, so he would not have been able to see them if he'd approached from the south instead of circling behind. They were looking the other way, watching geometrically framed slices of the two-lane highway through the windows of the cars parked in front of theirs.

Easing down from the top of the embankment, Ben lay on the slope for a minute, flat on his back. His mattress was composed of old pine needles, withered rye grass, and unfamiliar plants with variegated caladiumlike leaves that bruised under him and pressed their cool juice into the cloth of his shirt and jeans. He was so dirty and stained from the frantic descent of the mountainside below Eric's cabin that he had no concern about what additional mess these plants might make of him.

The Combat Magnum, tucked under his waistline, pressed painfully against the small of his back, so he shifted slightly onto one side to relieve that pressure. Uncomfortable though it was, the Magnum was also reassuring.

As he considered the two men waiting for him on the road above, he was tempted to head farther north until he found untended cars elsewhere. He might be able to steal a vehicle from another place and leave the area before they decided he was gone.

On the other hand, he might walk a mile or two or three without discovering other cars parked beyond the view of their owners.

And it was unlikely that Sharp and his fellow agent would wait here very long. If Ben did not show up soon, they would wonder if they had misjudged him. They would start cruising, perhaps stopping now and then to get out and scan the woods on both sides of the road, and though he was better at these games than they were, he could not be sure that they would not surprise him somewhere along the way.

Right now, he had the advantage of surprise, for he knew where they were, while they had no idea where he was. He decided to make good use of that advantage.

First, he looked around for a smooth fist-sized rock, located one, and tested its weight in his hand. It felt right — substantial. He unbuttoned his shirt part of the way, slipped the rock inside against his belly, and rebuttoned.

With the semiautomatic Remington twelve-gauge in his right hand, he stealthily traversed the embankment, moving south until he felt that he was just below the rear end of their Chevrolet. Edging up to the top of the slope again, he found that he had estimated the distance perfectly: The rear bumper of their sedan was inches from his face.

Sharp's window was open — standard government cars seldom boasted air-conditioning — and Ben knew he had to make the final approach in absolute silence. If Sharp heard anything suspicious and looked out his window, or if he even glanced at his side-view mirror, he would see Ben scurrying behind the Chevy.

A convenient noise, just loud enough to provide cover, would be welcome, and Ben wished the wind would pick up a bit. A good strong gust, shaking the trees, would mask his—

Better yet, the sound of a car engine rose, approaching from the north, from behind the sedan. Ben waited tensely, and a gray Pontiac Firebird appeared from that direction. As the Firebird drew nearer, the sound of rock music grew louder: a couple of kids on a pleasure ride, windows open, cassette player blaring, Bruce Springsteen singing enthusiastically about love and cars and foundry workers. Perfect.

Just as the supercharged Firebird was passing the Chevy, when the noise of engine and Springsteen were loudest, and when Sharp's attention was almost certainly turned in a direction exactly opposite that of his side-view mirror, Ben scrambled quickly over the top of the embankment and crept behind the sedan. He stayed low, under their back window, so he would not be seen in the rearview mirror if the other DSA agent checked the road behind.

As the Firebird and Springsteen faded, Ben duck-walked to the left rear corner of the Chevy, took a deep breath, leaped to his feet, and pumped a round from the shotgun into the back tire on that side. The blast shattered the still mountain air with such power that it scared Ben even though he knew it was coming, and both men inside cried out in alarm. One of them shouted, “Stay down!” The car sagged toward the driver's side. His hands stinging from the recoil of the first shot, Ben fired again, strictly to scare them this time, putting the load low over the top of the car, just low enough so some of the shot skipped across the roof, which to those inside must have sounded like pellets impacting in the interior. Both men were down on the front seat, trying to stay out of the line of fire, a position which also made it impossible for them either to see Ben or to shoot at him.

He fired another round into the dirt shoulder as he ran, paused to blow out the front tire on the driver's side, causing the car to sag further in that direction. He pumped one more load into the same tire solely for dramatic effect — the thunderous crash of the shotgun had unnerved even him, so it must have paralyzed Sharp and the other guy — then glanced at the windshield to be sure both of his adversaries were still below the line of fire. He saw no sign of them, and he put his sixth and final shot through the glass, confident that he would not seriously hurt either man but would scare them badly enough to ensure that they would continue to hug the car seat for another half minute or so.

Even as the shotgun pellets were lodging in the back seat of the Chevy and the safety glass was still falling out into the front seat, Ben took three running steps, dropped flat to the ground, and pulled himself under the Dodge station wagon. When they got the courage to lift their heads, they would figure he had run into the woods on one side of the road or the other, where he was reloading and waiting to make another pass at them when they showed themselves. They would never expect to find him lying prostrate on the ground beneath the very next car in line.

His lungs tried to draw breath in great noisy gulps, but he forced himself to breathe slowly, easily, rhythmically, quietly.

He wanted to rub his hands and arms, which stung from firing the shotgun so rapidly and from such unusual positions. But he rubbed nothing, just endured, knowing the stinging and numbness would subside unattended.

After a while, he heard them talking back there, and then he heard a door open.

“Damn it, Peake, come on!” Sharp said.

Footsteps.

Ben turned his head to the right, looking out from beneath the station wagon. He saw Sharp's black Freeman wing tips appear beside the car. Ben owned a pair just like them. These were scuffed, and several spiky burrs clung to the laces.

On the left, no shoes appeared.

“Now, Peake!” Sharp said in a hoarse whisper that was as good as a shout.

Another door opened back there, followed by hesitant footsteps, and then shoes came into view at the left side of the station wagon as well. Peake's cheaper black oxfords were in even worse shape than Anson Sharp's shoes: mud was smeared over the tops of them and caked along the soles and heels, and there were twice as many burrs clinging to his laces.

The two men stood on opposite sides of the station wagon, neither of them speaking, just listening and looking.

Ben had the crazy idea that they would hear his pounding heart, for to him it sounded like a timpani.

“Might be ahead, between two of these cars, waiting to sandbag us,” Peake whispered.

“He's gone back into the woods,” Sharp said in a voice as soft as Peake's, but with scorn. “Probably watching us from cover right now, trying not to laugh.”

The smooth, fist-sized rock that Ben had tucked inside his shirt was pressing into his belly, but he did not shift his position for fear the slightest sound would give him away.

Finally Sharp and Peake moved together, paralleling each other, stepping out of sight. They were probably looking warily into all the cars and between them.

But they were not likely to get down on their knees and look underneath, because it was insane of Ben to hide there, flat on his belly, nearly helpless, with no quick way out, where he could be shot as easily as the proverbial fish in the barrel. If his risk paid off, he would throw them off his trail, send them sniffing in the wrong direction, and have a chance to boost one of these cars. However, if they thought he was dumb enough — or clever enough — to hide under the station wagon, he was a dead man.

Ben prayed that the owner of the wagon would not return at this inopportune moment and drive the heap away, leaving him exposed.

Sharp and Peake reached the front of the line of vehicles and, having found no enemy, returned, still walking on opposite sides of the cars. They spoke a bit louder now.

“You said he'd never shoot at us,” Peake remarked sourly.

“He didn't.”

“He shot at me, sure enough,” Peake said, his voice rising.

“He shot at the car.”

“What's the difference? We were in the car.”

They stopped beside the station wagon once more.

Ben looked left and right at their shoes, hoping he would not have to sneeze, cough, or fart.

Sharp said, “He shot at the tires. You see? No point disabling our transportation if he was going to kill us.”

“He shot out the windshield,” Peake said.

“Yeah, but we were staying down, out of the way, and he knew he wouldn't hit us. I tell you, he's a damn pussy, a prissy moralist, sees himself as the guy in the white hat. He'd shoot at us only if he had no choice, and he'd never shoot at us first. We'll have to start the action. Listen, Peake, if he'd wanted to kill us, he could have poked the barrel of that piece through either one of our side windows, could've taken us both out in two seconds flat. Think about it.”

They were both silent.

Peake was probably thinking about it.

Ben wondered what Sharp was thinking. He hoped Sharp wasn't thinking about Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter. He did not suppose there was much danger of that because he did not think Sharp had ever in his life read anything other than skin magazines.

“He's down in those woods,” Sharp said at last, turning his back on the station wagon, showing Ben his heels. “Down toward the lake. He can see us, now, I'll bet. Letting us make the next move.”

“We have to get another car,” Peake said.

“First you've got to go down in these woods, have a look around, see if you can flush him out.”

“Me?”

“You,” Sharp said.

“Sir, I'm not really dressed for that sort of thing. My shoes—”

“There's less underbrush here than there was up near Leben's cabin,” Sharp said. “You'll manage.”

Peake hesitated but finally said, “What'll you be doing while I'm poking around down there?”

“From here,” Sharp said, “I can look almost straight down through the trees, into the brush. If you get near him down there on his own level, he might be able to move away from you under the cover of rocks and bushes, without you getting a glimpse of him. But see, from up above here, I'm almost sure to see him moving. And when I do, I'll go straight for the bastard.”

Ben heard a peculiar noise, like a lid being unscrewed from a mayonnaise jar. For a moment he could not imagine what it was, then realized Sharp was taking the silencer off his pistol.

Sharp confirmed that suspicion. “Maybe the shotgun still gives him the advantage—”

“Maybe?” Peake said with amazement.

“—but there's two of us, two guns, and without silencers we'll get better range. Go on, Peake. Go down there and smoke him out for me.”

Peake seemed on the point of rebellion, but he went.

Ben waited.

A couple of cars passed on the road.

Ben remained very still, watching Anson Sharp's shoes. After a while, Sharp moved one step away from the car, which was as far as he could go in that direction, for one step put him at the very brink of the embankment that sloped down into the woods.

When the next car rumbled along, Ben used the cover of its engine noise to slip out from under the Dodge wagon on the driver's side, where he crouched against the front door, below window level. Now the station wagon was between him and Sharp.

Holding the shotgun in one hand, he opened a few buttons on his shirt. He withdrew the rock that he had found in the forest.

On the other side of the Dodge, Sharp moved.

Ben froze, listened.

Evidently Sharp had only been sidestepping along the edge of the embankment to keep Peake in sight below.

Ben knew he had to act swiftly. If another car came by, he would present quite a spectacle to anyone in it: a guy in filthy clothes, holding a rock in one hand and a shotgun in the other, with a revolver tucked into his waistband. With one tap of the horn, any passing driver could warn Sharp of the wild man at his back.

Rising up from a crouch, Ben looked across the station wagon, directly at the back of Sharp's head. If Sharp turned around now, one of them would have to shoot the other.

Ben waited tensely until he was certain that Sharp's attention was directed down toward the northwest portion of the woods. Then he pitched the round fist-sized rock as hard as he could, across the top of the car, very high, very wide of Sharp's head, so the wind of its passage would not draw the man's attention. He hoped Sharp would not see the rock in flight, hoped it would not hit a tree too soon but would fall far into the forest before impacting.

He was doing a lot of earnest hoping and praying lately.

Without waiting to see what happened, he dropped down beside the car again and heard his missile shredding pine boughs or brush and finally impacting with a resonant thunk.

“Peake!” Sharp called out. “Back of you, back of you. Over that way. Movement over there in those bushes, by the drainage cut.”

Ben heard a scrape and clatter and rustle that might have been Anson Sharp bolting off the top of the embankment and down into the forest. Suspecting that it was too good to be true, he rose warily.

Amazingly, Sharp was gone.

With the state route to himself, Ben hurried along the line of parked cars, trying doors. He found an unlocked four-year-old Chevette. It was a hideous bile-yellow heap with clashing green upholstery, but he was in no position to worry about style.

He got in, eased the door shut. He took the.357 Combat Magnum out of his waistband and put it on the seat, where he could reach it in a hurry. Using the stock of the shotgun, he hammered the ignition switch until he broke the key plate off the steering column.

He wondered if the noise carried beyond the car and down through the woods to Sharp and Peake.

Putting the Remington aside, he hastily pulled the ignition wires into view, crossed the two bare ends, and tramped on the accelerator. The engine sputtered, caught, raced.

Although Sharp probably had not heard the hammering, he surely heard the car starting, knew what it meant, and was without a doubt frantically climbing the embankment that he had just descended.

Ben disengaged the handbrake. He threw the Chevette in gear and pulled onto the road. He headed south because that was the way the car was facing, and he had no time to turn it around.

The hard, flat crack of a pistol sounded behind him.

He winced, pulled his head down on his shoulders, glanced in the rearview mirror, and saw Sharp lurching between the sedan and the Dodge station wagon out into the middle of the road, where he could line up a shot better.

“Too late, sucker,” Ben said, ramming the accelerator all the way to the floor.

The Chevette coughed as if it were a tubercular, spavined old dray horse being asked to run the Kentucky Derby.

A bullet clipped the rear bumper or maybe a fender, and the high-pitched skeeeeeeen sounded like the Chevette's startled bleat of pain.

The car stopped coughing and shuddering, surged forward at last, spewing a cloud of blue smoke in its wake.

In the rearview mirror, Anson Sharp dwindled beyond the smoke as if he were a demon tumbling back into Hades. He might have fired again, but Ben did not hear the shot over the scream of the Chevette's straining engine.

The road topped a hill and sloped down, turned to the right, sloped some more, and Ben slowed a bit. He remembered the sheriff's deputy at the sporting-goods store. The lawman might still be in the area. Ben figured he had used up so much good luck in his escape from Sharp that he would be tempting fate if he exceeded the speed limit in his eagerness to get away from Arrowhead. After all, he was in filthy clothes, driving a stolen car, carrying a shotgun and a Combat Magnum, so if he was stopped for speeding, he could hardly expect to be let off with just a fine.

He was on the road again. That was the most important thing now — staying on the road until he had caught up with Rachael either out on I-15 or in Vegas.

Rachael was going to be all right.

He was sure that she would be all right.

White clouds had moved in low under the blue summer sky. They were growing thicker. The edges of some of them were gunmetal-gray.

On both sides of the road, the forest settled deeper into darkness.

28 DESERT HEAT

Rachael reached Barstow at 3:40 Tuesday afternoon. She thought about pulling off I-15 to grab a sandwich; she had eaten only an Egg McMuffin this morning and two small candy bars purchased at the Arco service station before she'd gotten on the interstate. Besides, the morning's coffee and the recent can of Coke were working through her; she began to feel a vague need to use a rest room, but she decided to keep moving. Barstow was large enough to have a police department plus a California Highway Patrol substation. Though there was little chance that she would encounter police of any kind and be identified as the infamous traitor of whom the radio reporter had spoken, her hunger and bladder pressure were both too mild to justify the risk.

On the road between Barstow and Vegas, she would be relatively safe, for CHiPs were rarely assigned to that long stretch of lonely highway. In fact, the threat of being stopped for speeding was so small (and so well and widely understood) that the traffic moved at an average speed of seventy to eighty miles an hour. She pushed the Mercedes up to seventy, and other cars passed her, so she was confident that she would not be pulled over by a patrol car even in the unlikely event that one appeared.

She recalled a roadside rest stop with public facilities about thirty miles ahead. She could wait to use that bathroom. As for food, she was not going to risk malnutrition merely by postponing dinner until she got to Vegas.

Since coming through the El Cajon Pass, she had noticed that the number and size of the clouds were increasing, and the farther she drove into the Mojave, the more somber the heavens became. Previously the clouds had been all white, then white with pale gray beards, and now they were primarily gray with slate-dark streaks. The desert enjoyed little precipitation, but during the summer the skies could sometimes open as if in reenactment of the biblical story of Noah, sending forth a deluge that the barren earth was unprepared to absorb. For the majority of its course, the interstate was built above the runoff line, but here and there road signs warned flash floods. She was not particularly worried about being caught in a flood. However, she was concerned that a hard rain would slow her down considerably, and she was eager to make Vegas by six-fifteen or six-thirty.

She would not feel half safe until she was settled in Benny's shuttered motel. And she would not feel entirely safe until he was with her, the drapes drawn, the world locked out.

Minutes after leaving Barstow, she passed the exit for Calico. Once the service stations and motels and restaurants at that turnoff were behind her, virtually unpeopled emptiness lay ahead for the next sixty miles, until the tiny town of Baker. The interstate and the traffic upon it were the only proof that this was an inhabited planet rather than a sterile, lifeless hunk of rock orbiting silently in a sea of cold space.

As this was a Tuesday, traffic was light, more trucks than cars. Thursday through Monday, tens of thousands of people were on their way to and from Vegas. Frequently, Fridays and Sundays, the traffic was so heavy that it looked startlingly anachronistic in this wasteland — as if all the commuters from a great city had been simultaneously transported back in time to a barren era prior to the Mesozoic epoch. But now, on several occasions, Rachael's was the only vehicle in sight on her side of the divided highway.

She drove over a skeletal landscape of scalped hills and bony plains, where white and gray and umber rock poked up like exposed ribs — like clavicles and scapulae, radii and ulnae, here an ilium, there a femur, here two fibulae, and over there a cluster of tarsals and metatarsals — as if the land were a burial ground for giants of another age, the graves reopened by centuries of wind. The many-armed Joshua trees — like monuments to Shiva — and the other cactuses of the higher desert were not to be found in these lower and hotter regions. The vegetation was limited to some worthless scrub, here and there a patch of dry brown bunchgrass. Mostly the Mojave was sand, rock, alkaline plains, and solidified lava beds. In the distance, to the north, were the Calico mountains, and still farther north the Granite Mountains rose purple and majestic at the horizon, and far to the southeast were the Cady Mountains: all appeared to be stark, hard-edged monoliths of bare and forbidding stofie.

At 4:10, she reached the roadside rest area that she had recalled when deciding not to stop in Barstow. She slowed, left the highway, and drove into a large empty parking lot. She stopped in front of a low concrete-block building that housed men's and women's rest rooms. To the right of the rest rooms, a piece of ground was shaded by sturdy metal latticework on four eight-foot metal poles, and under that sun-foiling shelter were three picnic tables. The scrub and bunchgrass were cleared away from the surrounding area, leaving clean bare sand, and blue garbage cans with hinged lids bore polite requests in white block letters — please do not litter.

She got out of the Mercedes, taking only the keys and her purse, leaving the thirty-two and the boxes of ammunition hidden under the driver's seat, where she had put them when she stopped for gas at the entrance to I-15. She closed the door, locked it more from habit than out of necessity.

For a moment she looked up at the sky, which was ninety percent concealed behind steel-gray clouds, as if it were girdling itself in armor. The day remained very hot, between ninety and one hundred degrees, although two hours ago, before the cloud cover settled in, the temperature had surely been ten or even twenty degrees higher.

Out on the interstate, two enormous eighteen-wheelers roared by, heading east, ripping apart the desert's quiet fabric but laying down an even more seamless cloth of silence in their wake.

Walking to the door of the women's rest room, she passed a sign that warned travelers to watch out for rattlesnakes. She supposed they liked to slither in from the desert and stretch full-length on the sunbaked concrete sidewalks.

The rest room was hot, ventilated only by jalousie windows set high in the walls, but at least it had been cleaned recently. The place smelled of pine-scented disinfectant. She also detected the limey odor of concrete that had cooked too long in the fierce desert sun.

Eric ascended slowly from an intense and vivid dream — or perhaps an unthinkably ancient racial memory — in which he was something other than a man. He was crawling inside a rough-walled burrow, not his own but that of some other creature, creeping downward, following a musky scent with the sure knowledge that succulent eggs of some kind could be found and devoured in the gloom below. A pair of glowing amber eyes in the inkiness was the first indication he had of resistance to his plans. A warm-blooded furry beast, well armed with teeth and claws, rushed at him to protect its subterranean nest, and he was suddenly engaged in a fierce battle that was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. Cold, reptilian fury filled him, making him forget the hunger that had driven him in search of eggs. In the darkness, he and his adversary bit, tore, and lashed at each other. Eric hissed — the other squealed and spat — and he inflicted more ruinous wounds than he received, until the burrow filled with the exciting stink of blood and feces and urine…

Regaining human consciousness, Eric realized that the car was no longer moving. He had no idea how long it had been stopped — maybe only a minute or two, maybe hours. Struggling against the hypnotic pull of the dreamworld that he'd just left, wanting to retreat back into that thrillingly violent and reassuringly simple place of primal needs and pleasures, he bit down on his lower lip to clear his head and was startled — but, on consideration, not surprised — to find that his teeth seemed sharper than they had been previously. He listened for a moment, but he heard no voices or other noises outside. He wondered if they had gone all the way to Vegas and if the car was now parked in the motel garage where Shadway had told Rachael to put it.

The cold, inhuman rage that he had felt in his dream was in him still, although redirected now from an amber-eyed, burrow-dwelling little mammal to Rachael. His hatred of her was overwhelming, and his need to get his hands on her — tear out her throat, rip open her guts — was building toward a frenzy.

He fumbled in the pitch-black trunk for the screwdriver. Though there was no more light than before, he did not seem quite as blind as he had been. If he was not actually seeing the vague dimensions of his Stygian cell, then he was evidently apprehending them with some newfound sixth sense, for he possessed at least a threshold awareness of the position and features of each metal wall. He also perceived the screwdriver lying against the wall near his knees, and when he reached down to test the validity of that perception, he put his hand on the ribbed Lucite handle of the tool.

He popped the trunk lid.

Light speared in. For a moment his eyes stung, then adjusted.

He pushed the lid up.

He was surprised to see the desert.

He climbed out of the trunk.

Rachael washed her hands at the sink — there was hot water but no soap — and dried them in the blast of the hot-air blower that was provided in lieu of paper towels.

Outside, as the heavy door closed behind her, she saw that no rattlesnakes had taken up residence on the walkway. She went only three steps before she also saw that the trunk of the Mercedes was open wide.

She stopped, frowning. Even if the trunk had not been locked, the lid could not have slipped its catch spontaneously.

Suddenly she knew: Eric.

Even as his name flashed through her mind, he appeared at the corner of the building, fifteen feet away from her. He stopped and stared as if the sight of her riveted him as much as she was frozen by the sight of him.

It was Eric, yet it was not Eric.

She stared at him, horrified and disbelieving, not immediately able to comprehend his bizarre metamorphosis, yet sensing that the manipulation of his genetic structure had somehow resulted in these monstrous changes. His body appeared deformed; however, because of his clothing, it was hard to tell precisely what had happened to him. Something was different about his knee joints and his hips. And he was hunchbacked: his red plaid shirt was straining at the seams to contain the mound that had risen from shoulder to shoulder. His arms had grown two or three inches, which would have been obvious even if his knobby and strangely jointed wrists had not thrust out beyond his shirt cuffs. His hands looked fearfully powerful, deformed by human standards, yet with a suggestion of suppleness and dexterity; they were mottled yellow-brown-gray; the hugely knuckled and elongated fingers terminated in claws; in places, his skin seemed to have been supplanted by pebbly scales.

His strangely altered face was the worst thing about him. Every aspect of his once-handsome countenance was changed, yet just enough of his familiar features remained to leave him recognizable. Bones had re-formed, becoming broader and flatter in some places, narrower and more rounded in others, heavier over and under his now-sunken eyes and through his jawline, which was prognathous. A hideous serrated bony ridge had formed up the center of his lumpish brow and — diminishing — trailed across the top of his scalp.

“Rachael,” he said.

His voice was low, vibratory, and hoarse. She thought there was a mournful, even melancholy, note in it.

On his thickened forehead were twin conical protrusions that appeared to be half formed, although they seemed destined to be horns the size of Rachael's thumb when they were finished growing. Horns would have made no sense at all to her if the patches of scaly flesh on his hands had not been matched by patches on his face and by wattles of dark leathery skin under his jaw and along his neck in the manner of certain reptiles; a few lizards had horns, and perhaps at some point in mankind's distant beginnings, evolution had included an amphibian stage boasting such protuberances (though that seemed unlikely). Other elements of his tortured visage were human, while still others were apelike. She dimly began to perceive that tens of millions of years of genetic heritage had been unleashed within him, that every stage of evolution was fighting for control of him at the same time; long-abandoned forms — a multitude of possibilities — were struggling to reassert themselves as if his tissues were just so much putty.

“Rachael,” he repeated but still did not move. “I want… I want…” He could not seem to find the words to finish the thought, or perhaps he simply did not know what it was he wanted.

She could not move, either, partly because she was paralyzed by terror but partly because she desperately wanted to understand what had happened to him. If in fact he was being pulled in opposing directions by the many racial memories within his genes, if he was devolving toward a subhuman state while his modern form and intellect strove to retain dominance of its tissues, then it seemed every change in him should be functional, with a purpose obviously connected to one prehuman form or another. However, that did not appear to be the case. In his face, pulsing arteries and gnarled veins and bony excrescences and random concavities seemed to exist without reason, with no connection to any known creature on the evolutionary ladder. The same was true of the hump on his back. She suspected that, in addition to the reassertion of various forms from human biological heritage, mutated genes were causing purposeless changes in him or, perhaps, were pushing him toward some alien life-form utterly different from the human species.

“Rachael…”

His teeth were sharp.

“Rachael…”

The gray-blue irises of his eyes were no longer perfectly round but were tending toward a vertical-oval shape like those in the eyes of serpents. Not all the way there, yet. Apparently still in the middle of metamorphosis. But no longer quite the eyes of a man.

“Rachael…”

His nose seemed to have collapsed part of the way into his face, and the nostrils were more exposed than before.

“Rachael… please… please…” He held one monstrous hand toward her in a pathetic gesture, and in his raspy voice was a note of misery and another of self-pity. But there was an even more obvious and more affecting note of love and longing that seemed to surprise him every bit as much as it surprised her. “Please… please… I want…”

“Eric,” she said, her own voice almost as strange as his, twisted by fear and weighted down with sadness. “What do you want?”

“I want… I… I want… not to be…”

“Yes?”

“… afraid…”

She did not know what to say.

He took one step toward her.

She immediately backed up.

He took another step, and she saw that he was having a little trouble with his feet, as if they had changed within his boots and were no longer comfortable in that confinement.

Again she retreated to match his advance.

Squeezing the words out as if it were agony to form and expel them, he said, “I want… you…”

“Eric,” she said softly, pityingly.

“… you… you…”

He took three quick, lurching steps; she scampered four backward.

In that voice fit for a man trapped in hell, he said, “Don't… don't reject me… don't… Rachael, don't…”

“Eric, I can't help you.”

“Don't reject me.”

“You're beyond help, Eric.”

“Don't reject me… again.”

She had no weapons, just her car keys in one hand and her purse in the other, and she cursed herself for leaving the pistol in the Mercedes. She backed farther away from him.

With a savage cry of rage that made Rachael go cold in the late-June heat, Eric came at her in a headlong rush.

She threw her purse at his head, turned, and sprinted into the desert behind the comfort station. The soft sand shifted under her feet, and a couple of times she almost twisted an ankle, almost fell, and the sparse scrub brush whipped at her legs and almost tripped her, but she did not fall, kept going, ran fast as the wind, tucked her head down, drew her elbows in to her sides, ran, ran for her life.

When confronting Rachael on the walk beside the rest rooms, Eric's initial reaction had surprised him. Seeing her beautiful face, her titian hair, and her lovely body beside which he had once lain, Eric was unexpectedly overcome with remorse for the way he had treated her and was filled with an unbearable sense of loss. The primal fury that had been churning in him abruptly subsided, and more human emotions held sway, though tenuously. Tears stung his eyes. He found it difficult to speak, not only because changes within his throat made speech more difficult, but because he was choked up with regret and grief and a sudden crippling loneliness.

But she rejected him again, confirming the worst suspicions he had of her and jolting him out of his anguish and self-pity. Like a wave of dark water filled with churning ice, the cold rage of an ancient consciousness surged into him again. The desire to stroke her hair, to gently touch her smooth skin, to take her in his arms — that vanished instantly and was replaced by something stronger than desire, by a profound need to kill her. He wanted to gut her, bury his mouth in her still-warm flesh, and finally proclaim his triumph by urinating on her lifeless remains. He threw himself at her, still wanting her but for different purposes.

She ran, and he pursued.

Instinct, racial memory of countless other pursuits — memories not only in the recesses of his mind but flowing in his blood — gave him an advantage. He would bring her down. It was only a matter of time.

She was fast, this arrogant animal, but they were always fast when propelled by terror and the survival instinct, fast for a while but not forever. And in their fear, the hunted were never as cunning as the hunter. Experience assured him of that.

He wished that he had taken off the boots, for they restricted him now. But his own adrenaline level was so high that he had blocked out the pain in his cramped toes and twisted heels; temporarily the discomfort did not register.

The prey fled south, though nothing in that direction offered the smallest hope of sanctuary. Between them and the faraway mountains, the inhospitable land was home only to things that crawled and crept and slithered, things that bit and stung and sometimes ate their own young to stay alive.

Having run only a few hundred yards, Rachael was already gasping for breath. Her legs felt leaden.

She was not out of shape; it was just that the desert heat was so fierce it virtually had substance, and running through it seemed almost as bad as trying to run through water. For the most part, the heat did not come down from above, because all but a sliver or two of sky was clouded over. Instead, the heat came up, rising from the scorching sand that had been baking in the now-hidden sun, storing that terrific heat since dawn, until the clouds had arrived within the last hour or so. The day was still warm, ninety degrees, but the air rising off the sand must have been well over a hundred. She felt as if she were running across a furnace grate.

She glanced back.

Eric was about twenty yards behind her.

She looked straight ahead and pushed harder, really pumping her legs, putting everything she had into it, crashing through that wall of heat, only to find endless other walls beyond it, sucking in hot air until her mouth went dry and her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and her throat began to crack and her lungs began to burn. A natural hedge line of stunted mesquite lay ahead, extending twenty or thirty yards to the left, an equal distance to the right. She didn't want to detour around it, because she was afraid she'd lose ground to Eric. The mesquite was only knee high, and as far as she could see it was neither too solid nor too deep, so she plunged through the hedge, whereupon it proved to be deeper than it looked, fifteen or twenty feet across, and also somewhat more tightly grown than it appeared. The spiky, oily plant poked at her legs and snagged her jeans and delayed her with such tenacity that it seemed to be sentient and in league with Eric. Her racing heart began to pound harder, too hard, slamming against her breastbone. Then she was through the hedge, with hundreds of bits of mesquite bark and leaves stuck on her jeans and socks. She increased her pace again, gushing sweat, blinking salty streams of the same effluvient from her eyes before it could blur her vision too much, tasting it at the corners of her mouth. If she kept pouring at this rate, she'd dehydrate dangerously. Already she saw whirls of color at the periphery of her vision, felt a flutter of nausea in her stomach, and sensed incipient dizziness that might abruptly overwhelm her. But she kept pumping her legs, streaking across the barren land, because there was absolutely nothing else she could do.

She glanced back again.

Eric was closer. Only fifteen yards now.

At great cost, Rachael reached into herself and found a little more strength, a little more energy, an additional measure of stamina.

The ground, no longer treacherously soft, hardened into a wide flat sheet of exposed rock. The rock had been abraded by centuries of blowing sand that had carved hundreds of fine, elaborate whorls in its surface — the fingerprints of the wind. It provided good traction, and she picked up speed again. Soon, however, her reserves would be used up, and dehydration would set in — though she dared not think about that. Positive thinking was the key, so she thought positively for fifty more strides, confident of widening the gap between them.

The third time she glanced back, she loosed an involuntary cry of despair.

Eric was closer. Ten yards.

That was when she tripped and fell.

The rock ended, and sand replaced it. Because she had not been looking down and had not seen that the ground was going to change, she twisted her left ankle. She tried to stay up, tried to keep going, but the twist had destroyed her rhythm. The same ankle twisted again the very next time she put that foot down. She shouted—"No!" — and pitched to the left, rolled across a few weeds, stones, and clumps of crisp bunchgrass.

She wound up at the brink of a big arroyo — a naturally carved water channel through the desert, which was a roaring river during a flash flood but dry most of the time, dry now — about fifty feet across, thirty deep, with walls that sloped but only slightly. Even as she stopped rolling at the arroyo, she took in the situation, saw what she must do, did it: She threw herself over the brink, rolling again, down the steep wall this time, desperately hoping to avoid sharp rocks and rattlesnakes.

It was a bruising descent, and she hit bottom with enough force to knock half the wind out of her. Nevertheless, she scrambled to her feet, looked up, and saw Eric — or the thing that Eric had become — staring down at her from the top of the arroyo wall. He was just thirty or thirty-five feet above her, but thirty vertical feet seemed like more distance than thirty horizontally measured feet; it was as if she were standing in a city street, with him peering down from the roof of a three-story building. Her boldness and his hesitation had gained her some time. If he had rolled down right behind her, he very likely would have caught her by now.

She had won a brief reprieve, and she had to make the best of it. Turning right, she ran along the flat bed of the arroyo, favoring her twisted ankle. She did not know where the arroyo would lead her. But she stayed on the move and kept her eyes open for something that she could easily turn to her advantage, something that would save her, something…

Something.

Anything.

What she needed was a miracle.

She expected Eric to plunge down the wall of the gulch when she began to run, but he did not. Instead, he stayed up there at the edge of the channel, running alongside the brink, looking down at her, matching her progress step for step.

She supposed he was looking for an advantage of his own.

29 REMADE MEN

With the help of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, which provided a patrol car and a deputy to drive it, Sharp and Peake were back in Palm Springs by four-thirty Tuesday afternoon. They took two rooms in a motel along Palm Canyon Drive.

Sharp called Nelson Gosser, the agent who had been left on duty at Eric Leben's Palm Springs house. Gosser bought bathrobes for Peake and Sharp, took their clothes to a one-hour laundry and dry cleaner, and brought them two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken with coleslaw, fries, and biscuits.

While Sharp and Peake had been at Lake Arrowhead, Rachael Leben's red Mercedes 560 SL had been found, with one flat tire, behind an empty house a few blocks west of Palm Canyon Drive. Also, the blue Ford that Shadway had been driving in Arrowhead was traced to an airport rental agency. Of course, neither car offered any hope of a lead.

Sharp called the airport and spoke with the pilot of the Bell JetRanger. Repairs on the chopper were nearly completed. It would be fully fueled and at the deputy director's disposal within an hour.

Avoiding the french fries because he believed that eating them was begging for heart disease, ignoring the coleslaw because it had turned sour last April, he peeled the crisp and greasy breading off the fried chicken and ate just the meat, no fatty skin, while he made a number of other calls to subordinates at the Geneplan labs in Riverside and at several places in Orange County. More than sixty agents were on the case. He could not speak to all of them, but by contacting six, he got a detailed picture of where the various aspects of the investigation were going.

Where they were going was nowhere.

Lots of questions, no answers. Where was Eric Leben? Where was Ben Shadway? Why hadn't Rachael Leben been with Shadway at the cabin above Lake Arrowhead? Where had she gone? Where was she now? Was there any danger of Shadway and Mrs. Leben putting their hands on the kind of proof that could blow Wildcard wide open?

Considering all of those urgent unanswered questions and the humiliating failure of the expedition to Arrowhead, most other men would have had little appetite, but with gusto Anson Sharp worked through the last of the chicken and biscuits. And considering that he had put his entire future at risk by virtually subordinating the agency's goals in this case to his own personal vendetta against Ben Shadway, it seemed unlikely that he would be able to lie down and enjoy the deep and untroubled sleep of an innocent child. But as he turned back the covers on the queen-sized motel bed, he had no fear of insomnia. He was always able to sleep the moment he rested his head on the pillow, regardless of the circumstances.

He was, after all, a man whose only passion was himself, whose only commitment was to himself, whose only interests lay in those things which impinged directly upon him. Therefore, taking care of himself — eating well, sleeping, staying fit, and maintaining a good appearance — was of paramount importance. Besides, truly believing himself to be superior to other men and favored by fate, he could not be devastated by any setback, for he was certain that bad luck and disappointment were transitory conditions, insignificant anomalies in his otherwise smooth and ever-ascending path to greatness and acclaim.

Before slipping into bed, Sharp sent Nelson Gosser to deliver some instructions to Peake. Then he directed the motel switchboard to hold all calls, pulled the drapes shut, took off his robe, fluffed his pillow, and stretched out on the mattress.

Staring at the dark ceiling, he thought of Shadway and laughed.

Poor Shadway must be wondering how in the hell a man could be court-martialed and dismissed from the Marine Corps with a dishonorable discharge and still become a DSA agent. That was the primary problem with good old pure-hearted Ben: He labored under the misconception that some behavior was moral and some immoral, that good deeds were rewarded and that, ultimately at least, bad deeds brought misery down upon the heads of those committing them.

But Anson Sharp knew there was no justice in the abstract, that you had to fear retribution from others only if you allowed them to retaliate, and that altruism and fair play were not automatically rewarded. He knew that morality and immorality were meaningless concepts; your choices in life were not between good and evil but between those things that would benefit you and those things that would not. And only a fool would do anything that did not benefit him or that benefited someone else more than it did him. Looking out for number one was all that counted, and any decision or action that benefited number one was good, regardless of its effect on others.

With his actions limited only by that extremely accommodating philosophy, he'd found it relatively easy to erase the dishonorable discharge from his record. His respect for computers and knowledge of their capabilities were also invaluable.

In Vietnam, Sharp had been able to steal large quantities of PX and USO-canteen supplies with astonishing success because one of his coconspirators — Corporal Eugene Dalmet — was a computer operator in the division quartermaster's office. With the computer, he and Gene Dalmet were able to accurately track all supplies within the system and choose the perfect place and time at which to intercept them. Later, Dalmet often managed to erase all record of a stolen shipment from the computer; then, through computer-generated orders, he was able to direct unwitting supply clerks to destroy the paper files relating to that shipment — so no one could prove the theft had ever occurred because no one could prove there had been anything to steal in the first place. In this brave new world of bureaucrats and high technology, it seemed that nothing was actually real unless there were paperwork and extensive computer data to support its existence. The scheme worked wonderfully until Ben Shadway started nosing around.

Shipped back to the States in disgrace, Sharp was not despairing because he took with him the uplifting knowledge of the computer's wondrous talent for remaking records and rewriting history. He was sure he could use it to remake his reputation as well.

For six months he took courses in computer programming, worked at it day and night, to the exclusion of all else, until he was not only a first-rate operator-programmer but a hacker of singular skill and cleverness. And those were the days when the word hacker had not yet been invented.

He landed a job with Oxelbine Placement, an executive-employment agency large enough to require a computer programmer but small and low-profile enough to be unconcerned about the damage to its image that might result from hiring a man with a dishonorable discharge. All Oxelbine cared about was that he had no civilian criminal record and was highly qualified for his work in a day when the computer craze had not yet hit the public, leaving businesses hungry for people with advanced data-processing skills.

Oxelbine had a direct link with the main computer at TRW, the largest credit-investigating firm. The TRW files were the primary source for local and national credit-rating agencies. Oxelbine paid TRW for information about executives who applied to it for placement and, whenever possible, reduced costs by selling to TRW information that TRW did not process. In addition to his work for Oxelbine, Sharp secretly probed at TRW's computer, seeking the scheme of its data-encoding system. He used a tedious trial-and-error approach that would be familiar to any hacker a decade later, though in those days the process was slower because the computers were slower. In time, however, he learned how to access any credit files at TRW and, more important, discovered how to add and delete data. The process was easier then than it would be later because, in those days, the need for computer security had not yet been widely recognized. Accessing his own dossier, he changed his Marine discharge from dishonorable to honorable, even gave himself a few service commendations, promoted himself from sergeant to lieutenant, and cleaned up a number of less important negatives on his credit record. Then he instructed TRW's computer to order a destruction of the company's existing hard-copy file on him and to replace it with a file based on the new computer record.

No longer stigmatized by the dishonorable-discharge notation on his credit record, he was able to obtain a new job with a major defense contractor, General Dynamics. The position was clerical and did not require security clearance, so he avoided coming under the scrutiny of the FBI and the GAO, both of which had linkages with an array of Defense Department computers that would have turned up his true military history. Using the Hughes computer's links with those same Defense Department systems, Sharp was eventually able to access his service records at the Marine Corps Office of Personnel (MCOP) and change them as he had changed his file at TRW. Thereafter, it was a simple matter to have the MCOP computer issue an order for the destruction of the hard copy of Sharp's Marine records and replacement with the “updated, corrected, and amended” file.

The FBI maintained its own records of men involved in criminal activity while in military service. It used these for cross-checking suspects in civilian criminal cases — and when required to conduct an investigation of a federal job applicant who was in need of a security clearance. Having compromised the MCOP computer, Sharp directed it to send a copy of his new records to the FBI, along with a notation that his previous file contained “serious inaccuracies of libelous nature, requiring its immediate destruction.” In those days, before anyone had heard of hackers or realized the vulnerability of electronic data, people believed what computers told them; even bureau agents, trained to be suspicious, believed computers. Sharp was relatively confident that his deception would succeed.

A few months later, he applied to the Defense Security Agency for a position in its training program, and waited to see if his campaign to remake his reputation had succeeded. It had. He was accepted into the DS A after passing an FBI investigation of his past and character. Thereafter, with the dedication of a true powermonger and the cunning of a natural-born Machiavelli, he had begun a lightning-fast ascent through the DSA. It didn't hurt that he was able to use that computer to improve his agency records by inserting forged commendations and exceptional service notations from senior officers after they were killed in the line of duty or died of natural causes and were unable to dispute those postdated tributes.

Sharp had decided that he could be tripped up only by a handful of men who'd served with him in Vietnam and had participated in his court-martial. Therefore, after joining the DSA, he began keeping track of those who posed a threat. Three had been killed in Nam after Sharp was shipped home. Another died years later in Jimmy Carter's ill-conceived attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages. Another died of natural causes. Another was shot in the head in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he'd opened an all-night convenience store after retiring from the Marines and where he'd had the misfortune to be clerking when a Benzedrine-crazed teenager tried to commit armed robbery. Three other men — each capable of revealing Sharp's true past and destroying him — returned to Washington after the war and began careers in the State Department, FBI, and Justice Department. With great care — but without delay, lest they discover Sharp at the DSA — he planned the murder of all three and executed those plans without a hitch.

Four others who knew the truth about him were still alive — including Shadway — but none of them was involved in government or seemed likely to discover him at the DSA. Of course, if he ascended to the director's chair, his name would more often appear in the news, and enemies like Shadway might be more likely to hear of him and try to bring him down. He had known for some time that those four must die sooner or later. When Shadway had gotten mixed up in the Leben case, Sharp had seen it as yet one more gift of fate, additional proof that he, Sharp, was destined to rise as far as he wished to go.

Given his own history, Sharp was not surprised to learn of Eric Leben's self-experimentation. Others professed amazement or shock at Leben's arrogance in attempting to break the laws of God and nature by cheating death. But long ago Sharp had learned that absolutes like Truth — or Right or Wrong or Justice or even Death — were no longer so absolute in this high-tech age. Sharp had remade his reputation by the manipulation of electrons, and Eric Leben had attempted to remake himself from a corpse into a living man by the manipulation of his own genes, and to Sharp it was all part of the same wondrous enchiridion to be found in the sorcerer's bag of twentieth-century science.

Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.

Sleep eluded Jerry Peake for a while. He had not been to bed in twenty-four hours, had chased up and down mountains, had achieved two or three shattering insights, and had been exhausted when they got back to Palm Springs a short while ago, too exhausted to eat any of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that Nelson Gosser supplied. He was still exhausted, but he could not sleep.

For one thing, Gosser had brought a message from Sharp to the effect that Peake was to catch two hours of shut-eye and be ready for action by seven-thirty this evening, which gave him half an hour to shower and dress after he woke. Two hours! He needed ten. It hardly seemed worth lying down if he had to get up again so soon.

Besides, he was no nearer to finding a way out of the nasty moral dilemma that had plagued him all day: serve as an accomplice to murder at Sharp's demand and thereby further his career at the cost of his soul; or pull a gun on Sharp if that became necessary, thus ruining his career but saving his soul. The latter course seemed an obvious choice, except that if he pulled a gun on Sharp he might be shot and killed. Sharp was cleverer and quicker than Peake, and Peake knew it. He had hoped that his failure to shoot at Shadway would have put him in such disfavor with the deputy director that he would be booted off the case, dropped with disgust, which would not have been good for his career but would sure have solved this dilemma. But Sharp's talons were deep in Jerry Peake now, and Peake reluctantly acknowledged that there would be no easy way out.

What most bothered him was the certainty that a smarter man than he would already have found a way to use this situation to his great advantage. Having never known his mother, having been unloved by his sullen widowed father, having been unpopular in school because he was shy and introverted, Jerry Peake had long dreamed of remaking himself from a loser into a winner, from a nobody into a legend, and now his chance had come to start the climb, but he did not know what to do with the opportunity.

He tossed. He turned.

He planned and schemed and plotted against Sharp and for his own success, but his plans and schemes and plots repeatedly fell apart under the weight of their own poor conception and naïveté. He wanted so badly to be George Smiley or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, but what he felt like was Sylvester the Cat witlessly plotting to capture and eat the infinitely clever Tweetie Bird.

His sleep was filled with nightmares of falling off ladders and off roofs and out of trees while pursuing a macabre canary that had Anson Sharp's face.

Ben had wasted time ditching the stolen Chevette at Silverwood Lake and finding another car to steal. It would be suicidal to keep the Chevette when Sharp had both its description and license number. He finally located a new black Merkur parked at the head of a long footpath that led down to the lake, out of sight of its fisherman owner. The doors were locked, but the windows were open a crack for ventilation. He had found a wire coat hanger in the trunk of the Chevette — along with an incredible collection of other junk — and he had brought it along for just this sort of emergency. He'd used it to reach through the open top of the window and pop the door latch, then had hot-wired the Merkur and headed for Interstate 15.

He did not reach Barstow until four forty-five. He had already arrived at the unnerving conclusion that he would never be able to catch up to Rachael on the road. Because of Sharp, he had lost too much time. When the lowering sky released a few fat drops of rain, he realized that a storm would slow the Merkur down even more than the reliably maneuverable Mercedes, widening the gap between him and Rachael. So he swung off the lightly trafficked interstate, into the heart of Barstow, and used a telephone booth at a Union 76 station to call Whitney Gavis in Las Vegas.

He would tell Whitney about Eric Leben hiding in the trunk of Rachael's car. With any luck at all, Rachael would not stop on the road, would not give Eric an easy opportunity to go after her, so the dead man would wait in his hidey-hole until they were all the way into Vegas. There, forewarned, Whit Gavis could fire about six rounds of heavy buckshot into the trunk as Eric opened it from the inside, and Rachael, never having realized she was in danger, would be safe.

Everything was going to be all right.

Whit would take care of everything.

Ben finished tapping in the number, using his AT&T card for the call, and in a moment Whit's phone began to ring a hundred and sixty miles away.

The storm was still having trouble breaking. Only a few big drops of rain spattered against the glass walls of the booth.

The phone rang, rang.

The previously milky clouds had curdled into immense gray-black thunderheads, which in turn had formed still-darker, knotted, more malignant masses that were moving at great speed toward the southeast.

The phone rang again and again and again.

Be there, damn it, Ben thought.

But Whit was not there, and wishing him home would not make it true. On the twentieth ring, Ben hung up.

For a moment he stood in the telephone booth, despairing, not sure what to do.

Once, he'd been a man of action, with never a doubt in a crisis. But in reaction to various unsettling discoveries about the world he lived in, he had tried to remake himself into a different man — student of the past, train fancier. He had failed in that remake, a failure that recent events had made eminently clear: He could not just stop being the man he had once been. He accepted that now. And he had thought that he had lost none of his edge. But he realized that all those years of pretending to be someone else had dulled him. His failure to look in the Mercedes's trunk before sending Rachael away, his current despair, his confusion, his sudden lack of direction were all proof that too much pretending had its deadly effect.

Lightning sizzled across the swollen black heavens, but even that scalpel of light did not split open the belly of the storm.

He decided there was nothing to be done but hit the road, head for Vegas, hope for the best, though hope seemed futile now. He could stop in Baker, sixty miles ahead, and try Whit's number again.

Maybe his luck would change.

It had to change.

He opened the door of the booth and ran to the stolen Merkur.

Again, lightning blasted the charred sky.

A cannonade of thunder volleyed back and forth between the sky and the waiting earth.

The air stank of ozone.

He got in the car, slammed the door, started the engine, and the storm finally broke, throwing a million tons of water down upon the desert in a sudden deluge.

30 RATTLESNAKES

Rachael had been following the bottom of the wide arroyo for what seemed miles but was probably only a few hundred yards. The illusion of greater distance resulted partly from the hot pain in her twisted ankle, which was subsiding but only slowly.

She felt trapped in a maze through which she might forever search futilely for a nonexistent exit. Narrower arroyos branched off the primary channel, all on the right-hand side. She considered pursuing another gulch, but each intersected the main run at an angle, so she couldn't see how far they extended. She was afraid of deviating into one, only to encounter a dead end within a short distance.

To her left, three stories above, Eric hurried along the brink of the arroyo, following her limping progress as if he were the mutant master of the maze in a Dungeons and Dragons game. If and when he started down the arroyo wall, she would have to turn and immediately climb the opposite wall, for she now knew she could not hold her own in a chase. Her only chance of survival was to get above him and find some rocks to hurl down on him as he ascended in her wake. She hoped he would not come after her for a few more minutes, because she needed time for the pain in her ankle to subside further before testing it in a climb.

Distant thunder sounded from Barstow in the west: one long peal, another, then a third that was louder than the first two. The sky over this part of the desert was gray and soot-black, as if heaven had caught fire, burned, and was now composed only of ashes and cold black coals. The burnt-out sky had settled lower as well, until it almost seemed to be a lid that was going to come down all the way and clamp tightly over the top of the arroyo. A warm wind whistled mournfully and moaned up there on the surface of the Mojave, and some gusts found their way down into the channel, flinging bits of sand in Rachael's face. The storm already under way in the west had not reached here yet, but it would arrive soon; a pre-storm scent was heavy in the air, and the atmosphere had the electrically charged feeling that preceded a hard rain.

She rounded a bend and was startled by a pile of dry tumbleweeds that had rolled into the gulch from the desert above. Stirred by a downdraft, they moved rapidly toward her with a scratchy sound, almost a hiss, as if they were living creatures. She tried to sidestep those bristly brown balls, stumbled, and fell full-length into the powdery silt that covered the floor of the channel. Falling, she feared for the ankle she had already hurt, but fortunately she did not twist it again.

Even as she fell, she heard more noise behind her. She thought for a moment that the sound was made by the tumbleweeds still rubbing against one another in their packlike progress along the arroyo, but a harder clatter alerted her to the true source of the noise. When she looked back and up, she saw that Eric had started down the wall of the gulch. He'd been waiting for her to fall or to encounter an obstacle; now that she was down, he was swiftly taking advantage of her bad luck. He had descended a third of the incline and was still on his feet, for the slope was not quite as steep here as it had been where Rachael had rolled over the edge. As he came, he dislodged a minor avalanche of dirt and stones, but the wall of the arroyo did not give way entirely. In a minute he would reach the bottom and then, in ten steps, would be on top of her.

Rachael pushed up from the ground, ran toward the other wall of the gulch, intending to climb it, but realized she had dropped her car keys. She might never find her way back to the car; in fact, she'd probably either be brought down by Eric or get lost in the wasteland, but if by some miracle she did reach the Mercedes, she had to have the keys.

Eric was almost halfway down the slope, descending through dust that rose from the slide he had started.

Frantically looking for the keys, she returned to the place where she'd fallen, and at first she couldn't see them. Then she glimpsed the shiny notched edges poking out of the powdery brown silt, almost entirely buried. Evidently she'd fallen atop the keys, pressing them into the soft soil. She snatched them up.

Eric was more than halfway to the arroyo floor.

He was making a strange sound: a thin, shrill cry — half stage whisper, half shriek.

Thunder pounded the sky, somewhat closer now.

Still pouring sweat, gasping for breath, her mouth seared by the hot air, her lungs aching, she ran to the far wall again, shoving the car keys into a pocket of her jeans. This embankment had the same degree of slope as the one Eric was descending, but Rachael discovered that ascending on her feet was not as easy as coming down that way; the angle worked against her as much as it would have worked for her if she'd been going the other direction. After three or four yards, she had to drop forward against the bank, desperately using hands and knees and feet to hold on and thrust herself steadily up the incline.

Eric's eerie whisper-shriek rose behind her, closer.

She dared not look back.

Fifteen feet farther to the top.

Her progress was maddeningly hampered every foot of the way by the softness of the earth face she was climbing. In spots, it tended to crumble under her as she tried to find or make handholds and footholds. She required all the tenacity of a spider to retain what ground she gained, and she was terrified of suddenly slipping back all the way to the bottom.

The top of the arroyo was less than twelve feet away, so she must be about two stories above the floor of it.

“Rachael,” the Eric-thing said behind her in a raspy voice like a rat-tail file drawn across her spine.

Don't look down, don't, don't, for God's sake, don't…

Vertical erosion channels cut the wall from top to bottom, some only a few inches wide and a few inches deep, others a foot wide and two feet deep. She had to stay away from those; for, where they scored the slope too close to one another, the earth was especially rotten and most prone to collapse under her.

Fortunately, in some places there were bands of striated stone — pink, gray, brown, with veins of what appeared to be white quartz. These were the outer edges of rock strata that the eroding arroyo had only recently begun to uncover, and they provided firmer footholds.

“Rachael …”

She grabbed a foot-deep rock ledge that thrust out of the soft earth above her, intending to pull and kick her way onto it, hoping that it would not break off, but before she could test it, something grabbed at the heel of her right shoe. She couldn't help it: she had to look down this time, and there he was, dear God, the Eric-thing, on the arroyo wall beneath her, holding himself in place with one hand, reaching up with the other, trying to get a grip on her shoe, coming up only an inch short of his goal.

With dismaying agility, more like an animal than a human being, he flung himself upward. His hands and knees and feet refastened to the earthen wall with frightening ease. He reached eagerly for her again. He was now close enough to clutch at her calf instead of at the bottom of her shoe.

But she was not exactly moving like a sloth. She was damn fast, too, responding even as he moved toward her. Reflexes goosed by a flood of adrenaline, she let go of the wall with her knees and feet, holding on only to the rock ledge an arm's length above her head, dangling, recklessly letting the untested stone support her entire weight. As he reached for her, she pulled her legs up, then kicked down with both feet, putting all the power of her thighs into it, striking his grasping hand, smashing his long bony, mutant fingers.

He loosed an inhuman wail.

She kicked again.

Instead of slipping back down the wall, as Rachael had hoped he would, Eric held on to it, surged upward another foot, shrieking in triumph, and took a swipe at her.

At the same moment she kicked out again, smashing one foot into his arm, stomping the other squarely into his face.

She heard her jeans tear, then felt a flash of pain and knew that he had hooked claws through the denim even as her kick had landed.

He bellowed in pain, finally lost his hold on the wall, and hung for an instant by the claws in her jeans. Then the claws snapped, and the cloth tore, and he fell away into the arroyo.

Rachael didn't wait long enough to watch him tumble two stories to the bottom of the gulch, but turned at once to the demanding task of heaving herself onto the narrow stone ledge from which she hung precariously. Pulsations of pain, throbbing in time with her wildly pounding heart, coursed through her arms from wrists to shoulders. Her straining muscles twitched and rebelled at her demands. Clenching her teeth, breathing through her nose so hard that she snorted like a horse, she struggled upward, digging at the wall beneath the ledge with her feet to provide what little thrust she could. By sheer perseverance and determination — spiced with a generous measure of motivating terror — she clambered onto the ledge at last.

Exhausted, suffering several pains, she nevertheless refused to pause. She dragged herself up the last eight feet of the arroyo wall, finding handholds in a few final outcroppings of rock and among the erosion-exposed roots of the mesquite bushes that grew at — the brink. Then she was at the edge, over the top, pushing through a break in the mesquite, and she rolled onto the surface of the desert.

Lightning stepped down the sky as if providing a staircase for some descending god, and all around Rachael the low desert scrub threw short-lived, giant shadows.

Thunder followed, hard and flat, and she felt it reverberate in the ground against her back.

She dragged herself back to the brink of the arroyo, praying that she would see the Eric-thing still at the bottom, motionless, dead a second time. Maybe he'd fallen on a rock. There were a few rocks on the floor of the gulch. It was possible. Maybe he had landed on one of them and had snapped his spine.

She peered over the edge.

He was more than halfway up the wall again.

Lightning flashed, illuminating his deformed face, silvering his inhuman eyes, plating an electric gleam to his too-sharp teeth.

Leaping up, Rachael started kicking at the loose earth along the brink and at the brush that grew there, knocking it down on top of him. He hung from the quartz-veined ledge, keeping his head under it for protection, so the sandy earth and brush cascaded harmlessly over him. She stopped kicking dirt, looked around for some stones, found a few about the size of eggs, and hurled them down at his hands. When the stones connected with his grotesque fingers, he let go of the ledge and moved entirely under it, clinging to the earth in the shadow of that stone shelf, where she could not hit him.

She could wait for him to reappear, then pelt him again. She could keep him pinned there for hours. But nothing would be gained. It would be a tense, wearying, futile enterprise; when she exhausted the supply of stones within her reach and had only dirt to throw, he would ascend with animal quickness, undeterred by that pathetic bombardment, and he would finish her.

A white-hot celestial cauldron tipped, spilling forth a third molten streak of lightning. It made contact with the earth much closer than the two before it, no more than a quarter of a mile away, accompanied by a simultaneous crash worthy of Armageddon, and with a crackle-sizzle that was the voice of Death speaking in the language of electricity.

Below, unfazed by the lightning, emboldened by the cessation of the attack Rachael had been waging, the Eric-thing put one monstrous hand over the edge of the ledge.

She kicked more dirt down on him, lots of it. He withdrew his hand, taking shelter again, but she continued to stomp away at the rotten brink of the embankment. Suddenly an enormous chunk collapsed directly under her feet, and she nearly fell into the arroyo. As the ground began to shift, she threw herself backward just in time to avoid catastrophe, and landed hard on her buttocks.

With so much dirt pouring down over him, he might hesitate longer before making another attempt to pull himself across the overhanging ledge. His caution might give her an extra couple of minutes' lead time. She got up and sprinted off into the forbidding desert.

The overused muscles in her legs were repeatedly stabbed and split by cleaver-sharp pains. Her right ankle remained tender, and her right calf burned where the claws had cut through her jeans.

Her mouth was drier than ever, and her throat was cracking. Her lungs felt seared by her deep shuddering gasps of hot desert air.

She didn't succumb to the agony, couldn't afford to succumb, just kept on running, not as fast as before but as fast as she could.

Ahead, the land became less flat than it had been, began to roll in a series of low hills and hollows. She ran up a hill and down, up another, on and on, trying to put concealing barriers between herself and Eric before he crawled out of the arroyo. Eventually, deciding to stay in one of the hollows, she turned in a direction that she thought was north; though her sense of direction might have become totally fouled up during the chase, she believed she had to go north first, then east, if she hoped to circle around to the Mercedes, which was now at least a mile away, probably much farther.

Lightning… lightning.

This time, an incredibly long-lived bolt glimmered between the thunderheads and the ground below for at least ten seconds, racing-jigging south to north, like a gigantic needle trying to sew the storm tight to the land forever.

That flash and the empyrean blast that followed were sufficient to bring the rain, at last. It fell hard, pasting Rachael's hair to her skull, stinging her face. It was cool, blessedly cool. She licked her chapped lips, grateful for the moisture.

Several times she looked back, dreading what she would see, but Eric was never there.

She had lost him. And even if she'd left footprints to mark her flight, the rain would swiftly erase them. In his alien incarnation, he might somehow be able to track her by scent, but the rain would provide cover in that regard as well, scrubbing her odor from the land and air. Even if his strange eyes provided better vision than the human eyes they had once been, he would not be able to see far in this heavy rain and gloom.

You've escaped, she told herself as she hurried north. You're going to be safe.

It was probably true.

But she didn't believe it.

By the time Ben Shadway drove just a few miles east of Barstow, the rain not only filled the world but became the world. Except for the metronomic thump of the windshield wipers, all sounds were those of water in motion, drowning out everything else: a ceaseless drumming on the roof of the Merkur, the snap-snap-snap of droplets hitting the windshield at high speed, the slosh and hiss of wet pavement under the tires. Beyond the comfortable — though abruptly humid — confines of the car, most of the light had bled out of the bruised and wounded storm-dark sky, and little remained to be seen other than the omnipresent rain falling in millions of slanting gray lines. Sometimes the wind caught sheets of water the same way it might catch sheer curtains at an open window, blowing them across the vast desert floor in graceful, undulant patterns, one filmy layer after another, gray on gray. When the lightning flashed — which it did with unnerving frequency — billions of drops turned bright silver, and for a second or two, it appeared as if snow were falling on the Mojave; at other times, the lightning-transformed rain seemed more like glittery, streaming tinsel.

The downpour grew worse until the windshield wipers could not keep the glass clear. Hunching over the steering wheel, Ben squinted into the storm-lashed day. The highway ahead was barely visible. He had switched on the headlights, which did not improve visibility. But the headlights of oncoming cars — though few — were refracted by the film of water on the windshield, stinging his eyes.

He slowed to forty, then thirty. Finally, because the nearest rest area was over twenty miles ahead, he drove onto the narrow shoulder of the highway, stopped, left the engine running, and switched on the Merkur's emergency blinkers. Since he had failed to reach Whitney Gavis, his concern for Rachael was greater than ever, and he was more acutely aware of his inadequacies by the minute, but it would be foolhardy to do anything other than wait for the blinding storm to subside. He would be of no help whatsoever to Rachael if he lost control of the car on the rain-greased pavement, slid into one of the big eighteen-wheelers that constituted most of the sparse traffic, and got himself killed.

After Ben had waited through ten minutes of the hardest rain he had ever seen, as he was beginning to wonder if it would ever let up, he saw that a sluice of fast-moving dirty water had overflowed the drainage channel beside the road. Because the highway was elevated a few feet above the surrounding land, the water could not flow onto the pavement, but it did spill into the desert beyond. As he looked out the side window of the Merkur, he saw a sinuous dark form gliding smoothly across the surface of the racing yellow-brown torrent, then another similar form, then a third and a fourth. For a moment he stared uncomprehendingly before he realized they were rattlesnakes driven out of the ground when their dens flooded. There must have been several nests of rattlers in the immediate area, for in moments two score of them appeared. They made their way across the steadily widening spate to higher and drier ground, where they came together, coiling among one another — weaving, tangling, knotting their long bodies — forming a writhing and fluxuous mass, as if they were not individual creatures but parts of one entity that had become detached in the deluge and was now struggling to re-form itself.

Lightning flashed.

The squirming rattlers, like the mane of an otherwise buried Medusa, appeared to churn with greater fury as the stroboscopic storm light revealed them in stuttering flashes.

The sight sent a chill to the very marrow of Ben's bones. He looked away from the serpents and stared straight ahead through the rain-washed windshield. Minute by minute, his optimism was fading; his despair was growing; his fear for Rachael had attained such depth and intensity that it began to shake him, physically shake him, and he sat shivering in the stolen car, in the blinding rain, upon the somber storm-hammered desert.

The cloudburst erased whatever trail Rachael might have left, which was good, but the storm had drawbacks, too. Though the downpour had reduced the temperature only a few degrees, leaving the day still very warm, and although she was not even slightly chilled, she was nevertheless soaked to the skin. Worse, the drenching rain fell in cataracts which, combined with the midday gloom that the gray-black clouds had imposed upon the land, made it difficult to maintain a good sense of direction; even when she risked ascending from one of the hollows onto a hill, to get a fix on her position, the poor visibility left her less than certain that she was heading back toward the rest area and the Mercedes. Worse still, the lightning shattered through the malignant bellies of the thunderheads and crashed to the ground with such frequency that she figured it was only a matter of time until she was struck by one of those bolts and reduced to a charred and smoking corpse.

But worst of all, the loud and unrelenting noise of the rain — the hissing, chuckling, sizzling, crackling, gurgling, dripping, burbling, and hollow steady drumming — blotted out any warning sounds that the Eric-thing might have made in pursuit of her, so she was in greater danger of being set upon by surprise. She repeatedly looked behind her and glanced worriedly at the tops of the gentle slopes on both sides of the shallow little hollow through which she hurried. She slowed every time she approached a turn in the course of the hollow, fearing that he would be just around the bend, would loom out of the rain, strange eyes radiant in the gloom, and would seize her in his hideous hands.

When, without warning, she encountered him at last, he did not see her. She turned one of those bends that she found so frightening, and Eric was only twenty or thirty feet away, on his knees in the middle of the hollow, preoccupied with some task that Rachael could not at first understand. A wind-carved, flute-holed rock formation projected out from the slope in a wedge-shaped wing, and Rachael quickly took cover behind it before he saw her. She almost turned at once to creep back the way she had come, but his peculiar posture and attitude had intrigued her. Suddenly it seemed important to know what he was doing because, by secretly observing him, she might learn something that would guarantee her escape or even something that would give her an advantage over him in a confrontation at some later time. She eased along the rock formation, peering into several convexities and flute holes, until she found a wind-sculpted bore about three inches in diameter, through which she could see Eric.

He was still kneeling on the wet ground, his broad humped back bowed to the driving rain. He appeared to have… changed. He did not look quite the same as when he had confronted her outside the public rest rooms. He was still monstrously deformed, though in a vaguely different way from before. A subtle difference but important… What was it, exactly? Peering out of the flute hole in the stone, wind whistling softly through the eight- or ten-inch-deep bore and blowing in her face, Rachael strained her eyes to get a better view of him. The rain and murky light hampered her, but she thought he seemed more apelike. Hulking, slump-shouldered, slightly longer in the arms. Perhaps he was also less reptilian than he had been, yet still with those grotesque, bony, long, and wickedly taloned hands.

Surely any change she perceived must be imaginary, for the very structure of his bones and flesh couldn't have altered noticeably in less than a quarter of an hour. Could it? Then again… why not? If his genetic integrity had collapsed thoroughly since he had beaten Sarah Kiel last night — when he'd still been human in appearance — if his face and body and limbs had been altered so drastically in the twelve hours between then and now, the pace of his metamorphosis was obviously so frantic that, indeed, a difference might be noticeable in just a quarter of an hour.

The realization was unnerving.

It was followed by a worse realization: Eric was holding a thick, writhing snake — one hand gripping it near the tail, the other hand behind its head — and he was eating it alive. Rachael saw the snake's jaws unhinged and gaping, fangs like twin slivers of ivory in the flickering storm light, as it struggled unsuccessfully to curl its head back and bite the hand of the man-thing that held it. Eric was tearing at the middle of the serpent with his inhumanly sharp teeth, ripping hunks of meat loose and chewing enthusiastically. Because his jaws were heavier and longer than the jaws of any man, their obscenely eager movement — the crushing and grinding of the snake — could be seen even at this distance.

Shocked and nauseated, Rachael wanted to turn away from the spy-hole in the rock. However, she did not vomit, and she did not turn away, because her nausea and disgust were outweighed by her bafflement and her need to understand Eric.

Considering how much he wanted to get his hands on her, why had he abandoned the chase? Had he forgotten her? Had the snake bitten him and had he, in his savage rage, traded bite for bite?

But he was not merely striking back at the snake: he was eating it, eagerly consuming one solid mouthful after another. Once, when Eric looked up at the fulminous heavens, Rachael saw his storm-lit countenance twisted in a frightening expression of inhuman ecstasy. He shuddered with apparent delight as he tore at the serpent. His hunger seemed as urgent and insatiable as it was unspeakable.

Rain slashed, wind moaned, thunder crashed, lightning flashed, and she felt as if she were peering through a chink in the walls of hell, watching a demon devour the souls of the damned. Her heart hammered hard enough to compete with the sound of the rain drumming on the ground. She knew she should run, but she was mesmerized by the pure evil of the sight framed in the flute hole.

She saw a second snake — then a third, fourth, fifth — oozing out of the rain-pooled ground around Eric's knees. He was kneeling at the entrance to a den of the deadly creatures, a nest that was apparently flooding with the runoff from the storm. The rattlers wriggled forth and, finding the man-thing in their midst, immediately struck at his thighs and arms, biting him repeatedly. Though Eric neither cried out nor flinched, Rachael was filled with relief, knowing that he would soon collapse from the effects of the venom.

He threw aside the half-eaten snake and seized another. With no diminishment of his perverse hunger, he sank his pointed, razored teeth into the snake's living flesh and tore loose one dripping gobbet after another. Maybe his altered metabolism was capable of dealing with the potent venom of the rattlers — either breaking it down into an array of harmless chemicals, or repairing tissues as rapidly as the venom damaged them.

Chain lightning flashed back and forth across the malevolent sky, and in that incandescent flare, Eric's long sharp teeth gleamed like shards of a broken mirror. His strangely shining eyes cast back a cold reflection of the celestial fire. His wet, tangled hair streamed with short-lived silvery brightness; the rain glistered like molten silver on his face; and all around him the earth sizzled as if the lightning-lined water was actually melted fat bubbling and crackling in a frying pan.

At last, Rachael broke the mesmeric hold that the scene exerted, turned from the flute hole, and ran back the way she had come. She sought another hollow between other low hills, a different route that would lead her to the roadside comfort station and the Mercedes.

Leaving the hilly area and recrossing the sandy plains, she was frequently the tallest thing in sight, much taller than the desert scrub. Once more, she worried about being struck by lightning. In the eerie stroboscopic light, the bleak and barren land appeared to leap and fall and leap again, as if eons of geological activity were being compressed into a few frantic seconds.

She tried to enter an arroyo, where she might be safe from the lightning. But the deep gulch was two-thirds full of muddy, churning water. Flotillas of whirling tumble-weed boats and bobbing mesquite rafts were borne on the water's rolling back.

She was forced to find a route around the network of flooded arroyos. But in time she came to the rest area where she had first encountered Eric. Her purse was still where she had dropped it, and she picked it up. The Mercedes was also exactly where she'd left it.

A few steps from the car, she halted abruptly, for she saw that the trunk lid, previously open, was now closed. She had the dreadful feeling that Eric — or the thing that had once been Eric — had returned ahead of her, had climbed into the trunk again, and had pulled the lid shut behind him.

Shaking, indecisive, afraid, Rachael stood in the drenching rain, reluctant to go closer to the car. The parking lot, lacking adequate drainage, was being transformed into a shallow lake. She stood in water that came over the tops of her running shoes.

The thirty-two pistol was under the driver's seat. If she could reach it before Eric threw open the trunk lid and came out…

Behind her, the staccato plop-plop-plop of water dripping off the picnic-table cover sounded like scurrying rats. More water sheeted off the comfort-station roof, splashing on the sidewalk. All around, the falling rain slashed into the pools and puddles with a crackling-cellophane sound that seemed to grow louder by the second.

She took a step toward the car, another, halted again.

He might not be in the trunk but inside the car itself. He might have closed the trunk and slipped into the back seat or even into the front, where he could be lying now — silent, still, unseen — waiting for her to open the door. Waiting to sink his teeth into her the way he'd sunk them into the snakes…

Rain streamed off the roof of the Mercedes, rippled down the windows, blurring her view of the car's shadowy interior.

Scared to approach the car but equally afraid of turning back, Rachael at last took another step forward.

Lightning flashed. Looming large and ominous in the stuttering light, the black Mercedes suddenly reminded her of a hearse.

Out on the highway, a large truck passed, engine roaring, big tires making a slushy sound on the wet pavement.

Rachael reached the Mercedes, jerked open the driver's door, saw no one inside. She fumbled under the seat for the pistol. Found it. While she still had the courage to act, she went around to the back of the car, hesitated only a second, pushed on the latch button, and lifted the trunk lid, prepared to empty the clip of the thirty-two into the Eric-thing if it was crouching there.

The trunk was empty. The carpet was soaked, and a gray puddle of rain spread over the center of the compartment, so she figured it had remained open to the elements until an especially strong gust of wind had blown it shut.

She slammed the lid, used her keys to lock it, returned to the driver's door, and got in behind the wheel. She put the pistol on the passenger's seat, where she could grab it quickly.

The car started without hesitation. The windshield wipers flung the rain off the glass.

Outside, the desert beyond the concrete-block comfort station was rendered entirely in shades of slate: grays, blacks, browns, and rust. In that dreary sandscape, the only movement was the driving rain and the windblown tumbleweed.

Eric had not followed her.

Maybe the rattlesnakes had killed him, after all. Surely he could not have survived so many bites from so many snakes. Perhaps his genetically altered body, though capable of repairing massive tissue damage, was not able to counteract the toxic effects of such potent venom.

She drove out of the rest area, back onto the highway, heading east toward Las Vegas, grateful to be alive. The rain was falling too hard to permit safe travel above forty or fifty miles an hour, so she stayed in the extreme right lane, letting the more daring motorists pass her. Mile by mile she tried to convince herself that the worst was past — but she remained unconvinced.

Ben put the Merkur in gear and pulled onto the highway again.

The storm was moving rapidly eastward, toward Las Vegas. The rolling thunder was more distant than before, a deep rumble rather than a bone-jarring crash. The lightning, which had been striking perilously close on all sides, now flickered farther away, near the eastern horizon. Rain was still falling hard, but it no longer came down in blinding sheets, and driving was possible again.

The dashboard clock confirmed the time on Ben's watch: 5:15. Yet the summer day was darker than it should have been at that hour. The storm-blackened sky had brought an early dusk, and ahead the somber land was fading steadily in the embrace of a false twilight.

At his current speed, he would not reach Las Vegas until about eight-thirty tonight, probably two or three hours after Rachael had gotten there. He would have to stop in Baker, the only outpost in this part of the Mojave, and try to reach Whitney Gavis again. But he had the feeling he was not going to get hold of Whit. A feeling that maybe his and Rachael's luck had run out.

31 FEEDING FRENZY

Eric remembered the rattlesnakes only vaguely. Their fangs had left puncture wounds in his hands, arms, and thighs, but those small holes had already healed, and the rain had washed the bloodstains from his sodden clothes. His mutating flesh burned with that peculiar painless fire of ongoing change, which completely masked the lesser sting of venom. Sometimes his knees grew weak, or his stomach churned with nausea, or his vision blurred, or a spell of dizziness seized him, but those symptoms of poisoning grew less noticeable minute by minute. As he moved across the storm-darkened desert, images of the serpents rose in his memory — writhing forms curling like smoke around him, whispering in a language that he could almost understand — but he had difficulty believing that they had been real. A few times, he recalled biting, chewing, and swallowing mouthfuls of rattler meat, gripped by a feeding frenzy. A part of him responded to those bloody memories with excitement and satisfaction. But another part of him — the part that was still Eric Leben — was disgusted and repelled, and he repressed those grim recollections, aware that he would lose his already tenuous grip on sanity if he dwelt on them.

He moved rapidly toward an unknown place, propelled by instinct. Mostly he ran fully erect, more or less like a man, but sometimes he loped and shambled, with his shoulders hunched forward and his body bent in an apelike posture. Occasionally he was overcome with the urge to drop forward on all fours and scuttle across the wet sand on his belly; however, that queer compulsion frightened him, and he successfully resisted it.

Shadowfires burned here and there upon the desert floor, but he was not drawn toward them as he had been before. They were not as mysterious and intriguing as they had been previously, for he now suspected that they were gateways to hell. Previously, when he had seen those phantom flames, he had also seen his long-dead uncle Barry, which probably meant that Uncle Barry had come out of the fire. Eric was sure that Barry Hampstead resided in hell, so he figured the doors were portals to damnation. When Eric had died in Santa Ana yesterday, he had become Satan's property, doomed to spend eternity with Barry Hampstead, but at the penultimate moment he had thrown off the claims of the grave and had rescued his own soul from the pit. Now Satan was opening these doors around him, in hopes he would be impelled by curiosity to investigate one gate or another and, on stepping through, would deliver himself to the sulfurous cell reserved for him. His parents had warned him that he was in danger of going to hell, that his surrender to his uncle's desires — and, later, the murder of his tormentor — had damned his soul. Now he knew they were right. Hell was close. He dared not look into its flames, where something beckoned and smiled.

He raced on through the desert scrub. The storm, like clashing armies, blasted the day with bright bursts and rolling cannonades.

His unknown destination proved to be the comfort station at the roadside rest area where he had first confronted Rachael. Activated by solenoids that had misinterpreted the storm as nightfall, banks of fluorescent lights had blinked on at the front of the structure and over the doors on each side. In the parking lot, a few mercury-vapor arc lamps cast a bluish light on the puddled pavement.

When he saw the squat concrete-block building in the rain-swept murk ahead, Eric's muddy thoughts cleared, and suddenly he remembered everything Rachael had done to him. His encounter with the garbage truck on Main Street was her doing. And because the violent shock of death was what had triggered his malignant growth, he blamed his monstrous mutation on her as well. He'd almost gotten his hands on her, had almost torn her to pieces, but she'd slipped away from him when he'd been overcome by hunger, by a desperate need to provide fuel for his out-of-control metabolism. Now, thinking of her, he felt that cold reptilian rage well up in him again, and he loosed a thin bleat of fury that was lost in the noise of the storm.

Rounding the side of the building, he sensed someone near. A thrill coursed through him. He dropped to all fours and crouched against the block wall, in a pool of shadow just beyond the reach of the nearest fluorescent light.

He listened — head cocked, breath held. A jalousie window was open above his head, high in the men's-room wall. Movement inside. A man coughed. Then Eric heard soft, sweet whistling: “All Alone in the Moonlight,” from the musical Cats. The scrape and click of footsteps on concrete. The door opened outward onto the walk, eight or ten feet from where Eric crouched, and a man appeared.

The guy was in his late twenties, solidly built, rugged-looking, wearing boots, jeans, cowboy shirt, and a tan Stetson. He stood for a moment beneath the sheltering overhang, looking out at the falling rain. Suddenly he became aware of Eric, turned, stopped whistling, and stared in disbelief and horror.

As the other turned toward him, Eric moved so fast he seemed to be a leaping reflection of the lightning that flashed along the eastern horizon. Tall and well-muscled, the cowboy would have been a dangerous adversary in a fight with an ordinary man, but Eric Leben was no longer an ordinary man — or even quite a man at all. And the cowboy's shock at his attacker's appearance was a grave disadvantage, for it paralyzed him. Eric slammed into his prey and drove all five talons of his right hand into the man's belly, very deep. At the same time, seizing his prey's throat with his other hand, he destroyed the windpipe, ripping out the voice box and vocal cords, ensuring instant silence. Blood spurted from severed carotid arteries. Death glazed the cowboy's eyes even before Eric tore open his belly. Steaming guts cascaded onto rain-wet concrete, and the dead man collapsed into his own hot entrails.

Feeling wild and free and powerful, Eric settled down atop the warm corpse. Strangely, killing no longer repulsed or frightened him. He was becoming a primal beast who took a savage delight in slaughter. However, even the part of him that remained civilized — the Eric Leben part — was undeniably exhilarated by the violence, as well as by the enormous power and catlike quickness of his mutant body. He knew he should have been shocked, nauseated, but he was not. All his life, he had needed to dominate others, to crush his adversaries, and now the need found expression in its purest form: cruel, merciless, violent murder.

He was also, for the first time, able to remember clearly the murder of the two young women whose car he had stolen in Santa Ana on Monday evening. He felt no burdensome responsibility for their deaths, no rush of guilt, only a sweet dark satisfaction and a fierce sort of glee. Indeed, the memory of their spilled blood, the memory of the naked woman whom he had nailed to the wall, only contributed to his exhilaration over the murder of the cowboy, and his heart pounded out a rhythm of icy joy.

Then, for a while, lowering himself onto the corpse by the men's-room door, he lost all conscious awareness of himself as a creature of intellect, as a creature with a past and a future. He descended into a dreamy state where the only sensations were the smell and taste of blood. The drumming and gurgling of rain continued to reach him, too, but it seemed now that it was an internal rather than external noise, perhaps the sound of change surging through his arteries, veins, bones, and tissues.

He was jolted out of his trance by a scream. He looked up from the ruined throat of his prey, where he'd buried his muzzle. A woman was standing at the corner of the building, wide-eyed, one arm held defensively across her breasts. Judging by her boots, jeans, and cowboy shirt, she was with the man whom Eric had just killed.

Eric realized that he had been feeding on his prey, and he was neither startled nor appalled by that realization. A lion would not be surprised or dismayed by its own savagery. His racing metabolism generated hunger unlike any he had ever known, and he needed rich nutrients to allay those pangs. In the meat of his prey, he found the food he required, just as the lion found what it needed in the flesh of the gazelle.

The woman tried to scream again but could not make a sound.

Eric rose from the corpse. He licked his blood-slicked lips.

The woman ran into the wind-driven rain. Her Stetson flew off, and her yellow hair streamed behind her, the only brightness in the storm-blackened day.

Eric pursued her. He found indescribable pleasure in the feel of his feet pounding on the hard concrete, then on waterlogged sand. He splashed across the flooded macadam parking lot, gaining on her by the second.

She was heading toward a dull red pickup truck. She glanced back and saw him drawing nearer. She must have realized that she would not reach the pickup in time to start it and drive away, so she turned toward the interstate, evidently hoping to get help from the driver of one of the infrequently passing cars or trucks.

The chase was short. He dragged her down before she had reached the end of the parking lot. They rolled through dirty ankle-deep water. She flailed at him, tried to claw him. He sank his razored talons into her arms, nailing them to her sides, and she let out a terrible cry of pain. Thrashing furiously, they rolled one last time, and then he had her pinned down in the storm runoff, which was chilly in spite of the warm air around them.

For a moment he was surprised to find his blood subsiding, replaced by carnal hunger as he looked down upon the helpless woman. But he merely surrendered to that need as he had surrendered to the urgent need for blood. Beneath him, sensing his intent, the woman tried desperately to throw him off. Her screams of pain gave way to shrill cries of pure terror. Ripping his talons loose of her arm, he shredded her blouse and put his dark, gnarled, inhuman hand upon her bare breasts.

Her screams faded. She stared up at him emptily — voiceless, shaking, paralyzed by dread.

A moment later, having torn open her pants, he eagerly withdrew his manhood from his own jeans. Even in his frenzy to couple with her, he realized that the erect organ in his hand was not human; it was large, strange, hideous. When the woman's gaze fell upon that monstrous staff, she began to weep and whimper. She must have thought that the gates of hell had opened and that demons had come forth. Her horror and abject fear further inflamed his lust.

The storm, which had been subsiding, grew worse for a while, as if in malevolent accompaniment to the brutal act that he was about to perpetrate.

He mounted her.

The rain beat upon them.

The water sloshed around them.

A few minutes later, he killed her.

Lightning blazed, and as its reflection played across the flooded parking lot, the woman's spreading blood looked like opalescent films of oil on the water.

After he had killed her, he fed.

When he was satiated, his primal urges grew less demanding, and the part of him that possessed an intellect gained dominance over the savage beast. Slowly he became aware of the danger of being seen. There was little traffic on the interstate, but if one of the passing cars or trucks pulled into the rest area, he would be spotted. He hurriedly dragged the dead woman across the macadam, around the side of the comfort station, and into the mesquite behind the building. He disposed of the dead man there as well.

He found the keys in the ignition of the pickup. The engine turned over on the second try.

He had taken the cowboy's hat. Now he jammed it on his head, pulling the brim down, hoping it would disguise the strangeness of his face. The pickup's fuel gauge indicated a full tank, so he would not need to stop between here and Vegas. But if a passing motorist glanced over and saw his face… He must remain alert, drive well, attract no notice — always resisting the retrograde evolution that steadily pulled him into the mindless perspective of the beast. He had to remember to avert his grotesque face from the vehicles he passed and from those that passed him. If he took those precautions, then the hat — in conjunction with the early dusk brought by the storm — might provide sufficient cover.

He looked into the rearview mirror and saw a pair of unmatched eyes. One was a luminous pale green with a vertical slit-shaped orange iris that gleamed like a hot coal. The other was larger, dark, and… multifaceted.

That jarred him as nothing had for a while, and he looked quickly away from the mirror. Multifaceted? That was far too alien to bear consideration. Nothing like that had featured in any stage of human evolution, not even in ancient eras when the first gasping amphibians had crawled out of the sea onto the shore. Here was proof that he was not merely devolving, that his body was not merely struggling to express all the potential in the genetic heritage of humankind; here was proof that his genetic structure had run amok and that it was conveying him toward a form and consciousness that had nothing to do with the human race. He was becoming something else, something beyond reptile or ape or Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man or modern European man, something so strange that he did not have the courage or the curiosity to confront it.

Henceforth, when he glanced in the mirror, he would be certain that it provided a view only of the roadway behind and revealed no slightest aspect of his own altered countenance.

He switched on the headlights and drove away from the rest area onto the highway.

The steering wheel felt odd in his malformed, monstrous hands. Driving, which should have been as familiar to him as walking, seemed like a singularly exotic act — and difficult, too, almost beyond his capabilities. He clutched the wheel and concentrated on the rainy highway ahead.

The whispering tires and metronomic thump of the windshield wipers seemed to pull him on through the storm and the gathering darkness, toward a special destiny. Once, when his full intellect returned to him for a brief moment, he thought of William Butler Yeats and remembered a fitting scrap of the great man's poetry:

32 FLAMINGO PINK

Tuesday afternoon, after their meeting with Dr. Easton Solberg at UCI, Detectives Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom, still on sick leave, had driven to Tustin, where the main offices of Shadway Realty were located in a suite on the ground floor of a three-story Spanish-style building with a blue tile roof. Julio had spotted the stakeout car on the first pass. It was an unmarked muck-green Ford, sitting at the curb half a block from Shadway Realty, where the occupants had a good view of those offices and of the driveway that serviced the parking lot alongside the building. Two men in blue suits were in the Ford: One was reading a newspaper and the other was keeping watch.

“Feds,” Julio said as he cruised by the stakeout.

“Sharp's men? DSA?” Reese wondered.

“Must be.”

“A little obvious, aren't they?”

“I guess they don't really expect Shadway to turn up here,” Julio said. “But they have to go through the motions.”

Julio parked half a block behind the stakeout, putting several cars between him and the DSA's Ford, so it was possible to watch the watchers without being seen.

Reese had participated in scores of stakeouts with Julio, and surveillance duty had never been the ordeal it might have been with another partner. Julio was a complex man whose conversation was interesting hour after hour. But when one or both of them did not feel up to conversation, they could sit through long silences in comfort, without awkwardness — one of the surest tests of friendship.

Tuesday afternoon, while they watched the watchers and also watched the offices of Shadway Realty, they talked about Eric Leben, genetic engineering, and the dream of immortality. That dream was by no means Leben's private obsession. A deep longing for immortality, for commutation of the death sentence, had surely filled humankind since the first members of the species had acquired self-awareness and a crude intelligence. The subject had a special poignancy for Reese and Julio because both had witnessed the deaths of much-loved wives and had never fully recovered from their losses.

Reese could sympathize with Leben's dream and even understand the scientist's reasons for subjecting himself to a dangerous genetic experiment. It had gone wrong, yes: the two murders and the hideous crucifixion of the one dead girl were proof that Leben had come back from the grave as something less than human, and he must be stopped. But the deadly result of his experiments — and the folly of them — did not entirely foreclose sympathy. Against the rapacious hunger of the grave, all men and women were united, brothers and sisters.

As the sunny summer day grew dreary under an incoming marine layer of ash-gray clouds, Reese felt a cloak of melancholy settle upon him. He might have been overwhelmed by it if he had not been on the job, but he was on the job in spite of also being on sick leave.

They — like the DSA stakeout team — were not expecting Shadway to arrive at his headquarters, but they were hoping to identify one of the real-estate agents operating out of the office. As the afternoon wore on they saw several people entering and leaving the premises, but one tall, thin woman with a Betty Boop cap of black hair was the most noticeable, her angular storklike frame emphasized by a clinging flamingo-pink dress. Not pale pink, not frilly pink, but bold flame-hot pink. She came and went twice, both times chauffeuring middle-aged couples who had arrived at the office in their own cars — evidently clients for whom she was tracking down suitable houses. Her own car, with its personalized license plate — requeen, which most likely stood for Real Estate Queen — was a new canary-yellow Cadillac Seville with wire wheels, as memorable as the woman herself.

“That one,” Julio said when she returned to the office with the second couple.

“Hard to lose in traffic,” Reese agreed.

At 4:50, she had again come out of the Shadway Realty door and had hurried like a scurrying bird for her car. Julio and Reese had decided that she was probably going home for the day. Leaving the DSA stakeout to its fruitless wait for Benjamin Shadway, they followed the yellow Cadillac down First Street to Newport Avenue and north to Cowan Heights. She lived in a two-story stucco house with a shake-shingle roof and lots of redwood balconies and decking on one of the steeper streets in the Heights.

Julio parked in front as the pink lady's Caddy disappeared behind the closing garage door. He got out of the car to check the contents of the mailbox — a federal crime — in hope of discovering the woman's name. A moment later he got back into the car and said, “Theodora Bertlesman. Apparently goes by the name Teddy, because that was on one of the letters.”

They waited a couple of minutes, then went to the house, where Reese rang the bell. Summer wind, warm in spite of the winter-gray sky from which it flowed, breathed through surrounding bougainvillea, red-flowered hibiscus, and fragrant star jasmine. The street was still, peaceful, the sounds of the outside world eliminated by the most effective filter known to man — money.

“Should've gotten into real estate, I think,” Reese said. “Why on earth did I ever want to be a cop?”

“You were probably a cop in a previous life,” Julio said dryly, “in another century when being a cop was a better scam than selling real estate. You just fell into the same pattern this time around, without realizing things had changed.”

“Caught in a karma loop, huh?”

A moment later, the door opened. The stork-tall woman in the flamingo-pink dress looked down at Julio, then only slightly up at Reese, and she was less birdlike and more impressive close up than she had been from a distance. Earlier, watching her from the car, Reese had not been able to see the porcelain clarity of her skin, her startling gray eyes, or the sculpted refinement of her features. Her Betty Boop hair, which had looked lacquered — even ceramic — from fifty yards, now proved to be thick and soft. She was no less tall, no less thin, and no less flamboyant than she had seemed before, but her chest was certainly not flat, and her legs were lovely.

“May I help you?” Teddy Bertlesman asked. Her voice was low and silken. She radiated such an air of quiet self-assurance that if Julio and Reese had been two dangerous men instead of two cops, they might not have dared try anything with her.

Presenting his ID and badge, Julio introduced himself and said, “This is my partner, Detective Hagerstrom,” and explained that they wanted to question her about Ben Shadway. “Maybe my information is out of date, but I believe you work as a sales agent in his firm.”

“Of course, you know perfectly well that I do,” she said without scorn, even with some amusement. “Please come in.”

She led them into a living room as bold in its decor as she was in her dress but with undeniable style and taste. A massive white-marble coffee table. Contemporary sofas upholstered in a rich green fabric. Chairs in peach silk moiré, with elaborately carved arms and feet. Four-foot-tall emerald vases holding huge stalks of white-plumed pampas grass. Very large and dramatic modern art filled the high walls of the cathedral-ceilinged room, giving a comfortable human scale to what could have been a forbidding chamber. A wall of glass presented a panorama of Orange County. Teddy Bertlesman sat on a green sofa, the windows behind her, a pale nimbus of light around her head, and Reese and Julio sat on moiré chairs, separated from her by the enormous marble table that seemed like an altar.

Julio said, “Ms. Bertlesman—”

“No, please,” she said, slipping off her shoes and drawing her long legs up under herself. “Either call me Teddy or, if you insist on remaining formal, it's Miss Bertlesman. I despise that ridiculous Miz business; it makes me think of the South before the Civil War — dainty ladies in crinolines, sipping mint juleps under magnolia trees while black mammies tend to them.”

“Miss Bertlesman,” Julio continued, “we are most eager to speak to Mr. Shadway, and we hope you might have an idea where he is. For instance, it occurs to us that, being a real-estate developer and investor as well as broker, he might own rental properties that are currently vacant, one of which he might now be using—”

“Excuse me, but I don't see how this falls in your jurisdiction. According to your ID, you're Santa Ana policemen. Ben has offices in Justin, Costa Mesa, Orange, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and Laguna Niguel, but none in Santa Ana. And he lives in Orange Park Acres.”

Julio assured her that part of the Shadway-Leben case fell into the jurisdiction of the Santa Ana Police Department, and he explained that cross-jurisdictional cooperation was not uncommon, but Teddy Bertlesman was politely skeptical and subtly uncooperative. Reese admired the diplomacy, finesse, and aplomb with which she fielded probing questions and answered without saying anything useful. Her respect for her boss and her determination to protect him became increasingly evident, yet she said nothing that made it possible to accuse her of lying or harboring a wanted man.

At last, recognizing the futility of the authoritarian approach, apparently hoping revelation of his true motives and a blatant bid for sympathy would work where authority had failed, Julio sighed, leaned back in his chair, and said, “Listen, Miss Bertlesman, we've lied to you. We aren't here in any official capacity. Not strictly speaking. In fact, we're both supposed to be on sick leave. Our captain would be furious if he knew we were still on this case, because federal agencies have taken charge and have told us to back off. But for a lot of reasons, we can't do that, not and keep our self-respect.”

Teddy Bertlesman frowned — quite prettily, Reese thought — and said, “I don't understand—”

Julio held up one slim hand. “Wait. Just listen for a moment.”

In a soft, sincere, and intimate voice far different from his official tone, he told her how Ernestina Hernandez and Becky Klienstad had been brutally murdered — one thrown in a dumpster, the other nailed to a wall. He told her about his own baby brother, Ernesto, who had been killed by rats a long time ago in a faraway place. He explained how that tragedy had contributed to his obsession with unjust death and how the similarity between the names Ernesto and Ernestina was one of the several things that had made the Hernandez girl's murder a special and very personal crusade for him.

“Though I'll admit,” Julio said, “if the names weren't similar and if other factors weren't the same, then I'd simply have found different reasons to make a crusade of this. Because I almost always make a crusade of a case. It's a bad habit of mine.”

“A wonderful habit,” Reese said.

Julio shrugged.

Reese was surprised that Julio was so thoroughly aware of his own motivations. Listening to his partner, contemplating the degree of insight and self-awareness at which these statements hinted, Reese acquired an even greater respect for the man.

“The point is,” Julio told Teddy Bertlesman, “I believe your boss and Rachael Leben are guilty of nothing, that they may be just pawns in a game they don't even fully understand. I think they're being used, that they might be killed as scapegoats to further the interests of others, perhaps even the interests of the government. They need help, and I guess what I'm trying to tell you is that they've sort of become another crusade of mine. Help me to help them, Teddy.”

Julio's performance was astonishing, and from anyone else it might have looked like exactly that — a mere performance. But there was no mistaking his sincerity or the depth of his concern. Though his dark eyes were watchful, and though there was a shrewdness in his face, his commitment to justice and his great warmth were unmistakably genuine.

Teddy Bertlesman was smart enough to see that Julio was not shucking and jiving her, and she was won over. She swung her long legs off the sofa and slid forward to the edge of it in a whispery rustle of pink silk, a sound that seemed to pass like a breeze over Reese, raising the small hairs on the backs of his hands and sending a pleasant shiver through him. “I knew darn well Ben Shadway was no threat to national security,” Teddy said. “Those federal agents came sniffing around with that line, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing in their faces. No, in fact, it was all I could do to keep from spitting in their faces.”

“Where might Ben Shadway have gone, he and Rachael Leben?” Julio asked. “Sooner or later, the feds are going to find them, and I think that for their sake Reese and I had better find them first. Do you have any idea where we should look?”

Rising from the sofa in a brilliant hot-pink whirl, stalking back and forth across the living room on stiltlike legs that ought to have been awkward but were the essence of grace, looking incredibly tall to Reese because he was still sitting on the moiré chair, pausing now and standing provocatively hip-shot in thought, then pacing again, Teddy Bertlesman considered the possibilities and enumerated them: “Well, okay, he owns property — mostly small houses — all over the county. Right now… the only ones not rented… let me see… One, there's a little bungalow in Orange, a place on Pine Street, but I don't figure he'd be there because he's having some work done on it — a new bathroom, improvements to the kitchen. He wouldn't hide where there're going to be workmen coming and going. Two, there's half of a duplex in Yorba Linda..”

Reese listened to her, but for the moment he did not care what she said; he left that part to Julio. All Reese had the capacity to care about was the way she looked and moved and sounded; she filled all his senses to capacity, leaving no room for anything else. At a distance she had seemed angular, birdlike, but up close she was a gazelle, lean and swift and not the least angular. Her size was less impressive than her fluidity, which was like that of a professional dancer, and her fluidity was less impressive than her suppleness, and her suppleness was less impressive than her beauty, and her beauty was less impressive than her intelligence and energy and flair.

Even when her pacing took her away from the window wall, she was surrounded by a nimbus of light. To Reese, she seemed to glow.

He had felt nothing like this in five years, since his Janet had been killed by the men in the van who'd tried to snatch little Esther that day in the park. He wondered if Teddy Bertlesman had taken special notice of him, too, or whether he was just another lump of a cop to her. He wondered how he could approach her without making a fool of himself and without giving offense. He wondered if there could ever be anything between a woman like her and a man like him. He wondered if he could live without her. He wondered when he was going to be able to breathe again. He wondered if his feelings showed. He didn't care if they showed.

“… the motel!” Teddy stopped pacing, looked startled for a moment, then grinned. An amazingly lovely grin. “Yes, of course, that would be the most likely place.”

“He owns a motel?” Julio asked.

“A run-down place in Las Vegas,” Teddy said. “He just bought it. Formed a new corporation to make the purchase. Might take the feds a while to tumble to the place because it's such a recent acquisition and in another state. Place is empty, out of business, but it was sold with furnishings. Even the manager's apartment was furnished, I think, so Ben and Rachael could squirrel away there in comfort.”

Julio glanced at Reese and said, “What do you think?”

Reese had to look away from Teddy in order to breathe and speak. With a funny little wheeze, he said, “Sounds right.”

Pacing again, flamingo-pink silk swirling around her knees, Teddy said, “I know it's right. Ben's in that project with Whitney Gavis, and Whitney is maybe the only man on earth Ben really, fully trusts.”

“Who's this Gavis?” Julio asked.

“They were in Vietnam together,” she said. “They're tight. As tight as brothers. Tighter, maybe. You know, Ben's a real nice guy, one of the best, and anyone'll tell you so. He's gentle, open, so darn honest and honorable that some people just plain don't believe him for a while, until they've gotten to know him better. But it's funny… in a way… he holds almost everybody at arm's length, never quite reveals himself completely. Except, I think, with Whit Gavis. It's as if things happened to him in the war that made him forever different from other people, that made it impossible for him to be truly close to anyone except those who went through the same thing he went through and came out with their minds in one piece. Like Whit.”

“Is he close in the same way with Mrs. Leben?” Julio asked.

“Yes, I think so. I think he loves her,” Teddy said, “which makes her about the luckiest woman I know.”

Reese sensed jealousy in Teddy's voice, and his heart felt as if it broke loose and plummeted down through his chest.

Apparently Julio heard the same note, for he said, “Forgive me, Teddy, but I'm a cop, and I'm curious by nature, and you sounded as if you wouldn't mind if he'd fallen for you.”

She blinked in surprise, then laughed. “Me and Ben? No, no. For one thing, I'm taller than he is, and in heels I positively tower over him. Besides, he's a homebody — a quiet, peaceful man who reads old mystery novels and collects trains. No, Ben's a great guy, but I'm far too flamboyant for him, and he's too low-key for me.”

Reese's heart stopped plummeting.

Teddy said, “Oh, I'm just jealous of Rachael because she's found herself a good man, and I haven't. When you're my size, you know from the start that men aren't going to flock to you — except basketball players, and I hate jocks. Then, when you get to be thirty-two, you can't help feeling a bit sour every time you see someone catch a good one, can't help it even when you're happy for them.”

Reese's heart soared.

After Julio had asked a few more questions about the motel in Las Vegas and had ascertained its location, he and Reese got up, and Teddy accompanied them to the door. Step by step, Reese wracked his mind for an approach, an opening line. As Julio opened the door, Reese looked back at Teddy and said, “Uh, excuse me, Miss Bertlesman, but I'm a cop, and asking questions is my business, you know, and I was wondering if you're…” He didn't know where to go with it. “… if you're maybe… uh… seeing anyone particular.” Listening to himself, Reese was amazed and dismayed that Julio could sound so smooth while he, trying to imitate his partner's cool manner, could sound so rough and obvious.

Smiling up at him, she said, “Does this have bearing on the case you're investigating?”

“Well… I just thought… I mean… I wouldn't want you mentioning this conversation to anyone. I mean, it's not just that we could get in trouble with our captain… but if you mentioned the motel to anyone, you might jeopardize Mr. Shadway and Mrs. Leben and… well…”

He wanted to shoot himself, put an end to this humiliation.

She said, “I'm not seeing anyone special, not anyone I'd share secrets with.”

Reese cleared his throat. “Well, uh, that's good. All right.”

He started to turn toward the door, where Julio was giving him a strange look, and Teddy said, “You are a big one, aren't you?”

Reese faced her again. “Excuse me?”

“You're quite a big guy. Too bad there aren't more your size. A girl like me would almost seem petite to you.”

What does she mean by that? he wondered. Anything? Just polite conversation? Is she giving me an opening? If it's an opening, how should I respond to it?

“It would be nice to be thought of as petite,” she said.

He tried to speak. Could not.

He felt stupid, awkward, and shy as he'd been at sixteen.

Suddenly he could speak, but he blurted out the question as he might have done as a boy of sixteen: “Miss-Bertlesman-would-you-go-out-with-me-sometime?”

She smiled and said, “Yes.”

“You would?”

“Yes.”

“Saturday night? Dinner? Seven o'clock?”

“Sounds nice.”

He stared at her, amazed. “Really?”

She laughed. “Really.”

A minute later, in the car, Reese said, “Well, I'll be damned.”

“I never realized you were such a smooth operator,” Julio said kiddingly, affectionately.

Blushing, Reese said, “By God, life's funny, isn't it? You never know when it might take a whole new turn.”

“Slow down,” Julio said, starting the engine and driving away from the curb. “It's just a date.”

“Yeah. Probably. But… I got a feeling it might turn out to be more than just that.”

“A smooth operator and a romantic fool,” Julio said as he steered the car down out of the Heights, toward Newport Avenue.

After some thought, Reese said, “You know what Eric Leben forgot? He was so obsessed with living forever, he forgot to enjoy the life he had. Life may be short, but there's a lot to be said for it. Leben was so busy planning for eternity, he forgot to enjoy the moment.”

“Listen,” Julio said, “if romance is going to make a philosopher out of you, I may have to get a new partner.”

For a few minutes Reese was silent, submerged in memories of well-tanned legs and flamingo-pink silk. When he surfaced again, he realized that Julio was not driving aimlessly. “Where we going?”

“John Wayne Airport.”

“Vegas?”

“Is that okay with you?” Julio asked.

“Seems like the only thing we can do.”

“Have to pay for tickets out of our own pockets.”

“I know.”

“You want to stay here, that's all right.”

“I'm in,” Reese said.

“I can handle it alone.”

“I'm in.”

“Might get dangerous from here on, and you have Esther to think about,” Julio said.

My little Esther and now maybe Theodora “Teddy” Bertlesman, Reese thought. And when you find someone to care about — when you dare to care — that's when life gets cruel; that's when they're taken from you; that's when you lose it all. A premonition of death made him shiver.

Nevertheless, he said, “I'm in. Didn't you hear me say I'm in? For God's sake, Julio, I'm in.”

33 VIVA LAS VEGAS

Following the storm across the desert, Ben Shadway reached Baker, California, gateway to Death Valley, at 6:20.

The wind was blowing much harder than it had been back toward Barstow. The driven rain snapped against the windshield with a sound like thousands of impacting bullets. Service-station, restaurant, and motel signs were swinging on their mountings, trying to tear loose and fly away. A stop sign twitched violently back and forth, caught in turbulent currents of air, and seemed about to screw itself out of the ground. At a Shell station, two attendants in yellow rain slickers moved with their heads bowed and shoulders hunched; the tails of their glistening vinyl coats flapped against their legs and whipped out behind them. A score of bristly tumbleweeds, some four or five feet in diameter, bounced-rolled-sailed across tiny Baker's only east-west street, swept in from the desolate landscape to the south.

Ben tried to call Whitney Gavis from a pay phone inside a small convenience store. He couldn't get through to Vegas. Three times, he listened to a recorded message to the effect that service had been temporarily interrupted. Wind moaned and shrieked against the store's plate-glass windows, and rain drummed furiously on the roof — which was all the explanation he required for AT&T's troubles.

He was scared. He had been badly worried ever since finding the ax propped against the refrigerator in the kitchen of Eric's mountain cabin. But now his fear was escalating by the moment because he began to feel that everything was going wrong for him, that luck had turned entirely against him. The encounter with Sharp, the disastrous change in the weather, his inability to reach Whit Gavis when the phones had been working, now the trouble with the lines to Vegas, made it seem as if the universe was, indeed, not accidental but was a machine with dark and frightful purpose, and that the gods in charge of it were conspiring to make certain he would never again see Rachael alive.

In spite of his fear, frustration, and eagerness to hit the road again, he paused long enough to grab a few things to eat in the car. He'd had nothing since breakfast in Palm Springs, and he was famished.

The clerk behind the counter — a blue-jeaned, middle-aged woman with sun-bleached hair, her brown skin toughened by too many years on the desert — sold him three candy bars, a few bags of peanuts, and a six-pack of Pepsi. When Ben asked her about the phones, she said, “I hear tell there's been flash flooding east of here, out near Cal Neva, and worse around Stateline. Undermined a few telephone poles, brought down the lines. Word is, it'll be repaired in a couple of hours.”

“I never knew it rained this hard in the desert,” he said as she gave him change.

“Don't rain — really rain, I mean — but maybe three times a year. Though when we do get a storm, it sometimes comes down like God is breaking his promise about the fire next time and figures to wipe us out with a great flood like before.”

The stolen Merkur was parked half a dozen steps beyond the exit from the store, but Ben was soaked again during the few seconds needed to get to the car. Inside, he popped open a can of Pepsi, took a long swallow, braced the can between his thighs, peeled the wrapper off a candy bar, started the engine, and drove back toward the interstate.

Regardless of how terrible the weather got, he would have to push toward Vegas at the highest possible speed, seventy or eighty miles an hour, faster if he could manage it, even though the chances were very high that, sooner or later, he would lose control of the car on the rain-greased highway. His inability to reach Whit Gavis had left him with no alternative.

Ascending the entrance ramp to I-15, the car coughed once and shuddered, but then it surged ahead without further hesitation. For a minute, heading east-northeast toward Nevada, Ben listened intently to the engine and glanced repeatedly at the dashboard, expecting to see a warning light blink on. But the engine purred, and the warning lights remained off, and none of the dials or gauges indicated trouble, so he relaxed slightly. He munched on his candy bar and gradually put the Merkur up to seventy, carefully testing its responsiveness on the treacherously wet pavement.

Anson Sharp was awake and refreshed by 7:10 Tuesday evening. From his motel room in Palm Springs, with the background sound of hard rain on the roof and water gurgling through a downspout near his window, he called subordinates at several places throughout southern California.

From Dirk Cringer, an agent at the case-operation headquarters in Orange County, Sharp learned that Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom had not dropped out of the Leben investigation as they were supposed to have done. Given their well-earned reputation as bulldog cops who were reluctant to quit even hopeless cases, Sharp had ordered both of their personal cars fitted with hidden transmitters last night and had assigned men to follow them electronically, at a distance from which Verdad and Hagerstrom would not spot a tail. That precaution had paid off, for this afternoon they had visited UCI to meet with Dr. Easton Solberg, a former associate of Leben's, and later they had spent a couple of hours on stakeout in front of Shadway Realty's main office in Tustin.

“They spotted our team and set up their own surveillance half a block back,” Cringer said, “where they could watch both us and the realty office.”

“Must've thought they were real cute,” Sharp said, “when all the time we were watching them while they watched us.”

“Then they followed one of the real-estate agents home, a woman named Theodora Bertlesman.”

“We already interviewed her about Shadway, didn't we?”

“Yeah, everyone who works with him in that office. And this Bertlesman woman wasn't any more cooperative than the rest of them, maybe less.”

“How long were Verdad and Hagerstrom at her place?”

“More than twenty minutes.”

“Sounds like she might've been more open with them. Have any idea what she told them?”

“No,” Cringer said. “She lives on a hillside, so it was hard to get a clear angle on any of the windows with a directional microphone. By the time we could've set it up, Verdad and Hagerstrom were leaving anyway. They went straight from her place to the airport.”

“What?” Sharp said, surprised. “LAX?”

“No. John Wayne Airport here in Orange County. That's where they are now, waiting for a flight out.”

“What flight? To where?”

“Vegas. They bought tickets on the first available flight to Vegas. It leaves at eight o'clock.”

“Why Vegas?” Sharp said, more to himself than to Cringer.

“Maybe they finally decided to give up on the case like they were told. Maybe they're going off for a little holiday.”

“You don't go off on a holiday without packing suitcases. You said they went straight to the airport, which

I suppose means they didn't make a quick stop home to grab a change of clothes.”

“Straight to the airport,” Cringer confirmed.

“All right, good,” Sharp said, suddenly excited. “Then they're probably trying to get to Shadway and Mrs. Leben before we do, and they've reason to believe the place to look is somewhere in Las Vegas.” There was a chance he would get his hands on Shadway, after all. And this time, the bastard would not slip away. “If there're any seats left on that eight o'clock flight, I want you to put two of your men aboard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have men here in Palm Springs, and we'll head to Vegas, too, just as soon as we can. I want to be in place at the airport there and ready to track Verdad and Hagerstrom the moment they arrive.”

Sharp hung up and immediately called Jerry Peake's room.

Outside, thunder roared in the north and faded to a soft rumble as it moved south through the Coachella Valley.

Peake sounded groggy when he answered.

“It's almost seven-thirty,” Sharp told him. “Be ready to roll in fifteen minutes.”

“What's happening?”

“We're going to Vegas after Shadway, and this time luck's on our side.”

One of the many problems of driving a stolen car is that you can't be sure of its mechanical condition. You can't very well ask for a guarantee of reliability and a service history from the owner before you make off with his wheels.

The stolen Merkur failed Ben forty miles east of Baker. It began coughing, wheezing, and shuddering as it had done on the entrance ramp to the interstate a while ago, but this time it did not cease coughing until the engine died. He steered onto the berm and tried to restart the car, but it would not respond. All he was doing was draining the battery, so he sat for a moment, despairing, as the rain fell by the pound and by the hundred-weight upon the car.

But surrender to despair was not his style. After only a few seconds, he formulated a plan and put it into action, inadequate though it might be.

He tucked the.357 Combat Magnum under his belt, against the small of his back, and pulled his shirt out of his jeans to cover the gun. He would not be able to take the shotgun, and he deeply regretted the loss of it.

He switched on the Merkur's emergency flashers and got out into the pouring rain. Fortunately, the lightning had passed away to the east. Standing in the storm-gray twilight gloom beside the disabled car, he shielded his eyes with one hand and looked into the rain, toward the west, where distant headlights were approaching.

I-15 was still lightly traveled. A few determined gamblers were trekking toward their mecca and would probably have been undeterred by Armageddon, though there were more big trucks than anything else. He waved his arms, signaling for help, but two cars and three trucks passed him without slowing. As their tires cut through puddles on the pavement, they sent sheets of water pluming in their wake, some of which cascaded over Ben, adding to his misery.

About two minutes later, another eighteen-wheeler came into view. It was bearing so many lights that it appeared to be decorated for Christmas. To Ben's relief, it began to brake far back and came to a full stop on the berm behind the Merkur.

He ran back to the big rig and peered up at the open window where a craggy-faced man with a handlebar mustache squinted down at him from the warm, dry cab. “Broke down!” Ben shouted above the cacophony of wind and rain.

“Closest mechanic you're going to find is back in Baker,” the driver called down to him. “Best cross over to the westbound lanes and try to catch a ride going that way.”

“Don't have time to find a mechanic and get her fixed!” Ben shouted. “Got to make Vegas fast as I can.” He had prepared the lie while waiting for someone to stop. “My wife's in the hospital there, hurt bad, maybe dying.”

“Good Lord,” the driver said, “you better come aboard, then.”

Ben hurried around to the passenger's door, praying that his benefactor was a highballer who would keep the pedal to the metal in spite of the weather and rocket into Vegas in record time.

Driving across the rain-lashed Mojave on the last leg of the trip to Las Vegas, with the darkness of the storm slowly giving way to the deeper darkness of night, Rachael felt lonelier than she'd ever felt before — and she was no stranger to loneliness. The rain had not let up for the past couple of hours, largely because she was more than keeping pace with the storm as it moved eastward, driving deeper into the heart of it. The hollow beating of the windshield wipers and the droning of the tires on the wet road were like the shuttles of a loom that wove not cloth but isolation.

Much of her life had been lived in loneliness and in emotional — if not always physical — isolation. By the time Rachael was born, her mother and father had discovered that they could not abide each other, but for religious reasons they had been unwilling to consider divorce. Therefore, Rachael's earliest years passed in a loveless house, where her parents' resentment toward each other was inadequately concealed. Worse, each of them seemed to view her as the other's child — a reason to resent her, too. Neither was more than dutifully affectionate.

As soon as she was old enough, she was sent to Catholic boarding schools where, except for holidays, she remained for the next eleven years. In those institutions, all run by nuns, she made few friends, none close, partly because she had a very low opinion of herself and could not believe that anyone would want to be friends with her.

A few days after she graduated from prep school, the summer before she was to enter college, her parents were killed in a plane crash on their way home from a business trip. Rachael had been under the impression that her father had made a small fortune in the garment industry by investing money that her mother had inherited the year of their wedding. But when the will was probated and the estate was settled, Rachael discovered that the family business had been skirting bankruptcy for years and that their upper-class life-style had eaten up every dollar earned. Virtually penniless, she had to cancel her plans to attend Brown University and, instead, went to work as a waitress, living in a boarding-house and saving what she could toward a more modest education in California's tax-supported university system.

A year later, when she finally started school, she made no real friends because she had to keep waitressing and had no time for the extracurricular activities through which college relationships are formed. By the time she received her degree and launched herself upon a program of graduate study, she had known at least eight thousand nights of loneliness.

She was easy prey for Eric when, needing to feed on her youth as a vampire feeds on blood, he had determined to make her his wife. He was twelve years her senior, so he knew far more about charming and winning a young woman than men her own age knew; he made her feel wanted and special for the first time in her life. Considering the difference in their ages, perhaps she also saw in him a father figure capable of giving her not only the love of a husband but the parental love she had never known.

Of course, it had turned out less well than she expected. She learned that Eric didn't love her but loved, instead, the thing that she symbolized to him — vigorous, healthful, energetic youth. Their marriage soon proved to be as loveless as that of her parents.

Then she had found Benny. And for the first time in her life she had not been lonely.

But now Benny was gone, and she didn't know if she would ever see him again.

The Mercedes's windshield wipers beat out a monotonous rhythm, and the tires sang a one-note tune — a song of the void, of despair and loneliness.

She attempted to comfort herself with the thought that at least Eric posed no further threat to her or Ben. Surely he was dead from a score of rattlesnake bites. Even if his genetically altered body could safely metabolize those massive doses of virulent poison, even if Eric could return from the dead a second time, he was obviously degenerating, not merely physically but also mentally. (She had a vivid mental image of him kneeling on the rain-soaked earth, eating a living serpent, as frightening and elemental as the lightning that flashed above him.) If he survived the rattlesnakes, he would very likely remain on the desert, no longer a human being but a thing, loping hunchbacked or squirming on its belly through the hillocks of sand, slithering down into the arroyos, feeding greedily on other desert dwellers, a threat to any beast he encountered but no longer a threat to her. And even if some glimmer of human awareness and intelligence remained in him, and if he still felt the need to avenge himself on Rachael, he would find it difficult if not impossible to come out of the desert into civilization and move freely about. If he tried that, he would create a sensation — panic, terror — wherever he went, and would probably be chased down and captured or shot.

Yet… she was still afraid of him.

She remembered glancing up at him as he followed her from the top of the arroyo wall, remembered staring down at him later when she had been on top and he had been climbing after her, remembered the way he had looked when she had last seen him engaged in battle with the nest of rattlers. In all those memories there was something about him that… well… something that seemed almost mythic, that transcended nature, that seemed powerfully supernatural, undying and unstoppable.

She shuddered with a sudden chill that spread outward from the marrow of her bones.

A moment later, topping a rise in the highway, she saw that she was nearing the end of the current leg of her journey. In a broad dark valley directly ahead and below, Las Vegas glimmered like a miraculous vision in the rain. So many millions of lights shone in every hue that the city looked bigger than New York, though it was actually one-twentieth the size. Even from this distance, at least fifteen miles, she could make out the Strip with all its dazzling resort hotels and the downtown casino center that some called Glitter Gulch, for those areas blazed with by far the greatest concentrations of lights, all of which seemed to blink, pulse, and twinkle.

Less than twenty minutes later, she came out of the vast empty reaches of the bleak Mojave onto Las Vegas Boulevard South, where the neon shimmered across the rain-mirrored road in waves of purple, pink, red, green, and gold. Pulling up to the front doors of the Bally's Grand, she almost wept with relief when she saw the bellmen, valet-parking attendants, and a few hotel guests standing under the porte cochere. For hours on the interstate, the passing cars had seemed untenanted in the storm-obscured night, so it was wonderful to see people again, even if they were all strangers.

At first, Rachael hesitated to leave the Mercedes with a valet-parking attendant because the precious Wildcard file was in a garbage bag on the floor behind the driver's seat. But she decided that no one was likely to steal a garbage bag, especially not one full of creased and crumpled papers. Besides, it would be safer with the valet than parked in the public lot. She left the car in his care and took a claim check for it.

She had mostly recovered from the twist she'd given her ankle when running from Eric. The claw punctures in her calf throbbed and burned, although those wounds felt better, too. She entered the hotel with only a slight limp.

For a moment, she was almost thrown into shock by the contrast between the stormy night behind her and the excitement of the casino. It was a glittery world of crystal chandeliers, velvet, brocade, plush carpets, marble, polished brass, and green felt, where the sound of wind and rain could not be heard above the roar of voices exhorting Lady Luck, the ringing of slot machines, and the raucous music of a pop-rock band in the lounge.

Gradually Rachael became uncomfortably aware that her appearance made her an object of curiosity in these surroundings. Of course, not everyone — not even a majority of the clientele — dressed elegantly for a night of drinking, nightclub shows, and gambling. Women in cocktail dresses and men in fine suits were common, but others were dressed more casually: some in polyester leisure suits, some in jeans and sports shirts. However, none of them wore a torn and soiled blouse (as she did), and none of them wore jeans that looked as if they might have just been through a rodeo contest (as she did), and none of them boasted filthy sneakers with blackened laces and one sole half torn off from scrambling up and down arroyo walls (as she did), and none of them was dirty-faced and stringy-haired (as she was). She had to assume that, even in the escapist world of Vegas, people watched some TV news and might recognize her as the infamous traitor and fugitive wanted throughout the Southwest. The last thing she needed was to call attention to herself. Fortunately, gamblers are a single-minded group, more intent upon their wagering than upon the need to breathe, and few of them even glanced up from their games to look at her; none looked twice.

She hurried around the perimeter of the casino to the public telephones, which were in an alcove where the casino noise faded to a soft roar. She called information for Whitney Gavis's number. He answered on the first ring. Rather breathlessly she said, “I'm sorry, you don't know me, my name's Rachael—”

“Ben's Rachael?” he interrupted.

“Yes,” she said, surprised.

“I know you, know all about you.” He had a voice amazingly like Benny's: calm and measured and reassuring. “And I just heard the news an hour ago, that ridiculous damn story about defense secrets. What a crock. Anybody who knows Benny wouldn't believe it for a second. I don't know what's going on, but I figured you guys would be coming my way if you needed to go to ground for a while.”

“He's not with me, but he sent me to you,” Rachael explained.

“Say no more. Just tell me where you are.”

“The Grand.”

“It's eight o'clock. I'll be there by eight-ten. Don't go wandering around. They have so much surveillance in those casinos you're bound to be on a monitor somewhere if you go onto the floor, and maybe one of the security men on duty will have seen the evening news. Get my drift?”

“Can I go to the rest room? I'm a mess. I could use a quick washup.”

“Sure. Just don't go onto the casino floor. And be back by the phones in ten minutes, 'cause that's where I'll meet you. There're no security cameras by the phones. Sit tight, kid.”

“Wait!”

“What is it?” he asked.

“What do you look like? How will I recognize you?”

He said, “Don't worry, kid. I'll recognize you. Benny's shown me your picture so often that every detail of your gorgeous face is burned into my cerebral cortex. Remember, sit tight!”

The line went dead, and she hung up.

Jerry Peake was not sure he wanted to be a legend anymore. He was not even sure he wanted to be a DSA agent, legendary or otherwise. Too much had been happening too fast. He was unable to assimilate it properly. He felt as if he were trying to walk through one of those big rolling barrels that were sometimes used as the entrance to a carnival funhouse, except they were spinning this barrel about five times faster than even the most sadistic carny operator would dare, and it also seemed to be an endless tube from which he would never emerge. He wondered if he would ever get his feet under him and know stability again.

Anson Sharp's call had roused Peake from a sleep so deep that it almost required a headstone. Even a quick cold shower had not entirely awakened him. A ride through rain-washed streets to the Palm Springs airport, with siren wailing and emergency beacon flashing, had seemed like part of a bad dream. At the airfield, at 8:10, a light transport twin turbo-prop arrived from the Marine Corps Training Center at nearby Twentynine Palms, provided as an interservice courtesy to the Defense Security Agency on an emergency basis, little more than half an hour after Sharp had requested it. They boarded and immediately took off into the storm. The daredevil-steep ascent of the hotshot military pilot, combined with the howling wind and driving rain, finally blew away the lingering traces of sleep. Peake was wide awake, gripping the arms of his seat so hard that his white knuckles looked as if they would split through his skin.

“With any luck,” Sharp told Peake and Nelson Gosser (the other man he'd brought along), “we'll land at McCarran International, in Vegas, about ten or fifteen minutes ahead of that flight from Orange County. When Verdad and Hagerstrom come waltzing into the terminal, we'll be ready to put them under tight surveillance.”

At 8:10, the 8:00 p.m. flight to Vegas had not yet taken off from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, but the pilot assured the passengers that departure was imminent. Meanwhile, there were beverages, honey-roasted beer nuts, and mint wafers to make the minutes pass more pleasantly.

“I love these honey-roasted beer nuts,” Reese said, “but I just remembered something I don't like at all.”

“What's that?” Julio asked.

“Flying.”

“It's a short flight.”

“A man doesn't expect to have to fly all over the map when he chooses a career in law enforcement.”

“Forty-five minutes, fifty at most,” Julio said soothingly.

“I'm in,” Reese said quickly before Julio could start to get the wrong idea about his objections to flying. “I'm in the case for the duration, but I just wish there was a boat to Vegas.”

At 8:12, they taxied to the head of the runway and took off.

Driving east in the red pickup, Eric struggled mile by mile to retain sufficient human consciousness to operate the truck. Sometimes bizarre thoughts and feelings plagued him: a wishful longing to leave the truck and run naked across the dark desert plains, hair flying in the wind, the rain sluicing down his bare flesh; an unsettlingly urgent need to burrow, to squirm into a dark moist place and hide; a hot, fierce, demanding sexual urge, not human in any regard, more like an animal's rutting fever. He also experienced memories, clear images in his mind's eye, that were not his own but from some genetic storage bank of racial recollections: scavenging hungrily in a rotting log for grubs and wriggling insects; mating with some musk-drenched creature in a dank and lightless den… If he allowed any of these thoughts, urges, or memories to preoccupy him, he would slip away into that mindless subhuman state he had entered both times when he had killed back at the rest area, and in that condition he'd drive the pickup straight off the road. Therefore, he tried to repress those alluring images and urges, strove to focus his attention on the rainy highway ahead. He was largely successful — though at times his vision briefly clouded, and he began to breathe too fast, and the siren call of other states of consciousness became almost too much to bear.

For long stretches of time, he felt nothing physically unusual happening to him. But on several occasions he was aware of changes taking place, and then it was as if his body were a ball of tangled worms that, having recently lain dormant and still, suddenly began to squirm and writhe frantically. After having seen his inhuman eyes in the rearview mirror back at the rest stop — one green and orange with a slit-shaped iris, the other multifaceted and even stranger — he had not dared to look at himself, for he knew that his sanity was already precarious. However, he could see his hands upon the steering wheel, and he was aware of ongoing alterations in them: For a while, his elongated fingers grew shorter, thicker, and the long hooked nails retracted somewhat, and the web between thumb and the first finger all but vanished; then the process reversed itself, and his hands grew larger again, the knuckles lumpier, the claws even sharper and more wickedly pointed than before. At the moment, his hands were so hideous — dark, mottled, with a backward-curving spur at the base of each monstrous nail, and with one extra joint in each finger — that he kept his gaze on the road ahead and tried not to look down.

His inability to confront his own appearance resulted not merely from fear of what he was becoming. He was afraid, yes, but he also took a sick, demented pleasure in his transformation. At least for the moment, he was immensely strong, lightning-quick, and deadly. Except for his inhuman appearance, he was the personification of that macho dream of absolute power and unstoppable fury that every young boy entertained and that no man ever quite outgrew. He could not allow himself to dwell on this, for his power fantasies could trigger a descent into the animal state.

The peculiar and not unpleasant fire in his flesh, blood, and bones was with him now at all times, without pause, and in fact it grew hotter by the hour. Previously he had thought of himself as a man melting into new forms, but now he almost felt as if he were not melting but aflame, as if fire would leap from his fingertips at any moment. He had given it a name: the changefire.

Fortunately, the debilitating spasms of intense pain that had seized him early in his metamorphosis were no longer a part of the changes. Now and then an ache arose, or a brief stabbing agony, but nothing as intense as before and nothing that lasted longer than a minute or two. Apparently, during the past ten hours, amorphousness had become a genetically programmed condition of his body, as natural to him — and therefore as painless — as respiration, a regular heartbeat, digestion, and excretion.

Periodic attacks of cripplingly severe hunger were the only pains he suffered. However, those pangs could be excruciating, unlike any hunger he had ever known in his previous life. As his body destroyed old cells and manufactured new ones at a frantic pace, it required a lot of fuel to fire the process. He also found himself urinating far more frequently than usual, and each time he pulled off the road to relieve his bladder, his urine reeked ever more strongly of ammonia and other chemicals.

Now, as he drove the pickup over a rise in the highway and suddenly found himself looking down upon the sprawling, scintillant spectacle of Las Vegas, he was hit once more by a hunger that seized his stomach in a viselike grip and twisted hard. He began to sweat and shake uncontrollably.

He steered the pickup onto the berm and stopped. He fumbled for the handbrake, pulled it on.

He had begun to whimper when the first pangs struck him. Now he heard himself growling deep in his throat, and he sensed his self-control rapidly slipping away as his animal needs became more demanding, less resistible.

He was afraid of what he might do. Maybe leave the car and go hunting in the desert. He could get lost out there in those trackless barrens, even within a few miles of Vegas. Worse: all intellect fled, guided by pure instinct, he might go onto the highway and somehow stop a passing car, drag the screaming driver from the vehicle, and rip him to pieces. Others would see, and then there would be no hope of journeying secretly to the shuttered motel in Vegas where Rachael was hiding.

Nothing must stop him from reaching Rachael. The very thought of her brought a blood-red tinge to his vision and elicited an involuntary shriek of rage that rebounded shrilly off the rain-washed windows of the truck. Taking his revenge on her, killing her, was the one desire powerful enough to have given him the strength to resist devolution during the long drive across the desert. The possibility of revenge had kept him sane, had kept him going.

Desperately repressing the primal consciousness that acute hunger had unleashed within him, he turned eagerly to the Styrofoam cooler that was in the open storage compartment behind the pickup's front seat. He had seen it when he had gotten into the truck at the rest area, but he had not thus far explored its contents. He lifted the lid and saw, with some relief, that the cowboy and the girl had been making a sort of picnic of their trip to Vegas. The cooler contained half a dozen sandwiches in tightly sealed Ziploc bags, two apples, and a six-pack of beer.

With his dragon hands, Eric shredded the plastic bags and ate the sandwiches almost as fast as he could stuff them into his mouth. Several times he choked on the food, gagged on gummy wads of bread and meat, and had to concentrate on chewing them more thoroughly.

Four of the sandwiches were filled with thick slices of rare roast beef. The taste and smell of the half-cooked flesh excited him almost unbearably. He wished the beef had been raw and dripping. He wished he could have sunk his teeth into the living animal and could have torn loose throbbing chunks of its flesh.

The other two sandwiches were Swiss cheese and mustard, no meat, and he ate them, too, because he needed all the fuel he could get, but he did not like them, for they lacked the delicious and exhilarating flavor of blood. He remembered the taste of the cowboy's blood. Even better, the intensely coppery flavor of the woman's blood, taken from her throat and from her breast… He began to hiss and to twist back and forth in his seat, exhilarated by those memories. Ravenous, he ate the two apples as well, although his enlarged jaws, strangely reshaped tongue, and sharply pointed teeth had not been designed for the consumption of fruit.

He drank all of the beer, choking and spluttering on it as he poured it down. He had no fear of intoxication, for he knew that his racing metabolism would burn off the alcohol before he felt any effect from it.

For a while, having devoured every ounce of food in the cooler, he slumped back in the driver's seat, panting. He stared stupidly at the water-filmed windows, the beast within him temporarily subdued. Dreamy memories of murder and vaguer recollections of coupling with the cowboy's woman drifted like tendrils of smoke across the back of his mind.

Out on the night-clad desert, shadowfires burned.

Doorways to hell? Beckoning him to the damnation that had been his destiny but that he had escaped by beating death?

Or merely hallucinations? Perhaps his tortured subconscious mind, terrified of the changes taking place in the body it inhabited, was trying desperately to externalize the changefire to transfer the heat of metamorphosis out of his flesh and blood and into these vivid illusions.

That was the most intellectual train of thought he had ridden in many hours, and for a moment he felt a heartening resurgence of the cognitive powers that had earned him the reputation of a genius in his field. But only for a moment. Then the memory of blood returned, and a shiver of savage pleasure passed through him, and he made a thick guttural sound in the back of his throat.

A few cars and trucks passed on the highway to his left. Heading east. Heading to Vegas. Vegas…

Slowly he recalled that he was also bound for Vegas, for the Golden Sand Inn, for a rendezvous with revenge.