Sole Survivor

13

The public telephone, one in a cluster of four, was not in a booth, but the wings of a sound shield provided a small measure of privacy.

As he entered Barbara’s Colorado Springs number on the keypad, Joe ground his teeth together as though he could bite off the noise of the crowded terminal and chew it into a silence that would allow him to concentrate. He needed to think through what he would say to her, but he had neither the time nor the solitude to craft the ideal speech, and he was afraid of committing a blunder that would pitch her deeper into trouble.

Even if her phone had not been tapped the previous evening, it was surely being monitored now, following his visit to her. His task was to warn her of the danger while simultaneously convincing the eavesdroppers that she had never broken the pledge of silence that would keep her and Denny safe.

As the telephone began to ring in Colorado, Joe glanced toward the storyteller, who had taken up a position farther along — and on the opposite side of — the concourse. He was standing outside the entrance to an airport newsstand and gift shop, nervously adjusting his Panama hat, and conversing with a Hispanic man in tan chinos, a green madras shirt, and a Dodgers cap.

Through the screen of passing travelers, Joe pretended not to watch the two men while they pretended, less convincingly, not to watch him. They were less circumspect than they should have been, because they were overconfident. Although they might give him credit for being industrious and clever, they thought that he was basically a jerk civilian in fast-running water way over his head.

He was exactly what they thought him to be, of course, but he hoped he was also more than they believed. A man driven by paternal love — and therefore dangerous. A man with a passion for justice that was alien to their world of situational ethics, in which the only morals were the morals of convenience.

Barbara answered the phone on the fifth ring, just as Joe was beginning to despair.

“It’s me, Joe Carpenter,” he said.

“I was just—”

Before Barbara could say anything that might reveal the extent of the revelations she’d made to him, Joe said, “Listen, I wanted to thank you again for taking me to the crash site. It wasn’t easy, but it was something I had to do, had to see, if I was ever going to have any peace. I’m sorry if I badgered you about what really happened to that airplane. I was a little crazy, I guess. A couple of odd things have happened lately, and I just let my imagination run wild. You were right when you said most of the time things are exactly what they appear to be. It’s just hard to accept that you can lose your family to anything as stupid as an accident, mechanical failure, human error, whatever. You feel like it just has to be a lot more significant than an accident because…well, because they were so significant to you. You know? You think there have to be villains somewhere, that it can’t be just fate, because God wouldn’t allow this to happen. But you started me thinking when you said the only place there’s always villains is in the movies. If I’m going to get over this, I’m going to have to accept that these things just happen, that no one’s to blame. Life is risk, right? God does let innocent people die, lets children die. It’s that simple.”

Joe was tense, waiting to hear what she would say, whether she had understood the urgent message that he was striving to convey so indirectly.

After a brief hesitation, Barbara said, “I hope you find peace, Joe, I really do. It took a lot of guts for you to go out there, right to the impact site. And it takes guts to face the fact that there’s no one to blame in the end. As long as you’re stuck in the idea that there’s someone who’s guilty of something, someone who’s got to be brought to justice…well, then you’re full of vengeance, and you’re not healing.”

She understood.

Joe closed his eyes and tried to gather his unraveled nerves into a tight bundle again.

He said, “It’s just…we live in such weird times. It’s easy to believe in vast conspiracies.”

“Easier than facing hard truths. Your real argument isn’t with the pilots or the maintenance crew. It isn’t with the air-traffic controllers or with the people who built the airplane. Your real argument’s with God.”

“Which I can’t win,” he said, opening his eyes.

In front of the newsstand, the storyteller and the Dodgers fan finished their conversation. The storyteller departed.

“We’re not supposed to understand why,” Barbara said. “We just have to have faith that there’s a reason. If you can learn to accept that, then you really might find peace. You’re a very nice man, Joe. You don’t deserve to be in such torment. I’ll be praying for you.”

“Thanks, Barbara. Thanks for everything.”

“Good luck, Joe.”

He almost wished her good luck as well, but those two words might be a tip-off to whoever was listening.

Instead, he said, “Good-bye.”

Still hummingbird tense, he hung up.

Simply by going to Colorado and knocking on Barbara’s door, he had put her, her son, and her son’s entire family in terrible jeopardy — although he’d had no way of knowing this would be the consequence of his visit. Anything might happen to her now — or nothing — and Joe felt a chill of blame coil around his heart.

On the other hand, by going to Colorado, he had learned that Nina was miraculously alive. He was willing to take the moral responsibility for a hundred deaths in return for the mere hope of seeing her again.

He was aware of how monstrous it was to regard the life of his daughter as more precious than the lives of any hundred strangers — two hundred, a thousand. He didn’t care. He would kill to save her, if that was the extreme to which he was driven. Kill anyone who got in his way. Any number.

Wasn’t it the human dilemma to dream of being part of the larger community but, in the face of everlasting death, always to operate on personal and family imperatives? And he was, after all, too human.

Joe left the public telephones and followed the concourse toward the exit. As he reached the head of the escalators, he contrived to glance back.

The Dodgers fan followed at a discreet distance, well disguised by the ordinariness of his dress and demeanor. He wove himself into the crowd so skillfully that he was no more evident than any single thread in a coat of many colors.

Down the escalator and through the lower floor of the terminal, Joe did not look back again. Either the Dodgers fan would be there or he would have handed Joe over to another agent, as the storyteller had done.

Given their formidable resources, they would have a substantial contingent of operatives at the airport. He could never escape them here.

He had exactly an hour until he had to meet Demi, who he hoped would take him to Rose Tucker. If he didn’t make the rendezvous in time, he had no way to reestablish contact with the woman.

His wristwatch seemed to be ticking as loudly as a grandfather clock.

Tortured faces melted into the mutant forms of strange animals and nightmare landscapes in the Rorschach stains on the walls of the vast, drab concrete parking structure. Engine noise from cars in other aisles, on other levels, echoed like a Grendel grumble through these man-made caverns.

His Honda was where he’d left it.

Although most of the vehicles in the garage were cars, three vans — none white — an old Volkswagen minibus with curtained windows, and a pickup truck with a camper shell were parked near enough to him to serve as surveillance posts. He didn’t give any of them a second look.

He opened the car trunk, and using his body to block the view of any onlooker, he quickly checked the spare-tire well for the money. He had taken two thousand to Colorado, but he had left the bulk of his funds in the Honda. He was afraid the bank’s manila envelope with the brass clasp would be gone, but it was where he’d left it.

He slipped the envelope under the waistband of his jeans. He considered taking the small suitcase as well, but if he transferred it to the front seat, the people watching him would not be suckered by the little drama he had planned for them.

In the driver’s seat, he took the envelope out of his waistband, opened it, and tucked the packets of hundred-dollar bills in the various pockets of his corduroy jacket. He folded the empty envelope and put it in the console box.

When he backed out of the parking space and drove away, none of the suspect vehicles followed him immediately. They didn’t need to be quick. Hidden somewhere on the Honda, another transponder was sending the surveillance team a signal that made constant visual contact unnecessary.

He drove down three levels to the exit. Departing vehicles were lined up at the cashiers’ booths.

As he inched forward, he repeatedly checked his rearview mirror. Just as he reached the cashier, he saw the pickup with the camper shell pull into line six cars behind him.

Driving away from the airport, he held his speed slightly below the legal limit and made no effort to beat traffic lights as they turned yellow ahead of him. He didn’t want to put too much distance between himself and his pursuers.

Preferring surface streets rather than the freeways, he headed toward the west side of the city. Block by block through a seedy commercial district, he searched for a setup that would serve his purposes.

The summer day was warm and clear, and the sunshine was diffused in matching parabolic rainbow arcs across the dirty windshield. The soapy washer spray and the wipers cleared the glass somewhat but not sufficiently.

Squinting through the glare, Joe almost failed to give the used-car dealership due consideration. Gem Fittich Auto Sales. Sunday was a car-shopping day, and the lot was open, though perhaps not for long. Realizing that this was precisely what he needed, he pulled to the right-hand curb and stopped half a block past the place.

He was in front of a transmission-repair shop. The business was housed in a badly maintained stucco and corrugated-steel building that appeared to have been blown together by a capricious tornado, using parts of several other structures that it had previously torn asunder. Fortunately, the shop was closed; he didn’t want any good-Samaritan mechanics coming to his rescue.

He shut off the engine and got out of the Honda.

The pickup with the camper shell was not yet within sight on the street behind him.

He hurried to the front of the car and opened the hood.

The Honda was of no use to him anymore. This time they would have concealed the transponder so well that he would need hours to find it. He couldn’t drive it to Westwood and lead them to Rose, but he couldn’t simply abandon it, either, because then they would know that he was onto them.

He needed to disable the Honda in such a fashion that it would appear to be not sabotage but genuine mechanical failure. Eventually the people following him would open the hood, and if they spotted missing spark plugs or a disconnected distributor cap, they would know that they had been tricked.

Then Barbara Christman would be in deeper trouble than ever. They would realize that Joe had recognized the storyteller on the airplane, that he knew they’d been following him in Colorado — and that everything he’d said to Barbara on the phone had been designed to warn her and to convince them that she had not told him anything important when, in fact, she had told him everything.

He carefully unplugged the ignition control module but left it sitting loosely in its case. A casual inspection would not reveal that it was disengaged. Even if later they searched until they found the problem, they were more likely to assume that the ICM had worked loose on its own rather than that Joe had fiddled with it. At least they would be left with the element of doubt, affording Barbara some protection.

The pickup with the camper shell drove past him.

He didn’t look directly at the truck but recognized it from the corner of his eye.

For a minute or two he pretended to study various things in the engine compartment. Poking this. Wiggling that. Scratching his head.

Leaving the hood up, he got behind the wheel again and tried to start the Honda, but of course he had no luck.

He got out of the car and went to look at the engine again.

Peripherally, he saw that the camper truck had turned off the street at the end of the block. It had stopped in the shallow parking area in front of an empty industrial building that featured a real-estate agency’s large For Sale sign on the front.

He studied the engine another minute, cursing it with energy and color, just in case they had directional microphones trained on him.

Finally he slammed the hood and looked worriedly at his watch. He stood indecisively for a moment. Consulted his watch again. He said, “Shit.”

He walked back the street in the direction he had come. When he arrived at the used-car lot, he hesitated for effect, then walked directly to the sales office.

Gem Fittich Auto Sales operated under numerous crisscrossing stringers of yellow and white and red plastic pennants faded by a summer of sun. In the breeze, they snapped like the flapping wings of a perpetually hovering flock of buzzards over more than thirty cars that ranged from good stock to steel carrion.

The office was in a small prefab building painted yellow with red trim. Through the large picture window, Joe could see a man lounging in a spring-back chair, watching a small television, loafer-clad feet propped on a desk.

As he climbed the two steps and went through the open doorway, he heard a sportscaster doing color commentary on a baseball game.

The building consisted of a single large room with a rest room in one corner, visible beyond the half-open door. The two desks, the four chairs, and the bank of metal file cabinets were cheap, but everything was clean and neatly kept.

Joe had been hoping for dust, clutter, and a sense of quiet desperation.

The fortyish salesman was cheery-looking, sandy-haired, wearing tan cotton slacks and a yellow polo shirt. He swung his feet off the desk, got up from his chair, and offered his hand. “Howdy! Didn’t hear you drive up. I’m Gem Fittich.”

Shaking his hand, Joe said, “Joe Carpenter. I need a car.”

“You came to the right place.” Fittich reached toward the portable television that stood on his desk.

“No, that’s okay, leave it on,” Joe said.

“You’re a fan, you might not want to see this one. They’re getting their butts kicked.”

Right now the transmission-repair shop next door blocked them from the surveillance team. If the camper truck appeared across the street, however, as Joe more than half expected, and if directional microphones were trained on the big picture window, the audio from the baseball game might have to be turned up to foil the listeners.

Positioning himself so he could talk to Fittich and look past him to the sales lot and the street, Joe said, “What’s the cheapest set of wheels you’ve got ready to roll?”

“Once you consider my prices, you’re going to realize you can get plenty of value without having to settle for—”

“Here’s the deal,” Joe said, withdrawing packets of hundred-dollar bills from a jacket pocket. “Depending on how it performs on a test drive, I’ll buy the cheapest car you have on the lot right now, one hundred percent cash money, no guarantee required.”

Fittich liked the look of the cash. “Well, Joe, I’ve got this Subaru, she’s a long road from the factory, but she’s still got life in her. No air conditioning but radio and—”

“How much?”

“Well, now, I’ve done some work on her, have her tagged at twenty-one hundred fifty, but I’ll let you have her for nineteen seventy-five. She—”

Joe considered offering less, but every minute counted, and considering what he was going to ask of Fittich, he decided that he wasn’t in a position to bargain. He interrupted the salesman to say, “I’ll take it.”

After a disappointingly slow day in the iron-horse trade, Gem Fittich was clearly torn between pleasure at the prospect of a sale and uneasiness at the way in which they had arrived at terms. He smelled trouble. “You don’t want to take a test drive?”

Putting two thousand in cash on Fittich’s desk, Joe said, “That is exactly what I want to do. Alone.”

Across the street, a tall man appeared on foot, coming from the direction in which the camper truck was parked. He stood in the shade of a bus-stop shelter. If he’d sat on the shelter bench, his view of the sales office would have been hampered by the merchandise parked in front of it.

“Alone?” Fittich asked, puzzled.

“You’ve got the whole purchase price there on the desk,” Joe said. From his wallet, he withdrew his driver’s license and handed it to Fittich. “I see you have a Xerox. Make a copy of my license.”

The guy at the bus stop was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and slacks, and he wasn’t carrying anything. Therefore, he wasn’t equipped with a high-power, long-range listening device; he was just keeping watch.

Fittich followed the direction of Joe’s gaze and said, “What trouble am I getting into here?”

Joe met the salesman’s eyes. “None. You’re clear. You’re just doing business.”

“Why’s that fella at the bus stop interest you?”

“He doesn’t. He’s just a guy.”

Fittich wasn’t deceived. “If what’s actually happening here is a purchase, not just a test drive, then there’re state forms we have to fill out, sales tax to be collected, legal procedures.”

“But it’s just a test drive,” Joe said.

He checked his wristwatch. He wasn’t pretending to be worried about the hour now; he was genuinely concerned.

“All right, look, Mr. Fittich, no more bullshit. I don’t have time. This is going to be even better for you than a sale, because here’s what’s going to happen. You take that money and stick it in the back of a desk drawer. Nobody ever has to know I gave it to you. I’ll drive the Subaru to where I have to go, which is only someplace on the West Side. I’d take my own car, but they’ve got a tracking device on it, and I don’t want to be followed. I’ll abandon the Subaru in a safe area and call you by tomorrow to let you know where it is. You bring it back, and all that’s happened is you’ve rented your cheapest car for one day for two thousand bucks tax free. The worst that happens is I don’t call. You’ve still got the money — and a theft write-off.”

Fittich turned the driver’s license over and over in his hand. “Is somebody going to ask me why I’d let you make a test drive alone even with a copy of your license?”

“The guy looked honest to me,” Joe said, feeding Fittich the lines he could use. “It was his picture on the license. And I just couldn’t leave, ’cause I expected a call from a hot prospect who came in earlier and might buy the best piece of iron I have on the lot. Didn’t want to risk missing that call.”

“You got it all figured out,” Fittich said.

His manner changed. The easygoing, smiley-faced salesman was a chrysalis from which another Gem Fittich was emerging, a version with more angles and harder edges.

He stepped to the Xerox and switched it on.

Nevertheless, Joe sensed that Fittich had not yet made up his mind. “The fact is, Mr. Fittich, even if they come in here and ask you some questions, there’s nothing they could do to you — and nothing they’d want to bother doing.”

“You in the drug trade?” Fittich asked bluntly.

“No.”

“’Cause I hate people who sell drugs.”

“I do too.”

“Ruining our kids, ruining what’s left of our country.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Not that there is much left.” Fittich glanced through the window at the man at the bus stop. “They cops?”

“Not really.”

“Cause I support the cops. They got a hard job these days, trying to uphold the law when the biggest criminals are some of our own elected officials.”

Joe shook his head. “These aren’t any kind of cops you’ve ever heard of.”

Fittich thought for a while, and then he said, “That was an honest answer.”

“I’m being as truthful with you as I can be. But I’m in a hurry. They probably think I’m in here to call a mechanic or a tow truck or something. If I’m going to get that Subaru, I want it to be now, before they maybe tumble to what I’m really doing.”

After glancing at the window and the bus stop across the street, Fittich said, “They government?”

“For all intents and purposes — yeah.”

“You know why the drug problem just grows?” Fittich said. “It’s because half this current group of politicians, they’ve been paid off to let it happen, and hell, a bunch of the bastards are even users themselves, so they don’t care.”

Joe said nothing, for fear that he would say the wrong thing. He didn’t know the cause of Fittich’s anger with authority. He could easily misspeak and be viewed suddenly as not a like thinker but as one of the enemy.

Frowning, Gem Fittich made a Xerox copy of the driver’s license. He returned the laminated card to Joe, who put it away in his wallet.

At the desk again, Fittich stared at the money. He seemed to be disturbed about cooperating — not because he was worried about getting in trouble but because the moral dimension, in fact, was of concern to him. Finally he sighed, opened a drawer, and slid the two thousand into it.

From another drawer, he withdrew a set of keys and handed them to Joe.

Taking them gratefully, Joe said, “Where is it?”

Fittich pointed at the car through the window. “Half an hour, I probably got to call the cops and report it stolen, just to cover myself.”

“I understand. With luck, I’ll be where I’m going by then.”

“Hell, don’t worry, they won’t even look for it anyway. You could use it a week and never get nailed.”

“I will call you, Mr. Fittich, and tell you exactly where I left it.”

“I expect you will.” As Joe reached the open door, Fittich said, “Mr. Carpenter, do you believe in the end of all things?”

Joe paused on the threshold. “Excuse me?”

The Gem Fittich who had emerged from the chrysalis of the cheerful salesman was not merely harder edged and edgier; he also had peculiar eyes — eyes different from what they had been, full of not anger but an unnerving pensiveness. “The end of time in our time, the end of this mess of a world we’ve made, all of it just suddenly rolled up and put away like an old moth-eaten rug.”

“I suppose it’s got to end someday,” Joe said.

“Not someday. Soon. Doesn’t it seem to you that wrong and right have all got turned upside down, that we don’t even half know the difference anymore?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and feel it coming? Like a tidal wave a thousand miles high, hanging over us, darker than the night and cold, going to crash over us and sweep us all away?”

“Yes,” Joe said softly and truthfully. “Yes, I’ve often felt just that in the middle of the night.”

The tsunami looming over Joe in dark hours was of an entirely personal nature, however: the loss of his family, towering so high that it blocked the stars and prevented him from seeing the future. He had often longed to be swept away by it.

He sensed that Fittich, sunk in some deep moral weariness, also longed for a delivering apocalypse. Joe was disquieted and surprised to discover he shared this melancholy with the car salesman.

The discovery disturbed him, because this expectation that the end of all things loomed was profoundly dysfunctional and antisocial, an illness from which he himself was only beginning to recover with great difficulty, and he feared for a society in which such gloom was widespread.

“Strange times,” Fittich said, as Joe had said weird times to Barbara a short while ago. “They scare me.” He went to his chair, put his feet on the desk, and stared at the ball game on television. “Better go now.”

With the flesh on the nape of his neck as crinkled as crepe paper, Joe walked outside to the yellow Subaru.

Across the street, the man at the bus stop looked impatiently left and right, as though disgruntled about the unreliability of public transportation.

The engine of the Subaru turned over at once, but it sounded tinny. The steering wheel vibrated slightly. The upholstery was worn, and pine-fragrant solvents didn’t quite mask the sour scent of cigarette smoke that over the years had saturated the vinyl and the carpet.

Without looking at the man in the bus-stop shelter, Joe drove out of the lot. He turned right and headed up the street past his abandoned Honda.

The pickup with the camper shell was still parked in front of the untenanted industrial building.

When Joe reached the intersection just past the camper truck, there was no cross-traffic. He slowed, did not come to a full stop, and instead put his foot down heavily on the accelerator.

In the rearview mirror, he saw the man from the bus stop hurrying toward the camper, which was already backing into the street. Without the transponder to guide them, they would have to maintain visual contact and risk following him close enough to blow their cover — which they thought they still enjoyed.

Within four miles Joe lost them at a major intersection when he sped through a yellow traffic signal that was changing to red. When the camper tried to follow him, it was thwarted by the surging cross-traffic. Even over the whine and rattle of the Subaru engine, he heard the sharp bark of their brakes as they slid to a halt inches short of a collision.

Twenty minutes later, he abandoned the Subaru on Hilgarde Street near the UCLA campus, as far as he dared from the address where he was to meet Demi. He walked fast to Westwood Boulevard, trying not to break into a run and draw attention to himself.

Not long ago Westwood Village had been an island of quaint charm in the more turbulent sea of the city around it, a mecca for shoppers and theatergoers. Amidst some of the most interesting small-scale architecture of any Los Angeles commercial district and along the tree-lined streets had thrived trendy clothing stores, galleries, restaurants, prosperous theaters featuring the latest cutting-edge dramas and comedies, and popular movie houses. It was a place to have fun, people-watch, and be seen.

Then, during a period when the city’s ruling elite was in one of its periodic moods to view certain forms of sociopathic behavior as a legitimate protest, vagrancy increased, gang members began to loiter in groups, and open drug dealing commenced. A few shootings occurred in turf disputes, and many of the fun lovers and shoppers decided that the scene was too colorful and that to be seen here was to be marked as a victim.

Now Westwood was struggling back from the precipice. The streets were safer than they had been for a while. Many shops and galleries had closed, however, and new businesses had not moved into all of the empty storefronts. The lingering atmosphere of despair might take years to dissipate entirely. Built at the solemn pace of coral reefs, civilization could be destroyed with frightening swiftness, even by a blast of good intentions, and all that was lost could be regained, if ever, only with determination.

The gourmet coffeehouse was busy. From the open door came the delicious aromas of several exotic brews and the music of a lone guitarist playing a New Age tune that was mellow and relaxing though filled with tediously repetitive chords.

Joe intended to scout the meeting place from across the street and farther along the block, but he arrived too late to do so. At two minutes past six o’clock, he stood outside the coffeehouse as instructed, to the right of the entrance, and waited to be contacted.

Over the noise of the street traffic and the guitar, he heard a soft tuneless jangling-tinkling. The sound instantly alarmed him, for reasons he could not explain, and he looked around nervously for the source.

Above the door were wind chimes crafted from at least twenty spoons of various sizes and materials. They clinked together in the light breeze.

Like a mischievous childhood playmate, memory taunted him from hiding place after hiding place in a deep garden of the past dappled by light and shadow. Then suddenly he recalled the ceiling-mounted rack of copper pots and pans in the Delmanns’ kitchen.

Returning from Charlie Delmann’s bedroom, in answer to Lisa’s scream, Joe had heard the cookware clinking and softly clanging as he had hurried along the downstairs hall. Coming through the door into the kitchen, he saw the pots and pans swinging like pendulums from their hooks.

By the time he reached Lisa and saw Georgine’s corpse on the floor, the cookware had settled into silence. But what set those items in motion in the first place? Lisa and Georgine were at the far end of the long room, nowhere near the dangling pots.

Like the flashing green numbers on the digital clock at Charlie Delmann’s bedside, like the swelling of flames in the three oil lamps on the kitchen table, this coppery music was important.

He felt as though a hard rap of insight was about to crack the egg of his ignorance.

Holding his breath, mentally reaching for the elusive connection that would make sense of these things, Joe realized that the shell-cracking insight was receding. He strained to bring it back. Then, maddeningly, it was gone.

Perhaps none of these things was important: not the oil lamps, not the digital clock, not the jangling cookware. In a world viewed through lenses of paranoia — a pair of distorting spectacles that he had been wearing with good reason for the past day and a half — every falling leaf, every whisper of wind, and every fretwork of shadows was invested with a portentous meaning that, in reality, it did not possess. He was not merely a neutral observer, not merely a reporter this time, but a victim, central to his own story, so maybe he could not trust his journalistic instincts when he saw significance in these small, if admittedly strange, details.

Along the sidewalk came a tall black kid, college age, wearing shorts and a UCLA T-shirt, gliding on Rollerblades. Joe, puzzling over clues that might not be clues at all, paid little attention to the skater, until the kid spun to a stop in front of him and handed him a cellular phone.

“You’ll need this,” said the skater, in a bass voice that would have been pure gold to any fifties doo-wop group.

Before Joe could respond, the skater rolled away with powerful pushes of his muscular legs.

The phone rang in Joe’s hand.

He surveyed the street, searching for the surveillance post from which he was being watched, but it was not obvious.

The phone rang again, and he answered it. “Yeah?”

“What’s your name?” a man asked.

“Joe Carpenter.”

“Who’re you waiting for?”

“I don’t know her name.”

“What do you call her?”

“Demi.”

“Walk a block and a half south. Turn right at the corner and keep going until you come to a bookstore. It’s still open. Go in, find the biography section.”

The caller hung up.

After all, there wasn’t going to be a pleasant get-acquainted chat over coffee.

According to the business hours posted on the glass door, the bookstore closed on Sundays at six o’clock. It was a quarter past six. Through the big display windows, Joe saw that the fluorescent panels toward the front of the store were dark; only a few at the back were lighted, but when he tried the door, it was unlocked.

Inside, a single clerk waited at the cashiers’ counter. He was black, in his late thirties, as small and wiry as a jockey, with a mustache and goatee. Behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes were as large as those of a persistent interrogator in a dream of inquisition.

“Biographies?” Joe asked.

Coming out from behind the counter, the clerk pointed to the right rear corner of the store, where light glowed beyond ranks of shadowed shelves.

As he headed deeper into the maze of books, Joe heard the front door being locked behind him.

In the biography aisle, another black man was waiting. He was a huge slab of ebony — and appeared capable of being an irresistible force or an immovable object, whichever was required. His face was as placid as that of Buddha.

He said, “Assume the position.”

At once Joe knew he was dealing with a cop or former cop.

Obediently, he faced a wall of books, spread his legs wide, leaned forward with both hands against the shelves, and stared at the spines of the volumes in front of him. One in particular caught his attention: a massive biography of Henry James, the writer.

Henry James.

For some reason even that name seemed significant. Everything seemed significant, but nothing was. Least of all, the name of a long-dead writer.

The cop frisked him quickly and professionally, searching for a weapon or a transmitter. When he found neither, he said, “Show me some ID.”

Joe turned away from the shelves and fished his driver’s license from his wallet.

The cop compared the photo on the license with Joe’s face, read his vital statistics and compared them to the reality, then returned the card. “See the cashier.”

“What?”

“The guy when you came in.”

The wiry man with the goatee was waiting by the front door. He unlocked it as Joe approached. “You still have the phone?”

Joe offered it to him.

“No, hold on to it,” the cashier said. “There’s a black Mustang parked at the curb. Drive it down to Wilshire and turn west. You’ll be contacted.”

As the cashier opened the door and held it, Joe stared at the car and said, “Whose is it?”

From behind the bottle-thick lenses, the magnified eyes studied him as though he were a bacterium at the lower end of a microscope. “What’s it matter whose?”

“Doesn’t, I guess.”

Joe went outside and got into the Mustang. The keys were in the ignition.

At Wilshire Boulevard, he turned west. The car was almost as old as the Subaru that he had gotten from Gem Fittich. The engine sounded better, however, the interior was cleaner, and instead of pine-scented disinfectant masking the stink of stale cigarette smoke, the air held a faint tang of menthol aftershave.

Shortly after he drove through the underpass at the San Diego Freeway, the cellular phone rang. “Yeah?”

The man who had sent him to the bookstore now said, “You’re going all the way to the ocean in Santa Monica. When you get there, I’ll ring you with more directions.”

“All right.”

“Don’t stop anywhere along the way. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll know if you do.”

They were somewhere in the traffic around him, in front or behind — or both. He didn’t bother to look for them.

The caller said, “Don’t try to use your phone to call anyone. We’ll know that too.”

“I understand.”

“Just one question. The car you’re driving — why did you want to know whose it was?”

Joe said, “Some seriously unpleasant bastards are looking for me. If they find me, I don’t want to get any innocent people in trouble just because I was using their car.”

“Whole world’s already in trouble, man. Haven’t you noticed?” the caller asked, and then he disconnected.

With the exception of the cop — or former cop — in the bookstore, these people who were hiding Rose Tucker and providing security for her were amateurs with limited resources compared to the thugs who worked for Teknologik. But they were thoughtful and clever amateurs with undeniable talent for the game.

Joe was not halfway through Santa Monica, with the ocean still far ahead, when an image of the book spine rose in his mind — the name Henry James.

Henry James. So what?

Then the title of one of James’s best-known works came to him. The Turn of the Screw. It would be on any short list of the most famous ghost stories ever written.

Ghost.

The inexplicable welling of the oil-lamp flames, the flashing of the numbers on the clock, the jangling pots and pans now seemed as if they might have been linked, after all. And as he recalled those images, it was easy in retrospect to discern a supernatural quality to them — although he was aware that his imagination might be enhancing the memories in that regard.

He remembered, as well, how the foyer chandelier had dimmed and brightened and dimmed repeatedly as he had hurried upstairs in response to the shotgun blast that killed Charlie Delmann. In the fearsome turmoil that followed, he’d forgotten that odd detail.

Now he was reminded of countless séance scenes in old movies and television programs, in which the opening of the door between this world and the realm of spirits was marked by the pulsing of electric lights or the guttering of candles without the presence of a draft.

Ghost.

This was absurd speculation. Worse than absurd. Insane. There were no such things as ghosts.

Yet now he recalled another disquieting incident that occurred as he’d fled the Delmann house.

Racing from the kitchen with the smoke alarm blaring behind him, along the hallway and across the foyer to the door. His hand on the knob. From behind comes a hissing cold, prickling his neck, drilling through the base of his skull. Then he is crossing the porch without any memory of having opened the door.

This seemed to be a meaningful incident as long as he considered it to be meaningful — but as soon as skepticism reasserted itself, the moment appeared to be utterly without import. Yes, if he had felt anything at the back of his neck, it should have been the heat of the fire, not a piercing chill. And, yes, this cold had been different from anything that he had ever felt before: not a spreading chill but like the tip of an icicle — indeed, more finely pointed yet, like a stiletto of steel taken from a freezer, a wire, a needle. A needle inserted into the summit of his spine. But this was a subjective perception of something that he had felt, not a journalist’s measured observation of a concrete phenomenon. He’d been in a state of sheer panic, and he’d felt a lot of peculiar things; they were nothing but normal physiological responses to extreme stress. As for the few seconds of blank memory between the time when he’d put his hand on the doorknob and when he’d found himself most of the way across the porch…Well, that was also easily explained by panic, by stress, and by the blinding power of the overwhelming animal instinct to survive.

Not a ghost.

Rest in peace, Henry James.

As he progressed through Santa Monica toward the ocean, Joe’s brief embrace of superstition loosened, lost all passion. Reason returned.

Nevertheless, something about the concept of a ghost continued to seem significant to him. He had a hunch that eventually he would arrive at a rational explanation derived from this consideration of the supernatural, a provable theory that would be as logical as the meticulously structured prose of Henry James.

A needle of ice. Piercing to the gray matter in the center of the spine. An injection, a quick cold squirt of…something.

Did Nora Vadance feel that ghost needle an instant before she got up from the breakfast table to fetch the camcorder?

Did the Delmanns feel it?

And Lisa?

Did Captain Delroy Blane feel it too, before he disengaged the autopilot, clubbed his first officer in the face, and calmly piloted Flight 353 straight into the earth?

Not a ghost, perhaps, but something fully as terrifying and as malevolent as any evil spirit returned from the abyss of the damned… something akin to a ghost.

When Joe was two blocks from the Pacific, the cell phone rang for the third time.

The caller said, “Okay, turn right on the Coast Highway and keep driving until you hear from us again.”

To Joe’s left, less than two hours of sunlight lay over the ocean, like lemon sauce cooking in a pan, gradually thickening to a deeper yellow.

In Malibu, the phone rang again. He was directed to a turnoff that would take him to Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea, a Southwest restaurant on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

“Leave the phone on the passenger’s seat and give the car to the valet. He knows who you are. The reservation is in your name,” said the caller, and he hung up for the last time.

The big restaurant looked like an adobe lodge transported from New Mexico, with turquoise window trim, turquoise doors, and walkways of red-clay tiles. The landscaping consisted of cactus gardens in beds of white pebbles — and two large sorrel trees with dark-green foliage and sprays of white flowers.

The Hispanic valet was more handsome by far than any current or past Latin movie star, affecting a moody and smoldering stare that he had surely practiced in front of a mirror for eventual use in front of a camera. As the man on the phone had promised, the valet was expecting Joe and didn’t give him a claim check for the Mustang.

Inside, Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea featured massive lodgepole-pine ceiling beams, vanilla-colored plaster, and more red-clay pavers. The chairs and tables and other furnishings, which fortunately didn’t push the Southwest theme to extremes, were J. Robert Scott knockoffs though not inexpensive, and the decorator’s palette was restricted to pastels used to interpret classic Navajo motifs.

A fortune had been spent here; and Joe was acutely aware that by comparison to the decor, he was a scruffy specimen. He hadn’t shaved since leaving for Colorado more than twelve hours ago. Because most contemporary male movie stars and directors indulged in a perpetually adolescent lifestyle, blue jeans were acceptable attire even at many tony establishments in Los Angeles. But his new corduroy jacket was wrinkled and baggy from having been rain-soaked earlier, and he had the rumpled look of a traveler — or a lush coming off a bender.

The young hostess, as beautiful as any famous actress and no doubt passing time in food service while waiting for the role that would win her an Oscar, seemed to find nothing about his appearance to disdain. She led him to a window table set for two.

Glass formed the entire west wall of the building. Tinted plastic blinds softened the power of the declining sun. The view of the coastline was spectacular as it curved outward to both the north and the south — and the sea was the sea.

“Your associate has been delayed,” the hostess said, evidently referring to Demi. “She’s asked that you have dinner without her, and she’ll join you afterwards.”

Joe didn’t like this development. Didn’t like it at all. He was eager to make the connection with Rose, eager to learn what she had to tell him — eager to find Nina.

He was playing by their rules, however. “All right. Thanks.”

If Tom Cruise had undergone cosmetic surgery to improve his appearance, he might have been as handsome as Joe’s waiter. His name was Gene, and he seemed to have had a twinkle surgically inserted in each of his gas-flame-blue eyes.

After ordering a Corona, Joe went to the men’s room and winced at the mirror. With his beard stubble, he resembled one of the criminal Beagle Boys in old Scrooge McDuck comics. He washed his hands and face, combed his hair, and smoothed his jacket. He still looked like he should be seated at not a window table but a Dumpster.

Back at his table, sipping ice-cold beer, he surveyed the other patrons. Several were famous.

An action-movie hero three tables away was even more stubbled than Joe, and his hair was matted and tousled like that of a small boy just awakened from a nap. He was dressed in tattered black jeans and a pleated tuxedo shirt.

Nearer was an Oscar-nominated actor and well-known heroin addict in an eccentric outfit fumbled from the closet in a state of chemical bliss: black loafers without socks, green-plaid golf pants, a brown-checkered sports jacket, and a pale-blue denim shirt. In spite of his ensemble, the most colorful things about him were his bloodshot eyes and his swollen, flame-red eyelids.

Joe relaxed and enjoyed dinner. Puréed corn and black-bean soup were poured into the same dish in such a way as to form a yellow and black yin-and-yang pattern. The mesquite-grilled salmon was on a bed of mango-and-red-pepper salsa. Everything was delicious.

While he ate, he spent as much time watching the customers as he did staring at the sea. Even those who were not famous were colorful, frequently ravishing, and generally engaged in one sort of performance or another.

Los Angeles was the most glamorous, tackiest, most elegant, seediest, most clever, dumbest, most beautiful, ugliest, forward-looking, retro-thinking, altruistic, self-absorbed, deal-savvy, politically ignorant, artistic-minded, criminal-loving, meaning-obsessed, money-grubbing, laid-back, frantic city on the planet. And any two slices of it, as different as Bel Air and Watts, were nevertheless uncannily alike in essence: rich with the same crazy hungers, hopes, and despairs.

By the time he was finishing dinner with mango bread pudding and jalapeño ice cream, Joe was surprised to realize how much he enjoyed this people-watching. He and Michelle had spent afternoons strolling places as disparate as Rodeo Drive and City Walk, checking out the “two-footed entertainment,” but he had not been interested in other people for the past year, interested only in himself and his pain.

The realization that Nina was alive and the prospect of finding her were slowly bringing Joe out of himself and back to life.

A heavyset black woman in a red and gold muumuu and two pounds of jewelry had been spelling the hostess. Now she escorted two men to a nearby table.

Both of these new patrons were dressed in black slacks, white silk shirts, and black leather jackets as supple as silk. The older of the two, approximately forty, had enormous sad eyes and a mouth sufficiently sensuous to assure him a contract to star in Revlon lipstick advertisements. He would have been handsome enough to be a waiter — except that his nose was red and misshapen from years of heavy drinking, and he never quite closed his mouth, which gave him a vacuous look. His blue-eyed companion, ten years younger, was as pink-faced as if he had been boiled — and plagued by a nervous smile that he couldn’t control, as if chronically unsure of himself.

The willowy brunette having dinner with the movie star-slash-heroin addict developed an instant attraction for the guy with the Mick Jagger mouth, in spite of his rose-bloom nose. She stared at him so hard and so insistently that he responded to her as quickly as a trout would respond to a fat bug bobbing on the surface of a stream — though it was difficult to say which of these two was the trout and which the tender morsel.

The actor-addict became aware of his companion’s infatuation, and he, too, began to stare at the man with the melancholy eyes — though he was glaring rather than flirting. Suddenly he rose from the table, almost knocking over his chair, and weaved across the restaurant, as if intending either to strike or regurgitate upon his rival. Instead, he curved away from the two men’s table and disappeared into the hall that led to the rest rooms.

By this time, the sad-eyed man was eating baby shrimps on a bed of polenta. He speared each tiny crustacean on the point of his fork and studied it appreciatively before sucking it off the tines with obscene relish. As he leisurely savored each bite, he looked toward the brunette as if to say that if he ever got a chance to bed her, she could rest assured that she would wind up as thoroughly shelled and de-veined as the shrimps.

The brunette was aroused or repulsed. Hard to tell which. With some Angelenos, those two emotions were as inextricably entwined as the viscera of inoperable Siamese twins. Anyway, she departed the actor-addict’s table and drew up a chair to sit with the two men in leather jackets.

Joe wondered how interesting things would get when the wasted actor returned — no doubt with a white dust glowing around the rims of his nostrils, since current heroin was sufficiently pure to snort. Before events could develop, the waiter, Gene of the twinkling eyes, stopped by to tell him there would be no charge for dinner and that Demi was waiting for him in the kitchen

Surprised, he left a tip and followed Gene’s directions toward the hallway that served the rest rooms and the cookery.

The late-summer twilight had finally arrived. On the griddle-flat horizon, a sun like a bloody yolk cooked toward a darker hue.

As Joe crossed the restaurant, where all of the tables were now occupied, something about that three-person tableau — the brunette, the two men in leather jackets — teased his memory. By the time that he reached the hallway to the kitchen, he was puzzled by a full-blown case of déjà vu.

Before stepping into the hall, Joe turned for one look back. He saw the seducer with fork raised, savoring a speared shrimp with his sad eyes, while the brunette murmured something and the nervous pink-faced man watched.

Joe’s puzzlement turned to alarm.

For an instant, he could not understand why his mouth went dry or why his heart began to race. Then in his mind’s eye he saw the fork metamorphose into a stiletto, and the shrimp became a sliver of Gouda cheese.

Two men and a woman. Not in a restaurant but in a hotel room. Not this brunette but Barbara Christman. If not these two men, then two astonishingly similar to them.

Of course Joe had never seen them, only listened to Barbara’s brief but vivid descriptions. The hound-dog eyes, the nose that was “bashed red by…decades of drink,” the thick-lipped mouth. The younger of the two: pink-faced, with the ceaselessly flickering smile.

Joe was more than twenty-four hours past the ability ever to believe in coincidence again.

Impossibly, Teknologik was here.

He hurried along the hallway, through one of two swinging doors, and into a roomy antechamber used as a salad-prep area. Two white-uniformed men, artfully and rapidly arranging plates of greenery, never even glanced at him.

Beyond, in the main kitchen, the heavyset black woman in the voluminous muumuu was waiting for him. Even her bright dress and the cascades of glittering jewelry could not disguise her anxiety. Her big-mama, jazz-singer face was pretty and lively and made for mirth, but there was no song or laughter in her now.

“My name’s Mahalia. Real sorry I couldn’t have dinner with you, Presentable Joe. That would’ve been a treat.” Her sexy-smoky voice pegged her as the woman whom he had named Demi. “But there’s been a change of plans. Follow me, honey.”

With the formidable majesty of a great ship leaving its dock, Mahalia set out across the busy and immaculate kitchen crowded with chefs, cooks, and assistants, past cooktops and ovens and griddles and grills, through steam and meat smoke and the eye-watering fragrance of sautéing onions.

Hurrying after her, Joe said, “Then you know about them?”

“Sure do. Been on the TV news today. The news people show you stuff to curl your hair, then try to sell you Fritos. This awful business changes everythin’.”

He put an arm on her shoulder, halted her. “TV news?”

“Some people been murdered after she talks to them.”

Even with the large culinary staff in white flurries of activity around them, they were afforded privacy for their conversation by the masking clang of pots, rattle of skillets, whir of mixers, swish of whisks, clatter of dishes, buzz, clink, tink, ping, pop, scrape, chop, sizzle.

“They call it somethin’ else on the news,” Mahalia said, “but it’s murder sure enough.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I’m talking about the men in the restaurant.”

She frowned. “What men?”

“Two of them. Black slacks, white silk shirts, black leather jackets—”

“I walked ’em to their table.”

“You did, yeah. I just recognized them a minute ago.”

“Bad folks?”

“The worst.”

Baffled, she shook her head. “But, sugar, we know you weren’t followed.”

“I wasn’t, but maybe you were. Or maybe someone else who’s protecting Rose was followed.”

“Devil himself would have a hard time finding Rosie if he had to depend on getting to her through us.”

“But somehow they’ve figured out who’s been hiding her for a year, and now they’re closing in.”

Glowering, wrapped by bulletproof confidence, Mahalia said, “Nobody’s gonna lay one little finger on Rosie.”

“Is she here?”

“Waitin’ for you.”

A cold tide washed through his heart. “You don’t understand — the two in the restaurant won’t have come alone. There’s sure to be more outside. Maybe a small army of them.”

“Yeah, maybe, but they don’t know what they’re dealin’ with, honey.” Thunderheads of resolve massed in her dark face. “We’re Baptists.”

Certain that he could not have heard the woman correctly, Joe hurried after her as she continued through the kitchen.

At the far end of the big room, they went through an open door into a sparkling scullery where fruits and vegetables were cleaned and trimmed before being sent in to the main cookery. This late in the restaurant’s day, no one was at work here.

Beyond the scullery was a concrete-floored receiving room that smelled of raw celery and peppers, damp wood and damp cardboard. On pallets along the right-hand wall, empty fruit and vegetable crates, boxes, and cases of empty beer bottles were stacked almost to the low ceiling.

Directly ahead, under a red Exit sign, was a wide steel exterior door, closed now, beyond which suppliers’ trucks evidently parked to make deliveries. To the left was an elevator.

“Rose is down below.” Mahalia pressed the call button, and the elevator doors slid open at once.

“What’s under us?”

“Well, one time, this was the service elevator to a banquet room and deck, where you could have big parties right on the beach, but we can’t use it like the joint did before us. Coastal Commission put a hard rule on us. Now it’s just a storeroom. Once you go down, I’ll have some boys come move the pallets and empty crates to this wall. We’ll cover the elevator real nice. Nobody’ll know it’s even here.”

Uneasy about being cornered, Joe said, “Yeah, but what if they come looking and they do find the elevator?”

“Gonna have to stop callin’ you Presentable Joe. Better would be Worryin’ Joe.”

“After a while, they will come looking. They won’t just wait till closing time and go home. So once I’m down there, do I have another way out?” he persisted.

“Never tore apart the front stairs, where the customers used to go down. Just covered the openin’ with hinged panels so you don’t really see it. You come up that way, though, you’ll be right across from the hostess station, in the middle of plain view.”

“No good.”

“So if somethin’ goes wrong, best to skedaddle out the lower door onto the deck. From there you have the beach, the whole coast.”

“They could be covering that exit too.”

“It’s down at the base of the bluff. From the upper level, they can’t know it’s there. You should just try to relax, sugar. We’re on the righteous side, which counts for somethin’.”

“Not much.”

“Worryin’ Joe.”

He stepped into the elevator but blocked the sliding door with his arm in case it tried to close. “How’re you connected with this place, Mahalia?”

“Half owner.”

“The food’s great.”

“You can look at me the way I am and think I don’t know?” she asked good-naturedly.

“What’re you to Rose?”

“Gonna call you Curious Joe pretty soon. Rosie married my brother Louis about twenty-two years ago. They met in college. Wasn’t truly surprised when Louis turned out smart enough to go to college, but I was sure surprised he had the brains to fall for someone like Rosie. Then, of course, the man proved he was a pure fool, after all, when he up and divorced her four years later. Rosie couldn’t have kids, and havin’ kids was important to Louis — though with less air in his skull and any common sense at all, the man would’ve realized Rosie was more treasure than a houseful of babies.”

“She hasn’t been your sister-in-law for eighteen years, but you’re willing to put yourself on the line for her?”

“Why not? You think Rosie turned into a vampire when Louis, the fool, divorced her? She’s been the same sweet lady ever I met her. I love her like a sister. Now she’s waitin’, Curious Joe.”

“One more thing. Earlier, when you told me these people don’t know who they’re dealing with…You didn’t say ‘We’re Baptists’?”

“That’s exactly what I did say. ‘Tough’ and ‘Baptists’ don’t go together in your head — is that it?”

“Well—”

“Mama and Daddy stood up to the Klan down in Mississippi when the Klan had a whole lot more teeth than they do now, and so did my grandma and grandpap before them, and they never let fear weigh ’em down. When I was a little girl, we went through hurricanes off the Gulf of Mexico and Delta floods and encephalitis epidemics and poor times when we didn’t know where tomorrow’s food was comin’ from, but we rode it out and still sung loud in the choir every Sunday. Maybe the United States Marines are some tougher than your average Southern black Baptist, Joe, but not by much.”

“Rose is a lucky woman with a friend like you.”

“I’m the lucky one,” said Mahalia. “She lifts me up — now more than ever. Go on, Joe. And stay down there with her till we close this place and figure a way we can slip you two out. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”

“Be ready for trouble long before that,” he warned her.

“Go.”

Joe let the doors slide shut.

The elevator descended.

14

Here now, at last and alone, at the far end of the long room, was Dr. Rose Marie Tucker, in one of four folding chairs at a scarred worktable, leaning forward, forearms on the table, hands clasped, waiting and silent, her eyes solemn and full of tenderness, this diminutive survivor, keeper of secrets that Joe had been desperate to learn but from which he suddenly shied.

Some of the recessed-can fixtures in the ceiling contained dead bulbs, and the live ones were haphazardly angled, so the floor that he slowly crossed was mottled with light and shadow as if it were an underwater realm. His own shadow preceded him, then fell behind, but again preceded him, flowed here into a pool of gloom and vanished like a soul into oblivion, only to swim into view three steps later. He felt as though he were a condemned man submerged in the concrete depths of an inescapable prison, on a long death-row walk toward lethal punishment — yet simultaneously he believed in the possibility of clemency and rebirth. As he approached the revelation that had lifted Georgine and Charlie Delmann from despair to euphoria, as he drew nearer the truth about Nina, his mind churned with conflicting currents, and hope like schools of bright koi darted through his internal darkness.

Against the left-hand wall were boxes of restaurant provisions, primarily paper towels for the rest rooms, candles for the tables, and janitorial supplies purchased in bulk. The right-hand wall, which faced the beach and the ocean beyond, featured two doors and a series of large windows, but the coast was not visible because the glass was protected by metal Rolladen security shutters. The banquet room felt like a bunker.

He pulled out a chair and sat across the table from Rose.

As in the cemetery the previous day, this woman radiated such extraordinary charismatic power that her petite stature was a source of continual surprise. She seemed more physically imposing than Joe — yet her wrists were as dainty as those of a twelve-year-old girl. Her magnetic eyes held him, touched him, and some knowledge in them humbled him in a way that no man twice his size could have humbled him — yet her features appeared so fragile, her throat so slender, her shoulders so delicate that she should have seemed as vulnerable as a child.

Joe reached across the table toward her.

She gripped his hand.

Dread fought with hope for his voice, and while the battle raged, he could not speak to ask about Nina.

More solemn now than she had been in the cemetery, Rose said, “It’s all going so badly. They’re killing everyone I talk to. They’ll stop at nothing.”

Relieved of the obligation to ask, first, the fateful question about his younger daughter, Joe found his voice. “I was there at the house in Hancock Park with the Delmanns…and Lisa.”

Her eyes widened in alarm. “You don’t mean…when it happened?”

“Yes.”

Her small hand tightened on his. “You saw?”

He nodded. “They killed themselves. Such terrible…such violence, madness.”

“Not madness. Not suicide. Murder. But how in the name of God did you survive?”

“I ran.”

“While they were still being killed?”

“Charlie and Georgine were already dead. Lisa was still burning.”

“So she wasn’t dead yet when you ran?”

“No. Still on her feet and burning but not screaming, just quietly…quietly burning.”

“Then you got out just in time. A miracle of your own.”

“How, Rose? How was it done to them?”

Lowering her gaze from his eyes to their entwined hands, she didn’t answer Joe’s question. More to herself than to him, she said, “I thought this was the way to begin the work — by bringing the news to the families who’d lost loved ones on that airliner. But because of me…all this blood.”

“You really were aboard Flight 353?” he asked.

She met his eyes again. “Economy class. Row sixteen, seat B, one away from the window.”

The truth was in her voice as sure as rain and sunshine are in a green blade of grass.

Joe said, “You really walked away from the crash unharmed.”

“Untouched,” she said softly, emphasizing the miraculousness of her escape.

“And you weren’t alone.”

“Who told you?”

“Not the Delmanns. Not anyone else you’ve spoken with. They have all kept faith with you, held tight to whatever secrets you’ve told them. How I found out goes all the way back to that night. Do you remember Jeff and Mercy Ealing?”

A faint smile floated across her mouth and away as she said, “The Loose Change Ranch.”

“I was there early this afternoon,” he said.

“They’re nice people.”

“A lovely quiet life.”

“And you’re a good reporter.”

“When the assignment matters to me.”

Her eyes were midnight-dark but luminous lakes, and Joe could not tell whether the secrets sunk in them would drown or buoy him.

She said, “I’m so sorry about all the people on that plane. Sorry they went before their time. So sorry for their families…for you.”

“You didn’t realize that you were putting them in jeopardy — did you?”

“God, no.”

“Then you’ve no guilt.”

“I feel it, though.”

“Tell me, Rose. Please. I’ve come a long, long way around to hear it. Tell me what you’ve told the others.”

“But they’re killing everyone I tell. Not just the Delmanns but others, half a dozen others.”

“I don’t care about the danger.”

“But I care. Because now I do know the jeopardy I’m putting you in, and I’ve got to consider it.”

“No jeopardy. None whatsoever. I’m dead anyway,” he said. “Unless what you have to tell me is something that gives me a life again.”

“You’re a good man. In all the years you have left, you can contribute so much to this screwed-up world.”

“Not in my condition.”

Her eyes, those lakes, were sorrow given substance. Suddenly they scared him so profoundly that he wanted to look away from them — but could not.

Their conversation had given him time to approach the question from which at first he’d cringed, and now he knew that he must ask it before he lost his courage again. “Rose…Where is my daughter Nina?”

Rose Tucker hesitated. Finally, with her free hand, she reached into an inner pocket of her navy-blue blazer and withdrew a Polaroid photograph.

Joe could see that it was a picture of the flush-set headstone with the bronze plaque bearing the names of his wife and daughters — one of those she had taken the previous day.

With a squeeze of encouragement, she let go of his hand and pressed the photograph into it.

Staring at the Polaroid, he said, “She’s not here. Not in the ground. Michelle and Chrissie, yes. But not Nina.”

Almost in a whisper, she said, “Open your heart, Joe. Open your heart and your mind — and what do you see?”

At last she was bringing to him the transforming gift that she had brought to Nora Vadance, to the Delmanns, and to others.

He stared at the Polaroid.

“What do you see, Joe?”

“A gravestone.”

“Open your mind.”

With expectations that he could not put into words but that nevertheless caused his heart to race, Joe searched the image in his hand. “Granite, bronze…the grass around.”

“Open your heart,” she whispered.

“Their three names…the dates…”

“Keep looking.”

“…sunshine…shadows…”

“Open your heart.”

Although Rose’s sincerity was evident and could not be doubted, her little mantra—Open your mind, open your heart—began to seem silly, as though she were not a scientist but a New Age guru.

“Open your mind,” she persisted gently.

The granite. The bronze. The grass around.

She said, “Don’t just look. See.”

The sweet milk of expectation began to curdle, and Joe felt his expression turning sour.

Rose said, “Does the photo feel strange to you? Not to your eyes…to your fingertips? Does it feel peculiar against your skin?”

He was about to tell her no, that it felt like nothing more than what it was, like a damned Polaroid, glossy and cool — but then it did feel peculiar.

First he became conscious of the elaborate texture of his own skin to an extent that he had never before experienced or imagined possible. He felt every arch, loop, and whorl as it pressed against the photo, and each tiny ridge and equally tiny trough of skin on each finger pad seemed to have its own exquisitely sensitive array of nerve endings.

More tactile data flowed to him from the Polaroid than he was able to process or understand. He was overwhelmed by the smoothness of the photograph, but also by the thousands of microscopic pits in the film surface that were invisible to the unassisted eye, and by the feel of the dyes and fixatives and other chemicals of which the graveyard image was composed.

Then to his touch, although not to his eye, the image on the Polaroid acquired depth, as if it were not merely a two-dimensional photograph but a window with a view of the grave, a window through which he was able to reach. He felt warm summer sun on his fingers, felt granite and bronze and a prickle of grass.

Weirder still: Now he felt a color, as if wires had crossed in his brain, jumbling his senses, and he said, “Blue,” and immediately he felt a dazzling burst of light, and as if from a distance, he heard himself say, “Bright.”

The feelings of blueness and light quickly became actual visual experiences: The banquet room began to fade into a bright blue haze.

Gasping, Joe dropped the photograph as if it had come alive in his hand.

The blue brightness snapped to a small point in the center of his field of vision, like the picture on a television screen when the Off switch is clicked. This point shrank until the final pixel of light hung starlike for an instant but then silently imploded and was gone.

Rose Tucker leaned across the table toward him.

Joe peered into her commanding eyes — and perceived something different from what he had seen before. The sorrow and the pity, yes. They remained. The compassion and the intelligence were still there, in as full measure as ever. But now he saw — or thought he saw — some part of her that rode a mad horse of obsession at a gallop toward a cliff over which she wanted him to follow.

As though reading his thoughts, she said, “Joe, what you’re afraid of has nothing to do with me. What you’re truly afraid of is opening your mind to something you’ve spent your life refusing to believe.”

“Your voice,” he said, “the whisper, the repetitive phrases—Open your heart, open your mind—like a hypnotist.”

“You don’t really believe that,” she said as calmly as ever.

“Something on the Polaroid,” he said, and heard the quiver of desperation in his voice.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“A chemical substance.”

“No.”

“A hallucinogenic drug. Absorbed through the skin.”

“No.”

“Something I absorbed through the skin,” he insisted, “put me in an altered state of consciousness.” He rubbed his hands on his corduroy jacket.

“Nothing on the photograph could have entered your bloodstream through your skin so quickly. Nothing could have affected your mind in mere seconds.”

“I don’t know that to be true.”

“I do.”

“I’m no pharmacologist.”

“Then consult one,” she said without enmity.

“Shit.” He was as irrationally angry with her as he had briefly been angry with Barbara Christman.

The more rattled he became, the deeper her equanimity. “What you experienced was synesthesia.”

“What?”

All scientist now, Rose Tucker said, “Synesthesia. A sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied in a different modality.”

“Mumbo-jumbo.”

“Not at all. For instance, a few bars of a familiar song are played — but instead of hearing them, you might see a certain color or smell an associated aroma. It’s a rare condition in the general population, but it’s what most people first feel with these photos — and it’s common among mystics.”

“Mystics!” He almost spat on the floor. “I’m no mystic, Dr. Tucker. I’m a crime reporter — or was. Only the facts matter to me.”

“Synesthesia isn’t simply the result of religious mania, if that’s what you’re thinking, Joe. It’s a scientifically documented experience even among nonbelievers, and some well-grounded people think it’s a glimpse of a higher state of consciousness.”

Her eyes, such cool lakes before, seemed hot now, and when he peered into them, he looked at once away, afraid that her fire would spread to him. He was not sure if he saw evil in her or only wanted to see it, and he was thoroughly confused.

“If it was some skin-permeating drug on the photograph,” she said, as maddeningly soft-spoken as any devil ever had been, “then the effect would have lingered after you dropped it.”

He said nothing, spinning in his internal turmoil.

“But when you released the photo, the effect ceased. Because what you’re confronted with here is nothing as comforting as mere illusion, Joe.”

“Where’s Nina?” he demanded.

Rose indicated the Polaroid, which now lay on the table where he had dropped it. “Look. See.”

“No.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

Anger surged in him, boiled. This was the savage anger that had frightened him before. It frightened him now, too, but he could not control it.

“Where’s Nina, damn it?”

“Open your heart,” she said quietly.

“This is bullshit.”

“Open your mind.”

“Open it how far? Until I’ve emptied out my head? Is that what you want me to be?”

She gave him time to get a grip on himself. Then: “I don’t want you to be anything, Joe. You asked me where Nina is. You want to know about your family. I gave you the photograph so you could see. So you could see.”

Her will was stronger than his, and after a while he found himself picking up the photograph.

“Remember the feeling,” she encouraged him. “Let it come to you again.”

It did not come to him again, however, although he turned the photograph over and over in his hands. He slid his fingertips in circles across the glossy image but could not feel the granite, the bronze, the grass. He summoned the blueness and the brightness, but they did not appear.

Tossing the photograph aside in disgust, he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing with this.”

Infuriatingly patient, she smiled compassionately and held out a hand to him.

He refused to take it.

Although he was frustrated by what he now perceived as her New Age proclivities, he also felt that somehow, by not being able to lose himself a second time in the phantasmal blue brightness, he had failed Michelle and Chrissie and Nina.

But if his experience had been only a hallucination, induced with chemicals or hypnosis, then it had no significance, and giving himself to the waking dream once again could not bring back those who were irretrievably lost.

A fusillade of confusions ricocheted through his mind.

Rose said, “It’s okay. The imbued photograph is usually enough. But not always.”

“Imbued?”

“It’s okay, Joe. It’s okay. Once in a while there’s someone…someone like you…and then the only thing that convinces is galvanic contact.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The touch.”

“What touch?”

Instead of answering him, Rose picked up the Polaroid snapshot and stared at it as though she could clearly see something that Joe could see not at all. If turmoil touched her heart and mind, she hid it well, for she seemed as tranquil as a country pond in a windless twilight.

Her serenity only inflamed Joe. “Where’s Nina, damn it? Where is my little girl?”

Calmly she returned the photograph to her jacket pocket.

She said, “Joe, suppose that I was one of a group of scientists engaged in a revolutionary series of medical experiments, and then suppose we unexpectedly discovered something that could prove there was some kind of life after death.”

“I might be a hell of a lot harder to convince than you.”

Her softness was an irritating counterpoint to his sharpness: “It’s not as outrageous an idea as you think. For the past couple of decades, discoveries in molecular biology and certain branches of physics have seemed ever more clearly to point toward a created universe.”

“You’re dodging my question. Where are you keeping Nina? Why have you let me go on thinking she’s dead?”

Her face remained in an almost eerie repose. Her voice was still soft with a Zen-like sense of peace. “If science gave us a way to perceive the truth of an afterlife, would you really want to see this proof? Most people would say yes at once, without thinking how such knowledge would change them forever, change what they have always considered important, what they intend to do with their lives. And then… what if this were a revelation with an unnerving edge? Would you want to see this truth — even if it was as frightening as it was uplifting, as fearsome as it was joyous, as deeply and thoroughly strange as it was enlightening?”

“This is just a whole lot of babble to me, Dr. Tucker, a whole lot of nothing — like healing with crystals and channeling spirits and little gray men kidnapping people in flying saucers.”

“Don’t just look. See.”

Through the red lenses of his defensive anger, Joe perceived her calmness as a tool of manipulation. He got up from his chair, hands fisted at his sides. “What were you bringing to L.A. on that plane, and why did Teknologik and its friends kill three hundred and thirty people to stop you?”

“I’m trying to tell you.”

“Then tell me!”

She closed her eyes and folded her small brown hands, as though waiting for this storm in him to pass — but her serenity only fed the winds of his tempest.

“Horton Nellor. Once your boss, once mine. How does he figure in this?” Joe demanded.

She said nothing.

“Why did the Delmanns and Lisa and Nora Vadance and Captain Blane commit suicide? And how can their suicides be murder, like you say? Who’re those men upstairs? What the hell is this all about?” He was shaking. “Where is Nina?”

Rose opened her eyes and regarded him with sudden concern, her tranquillity at last disturbed. “What men upstairs?”

“Two thugs who work for Teknologik or some secret damn police agency, or someone.”

She turned her gaze toward the restaurant. “You’re sure?”

“I recognized them, having dinner.”

Getting quickly to her feet, Rose stared at the low ceiling as though she were in a submarine sinking out of control into an abyss, furiously calculating the enormity of the crushing pressure, waiting for the first signs of failure in the hull.

“If two of them are inside, you can bet others are outside,” Joe said.

“Dear God,” she whispered.

“Mahalia’s trying to figure a way to slip us past them after closing time.”

“She doesn’t understand. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

“She’s having boxes stacked in the receiving room to cover the entrance of the elevator—”

“I don’t care about those men or their damn guns,” Rose said, rounding the end of the table. “If they come down here after us, I can face that, handle that. I don’t care about dying that way, Joe. But they don’t really need to come after us. If they know we’re somewhere in this building right now, they can remote us.”

“What?”

“Remote us,” she said fearfully, heading toward one of the doors that served the deck and the beach.

Following her, exasperated, Joe said, “What does that mean — remote us?”

The door was secured by a pair of thumb-turn dead-bolts. She disengaged the upper one.

He clamped his hand over the lower lock, preventing her from opening it. “Where’s Nina?”

“Get out of the way,” she demanded.

“Where’s Nina?”

“Joe, for God’s sake—”

This was the first time that Rose Tucker had seemed vulnerable, and Joe was going to take advantage of the moment to get what he most wanted. “Where’s Nina?”

“Later. I promise.”

“Now.”

From upstairs came a loud clatter.

Rose gasped, turned from the door, and pressed her gaze upon the ceiling again as if it might crash down on them.

Joe heard voices raised in argument, filtered through the elevator shaft — Mahalia’s and those of at least two or three men. He was sure that the clatter was the sound of empty packing crates and pallets being dragged and tossed away from the cab door.

When the men in the leather jackets discovered the elevator and knew there was a lower floor to the building, they might realize that they had left an escape gate open by not covering the beach. Indeed, others might even now be looking for a way down the sheer forty-foot bluff, with the hope of cutting off that route.

Nevertheless, face-to-face with Rose, recklessly determined to have an answer at any cost, fiercely insistent, Joe pressed his question: “Where’s Nina?”

“Dead,” she said, seeming to wrench the word from herself.

“Like hell she is.”

“Please, Joe—”

He was furious with her for lying to him, as so many others had lied to him during the past year. “Like hell she is. No way. No damn way. I’ve talked to Mercy Ealing. Nina was alive that night and she’s alive now, somewhere.”

“If they know we’re in this building,” Rose repeated in a voice that now shook with urgency, “they can remote us. Like the Delmanns. Like Lisa. Like Captain Blane!”

“Where is Nina?”

The elevator motor rumbled to life, and the cab began to hum upward through the shaft.

“Where is Nina?”

Overhead, the banquet room lights dimmed, probably because the elevator drew power from their circuit.

At the dimming of the lights, Rose cried out in terror, threw her body against Joe, trying to knock him off his feet, and clawed frenziedly at the hand that he had clamped over the lower deadbolt.

Her nails gouged his flesh, and he hissed in pain and let go of the lock, and she pulled open the door. In came a breeze that smelled of the ocean, and out went Rose into the night.

Joe rushed after her, onto a twenty-foot-wide, eighty-foot-long, elevated wood deck overhung by the restaurant. It reverberated like a kettledrum with each footfall.

The scarlet sun had bled into a grave on the far side of Japan. The sky and the sea to the west were raven meeting crow, as feathery smooth and sensuous and inviting as death.

Rose was already at the head of the stairs.

Following her, Joe found two flights that led down fourteen or sixteen feet to the beach.

As dark as Rose was, and darkly dressed, she all but vanished in the black geometry of the steps below him. When she reached the pale sand, however, she regained some definition.

The strand was more than a hundred feet across at this point, and the phosphorescent tumble of surf churned out a low white noise that washed like a ghost sea around him. This was not a swimming or surfing beach, and there were no bonfires or even Coleman lanterns in sight in either direction.

To the east, the sky was a pustulant yellow overlaid on black, full of the glow of the city, as insistent as it was meaningless. Cast from high above, the pale-yellow rectangles of light from the restaurant windows quilted part of the beach.

Joe did not try to stop Rose or to slow her. Instead, when he caught up with her, he ran at her side, shortening his stride to avoid pulling ahead of her.

She was his only link to Nina. He was confused by her apparent mysticism, by her sudden transit from beatific calm to superstitious terror, and he was furious that she would lie to him about Nina now, after she had led him to believe, at the cemetery, that she would ultimately tell him the full truth. Yet his fate and hers were inextricably linked, because only she could ever lead him to his younger daughter.

As they ran north through the soft sand and passed the corner of the restaurant, someone rushed at them from ahead and to the right, from the bluff, a shadow in the night, quick and big, like the featureless beast that seeks us in nightmares, pursuer through corridors of dreams.

“Look out,” Joe warned Rose, but she also saw the oncoming assailant and was already taking evasive action.

Joe attempted to intervene when the hurtling dark shape moved to cut Rose off — but he was blindsided by a second man, who came at him from the direction of the sea. This guy was as big as a professional football linebacker, and they both went down so hard that the breath should have been knocked out of Joe, but it wasn’t, not entirely — he was wheezing but breathing — because the sand in which they landed was deep and soft, far above the highest lapping line of the compacting tide.

He kicked, flailed, ruthlessly used knees and elbows and feet, and rolled out from under his attacker, scrambling to his feet as he heard someone shout at Rose farther along the strand—“Freeze, bitch!”—after which he heard a shot, hard and flat. He didn’t want to think about that shot, a whip of sound snapping across the beach to the growling sea, didn’t want to think about Rose with a bullet in her head and his Nina lost again forever, but he couldn’t avoid thinking about it, the possibility like a lash burn branded forever across the surface of his brain. His own assailant was cursing him and pushing up now from the sand, and as Joe spun around to deal with the threat, he was full of the meanness and fury that had gotten him thrown out of the youth boxing league twenty years ago, seething with church-vandalizing rage — he was an animal now, a heartless predator, cat-quick and savage — and he reacted as though this stranger were personally responsible for poor Frank’s being crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, as if this son of a bitch had worked some hoodoo to make Frank’s joints swell and deform, as if this wretched thug were the sole perpetrator who had somehow put a funnel in Captain Blane’s ear and poured an elixir of madness into his head, so Joe kicked him in the crotch, and when the guy grunted and began to double over, Joe grabbed the bastard’s head and at the same time drove a knee upward, shoving the face down into the knee and jamming the knee up hard into the face, a ballet of violence, and he actually heard the crunch of the man’s nose disintegrating and felt the bite of teeth breaking against his kneecap. The guy collapsed backward on the beach, all at once choking and spitting blood and gasping for breath and crying like a small child, but this wasn’t enough for Joe, because he was wild now, wilder than any animal, as wild as weather, a cyclone of anger and grief and frustration, and he kicked where he thought ribs would be, which hurt him almost as much as it hurt the broken man who received the blow, because Joe was only wearing Nikes, not hard-toed shoes, so he tried to stomp the guy’s throat and crush his windpipe, but stomped his chest instead — and would have tried again, would have killed him, not quite realizing that he was doing so, but then he was rammed from behind by a third attacker.

Joe slammed facedown onto the beach, with the weight of this new assailant atop him, at least two hundred pounds pinning him down. Head to one side, spitting sand, he tried to heave the man off, but this time his breath was knocked out of him; he exhaled all of his strength with it, and he lay helpless.

Besides, as he gasped desperately for air, he felt his attacker thrust something cold and blunt against the side of his face, and he knew what it must be even before he heard the threat.

“You want me to blow your head off, I’ll do it,” the stranger said, and his reverberant voice had a ragged homicidal edge. “I’ll do it, you asshole.”

Joe believed him and stopped resisting. He struggled only for his breath.

Silent surrender wasn’t good enough for the angry man atop him. “Answer me, you bastard. You want me to blow your damn head off? Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Going to behave?”

“Yes.”

“I’m out of patience here.”

“All right.”

“Son of a bitch,” the stranger said bitterly.

Joe said nothing more, just spit out sand and breathed deeply, getting his strength back with his wind, though trying to stave off the return of the brief madness that had seized him.

Where is Rose?

The man atop Joe was breathing hard too, expelling foul clouds of garlic breath, not only giving Joe time to calm down but getting his own strength back. He smelled of a lime-scented cologne and cigarette smoke.

What’s happened to Rose?

“We’re going to get up now,” the guy said. “Me first. Getting up, I got this piece aimed at your head. You stay flat, dug right into the sand the way you are, just the way you are, until I step back and tell you it’s okay to get up.” For emphasis, he pressed the muzzle of the gun more deeply into Joe’s face, twisting it back and forth; the inside of Joe’s cheek pressed painfully against his teeth. “You understand, Carpenter?”

“Yes.”

“I can waste you and walk away.”

“I’m cool.”

“Nobody can touch me.”

“Not me anyway.”

“I mean, I got a badge.”

“Sure.”

“You want to see it? I’ll pin it to your damn lip.”

Joe said nothing more.

They hadn’t shouted Police, which didn’t prove that they were phony cops, only that they didn’t want to advertise. They hoped to do their business quickly, cleanly — and get out before they were required to explain their presence to the local authorities, which would at least tangle them in inter-jurisdictional paperwork and might result in troubling questions about what legitimate laws they were enforcing. If they weren’t strictly employees of Teknologik, they had some measure of federal power behind them, but they hadn’t shouted FBI or DEA or ATF when they had burst out of the night, so they were probably operatives with a clandestine agency paid for out of those many billions of dollars that the government dispensed off the accounting books, from the infamous Black Budget.

Finally the stranger eased off Joe, onto one knee, then stood and backed away a couple of steps. “Get up.”

Rising from the sand, Joe was relieved to discover that his eyes were rapidly adapting to the darkness. When he had first come out of the banquet room and run north along the beach, hardly two minutes ago, the gloom had seemed deeper than it was now. The longer he remained night blind to any degree, the less likely he would be to see an advantage and to be able to seize it.

Although his rakish Panama hat was gone, and in spite of the darkness, the gunman was clearly recognizable: the storyteller. In his white slacks and white shirt, with his long white hair, he seemed to draw the meager ambient light to himself, glowing softly like an entity at a séance.

Joe glanced back and up at Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea. He saw the silhouettes of diners at their tables, but they probably couldn’t see the action on the dark beach.

Crotch-kicked, face-slammed, the disabled agent still sprawled nearby on the sand, no longer choking but gagging, in pain, and still spitting blood. He was striving to squeeze off his flow of tears by wheezing out obscenities instead of sobs.

Joe shouted, “Rose!”

The white-clad gunman said, “Shut up.”

“Rose!”

“Shut up and turn around.”

Silent in the sand, a new man loomed behind the storyteller and, instead of proving to be another Teknologik drone, said, “I have a Desert Eagle.44 magnum just one inch from the back of your skull.”

The storyteller seemed as surprised as Joe was, and Joe was dizzied by this turn of events.

The man with the Desert Eagle said, “You know how powerful this weapon is? You know what it’ll do to your head?”

Still softly radiant but now also as powerless as a ghost, the astonished storyteller said, “Shit.”

“Pulverize your skull, take your fat head right off your neck, is what it’ll do,” said the new arrival. “It’s a doorbuster. Now toss your gun in the sand in front of Joe.”

The storyteller hesitated.

“Now.”

Managing to surrender with arrogance, the storyteller threw the gun as if disdaining it, and the weapon thudded into the sand at Joe’s feet.

The savior with the.44 said, “Pick it up, Joe.”

As Joe retrieved the pistol, he saw the new arrival use the Desert Eagle as a club. The storyteller dropped to his knees, then to his hands and knees, but did not go all the way out until struck with the pistol a second time, whereupon he plowed the sand with his face, planting his nose like a tuber. The stranger with the.44—a black man dressed entirely in black — stooped to turn the white-maned head gently to one side to ensure that the unconscious thug would not suffocate.

The agent with the knee-smashed face stopped cursing. Now that no witnesses of his own kind were able to hear, he sobbed miserably again.

The black man said, “Come on, Joe.”

More impressed than ever with Mahalia and her odd collection of amateurs, Joe said, “Where’s Rose?”

“This way. We’ve got her.”

With the disabled agent’s sobs purling eerily across the strand behind them, Joe hurried with the black man north, in the direction that he and Rose had been heading when they were assaulted.

He almost stumbled over another unconscious man lying in the sand. This was evidently the first one who had rushed them, the one who had fired a gun.

Rose was on the beach but in the inky shadow of the bluff. Joe could barely see her in the murk, but she seemed to be hugging herself as though she were shivering and cold on this mild summer night.

He was half surprised by the wave of relief that washed through him at the sight of her, not because she was his only link to Nina but because he was genuinely glad that she was alive and safe. For all that she had frustrated and angered and sorely confused him, she was still special, for he recalled, as well, the kindness in her eyes when she had encountered him in the cemetery, the tenderness and pity. Even in the darkness, small as she was, she had an imposing presence, an aura of mystery but also of consequence and prodigious wisdom, probably the same power with which great generals and holy women alike elicited sacrifice from their followers. And here, now, on the shore of the night sea, it was almost possible to believe that she had walked out of the deeps to the west, having breathed water as easily as she now breathed air, come to land with the wonderful secrets of another realm.

With her was a tall man in dark clothes. He was little more than a spectral form — except for masses of curly blond hair that shone faintly like sinuous strands of phosphorate seaweed.

Joe said, “Rose, are you all right?”

“Just got… battered around a little,” she said in a voice taut with pain.

“I heard a shot,” he worried. He wanted to touch her, but he wasn’t sure that he should. Then he found himself with his arms around her, holding her.

She groaned in pain, and Joe started to let go of her, but she put one arm around him for a moment, embracing him to let him know that in spite of her injuries she was grateful for his expression of concern. “I’m fine, Joe. I’ll be okay.”

Shouting rose in the distance, from the bluff top beside the restaurant. And from the beach to the south, the disabled agent replied, calling feebly for help.

“Gotta get out of here,” said the blond guy. “They’re coming.”

“Who are you people?” Rose asked.

Surprised, Joe said, “Aren’t they Mahalia’s crew?”

“No,” Rose said. “Never saw them before.”

“I’m Mark,” said the man with the curly blond hair, “and he’s Joshua.”

The black man — Joshua — said something that sounded like: “We’re both in finna face.”

Rose said, “I’ll be damned.”

“Who, what? You’re in what?” Joe asked.

“It’s all right, Joe,” Rose said. “I’m surprised, but I probably shouldn’t be.”

Joshua said, “We believe we’re fighting on the same side, Dr. Tucker. Anyway, we have the same enemies.”

Out of the distance, at first as soft as the murmur of a heart, but then like the approaching hooves of a headless horseman’s steed, came the whump-whump-whump of helicopter rotors.

15

Having stolen nothing but their own freedom, they raced like fleeing thieves alongside the bluffs, which soared and then declined and then soared high again, almost as if mirroring Joe’s adrenaline levels.

While they were on the move, with Mark in the lead and Rose at his heels, Joe heard Joshua talking urgently to someone. He glanced back and saw the black man with a cell phone. Hearing the word car, he realized that their escape was being planned and coordinated even as it was unfolding.

Just when they seemed to have gotten away, the thumping promise of the helicopter became a bright reality to the south. Like a beam from the jewel eye of a stone-temple god angered by desecration, a searchlight pierced the night and swept the beach. Its burning gaze arced from the sandy cliffs to the foaming surf and back again, moving relentlessly toward them.

Because the sand was soft near the base of the palisades, they left shapeless impressions in it. Their aerial pursuers, however, wouldn’t be able to follow them by their footprints. Because this sand was never raked, as it might have been on a well-used public beach, it was disturbed by the tracks of many others who had come before them. If they had walked nearer the surf, in the area where higher tides had compacted the sand and left it smooth, their route would have been as clearly marked as if they’d left flares.

They passed several sets of switchback stairs leading to great houses on the bluffs above, some of masonry pinned to the cliff face with steel, some of wood bolted to deep pylons and vertical concrete beams. Joe glanced back once and saw the helicopter hovering by one staircase, the searchlight shimmering up the treads and across the railings.

He figured that a team of hunters might already have driven north from the restaurant and gone by foot to the beach to work methodically southward. Ultimately, if Mark kept them on the strand like this, they would be trapped between the northbound chopper and the southbound searchers.

Evidently the same thought occurred to Mark, because he suddenly led them to an unusual set of redwood stairs rising through a tall box frame. The structure was reminiscent of an early rocket gantry as built back when Cape Kennedy had been called Cape Canaveral, the spacecraft gone now and the architecture surrounding a curious void.

While they ascended, they were putting no additional distance between themselves and the chopper, but it continued to approach. Two, four, six, eight flights of steep stairs brought them to a landing where they seemed horribly exposed. The helicopter, after all, was hovering no more than a hundred feet above the beach — which put it perhaps forty feet above them as they stood atop the bluff — and hardly a hundred and fifty yards to the south. The house next door had no stairs to the shore, which made this platform even more prominent. If either the pilot or the copilot looked to the right and at the bluff top instead of at the searchlight-splashed sand below, discovery could not be avoided.

The upper landing was surrounded by a six-foot-tall, wrought-iron, gated security fence with a sharply inward-angled, spiked top to prevent unwanted visitors from gaining access by way of the beach below. It had been erected long ago, in the days when the Coastal Commission didn’t control such things.

The helicopter was now little more than a hundred yards to the south, moving forward slowly, all but hovering. Its screaming engine and clattering rotors were so loud that Joe could not have made himself heard to his companions unless he shouted.

There was no easy way to climb the fence, not in the minute or two of grace they might have left. Joshua stepped forward with the doorbuster Desert Eagle, fired one round into the lock, and kicked the gate open.

The men in the helicopter could not have heard the gunshot, and it was unlikely that the sound was perceived in the house as anything more than additional racket caused by the aircraft. Indeed, every window was dark, and all was as still as though no one was home.

They passed through the gate into an expansive, estate-size property with low box hedges, formal rose gardens, bowl fountains currently dry, antique French terra-cotta walkways lit by bronze-tulip path lights, and multilevel terraces with limestone balustrades rising to a Mediterranean mansion. There were phoenix palms, ficus trees. Massive California live oaks were underlit by landscape spots: magisterial, frost-and-black, free-form scaffoldings of branches.

Because of the artfulness of the landscape lighting, no glare spoiled any corner. The romantic grounds cast off tangled shawls of shadow, intricate laces of soft light and hard darkness, in which the four of them surely could not be seen by the pilots even as the helicopter now drew almost even with the bluff on which the estate made its bed.

As he followed Rose and Mark up stone steps onto the lowest terrace, Joe hoped that security-system motion detectors were not installed on the exterior of the enormous house, only within its rooms. If their passage activated kleigs mounted high in the trees or atop the perimeter walls, the sudden dazzle would draw the pilots’ attention.

He knew how difficult it could be even for a lone fugitive on foot to escape the bright eye of a police search chopper with a good and determined pilot — especially in comparatively open environs such as this neighborhood, which didn’t offer the many hiding places of a city’s mazes. The four of them would be altogether too easy to keep pinpointed once they had been spotted.

Earlier, an onshore breeze had come with the grace of gull wings from the sea; currently, the flow was offshore and stronger. This was one of those hot winds, called Santa Anas, born in the mountains to the east, out of the threshold of the Mojave, dry and blustery and curiously wearing on the nerves. Now a loud whispering rose from the oaks, and the great fronds of the phoenix palms hissed and rattled and creaked as though the trees were warning one another of gales that might soon descend.

Joe’s fear of an outer security line seemed unwarranted as they hurriedly climbed another short flight of stone steps to the upper terrace. The grounds remained subtly lighted, heavily layered with sheltering shadows.

Out beyond the bluff’s edge, the search chopper was parallel with them, moving slowly northward. The pilots’ attention remained focused on the beach below.

Mark led them past an enormous swimming pool. The oil-black water glimmered with fluid arabesques of silver, as though schools of strange fish with luminous scales were swimming just beneath the surface.

They were still passing the pool when Rose stumbled. She almost fell but regained her balance. She halted, swaying.

“Are you all right?” Joe asked worriedly.

“Yes, fine, I’ll be okay,” she said, but her voice was thin, and she still appeared to be unsteady.

“How badly were you hurt back there?” Joe pressed as Mark and Joshua gathered around.

“Just knocked on my ass,” she said. “Bruised a little.”

“Rose—”

“I’m okay, Joe. It’s just all this running, all those damn stairs up from the beach. I guess I’m not in as good a shape as I should be.”

Joshua was talking sotto voce on the cell phone again.

“Let’s go,” Rose said. “Come on, come on, let’s go.”

Beyond the bluff, above the beach, the helicopter was almost past the estate.

Mark led the way again, and Rose followed with renewed energy. They dashed under the roof of the arched loggia against the rear wall, where they were no longer in any danger of being spotted by the chopper pilots, and then to the corner of the house.

As they moved single file along the side of the mansion on a walkway that serpentined through a small grove of shaggy-barked melaleucas, they were abruptly pinned in the bright beam of a big flashlight. Blocking the path ahead of them, a watchman said, “Hey, who the hell are—”

Acting without hesitation, Mark began to move even as the beam flicked on. The stranger was still speaking when Mark collided with him. The two men grunted from the impact.

The flashlight flew against the trunk of a melaleuca, rebounded onto the walkway, and spun on the stone, making shadows whirl like a pack of tail-chasing dogs.

Mark swiveled the startled watchman around, put a hammerlock on him, bum-rushed him off the sidewalk and through bordering flower beds, and slammed him against the side of the house so hard that the nearby windows rattled.

Scooping up the flashlight, Joshua directed it on the action, and Joe saw that they had been challenged by an overweight uniformed security guard of about fifty-five. Mark pressed him to his knees and kept a hand on the back of his head to force his face down and away from them, so he couldn’t describe them later.

“He’s not armed,” Mark informed Joshua.

“Bastards,” the watchman said bitterly.

“Ankle holster?” Joshua wondered.

“Not that, either.”

The watchman said, “Stupid owners are pacifists or some damn thing. Won’t have a gun on the place, even for me. So now here I am.”

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Mark said, pulling him backward from the house and forcing him to sit on the ground with his back against the trunk of a melaleuca.

“You don’t scare me,” the watchman said, but he sounded scared.

“Dogs?” Mark demanded.

“Everywhere,” the guard said. “Dobermans.”

“He’s lying,” Mark said confidently.

Even Joe could hear the bluff in the watchman’s voice.

Joshua gave the flashlight to Joe and said, “Keep it pointed at the ground.” Then he produced handcuffs from a fanny pack.

Mark directed the guard to reach in back of himself and clasp his hands behind the tree. The trunk was only about ten inches in diameter, so the guard didn’t have to contort himself, and Joshua snapped the cuffs on his wrists.

“The cops are on the way,” the watchman gloated.

“No doubt riding Dobermans,” Mark said.

“Bastard,” said the watchman.

From his fanny pack, Mark withdrew a tightly rolled Ace bandage. “Bite on this,” he told the guard.

“Bite on this,” the guard said, indulging in one last bleat of hopeless bravado, and then he did as he was told.

Three times, Joshua wound electrician’s tape around the guard’s head and across his mouth, fixing the Ace bandage firmly in place.

From the watchman’s belt, Mark unclipped what appeared to be a remote control. “This open the driveway gate?”

Through his gag, the watchman snarled something obscene, which issued as a meaningless mumble.

“Probably the gate.”

To the guard, Joshua said, “Just relax. Don’t chafe your wrists. We’re not robbing the place. We’re really not. We’re only passing through.”

Mark said, “When we’ve been gone half an hour, we’ll call the cops so they can come and release you.”

“Better get a dog,” Joshua advised.

Taking the watchman’s flashlight, Mark led them toward the front of the house.

Whoever these guys were, Joe was glad that they were on his side.

The estate occupied at least three acres. The huge house was set two hundred feet back from the front property wall at the street. In the eye of the wide, looping driveway was a four-tier marble fountain: four broad scalloped bowls, each supported by three leaping dolphins, bowls and dolphins diminishing in scale as they ascended. The bowls were full of water, but the pump was silent, and there were no spouts or cascades.

“We’ll wait here,” Mark said, leading them to the dolphins.

The dolphins and bowls rose out of a pool with a two-foot-high wall finished with a broad cap of limestone. Rose sat on the edge — and then so did Joe and Mark.

Taking the remote control they had gotten from the watchman, Joshua walked along the driveway toward the entrance gate, talking on the cellular phone as he went.

Dogs of warm Santa Ana wind chased cat-quick leaves and curls of papery melaleuca bark along the blacktop.

“How do you even know about me?” Rose asked Mark.

“When any enterprise is launched with a one-billion-dollar trust fund, like ours,” Mark said, “it sure doesn’t take long to get up to speed. Besides, computers and data technology are what we’re about.”

“What enterprise?” Joe asked.

The answer was the same mystifying response that Joshua had given on the beach, “In finna face.”

“And what’s that mean?”

“Later, Joe,” Rose promised. “Go on, Mark.”

“Well, so, from day one, we’ve had the funds to try to keep track of all promising research in every discipline, worldwide, that could conceivably lead to the epiphany we expect.”

“Maybe so,” Rose said, “but you people have been around two years, while the largest part of my research for the past seven years has been conducted under the tightest imaginable security.”

“Doctor, you showed enormous promise in your field until you were about thirty-seven — and then suddenly your work appeared to come almost to a complete halt, except for a minor paper published here or there from time to time. You were a Niagara of creativity — and then went dry overnight.”

“And that indicates what to you?”

“It’s the signature pattern of a scientist who’s been co-opted by the defense establishment or some other branch of government with sufficient power to enforce a total information blackout. So when we see something like that, we start trying to find out exactly where you’re at work. Finally we located you at Teknologik, but not at any of their well-known and accessible facilities. A deep subterranean, biologically secure complex near Manassas, Virginia. Something called ‘Project 99.’”

While he listened intently to the conversation, Joe watched as, out at the end of the long driveway, the ornate electric gate rolled aside.

“How much do you know about what we do on Project 99?” Rose asked.

“Not enough,” Mark said.

“How can you know anything at all?”

“When I say we track ongoing research worldwide, I don’t mean that we limit ourselves to the same publications and shared data banks that any science library has available to it.”

With no animosity, Rose said, “That’s a nice way of saying you try to penetrate computer security systems, hack your way in, break encryptions.”

“Whatever. We don’t do it for profit. We don’t economically exploit the information we acquire. It’s simply our mission, the search we were created to undertake.”

Joe was surprised by his own patience. Although he was learning things by listening to them talk, the basic mystery only grew deeper. Yet he was prepared to wait for answers. The bizarre experience with the Polaroid snapshot in the banquet room had left him shaken. Now that he’d had time to think about what had happened, the synesthesia seemed to be but prelude to some revelation that was going to be more shattering and humbling than he had previously imagined. He remained committed to learning the truth, but now instinct warned him that he should allow the revelations to wash over him in small waves instead of in one devastating tsunami.

Joshua had gone through the open gate and was standing along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Over the eastern hills, the swollen moon ascended yellow-orange, and the warm wind seemed to blow down out of it.

Mark said, “You were one of thousands of researchers whose work we followed — though you were of somewhat special interest because of the extreme secrecy at Project 99. Then, a year ago, you left Manassas with something from the project, and overnight you were the most wanted person in the country. Even after you supposedly died aboard that airliner in Colorado. Even then…people were looking for you, lots of people, expending considerable resources, searching frantically for a dead woman — which seemed pretty weird to us.”

Rose said nothing to encourage him. She seemed tired.

Joe took her hand. She was trembling, but she squeezed his hand as if to assure him that she was all right.

“Then we began to intercept reports from a certain clandestine police agency…reports that said you were alive and active in the L.A. area, that it involved families who’d lost loved ones on Flight 353. We set up some surveillance of our own. We’re pretty good at it. Some of us are ex-military. Anyway, you could say we watched the watchers who were keeping tab on people like Joe here. And now…I guess it’s a good thing we did.”

“Yes. Thank you,” she said. “But you don’t know what you’re getting into here. There’s not just glory…there’s terrible danger.”

“Dr. Tucker,” Mark persisted, “there are over nine thousand of us now, and we’ve committed our lives to what we do. We’re not afraid. And now we believe that you may have found the interface — and that it’s very different from anything we quite anticipated. If you’ve actually made that breakthrough…if humanity is at that pivot point in history when everything is going to change radically and forever…then we are your natural allies.”

“I think you are,” she agreed.

Gently but persistently selling her on this alliance, Mark said, “Doctor, we both have set ourselves against those forces of ignorance and fear and self-interest that want to keep the world in darkness.”

“Remember, I once worked for them.”

“But turned.”

A car swung off Pacific Coast Highway and paused to pick up Joshua. It was followed through the gate and along the driveway by a second car.

Rose, Mark, and Joe got to their feet as the two vehicles — a Ford trailed by a Mercedes — circled the fountain and stopped in front of them.

Joshua stepped from the passenger door of the Ford, and a young brunette woman got out from behind the steering wheel. The Mercedes was driven by an Asian man of about thirty.

They all gathered before Rose Tucker, and for a moment everyone stood in silence.

The steadily escalating wind no longer spoke merely through the rustling foliage of the trees, through the cricket-rasping branches of the shrubbery, and through the hollow flute-like music issuing from the eaves of the mansion, for now it also enjoyed a voice of its own: a haunted keening that curled chillingly in listening ears, akin to the muted but frightful ululant crying of coyote packs chasing down prey in some far canyon of the night.

In the landscape lights, the shuddering greenery cast nervous shadows, and the gradually paling moon gazed at itself in the shiny surfaces of the automobiles.

Watching these four people as they watched Rose, Joe realized that they regarded the scientist not solely with curiosity but with wonder, perhaps even with awe, as though they stood in the presence of someone transcendent. Someone holy.

“I’m surprised to see every one of you in mufti,” Rose said.

They smiled, and Joshua said, “Two years ago, when we first set out on this mission, we were reasonably quiet about it. Didn’t want to excite a lot of media interest…because we thought we’d largely be misunderstood. What we didn’t expect was that we’d have enemies. And enemies so violent.”

“So powerful,” Mark said.

“We thought everyone would want to know the answers we were seeking — if we ever found them. Now we know better.”

“Ignorance is a bliss that some people will kill for,” said the young woman.

“So a year ago,” Joshua continued, “we adopted the robes as a distraction. People understand us as a cult — or think they do. We’re more acceptable when we’re viewed as fanatics, neatly labeled and confined to a box. We don’t make people quite so nervous.”

Robes.

Astonished, Joe said, “You wear blue robes, shave your heads.”

Joshua said, “Some of us do, yes, as of a year ago — and those in the uniform pretend to be the entire membership. That’s what I meant when I said the robes are a distraction — the robes, the shaved heads, the earrings, the visible communal enclaves. The rest of us have gone underground, where we can do the work without being spied on, subjected to harassment, and easily infiltrated.”

“Come with us,” the young woman said to Rose. “We know you may have found the way, and we want to help you bring it to the world — without interference.”

Rose moved to her and put a hand against her cheek, much as she had touched Joe in the cemetery. “I might be with you soon, but not tonight. I need more time to think, to plan. And I’m in a hurry to see a young girl, a child, who is at the center of what is happening.”

Nina, Joe thought, and his heart shuddered like the shadows of the wind-shaken trees.

Rose moved to the Asian man and touched him too. “I can tell you this much…we stand on the threshold you foresaw. We will go through that door, maybe not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or next week, but in the years ahead.”

She went to Joshua. “Together we will see the world change forever, bring the light of knowledge into the great dark loneliness of human existence. In our time.”

And finally she approached Mark. “I assume you brought two cars because you were prepared to give one to Joe and me.”

“Yes. But we hoped—”

She put a hand on his arm. “Soon but not tonight. I’ve got urgent business, Mark. Everything we hope to achieve hangs in the balance right now, hangs so precariously — until I can reach the little girl I mentioned.”

“Wherever she is, we can take you to her.”

“No. Joe and I must do this alone — and quickly.”

“You can take the Ford.”

“Thank you.”

Mark withdrew a folded one-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to Rose. “There are just eight digits in the serial number on this bill. Ignore the fourth digit, and the other seven are a phone number in the 310 area code.”

Rose tucked the bill into her jeans.

“When you’re ready to join us,” Mark said, “or if you’re ever in trouble you can’t get out of, ask for me at that number. We’ll come for you no matter where you are.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “We’ve got to go.” She turned to Joe. “Will you drive?”

“Yes.”

To Joshua, she said, “May I take your cell phone?”

He gave it to her.

Wings of furious wind beat around them as they got into the Ford. The keys were in the ignition.

As Rose pulled the car door shut, she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and leaned forward, gasping for breath.

“You are hurt.”

“Told you. I got knocked around.”

“Where’s it hurt?”

“We’ve got to get across the city,” Rose said, “but I don’t want to go back past Mahalia’s.”

“You could have a broken rib or two.”

Ignoring him, she sat up straight, and her breathing improved as she said, “The creeps won’t want to risk setting up a roadblock and a traffic check without cooperation from the local authorities, and they don’t have time to get that. But you can bet your ass they’ll be watching passing cars.”

“If you’ve got a broken rib, it could puncture a lung.”

“Joe, damn it, we don’t have time. We’ve got to move if we’re going to keep our girl alive.”

He stared at her. “Nina?”

She met his eyes. She said, “Nina,” but then a fearful look came into her face, and she turned from him.

“We can head north from here on PCH,” he said, “then inland on Kanan-Dume Road. That’s a county route up to Augora Hills. There we can get the 101 east to the 210.”

“Go for it.”

Faces powdered by moonlight, hair wind-tossed, the four who would leave in the Mercedes stood watching, backdropped by leaping stone dolphins and thrashing trees.

This tableau struck Joe as both exhilarating and ominous — and he could not identify the basis of either perception, other than to admit that the night was charged with an uncanny power that was beyond his understanding. Everything his gaze fell upon seemed to have monumental significance, as if he were in a state of heightened consciousness, and even the moon appeared different from any moon that he had ever seen before.

As Joe put the Ford in gear and began to pull away from the fountain, the young woman came forward to place her hand against the window beside Rose Tucker’s face. On this side of the glass, Rose matched her palm to the other. The young woman was crying, her lovely face glimmering with moon-bright tears, and she moved with the car along the driveway, hurrying as it picked up speed, matching her hand to Rose’s all the way to the gate before at last pulling back.

Joe felt almost as if somewhere earlier in the night he had stood before a mirror of madness and, closing his eyes, had passed through his own reflection into lunacy. Yet he did not want to return through the silvered surface to that old gray world. This was a lunacy that he found increasingly agreeable, perhaps because it offered him the one thing he desired most and could find only on this side of the looking glass — hope.

Slumped in the passenger seat beside him, Rose Tucker said, “Maybe all this is more than I can handle, Joe. I’m so tired — and so scared. I’m nobody special enough to do what needs doing, not nearly special enough to carry a weight like this.”

“You seem pretty special to me,” he said.

“I’m going to screw it up,” she said as she entered a phone number on the keypad of the cellular phone. “I’m scared shitless that I’m not going to be strong enough to open that door and take us all through it.” She pushed the Send button.

“Show me the door, tell me where it goes, and I’ll help you,” he said, wishing she would stop speaking in metaphors and give him the hard facts. “Why is Nina so important to whatever’s happening? Where is she, Rose?”

Someone answered the cellular call, and Rose said, “It’s me. Move Nina. Move her now.”

Nina.

Rose listened for a moment but then said firmly, “No, now, move her right now, in the next five minutes, even sooner if you can. They linked Mahalia to me…yeah, and in spite of all the precautions we’d taken. It’s only a matter of time now — and not very much time — until they make the connection to you.”

Nina.

Joe turned off the Pacific Coast Highway onto the county road to Augora Hills, driving up through a rumpled bed of dark land from which the Santa Ana wind flung sheets of pale dust.

“Take her to Big Bear,” Rose told the person on the phone.

Big Bear. Since Joe had talked to Mercy Ealing in Colorado — could it be less than nine hours ago? — Nina had been back in the world, miraculously returned, but in some corner where he could not find her. Soon, however, she would be in the town of Big Bear on the shores of Big Bear Lake, a resort in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains, a place he knew well. Her return was more real to him now that she was in a place that he could name, the byways of which he had walked, and he was flooded with such sweet anticipation that he wanted to shout to relieve the pressure of it. He kept his silence, however, and he rolled the name between the fingers of his mind, rolled it over and over as if it were a shiny coin: Big Bear.

Rose spoke into the phone: “If I can…I’m going to be there in a couple of hours. I love you. Go. Go now.”

She terminated the call, put the phone on the seat between her legs, closed her eyes, and leaned against the door.

Joe realized that she was not making much use of her left hand. It was curled in her lap. Even in the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see that her hand was shaking uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Give it a rest, Joe. It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but you’re getting to be a nag. I’ll be fine once we get to Nina.”

He was silent for half a mile. Then: “Tell me everything. I deserve to know.”

“You do, yes. It’s not a long story…but where do I begin?”

16

Great bristling balls of tumbleweed, robbed of their green by the merciless Western sun, cracked from their roots by the withering dryness of the California summer, torn from their homes in the earth by the shrieking Santa Ana wind, now bounded out of the steep canyons and across the narrow highway, silver-gray in the headlights, a curiously melancholy sight, families of thistled skeletons like starved and harried refugees fleeing worse torment.

Joe said, “Start with those people back there. What kind of cult are they?”

She spelled it for him: Infiniface.

“It’s a made word,” she said, “shorthand for ‘Interface with the Infinite.’ And they’re not a cult, not in any sense you mean it.”

“Then what are they?”

Instead of answering immediately, she shifted in her seat, trying to get more comfortable.

Checking her wristwatch, she said, “Can you drive faster?”

“Not on this road. In fact, better put on your safety belt.”

“Not with my left side feeling like it does.” Having adjusted her position, she said, “Do you know the name Loren Pollack?”

“The software genius. The poor man’s Bill Gates.”

“That’s what the press sometimes calls him, yes. But I don’t think the word poor should be associated with someone who started from scratch and made seven billion dollars by the age of forty-two.”

“Maybe not.”

She closed her eyes and slumped against the door, supporting her weight on her right side. Sweat beaded her brow, but her voice was strong. “Two years ago, Loren Pollack used a billion dollars of his money to form a charitable trust. Named it Infiniface. He believes many of the sciences, through research facilitated by new generations of superfast computers, are approaching discoveries that will bring us face-to-face with the reality of a Creator.”

“Sounds like a cult to me.”

“Oh, plenty of people think Pollack is a flake. But he’s got a singular ability to grasp complex research from a wide variety of sciences — and he has vision. You know, there’s a whole movement of modern physics that sees evidence of a created universe.”

Frowning, Joe said, “What about chaos theory? I thought that was the big thing.”

“Chaos theory doesn’t say the universe is random and chaotic. It’s an extremely broad theory that among many other things notes strangely complex relationships in apparently chaotic systems — like the weather. Look deeply enough in any chaos, and you find hidden regularities.”

“Actually,” he admitted, “I don’t know a damn thing about it — just the way they use the term in the movies.”

“Most movies are stupidity machines — like politicians. So…if Pollack was here, he’d tell you that just eighty years ago, science mocked religion’s assertion that the universe was created ex nihilo, out of nothing. Everyone knew something couldn’t be created from nothing — a violation of all the laws of physics. Now we understand more about molecular structure — and particle physicists create matter ex nihilo all the time.” Inhaling with a hiss through clenched teeth, she leaned forward, popped open the glove box, and rummaged through its contents. “I was hoping for aspirin or Excedrin. I’d chew them dry.”

“We could stop somewhere—”

“No. Drive. Just drive. Big Bear’s so far…” She closed the glove box but remained sitting forward, as though that position gave her relief. “Anyway, physics and biology are the disciplines that most fascinate Pollack — especially molecular biology.”

“Why molecular biology?”

“Because the more we understand living things on a molecular level, the clearer it becomes that everything is intelligently designed. You, me, mammals, fish, insects, plants, everything.”

“Wait a second. Are you tossing away evolution here?”

“Not entirely. Wherever molecular biology takes us, there might still be a place for Darwin’s theory of evolution — in some form.”

“You’re not one of those strict fundamentalists who believe we were created exactly five thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden.”

“Hardly. But Darwin’s theory was put forth in 1859, before we had any knowledge of atomic structure. He thought the smallest unit of a living creature was the cell — which he saw as just a lump of adaptable albumen.”

“Albumen? You’re losing me.”

“The origin of this basic living matter, he thought, was most likely an accident of chemistry — and the origin of all species was explained through evolution. But we now know cells are enormously complex structures of such clockwork design that it’s impossible to believe they are accidental in nature.”

“We do? I guess I’ve been out of school a long time.”

“Even in the matter of the species…Well, the two axioms of Darwinian theory — the continuity of nature and adaptable design — have never been validated by a single empirical discovery in nearly a hundred and fifty years.”

“Now you have lost me.”

“Let me put it another way.” She still leaned forward, staring out at the dark hills and the steadily rising glow of the sprawling suburbs beyond. “Do you know who Francis Crick is?”

“No.”

“He’s a molecular biologist. In 1962, he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Maurice Wilkins and James Watson for discovering the three-dimensional molecular structure of DNA — the double helix. Every advancement in genetics since then — and the countless revolutionary cures for diseases we’re going to see over the next twenty years — spring directly from the work of Francis Crick and his colleagues. Crick is a scientist’s scientist, Joe, to no degree a spiritualist or mystic. But do you know what he suggested a few years ago? That life on earth may well have been designed by an extraterrestrial intelligence.”

“Even highbrows read the National Enquirer, huh?”

“The point is — Crick was unable to square what we now know of molecular biology’s complexity with the theory of natural selection, but he was unwilling to suggest a Creator in any spiritual sense.”

“So…enter the ever-popular god-like aliens.”

“But it totally begs the issue, you see? Even if every form of life on this planet was designed by extraterrestrials…who designed them?”

“It’s the chicken or the egg all over again.”

She laughed softly, but the laughter mutated into a cough that she couldn’t easily suppress. She eased back, leaning against the door once more — and glared at him when he tried to suggest that she needed medical attention.

When she regained her breath, she said, “Loren Pollack believes the purpose of human intellectual striving — the purpose of science — is to increase our understanding of the universe, not just to give us better physical control of our environment or to satisfy curiosity, but to solve the puzzle of existence God has put before us.”

“And by solving it to become like gods ourselves.”

She smiled through her pain. “Now you’re tuned to the Pollack frequency. Pollack thinks we’re living in the time when some key scientific breakthrough will prove there is a Creator. Something that is…an interface with the infinite. This will bring the soul back to science — lifting humanity out of its fear and doubt, healing our divisions and hatreds, finally uniting our species on one quest that’s both of the spirit and of the mind.”

“Like Star Trek.”

“Don’t make me laugh again, Joe. It hurts too much.”

Joe thought of Gem Fittich, the used-car dealer. Both Pollack and Fittich sensed an approaching end to the world as they knew it, but the oncoming tidal wave that Fittich perceived was dark and cold and obliterating, while Pollack foresaw a wave of purest light.

“So Pollack,” she said, “founded Infiniface to facilitate this quest, to track research worldwide with an eye toward projects with…well, with metaphysical aspects that the scientists themselves might not recognize. To ensure that key discoveries were shared among researchers. To encourage specific projects that seemed to be leading to a breakthrough of the sort Pollack predicts.”

“Infiniface isn’t a religion at all.”

“No. Pollack thinks all religions are valid to the extent that they recognize the existence of a created universe and a Creator — but that then they bog down in elaborate interpretations of what God expects of us. What’s wanted of us, in Pollack’s view, is to work together to learn, to understand, to peel the layers of the universe, to find God…and in the process to become His equals.”

By now they were out of the dark hills and into suburbs again. Ahead was the entrance to the freeway that would take them east across the city.

As he drove up the ramp, heading toward Glendale and Pasadena, Joe said, “I don’t believe in anything.”

“I know.”

“No loving god would allow such suffering.”

“Pollack would say that the fallacy of your thinking lies in its narrow human perspective.”

“Maybe Pollack is full of shit.”

Whether Rose began to laugh again or fell directly victim to the cough, Joe couldn’t tell, but she needed even longer than before to regain control of herself.

“You need to see a doctor,” he insisted.

She was adamantly opposed. “Any delay…and Nina’s dead.”

“Don’t make me choose between—”

“There is no choice. That’s my point. If it’s me or Nina…then she comes first. Because she’s the future. She’s the hope.”

Orange-faced on first appearance, the moon had lost its blush and, stage fright behind it, had put on the stark white face of a smugly amused mime.

Sunday night traffic on the moon-mocked freeway was heavy as Angelenos returned from Vegas and other points in the desert, while desert dwellers streamed in the opposite direction, returning from the city and its beaches: ceaselessly restless, these multitudes, always seeking a greater happiness — and often finding it, but only for a weekend or an afternoon.

Joe drove as fast and as recklessly as he dared, weaving from lane to lane, but keeping in mind that they could not risk being stopped by the highway patrol. The car wasn’t registered in either his name or Rose’s. Even if they could prove it had been loaned to them, they would lose valuable time in the process.

“What is Project 99?” he asked her. “What the hell are they doing in that subterranean facility outside Manassas?”

“You’ve heard about the Human Genome Project.”

“Yeah. Cover of Newsweek. As I understand it, they’re figuring out what each human gene controls.”

“The greatest scientific undertaking of our age,” Rose said. “Mapping all one hundred thousand human genes and detailing the DNA alphabet of each. And they’re making incredibly fast progress.”

“Find out how to cure muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis—”

“Cancer, everything — given time.”

“You’re part of that?”

“No. Not directly. At Project 99…we have a more exotic assignment. We’re looking for those genes that seem to be associated with unusual talents.”

“What — like Mozart or Rembrandt or Michael Jordan?”

“No. Not creative or athletic talents. Paranormal talents. Telepathy. Telekinesis. Pyrokinesis. It’s a long strange list.”

His immediate reaction was that of a crime reporter, not of a man who had recently seen the fantastic in action: “But there aren’t such talents. That’s science fiction.”

“There are people who score far higher than chance on a variety of tests designed to disclose psychic abilities. Card prediction. Calling coin tosses. Thought-image transmission.”

“That stuff they used to do at Duke University.”

“That and more. When we find people who perform exceptionally well in these tests, we take blood samples from them. We study their genetic structure. Or children in poltergeist situations.”

“Poltergeists?”

“Poltergeist phenomena — weeding out the hoaxes — aren’t really ghosts. There’s always one or more children in houses where this happens. We think the objects flying around the room and the ectoplasmic apparitions are caused by these children, by their unconscious exercise of powers they don’t even know they have. We take samples from these kids when we can find them. We’re building a library of unusual genetic profiles, looking for common patterns among people who have had all manner of paranormal experiences.”

“And have you found something?”

She was silent, perhaps waiting for another spasm of pain to pass, though her face revealed more mental anguish than physical suffering. At last she said, “Quite a lot, yes.”

If there had been enough light for Joe to see his reflection in the rearview mirror, he knew that he could have watched as his tan faded and his face turned as white as the moon, for he suddenly knew the essence of what Project 99 was all about. “You haven’t just studied this.”

“Not just. No.”

“You’ve applied the research.”

“Yes.”

“How many work on Project 99?”

“Over two hundred of us.”

“Making monsters,” he said numbly.

“People,” she said. “Making people in a lab.”

“They may look like people, but some of them are monsters.”

She was silent for perhaps a mile. Then she said, “Yes.” And after another silence: “Though the true monsters are those of us who made them.”

Fenced and patrolled, identified at the highway as a think tank called the Quartermass Institute, the property encompasses eighteen hundred acres in the Virginia countryside: meadowed hills where deer graze, hushed woods of birch and beeches where a plenitude of small game thrives beyond the rifle reach of hunters, ponds with ducks, and grassy fields with nesting plovers.

Although security appears to be minimal, no animal larger than a rabbit moves across these acres without being monitored by motion detectors, heat sensors, microphones, and cameras, which feed a continuous river of data to a Cray computer for continuous analysis. Unauthorized visitors are subject to immediate arrest, and on those rare occasions when hunters or adventurous teenagers scale the fence, they are halted and taken into custody within five hundred feet of the point of intrusion.

Near the geographical center of these peaceful acres is the orphanage, a cheerless three-story brick structure that resembles a hospital. Forty-eight children currently reside herein, every one below the age of six — though some appear older. They are all residents by virtue of having been born without mothers or fathers in any but the chemical sense. None of them was conceived in love, and none entered the world through a woman’s womb. As fetuses, they were nurtured in mechanical wombs, adrift in amniotic fluid brewed in a laboratory.

As with laboratory rats and monkeys, as with dogs whose skulls are cut open and brains exposed for days during experiments related to the central nervous system, as with all animals that further the cause of knowledge, these orphans have no names. To name them would be to encourage their handlers to develop emotional attachments to them. The handlers — who include everyone from those security men who double as cooks to the scientists who bring these children into the world — must remain morally neutral and emotionally detached in order to do their work properly. Consequently, the children are known by letter and number codes that refer to the specific indices in Project 99’s genetic-profile library from which their special abilities were selected.

Here on the third floor, southwest corner, in a room of her own, sits ATX-12-23. She is four years old, catatonic, and incontinent. She waits in her crib, in her own wastes until her nurse changes her, and she never complains. ATX-12-23 has never spoken a single word or uttered any sound whatsoever. As an infant, she never cried. She cannot walk. She sits motionlessly, staring into the middle distance, sometimes drooling. Her muscles are partially atrophied even though she is given manipulated exercise three times a week. If her face were ever enlivened by expression, she might be beautiful, but the unrelieved slackness of her features gives her a chilling aspect. Cameras cover every inch of her room and record around the clock, which might seem to be a waste of videotape — except that from time to time, inanimate objects around ATX-12-23 become animated. Rubber balls of various colors levitate and spin in the air, float from wall to wall or circle the child’s head for ten or twenty minutes at a time. Window blinds raise and lower without a hand touching them. Lights dim and flare, the digital clock speeds through the hours, and a teddy bear that she has never touched sometimes walks around the room on its stubby legs as if it contains the mechanical system that would allow it to do so.

Now come here, down to the second floor, to the third room east of the elevators, where lives a five-year-old male, KSB-22-09, who is neither physically nor mentally impaired. Indeed, he is an active redheaded boy with a genius-level IQ. He loves to learn, receives extensive tutoring daily, and is currently educated to a ninth-grade equivalent. He has numerous toys, books, and movies on video, and he participates in supervised play sessions with the other orphans, because it is deemed essential by the project architects that all subjects with normal mental faculties and full physical abilities be raised in as social an atmosphere as possible, given the limitations of the Institute. Sometimes when he tries hard (and sometimes when he is not trying at all), KSB-22-09 is able to make small objects — pencils, ball bearings, paper clips, thus far nothing larger than a glass of water — vanish. Simply vanish. He sends them elsewhere, into what he calls “The All Dark.” He is not able to bring them back and cannot explain what The All Dark may be — though he does not like the place. He must be sedated to sleep, because he frequently suffers vivid nightmares in which he uncontrollably sends himself, piece by piece, into The All Dark — first a thumb, and then a toe, and then his left foot, a tooth and another tooth, one eye gone from a suddenly empty socket, and then an ear. Lately, KSB-22-09 is experiencing memory lapses and spells of paranoia, which are thought to be related to the long-term use of the sedative that he receives before bed each night.

Of the forty-eight orphans residing at the Institute, only seven exhibit any paranormal powers. The other forty-one, however, are not regarded as failures. Each of the seven successes first revealed his or her talent at a different age — one as young as eleven months, one as old as five. Consequently, the possibility remains that many of the forty-one will blossom in years to come — perhaps not until they experience the dramatic changes in body chemistry related to puberty. Eventually, of course, those subjects who age without revealing any valuable talent will have to be removed from the program, as even Project 99’s resources are not infinite. The project’s architects have not yet determined the optimum point of termination.

Although the steering wheel was hard under his hands and slick with his cold sweat, although the sound of the engine was familiar, although the freeway was solid under the spinning tires, Joe felt as if he had crossed into another dimension as treacherously amorphous and inimical to reason as the surreal landscapes in Salvador Dalí’s paintings.

As his horror grew, he interrupted Rose: “This place you’re describing is Hell. You… you couldn’t have been part of anything like this. You’re not that kind of person.”

“Aren’t I?”

“No.”

Her voice grew thinner as she talked, as though the strength supporting her had been the secrets she kept, and as she revealed them one by one, her vitality ebbed as it had for Samson lock by lock. In her increasing weariness was a sweet relief like that dispensed in a confessional, a weakness that she seemed to embrace — but that was nonetheless colored by a gray wash of despair. “If I’m not that kind of person now…I must have been then.”

“But how? Why? Why would you want to be involved with these…these atrocities?”

“Pride. To prove that I was as good as they thought I was, good enough to take on this unprecedented challenge. Excitement. The thrill of being involved with a program even better funded than the Manhattan Project. Why did the people who invented the atomic bomb work on it…knowing what they were making? Because others, elsewhere in the world, will do it if we don’t…so maybe we have to do it to save ourselves from them?”

“Save ourselves by selling our souls?” he asked.

“There’s no defense I can offer that should ever exonerate me,” Rose said. “But it is true that when I signed on, there was no consensus that we would carry the experiments this far, that we would apply what we learned with such…zeal. We entered into the creation of the children in stages…down a slippery slope. We intended to monitor the first one just through the second trimester of the fetal stage — and, after all, we don’t consider a fetus to be an actual human being. So it wasn’t like we were experimenting on a person. And when we brought one of them to full term…there were intriguing anomalies in its EEG graphs, strangeness in its brainwave patterns that might have indicated heretofore unknown cerebral function. So we had to keep it alive to see…to see what we had achieved, to see if maybe we had moved evolution forward a giant step.”

“Jesus.”

Though he had first met this woman only thirty-six hours ago, his feelings for her had been rich and intense, ranging from virtual adoration to fear and now to repulsion. Yet from his repulsion came pity, because for the first time he saw in her one of the many cloves of human weakness that, in other forms, were so ripe in himself.

“Fairly early on,” she said, “I did want out. So I was invited for a private chat with the project director, who made it clear to me that there was no quitting now. This had become a job with lifetime tenure. Even to attempt to leave Project 99 is to commit suicide — and to put the lives of your loved ones at risk as well.”

“But couldn’t you have gone to the press, broken the story wide open, shut them down?”

“Probably not without physical evidence, and all I had was what was in my head. Anyway, a couple of my colleagues had the idea that they could bring it all down, I think. One of them suffered a timely stroke. The other was shot three times in the head by a mugger — who was never caught. For a while…I was so depressed I considered killing myself and saving them the trouble. But then…along came CCY-21-21….”

First, born a year ahead of CCY-21-21 was male subject SSW-89-58. He exhibits prodigious talents in every regard and his story is of importance to you because of your own recent experiences with people who eviscerate themselves and set themselves afire — and because of your losses in Colorado.

By the time he is forty-two months old, SSW-89-58 possesses the language skills of the average first-year college student and is able to read a three-hundred-page volume in one to three hours, depending on the complexity of the text. Higher math comes to him as easily as eating ice cream, as do foreign languages from French to Japanese. His physical development proceeds at an accelerated rate as well, and by the time he is four, he stands as tall and is as proportionately developed as the average seven-year-old. Paranormal talents are anticipated, but researchers are surprised by 89–58’s great breadth of more ordinary genius — which includes the ability to play any piece of piano music after hearing it once — and by his physical precocity, for which no genetic selection has been made.

When 89–58 begins to exhibit paranormal abilities, he proves to be phenomenally endowed. His first startling achievement is remote viewing. As a game, he describes to researchers the rooms in their own homes, where he has never visited. He walks them through tours of museums to which he has never been admitted. When he is shown a photograph of a Wyoming mountain in which is buried a top-secret Strategic Air Command defense center, he describes in accurate detail the missile-status display boards in the war room. He is considered an espionage asset of incalculable value — until, fortunately by degrees, he discovers that he is able to step into a human mind as easily as he steps into distant rooms. He takes mental control of his primary handler, makes the man undress, and sends him through the halls of the orphanage, crowing like a rooster. When SSW-89-58 relinquishes control of the handler and what he’s done is discovered, he is punished severely. He resents the punishment, resents it deeply. That night he conducts a remote viewing of the handler’s home and enters the handler’s mind at a distance of forty-six miles. Using the handler’s body, he brutally murders the man’s wife and daughter, and then he walks the handler through suicide.

Following this episode, SSW-89-58 is subdued by the use of a massive dose of tranquilizers administered by a dart gun. Two employees of Project 99 perish in the process.

Thereafter, for a period of eighteen days, he is maintained in a drug-induced coma while a team of scientists designs and oversees the urgent construction of a suitable habitat for their prize — one which will sustain his life but assure that he remains controlled. A faction of the staff suggests immediate termination of SSW-89-58, but this advice is considered and rejected. Every endeavor is at some point troubled by pessimists.

Here, now, come into the security room in the southeast corner of the first floor of the orphanage. In this place — if you were an employee — you must present yourself for the scrutiny of three guards, because this post is never manned by fewer, regardless of the hour. You must place your right hand on a scanner that will identify you by your fingerprints. You must peer into a retina scanner as well, which will compare your retinal patterns to those recorded in the scan taken when you first accepted employment.

From here you descend in an elevator past five subterranean levels, where much of the work of Project 99 is conducted. You are interested, however, in the sixth and lowest level, where you walk to the end of a long corridor and through a gray metal door. You stand in a plain room with simple institutional furnishings, with three security men, none of whom is interested in you. These men work six-hour shifts to ensure that they remain alert not only to what is happening in this room and the next but to nuances in one another’s behavior.

One wall of this room features a large window that looks into the adjoining chamber. Frequently you will see Dr. Louis Blom or Dr. Keith Ramlock — or both — at work beyond this glass, for they are the designers of SSW-89-58 and oversee the exploration and the utilization of his gifts. When neither Dr. Blom nor Dr. Ramlock is present, at least three other members of their immediate staff are in attendance.

SSW-89-58 is never left unsupervised.

They were transitioning from Interstate 210 to Interstate 10 when Rose interrupted herself to say, “Joe, could you find an exit with a service station? I need to use a rest room.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just need…a rest room. I hate to waste the time. I want to get to Big Bear as quick as we can. But I don’t want to wet my pants, either. No hurry. Just somewhere in the next few miles, okay?”

“All right.”

She conducted him, once more, on her version of a remote viewing of Project 99 outside Manassas.

Onward, please, through the connecting door and into the final space, where stands the elaborate containment vessel in which 89–58 now lives and, barring any unforeseen and calamitous developments, in which he will spend the rest of his unnatural life. This is a tank that somewhat resembles the iron lungs which, in more primitive decades, were used to sustain victims of polio. Nestled like a pecan in its shell, 89–58 is entirely enclosed, pressed between the mattress-soft halves of a lubricated body mold that restricts all movement, including even the movement of each finger, limiting him to facial expressions and twitches — which no one can see anyway. He is supplied with bottled air directly through a nose clip from tanks outside the containment vessel. Likewise, he is pierced by redundant intravenous-drip lines, one in each arm and one in his left thigh, through which he receives life-sustaining nourishment, a balance of fluids, and a variety of drugs as his handlers see fit to administer them. He is permanently catheterized for the efficient elimination of waste. If any of these IV drips or other lifelines works loose or otherwise fails, an insistent alarm immediately alerts the handlers, and in spite of the existence of redundant systems, repairs are undertaken without delay.

The researchers and their assistants conduct conversations as necessary with 89–58 through a speakerphone. The clamshell body mold in which he lies inside the steel tank is equipped with audio feed to both of his ears and a microphone over his mouth. The staff is able to reduce 89–58’s words to a background whisper whenever they wish, but he does not enjoy an equivalent privilege to tune them out. A clever video feed allows images to be transmitted by glass fiber to a pair of lenses fitted to 89–58’s sockets; consequently, he can be shown photographs — and if necessary the geographical coordinates — of buildings and places in which he is required to conduct remote viewings. Sometimes he is shown photographs of individuals against whom it is desired that he take one form of action or another.

During a remote viewing, 89–58 describes in vivid detail what he sees in whatever far place they have sent him, and he dutifully answers questions that his handlers put to him. By monitoring his heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, brainwaves, eyelid movements, and changes in the electrical conductivity of his skin, they are able to detect a lie with better than ninety-nine-percent accuracy. Furthermore, they test him from time to time by remoting him to places on which extensive, reliable intelligence has already been gathered; his answers are subsequently compared to the material currently in file.

He has been known to be a bad boy. He is not trusted.

When 89–58 is instructed to enter the mind of a specific person and either eliminate that individual or use him to eliminate another — which is most often a foreign national — the assignment is referred to as a “wet mission.” This term is used partly because blood is spilled but largely because 89–58 is plunged not into the comparative dryness of faraway rooms but into the murky depths of a human mind. As he conducts a wet mission, 89–58 describes it to Dr. Blom or Dr. Ramlock, at least one of whom is always present during the event. After numerous such missions, Blom and Ramlock and their associates are adept at identifying deception even before the polygraph signals trouble.

For his handlers, video displays of electrical activity in 89–58’s brain clearly define the activity in which he is engaged at every moment. When he is only remote viewing, the patterns are radically different from those that arise when he is engaged in wet work. If he is assigned only to observe some distant place and, while viewing, disobediently occupies the mind of someone in that remote location, either as an act of rebellion or sheerly for sport, this is known at once to his handlers.

If SSW-89-58 refuses an instruction, exceeds the parameters of an assignment, or exhibits any other signs of rebellion, he can be punished in numerous ways. Electrical contacts in the body mold — and in his catheter — can be activated to deliver painful shocks to selected tender points head to foot or over his entire skin surface. Piercing electronic squeals at excruciating volume may be blasted into his ears. Disgusting odors are easily introduced with his air supply. A variety of drugs are available to precipitate painful and terrifying physiological symptoms — such as violent muscle spasms and inflamed nerve sheaths — which pose no danger to the life of this valuable asset. Inducing claustrophobic panic by cutting off his air supply is also a simple but effective disciplinary technique.

If he is obedient, 89–58 can be rewarded in one of five ways. Although he receives his primary nutrients — carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, minerals — through IV drips, a feeding tube can be extruded from the body mold and between his lips, to allow him to enjoy tasty liquids, from Coca-Cola to apple juice to chocolate milk. Second, because he is a piano prodigy and takes great pleasure from music, he can be rewarded with anything from the Beatles to Beethoven. Third, entire movies can be transmitted to the lenses over his eyes — and from such an intimate perspective, he seems to be virtually in the middle of the cinematic experience. Fourth, he can receive mood-elevating drugs that make him as happy, in some ways, as any boy in the world. Fifth, and best of all, he is sometimes allowed to go remote viewing in places that he would like to experience, and during these glorious expeditions, guided by his own interests, he knows freedom — or as much of it as he can imagine.

Routinely, no fewer than three staff monitor the containment vessel and its occupant, because 89–58 can control only one mind at a time. If any of the three were to turn suddenly violent or exhibit any unusual behavior, either of the other two could, with the flip of a switch, administer sufficient sedatives through the intravenous feeds to drop 89–58 into a virtually instant, deep, and powerless sleep. In the unlikely event that this should fail, a doomsday button follows the sedative with a lethal dose of nerve toxin that kills in three to five seconds.

The three guards on the other side of the observation window have similar buttons available for use at their discretion.

SSW-89-58 is not able to read minds. He is not a telepath. He can only repress the personality of the person he inhabits and take control of the physical plant. There is disagreement among the staff of Project 99 as to whether 89–58’s lack of telepathic ability is a disappointment or a blessing.

Furthermore, when sent on a wet mission, he must know where his target is located before being able to invade its mind. He cannot search at will across the populations of the world but must be guided by his handlers, who first locate his prey. Once shown an image of the building or vehicle in which the target can be found — and when that place is geographically sited in his mind — he can act.

Thus far, he is also limited to the walls of that structure and cannot effectively pursue a wanted mind beyond the boundaries that are initially established. No one knows why this limitation should exist, though theories abound. Perhaps it is because the invisible psychic self, being only a wave energy of some type, responds to open spaces in much the manner of heat contained in a hot stone placed in a cold room: It radiates outward, dissipating, dispersing itself, and cannot be conserved in a coherent form. He is able to practice remote viewing of outdoor locations — but only for short periods of time. This shortcoming frustrates 89–58’s handlers, but they believe and hope that his abilities in this regard may improve with time.

If you can bear to watch, the containment vessel is opened twice each week to allow the handlers to clean their asset. He is without fail deeply sedated for this procedure — and remains connected to the doomsday button. He is given a thorough sponge bath, irritations of the skin are treated, the minimal solid waste that he produces is evacuated from the bowel, teeth are cleaned, eyes are examined for infection and then are flushed with antibiotic, and other maintenance is performed. Although 89–58 receives daily low-voltage electrical stimulation of his muscles to ensure a minimal life-sustaining mass, he resembles one of the starving children of any third-world country racked by drought and evil politics. He is as pale as any job on a mortician’s table, withered, with elfin bones grown thin from lack of use; and when unconsciously he curls his feeble fingers around the hands of ministering attendants, his grip is no stronger than that of a cradled newborn baby struggling to hold fast to its mother’s thumb.

Sometimes, in this profound sedation, he murmurs wordlessly but forlornly, mewls, and even weeps, as if adrift in a soft sad dream.

At the Shell station, only three vehicles were at the self-service pumps. Tending to their cars, the motorists squinted and ducked their heads to keep wind-blown grit out of their eyes.

The lighting was as bright as that on a movie set, and though Joe and Rose were not being sought by the type of police agency that would distribute their photographs to local television news programs, Joe preferred to stay out of the glare. He parked along the side of the building, near the rest rooms, where huddled shadows survived.

Joe was in emotional turmoil, felt slashed across the heart, because now he knew the exact cause of the catastrophic crash, knew the murderer’s identity and the twisted details. The knowledge was like a scalpel that pared off what thin scabs had formed over his pain. His grief felt fresh, the loss more recent than it really was.

He switched off the engine and sat speechless.

“I don’t understand how the hell they found out I was on that flight,” Rose said. “I’d taken such precautions…. But I knew when he remote-viewed the passenger cabin, looking for us, because there was an odd dimming of lights, a problem with my wristwatch, a vague sense of a presence—signs I’d learned to read.”

“I’ve met a National Transportation Safety Board investigator who’s heard the tape from the cockpit voice recorder, before it was destroyed in a convenient sound-lab fire. This boy was inside the captain’s head, Rose. I don’t understand…Why didn’t he take out just you?”

“He had to get us both, that was his assignment, me and the girl — and while he could’ve nailed me without any problem, it wouldn’t have been easy with her.”

Utterly baffled, Joe said, “Nina? Why would they have been interested in her then? She was just another passenger, wasn’t she? I thought they were after her later because… well, because she survived with you.”

Rose would not meet his eyes. “Get me the key to the women’s rest room, Joe. Will you, please? Let me have a minute here. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way to Big Bear.”

He went into the sales room and got the key from the cashier. By the time he returned to the Ford, Rose had gotten out. She was leaning against a front fender, back turned and shoulders hunched to the whistling Santa Ana wind. Her left arm was curled against her breast, and her hand was still shaking. With her right hand, she pulled the lapels of her blazer together, as though the warm August wind felt cold to her.

“Would you unlock the door for me?” she asked.

He went to the women’s room. By the time he unlocked the door and switched on the light, Rose had arrived at his side.

“I’ll be quick,” she promised, and slipped past him.

He had a glimpse of her face in that brightness, just before the door fell shut. She didn’t look good.

Instead of returning to the car, Joe leaned against the wall of the building, beside the lavatory door, to wait for her.

According to nurses in asylums and psychiatric wards, a greater number of their most disturbed patients responded to the Santa Ana winds than ever reacted to the sight of a full moon beyond a barred window. It wasn’t simply the baleful sound, like the cries of an unearthly hunter and the unearthly beasts that it pursued; it was also the subliminal alkaline scent of the desert and a queer electrical charge, different from those that other — less dry — winds imparted to the air.

Joe could understand why Rose might have pulled her blazer shut and huddled into it. This night had both the moon and the Santa Ana wind to spark a voodoo current in the spine — and a parentless boy without a name, who lived in a coffin of steel and moved invisible through a world of potential victims oblivious to him.

Are we recording?

The boy had known about the cockpit voice recorder — and he’d left a cry for help on it.

One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom. One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock. They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.

Whatever else he was — sociopathic, psychotic, homicidal — he was also a child. A beast, an abomination, a terror, but also a child. He had not asked to be born, and if he was evil, they had made him so by failing to teach him any human values, by treating him as mere ordnance, by rewarding him for murder. Beast he was, but a pitiable beast, lost and alone, wandering in a maze of misery.

Pitiable but formidable. And still out there. Waiting to be told where he could find Rose Tucker. And Nina.

This is fun.

The boy enjoyed the killing. Joe supposed it was even possible that his handlers had never instructed him to destroy everyone aboard Nationwide Flight 353, that he had done it as an act of rebellion and because he enjoyed it.

Make them stop or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

Recalling those words from the transcript, Joe sensed that the boy had not been referring merely to the passengers on the doomed airliner. By then he had already made the decision to kill them all. He was speaking of some act more apocalyptic than three hundred and thirty murders.

What could he accomplish if provided with photographs and the geographical coordinates of not merely a missile-tracking facility but a complex of nuclear-missile launch silos?

“Jesus,” Joe whispered.

Somewhere in the night, Nina waited. In the hands of a friend of Rose’s, but inadequately protected. Vulnerable.

Rose seemed to be taking a long time.

Rapping on the rest room door, Joe called her name, but she did not respond. He hesitated, knocked again, and when she weakly called “Joe,” he pushed the door open.

She was perched on the edge of the toilet seat. She had taken off her navy blazer and her white blouse; the latter lay blood-soaked on the sink.

He hadn’t realized she’d been bleeding. Darkness and the blazer had hidden the blood from him.

As he stepped into the rest room, he saw that she had shaped a compress of sorts from a wad of wet paper towels. She was pressing it to her left pectoral muscle, above her breast.

“That one shot on the beach,” he said numbly. “You were hit.”

“The bullet passed through,” she said. “There’s an exit wound in back. Nice and clean. I haven’t even bled all that much, and the pain is tolerable…. So why am I getting weaker?”

“Internal bleeding,” he suggested, wincing as he looked at the exit wound in her back.

“I know anatomy,” she said. “I took the hit in just the right spot. Couldn’t have picked it better. Shouldn’t be any damage to major vessels.”

“The round might have hit a bone and fragmented. The fragment maybe didn’t come out, took a different track.”

“I was so thirsty. Tried to drink some water from the faucet. Almost passed out when I bent over.”

“This settles it,” he said. His heart was racing. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

“Get me to Nina.”

“Rose, damn it—”

“Nina can heal me,” she said, and as she spoke, she looked guiltily away from him.

Astonished, he said, “Heal you?”

“Trust me. Nina can do what no doctor can, what no one else on earth can do.”

At that moment, on some level, he knew at least one of Rose Tucker’s remaining secrets, but he could not allow himself to take out that dark pearl of knowledge and examine it.

“Help me get my blouse and blazer on, and let’s go. Get me into Nina’s hands. Her healing hands.”

Though half sick with worry, he did as she wanted. As he dressed her, he remembered how larger than life she had seemed in the cemetery Saturday morning. Now she was so small.

Through a hot clawing wind that mimicked the songs of wolves, she leaned on him all the way back to the car.

When he got her settled in the passenger’s seat, she asked if he would get her something to drink.

From a vending machine in front of the station, he purchased a can of Pepsi and one of Orange Crush. She preferred the Crush, and he opened it for her.

Before she accepted the drink, she gave him two things: the Polaroid photograph of his family’s graves and the folded dollar bill on which the serial number, minus the fourth digit, provided the phone number at which Mark of Infiniface could be reached in an emergency. “And before you start driving, I want to tell you how to find the cabin in Big Bear — in case I can’t hold on until we get there.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll make it.”

“Listen,” she said, and again she projected the charisma that commanded attention.

He listened as she told him the way.

“And as for Infiniface,” she said, “I trust them, and they are my natural allies — and Nina’s — as Mark said. But I’m afraid they can be too easily infiltrated. That’s why I wouldn’t let them come with us tonight. But if we’re not followed, then this car is clean, and maybe their security is good enough. If worse comes to worst and you don’t know where to turn…they may be your best hope.”

His chest tightened and his throat thickened as she spoke, and finally he said, “I don’t want to hear any more of this. I’ll get you to Nina in time.”

Rose’s right hand trembled now, and Joe was not certain that she could hold the Orange Crush. But she managed it, drinking thirstily.

As he drove back onto the San Bernardino Freeway, heading east, she said, “I’ve never meant to hurt you, Joe.”

“You haven’t.”

“I’ve done a terrible thing, though.”

He glanced at her. He didn’t dare ask what she had done. He kept that shiny black pearl of knowledge tucked deep in the purse of his mind.

“Don’t hate me too much.”

“I don’t hate you at all.”

“My motives were good. They haven’t always been. Certainly weren’t spotless when I went to work at Project 99. But my motives were good this time, Joe.”

Driving out of the lightstorm of Los Angeles and its suburbs, toward the mountain darkness where Nina dwelled, Joe waited for Rose to tell him why he should hate her.

“So…let me tell you,” she said, “about the project’s only true success….”

Ascend, now, in the elevator from the little glimpse of Hell at the bottom of those six subterranean levels, leaving the boy in his containment vessel, and come all the way up to the security room where the descent began. Farther still, to the southeast corner of the ground floor, where CCY-21-21 resides.

She was conceived without passion one year after 89–58, though she was the project not of Doctors Blom and Ramlock but of Rose Tucker. She is a lovely child, delicate, fair of face, with golden hair and amethyst eyes. Although the majority of the orphans living here are of average intelligence, CCY-21-21 has an unusually high IQ, even higher perhaps than that of 89–58, and she loves to learn. She is a quiet girl, with much grace and natural charm, but for the first three years of her life, she exhibits no paranormal abilities.

Then, on a sunny May afternoon, when she is participating in a session of supervised play with other children on the orphanage lawn, she finds a sparrow with a broken wing and one torn eye. It lies in the grass beneath a tree, flopping weakly, and when she gathers it into her small hands, it becomes fearfully still. Crying, the girl hurries with the bird to the nearest handler, asking what can be done. The sparrow is now so weak and so paralyzed by fear that it can only feebly work its beak — and produces no sound whatsoever. The bird is dying, the handler sees nothing to be done, but the girl will not accept the sparrow’s pending death. She sits on the ground, grips the bird gently in her left hand, and carefully strokes it with her right, singing softly to it a song about Robin Red Breast — and in but a minute the sparrow is restored. The fractures in the wing knit firm again, and the torn eye heals into a bright, clear orb. The bird sings — and flies.

CCY-21-21 becomes the center of a happy whirlwind of attention. Rose Tucker, who has been driven to the contemplation of suicide by the nightmare of Project 99, is as reborn as the bird, stepping back from the abyss into which she has been peering. For the next fifteen months, 21–21’s healing power is explored. At first it is an unreliable talent, which she cannot exercise at will, but month by wondrous month she learns to summon and control her gift, until she can apply it whenever asked to do so. Those on Project 99 with medical problems are brought to a level of health they never expected to enjoy again. A select few politicians and military figures — and members of their families — suffering from life-threatening illnesses are brought secretly to the child to be healed. There are those in Project 99 who believe that 21–21 is their greatest asset — although others find 89–58, in spite of the considerable control problems that he poses, to be the most interesting and valuable property in the long run.

Now look here, come forward in time to one rainy day in August, fifteen months after the restoration of the injured sparrow. A staff geneticist named Amos has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease. While healing Amos with only a soft and lingering touch, the girl detects an illness in addition to the malignancy, this one not of a physical nature but nonetheless debilitating. Perhaps because of what he has seen at Project 99, perhaps for numerous other reasons that have accumulated throughout his fifty years, Amos has decided that life is without purpose or meaning, that we have no destiny but the void, that we are only dust in the wind. This darkness in him is blacker than the cancer, and the girl heals this as well, by the simple expedient of showing Amos the light of God and the strange dimensional lattices of realms beyond our own.

Once shown these things, Amos is so overcome with joy and awe that he cycles between laughter and weeping, and to the eyes of the others in the room — a researcher named Janice, another named Vincent — he seems to be seized by an alarming hysteria. When Amos urges the girl to bring Janice into the same light that she has shown to him, she gives the gift again.

Janice, however, reacts differently from Amos. Humbled and frightened, she collapses in remorse. She claws at herself in regret for the way she has lived her life and in grief for those she has betrayed and harmed, and her anguish is frightening.

Tumult.

Rose is summoned. Janice and Amos are isolated for observation and evaluation. What has the girl done? What Amos tells them seems like the happy babbling of a harmlessly deranged man, but babbling nonetheless, and from one who was but a few minutes ago a scientist of serious — if not brooding — disposition.

Baffled and concerned by the strikingly different reactions of Amos and Janice, the girl withdraws and becomes uncommunicative. Rose works in private with 21–21 for more than two hours before she finally begins to pry the astounding explanation from her. The child cannot understand why the revelation that she’s brought to Amos and Janice would overwhelm them so completely or why Janice’s reaction is a mix of euphoria and self-flagellation. Having been born with a full awareness of her place and purpose in the universe, with an understanding of the ladder of destinies that she will climb through infinity, with the certain knowledge of life everlasting carried in her genes, she cannot grasp the shattering power of this revelation when she brings it to those who have spent their lives in the mud of doubt and the dust of despair.

Expecting nothing more than that she is going to experience the psychic equivalent of a magic-lantern show, a tour of a child’s sweet fantasy of God, Rose asks to be shown. And is shown. And is forever changed. Because at the touch of the child’s hand, she is opened to the fullness of existence. What she experiences is beyond her powers to describe, and even as torrents of joy surge through her and wash away all the countless griefs and miseries of her life heretofore, she is flooded, as well, with terror, for she is aware not only of the promise of a bright eternity but of expectations that she must strive to fulfill in all the days of life ahead of her in this world and in the worlds to come, expectations that frighten her because she is unsure that she can ever meet them. Like Janice, she is acutely aware of every mean act and unkindness and lie and betrayal of which she has ever been guilty, and she recognizes that she still has the capacity for selfishness, pettiness, and cruelty; she yearns to transcend her past even as she quakes at the fortitude required to do so.

When the vision passes and she finds herself in the girl’s room as before, she harbors no doubt that what she saw was real, truth in its purest form, and not merely the child’s delusion transmitted through psychic power. For almost half an hour she cannot speak but sits shaking, her face buried in her hands.

Gradually, she begins to realize the implications of what has happened here. There are basically two. First: If this revelation can be brought to the world — even to as many as the girl can touch — all that is now will pass away. Once one has seen—not taken on faith but seen—that there is life beyond, even if the nature of it remains profoundly mysterious and as fearsome as it is glorious, then all that was once important seems insignificant. Avenues of wondrous possibilities abound where once there was a single alley through the darkness. The world as we know it ends. Second: There are those who will not welcome the end of the old order, who have taught themselves to thrive on power and on the pain and humiliation of others. Indeed, the world is full of them, and they will not want to receive the girl’s gift. They will fear the girl and everything that she promises. And they will either sedate and isolate her in a containment vessel — or they will kill her.

She is as gifted as any messiah — but she is human. She can heal the wing of a broken bird and bring sight to its blinded eye. She can banish cancer from a disease-riddled man. But she is not an angel with a cloak of invulnerability. She is flesh and bone. Her precious power resides in the delicate tissues of her singular brain. If the magazine of a pistol is emptied into the back of her head, she will die like any other child; dead, she cannot heal herself. Although her soul will proceed into other realms, she will be lost to this troubled place that needs her. The world will not be changed, peace will not replace turmoil, and there will be no end to loneliness and despair.

Rose quickly becomes convinced that the project’s directors will opt for termination. The moment that they understand what this little girl is, they will kill her.

Before nightfall, they will kill her.

Certainly before midnight, they will kill her.

They will not be willing to risk consigning her to a containment vessel. The boy possesses only the power of destruction, but 21–21 possesses the power of enlightenment, which is immeasurably the more dangerous of the two.

They will shoot her down, soak her corpse with gasoline, set her remains afire, and later scatter her charred bones.

Rose must act — and quickly. The girl must be spirited out of the orphanage and hidden before they can destroy her.

“Joe?”

Against a field of stars, as though at this moment erupting from the crust of the earth, the black mountains shouldered darkly across the horizon.

“Joe, I’m sorry.” Her voice was frail. “I’m so sorry.”

They were speeding north on State Highway 30, east of the city of San Bernardino, fifty miles from Big Bear.

“Joe, are you okay?”

He could not answer.

Traffic was light. The road ascended into forests. Cottonwoods and pines shook, shook, shook in the wind.

He could not answer. He could only drive.

“When you insisted on believing the little girl with me was your own Nina, I let you go on believing it.”

For whatever purpose, she was still deceiving him. He could not understand why she continued to hide the truth.

She said, “After they found us at the restaurant, I needed your help. Especially after I was shot, I needed you. But you hadn’t opened your heart and mind to the photograph when I gave it to you. You were so…fragile. I was afraid if you knew it really wasn’t your Nina, you’d just…stop. Fall apart. God forgive me, Joe, but I needed you. And now the girl needs you.”

Nina needed him. Not some girl born in a lab, with the power to transmit her curious fantasies to others and cloud the minds of the gullible. Nina needed him. Nina.

If he could not trust Rose Tucker, was there anyone he could trust?

He managed to shake two words from himself: “Go on.”

Rose again. In 21–21’s room. Feverishly considering the problem of how to spirit the girl through a security system equal to that of any prison.

The answer, when it comes, is obvious and elegant.

There are three exits from the ground floor of the orphanage. Rose and the girl walk hand in hand to the door that connects the main building to the adjoining two-story parking structure.

An armed guard views their approach with more puzzlement than suspicion. The orphans are not permitted into the garage even under supervision.

When 21–21 holds out her tiny hand and says Shake, the guard smiles and obliges — and receives the gift. Suddenly filled with cyclonic wonder, he sits shaking uncontrollably, weeping with joy but also with hard remorse, just as Rose had trembled and wept in the girl’s room.

It is a simple matter to push the button on the guard’s console to throw the electronic lock on the door and pass through.

Another guard waits on the garage side of the connecting door. He is startled by the sight of this child. She reaches for him, and his surprise at seeing her is nothing compared to the surprise that follows.

A third guard is stationed at the gated exit from the garage. Alarmed by the sight of 21–21 in Rose’s car, he leans in the open window to demand an explanation — and the girl touches his face.

Two more armed men staff the gate at the highway. All barriers fall, and Virginia lies ahead.

Escape will never be as easy again. If they are apprehended, the girl’s offer of a handshake will be greeted by gunfire.

The trick now is to get out of the area quickly, before project security realizes what has happened to five of its men. They will mount a pursuit, perhaps with the assistance of local, state, and federal authorities. Rose drives madly, recklessly, with a skill — born of desperation — that she has never known before.

Barely big enough to see out of the side window, 21–21 studies the passing countryside with fascination and, at last, says, Wow, it sure is big out here.

Rose laughs and says, Honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

She realizes that she must get the word out as quickly as possible: use the media to display 21–21’s healing powers and then to demonstrate the greater gift that the girl can bestow. Only the forces of ignorance and darkness benefit from secrecy. Rose believes that 21–21 will never be safe until the world knows of her, embraces her, and refuses to allow her to be taken into custody.

Her ex-bosses will expect her to go public quickly and in a big way. Their influence within the media is widespread — yet as subtle as a web of cloud shadows on the skin of a pond, which makes it all the more effective. They will try to find her as soon as possible after she surfaces and before she can bring 21–21 to the world.

She knows a reporter whom she would trust not to betray her: Lisa Peccatone, an old college friend who works at the Post in Los Angeles.

Rose and the girl will have to fly to Southern California — and the sooner the better. Project 99 is a joint venture of private industry, elements of the defense establishment, and other powerful forces in the government. Easier to halt an avalanche with a feather than to resist their combined might, and they will shortly begin to use every asset in their arsenal to locate Rose and the girl.

Trying to fly out of Dulles or National Airport in Washington is too dangerous. She considers Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. She chooses New York.

She reasons that the more county and state lines she crosses, the safer she becomes, so she drives to Hagerstown, Maryland, and from there to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, without incident. Yet mile by mile, she is increasingly concerned that her pursuers will have put out an APB on her car and that she will be captured regardless of the distance she puts between herself and Manassas. In Harrisburg, she abandons the car, and she and the girl continue to New York City by bus.

By the time they are in the air aboard Nationwide Flight 353, Rose feels safe. Immediately on landing at LAX, she will be met by Lisa and the crew that Lisa has assembled — and the series of media eruptions will begin.

For the airline passenger manifest, Rose implied that she was married to a white man, and she identified 21–21 as her stepdaughter, choosing the name “Mary Tucker” on the spur of the moment. With the media, she intends initially to use CCY-21-21’s project name because its similarity to concentration-camp inmates’ names will do more than anything else to characterize Project 99 in the public mind and generate instant sympathy for the child. She realizes that eventually she will have to consult with 21–21 to pick a permanent name — which, considering the singular historical importance of this child’s life, should be a name that resonates.

They are seated across the aisle from a mother and her two daughters, who are returning home to Los Angeles. Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina Carpenter.

Nina, who is approximately 21–21’s age and size, is playing with a hand-held electronic game called Pigs and Princes, designed for preschoolers. From across the aisle, 21–21 becomes fascinated by the sounds and the images on the small screen. Seeing this, Nina asks “Mary” to move with her to a nearby pair of empty seats, where they can play the game together. Rose is hesitant to allow this — but she knows that 21–21 is intelligent far beyond her years and is aware of the need for discretion, so she relents. This is the first unstructured play time in 21–21’s life, the first genuine play she has ever known. Nina is a child of enormous charm, sweet and gregarious. Although 21–21 is a genius with the reading skills of a college freshman, a healer with miraculous powers, and literally the hope of the world, she is soon enraptured by Nina, wants to be Nina, as totally cool as Nina, and unconsciously she begins imitating Nina’s gestures and manner of speaking.

Theirs is a late flight out of New York, and after a couple of hours, Nina is fading. She hugs 21–21, and with the permission of Michelle, she gives Pigs and Princes to her new friend before returning to sit with her mother and sister, where she falls asleep.

Transported by delight, 21–21 returns to her seat beside Rose, hugging the small electronic game to her breast as though it is a treasure beyond value. Now she won’t even play with it because she is afraid that she might break it, and she wants it to remain always exactly as Nina gave it to her.

West of the town of Running Lake, still many miles from Big Bear Lake, following ridgelines past the canyons where the wind was born, bombarded by thrashing conifers hurling cones at the pavement, Joe refused to consider the implications of Pigs and Princes. Listening to Rose tell the story, he had barely found the self-control to repress his rage. He knew that he had no reason to be furious with this woman or with the child who had a concentration-camp name, but he was livid nonetheless — perhaps because he knew how to function well in anger, as he had done throughout his youth, and not well at all in grief.

Turning the subject away from little girls at play, he said, “How does Horton Nellor fit into this — aside from owning a big chunk of Teknologik, which is deep in Project 99?”

“Just that well-connected bastards like him…are the wave of the future.” She was holding the can of Pepsi between her knees, clawing at the pull tab with her right hand. She had barely enough strength and coordination to get it open. “The wave of the future…unless Nina…unless she changes everything.”

“Big business, big government, and big media — all one beast now, united to exploit the rest of us. Is that it? Radical talk.”

The aluminum can rattled against her teeth, and a trickle of Pepsi dribbled down her chin. “Nothing but power matters to them. They don’t believe…in good and evil.”

“There are only events.”

Though she had just taken a long swallow of Pepsi, her throat sounded dry. Her voice cracked. “And what those events mean…”

“…depends only on what spin you put on them.”

He remained blindly angry with her because of what she insisted that he believe about his Nina, but he could not bear to glance at her again and see her growing weaker. He blinked at the road ahead, where showers of pine needles stitched together billowing sheets of dust, and he eased down on the accelerator, driving as fast as he dared.

The soda can slipped out of her hand, dropped on the floor, and rolled under her seat, spilling the remainder of the Pepsi. “Losin’ it, Joe.”

“Not long now.”

“Got to tell you how it was…when the plane went in.”

Four miles down, gathering speed all the way, engines shrieking, wings creaking, fuselage thrumming. Screaming passengers are pressed so hard into their seats by the accumulating gravities that many are unable to lift their heads — some praying, some vomiting, weeping, cursing, calling out the many names of God, calling out to loved ones present and far away. An eternity of plunging, four miles but as if from the moon—

— and then Rose is in a blueness, a silent bright blueness, as if she is a bird in flight, except that no dark earth lies below, only blueness all around. No sense of motion. Neither hot nor cool. A flawless hyacinth-blue sphere with her at the center. Suspended. Waiting. A deep breath held in her lungs. She tries to expel her stale breath but cannot, cannot, until—

— with an exhalation as loud as a shout, she finds herself in the meadow, still in her seat, stunned into immobility, 21–21 beside her. The nearby woods are on fire. On all sides, flames lick mounds of twisted debris. The meadow is an unspeakable charnel house. And the 747 is gone.

At the penultimate moment, the girl had transported them out of the doomed aircraft by a monumental exertion of her psychic gift, to another place, to a dimension outside space and time, and had held them in that mysterious sheltering limbo through one terrible minute of cataclysmic destruction. The effort has left 21–21 cold, shaking, and unable to speak. Her eyes, bright with reflections of the many surrounding fires, have a faraway look like those of an autistic child. Initially she cannot walk or even stand, so Rose must lift her from the seat and carry her.

Weeping for the dead scattered through the night, shuddering with horror at the carnage, wonderstruck by her survival, slammed by a hurricane of emotion, Rose stands with the girl cradled in her arms but is unable to take a single step. Then she recalls the flickering passenger-cabin lights and the spinning of the hands on her wristwatch, and she is certain that the pilot was the victim of a wet mission, remoted by the boy who lives in a steel capsule deep below the Virginia countryside. This realization propels her away from the crash site, around the burning trees, into the moonlit forest, wading through straggly underbrush, then along a deer trail powdered with silver light and dappled with shadow, to another meadow, to a ridge from which she sees the lights of Loose Change Ranch.

By the time they reach the ranch house, the girl is somewhat recovered but still not herself. She is able to walk now, but she is lethargic, brooding, distant. Approaching the house, Rose tells 21–21 to remember that her name is Mary Tucker, but 21–21 says, My name is Nina. That’s who I want to be.

Those are the last words that she will speak — perhaps forever. In the months immediately following the crash, having taken refuge with Rose’s friends in Southern California, the girl sleeps twelve to fourteen hours a day. When she’s awake, she shows no interest in anything. She sits for hours staring out a window or at a picture in a storybook, or at nothing in particular. She has no appetite, loses weight. She is pale and frail, and even her amethyst eyes seem to lose some of their color. Evidently the effort required to move herself and Rose into and out of the blue elsewhere, during the crash, has profoundly drained her, perhaps nearly killed her. Nina exhibits no paranormal abilities anymore, and Rose dwells in despondency.

By Christmas, however, Nina begins to show interest in the world around her. She watches television. She reads books again. As the winter passes, she sleeps less and eats more. Her skin regains its former glow, and the color of her eyes deepens. She still does not speak, but she seems increasingly connected. Rose encourages her to come all the way back from her self-imposed exile by speaking to her every day about the good that she can do and the hope that she can bring to others.

In a bureau drawer in the bedroom that she shares with the girl, Rose keeps a copy of the Los Angeles Post, the issue that devotes the entire front page, above the fold, to the fate of Nationwide Flight 353. It helps to remind her of the insane viciousness of her enemies. One day in July, eleven months after the disaster, she finds Nina sitting on the edge of the bed with this newspaper open to a page featuring photographs of some of the victims of the crash. The girl is touching the photo of Nina Carpenter, who had given her Pigs and Princes, and she is smiling.

Rose sits beside her and asks if she is feeling sad, remembering this lost friend.

The girl shakes her head no. Then she guides Rose’s hand to the photograph, and when Rose’s fingertips touch the newsprint, she falls away into a blue brightness not unlike the sanctuary into which she was transported in the instant before the plane crash, except that this is also a place full of motion, warmth, sensation.

Clairvoyants have long claimed to feel a residue of psychic energy on common objects, left by the people who have touched them. Sometimes they assist police in the search for a murderer by handling objects worn by the victim at the time of the assault. This energy in the Post photograph is similar but different — not left in passing by Nina but imbued in the newsprint by an act of will.

Rose feels as if she has plunged into a sea of blue light, a sea crowded with swimmers whom she cannot see but whom she feels gliding and swooping around her. Then one swimmer seems to pass through Rose and to linger in the passing, and she knows that she is with little Nina Carpenter, the girl with the lopsided smile, the giver of Pigs and Princes, who is dead and gone but safe, dead and gone but not lost forever, happy and alive in an elsewhere beyond this swarming blue brightness, which is not really a place itself but an interface between phases of existence.

Moved as deeply as she had been when she was first given the knowledge of the afterlife, in the room at the orphanage, Rose withdraws her hand from the photo of Nina Carpenter and sits silently for a while, humbled. Then she takes her own Nina into her arms and holds the girl tightly and rocks her, neither capable of speaking nor in need of words.

Now that this special girl’s power is being reborn, Rose knows what they must do, where they must start their work. She does not want to risk going to Lisa Peccatone again. She doesn’t believe that her old friend knowingly betrayed her, but she suspects that through Lisa’s link to the Post—and through the Post to Horton Nellor — the people at Project 99 learned of her presence on Flight 353. While Rose and Nina are believed dead, they need to take advantage of their ghostly status to operate as long as possible without drawing the attention of their enemies. First, Rose asks the girl to give the great gift of eternal truth to each of the friends who has sheltered them during these eleven months in their emotional wilderness. Then they will contact the husbands and wives and parents and children of those who perished on Flight 353, bringing them both the received knowledge of immortality and visions of their loved ones at the blue interface. With luck, they will spread their message so widely by the time they are discovered that it cannot be contained.

Rose intends to start with Joe Carpenter, but she can’t locate him. His coworkers at the Post have lost track of him. He has sold the house in Studio City. He has no listed phone. They say he is a broken man. He has gone away to die.

She must begin the work elsewhere.

Because the Post published photographs of only a fraction of the Southern California victims and because she has no easy way to gather photos of the many others, Rose decides not to use portraits, after all. Instead, she tracks down their burial places through published funeral-service notices, and she takes snapshots of their graves. It seems fitting that the imbued image should be of a headstone, that these grim memorials of bronze and granite should become doorways through which the recipients of the pictures will learn that Death is not mighty and dreadful, that beyond this bitter phase, Death himself dies.

High in the wind-churned mountains, with waves of moon-silvered conifers casting sprays of needles onto the roadway, still more than twenty miles from Big Bear Lake, Rose Tucker spoke so softly that she could barely be heard over the racing engine and the hum of the tires: “Joe, will you hold my hand?”

He could not look at her, would not look at her, dared not even glance at her for a second, because he was overcome by the childish superstition that she would be all right, perfectly fine, as long as he didn’t visually confirm the terrible truth that he heard in her voice. But he looked. She was so small, slumped in her seat, leaning against the door, the back of her head against the window, as small to his eyes as 21–21 must have appeared to her when she had fled Virginia with the girl at her side. Even in the faint glow from the instrument panel, her huge and expressive eyes were again as compelling as they had been when he’d first met her in the graveyard, full of compassion and kindness — and a strange glimmering joy that scared him.

His voice was shakier than hers. “It’s not far now.”

“Too far,” she whispered. “Just hold my hand.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It’s all right, Joe.”

The shoulder of the highway widened to a scenic rest area. He stopped the car before a vista of darkness: the hard night sky, the icy disk of a moon that seemed to shed cold instead of light, and a vast blackness of trees and rocks and canyons descending.

He released his seat belt, leaned across the console, and took her hand. Her grip was weak.

“She needs you, Joe.”

“I’m nobody’s hero, Rose. I’m nothing.”

“You need to hide her…hide her away…”

“Rose—”

“Give her time…for her power to grow.”

“I can’t save anyone.”

“I shouldn’t have started the work so soon. The day will come when…when she won’t be so vulnerable. Hide her away…let her power grow. She’ll know…when the time has come.”

She began to lose her grip on him.

He covered her hand with both of his, held it fast, would not let it slip from his grasp.

Voice raveling away, she seemed to be receding from him though she did not move: “Open…open your heart to her, Joe.”

Her eyelids fluttered.

“Rose, please don’t.”

“It’s all right.”

“Please. Don’t.”

“See you later, Joe.”

“Please.”

“See you.”

Then he was alone in the night. He held her small hand alone in the night while the wind played a hollow threnody. When at last he was able to do so, he kissed her brow.

The directions Rose had given him were easy to follow. The cabin was neither in the town of Big Bear Lake nor elsewhere along the lakefront, but higher on the northern slopes and nestled deep in pines and birches. The cracked and potholed blacktop led to a dirt driveway, at the end of which was a small white clapboard house with a shake-shingle roof.

A green Jeep Wagoneer stood beside the cabin. Joe parked behind the Jeep.

The cabin boasted a deep, elevated porch, on which three cane-backed rocking chairs were arranged side by side. A handsome black man, tall and athletically built, stood at the railing, his ebony skin highlighted with a brass tint cast by two bare yellow lightbulbs in the porch ceiling.

The girl waited at the head of the flight of four steps that led up from the driveway to the porch. She was blond and about six years old.

From under the driver’s seat, Joe retrieved the gun that he had taken from the white-haired storyteller after the scuffle on the beach. Getting out of the car, he tucked the weapon under the waistband of his jeans.

The wind shrieked and hissed through the needled teeth of the pines.

He walked to the foot of the steps.

The child had descended two of the four treads. She stared past Joe, at the Ford. She knew what had happened.

On the porch, the black man began to cry.

The girl spoke for the first time in over a year, since the moment outside the Ealings’ ranch house when she had told Rose that she wanted to be called Nina. Gazing at the car, she said only one word, in a voice soft and small: “Mother.”

Her hair was the same shade as Nina’s hair. She was as fine-boned as Nina. But her eyes were not gray like Nina’s eyes, and no matter how hard Joe tried to see Nina’s face before him, he could not deceive himself into believing that this was his daughter.

Yet again, he had been engaged in searching behavior, seeking what was lost forever.

The moon above was a thief, its glow not a radiance of its own but a weak reflection of the sun. And like the moon, this girl was a thief — not Nina but only a reflection of Nina, shining not with Nina’s brilliant light but with a pale fire.

Regardless of whether she was only a lab-born mutant with strange mental powers or really the hope of the world, Joe hated her at that moment, and hated himself for hating her — but hated her nonetheless.

17

Hot wind huffed at the windows, and the cabin smelled of pine, dust, and the black char from last winter’s cozy blazes, which coated the brick walls of the big fireplace.

The incoming electrical lines had sufficient slack to swing in the wind. From time to time they slapped against the house, causing the lights to throb and flicker. Each tremulous brownout reminded Joe of the pulsing lights at the Delmann house, and his skin prickled with dread.

The owner was the tall black man who had broken into tears on the porch. He was Louis Tucker, Mahalia’s brother, who had divorced Rose eighteen years ago, when she proved unable to have children. She had turned to him in her darkest hour. And after all this time, though he had a wife and children whom he loved, Louis clearly still loved Rose too.

“If you really believe she’s not dead, that she’s only moved on,” Joe said coldly, “why cry for her?”

“I’m crying for me,” said Louis. “Because she’s gone from here and I’ll have to wait through a lot of days to see her again.”

Two suitcases stood in the front room, just inside the door. They contained the belongings of the child.

She was at a window, staring out at the Ford, with sorrow pulled around her like sackcloth.

“I’m scared,” Louis said. “Rose was going to stay up here with Nina, but I don’t think it’s safe now. I don’t want to believe it could be true — but they might’ve found me before I got out of the last place with Nina. Couple times, way back, I thought the same car was behind us. Then it didn’t keep up.”

“They don’t have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.”

“And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out onto the porch ’cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind — does that make sense?”

“You better get her out of here,” Joe agreed.

As the wind slapped the electrical lines against the house, Louis paced to the fireplace and back, a hand pressed to his forehead as he tried to put the loss of Rose out of his mind long enough to think what to do. “I figured you and Rose…well, I thought the two of you were taking her. And if they’re onto me, then won’t she be safer with you?”

“If they’re onto you,” Joe said, “then none of us is safe here, now, anymore. There’s no way out.”

The lines slapped the house, slapped the house, and the lights pulsed, and Louis walked to the fireplace and picked up a battery-powered, long-necked butane match from the hearth.

The girl turned from the window, eyes wide, and said, “No.”

Louis Tucker flicked the switch on the butane match, and blue flame spurted from the nozzle. Laughing, he set his own hair on fire and then his shirt.

“Nina!” Joe cried.

The girl ran to his side.

The stink of burning hair spread through the room.

Ablaze, Louis moved to block the front door.

From the waistband of his jeans, Joe drew the pistol, aimed — but couldn’t pull the trigger. This man confronting him was not really Louis Tucker now; it was the boy-thing, reaching out three thousand miles from Virginia. And there was no chance that Louis would regain control of his body and live through this night. Yet Joe hesitated to squeeze off a shot, because the moment that Louis was dead, the boy would remote someone else.

The girl was probably untouchable, able to protect herself with her own paranormal power. So the boy would use Joe — and the gun in Joe’s hand — to shoot the girl point-blank in the head.

“This is fun,” the boy said in Louis’s voice, as flames seethed off his hair, as his ears charred and crackled, as his forehead and cheeks blistered. “Fun,” he said, enjoying his ride inside Louis Tucker but still blocking the exit to the porch.

Maybe, at the instant of greatest jeopardy, Nina could send herself into that safe bright blueness as she had done just before the 747 plowed into the meadow. Maybe the bullets fired at her would merely pass through the empty air where she had been. But there was a chance that she was still not fully recovered, that she wasn’t yet able to perform such a taxing feat, or even that she could perform it but would be mortally drained by it this time.

“Out the back!” Joe shouted. “Go, go!”

Nina raced to the door between the front room and the kitchen at the rear of the cabin.

Joe backed after her, keeping the pistol trained on the burning man, even though he didn’t intend to use it.

Their only hope was that the boy’s love of “fun” would give them the chance to get out of the cabin, into the open, where his ability to conduct remote viewing and to engage in mind control would be, according to Rose, severely diminished. If he gave up the toy that was Louis Tucker, he would be into Joe’s head in an instant.

Tossing aside the butane match, with flames spreading along the sleeves of his shirt and down his pants, the boy-thing said, “Oh, yeah, oh, wow,” and came after them.

Joe recalled too clearly the feeling of the ice-cold needle that had seemed to pierce the summit of his spine as he had barely escaped the Delmann house the previous night. That invading energy scared him more than the prospect of being embraced by the fiery arms of this shambling specter.

Frantically he retreated into the kitchen, slamming the door as he went, which was pointless because no door — no wall, no steel vault — could delay the boy if he abandoned Louis’s body and went incorporeal.

Nina slipped out the back door of the cabin, and a wolf pack of wind, chuffing and puling, rushed past her and inside.

As Joe followed her into the night, he heard the living room door crash into the kitchen.

Behind the cabin was a small yard of dirt and natural bunch-grass. The air was full of wind-torn leaves, pine needles, grit. Beyond a redwood picnic table and four redwood chairs, the forest rose again.

Nina was already running for the trees, short legs pumping, sneakers slapping on the hard-packed earth. She thrashed through tall weeds at the perimeter of the woods and vanished in the gloom among the pines and birches.

Nearly as terrified of losing the girl in the wilds as he was frightened of the boy in the burning man, Joe sprinted between the trees, shouting the girl’s name, one arm raised to ward off any pine boughs that might be drooping low enough to lash his eyes.

From the night behind him came Louis Tucker’s voice, slurred by the damage that the spreading flames had already done to his lips but nevertheless recognizable, the chanted words of a childish challenge: “Here I come, here I come, here I come, ready or not, here I come, ready or not!”

A narrow break in the trees admitted a cascade of moonbeams, and Joe spotted the girl’s cap of wind-whipped blond hair glowing with pale fire, the reflection of reflected light, to his right and only six or eight yards ahead. He stumbled over a rotting log, slipped on something slimy, kept his balance, flailed through prickly waist-high brush, and discovered that Nina had found the beaten-clear path of a deer trail.

As he caught up with the girl, the darkness around them abruptly brightened. Salamanders of orange light slithered up the trunks of the trees and whipped their tails across the glossy boughs of pines and spruces.

Joe turned and saw the possessed hulk of Louis Tucker thirty feet away, ablaze from head to foot but still standing, hitching and jerking through the woods, caroming from tree to tree, twenty feet away, barely alive, setting fire to the carpet of dry pine needles over which he shambled and to the bristling weeds and to the trees as he passed them. Now fifteen feet away. The stench of burning flesh on the wind. The boy-thing shouted gleefully, but the words were garbled and unintelligible.

Even in a two-hand grip, the pistol shook, but Joe squeezed off one, two, four, six rounds, and at least four of them hit the seething specter. It pitched backward and fell and didn’t move, didn’t even twitch, dead from fire and gunfire.

Louis Tucker was not a person now but a burning corpse. The body no longer harbored a mind that the boy could saddle and ride and torment.

Where?

Joe turned to Nina — and felt a familiar icy pressure at the back of his neck, an insistent probing, not as sharp as it had been when he was almost caught on the threshold of the Delmann house, perhaps blunted now because the boy’s power was indeed diminishing here in the open. But the psychic syringe was not yet blunt enough to be ineffective. It still stung. It pierced.

Joe screamed.

The girl seized his hand.

The iciness tore out its fangs and flew from him, as though it were a bat taking wing.

Reeling, Joe clamped a hand to the nape of his neck, certain that he would find his flesh ripped and bleeding, but he was not wounded. And his mind had not been violated, either.

Nina’s touch had saved him from possession.

With a banshee shriek, a hawk exploded out of the high branches of a tree and dive-bombed the girl, striking at her head, pecking at her scalp, wings flapping, beak click-click-clicking. She screamed and covered her face with her hands, and Joe batted at the assailant with one arm. The crazed bird swooped up and away, but it wasn’t an ordinary bird, of course, and it wasn’t merely crazed by the wind and the churning fire that swelled rapidly through the woods behind them.

Here it came again, with a fierce skreeeek, the latest host for the visitant from Virginia, arrowing down through the moonlight, its rapier beak as deadly as a stiletto, too fast to be a target for the gun.

Joe let go of the pistol and dropped to his knees on the deer trail and pulled the girl protectively against him. Pressed her face against his chest. The bird would want to get at her eyes. Peck at her eyes. Jab-jab-jab through the vulnerable sockets at the precious brain beyond. Damage the brain, and her power cannot save her. Tear her specialness right out of her gray matter and leave her in spasms on the ground.

The hawk struck, sank one set of talons into the sleeve of Joe’s coat, through the corduroy, piercing the skin of his forearm, planting the other set of talons in Nina’s blond hair, wings drumming as it pecked her scalp, pecked, angry because her face was concealed. Pecking now at Joe’s hand as he tried to knock it away, holding fast to sleeve and hair, determined not to be dislodged. Pecking, pecking at his face now, going for his eyes, Jesus, a flash of pain as it tore open his cheek. Seize it. Stop it. Crush it quickly. Peck, the darting head, the bloody beak, peck, and it got his brow this time, above his right eye, sure to blind him with the next thrust. He clenched his hand around it, and its talons tore at the cuff of his coat sleeve now, tore at his wrist, wings beating against his face, and it bobbed its head, the wicked beak darting at him, but he held it off, the hooked yellow point snapping an inch short of a blinding wound, the beady eyes glaring fiercely and blood-red with reflections of fire. Squeeze it, squeeze the life out of it, with its racing heart stuttering against his relentless palm. Its bones were thin and hollow, which made it light enough to fly with grace — but which also made it easier to break. Joe felt its breast crumple, and he threw it away from the girl, watched it tumble along the deer trail, disabled but still alive, wings flapping weakly but unable to lift into the night.

Joe pushed Nina’s tangled hair away from her face. She was all right. Her eyes had not been hit. In fact, she was unmarked, and he was overcome by a rush of pride that he had prevented the hawk from getting at her.

Blood oozed from his slashed brow, around the curve of the socket, and into the corner of his eye, blurring his vision. Blood streamed from the wound in his cheek, dripped from his pecked and stinging hand, from his gouged wrist.

He retrieved the pistol, engaged the safety, and jammed the weapon under his waistband again.

From out of the surrounding woods issued a bleat of animal terror, which abruptly cut off, and then across the mountainside, over the howling of the wind, a sharp shriek sliced through the night. Something was coming.

Maybe the boy had gained more control of his talent during the year that Rose had been on the run, and maybe now he was more capable of remoting someone in the outdoors. Or perhaps the coalesced power of his psychogeist was radiating away like the heat from a rock, as Rose had explained, but just wasn’t dispersing fast enough to bring a quick end to this assault.

Because of the blustery wind and the express-train roar of the wildfire, Joe couldn’t be certain from which direction the cry had arisen, and now the boy, clothed in the flesh of his host, was coming silently.

Joe scooped the girl off the deer trail, cradling her in his arms. They needed to keep moving, and until his energy faded, he could move faster through the woods if he carried her than if he led her by the hand.

She was so small. He was scared by how small she was, nearly as breakable as the avian bones of the hawk.

She clung to him, and he tried to smile at her. In the hellish leaping light, his flaring eyes and strained grin were probably more frightening than reassuring.

The mad boy in his new incarnation was not the only threat they faced. The explosive Santa Ana wind threw bright rags, threw sheets, threw great billowing sails of fire across the flank of the mountain. The pines were dry from the hot rainless summer, their bark rich with turpentine, and they burst into flame as though they were made of gasoline-soaked rags.

Ramparts of fire at least three hundred feet across blocked the way back to the cabin. They could not get around the blaze and behind it, because it was spreading laterally faster than they could hike through the underbrush and across the rugged terrain.

At the same time, the fire was coming toward them. Fast.

Joe stood with Nina in his arms, riveted and dismayed by the sight of the towering wall of fire, and he realized that they had no choice but to abandon the car. They would have to make the trip out of the mountains entirely on foot.

With a hot whoosh, roiling gouts of wind-harried flames spewed through the treetops immediately overhead, like a deadly blast from a futuristic plasma weapon. The pine boughs exploded, and burning masses of needles and cones tumbled down through lower branches, igniting everything as they descended, and suddenly Joe and Nina were in a tunnel of fire.

He hurried with the girl in his arms, away from the cabin, along the narrow deer trail, remembering stories of people caught in California brushfires and unable to outrun them, sometimes not even able to outdrive them when the wind was particularly fierce. Maybe the flames couldn’t accelerate through this density of trees as quickly as through dry brush. Or maybe the pines were even more accommodating fuel than mesquite and manzanita and grass.

Just as they escaped the tunnel of fire, more rippling flags of flames unfurled across the sky overhead, and again the treetops in front of them ignited. Burning needles swarmed down like bright bees, and Joe was afraid his hair would catch fire, Nina’s hair, their clothes. The tunnel was growing in length as fast as they could run through it.

Smoke plagued him now. As the blaze rapidly intensified, it generated winds of its own, adding to the force of the Santa Anas, building toward a firestorm, and the blistering gales first blew tatters of smoke along the deer trail and then choking masses.

The cloistered path led upward, and though the degree of slope was not great, Joe became more quickly winded than he had expected. Incredible withering heat wrung oceans of sweat from him. Gasping for breath, sucking in the astringent fumes and greasy soot, choking, gagging, spitting out saliva thickened and soured by the flavor of the fire, desperately holding on to Nina, he reached a ridgeline.

The pistol under his waistband pressed painfully against his stomach as he ran. If he could have let go of Nina with one hand, he would have drawn the weapon and thrown it away. He was afraid that he was too weak to hold on to her with one arm, that he would drop her, so he endured the gouging steel.

As he crossed the narrow crest and followed the descending trail, he discovered that the wind was less furious on this side of the ridge. Even though the flames surged across the brow, the speed at which the fire line advanced now dropped enough to allow him to get out of the incendiary zone and ahead of the smoke, where the clean air was so sweet that he groaned at the cool, clear taste of it.

Joe was running on an adrenaline high, far beyond his normal level of endurance, and if not for the bolstering effect of panic, he might have collapsed before he topped the ridge. His leg muscles ached. His arms were turning to lead under the weight of the girl. They were not safe, however, so he kept going, stumbling and weaving, blinking tears of weariness out of his smoke-stung eyes, nevertheless pressing steadily forward — until the snarling coyote slammed into him from behind, biting savagely at the hollow of his back but capturing only folds of his corduroy jacket in its jaws.

The impact staggered him, eighty or ninety pounds of lupine fury. He almost fell facedown onto the trail, with Nina under him, except that the weight of the coyote, hanging on him, acted as a counterbalance, and he stayed erect.

The jacket ripped, and the coyote let go, fell away.

Joe skidded to a halt, put Nina down, spun toward the predator, drawing the pistol from his waistband, thankful that he had not pitched it away earlier.

Backlighted by the ridgeline fire, the coyote confronted Joe. It was so like a wolf but leaner, rangier, with bigger ears and a narrower muzzle, black lips skinned back from bared fangs, scarier than a wolf might have been, especially because of the spirit of the vicious boy curled like a serpent in its skull. Its glowering eyes were luminous and yellow.

Joe pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire. He remembered the safety.

The coyote skittered toward him, staying low, quick but wary, snapping at his ankles, and Joe danced frantically backward to avoid being bitten, thumbing off the safety as he went.

The animal snaked around him, snarling, snapping, foam flying from its jaws. Its teeth sank into his right calf.

He cried out in pain, and twisted around, trying to get a shot at the damn thing, but it turned as he did, ferociously worrying the flesh of his calf until he thought he was going to pass out from the crackling pain that flashed like a series of electrical shocks all the way up his leg into his hip.

Abruptly the coyote let go and shrank away from Joe as if in fear and confusion.

Joe swung toward the animal, cursing it and tracking it with the pistol.

The beast was no longer in an attack mode. It whined and surveyed the surrounding night in evident perplexity.

With his finger on the trigger, Joe hesitated.

Tilting its head back, regarding the lambent moon, the coyote whined again. Then it looked toward the top of the ridge.

The fire was no more than a hundred yards away. The scorching wind suddenly accelerated, and the flames climbed gusts higher into the night.

The coyote stiffened and pricked its ears. When the fire surged once more, the coyote bolted past Joe and Nina, oblivious of them, and disappeared at a lope into the canyon below.

At last defeated by the draining vastness of these open spaces, the boy had lost his grip on the animal, and Joe sensed that nothing spectral hovered any longer in the woods.

The firestorm rolled at them again, blinding waves of flames, a cataclysmic tide breaking through the forest.

With his bitten leg, limping badly, Joe wasn’t able to carry Nina any longer, but she took his hand, and they hurried as best they could toward the primeval darkness that seemed to well out of the ground and drown the ranks of conifers in the lower depths of the canyon.

He hoped they could find a road. Paved or graveled or dirt — it didn’t matter. Just a way out, any sort of road at all, as long as it led away from the fire and would take them into a future where Nina would be safe.

They had gone no more than two hundred yards when a thunder rose behind them, and when he turned, fearful of another attack, Joe saw only a herd of deer galloping toward them, fleeing the flames. Ten, twenty, thirty deer, graceful and swift, parted around him and Nina with a thudding of hooves, ears pricked and alert, oil-black eyes as shiny as mirrors, spotted flanks quivering, kicking up clouds of pale dust, whickering and snorting, and then they were gone.

Heart pounding, caught up in a riot of emotions that he could not easily sort out, still holding the girl’s hand, Joe started down the trail in the hoofprints of the deer. He took half a dozen steps before he realized there was no pain in his bitten calf. No pain, either, in his hawk-pecked hand or in his beak-torn face. He was no longer bleeding.

Along the way and in the tumult of the deers’ passing, Nina had healed him.

18

On the second anniversary of the crash of Nationwide Flight 353, Joe Carpenter sat on a quiet beach in Florida, in the shade of a palm tree, watching the sea. Here, the tides came to shore more gently than in California, licking the sand with a tropical languor, and the ocean seemed not at all like a machine.

He was a different man from the one who had fled the fire in the San Bernardino Mountains. His hair was longer now, bleached both by chemicals and by the sun. He had grown a mustache as a simple disguise. His physical awareness of himself was far greater than it had been one year ago, so he was conscious of how differently he moved these days: with a new ease, with a relaxed grace, without the tension and the coiled anger of the past.

He possessed ID in a new name: birth certificate, social security card, three major credit cards, a driver’s license. The forgers at Infiniface didn’t actually forge documents as much as use their computer savvy to manipulate the system into spitting out real papers for people who didn’t actually exist.

He had undergone inner changes too, and he credited those to Nina — though he continued to refuse the ultimate gift that she could give him. She had changed him not by her touch but by her example, by her sweetness and kindness, by her trust in him, by her love of life and her love of him and her calm faith in the rightness of all things. She was only six years old but in some ways ancient, because if she was what everyone believed she was, then she was tied to the infinite by an umbilical of light.

They were staying with a commune of Infiniface members, those who wore no robes and left their heads unshaven. The big house stood back from the beach and was filled at almost any hour of the day with the soft clatter of computer keyboards. In a week or two, Joe and Nina would move on to another group, bringing them the gift that only this child could reveal, for they traveled continuously in the quiet spreading of the word. In a few years, when her maturing power made her less vulnerable, the time would arrive to tell the world.

Now, on this anniversary of loss, she came to him on the beach, under the gently swaying palm, as he had known she would, and she sat at his side. Currently her hair was brown. She was wearing pink shorts and a white top with Donald Duck winking on her chest — as ordinary in appearance as any six-year-old on the planet. She drew her knees up and encircled her legs with her arms, and for a while she said nothing.

They watched a big, long-legged sand crab move across the beach, select a nesting place, and burrow out of sight.

Finally she said, “Why won’t you open your heart?”

“I will. When the time’s right.”

“When will the time be right?”

“When I learn not to hate.”

“Who do you hate?”

“For a long time — you.”

“Because I’m not your Nina.”

“I don’t hate you anymore.”

“I know.”

“I hate myself.”

“Why?”

“For being so afraid.”

“You’re not afraid of anything,” she said.

He smiled. “Scared to death of what you can show me.”

“Why?”

“The world’s so cruel. It’s so hard. If there’s a God, He tortured my father with disease and then took him young. He took Michelle, my Chrissie, my Nina. He allowed Rose to die.”

“This is a passage.”

“A damn vicious one.”

She was silent for a while.

The sea whispered against the strand. The crab stirred, poked an eye stalk out to examine the world, and decided to move.

Nina got up and crossed to the sand crab. Ordinarily, these creatures were shy and scurried away when approached. This one did not run for cover but watched Nina as she dropped to her knees and studied it. She stroked its shell. She touched one of its claws, and the crab didn’t pinch her.

Joe watched — and wondered.

Finally the girl returned and sat beside Joe, and the big crab disappeared into the sand.

She said, “If the world is cruel…you can help me fix it. And if that’s what God wants us to do, then He’s not cruel, after all.”

Joe did not respond to her pitch.

The sea was an iridescent blue. The sky curved down to meet it at an invisible seam.

“Please,” she said. “Please take my hand, Daddy.”

She had never called him daddy before, and his chest tightened when he heard the word.

He met her amethyst eyes. And wished they were gray like his own. But they were not. She had come with him out of wind and fire, out of darkness and terror, and he supposed that he was as much her father as Rose Tucker had been her mother.

He took her hand.

And knew.

For a time he was not on a beach in Florida but in a bright blueness with Michelle and Chrissie and Nina. He did not see what worlds waited beyond this one, but he knew beyond all doubt that they existed, and the strangeness of them frightened him but also lifted his heart.

He understood that eternal life was not an article of faith but a law of the universe as true as any law of physics. The universe is an efficient creation: matter becomes energy; energy becomes matter; one form of energy is converted into another form; the balance is forever changing, but the universe is a closed system from which no particle of matter or wave of energy is ever lost. Nature not only loathes waste but forbids it. The human mind and spirit, at their noblest, can transform the material world for the better; we can even transform the human condition, lifting ourselves from a state of primal fear, when we dwelled in caves and shuddered at the sight of the moon, to a position from which we can contemplate eternity and hope to understand the works of God. Light cannot change itself into stone by an act of will, and stone cannot build itself into temples. Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself; it is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself, and it is, therefore, the most powerful and valuable form of energy in the universe. For a time, the spirit may become flesh, but when that phase of its existence is at an end, it will be transformed into a disembodied spirit once more.

When he returned from that brightness, from the blue elsewhere, he sat for a while, trembling, eyes closed, burrowed down into this revealed truth as the crab had buried itself in the sand.

In time he opened his eyes.

His daughter smiled at him. Her eyes were amethyst, not gray. Her features were not those of the other Nina whom he had loved so deeply. She was not, however, a pale fire, as she had seemed before, and he wondered how he could have allowed his anger to prevent him from seeing her as she truly was. She was a shining light, all but blinding in her brightness, as his own Nina had been — as are we all.

About the Author

DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.