The Puppet Master

Hamilton and I actually did catch a decent nap. But Charles was wound up like an old clock spring, so about seven, Hjelmgaard took him to a movie. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was going around again. I'd like to have gone myself.

Our preliminary overflight showed the lodge occupied. A sky limo was on the ground beside it, while a skyvan was parked at the guard barracks. Apparently some bigwig was there, though why I couldn't guess. At that elevation, the ground was still snow-covered. A thought struck me: Wouldn't it be something if Christman was back in residence there, hail and strong. I asked the pilot if there was an aurora in the weather forecast.

She turned to me with a quizzical expression. "In the forecast?" she said, and pointed. "Look out the window."

And there it was, not a major display—as a kid I'd often seen better over Lake Superior—but there it was, some cold shimmering curtains, and sheaves of icy-looking bundles of lightspears, shifting and pulsing. I'd been looking down, ignoring up.

We flew over just fast enough not to look like snoopers, in case we were being monitored from the ground. The skyvan's computer recorded everything our scanners picked up, of course, so we could examine it more closely on the flight back to town. Among other things, it showed a small security patrol—seemingly three men and a dog—near the forest road along the property's lower edge, where there was more chance of trespass. As on our earlier trip, there was no evidence of radar or other electronic activity on the ridge, and no people on it or on the trail that climbed it. The observatory was glass-roofed and glass-walled, surrounded by a wooden walkway and railing. The telescope inside was aligned with an oblong panel that presumably could be opened. Apparently the whole building could be rotated. It was mounted on a circular metal base. Now though, it was dark and cold.

There was no question. We'd go for it as planned, making another preliminary overflight just before landing there, to be sure no threat had developed.

Back at the airport, Hamilton stayed with our pilot. I took a cab to the motel, in case Hjelmgaard needed help. He didn't really, though he'd had trouble getting Charles awake enough to get dressed. I helped Charles stumble out to the cab, where he fell asleep immediately. I began to wonder if he'd be functional, but kept it to myself. If there was a problem, it would be Hjelmgaard's to handle. Charles became more alert at the airport, and walked to the skyvan on his own, still not talking, but looking around. After we took off, I told him again what I thought might have happened on the ridge, and what I hoped he'd provide us with. He nodded without speaking, but now his eyes were bright.

It was 2:16 when we made our preliminary overflight. There was no sign of anyone outdoors now, just a pair of sentry dogs in the run outside the kennel. The sky limo was still there, and an IR reading showed that the lodge was heated to a comfortable temperature. We made our landing approach from the northeast, keeping the ridge between us and the lodge, the dark and brooding evergreen forest barely beneath us. Our pilot set us down carefully about 150 feet from the observatory. Charles still wasn't talking, but his eyes were wide and alive.

The observatory was on a rock hump, a sort of ridgetop prominence without trees, though there'd been some cut down, both outside and inside the fence. Their stumps had prevented landing closer. As we got out, I realized the sentry dogs had sensed us. They were barking in their run, maybe a quarter mile away and 400 feet lower. I wondered if the security people would let them loose. Even with the distance and the protection of the boundary fence, we walked somewhat hurriedly across the hard, crusty, frost-rimed snow till we were within 40 feet of the observatory. It had been a mild spring night in Eugene; on the ridge it was cold.

I pointed. "That's it," I told Charles, then stepped back with my repeating Polaroid. Hjelmgaard stood beside me with his own. Charles turned, faced the observatory, and stood quiet for a long minute. My shivering was only partly from the cold. Then he shifted his gaze down the path that led to it, closed his eyes and grimaced. After a long moment he gritted out: "Now!" I pressed the shutter release. "Now!" he repeated, and again, my finger keeping time. Then he turned, facing almost toward the skyvan. "Now!" I exposed a fourth frame. "Now! Now!" Two more.

His eyes gleamed as he turned back to Hjelmgaard. "That's all, Clarence," he said. He didn't sound retarded at all; at his game we were retarded.

"Thank you, Charles," Hjelmgaard answered, smiling, then looked at Hamilton and me. "Well, gentlemen." We crunched our way back to the van, where the pilot eyed us curiously as we climbed in.

Off the ground and flying back to Eugene, I turned on the cabin lights and we removed the prints from the cameras. Hjelmgaard was blasé about what we found, but Hamilton and I stared. Charles had unbelted, and crowding close, laughed delightedly, a strange sound in the chilly skyvan cruising otherwise silently above nightbound mountains. The prints looked as if they'd been shot with Ultracept 1000, instead of Polaroid, the details of faces and figures equal to film exposed in, say, overcast daylight with a proper exposure setting. Yet the background was dark with night.

The first shot showed Christman walking beside a young woman, both of them wearing down parkas with the hoods back. His arm was around her waist. Behind them to one side, you could make out a man wearing black trousers and jersey, his face and hands blackened. He was half crouched, as if just getting to his feet. The rest formed a sequence, two men grappling with Christman, Christman being injected, Christman being supported to a skyvan while the young woman was carried to it dead or unconscious. And two men pushing and pulling Christman through the door. He seemed semiconscious; his head wasn't lolling.

The final shot appeared as if taken from the rear of the skyvan's cabin. The woman was trussed up on the floor, apparently unconscious instead of dead, while Christman lay on a side seat, handcuffed and seemingly also unconscious. Three men sat across from him, looking toward him, and each face was clear. In the previous shot we'd seen four men. The fourth was either the pilot, or was with the pilot in the pilot's compartment.

"Do you know any of them?" I asked Hamilton.

He shook his head. "Only Christman."

At the airport I called a taxivan, and had it take us to an all-night restaurant off the freeway. We were too wound up to go to bed, especially Charles. He chattered about the food, and a place in Minneapolis where Hjelmgaard and his wife occasionally took him for supper, and about other pictures he'd made that he was particularly proud of. I had bacon and fried eggs, buttered sourdough toast, and tomato slices, and listened to him partly because I owed it to him, but also because he was interesting. Charles had strawberry waffles, and respectable table manners in spite of talking so much.

I looked forward to a few more hours of sleep. But more than anything else, I looked forward to getting back to L.A. and finding a way to identify the men in the pictures. The pictures weren't legal evidence of anything, but they could be a powerful wedge for breaking the case.

24

LUNCH BREAK

The effect of the Veritas had begun to fade; it showed on the aura analyzer. Now the young woman spoke, breaking Martti's groove. "This is a good place to stop for lunch, and the injection is wearing off."

His eyes had opened. "Ah. How did we do?"

"Just fine. Excellent in fact. Why don't we eat on my expense account and start again at one-thirty."

"Sounds good. Do I need a counter injection?"

"No. A bit of walking will handle what's left. Is there a restaurant you like within walking distance?"

They agreed on Canter's. It was a bit far, but she was willing and they had time.

He'd been aware of his monolog as he gave it, aware that he'd rambled, and aware that he had no will to edit as he spoke. As he went down the hall to the men's room, he was also aware that his throat felt none the worse for his verbal marathon. The effect of the Veritas, he decided. It was, after all, a sort of hypnotic.

PART TWO:

SERVICIO VIAJERO INTERNACIONAL

PROLOG

The old man was no longer bed-bound, nor showed any obvious sign of the stroke he'd suffered some years earlier. He still did not look healthy—his face remained puffy, his eyes yellow with jaundice, and his body flaccid—but neither did he seem actively ill.

The sun was high enough that the cool of morning was beginning to dispel. Sweatered, he rested beneath a large parasol in his garden, on a light, motorized, mobile recliner. Beside him, several books lay scattered on a glass-topped table, waiting to be devoured. Another lay open, facedown on his little paunch. His lips were pursed, and a frown creased his forehead.

Most people's minds the old man could monitor undetected, especially someone who discussed or argued with himself a lot. Ordinarily he would eavesdrop from the fringes of the person's immediate mental field, but would sometimes intrude within it, to poke and pry for information, blending in as the self-generated entity the person discoursed with.

Some, though, when he intruded, would sense his presence, and almost invariably reacted sharply, repelling him, a jolting experience that snapped him back to his body. Given his poor health, he'd designed and practiced drills enabling him to better withstand ejection shock.

If he intruded undetected, however, there was then the possibility of hypnotizing the person from within, whispering his formula directly into their mind. Subliminally at first, then more strongly as it began to influence them.

If they were susceptible enough to suggestion. So far he'd found no firm criterion for predicting that susceptibility. Intelligence, emotional stability, strength of character—none of these assured it or ruled it out. And therein lay danger. For if, when he tried to hypnotize someone, his would-be victim discovered him, their reaction was likely to be violent. Shocking to both of them but far worse for the intruder—far worse than simple ejection shock. The first time it happened, he'd been taken by surprise, and very nearly died. The crippling effects still were not entirely gone.

To him though, the game was worth the risk. It was what he lived for now. And he was too strong-willed to abandon his plans, though he had learned caution. Besides, once a subject had been hypnotized and given an appropriate post-hypnotic suggestion, he could reenter at will to give further commands, seemingly with little or no danger.

After the shock that had precipitated his heart attack and subsequent stroke, he'd worked very carefully, improving his technique. But although his skill had increased markedly, there still was risk in undertaking to hypnotize someone from within their mind for the first time. He'd learned this the hard way, and again had lain in a coma for two days. And again, if his personal physician had not been at hand, he would probably have died. After that he became very selective, taking the risk only for compelling reasons.

Another difficulty in using his skills was the initial contact, psychically "finding" the person he wanted to eavesdrop on, or possibly control. Once a contact was made, it left him with a connection which, while tenuous and subliminal, made the person easy to reach again. But to make that first contact, he needed an intermediary, a live introduction, so to speak. He hadn't learned to surmount that requirement, though he expected to. Thus he'd found and connected with Alex DeSmet by first controlling an old student in Monterey, and implanting a post-hypnotic command to meet and cultivate DeSmet.

Then, after cautiously infiltrating DeSmet, he'd prodded and peered, and learned about a man named Kelly Masters.

* * *

When one of his out-of-use contacts had a shock of some sort, it sometimes caught the old man's attention from a distance. The criterion seemed to be whether or not the event had anything to do with his own interests. Lon Thomas had just received not a shock, but a troubling report, and it was that which had interrupted the old man's reading.

It had been months since he'd eavesdropped on Thomas' mind. He'd long since learned what he'd needed from Thomas, and the man seemed quite able to scuttle the Church of the New Gnosis unintentionally and unassisted, given time. Now though— Something clearly was wrong.

Thomas was at Christman's mountain retreat. The old man listened, then ferreted out what had preceded it.

It had begun the night before. The sentry dogs had barked furiously and at length, and finally Thomas had roused enough to call Security. The chief told him that the perimeter alarms had not been triggered. The dogs' attention had been on the ridgetop, in the direction of the observatory. Perhaps a bear was prowling up there.

Thomas had had a patrol sent out, well armed and with the dogs. Then he'd lain back down. He was not very alert mentally. He'd rutted till late with his latest lady, maintaining his lust and capacity with Harem Smoke—illegal but readily available. The result had been deep exhaustion, and with the dogs shut up, he was asleep again as soon as his eyes closed.

What had drawn the old man's attention was not what had happened that night, however. It was Thomas' reaction to the security chief's report after breakfast. There were fresh landing marks in the snow on the ridgetop, on the other side of the fence. And foot tracks, several sets of them, ending at a point near the observatory.

The Gnostie chief didn't know the significance of the report, but it alarmed him in an undefined sort of way. The old man, on the other hand, sensed in a general way what it meant, and was possessed by a cold, intense anger. Two valuable tools were endangered, tools he'd cultivated carefully and with no little risk to himself, to his life. He wouldn't take action through Thomas, though. Thomas, it seemed to him now, was nothing. A fool! Like Christman had been a fool in the last analysis.

He'd use one of the endangered tools instead.

25

CLOUD MAN AND STEINHORN

The UCLA researcher removed the syringe from the flat, velvet-lined box. She knew that Martti had stopped at the mens' room again when they'd returned from Canter's, but she asked anyway. "Any last-minute business to take care of?"

"Nope. Let's do it."

She nodded, took his hand and held the syringe against the back of it, then pulled the trigger. The syringe hissed, and she put it back in the box. Martti watched, vision already blurring. Again he closed his eyes and began to talk.

On the day after we got back, I went into Morey's for breakfast. Indian was there at his favorite table, and waved me over. There was a strong-looking guy with him I hadn't seen before. He wore well-worn jeans and a new twill work shirt. I assumed he was from Yitzhak's, probably a Gnostie.

After I'd ordered my breakfast, I went over to them. "Martti," Indian said, "meet my friend Cloud Man. He's a new brother that lives at our house. He's started working for Yitzhak, too. Cloud Man, this is Martti Seppanen I told you about." He looked at me again. "I didn't tell him anything I shouldn't," he added.

Cloud Man and I shook hands. A Loonie? I doubted it. The Loonies I'd met, admittedly not very many, didn't have Cloud Man's watchful, appraising eyes. They tended to be easygoing, sometimes spaced out.

"Nothing doing today, eh?" I said.

"Nah. The turn of the month rush is over. Him and me got in fifty-eight hours in four days; I'm just as glad it's come up slow now. A real slate pool table and two baby grands, for chrissake! The pool table took eight of us, up thirty-one steps to this house in Woodland Hills! You shoulda been there. We could've used your muscle."

"No thanks. I thought Yitzhak generally didn't hire anyone but New Gnus."

"I guess I broke the ice. Now he'll hire other guys that's religious, if they come in recommended and they ain't druggies. How you doin' with them? The Gnus, I mean."

"As little as possible." I didn't want anything more said about the Gnosties and myself in front of Cloud Man, so I changed the subject. "A slate pool table and two pianos, eh? Sounds like a workout all right."

"Yeah, and the world's biggest Murphy bed. That was on the fourth job. It must have weighed four hundred pounds, and opened out queen sized! No shit! We never did figure out how anyone got the sonofabitch into that fourth-floor apartment. It was one of those old buildings with narrow inside halls and narrow doors. We finally took it out through a bay window; used tie-straps tied together for rope. To keep it from bustin' the windows below it, we tied another rope to it, and a big guy—you know Bill Brawn? No? That's his real name! He was out on the lawn with the rope belayed around a tree, keepin' the Murphy bed away from the wall. I tell you, when we pushed it out the window, I almost shit my pants. I didn't know what would happen, whether it'd get away from us or what."

My food came, and while I ate, we talked about this and that, mostly the Dodgers. Then I left. I couldn't help wondering if Cloud Man was an undercover Gnostie. That would account for Yitzhak hiring him, and he could have been sent by Lon Thomas. No, I told myself, not after what happened. Thomas isn't that stupid. And just because the guy might see me in Morey's now and then, he'd be in no position to learn what we're doing.

So, was he LAPD? If he was, it was none of my business, which didn't make me less curious. I spent awhile that morning with Carlos, shuffling the photos, staring at them. To the cost of Charles Tomasic's services, add my travel and lodging and everybody else's, and the charter costs for the skyvan, including Hamilton's and my earlier trip . . . Altogether those photos had cost Butzburger more than six thousand dollars, not including my hours. And I still had no idea who the kidnappers were, or how to find out; only what they looked like. The main thing I'd learned was that Christman had been abducted, that he hadn't just run off somewhere to a life of wealthy anonymity with a lady love.

Maybe that would be enough for Butzburger. I hoped not. It would be worse than coitus interruptus to pull out of this case now.

* * *

Most of that day and evening I spent on the unpromising cycle of calling and visiting informants, with the usual total lack of success. One thing had changed though. Melanie wasn't seeing me anymore. I wasn't surprised. Someone could easily have an informer in her place, one she was aware of, working for someone who wouldn't like her having anything to do with an investigator of any kind.

The next morning I slept in, then spent most of the afternoon at Gold's, working off my frustrations. Maybe I hoped, subliminally, that some ideas would grow out of my sweat. They didn't. I spent the next few working days doing other stuff, for Carlos, till he felt he had to nudge me to get me back on the Christman case again. Nudging like that was something Carlos didn't like to do to his investigators, which tells you something about my mental state at the time.

Then one morning, Carlos introduced me to a new investigative assistant who'd started with Prudential the afternoon before. His name was David Steinhorn. He had a strong handshake, and a face with no trace of illusion. I judged him at thirty-something.

Investigative contracting by public agencies had been increasing, and Prudential was getting more than its share, so Joe was trying to beef up staff. Unfortunately, a lot of applicants have romanticized ideas of the business. They don't realize how difficult it can be, how double-damned frustrating, and sometimes monotonous as hell. And when they find out, they're apt to quit, after the firm has spent a bunch of time and money breaking them in. Or they're bovine—they stand the monotony all right, but they're mentally lazy. Or they're smart and interested, but lack toughness. I don't mean pushing people around; that's a good way to get off-loaded around here. They just can't face up to some of the people you have to face up to.

After returning him to the IA pen where the investigative assistants were officed together, Carlos came back looking pleased with himself.

"I think we've got a keeper," he said. Steinhorn, it seems, had brought a good record with him. In the army he'd spent four years as a Ranger, then injured a hip in a jungle drop and been transferred to the CID, where he'd been trained as an investigator. His military record had been excellent; he'd made sergeant first class before he'd turned twenty-five. A check of his CID personnel file turned up phrases like "analytical, tough, and learns quickly. Shows particular talent in the adaptation of electronic resources." Also, "Is not given to talking shop, even with his peers."

Then his wife and kid had been killed in a retaliatory hit near Salinas. He'd applied for a discharge, and it had been granted.

After leaving Fort Ord, he'd gone to Tucson, a city he'd gotten to know and like while investigating a theft ring at Fort Huachuca. He'd wanted to get a civilian investigative job, but they were hard to get at the time, particularly without a college degree in law enforcement. Contract legal investigation hadn't begun its major expansion yet.

So in Tuscon he'd taken a job as a security supervisor with Algotsson-Scherker, a Westwide construction contractor, and worked there for more than two years. The job involved the routine security of buildings, and also of equipment at company warehouses, equipment parks, and on the job. A-S' personnel records rated him highly, particularly for his "scrupulous attention to details." Carlos loved that, I was sure. It's important in our work, although in my opinion it can be overrated.

After a while he'd subscribed to a professional job-listing network, watching for a job in investigation with a company that might offer a good future. When Joe listed Prudential as hiring, Steinhorn applied. An opening-level job with us paid quite a bit less than his A-S job did, and the cost of living is higher in L.A., but as he put it in his application, "It offers a career ladder in my preferred line of work." An attitude Joe Keneely liked.

Joe and Carlos might have thought we had a good one, but somehow I didn't feel right about Steinhorn. There was something behind his eyes, as if he wasn't being straight with us. And unlike Joe and Carlos, it didn't make any difference to me whether the new positions got filled or not. So it was easier for me to feel skeptical of him.

I didn't say anything though. His employment record was excellent, his test scores very good, and so what if I didn't like his eyes? Me, a guy who'd allowed himself to get thoroughly bogged down on a case.

Looking back, I'd say my attitude just then constituted treason against myself, against my own instincts, but that's how it was.

26

COMPUTER TRESPASS

The next day it was time to make the rounds of my informants again, and Carlos told me to take Steinhorn with me, give him the feel of the L.A. underworld. It went okay. We didn't talk much, beyond line of duty, but he had a good attitude. Sometimes a person with experience thinks he knows it all, and scorns procedures different from those he'd learned somewhere else. Not Steinhorn. So I pretty much banished my misgivings about him.

The only thing wrong with the day was the continuing lack of any useful results.

* * *

That evening Tuuli called from Diacono's. She sounded great, and said she'd be coming home in three days. When she asked me how things were going, I lied: I said fine. I'd called her the evening after I'd gotten back from Eugene, telling her about the photos, so "fine" might have been believeable, but after we'd disconnected, it seemed to me she knew better. Also, I realized I was feeling sorry for myself because she wasn't home already, "when I needed her." Yeah, you big clod, I told myself, what you want is someone to pat you on the head and say, "Poor thing, poor poor thing."

* * *

The next morning I looked into Carlos' office to say "buenos dias, jefe" or maybe "ohaio, gozaimasu." Carlos wasn't there though. He'd gone to Fresno and wouldn't be back before late afternoon, and Steinhorn was sitting at Carlos' desk. I didn't think anything of it, beyond, he's doing some flunky work for Carlos. The sort of thing I used to do as an investigative assistant, although Carlos had never told me to use his desk and computer; I'd done my work in the IA pen.

In my office, I took my six thousand dollars' worth of photos out of the desk—or actually computer facsimiles; the originals were in the evidence vault—and stared without really seeing them. I knew right away I could look at them all day and come up with nothing. So after a couple of minutes I told Fidela I was going to take some compensatory time off, and left. I didn't go to Gold's; I drove west out Sunset Boulevard and parked in the lot at Will Rogers State Beach.

The day was overcast—common enough for the season—and the onshore wind verged on chilly, so there weren't many people there. Mostly surfers in wet suits, because the surf was up a bit. I hiked the sand for quite a ways along the fringe of the surf wash, deliberately using my eyes instead of thinking about things. Spotting the dead gull, the piece of driftwood with some old carving worn nearly illegible by sea and sand, the discarded condom, while listening to the regular, soothing rush and hiss of breakers and their backwash, and the random, counterpoint screeing of gulls. I'd discovered some years earlier, as a junior detective with the Marquette, Michigan, police force, that skiing some forest trail or hiking the Lake Superior shoreline could sometimes shake things loose for me. This was the same sort of thing.

On toward noon I got back to my car and drove south to Santa Monica Beach. There I walked around eating the local equivalent of a Dodger dog and a couple of ice-cream cones, and watched people ride the rides and throw baseballs at targets. This one girl about eleven, who should have been in school, was watching the baseball throwers. She wore as despondent an expression as I'd seen for a while. Even I didn't look that bad. So I bought three tosses, knocked down three targets, and won a fluffy, meter-long nylon or something rabbit which I handed to her, then walked away quickly so she wouldn't get the wrong idea and be scared.

After that I browsed the bookshelves at the Change of Hobbit II, and bought a couple of paperbacks—an Ed Bryant collection and a new novel by an old master, David Brin. It was almost quitting time when I got back to the office. I told my computer "hyvää iltaa," and called up the Christman file, prepared to enter another null day.

Before it downloaded, a code flagged on the screen. When I'd first been with the Marquette Police Department, there'd been some factional infighting, replete with spying and even accusations of the sabotage of files. And because it wasn't all right to make a file inaccessible to the office, or try to, I'd learned to install a covert security alarm on sensitive files, something I've done routinely ever since, on general principle. "Hyvää iltaa,"—"good evening" in Finnish—or hyvää päivää, depending on the time of day, were the codes I used to identify myself and tell the computer to flag anything that might be a trespass.

And someone had activated the Christman file, called it up on Carlos' terminal at 12:27 that afternoon! Fidela would have been in the lunchroom, and a check indicated that Carlos still wasn't back from Fresno. So far as I knew, the only people who should be using Carlos' computer were Carlos himself, and whoever he might have told to use it for some reason. Steinhorn for example. Except there was zero likelihood that Carlos would have told him to do anything with the Christman file.

So. Presuming it had been Steinhorn—why would he have snooped? Curiosity?

I called up the file again, to look at it "with other eyes than mine," and see what it might have looked like to him. Parts of it were clear and detailed. The Oregon project, on the other hand, read cryptically, if you didn't already know what was going on. The entries were dated, and the photos were there, but how we'd gotten them wasn't even hinted at. The bills, the charges and times of charter flights, the trip to Minneapolis to see Hjelmgaard—all those things were there, but not the why, not what they meant. Charles Tomasic wasn't even mentioned except as Charles—"Hjelmgaard and Charles."

And since then, all the entries simply stated "null," or "nothing new."

I asked the computer for a reprise of all operations run while whoever it was had the Christman file in the RAM. It had been scrolled, stopped, and scrolled again, repeatedly. Nothing had been entered, deleted, or altered in any way, but the computer had printed a copy of each of the photographs from Oregon!

Perkele! Who had he sent them to? He'd hardly have faxed them on one of our office machines. There'd be a record, and he knew it. I checked anyway. They record everything sent; my expensive pictures weren't among them. But there were plenty of commercial fax machines in the neighborhood. Lots of stores have them for customer use, cheap.

It seemed to me that someone, perhaps the abductor, perhaps the church, now had copies. And someone's hair just might have been standing six inches out from their head when they saw them. The important question now was, what might they do next?

I locked my door, then took the bug scanner from my attaché case and checked my office over. Sure as hell! There was one in the thermostat control! I let it be. It could have been there for weeks or months, but I was willing to bet it had been installed that day, or at most only a few days earlier. By Steinhorn. Better let him, or whoever it was, think none of it had been discovered, neither bug nor computer trespass.

Then I walked down the hall and asked Fidela if Carlos had called in. He hadn't. So I phoned his flat and asked Penny if he was home yet. She said no, and that he'd probably stop at the office first. I told her I'd call that evening if I didn't see him sooner.

By that time it was five o'clock, and people were leaving. I called up the Christman file again and entered a null day. Which of course was a gross lie. Because, I told myself, I'd just been handed a lead that might be more important than the photographs.

I was wrong about that, it turned out. Both were vitally important.

I also decided to call Tuuli that evening and talk her into staying longer in Arizona. If Christman's murderers or abductors had those photos, things could get dangerous again.

* * *

I hung around for a little and read my messages, dictating the necessary replies or comments to the computer. Vocorders are still pretty expensive, but Joe liked to hold down the paperwork for his investigators. Everyone else was gone except floor security and the night receptionist, but with Tuuli out of town, I felt no urge to get home, and this way I missed the quitting-time traffic. Real Angelenos say the traffic these days isn't nearly as bad as before the plagues, but I still prefer to leave early or late.

Then Carlos came in. I waited a few minutes while he handled his in-messages, then asked him if he'd walk to La Fonda with me and eat Mexican. He knew I wouldn't distract him if I didn't need to—not when he was being an investigator instead of a supervisor, and working on a case of his own. So he called Penny and told her he'd be eating before he came home.

La Fonda is only five blocks from the office. It's not as good as La Casa de Herreras, but it's cheaper. And we were really going out to talk; the meal was incidental. Neither of us said much on the way. It was a pleasant evening, and the only reason I wore a jacket was to cover my shoulder holster.

Based on experience, we both ordered enchiladas suizas. Then, while I creamed and sweetened my coffee, Carlos asked what was on my mind. First I told him my office was bugged, and that his might be, and conceivably other places around corporate headquarters. That sobered him. Then I told him about the trespass into the Christman file at noon, and that the photos had been copied. I could almost hear the wheels turning in his mind. "You see why I didn't want to talk about it at work," I finished.

He nodded. "And you've got some ideas about what it means."

"Right." Then I told him about Steinhorn using his desk that day. "You didn't tell him to, did you?" I asked.

He was frowning, mouth and eyes. "No. Which doesn't prove anything, but it's suggestive. What do you make of it?"

"For one thing, it's a break in the case. Also, I don't want Steinhorn to know I suspect him, or that I even know anything's wrong. I think we need to check the personnel reports we got on him against the original files, both with the army and Algotsson-Scherker. But first I think you should scan your office for bugs, because quick-checking his personnel records will require using the phone."

"I doubt that the army's files were tampered with," Carlos said thoughtfully. "These days, military storage archives are supposed to be about as tamperproof as you can find. When one of them gets compromised, it closes down the whole system, alarms God knows how many offices, and kicks in a backup system."

"Even personnel records?!"

"Once they're closed."

That didn't make much sense to me, but if that's how it was . . . That left Algotsson-Scherker's. He'd check them in the morning, he said, during A-S' office hours.

* * *

After enchiladas, we went back to the office. A scan showed no bugs in Carlos', but that didn't mean it would stay clean. He decided to check it again whenever he came in. The men's room was clean too, electronically as well as otherwise. He'd send Steinhorn out with Rossi first thing in the morning; that would keep him out of the way till quitting time. Then we could sit down and do some brainstorming.

Prudential has the security contract for our building. Our security crews are the best in the business. As we left, Carlos gave instructions for the swing shift and night shift to record any staff who came in, along with time in and time out. And not to tell anyone but him and me; he stressed that. If anyone else came in after hours "to work late," he wanted to know.

* * *

On my way home, I stopped and called Tuuli—on a coin phone, leaving no paper or electronic trail—and asked her to stay in Arizona for another week. I expected her to ask why, and I also knew that anything but the truth would sound weak. Which could start an argument. To my surprise, she agreed right away, and never asked a thing.

That got me worried. Had she found some guy in Arizona that she liked better than me? Would worrying about it keep me awake half the night?

So I stopped at Gold's for an hour and a half, to poop myself out good, then buried my nose in Hirschman's massive Twenty Case Histories of the Post-Reform Era—about my fifth reading of it—and around midnight went to sleep without any trouble. By that time I'd decided Tuuli wouldn't have found anyone at Long Valley, Arizona, who was stronger or smarter than me. Not that she could talk Finnish with.

27

NEW BREAKTHROUGH

I was finishing off an omelette in Morey's the next morning when Indian came in. Usually when he comes in, he's there earlier, and I could tell by his expression that something was seriously wrong. I waved to him and he came over without even stopping to order.

"Jesus Christ!" he said as he flopped down.

"What is it?"

"Cloud Man's dead! Killed! This morning!"

It turned out they'd been riding in together on Indian's big bike—an Indian Buffalo, appropriately enough—with Cloud Man on behind. They'd turned onto Hollywood from Gower and just passed the intersection with Cahuenga when a sniper had shot Cloud Man right off the bike. Indian had almost lost it; it took him forty or fifty meters to stop. By the time he'd run back to Cloud Man, cars had stopped and people were gathering. A couple of them were on their knees, trying to help. Crowding them aside, Indian knelt. Cloud Man's eyes were open, and when he saw Indian, he tried to talk to him. Indian had to get his ear down close to hear.

"My real name," Cloud Man whispered, "is Leo McCarver." He repeated it. "Leo McCarver. The guy, who shot me— Card in my wallet. Ensenada. Mexico. Warn Martti. They'll kill him too."

As Indian finished telling me, his eyes opened wide, as if only the words, not the meaning, had registered before. As if his attention had been so totally on the incomprehensible—someone shooting Cloud Man—that he hadn't really connected the words with reality. "Go on," I said. "Then what?"

That was all Cloud Man had told him; then he'd closed his eyes. Indian hadn't tried to frisk him for his wallet, because about that time two beat cops came running up. Three or four minutes later an ambulance was there, and the paramedics had gotten Leo McCarver—Cloud Man—onto a litter. Indian heard one of them say he was dead. By that time a patrol floater was there too, and Indian told the sergeant Cloud Man's name—names—and where he'd lived, and what his own name was. The sergeant had asked a few more questions, then let him go.

He hadn't mentioned Ensenada or me. Indian had driven on to Yitzhak's then, even though he'd arrive too late for muster, to tell them what happened. The jobs had already been assigned, so he'd come to Morey's.

Warn Martti. They'll kill him too! Unless Indian had left something out, those were McCarver's last words, said with almost his last breath! Why, unless he thought it was true? And where did I fit in?

* * *

I passed Steinhorn and Rossi in the lobby, going out as I went in. Rossi said hi; Steinhorn only nodded. I suppose I said something back.

Carlos' office was still clean, and I sat down next to him so we could both watch his computer screen. I told him about Cloud Man. Leo McCarver: the name meant nothing to him either. He called Algotsson-Scherker, and as you'd expect of a construction outfit, their headquarters' office was open. They opened at eight instead of nine, and they were on Mountain Time. The guy who answered connected him with their personnel office, where a Francine answered. After Carlos had identified himself and the firm, he told Francine he needed to see their personnel file on David Steinhorn.

She asked why he needed to know. When he'd satisfied her, she said, "Just a moment, Mr. Katagawa." Her attention went to her computer; presumably her fingers were giving it instructions. Then, frowning, she looked back at her vidcam. "I'm sorry, Mr. Katagawa, but we have no record of a David Steinhorn."

"You did when I checked with you a little over a week ago," Carlos said. "You may have a record of my call. We hired him on the basis of it."

Her gaze returned to her computer screen, her brows drawn down in concentration. Again her fingers wrote. She shook her head slightly, still frowning, and tried something else, then something else again, finally staring thoughtfully with her lower lip between her teeth. Then she looked out at us from the phone screen. "I'm sorry, sir. I have nothing on a David Steinhorn; on any Steinhorn; or any other name beginning with S-T-E-I-N or S-T-I-E-N or S-T-E-N."

"But you do remember my call."

"I remember your face, yes."

"Do you remember finding a file on Steinhorn?"

"I remember finding a file for you, yes sir, but I don't recall its identity."

"Okay. There's something strange here. May I speak with whoever's in charge of personnel files?"

"I'm in charge of personnel files," she said. She was still frowning. I got the notion that actually she remembered seeing the file and was wondering what the hell had happened to it. "Would you like to speak with Ms. Hawks, the personnel director?"

"If I may, please."

Ms. Hawks was a trim and handsome woman, black but with an Oriental look. Her father'd probably been a GI in Asia somewhere. When Carlos had explained our problem to her, she shook her head. "I'm sure we've had no salaried employee named Steinhorn since I came here in oh-four. And our personnel files haven't been culled since they were computerized; probably in the seventies or eighties."

"Who has access to them?"

"Various people, in read-only. Only Francine and I have access to them in edit mode. Except of course Mr. Scherker, and Ms. Lopez, his administrative assistant. And— We employ standard precautionary systems to ensure the integrity of our personnel files. To meet the legal requirements for personal privacy. Entering them illegally would require someone skilled and resourceful. And reckless."

She left it at that. The rest was understood: Such people were available for hire, operating out of homes and offices everywhere. There was a constant attrition of them, of course. Some made their stake and quit. Others got located by monitor programs and arrested; sent to work camps to chop cotton in the desert sun, or plant trees on old cutovers and burns. Hard manual labor, hot and sweaty or wet and cold. But the payoffs could be big. There were always recruits to the ranks of computer criminals. Or perhaps Lopez or even Scherker could have done it, maybe as a favor to a friend. Or it could have been Hawks or Francine, though Francine especially had seemed too convincing to be acting. Carlos decided to let be; he thanked Hawks and disconnected. Then we talked. Conceivably Steinhorn might have hacked into A-S' personnel files himself, and inserted the erroneous file. Then erased it after he was hired, to avoid someone like Hawks running across it and perhaps informing us, if they logged the personnel reference requests they received.

But if Steinhorn had the skills for that, what was he doing working for Prudential as an investigative assistant?

To both of us, it seemed a lot more likely that someone else had arranged the false file, for the purpose of inserting Steinhorn in our office. Someone interested in the Christman case. Which could be any of our active suspects, or someone else, unsuspected and maybe unknown.

"So," I said, "assume his military record is genuine. It probably is. If he hasn't been working for Algotsson-Scherker since he took his discharge, what has he been doing?

"And Cloud Man, Leo McCarver—was he connected with Steinhorn in any way? They both arrived on the scene about the same time. When I first met McCarver, he didn't seem like a Loonie to me. I thought he might be undercover for the LAPD, or maybe the DEA—something like that. Whose card did McCarver have in his wallet? Apparently someone in Ensenada who might be interested in killing me.

"Why would someone, or some business entity, in Ensenada want me dead? Is there a connection with Steinhorn? And why would McCarver want to warn me, when we'd barely met? Was there a faction that wanted me dead, and another that wanted me alive and on the job? Specifically the Christman job? Because that's the only job I'm handling."

Carlos had been leaning back in his chair, listening with eyes half closed. Now he sat up and leaned toward his computer, his fingers pecking. He accessed ITT's public-access listing of private security and investigation firms in Ensenada, a hundred kilometers south of the border on the west coast of Baja. There were three firms listed that did investigations—a lot for a town that size. A phone call to a contact and friend in the PEF—the "federales," the Mexican national police—established that all of them were one- or two-man operations, probably operating out of one-room offices. That sort of thing.

"So," I said when he'd disconnected. "Where does that leave us?"

Carlos grunted. He can put considerable meaning into a grunt, but it's not always apparent what the meaning is. "Back before La Guerra de Octubre, there was an outfit in Ciudad Juarez, with branches elsewhere, that called itself a travel and transportation service. A charter operation. But their main activities were smuggling weapons and drugs, and sometimes they took on a murder contract. The cover allowed them to operate aircraft and trucks without making anyone curious."

His fingers moved again, calling up transportation and travel services in Ensenada. Aside from the usual travel agencies, there was an outfit that called itself SVI—"Servicio Viajero Internacional." Then he called up the public-access records on its ownership and management. It was a partnership, the listed partners being an Aquilo Reyes, a Eustaquio Tischenberg-Hinz, and a Kelly Masters.

"Carlos," I said, "call the Data Center and get McCarver's social security number. Use the Boghosian bombing case ID for access." To our surprise, they actually had a Leo McCarver listed as employed by Yitzhak's. His SocSec number was 1487-23-8765.

"Now see if he's been in the military."

He keyed up the Pentagon, went through three connections, then made his request, listing the contingency contract we had with the LAPD regarding the Boghosian bombing. He was referred to a captain, who asked enough questions to satisfy himself that there was at least some connection between the request and the case, then let it go at that. After all, we weren't asking for access to national security secrets.

He didn't show us a readout. He read from it, apparently editing out things he considered irrelevant to our needs. McCarver, it turned out, had been in Special Forces, and discharged without prejudice in November 2007, in the middle of an enlistment.

Carlos thanked the captain and disconnected, then turned to me. "So?"

"I'm not sure. But McCarver was in Special Forces, and Steinhorn supposedly in the Rangers. Steinhorn left in February '08 and McCarver, what? Three months earlier? Let's say that both of them were connected with SVI. So how did they get recruited?"

Carlos nodded, turned back to his computer and keyed up another Pentagon office. This time he asked for the Criminal Investigation Division, and did something illegal: Citing a contract with Sonoma County, regarding smuggling, he asked for access to a name-and-number-coded list of army personnel separated since 2006, with final postings. There had been no Tischenberg-Hinz. A Captain Aquilo Reyes had resigned in August 2007, last duty post Fort Bragg, Kentucky, which would fit both the Rangers and Special Forces. And the name could hardly be a coincidence. There was also a Spec 2 Kelly W. Masters who'd taken his discharge in 2010 at Fort Benning, an unlikely match.

Carlos looked like he does when he's on a roll though. His fingers jabbed again, calling up directory assistance. The guy he wanted was listed, and he keyed the number. While it rang, he told me what he was after. "There's an engineer I've heard of," he said, "a spook freak, who's researched and compiled a list of ex-OSS personnel. As complete as he could . . ."

The guy answered. Yes, he'd compiled such a list, including ex-Special Projects personnel from the CIA, before Haugen had split it off and reconstituted the old OSS. All in all, he said, his list included probably half its retired or otherwise terminated operatives. Why, he wanted to know, was Carlos interested? Carlos explained without being specific, and said he was interested in just two names: An Eustaquio Tischenberg-Hinz, and a Kelly Masters. He spelled the first. The guy's list had a Kelly Masters, but not a Tischenberg-Hinz. Masters had taken an early retirement in June 2007.

Only two months before Reyes had resigned his commission! Something was starting to take shape. We might have been looking at coincidences, of course, but it felt unlikely. And while it still might have nothing to do with me or the Christman case, we'd work on the assumption that it did.

Carlos decided he'd go to Ensenada and investigate SVI on the ground. He wouldn't be conspicuous. He speaks fluent Spanish in three dialects: the chicano patois of Colorado's Rocky Ford-LaJunta Irrigation District, where he grew up; the somewhat different patois of L.A.'s Mexican barrios; and the proper Spanish of educated Mexicans. And his appearance wouldn't be a problem; there's a sizeable Japanese colony in Ensenada.

He also had a friend he'd worked with a couple of times, an inspector in the PEF in Mexicali, the capital of Baja Norte. Presumably the guy would be willing to provide him with credentials for liaising with the PEF in Ensenada, if necessary.

My Spanish, on the other hand, was merely functional, so I wouldn't go with him. I'd be recognized as a gringo right away. Instead he'd take one of our junior investigators, Miguel Vasquez. Until they got back, I could fill in for Miguel, helping Ernie Johnson on a case of trespass and illegal dumping. I'd be doing legwork, that sort of thing. If anything further broke on the Christman case, I was to go back to it. Ernie's was a case with its main features well worked out. The job was to fill in the details for litigation and prosecution. It sounded restful, compared to the Christman case.

* * *

That evening I called Tuuli again, at the Diaconos'. Someone named Debbie answered. Tuuli, she said, was off to some place called Sipapu, with the Diaconos and a couple of other people. I got the impression it was some sort of test. I hoped she was having a good time. Meanwhile I took advantage of the opportunity to feel sorry for myself because I couldn't talk with her.

28

HARLEY SUK O'CONNELL

A couple of days later I went down to the parking lot to grab a company car and check some things for Ernie. As I started east down Beverly, a small maroon sedan pulled out of the lot across the street. So why not? A lot of cars pull out of parking lots behind me, and don't mean a thing. But this one rang an alarm in my mind, so I called Ernie and told him. He said he'd be right down.

I hoped to hell it wasn't a false alarm. At the stop light at Sweetzer, I could see the car and driver in my outside mirror, a few cars back. I couldn't actually see his face very well, but it could have been the face I remembered from a few weeks earlier, when I'd been followed two or three times. I'd almost forgotten about that. This time I wouldn't try to throw him off. To give Ernie time, I pulled into the parking lot at the Big Ekon between Fairfax and Grove, and hurried in as if to buy something. When I came out, I couldn't see my tail anywhere, but I continued east. Sure enough, he'd jogged south a few blocks, then circled north and pulled in behind me again at the intersection with Genesee. I told Ernie, who by that time was in a car and on the phone only a couple of blocks behind us.

I also told Ernie what I had in mind, so he peeled off north on Highland. Keeping it down to the speed limit, I stayed on Beverly a ways farther, then turned north on Rossmore. When my tail and I came to the intersection of Melrose, where Rossmore becomes Vine, Ernie was only a couple of blocks west. Probably by crowding the ambers or even the reds. I stopped for a stoplight at the corner of Sunset, and took the opportunity to snap the silencer onto the Glock 9mm the firm equips each car with. When the light turned green, I continued north to Franklin, then east to Beachwood Canyon and north to Mossydale, a little goat-trail street that hairpins its way up a ridge in the Hollywood Hills. My tail had dropped a little farther back on Beachwood, as if he hadn't wanted to be noticed. The traffic had been light. I couldn't see him at all, and wondered if he'd thought better of it, but at the upper switchback I glimpsed his maroon sedan a couple of switchbacks lower, still coming.

The danger then was that I'd lose him even if he didn't quit, so on the top I stopped where he could see me from a little ways back, got out with a camera, and let it seem as if I was taking pictures of a house there, shooting over the roof of my car as if trying not to be noticed. He stopped as soon as he saw me, got out and opened his hatchback as if doing something entirely legitimate. He even took out a piece of paper and stuck it in the gate of a yard there, like a notice. He was back in his car before I was.

I knew exactly where I wanted to lead him, and told Ernie, who by now was coming up the switchbacks. There's a point—a short side ridge with a curving stub street about a block long—where couples sometimes park. I turned off on it. If my tail knew the area well, he'd smell a rat and drive right on by. It dead ends where you can look out southeast over the L.A. basin, and there's no houses on it, I suppose because of a landslide hazard. It's just chaparral brush and the overlook. The curve is near the end. As soon as I was well around it, I stopped and got out, keeping the car between me and my follower, if any. Sure as hell, there he came, and saw me as he rounded the curve. Right away he stopped and began to back.

I heard my phone. "I see him!" Ernie said. Then, "I've got him blocked!"

I could still see the maroon sedan from my end, too, and with the Glock in both fists in front of me, I started toward it. The guy got out, a bearded black, caramel brown, actually, staring at Ernie. You've seen those old Dirty Harry movies on late-night TV. Ernie looks a lot like Clint Eastwood did—like a forty-year-old Dirty Harry. He was actually mild-mannered, but he knew how to use the resemblance. He'd have his car gun too; the guy was boxed.

"Spread 'em!" I shouted, and he did, hands and feet wide, leaning on his car. Close up I recognized him—Harley Suk O'Connell, the son of a black G.I. and his Korean wife. He was a minor league gun who got hired from time to time by the black mafia. He hadn't worn a beard when he'd ambushed Tuuli and me last October, but close up I knew him. I had a memento from that time, a scar on my right cheek from a bullet fragment.

"What're you up to, O'Connell?" I asked.

"I drove up to enjoy the view."

I pressed the silencer against his ear. "This is a nice private place here," I said, "and I've got a good memory. With the silencer, this nine em-em is as quiet as the one you shot at me with. Only there's no ornamental railing to blow the bullet up; just that quarter inch of skull bone.

"So, I'll ask again. What're you up to, O'Connell? Who are you working for?"

"You won't believe me if I tell you."

"Try me."

"You know I followed you a few weeks ago."

"Right. Several times"

"I was doing a job for the Carwood Family. They hired me to do a surveillance of Melanie's house. Suspected some brother was selling her information on the family's operations, and she was passing it on to Kim Soo."

"Was she?"

"Not that I could see. But I saw you go in, so Roman hired me to follow you and see what I could learn. About what you were working on. No big deal, but you got him curious, and he likes to know. It seemed to me you were doing something on the Gnosties, but I couldn't be sure. I told him you were on to me, and he said let it cool.

"Not long after that I heard he had Melanie picked up, questioned her about stuff and let her go. No profit gettin' in a war with the Soong Family. And he never did say to get back on you. I figured maybe he found out what he wanted."

"So what happened this morning?"

"I got a different car, and I'd been busy in Beverly Hills last night. You know how it is; a guy's got to make a living. And I was driving by your place of occupation and thought I'd stop a few minutes and see if you came out. If you did, I was going to follow you. See if you'd spot me this time."

I stared at him. He was still spread, looking at me from the corner of his eye. It sounded unlikely as hell, him just happening to stop. He'd had no reason to expect me.

He must have read my mind. "See!" he said. "I told you you wouldn't believe me!"

The funny thing was, I decided I did. I didn't like him, didn't trust him. He'd tried to kill me twice, and come close. His first bullet would probably have hit either Tuuli or me, if it hadn't hit that iron railing. And apparently he'd spent last night burgling. But somehow I believed him.

And he'd been lucky for me that other time: His trying to kill me had given me the leverage I needed to complete the Ashkenazi murder case. I stepped back and lowered my gun. "I believe you," I told him. "Just don't ask me why. But do us both a favor, O'Connell. Don't try me again." Not that I'd have shot him there in cold blood, but he didn't know that.

He stared at me a couple of seconds, then nodded and got in his car. We both stood watching him, guns in our hands, as he jockeyed around and left, squeezing past Ernie's car.

Ernie looked at me. "We should have looked in his luggage space," he said. "Then held him here till the police came. He's probably got a couple months' pay worth of loot in there."

I nodded. That's what policy said we should have done. It's what the law would have us do. And it would have been a point for Prudential with the LAPD.

"I'll call them," Ernie said.

"No," I told him. "Let him go."

Ernie peered at me, then shrugged. I didn't know why I said what I had, and neither did he. But it seemed to me like the right thing to do.

29

PULLING THREADS

Carlos was in Ensenada for four days. It turned out that SVI occupied a rented floor of offices over a large clothing store. Across from it was a big furniture store with a warehouse upstairs, and Carlos managed to rent a dusty upstairs corner with two windows, pretty much screened from the rest of the loft by furniture. His cover was, he'd been hired by an absent partner in SVI, who wanted to know what went on across the street. Carlos dropped a vague hint that gun-running might be involved, but didn't make clear whether with or without the partner's approval. In any case, it could obviously be dangerous for the furniture store owner to snoop or talk.

The SVI offices seemed to be three good-sized rooms in front, with maybe two rooms and a lavatory in back. Masters' office was the smallest front room, located in a corner.

Carlos had already learned, through his PEF connection, that SVI also leased four hectares of land from a dairy farm twelve kilometers out of town. He drove past on the day they arrived. Mostly it was an equipment park. Either they didn't have a lot of equipment, or most of it was out; there was more than room to spare. It also had a big Plastosil shed where they maintained their ground- and aircraft, and maybe drilled their operations.

The farm buildings were a kilometer farther up the road, which was known as El Camino Alfarería, "The Pottery Road." A couple hundred feet back from the road, and just across from the SVI land, was the pottery itself, which had been closed for about a year.

The next day, Carlos and Miguel got up well before dawn and drove out the Pottery Road to a jeep trail Carlos had noticed the day before, maybe a kilometer short of the pottery and on the same side of the road. They drove back in out of sight and parked. Then they walked to the pottery, which was on a little slope, giving them a view of the equipment park and its shed.

They spent the morning watching, careful not to be seen themselves. At one point after daylight, Carlos nosed around in the building and noticed a sizeable but inconspicuous brown stain on the coarse concrete floor, pale from washing. Basically the stain existed in the pits in the concrete, and it could have been anything. Including old blood. He also noticed a mop in the restroom and, checking it out, found the mop strings stained pale brown. With his pocketknife, he trimmed about half an inch off the strings, and bagged the trimmings.

All they learned from watching the shed and equipment was that the four men there didn't have much to do, that day at least. A resonance scanner, aimed at a window of the shed's office, found them playing cards most of the morning. A skyvan came in at 10:25, carrying two men who left for town after giving instructions about a skytruck they'd be taking out that evening.

Back in town that afternoon, Carlos called his connection in Mexicali, and Miguel was able to pick up a kit from the PEF's Ensenada office for collecting samples of bloodstains—in this case from the pits in the concrete. He drove out again at dawn the next day and collected his sample as soon as it was light enough.

Between he and Miguel, they also got telephoto footage of people arriving at and leaving the SVI offices over two-plus days. And eavesdropped on conversations in Kelly Masters' office. Mostly what they heard didn't mean much to them because it lacked context. But they did hear Masters' half of a phone conversation with "Dave." Masters was interested in "Seppanen," with whom Dave worked. There was no doubt at all now that Steinhorn was part of SVI.

Carlos didn't get any explicit information on the Christman case, but he arrived back tentatively pleased. We screened his video footage and compared the faces with the pictures Charles Tomasic had given us. And found matches for two of the three faces in Charles' pictures. Carlos had also left the mop trimmings with Skip at the lab, along with the putative blood residue from the pottery floor. Charles' pictures had no value as courtroom evidence, but if—if—the blood could be identified as Christman's . . . Assuming it was blood.

I was just getting up to leave when Skip came into Carlos' office. "It's human blood," he said. "They seem to have mopped before the blood dried, and didn't use any cleaning compound. If you can get me some blood, tissue—maybe hair from a presumed victim, I can hire a DNA match made at UCLA."

* * *

The only possibility I could see was that Winifred Sproule just might have a keepsake of some kind. Or know of one. I couldn't imagine her keeping a lock of anyone's hair. My office being bugged, I called her on Carlos' phone. She said to come out and we'd talk; she'd treat me to lunch.

Come out. She'd treat me to lunch. It gave me an erection. I was glad Tuuli was coming home the next day.

Sproule, though she still came across sexy, didn't make a move on me, and to my dismay, I found myself disappointed. And while she had no keepsakes, she did have some information. Christman had had a vasectomy—"the better to tom-cat around"—as she put it, and before the operation he'd had a sperm sample stored. She also gave me the name and maiden name of Christman's ex-wife, along with the street she'd lived on in Phoenix, twenty years earlier.

* * *

Back at the office that afternoon, Carlos sicced an investigative assistant, Bridges, onto tracing down Christman's ex-wife, who hopefully would know the name of the sperm bank. Where hopefully Christman's sperm were still happily hibernating. Even though he'd sent Steinhorn off with Rossi again, Carlos made sure that Bridges knew damned well not to mention the assignment to anyone, in or out of the firm.

Meanwhile there was the question of getting access to the sperm. Needless to say, while some of our own people have law degrees, Prudential has a high-powered law firm on retainer, so Carlos called them. There was, it turned out, a legal precedent. If we had a contract with some law enforcement agency to investigate Christman's disappearance, and assuming no one contested it, we should be able to get a court order for a microscopic sample. Enough to test for a DNA match.

Unfortunately—so we thought—none of this fell within the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles. Or the county, or the State of California, as far as that's concerned. And at that time the feds rarely contracted investigations. So Carlos got on the phone and called the Lane County Sheriff's Department in Oregon. The receptionist said that Sheriff Savola was on another line, if we cared to wait. I told Carlos that Savola was a Finnish name—Americanized Finnish, shortened from Savolainen. I went to school with some Savolas in Hemlock Harbor.

Unless he was totally divorced from his roots, Savola would recognize my name as Finnish too. So when he came on the screen, Carlos introduced both of us to him, and told him I was the investigator. And that I had evidence which might lead to an indictment for an assault on Ray Christman, assault leading to kidnaping. We believed it might have taken place on the church's estate in Lane County, and we'd like a contingency contract for the case, to give us access to information we couldn't get otherwise.

Savola pointed out that interstate kidnaping was a federal offense, and as such an FBI responsibility. Which of course was why I'd talked in terms of the assault. It was the junior of the two felonies, but it came under the sheriff's jurisdiction. I told him I'd run onto the evidence while carrying out two other investigations, one private, the other for the City of Los Angeles. If the feebs, the FBI, started an investigation of the Christman disappearance, they'd pull the rug out from under me and the firm on both of them. But if we could present major evidence that certain persons had abducted Christman, the government would have to pay us our costs and a reasonable fee, which could be substantial.

I watched Savola while he thought it over. Not every county sheriff feels friendly to contract investigation firms, but most of them feel even less friendly to the feebs, who can be really arrogant and overbearing toward local agencies when their interests overlap. Besides, Joe Keneely has carefully nurtured Prudential's good name, and this wouldn't need to cost Lane County much if any money.

"Seppanen, eh? I've read about you." It had to be the twice-killed astronomer again. As Joe likes to say: "The best promotion is outstanding work properly publicized." Savola ended up saying okay, if our terms were suitable. Carlos transferred the call to Joe, and twenty minutes later we had another contract we could use, registered in the National Law Enforcement Network. It didn't mention kidnaping.

As Joe put it: "Ah, the marvels of electronics, the Network, and a good reputation."

* * *

While we waited, I got a bright idea for my next action. My office was still bugged, and I needed to use the National Law Enforcement Network, which meant I couldn't do it from home. So I sat down, called up the army's CID headquarters in the Pentagon, and instead of telling them orally what I wanted, I wrote it. Including: "My office is bugged, and I need to pretend I don't know it. So I'm writing this." I figured a little drama might help get me what I wanted. Then, still writing, I identified my firm, myself, and the contract, and indicated that at least two of our suspects were ex-Rangers. What I needed, I told the guy, was a printout, with photos and certain other particulars, of all Rangers who'd served in the same company as Captain Aquilo Reyes, and who'd resigned or failed to reenlist between 2007:1:1 and 2008:12:31.

He checked me out on the Network first, then agreed. It turned out there were sixteen of them, including Steinhorn. Eight had been unmarried, and three had Hispanic names. Two of the sixteen photos matched faces in Carlos' videotapes from Ensenada. A third matched a face in Charles' photos. Of those three, all had been single at the time of discharge.

Then I went home. I decided to start with the eight who'd been single. I'd gotten their addresses at the time of enlistment; now I called up local directories and got the phone numbers for those addresses. At six of the eight, someone answered, none of them the subject. Only two knew, or admitted knowing, the person I was calling about. I pitched myself as an old army buddy trying to get in touch, and got addresses for the two; neither was in Ensenada.

Then I called up the Ensenada directory; two of the others were listed there. That left me with four to go. I called up the directories for their pre-enlistment home towns, then called the listed numbers. I put on a mild Finnish accent, in case people were suspicious that I was police. People don't usually associate foreign accents with police, except in some places Hispanic or Oriental accents.

One number got me an L.A. family. My man, Robert Myers, was their son. Until recently he'd lived in Ensenada, Mexico, they said, where he'd done security work and traveled a lot. But three weeks previous they'd called him and gotten a recording in Spanish. Their college-student daughter told them it meant the number was out of service. So they'd written to him. The letter had been returned: he was no longer at that address, and had left no forwarding address.

I promised them I'd let them know if I learned where he was, and the daughter gave me the names of three L.A. friends of his. The directory gave me numbers for two of them. The third was a Jesse Johnson. There were eight Jesse Johnsons listed, along with maybe thirty J. Johnsons, so I skipped him. At one of the two numbers, for an Osazi Gorman, a woman answered. She was suspicious and hostile, and said her husband didn't know any Robert Myers.

At the other number, a man answered. He told me he'd heard, a week or so earlier, that Robert was in town, but he hadn't seen him. And if his parents hadn't seen him, then . . . After a long hesitation, he suggested I call Osazi Gorman. There was also an Arnette Jones who was more likely than anyone else to have seen him, but Jones had no regular address. He hung out around Lafayette-MacArthur Park a lot, and was easy to recognize. An ex-Colorado State basketball player, he was seven feet tall and usually wore a feathered headdress.

You work at UCLA, so you probably live in Westwood, and might not be familiar with those midtown parks. They've pretty much been taken over by street people and assorted characters, many of them doing drugs. Was Myers in trouble? Maybe on drugs and gotten fired? Or run away? If SVI was smartly run, and it probably was, they wouldn't keep someone on the payroll who used drugs. He might blab; even sell information. Or had Myers gotten crosswise of them for some other reason? In either case they might not want him running loose.

Had Leo McCarver been another runaway from VSI?

It was conceivable that Myers was still with them, had gone underground for them on some job, though my gut reaction to that was rejection.

But the real question was, could Robert Myers give me any information regarding Christman.

30

MacARTHUR PARK

I'd planned to eat breakfast at home the next morning. I got up more than early enough, showered, shaved, and being alone in the apartment, turned on the radio. The first thing I heard was a news item about a newly reported development by a Brit research project. They'd built what they called a spatial transposer, and tried to move a rock from one side of their lab to another with it. Somehow it was supposed to relocate without moving through the intervening space! They transposed it, all right, but it arrived as a little pile of molecular dust.

Back to the drawing board. Yeah. But when they perfected it, and they probably would . . . What a terrorist could do with something like that! Or a dictator, or anyone else who was ruthless. What price peace then? Or privacy? What would happen to wilderness areas? Wildlife refuges? Homes? Convents for chrissake! Let alone what it would do to people's sense of what kind of universe they lived in. This report by itself would stimulate a new spike of craziness for the newscasts to tell about.

With that on my mind, I finished dressing without noticing. The next thing I knew, I'd put on my shoulder holster and was shrugging into my jacket without fixing breakfast. To hell with it, I decided, I could eat at Morey's. Tuuli'd be flying home later that day, and maybe the world would seem right again.

I left for work. Twenty minutes later I was driving south on Fairfax, still thinking about the spatial transposer and half listening to music on the radio. Then KMET interrupted with a special news bulletin. According to the station's traffic floater, a huge explosion in Van Nuys, a couple of minutes earlier, had done massive damage to an apartment building in the vicinity of Woodman Avenue, south of Ventura Boulevard.

My stomach spasmed and I jerked over toward the side of the street, braking, almost hitting a parked car and damned near getting rear-ended. Horns blared. For a minute I just sat there, till someone got out of a car and came over to see if I was all right. He thought I'd had a seizure of some kind, which I guess in a way I had. I thanked the guy, and told him I'd be all right; that I'd just heard on the radio my apartment house had been blown up. Because I had no doubt at all what building it was. A day later, Tuuli would have been there asleep when the place blew. If I'd eaten at home as planned, I'd have been there. Meanwhile, the building security guys were ours. Had been ours. I realized then that I'd heard the explosion and ignored it, dismissed it. As if it might be some demolition contractor bringing down an old high rise.

I drove on to work but didn't go to Morey's. Breakfast didn't interest me then. Instead I went into the lobby, pressed the up button, and waited for an elevator. When one arrived, who should step out but Rossi and Steinhorn, getting an early start on their day. I took myself totally by surprise. I slammed Steinhorn right between the eyes, driving him back into the elevator cab, stunning him and breaking his nose. Grabbing his feet, I dragged him back out in the lobby, got in the cab, and started upstairs, leaving poor Rossi staring, his lower jaw hanging down on his chest. Steinhorn was bleeding all over himself.

When I got upstairs, I didn't know what the hell to do, so I just sat down in reception. A minute later Joe came out of his office looking terrible. He saw me there, and asked if Tuuli was still out of town. He'd just gotten a call from one of the night guards who'd gotten off duty at 6:05; at the apartment. He'd stopped for breakfast at a Clancy's a few blocks from there—had finished eating and was drinking his coffee—when a huge explosion broke all the tempered glass windows in the restaurant.

He'd had a feeling it might have been "his" building, and had driven back, bleeding from glass cuts. It had been a car bomb, apparently on the entrance ramp to the underground garage. The whole front half of the building was rubble; there was even major damage to the building across the street. No way the entrance or garage guards could have survived. The hall man might have, possibly, if he'd been in the back of the building.

When he'd finished telling me, Joe went back into his office. Meanwhile Rossi had come up, and heard most of it. "Your partner," I told him, which made no sense to him at all. Made no sense, period. I started down the corridor, thinking how many people must have been killed. Most wouldn't have started for work yet. Kids wouldn't have left for school.

Rossi followed me into my own office. I knew what I had to do. First I removed the bug from the thermostat control; no use playing that game anymore. Then I called Tuuli. I told her what had happened, and to stay where she was a while longer. All after telling the computer to charge the call to my home phone, so the call and destination wouldn't be registered in the office computer.

When I disconnected, I told Rossi his partner was a plant, then asked myself aloud: "Why in hell have I been screwing around trying to get a line on Robert Myers, when one of the murderous assholes was sitting right here in our offices? And I knew it!" And I'd left him downstairs! I should have put him under citizen's arrest! Rossi said he'd told Steinhorn to go to the building infirmary, which was on the ground floor, so I called there. They hadn't seen him. I wasn't surprised. He'd realized his cover must be blown, and taken off. All the satisfaction I got from it was what Rossi told me: Steinhorn had been bleeding badly from the nose, and his eyes had started to swell.

Meanwhile I still had the lead I'd dug up the day before: Robert Myers. Carlos wasn't in—he was flying to Fresno that morning—or I'd have told him what I had in mind. So I clipped a gadget pouch on my belt, with some stuff I'd need, then told Fidela where I was headed, and left.

* * *

I took Sixth Street east toward downtown, and parked in the shade in the big lot at the First Congregational Church between Commonwealth and Occidental. Then I crossed the street to Lafayette-MacArthur Park, and started circulating. It's an open-access park south of Sixth Street, a mile long and half as wide. That's a lot of city blocks, and it always has a lot of people. Even finding someone seven feet tall and wearing a feathered headdress could take awhile.

The eastern section north of the lake is sort of a bivouac for street people—a lot of Plastosil bubble tents that the city set up, with interspersed latrines and showers, and stand-up mess tents with rice, beans, bread and cheese, and whatever produce is a glut on the current market.

There aren't as many street people as there used to be, and they're different from the street people of the eighties and nineties. A good job is still a problem for the functionally illiterate, but they're a lot less common than they were years ago. For a lot of today's street people, it's the rate of change that's gotten to them, and they've opted for days in the sun, with music or drugs or both, till they get bored with it or maybe die. When the weather's nice, there's a sense of fun and laughter. When it rains or a Santa Ana blows in, those who stay tend to get gloomy and suicidal, or surly and mean. Sort of a manic-depressive subculture. But this day was beautiful—sunny, temperature about 75, and a light breeze.

I'd been walking around for the better part of an hour, when I saw a small crowd on the west shore of the lake, gathered around some drumming and chanting. I drifted over. In the center of them, some guys, mostly blacks, were bounding up and down in a Watusi-looking dance. One of them was going so high, he looked like he was on a pogo stick. He wore a feathered headdress that added an extra foot to what was already way more height than anyone else there. Arnette Jones, I decided, and moved in closer. Maybe Robert Myers was one of the other dancers.

He wasn't. He was sitting cross-legged, slapping the bongos. I recognized the face from his picture. He was a caramel-colored, average sized, athletic-looking black. The dance was nearly over by the time I moved in. A tallish, lean-looking guy was doing a sort of rap counterpoint to the chant in some African-sounding language. He changed tempo, speeding up and raising his pitch; the drums crescendoed; then everything stopped, the dancers streaming sweat.

I'd already gone over and squatted down beside Myers. He looked at me, not very alert, under the influence of some chemical, hopefully New Orleans Sugar. It's supposed to be big with musickers, and they can shake it off if they need to. "Robert," I said quietly, "I'm trying to bust Kelly. For the abduction of Ray Christman. And for Christman's murder, if that's what he did to him."

He turned to me, coming back into the world a bit.

"Steinhorn's in L.A.," I went on. "Steinhorn and others. They've already killed McCarver. Maybe you knew that."

He shook his head.

"They don't wish you well, either. Kelly's gone kill-crazy, and if I could find you, his guys can. This morning he car-bombed the apartment house I live in. Lived in. It killed a lot of people; it's not known how many yet. If my wife had been in town and I hadn't gone out for breakfast, she and I would be dead now. That's what they had in mind."

I held his eyes. "If you're willing to give me your deposition regarding SVI and Christman, I can hide you where you can't be found. Not in the time Kelly will have. Because with your statement we can nail the sonofabitch. And as far as I'm concerned, you won't have to name any other names than Kelly Masters."

He was looking at me, apathetically but taking it all in. With the music and dancing over, the crowd was dispersing. Arnette Jones and another dancer were standing by though, to find out what was going on between me and their buddy.

"Robert, you want us to run this shark?" Jones asked. In street argot, a shark's a detective.

Myers shook himself, physically. "No," he said, looking up at Jones. "I told you I was in deep shit. Maybe the shark's got a ladder for me to climb out with."

I took the minicam out of my pouch and found his face in the viewfinder. I was going to get his statement now, before anything happened, before anything ran him off. I deliberately didn't read him his rights. It might spook him. Of course it would make him hard to prosecute, but if he netted Masters and company for us, that was fine with me. Joe and Carlos would understand, even if they weren't overjoyed. And if the prosecutor's office bitched, their heart wouldn't be in it. They're not what you'd call naive, and they've negotiated more than a few plea bargains.

"All right," I said, "if you'll speak slowly and clearly, starting with your name . . ."

He took a deep breath. "My name is Robert Fielding Myers. I was copilot of the skyvan that forcibly removed Ray Christman from Church of the New Gnosis property in Oregon about 7 October, 2011." He sounded like someone trained on being debriefed. I wondered if that was his Ranger training, or something the SVI taught its people. "Mr. Christman and a female companion were abducted by personnel acting for my employer, Servicio Viajero Internacional, of Ensenada, State of Baja California del Norte, Mexico. I'd been briefed as an alternate to the abductors, but I wasn't used in that role. I was the copilot.

"The managing partner of SVI, Kelly Masters, was the pilot. Masters is an ex-OSS officer. Christman was flown to Mexico alive and in constraints, to a place about twelve kilometers from Ensenada, arriving there at approximately 0230 hours, Pacific Time.

"After we arrived, I went home to bed. The next day I was told that Christman and the woman had been taken to a shut-down pottery works across the road, where they were killed, then cremated in a large pottery kiln. Their ashes, I was told, were dumped in a manure pit on an adjacent dairy farm, and covered with manure."

Myers hadn't changed expression during his recital. "How did they kill him?" I asked.

"The plan had been to resedate him, then suffocate him. But because Christman was a large man—this part is hearsay, from, uh, one of the guys there—because Christman was a large man and it was uphill to the pottery works, they decided to have him walk there before they resedated him. They didn't want to carry him. They told him they planned to hold him for ransom. Inside the plant though, he started to fight and kick, as if he realized what they had in mind. Maybe the kiln was on and he could hear the gas flames, I don't know. Then Mr. Masters shot him and they cremated him. While he was in the kiln, they suffocated the woman, and when they finished cremating Christman, they cremated her. And that's it."

"Thanks, Robert." I popped another microcube into the minicam and started making a copy. "That seems to cover it. We got samples of the dried blood from a mop, and from pores in the concrete. Your statement should clinch it. Now let's get you out of here."

I got to my feet and helped him up. Jones and the other dancer had heard the whole thing. I wasn't very comfortable with that, but I couldn't see what harm could come of it. There hadn't been anything I could do about it anyway, not and get Meyers' statement.

It seemed to me I was up against something worse than just a commercial murder operation. Something more evil had reared its head this morning. Now, as Myers and I crossed the grassy park past one of the slender, HardSteel pylons of the Wilshire Monorail, we were escorted by one medium-sized and one very tall black man, both seeming dedicated to Myers' survival.

I decided that when I got to the car, I'd transmit a copy of Myers' video statement to Joe, with a recommendation that he transmit copies to whoever—the feebs and Lane County, I suppose. Promptly, before Masters tried blowing up our office building. These new semi high-rises, built to current earthquake specs and with key structural elements made of HardSteel, could stand a lot. But a delivery van loaded with high explosives rammed into the entryway? Or a well-trained hit team with assault rifles and grenades, preceded by a couple of pleasant-looking guys with Uzis in their attaché cases and pistols inside their jackets? Guys who could take out the lobby guards before the man at the desk could hit the switch that locked the elevators and stairwell doors?

Sure I was paranoid. I'd earned it.

As far as that was concerned, my escorts, my Choi Li Fut, the Walther under my arm, and Myers' undoubted close-combat skills wouldn't mean a thing against an armed hit team with orders simply to kill. My real security lay in staying on the move, location unknown.

Shortly we were walking along Sixth Street, striding out, unconsciously hurrying. A block ahead, just across from the handsome, vine-grown privacy wall of the Frederic Knepper Village greenbelt, stood the First Congregational Church. Its parking lot was surrounded by a waist-high, ornamental stone wall overgrown by ivy.

I stopped. "Just a minute, guys," I said. The lot would be a perfect ambush site. But hell! That was silly! Who'd know I left the car there? All I'd told Fidela was, I was going to Lafayette-MacArthur Park, and I was reasonably sure no one had followed me.

Unless . . . Had Steinhorn been carrying a key to one of the vehicles? Each company vehicle was fitted with a 360-degree, narrow-band pulse beacon, so they could be located in emergencies from our office and from our other vehicles. Joe had a policy that you left them on except under certain conditions, unusual and specified. Some of our vehicles were kept in the outside lot, and when Steinhorn left the building, he could have . . . But hell, he hadn't even known I'd be going out that morning! And given Steinhorn's appearance, the gate guard would have called the office. Policy was to report anything unusual. And the office would have let me know.

But if someone cut me down with an assault rifle as I entered the parking lot, all that logic wouldn't mean squat. Paranoid was the word all right, but just the same . . . I looked at Jones. "Arnette," I said, "there's something I need you to do."

He looked at me suspiciously. I opened my gadget pouch, took out the minicam, then popped out the backup cube I'd made and handed it to him. "I want you to take this to the nearest police station. Tell them Martti Seppanen from Prudential gave it to you. In case anything happens to Robert and me." I repeated my name so he got it. "And tell them what it's about. So they take the time to listen to it."

He put the cube in his pocket, but stood as if unwilling to leave Myers. He still didn't trust me. A thought came to me then, and I looked at the other guy. The thought was of the biggest eager beavers in L.A. television news. Taking out my minicam again, I popped in another microcube for copying, then stood there watching the red light blink. When it quit, I took the cube out and held it up, looking at the other dancer. "I need someone to get this to KCBS-TV for me. To the news director."

He was a slim muscular black with sharp, pretty much Caucasian features. Just now he was grinning. He knew exactly what I had in mind. "I'm your man, shark," he said.

"You know where it is?"

"On Sunset, where it crosses the one-oh-one." His accent struck me as Jamaican.

"Good. When this gets aired, the danger of Robert and me getting hit goes way down, quick." I put it in his outstretched hand.

"It's done," he said, and started to turn away. I put my hand on his arm.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Duncan."

"Thanks, Duncan." I put out a hand and he shook it.

"That's all right," he said. "You have good luck, eh?" Then he took off at an easy lope, presumably for a monorail station a couple of blocks west.

Arnette hadn't been happy; now he looked resigned. "All right," he said, "I'll take this one to the Rampart Station. It ain't far." He too left us then, jogging northward up Hoover to bypass the privacy-walled Alvarado Village. By that time Duncan had reached the corner of Occidental, where the parking lot began, and was crossing Sixth against the light, through a gap in the traffic.

"Okay, Robert," I said, "let's go." If there was an ambusher behind the stone wall . . . Hell, I thought, it's just your nerves. And I was right. When we walked through the entrance, we were the only ones there. I looked the vehicle over. It had been locked, and still was. Had someone rigged it to blow up? I looked it over, through the windows and underneath. Nothing. Still, I was pretty uncomfortable, inserting the Ferroplast key into the slot, and even more so pressing the latch release and opening the door. Then Myers and I got in. I shut off the beacon, activated the motor, drove out of the lot, and started west on Sixth, feeling a lot better.

Until, in an approaching car, I saw two faces I knew. One was Steinhorn; he was driving despite a swollen nose and two swollen eyes. The other was Kelly Masters; I knew his face from Carlos' video footage. I saw Steinhorn's mouth open as if shouting, and Masters turned. His eyes latched onto me like something—evil, as if he were memorizing my face. All this in about two seconds; then they were past me.

In my rearview mirror I saw Steinhorn try a U-turn to come after me. The move depended on other cars swerving or braking quickly enough to avoid hitting him. Two of them didn't. He sideswiped one of them, and at almost the same moment the other one broadsided him. I was just coming to the intersection with Vermont Avenue. I turned north, my heart rate about a hundred and sixty.

31

THE WORLD TURNED

UPSIDE DOWN

I'd planned to drive to the office and deliver Myers. I'd also figured to call Joe and tell him what I'd learned. But that morning's bombing, and the encounter with Steinhorn and Masters, had shaken me. I didn't trust my assumptions anymore. It might be dangerous to go to the office. It was hard to imagine that SVI would start an actual shooting war with us, but they'd already blown up a building and killed a lot of people.

Tooling north up Vermont, I decided to leave Robert off somewhere first. If there was an ambush waiting for us near the office, I wanted him safe. Molly Cadigan's wasn't too far; I'd see if she'd keep him for a few hours. When the police got the cube, SVI would soon be out of business.

I turned the short wave on to the police band. It was way too soon for Arnette to have arrived at the LAPD's Rampart Station, but when they broadcast a bulletin to watch for SVI's people, I wanted to be sure to catch it. Maybe, I thought, I should call LAPD headquarters and tell them about Masters. Maybe they could pick him up at the wreck. I'd do that, I decided, at the next stop light, when I had a break from dealing with traffic.

As luck had it, the next several signals were green. I was on the Hollywood Freeway overpass when a police broadcast grabbed my attention. It wasn't what I'd expected. Three cars were ordered to watch for, and arrest for questioning, a black Hispanic male named Hector Duncan, height about five-eleven, weight about 170, believed to be on foot in the vicinity of the CBS studios on Sunset Boulevard. And to bring him downtown to detective headquarters!

"Hector Duncan?" I said aloud. The description and locale were right. "Are they talking about our Duncan?"

Myers nodded, forehead furrowed. I thought: What the hell?! Had they picked up Arnette on his way to the station? Maybe he'd seen a patrol car and flagged it down. But why arrest Duncan? The same call would alert the beat officers in the vicinity. KCBS building security would get a call, too.

Seconds later they broadcast an all-cars bulletin to arrest for questioning Martti Seppanen, white male, age 33, height about 6 feet, weight about 230, hair brown, eyes blue, build stocky and muscular, last seen driving an aquamarine four-door Ford sedan traveling west on Sixth near Vermont, license plates unknown.

They hadn't learned that from Arnette. The only ones who could have told them that were Steinhorn and Masters! I had gooseflesh crawling over me in waves, and I expected to hear sirens and see flashers coming behind me any minute. I got myself together and had the car's computer copy the microcube into memory.

Luckily for me, the LAPD is chronically undermanned. We reached the Hollywood Hills with no sign of having been spotted. I'd just started up Hollycliffe when we heard a patrol car report that they had Hector Duncan in custody and would be heading downtown on the one-oh-one.

If they had Arnette and Duncan both, then they also had both of the microcube copies I'd sent. Most importantly, they had the one I'd sent to KCBS.

When I got to Molly's place, I drove a couple hundred feet past it and turned up a little dead-end lane, parking by a "For Sale" sign on a picket fence. Then we backtracked to Molly's on foot. When I rang her doorbell, I half expected a uniformed policeman to answer. That's the shape my mind was in. Instead I heard Molly's voice trumpet, "NEVER MIND, KATEY! I'VE GOT IT!" Seconds later she opened the door. "Martti!" she said, as if I was an old and dear friend. Then Myers registered on her. "Both of you! Come in!" She bustled us through the door and closed it behind us, then we sat down in a sunroom with a view across the L.A. Basin. "So," she said to me, "who's your friend? And what brings you here today?"

There was something about that brass voice, red hair, and complete integrity that settled me down. I introduced Myers, then I told her about his statement, and Arnette, and Duncan, and seeing Masters—all of it, wondering if I was giving her too much too fast. She grew a crease between her eyes, and clenched her jaw, jutting her chin out.

"You know what the hell's happened, don't you?" she said when I'd finished.

"Masters and the LAPD have something going together."

She nodded. "Damn straight they do! That's the only explanation. D'you have the foggiest idea what?"

"I think so," I answered. And told her, the picture developing for me as I talked. The biggest crime organization in L.A. is the so-called Spanish mafia. It's bigger than the Sicilian or Korean, even bigger than the black. None of them is actually an organization. Each is a group of so-called "families," with loose agreements on what are sometimes called franchises. Anyway, in the Spanish mafia, the three biggest, most troublesome dons had disappeared during the past three years, which had thrown the families into serious disarray. With discipline impaired, factions distrusting each other, fighting each other, it wasn't surprising that their morale, security policies, and agreements had gone down the tubes. The LAPD had arrested dozens of family members, and the prosecutor's office had sent most of them to prison.

In major crime syndicates, the leaders, the dons, are protected by layers of underlings—protected from violence, protected from informers, protected from getting their own hands dirty in ways the police could use to put them away. And if the heat did get bad, they'd bop across the border into Mexico. Take a vacation for a few weeks or months till things cooled off.

But starting two years ago, Luis "El Grande" Lopez, Eddie "Yaqui" Macias, and Johnny "Numero Uno" Guzman had dropped from sight, one after another, as if on one of those vacations. Only they hadn't reappeared. After this long, it was doubtful they'd be back, doubtful they were alive. Matter of fact, I'd pretty much forgotten about them.

How it looked to me was, the LAPD had gotten used to hiring Prudential, for example, to handle a lot of their more demanding investigation load. It was more economical: didn't require as much staff, as much organization, as much facilities—as much pressure. Now, it seemed to me, they'd gone a step, a long step, further. They'd hired an Ensenada-based criminal organization, SVI, to assassinate selected underworld leaders who seemed legally untouchable.

I asked Myers if I was on the right trail. He smiled a small, wry smile. "I'm your witness on that, too," he said.

"What're you going to do about it?" Molly asked.

"First of all, I was hoping you'd hide Robert here till I can pick him up again. He's our principal witness. Beyond that, I've got some resources I have to check with before I can make any explicit plans."

It was about a minute till noon then. Molly turned her TV on to the KCBS noon news, to see if, just possibly, Hector Duncan's microcube had somehow gotten through to their news people. Instead of hearing about SVI though, and the murder of Ray Christman, we watched footage of an apartment building—my home—the front half of it a pile of broken concrete. Police with dogs poked around for possible survivors while equipment and workmen moved rubble. The anchorman, Bart Weisner, said nothing at all about Kelly Masters, but he did say that the police were seeking an unnamed resident of the building for questioning.

I was willing to bet that I was the unnamed resident. They'd have a hard time making that stick. I had witnesses to my arrival at the office at a time that wouldn't allow my being the bomber. So they weren't thinking clearly. There were people at the top, in the LAPD, who were sweating, making poor decisions they'd play hell backing out of. And this had to be something that only a few were involved with. Now things were getting out of their control—Masters was going psychotic—and every time they did something to cover it—gave some weird order—the people around them would wonder. It wouldn't hold together long. Their only chance, not very good, was to get rid of me as soon as possible, and hope everything would settle out again.

Now, with Molly using my minicam, I recorded briefly what had been learned in Ensenada, and what I'd heard on the police band afterward, including the pickup of Hector Duncan. Concluding with what I suspected about unidentified LAPD officials and the SVI. Robert verified it. Then I used my last spare microcube to copy Myers' earlier statement, with my own as an addendum.

* * *

As long as my car was parked where it was, our hiding place was compromised. So leaving the cubes with Molly, I drove the car to Ralphs' Market at the corner of Western and Franklin, and left it in the parking lot. According to Molly, the store was open around the clock. A car parked there could go unnoticed for days.

Then I hiked back up the hill. She'd offered me the use of her second car, an old Dodge Town Van. I also borrowed a Dodger cap her son had left at home, and a denim work jacket she wore in cool weather, for walking, or for working around the yard. Plus I got a microcube mailer from her.

I drove the old Dodge down the hill. I wanted to mail the cube to Bart Weisner at his home, rather than the studio, but I didn't know his address. It wasn't listed in the public directory. So I stopped at Ralphs' lot, got in the company car, and used its computer to access the State Data Center—via the office mainframe, of course—then used the Lane County contract to access Weisner's mailing address. I was in luck: it was a 90027 post office box.

I didn't know whether the LAPD was monitoring the firm's computer or not, or even if they could. But if they were, they could use the call to locate the car; the boys in blue might arrive soon. So I got back in the Dodge and left. At the nearby Los Feliz Post Office—90027—I addressed the mailer, and dropped the microcube in the chute. Weisner's postal box was in the same building. If he picked up his mail that evening, he'd get it then. Otherwise, surely the next day.

Unless, of course, the police read the call, realized which "Weisner" I was interested in, and got a federal court order requiring the branch supervisor to turn it over to them. Which might—should—require convincing answers to some awkward questions.

I drove back to Molly's. I still didn't know what I was going to do next. I'd had ideas, but none of them felt good.

* * *

Molly and Myers and Katey and I sat around playing cards for a while, with the radio tuned to KFWB News. All we heard of any relevance was that the body count at the apartment was up to thirty-three, and so far no one had been found alive in the rubble. At about two-thirty, Myers started yawning. I lay down on one sofa and he on the other, and went to sleep.

The clock read 1640 when I woke up from busy dreams. I couldn't remember what they were about, but I'd awakened with the germ of an idea. After buckling my shoulder holster back on, I found the hyysikkään, then went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Molly heard me and came out of her office.

"So," she said, "what's happening?"

"I think it's time for me to move."

She started rustling around the kitchen, got out a plate of the great temptation, brownies, put them on the kitchen table, and was in the middle of pouring coffee when she stopped abruptly, scowling.

"Get your goddamn ass out of my space!" She didn't yell it, just said it loudly and firmly, with a distinct tone of annoyance. It embarrassed me, even though she wasn't looking at me when she said it. Then she finished pouring, and sat down as if nothing had happened.

"Reel your eyes back in, sweetbuns," she told me. "I wasn't talking to you." She tested her coffee with her upper lip, and sipped. "Now and then," she went on, "someone, some entity, some being, will show up in my space. If I don't like the way they feel, I send 'em packing. And if they don't git when I tell 'em to, I blast 'em. That gets rid of 'em every time."

"You mean—ghosts?"

"Not usually. Not in the usual sense. But someone without a body, or out of the body."

I got a rush of chills. "Do you know who it was?"

She snorted. "Don't know, don't care." She dunked a brownie and bit it in two. "D'you feel like telling me what you're going to do? Or would you rather keep it to yourself?"

I shifted my attention to my present problems. "Keep it to myself for now."

We sat there eating brownies and sipping coffee. Molly's blast had wakened Myers in the next room. He'd peeked in worriedly, saw us talking normally, and after a trip to the bathroom, joined us. Neither Myers nor I had much to say, and Molly wasn't being talkative either. I finished my coffee and stood up. "It's time for me to go," I said to her. "If you'll let Myers hide out here temporarily, the firm will pay. Fifty bucks per diem. How about it?"

Molly scowled. "For a couple of days tops; I'm not into house guests. I don't even let my kids stay more than two or three days."

"Is that okay with you, Robert?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Good. If I'm not back day after tomorrow . . ." I looked in my billfold; I didn't have a lot of cash, but enough to give Myers a hundred. "Catch a flight out of town, to Phoenix maybe, or San Francisco, and tell your story to the FBI."

He nodded again.

I got the jacket and Dodger cap that Molly had loaned me, and went out to her old Dodge. She'd been damned generous to someone she hardly knew. Then I got in and started it up, but before I could drive away, it seemed to me someone was there, watching me. So I looked in the back, and saw no one.

Then I got out and looked in the enclosed luggage compartment. As I closed the hatchback, I suddenly realized.

"Get your goddamn ass out of my space!" I didn't shout it, but it slashed out of me with snap and anger. Waves of chills washed over me then, as intense as orgasm, and after half a minute, when they'd settled out, I realized there was no one there but me.

But there had been! I didn't doubt it. I hoped I'd blasted him out of his ectoplasmic socks.

32

PICTURE AT A PARTY

I got back in the Dodge and drove down Hollycliffe to Bronson. In some respects, Los Feliz and the I-5 Freeway was the most logical route to take, but Los Feliz was continually patrolled because of speeders, so instead I took Franklin west, and then the Hollywood Freeway. The freeways were safer for me than surface streets. They were patrolled by the California Highway Patrol, and I was pretty sure the bad apples in the LAPD wouldn't invite the CHP in on their game. They could order their own officers without questions getting asked, at least out loud, at least for a while. But the CHP or the sheriff's department would want explanations.

I crossed Cahuenga Pass and left the Hollywood for the Ventura Freeway westbound, then exited onto Coldwater Canyon and drove north. LAPD territory again. I hadn't gone far, hadn't crossed Tujunga Wash yet, when I heard a siren growl, the sort of little growl patrolmen use to get your attention. I looked in my rearview mirror, and sure as hell, there he was, coming up on me from behind, flasher spinning.

I'd been careful not to speed or break any other traffic laws, and it was still daylight, so it couldn't be a taillight out or the telltale wrong glint from an out-of-date license sticker. The first thing they'd want was to see my driver's license, and even if they didn't remember the all-cars bulletin, they'd check the name on their computer. Standard practice. And there I'd be.

I didn't think it all out like that, of course; that's simply the data I acted on. Instead of pulling over, I swerved through a short gap in the oncoming traffic. Horns blared; tires squealed. Someone sideswiped me and caromed into the police cruiser. Someone else broadsided me. I was pretty well shaken up. There were other crashes, half a dozen or more, then relative quiet. Molly's van was on its left side, and the right side was smashed in, so I unbuckled, crawled quickly to the rear and out the back door, which had sprung open. I needed to separate myself from the Dodge, hopefully before the patrolmen worked their way to where they could see me get out of it. The scene was turning into an ants' nest. People were running over, helping people out of smashed cars, and for half a minute I pretended to be part of them. The patrol car was on its side, too, and it looked as if the officers hadn't been able to get out yet. There were enough smashed cars there, and stopped cars, that it looked as if I'd get away with it. And I didn't even seem to be injured, just shaken up.

I walked over to the sidewalk, where a crowd of people stood staring at the wreckage. There were too many of them to have gathered since the pileup; they'd been there before. Mostly they were young; we were right next to Valley College. A small group of them, about eight or nine that seemed to be together, started walking away then, and I joined them. I didn't want to be around when more police arrived.

"Quite a pileup," I said to a couple of them, a guy and a girl.

"You ain't just glibbin'," the guy answered. "I wonder what started it?"

I shook my head. "No telling. Someone lost control, I suppose. Went to sleep, maybe. What's the crowd about?"

"We just left the ball game. We beat Pierce."

"Pierce? Are they good?"

"They're the defending league champions."

"Huh! That's pretty good! Now what? Parties?"

"You got it."

Of the group I'd attached myself to, one or two looked to be still in their teens, but most were in their twenties. We crossed Tujunga Wash on Victory Boulevard, and after a few more blocks turned north on a residential street, and went in a small house rented by several of them. Someone got a jug of wine out of the fridge and poured. Someone else went out for more. Three or four other people came in, one of them with a giant bag of tortilla chips, and opened it. A joint got passed around.

I didn't drink or toke or add to the conversation, just threw in a ten when someone else went out to get a bushel of chicken wings from Colonel Sanders. The conversation soon left baseball and went to psychic stuff. Since the 2006 Stanford study of psychic phenomena, interest had surged on campuses.

The place was getting crowded. A girl who came in about the time the chicken wings arrived was a psychic photographer with a different shtick. Instead of people pointing their cameras at her and getting strange results, she pointed her Polaroid at other people. And my being a total stranger, she asked if she could take my picture.

"What does it do?" I asked. "Capture my soul?"

She laughed. "Maybe, in a sense. Usually I get a picture of the person surrounded by their aura."

"Kirlian photography?"

"No," someone else said, "better than that. Manuela uses ordinary Polaroid color film and gets the auras on that!"

"How does it work?"

She shrugged. I was standing; she was sitting on a tall kitchen stool. "Stand still and I'll shoot you," she said, so I did. After a few seconds she pulled the picture and stared at it. "Huh!" she said, "I never got one like this before." Two or three people looking over her shoulders seemed impressed too.

"Here." She handed it to me. It showed me, all right, but not in real time, and there wasn't any aura. It showed me standing behind Molly Cadigan's Town Van, peering in through the opened luggage doors. While from close behind me and a little to one side, an old man watched. Dimly you could see right through him! The farther down you got from his head, the more transparent, the less there he looked, but from what I could see of his feet, they were well above the pavement. His face was clear enough though, and from his expression, he did not wish me well.

Others crowded around to see. "How'd you do that, Manuela?" one of them asked.

"Darned if I know. I'm not sure it was me, this time. It felt as if someone, some spirit, was helping." She laughed then, pointing at the photo. "Not that one though. That is an evil spirit."

I just kind of sat there a while. This "evil spirit" was the wild card, the joker in the deck. Somehow it seemed to me he was behind the whole thing—Kelly Masters jumping into the scene, the apartment building blown up . . . The police recognizing Molly's van this evening, for chrissake! Though how someone like that communicated with people . . . But hell! Who else or what else knew I was using it?

Besides Molly. It could have been Molly. I couldn't have that though. I'd always been a good judge of character, and Molly wasn't someone who operated like that. She'd have . . . Geez! They'd trace her van and know where it came from! They'd probably been there already, and picked up Myers! I should have called! Where in hell was my head?!

"Can I use the phone?" I asked, loudly enough that whoever's place it was would hear. "Local call," I added.

"Go ahead," a guy said.

It was an old-fashioned voice-only phone. "Katey," I said, "is Molly there?"

Molly's voice came in then, on an extension. "Martti? Where the hell are you?"

"I'm not exactly sure, but I'm all right."

"The police just called, said my car was in a wreck. Totalled. I told them I'd loaned it to a friend. They said the driver was trying to elude a police cruiser and caused a pileup. They couldn't find him afterward; thought he must be wandering around hurt. They wanted to know your name, so I told them. Then I took Robert to stay with a friend of mine. A guy named Casey Jones. You want his number?"

I got it, memorized it, thanked her, and hung up. I didn't call Myers though. I just sat there awhile, not really thinking, just sort of mulling, turning over the same spadeful time after time and coming up with nothing. Finally I decided it was time to carry out my earlier plan, the one I had in mind when I'd left Molly's. I got up from my chair, Manuela, the psychic photographer, watching me. "You leaving too?" she asked.

"Yeah. I've got things I need to do."

She stood, and picked up her gadget bag. "So do I. You driving?"

"No. My car's in the shop. I'm walking."

"Maybe I can take you somewhere." She didn't wait for an answer, just went to the door with me and out into a lovely spring evening. It was nearly dark. "D'you know the spirit that helped me take the picture?" she asked.

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"It was a woman."

"Small?"

"Physically? Smaller than me." Manuela was a petite chicana, not a lot bigger than Tuuli, with small bones and fine features, about five-three and maybe a hundred pounds.

"How do you know?"

She shrugged. "You either know or you don't. Do you live around here?"

"Not close. I— I lived in the building that got bombed this morning."

Her eyes widened. "Jesus! Did you—lose anyone?"

She was thinking about the spirit, the female spirit she thought had helped her get the picture. I shook my head. "Acquaintances. My wife's out of town. Have you heard of Tuuli Waanila?"

"She's your wife? Tuuli Waanila's your wife?"

"Right."

"It must have been her then. Congratulations! . . . And to think I was going to make a pass at you!

"So where can I take you?"

Rather than tell her where I was headed, I had her drop me off at the Hollywood-Burbank Airport terminal. It wasn't that I didn't trust her. It just seemed wisest to keep things to myself. After she drove away, I turned and started walking. I had maybe a mile to go.

33

SETTING THINGS UP

Where I went was our security headquarters in an industrial section of north Burbank. It's where security crews are dispatched to short-term jobs. Prudential gets a lot of those: the grand opening of a new mall, a big celebrity party—that sort of thing. Guys logged in there by phone or radio when they reached the job, and it's the place they called their reports to at the end of their shifts. There are always guys without assignments, and it's where some of them would hang around and wait, reading or watching the tube, playing cards or pumping iron. At intervals, guys got physical exams there from a staff paramedic. Who also checked them for overweight. Joe doesn't mind a little overweight, luckily for me, but he won't stand for his guys getting actually fat. I knew some of the guys, and all of them knew who I was—sort of a celebrity investigator. I knew the senior sergeant in charge: Wayne Castro. "Martti!" he said when I came in. "How the hell are you?" It was obvious he didn't know I was in trouble. "What are you doing here amongst us peasants?"

"Is there a place we can talk, you and I? Privately? I'm on a case."

"Sure." He got up from his desk. "This way." They have a little debriefing room, and he took me inside. "How can I help?"

That's the attitude that made him senior sergeant in charge.

I wondered how private we really were there. Was that old man floating unseen beside us? I'd felt him before when he was. Hopefully I'd feel him if he was again.

"First I'm going to tell you what I've got in mind," I said. "If it sounds doable, I'll call Joe and check it out with him."

To begin with, I gave him the picture in brief, then told him what I had in mind. He turned really sober, but didn't let it throw him. After asking a few questions on details, he said it sounded doable—scary but doable. With Joe's approval. He'd have to call in some guys listed as occasionals—mostly off-duty sheriff's deputies and police from outlying communities, who moonlight with us from time to time.

I wasn't going to call Joe from there. If his house phone was monitored, they'd get my location. Instead I borrowed a company car and drove a few miles to North Hollywood, where I called from an outdoor booth at a shopping center. I caught him at home.

"Joe, this is Martti."

"Martti? Sinulla on musta rupinen perse!"

I should mention that Joe grew up among Finns in Iron Mountain, Michigan, and learned to talk a little MichFinn as a kid—enough to play with—back when it was still spoken quite a bit. What he'd just said was crude bordering on obscene—totally out of character for him. It was also totally non sequitur. He was trying to tell me something was wrong, that he didn't trust his phone. Which meant I couldn't talk freely. Then he went on. "Do you know the police are looking for you?"

I wished he spoke enough Finnish that we could talk about my plans in it. Unfortunately he couldn't say much more than thank you, give me a beer, shut up, and a dozen or two other phrases handy for teenagers. "Yeah," I said, "I heard it on the police band. Look, I'm at Meredith's, in the Valley—you know Meredith—and I have to make this fast. What I want to do is spend a bunch of company money. Minä valehtelen." (It means I'm lying; I figured he'd catch that one. He knew sinä valehtelet—you're lying.) "Maybe up to the max for my working account," I continued. "I need to leave town, do some stuff in Mexico. Fight fire with fire, so to speak. Make it all right, will you? Authorize it. I'm short on cash."

"Now look!" he said, "I'm not financing you for setting any bombs in Ensenada! The smart thing to do is give yourself up. You know that, don't you?"

"There's a time and place for everything, Joe. I'm going to do what I do with or without your help."

"It's your ass, Martti. Minua on nälkä." Which means "I'm hungry," another total non sequitur. Hopefully he'd try to get in touch with me on a safe line.

"Thanks for the help, Joe," I said sarcastically. "And the same to you." I disconnected, then hurried out, got in the car, and headed back to the security office. I wasn't sure what he'd do. But he and I didn't have any mutual friend named Meredith. Meredith was the street the security office was on, a connection I was betting he'd made. If he didn't—well, we'd see.

While I drove back, another possibility occurred to me: What if it was Steinhorn monitoring the calls? If it was— He hadn't been with us very long, but maybe long enough to recognize the allusion to "Meredith's." The Burbank PD was independent, but the LAPD just might ask for their help, if they were worried enough.

When I got there, there weren't any police cars or barricades. Joe had already called from a shopping center and said he'd call back. About ten minutes later he did. I gave him a rundown on what I'd learned—from Myers, and about seeing Masters and Steinhorn together . . . all of it with him recording. Including where Myers was hiding out. And told him what I wanted to do. He was spooked by it—so was I—but he approved. If we didn't get Masters soon, the guy might cut out and we'd never see him again. That or he'd do something even crazier than he already had.

Then he talked to Wayne, among other things telling him to follow my orders. Before we disconnected, he told me "Martti, for God's sake try to avoid bloodshed."

Joe doesn't take the Lord's name in vain. He really meant it. "I promise," I told him. "No bloodshed if I can help it." That had been my dad's working principle, too. I'd try, but I wasn't sure how avoidable it would be.

34

AMBUSH!

After our talk with Joe, Wayne phoned off-duty personnel and occasionals until we had a team of twelve men, including ourselves, that he thought were up to the job. All of them were police or ex-police, and several were ex-military as well. We even had an ex-Ranger and an ex-marine. He made it clear there might be shooting, and got only five refusals: four claiming other commitments, and one because of the 4 a.m. check-in.

I'd have preferred more time to sleep myself, but operating considerations dictated starting early.

Then Wayne and I worked out our plan. Normally you'd plan first and then decide on team size, but our team had needed to be nailed down before it got any later. Besides, the plan was simple. The main thing was to go over it on paper and try to foresee all the potential problems. Wayne called a couple guys back, and arranged to hire their personal vehicles as well. Meanwhile he sent two on-duty standbys to corporate headquarters in West Hollywood, to pick up an unmarked sedan with my access card. All the vehicles in Burbank had the company logo, so they wouldn't do for this job.

We both stuck to drinking decaf while we talked. The security office has a bunk room for men on standby, and we wanted to get what sleep we could. But when I finally lay down at 11:30, my mind was full of the uncertainties. Our plan had some serious holes, but we couldn't see any feasible way around them. The last time I looked at the clock glowing on the wall, it was 1:10, and the guy on the desk woke me at 3:20. I took a quick shower, first with near-scalding water, then with water as cold as the L.A. Water Board provides in May. Then I dried myself with a rough towel and made the best of it. When the first of our team arrived, I was breakfasting on a Peanut Plank out of the snack machine, and a mug of sweet coffee fortified with instant to make it stronger. Actually I felt alert, even a little wired.

First we briefed our team on the mission, stressing that anyone could still opt out without prejudice. No one did.

The sun was barely up, and there was very little traffic when we left in two private vans. Plus Wayne's personal pickup, and the unmarked company car—with the locater off. Everyone but me had Glocks as side arms. In addition, there were eight twelve-gauge pumpguns loaded with buckshot, and two spare box magazines for each. Since they've come out with a good automatic tube loader, shotguns have regained a lot of favor for police work. Actually I couldn't imagine needing to reload—if there was any shooting, it would be brief—but it seemed foolish not to take them. Two men carried car killers—lightweight, 50mm, low-muzzle-energy rocket launchers, only twenty-eight inches long. They'd been designed after the massive civil demonstrations and street fighting during the Great Crash. Wayne brought along a Colt Suppressor, a police version of the old Colt Commando. It's a fully automatic .22 caliber carbine, also only 28 inches long.

On the road, the weapons were stashed out of sight. As for me, I carried only the Walther in my shoulder holster. I wanted to seem unarmed.

We didn't want to look like a caravan, so we strung out. I led off, and each vehicle kept only the vehicle ahead of him in sight. It was a short drive to the Golden State Freeway, then north to the Valley Freeway and west out of the city, out of the LAPD's jurisdiction. From there we took a state road north to Fillmore—a small town by southern California standards—where we broke up to eat breakfast in two different restaurants, in three seemingly separate groups. I was the only one of us who went to breakfast armed. If we'd met the SVI there, we'd have been in real trouble. From Fillmore, we drove north a few miles into the Los Padres National Forest, to a picnic area Wayne knew. At that hour, no one was there but two drifters sleeping in the back of their eleven-year-old Ford pickup. It was a beautiful May morning, and I hated to do it, but I hassled them out. I had leverage: the area was posted against camping, I'm built like a wrestler, and there were two other guys in the car with me. Then, consulting with our ex-Ranger and marine noncoms, we decided on our ambush locations. The wooded picnic ground was strung out along a nearly dry creek. We chose the down-road edge; that way, if any early picnickers arrived before things got interesting, they'd be farther up the creek, hopefully out of harm's way.

By the time all assignments had been made, it was almost 8 o'clock: nearly time to call Joe at the office. I was depending on the phones there being monitored by either the LAPD, or hopefully the SVI. My bet was the SVI, using access provided by the LAPD; their conspiracy had to minimize officer involvement. The more they involved honest cops, the more likely that questions would get asked. Questions without safe and convincing answers. Then someone would call Internal Affairs, and the fat would be in the fire.

At 8:05 I got back in the company car and keyed the phone. Dalili transferred me to Joe without even checking with him. Obviously he'd told her to expect my call.

"Joe," I said, "I've had second thoughts since last evening."

"What do you mean, 'second thoughts,' Seppanen?"

"Tuuli got back last night. She doesn't want me to go to Mexico. So we're hiding out. We're in a National Forest campground about an hour from town. She's freaked, afraid I'll be killed, scared the SVI will track me down. I know this is a lot to ask, but— Could you send a couple guys out as bodyguards? From the security division? They wouldn't have to be top men; she won't know the difference. I'll pay for them myself if you want."

Joe put on a testy voice. "Damn it, Seppanen, you're stretching my patience."

I put a little edge on my own tongue. "Keep in mind what happened to our apartment house."

Long pause. "I don't know. You're a fugitive . . . How long do you want these guys?"

"A day or two. Yesterday I recorded a statement from a runaway SVI man, a guy named Robert Myers. It tells all about the SVI abducting and murdering Christman, and fits our earlier information perfectly. I've got it on microcube; it's in my pocket right now. The thing is, I sent a copy to KCBS-TV, via a runner named Hector Duncan. The whole thing ought to be playing on the noon news today—the evening news anyway. I'm surprised it wasn't on yesterday or this morning. I suppose they're doing some checking, to make sure it's not a hoax.

"After I sent off Myers' statement, he told me the LAPD is involved with the SVI. The SVI's terminated some heavy dons for them, in the Spanish mafia. He didn't know what the payoff was. Not cash, I wouldn't think. Probably privileges and an information pipeline. That's one reason Tuuli's so scared; the LAPD involvement."

"Huh!" Long pause. "Martti, you'd better not be lying to me. Okay, I'll send three good men. But if it comes to a face-off with the police, they'll have my orders to lay down. You got that? Now, where to?"

I told him. We were camped at the Rito Oso Picnic Area north of Fillmore, on a spur road off Forest Road 14. There were directional signs. Joe said the guys would get there about 11 o'clock.

Then we disconnected. He'd done a good job of acting. We both had.

Wayne had one of the guys drive back to where the spur road met Forest Road 14. The directional sign there had another sign hanging from it that said no camping, which contradicted my story, and we wanted it out of sight when the SVI arrived. Assuming they came. When he got back, we moved all the vehicles but the company sedan to the back end of the picnic area, where they couldn't be seen from the ambush zone. Then I had the men take their positions.

One of the considerations was that the guys would get sleepy. So Wayne was up the road a ways, hiding in a thicket of chaparral oak, watching. He was an inveterate varmint hunter—he lived in the Simi Valley near the edge of development—and carried a crow hunter's call in his glove compartment. When he saw someone coming, he was to caw three times, pause, then repeat, to alert us so everyone could get prone and ready. The guys were stationed in pairs, responsible for keeping each other awake.

I sat at the first picnic table, 60 or 70 feet from the road and next to a chimneyed stone fireplace I could duck behind. Then I waited, reading a copy of Sports Afield that Wayne had had in his pickup. Reading a bit and thinking a lot. Any battle plan, even a simple one like ours, is based on assumptions, and battles are famous for not going as planned. Things come up. Things go wrong. Everything goes to hell and confusion. If you've read much history, you know that.

The SVI might not have heard my talk with Joe, and the LAPD might not get the word to them. Hell, no one might have been monitoring at all; we could have been talking to ourselves. Or Masters might smell a rat and stay away, or send in a whole squad of men. Hopefully he'd come in personally with only two or three guys, and that would be all. But he might arrive with a squad, and send scouts in first, and we'd think the scouts were the whole party. Then we'd have the rest of them down on us after we'd committed ourselves, and the shit would hit the fan.

That was my biggest worry—that he'd send in scouts first. After all, most of his guys were ex-Rangers or ex-Special Forces, and if he didn't think to send out scouts, they'd remind him.

But then, if they were only expecting a guy and his wife, why send scouts?

Unless Masters smelled a rat. Back to that again. The stuff was running in circles through my mind. I'd read a little, then discover I didn't know what I'd been reading—that I was too busy worrying. A time or two I was interrupted in all this by crows cawing, but it was never three caws, then pause, then three more. It was always some other pattern, and answered from somewhere else—genuine conversations among genuine crows. They helped keep everyone more or less alert.

In my planning, I'd figured the SVI people might come out in ground cars, but I'd allowed for the chance that they'd fly to Fillmore in a floater or maybe two, which would be a lot quicker. Then fly in the rest of the way at near road level, in order to follow the signs. They'd surely have flown to L.A., and Masters no doubt had an LAPD temporary permit to operate out of the city's various shuttle fields.

At 9:12 by my watch, I heard Wayne's crow call, and my guts tightened. I was glad I'd taken time to relieve myself at the restaurant. Ten or twelve seconds later, an eight-passenger skyvan floated into sight, just centimeters above the road. I recognized the driver as Masters; this was no scouting party. Steinhorn sat next to him in front—I could see his black eyes—and there were several guys behind them. They saw me almost at once and stopped in the road. Masters gave an order, then got out, leaving Steinhorn in front. I got up slowly, staring as if I'd just then realized who they were. Three guys got out of the back, carrying old AK-47s. Masters himself held a .45 caliber service pistol pointed loosely in my direction.

The hair bristled on the back of my neck.

"Mr. Seppanen," Masters said with exaggerated courtesy. "I'm delighted to meet you at last."

I dropped the pretense. "The feeling is mutual, Masters. Please drop your weapons. My people are all around you, ready to blow . . ."

That's all I got out. Masters raised his automatic with both hands and I started to throw myself behind the fireplace. There was a lot of gunfire—the boom of the .45, the brief vicious sound of AK-47s, the heavier boom of shotguns, and the swoosh-whump of two car-killers hitting the engine compartment, all of it seeming simultaneous with a stunning pain in my head, a searing pain in my buttocks. Somehow I was still conscious, even though my vision had turned off. Someone was shouting "Jesus Christ, guys, hold your fire! Hold your fire!"

By that time it had already stopped. Voices called sharply; I don't recall what. Then someone right next to me said "Shit! God damn it! He took one right in the head!"

It hurt, all right, and my butt felt like someone had run a red-hot poker through it from one side to the other. I couldn't see anything, but for some stupid reason tried to get up. All I accomplished was to nearly pass out.

"Hey, he moved! He's alive!"

I wanted to say "Hell yes I'm alive," but didn't. It occurred to me I might vomit, and choke on it.

The next thing I was aware of, an indeterminate time later, I was on a stretcher, being loaded by paramedics into a floater.

35

LEGAL WRAP-UP

I was more or less conscious in the ambulance at first. I was aware of a paramedic saying, "I don't think his wound is that serious," and then, "Him? We may lose him." And realized vaguely that I wasn't the only casualty in the ambulance. When they were satisfied my skull wasn't fractured, they shot me up with something, after which I didn't remember anything for a while.

Actually they evacuated four wounded in two ambulances: me and three of the SVI people, while two lay dead back in the campground: Masters and one of his men. We got out of it so cheaply because our men were shooting at seen targets while Masters' men weren't. In fact, only two of Masters' men fired their AK-47s, a short burst each, one apparently while already hit and falling.

In my case, a .30 caliber slug—technically a 7.62mm from an AK-47—had hit the right side of my head at an angle. It tore its way across the top of my skull beneath the skin, and exited the other side near the top, actually creating a shallow groove in the bone. A weird wound. A doctor told me later it was remarkable I'd remained even semiconscious. I guess he doesn't know Finns, or half-Finns in my case. Another bullet had penetrated both buttocks from the right side, damaging nothing but meat. It seems that the lower half of my body never reached the shelter of the fireplace.

Joe told me about it in the hospital, after I woke up. He was also the one who told me that Masters was dead. Steinhorn had shot him in the back of the head, and Masters' .45 had kicked out one shot that went God knows where. It turned out that apparently none of Masters' guys had been very eager for this mission, and except for Steinhorn's shot that killed him, the men still in the skyvan hadn't shot at all. They'd come to the conclusion, the last few days, that their boss had gone bonkers. They'd stayed with him as long as they had because of old loyalties, and because they were in so deeply themselves.

Steinhorn had shot him hoping to prevent a firefight. For his troubles, he took some buckshot through the open door, in the left arm and leg, and in the guts.

Meanwhile the cube I'd mailed the day before made the KCBS noon news. So did the shoot-out at the Rito Oso Picnic Area, and the apparent LAPD involvement with SVI. Joe posted guards in my hospital room, more than anything else to protect me from possible news cameras. He loves publicity for the firm, but tries to keep his investigators' faces off the tube, for obvious reasons.

The survivors on Masters' team verified just about all our conjectures, mine and Carlos', and explained some things we'd missed. For example, what the SVI was all about, or had been to start with. While in the OSS, Masters had developed a dedicated hostility toward terrorists. Then he'd inherited investments that would enable him to live more than comfortably without working, so he'd taken an early retirement. But not to play golf. He and Reyes, along with a well-to-do veteran of the Mexican Foreign Service, started SVI as an aberrated expression of idealism, to assassinate and otherwise terrorize terrorists. Masters and Reyes had recruited men they'd known from the Rangers, Special Forces, and OSS.

It was about the time they'd contracted to abduct Ray Christman that Masters began to change. We got some insight into that because the PEF raided SVI's offices late on the day of the shoot-out, and arrested Aquilo Reyes. Reyes was an American citizen, originally from Casa Grande, Arizona. According to him—and this was validated by computer records of SVI and Security Pacific Bank—Christman's death was contracted for by Alex DeSmet, a retired OSS official, and one-time mentor and patron of Masters in the agency. That's right; that DeSmet. Fred Hamilton's ex-father-in-law.

According to Reyes, Masters was at first unwilling to even consider the contract, though he pretended to, to avoid offending his old boss. Such a contract was very much at variance with his principles. But it troubled him to refuse the man who'd done so much for him, troubled him enough that he'd talked about it repeatedly to his partner. Masters also said that such a proposal was totally out of character for DeSmet, and wondered if the older man was having psychological problems.

I'd have wondered too. DeSmet's behavior certainly didn't sound like the man who'd dismayed his wife by refusing to be upset when their daughter joined the Gnosties.

Then one day, DeSmet flew back down to Ensenada in his private plane. The two of them had played a round of golf, then eaten supper together, and DeSmet made his pitch again. In the morning, Masters agreed. From that day on, according to Reyes, Masters was a different man. The change was mostly subtle, but on occasion it was glaring: He would do and say things that were very unlike him. The mission to stop Prudential's investigation was an example. Reyes had objected vehemently, but Masters had been the managing partner. After Masters and his team had taken off for L.A., Reyes had called Tischenberg-Hinz, and they'd talked about dissolving the partnership.

I could see Steinhorn's motivation now. His family had been killed by terrorists. He'd been ripe for recruiting. Then things had gone sour, gotten worse and worse, and at the end he'd done what he could toward making it right.

* * *

As far as the LAPD connection was concerned, five second- and third-echelon officials had knowingly and deliberately conspired with the SVI to have the three racketeers murdered. In the project to kill the investigation, they'd operated through several lower-ranking officials who were aware that the orders they were carrying out were illegal, but didn't know the details. A total of eleven officials are in prison on assorted convictions of criminal conspiracy, racketeering, and murder.

Aquilo Reyes, Eustaquio Tischenberg-Hinz, and most of their agents, have been tried and sentenced by the Mexican government on a variety of charges.

Prudential collected the agreed-upon nominal fee from Lane County, and a sizeable fee from the feds, based on a previous court decision. We got substantial payment from the city of Los Angeles for exposing the criminal activities in the department, and settled for goodwill from the Mexican government, which legally owed us nothing. We also collected the completion fee from Butzburger, who came to the hospital and wished me well.

Finally we collected headlines galore. Prudential is now, beyond a doubt, the most famous investigation firm in the world. Joe's having to turn down contracts, while he recruits and reorganizes for a larger scale of operations. He's rented another floor in our building, too. I ended up with a promotion to senior investigator, and mixed emotions. For one thing, terrorism, foreign and domestic, is a curse of our times. And while SVI's activities were themselves a kind of terrorism, they may actually have had the effect of reducing terrorism overall. It's hard to honestly know. At any rate, their original impulse was understandable.

A couple of days after the shoot-out, I had an orderly wheel me in to visit Steinhorn. There was a pair of federal marshals guarding his door. I thanked him for not letting Masters kill me, and he said someone had to do something before things got any worse. After that I apologized for sucker punching him, and he told me to stuff it, that a sucker punch was the least he'd had coming. Then he kind of half grinned, we shook hands, and I left. I couldn't think of anything else to say, and he had stuff on his mind. He's in prison now in Mexico.

Tuuli got to the hospital on the night of shoot-out day. She'd learned about it not by any psychic route, but on the six o'clock news from Phoenix. The only (possibly) psychic element in it was, she'd never watched the six o'clock news in Arizona before. She "just happened to turn it on that day." When I asked if she'd influenced the psychic photographer, she said, "What psychic photographer?," and made me tell her about it.

Oh, and DeSmet suicided the evening after the shoot-out—shot himself through the brain. Sad. He'd been an able man, and apparently a good one, a decent one, most of his life. But that's history now. I've got a new case, not as interesting as that one, but nowhere near as dangerous. So. Are we done? . . . Good. Then if you can give me the antidote, I'll get out of here and go to Gold's for a workout. My damn weight's slid up five pounds again.

PART THREE:

CLIMAX AND

COMPLETION

PROLOG

Her crepe-soled nurse's shoes stepped quietly on the closely fitted flagstones. It was past time for her employer's breakfast, but sometimes he'd lose himself in contemplation or a book, neglecting to come in at nine o'clock to eat. And if he was meditating, it would be worth her job to disturb him. She didn't expect to find anything wrong, despite his generally poor health. He'd simply been preoccupied lately.

When she saw him on the ground, half out of the arbor, she hurried to him, knelt in brief examination, then as fast as her overweight, middle-aged body would take her, ran back to the house to get help.

* * *

The physician left the room thoughtfully. He'd done what he could, and considered the prognosis favorable. Next time—who knew? He'd once wanted a brain scan done on his patient, but the man had refused, absolutely, and it seemed now there'd been no tumor, for that had been years earlier. Beyond that, he had no explanation for the seizures. Possibly someone else might, but his patient had expressly forbidden him to bring in consultants.

He had no illusions that he was medically up to date. As up to date as many, no doubt, but . . . Not much of his reading was professional these days. Hadn't been for years.

His patient's reclusiveness went beyond a simple preference for privacy. It seemed to reflect some pathological condition, although he was brilliant beyond a doubt.

Being a house physician for a sometimes crochety recluse was not what he'd visualized as a student, many years earlier. He hadn't known himself well then, hadn't foreseen his susceptibility to alcohol, and eventually cocaine. Or how he would ruin his marriages—one, two, and three—and allow, even cultivate the decay of his practice.

Then his patient-to-be had found him. No doubt through agents. He was aware, vaguely, that the man had people elsewhere who served him, though as far as he knew, they never came in person. The man, whose health had already been poor, had sat down with him as a friend, not a patient. Had charmed him, impressed him with his knowledge—its breadth, its depth—and his insights into many things. And in a short series of ever-stranger visits and gentle questionings, had given him to see things he'd never imagined. Until he became aware that he no longer wanted to snort white powder or drink amber whiskey.

Only then had his friend asked him to be his private physician. At a salary ridiculously low for a doctor, but impossible to refuse. He wasn't young himself, though less old than he looked, and his "future" was past. And after all, the man had saved him, from himself and his addictions. With a signed contract in hand, he'd saved him from his creditors as well, by a remarkable display of bargaining. He'd paid them off in cash, thirty to sixty cents on the dollar!

Besides, the man had a remarkable library, and the doctor had one addiction left—books. Between the two of them, they read enough for fifty ordinary people.

But they rarely talked anymore as friends. They seldom had, once their agreement was signed.

* * *

Looking back a few days later, the old man considered himself lucky to have come through alive. He'd been unconscious for more than twenty hours. The mind he'd been in was one he'd felt secure with, one he'd come to control more completely than any he'd associated with before. But to be in it at the moment of violent death . . .

Never had anyone interfered so utterly with him before. Never. Not Christman, not anyone. Christman had cost him more, far more. But in terms of personal interference . . .

And to develop one's powers, one must uphold one's integrity.

Christman he'd killed personally, so to speak. He'd been there, willed the trigger pulled, seen the dismay on Christman's face. He'd be more circumspect in handling this man—use a throwaway resource, some potent underworld group, set it in motion and allow it to operate. And if it failed, use another. There was no hurry. And he needed to husband his physical strength, the health that remained to him. While he developed his powers further, sufficiently to renovate the difficult husk he occupied, rejuvenate it.

He chuckled. He would rejuvenate it; he was confident of that now. He'd made major progress recently in his ability to psychically tinker bodies. He could even kill now without an intermediary, if the person's consciousness was sufficiently weakened. He'd tested that, first with comatose, then semi-comatose bodies. It involved manipulating certain gross physiological functions. To rejuvenate a body, of course, would require more subtle, intricate, and knowledgeable manipulations. He'd hypnotize his physician and question him, have him help design a program. Presumably it would take time, and no doubt numerous steps. But he'd always been patient, he told himself. Almost always.

36

GRAND CANYON;

THE BARNEY TRAIL

October 2012

It was Indian summer in Flagstaff, Arizona. With Tuuli beside him, Martti Seppanen turned their rented Ford travel van north on US 180, here called Humphrey Street. In less than a minute they were out of the downtown business district, driving through a pleasant residential area.

This was the Coconino Plateau, which at 2,100 meters and higher was a land of coniferous forests. To their left, intermittently visible between shade trees, was the low, pine-clad mesa called Mars Hill, with its observatory domes and comblike arrays of antennae. Northward, the street led the eye to a pyramidal mountain peak that loomed bare-topped above forested slopes. To Martti, Tuuli seemed energized with an expectation he didn't really understand. "Those peaks," she said, "are the eroded rim of an ancient volcano. Did you know that?"

"Nope. No I didn't."

"It's supposed to have been twenty thousand feet tall before the top blew off, a very long time ago. Can you imagine? And this is what's left. Humphrey Peak is the highest part of the rim, 12,680 feet. An Indian spirit lives in it. I've met him."

Martti said nothing. Nothing came to him.

"You can't see Humphrey from here," she went on. "Agassiz and Fremont are in the way, with the ancient crater in between. Twenty thousand years ago it held a glacier. Now it holds patches of aspen, and great heaps of rock."

He'd seldom seen her so talkative. She paused, then began to recite:

Primal mountain bursting long ago,

rupturing the darkness with your might,

shrouded with clouds of ash and fumes

that glowed and flashed and shuddered

in the night,

high shoulders flowing red with molten rock,

with heat and sullen light.

Is that you?

Is that you

so calm and clean beneath the sky,

slopes serene in snow

and forest frosted white?

Ah, I know you in many moods,

green, with branches dripping rain,

yellow with aspen

or blind with blizzard.

I know you now.

She looked at her husband expectantly. "Nice," he said. It seemed to him he should say more, but didn't know what. After a moment he asked, "Who wrote it?"

"I don't know. Frank recited it when he and Mikki hiked me up the mountain to meet the Indian spirit. He wrote it down for me when we got back to Long Valley."

Indian spirit. Was there really such a thing up there? He supposed there was, if Tuuli said so. And if there was, she'd probably have felt it; maybe communed with it. The old-time Lapps, it seemed to him, had missed a bet in having had only male shamans. He wondered if he could ever sense a spirit, then remembered the visitor he'd felt in front of Molly Cadigan's that day, and wondered if it qualified.

While they'd talked, they'd left the town behind, for what a sign told them was the Coconino National Forest. For some miles its pines alternately crowded the highway and stood back behind meadows of tall grass that formed vistas, provided scope. Here and there was private land, subdivided and built upon, but mostly it was forest. There was no hint of cloud, but autumn haze softened every view. Then the highway climbed a long tapering skirt of the mountain, to top out on a higher level of the plateau. Here for a few miles the land was an old lava flow, its forest thin and scrubby, its black and rugged bedrock showing often through short bunchgrass.

From this, the highway emerged into a long meadow that gave them another vista. Martti pulled off at a tiny roadside chapel, a rustic, cross-topped A-frame. Here there was soil again, and the grass stood tall, cured pale yellow by late summer's freezing nights.

Tuuli was out of the van ahead of him, beaming at what she saw. They'd driven half around the mountain, and looked southward now at its north side. A band of yellow aspen clothed its lower slopes, and nearer, bordering the meadow, tall stands of it glowed red-gold in the late sun. Above the aspen zone was a forest of dark spruce, and above timberline a thin covering of snow bequeathed by an early October storm. Tuuli's hand found Martti's, and she stood close, leaning against his arm, her head against his shoulder.

It seemed to him he should say something, then she said it for him: "It's beautiful."

"Yeah," he said, "it sure is." They stood a minute longer, then got back in the van and drove on. They'd traveled little in their year of marriage. Actually they'd been married on a trip, but it hadn't been a vacation in the usual sense. After he'd solved the case of the twice-killed astronomer, Joe had given him administrative leave and sent him out of town to avoid the cameras. The case itself hadn't drawn nearly the attention the Christman case had, but Martti had drawn a lot. In that earlier instance, the detective had become the focus of attention. In the Christman case, the case itself, with its sensational elements, had become the focus, with the media only secondarily interested in the detective.

At any rate, it was their first vacation trip since their honeymoon, with the Grand Canyon, Tahoe, and Yosemite the principal points they planned to visit.

After leaving the meadow, they passed between two cinder cones and dropped back to a lower level, perhaps 7,000 feet, driving for a time across a broad plain sparsely grown with juniper; a rather bleak plain, scarred for a short distance by some abandoned effort at development. Some miles farther, the scrub began to change. Pinyon pines became prominent, looking like some needle-bearing orchard in drastic need of tending. Then ponderosa pines again, their trunks straight, their bark rusty yellow. Soon afterward, the van entered Grand Canyon National Park, following the highway to Grand Canyon Village.

Because it was late, they went to the Visitors' Center first, before it might close, to register for their wilderness hike. While Tuuli held their place in line, Martti browsed brochures and maps, buying a plastic topographic map from a dispenser. After a few minutes, they met with the ranger on duty.

"Where do you plan on hiking?" the man asked.

It was Tuuli who answered. It had been her choice, based on discussion with the Diaconos. "The Barney Trail."

The ranger smiled slightly. "Have you ever been on the Barney Trail?"

"No, but I've hiked with people who have. I hiked with them to Sipapu and other places. They recommended it to me."

The official face turned condescending. "I'm familiar with the trail to Sipapu. It is not the Barney Trail."

Martti interrupted. "Did anyone say it was?"

The ranger's eyebrows registered surprise at the response.

"We didn't come in here to listen to sarcasm," Martti went on. Though he spoke quietly, he drew the attention of half the room. "We came in to register and get advice. If you want to advise against it, good enough, but mind your manners. And if you refuse us, you better be ready to justify it in a hearing, because I guarantee there'll be one."

Martti Seppanen had a lot of presence when he chose to. The ranger was blushing now, and Martti was starting to. This was the sort of thing that once would have made Tuuli furious with him. She hated scenes. And ironically, he rarely created one, except in reaction to what he took as a slight to her.

The ranger rallied. "No offense intended, sir. I only want to impress you both that the Barney Trail is dangerous. There are places where it may slide beneath your feet, for example. But the most serious risk is getting lost. Old Man Barney roughed out that trail a hundred and twelve years ago, carved it out just enough to lead burros over it, loaded with packs of ore. He last used it in 1907, before the canyon became a national park." The ranger's color was back to normal now. So was Martti's. "Since then it's washed out or slid out in numerous places, and it's entirely unmaintained. Today it's used about once a week. You can easily stray off of it onto some game trail. More than a few people have gotten lost hiking old prospector trails in the Park, an experience more than just frightening. Some have died. There's usually no water till you get to the bottom, to the river. And the hike back out involves climbing 5,000 feet—about a mile—in places up very steep slopes.

"Also we don't go in looking for people simply because they fail to check back in. Most people don't take the trouble to. So someone has to report them missing. Perhaps the sheriff's department, when their car is reported abandoned."

His eyebrows stood high, questioning. Tuuli smiled at him. "Thank you, Mr. Kensington." She'd read his name badge. "My husband and I both grew up in the backwoods, he in northern Michigan, I in Finnish Lapland. I've hiked a great deal this year, and he's a Choi Li Fut black belt who trains regularly, so we're reasonably fit. I believe that with a map to orient on, we'll be all right."

Martti wrote their names and address on the register. She hadn't gotten mad at him, and for the manyeth time, he reminded himself of how much she'd changed since their visit to the Merlins. And even more since her long stay with the Diaconos. He still hadn't fully adjusted.

"Will you be camping?" the ranger asked. "Or do you plan to stay in the village tonight?"

"In the village, at the Harvey House," she said.

"Well then, have a good stay and enjoy your hike. I'm sure that experienced people like yourselves won't do anything reckless."

As they walked to their car, they agreed to go find the trailhead while it was still daylight. That would allow them an early start in the morning. They drove slowly along the narrow blacktopped road, past landmarks the Diaconos had told Tuuli about, until she said, "There!" Martti slowed, his eyes following her pointing finger, then pulled off onto the shoulder. "That tree with three small blazes, one above the other," she told him. "There should be a footpath there, maybe hard to see. The trailhead should be only about a hundred yards in. It's marked by a small sign."

They found the path, and then by the canyon's rim, the sign—a printed, legal-sized sheet, laminated and framed. Martti read it aloud:

!!WARNING! USE THIS TRAIL AT YOUR OWN RISK!!

DO NOT HIKE IT WITHOUT FIRST REGISTERING AT THE NATIONAL PARK VISITORS' CENTER IN GRAND CANYON VILLAGE.

* * *

THE BARNEY TRAIL IS AN HISTORIC PROSPECTOR TRAIL. IT IS NOT MAINTAINED OR PATROLLED, AND IS DANGEROUS TO HIKE. IN PLACES IT DISAPPEARS; ONE CAN EASILY GET LOST. IN PLACES IT IS TREACHEROUS; ONE CAN EASILY HAVE A DANGEROUS OR FATAL FALL. THE TRAIL IS STEEP; ONE CAN EASILY BECOME EXHAUSTED AND COLLAPSE. THERE IS NO WATER TO BE HAD ABOVE THE RIVER; ONE CAN EASILY BECOME DEHYDRATED AND DIE, ESPECIALLY IN SUMMER, WHEN AIR TEMPERATURES IN THE CANYON COMMONLY EXCEED 100° (38° C).

* * *

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HIKE THE BARNEY TRAIL, OR ANY OTHER UNMAINTAINED, UNPATROLLED TRAIL, IF YOU SUFFER FROM A HEART CONDITION, OR ANY OTHER CONDITION THAT RENDERS YOU SUSCEPTIBLE TO COLLAPSE. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HIKE THIS TRAIL IF YOU ARE NOT IN VERY GOOD PHYSICAL CONDITION.

* * *

THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO USE THIS TRAIL. YOU USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. DO NOT USE IT WITHOUT FIRST REGISTERING AT THE NATIONAL PARK VISITORS' CENTER IN GRAND CANYON VILLAGE.

* * *

IT IS ILLEGAL TO CARRY FIREARMS IN THE PARK. IT IS ILLEGAL TO DAMAGE PLANTS OR WILDLIFE.

THE RULE CONCERNING TRASH IS: IF YOU CARRY IT IN, YOU MUST CARRY IT OUT. DO NOT LEAVE TRASH IN THE CANYON. DO NOT BURY TRASH; WILD ANIMALS WILL SMELL IT AND DIG IT UP. BRING YOUR TRASH OUT WITH YOU.

artti finished reading with an irritation he knew was unreasonable. A reaction, he realized, to a public agency telling him what was good for him. Mainly they're just informing people, he chided himself, and reminding them about decent ethics.

He looked at Tuuli. "What do you think?"

"I think," she answered, "that after we've eaten, we should drive back out here and sleep in the van, instead of the hotel. We'll get to sleep earlier, and get an earlier start in the morning. And save ourselves money."

* * *

It was barely breaking dawn when their travel alarm woke them. Though the morning was near freezing, inside it was snug, thanks to the small electric heater powered by the GPC. After taking turns at the chem-pot, they washed in the tiny sink, being frugal with the water. Then they breakfasted on trail rations—rye wafers spread thick with liverwurst; rice-balls; freeze-dried pineapple slices; and a handful of raisins, washed down with decaf.

Finally they donned sweaters and shouldered their daypacks. It occurred to Martti to take his Walther, but he recalled the regulation against firearms in the park. Leaving it in the door pocket, he locked the van and they left. Dawn had lightened enough that even in the woods they followed the path without trouble, then started down the Barney Trail. It angled downward into a steeply descending side canyon, Barney Canyon, and was difficult at first. Wherever possible they clutched shrubs. To lose one's footing there would be to slide, maybe bounce, down a steep rocky slope, certainly to injury, and possibly death.

Yet mostly the going was not as tricky or treacherous as Martti had expected. For a time, Barney Canyon was roughly V-shaped, its slopes steep but not precipitous, with patchy shrubs. In places the trail was plain to see, still showing the signs of Old Man Barney's pick-and-shovel work. Martti thought what a tough and patient man the prospector had been, a glutton for danger and the hardest kind of labor. And wondered if, in fact, Old Man Barney had been old at the time, or if he'd been young, and the appellation added later.

Ahead of them the slope steepened, while the ridge crest above descended faster than they, in a series of great rugged steps. Before long, the crest met the trail, to form a long, nearly level "backbone" 10 to 20 feet wide on top, leading out to a crumbling sandstone "chimney." From the backbone they looked out across the miles-wide Grand Canyon. The terrain below them was wildly broken—a confused jumble of time-eroded ridges, chimneys, and arroyos. The sun was newly risen, and the pinnacles and upper walls of the opposite rim were washed with pale rose.

To the east they heard a distant commotion of raven voices. A great clamoring flock, diffuse and disorganized, was flying westward down the canyon toward them, and Tuuli and Martti, hands joined, stopped to watch. The flock flew pretty much at the same level as the crest they stood on, and as it approached, its noise differentiated into separate voices, deep and harsh: "COR-R-R-RP! COR-R-R-RP!" with now and then a single liquid note, as if a stone had been dropped into a deep well.

The point of the flock crossed ahead, then the flock proper was passing close around them. One great black bird climbed past them not four meters distant, gaining altitude, its wings, spreading some 40 inches, sounding a sharp whoosh! whoosh! whoosh! as they thrust the air. The flock passed and passed. Two crossed the crest just ahead and some 20 feet higher, flying parallel perhaps 15 feet apart. Abruptly and in unison they folded their inside wings, slipping sharply down and toward each other, then spread them again, rolling sideways, their bodies touching in a playful feathered kiss before they flew on.

Then the flock was past. The earthbound humans watched it draw away, Tuuli radiant, Martti humbled. After another minute they turned and hiked on.

* * *

Another van drove eastward from the village, a larger and more expensive machine, also with California plates. When it came in sight of the travel van, it slowed, to pull off the blacktop across the road from it. Four black men and a woman got out and walked to Martti's vehicle. "It's theirs, all right," the leader said. "Got to be." He turned to one whose eyes showed oriental ancestry. "Harley, open it up."

Harley Suk O'Connell took a flat kit from a jacket pocket, removed a tool, and worked with it on a lock. After a few seconds the door opened for him. The leader climbed inside, checked the glove compartment, then the driver's door pocket. He found the Walther, and after removing the cartridges from magazine and chamber, replaced the magazine. "Just in case," he said grinning, and got back out.

One of the men was dressed differently than the others, in denims and work boots. He was tall, lean, and very dark, with exceptionally long hands. The leader turned to him. "What's next, Cowboy?"

Cowboy beckoned with his head, then turned away without speaking and strode into the woods, the others trotting to keep up. In a minute they came to the trailhead sign that Martti had studied the evening before. Cowboy stopped and began to read silently. One of the others scowled. "Read it out loud, Cowboy," he said.

Cowboy looked at him. It was clear he didn't like the man. "Read it yourself."

The man tightened. "I don't read shit like that."

"I'll bet you don't."

The man's face twisted in anger, and the leader intervened. "Lionel, Cowboy, cool it, both of you!" he said, then read the sign aloud himself. When he'd finished, he grunted. "It's like the ranger said when he talked to Seppanen yesterday: You could get lost and die down there."

Eyes hooded by blued lids, the woman looked down the trail. "And they went down anyway?"

"Looks like it." He turned to Cowboy, who was examining the ground.

Cowboy nodded. "Fresh tracks. One set is small."

The leader looked where Cowboy was pointing. All he could see was that the ground was scuffed. "You ready to go down there now?"

The man shrugged. "Why not?"

They went back to their van, where Cowboy opened the luggage compartment and belted on his canteen and heavy Colt .44 revolver. Then he took his rifle out, an old .257 Sako with scope and a silencer—a high-velocity, flat trajectory sport rifle with a clip of soft-point bullets. Finally he saluted the leader. "See you later, Jamaal." He looked at the others. "Harley, Naylene. Lionel. Quite a while later, unless they change their minds and don't go all the way down. That may be what they'll do."

He slung the rifle across his back, and the others followed him back to the trailhead. He started down, and they watched till the canyon wall curved and Cowboy passed out of sight. Then they returned to their van again. It was still chilly on the rim, and they sat inside to stay warm.

"How come," said Lionel, "that Cowboy talk like he does? He don' sound like no brothuh."

Jamaal looked him over before answering. Not many blacks talked like Lionel anymore. It was out of style, though he tended to slip into it himself a bit when talking with Lionel. "Cowboy's from Wyoming," Jamaal said. "He's a cowboy. He didn't grow up around brothers, except his family. Everyone else was white around there."

Lionel already knew Cowboy's origins. Simply, his considerations of race didn't allow for such anomalies—for any anomalies. He couldn't handle them; forgot them, or failing that, ignored them. Now he dismissed Cowboy from his mind. "We should have killed 'em last night. Found out what room they in, snuck up there and killed 'em then."

"We're supposed to kill them where no one will know," Jamaal said patiently. "If we can. That's why Terence hired Cowboy. Seppanen's a shark, you know that. Works for Prudential, and Terence doesn't need Prudential on our ass. That's why, when I heard Seppanen and that ranger, I decided we'd do it down there." He gestured toward the canyon. "Down there, if Cowboy does his job right, nobody'll find the bodies. And the rangers won't know they never came out. Likely Prudential won't even know they were here, unless Seppanen called and told them. And why would he do that? He's on vacation."

Jamaal was as much reviewing things for himself as talking to Lionel. Terence would like the way he was handling it, he told himself. There'd likely be a bonus for him when they got back.

Meanwhile Lionel sulked. "That's roach shit, bein' scared of Prudential."

"When you tell Terence he's roach shit," Jamaal said dryly, "do it when I'm not there. You'll be lucky if the worse he does is whup your ass. He's not bein' roach shit; he's bein' smart. He's avoidin' hassles with no profit in them."

Lionel subsided, scowling, then looked toward Harley, who was smoking a cigarette in the driver's seat. "Hey, gook eyes," Lionel said, "what you thinkin' about?"

Harley didn't even turn around. "You don't want to know."

Lionel bridled at that. "What you mean, I don't want to know? I asked you, didn't I?

"Lionel!" Jamaal snapped, "shut your mouth." Jamaal wished he'd argued when Terence had assigned the man to him. Lionel had tried repeatedly to pick a fight with Harley. Without his own repeated intervention, they'd have fought by now, and one of them might be dead.

Cowboy was worth ten Lionels. Jamaal had no doubt that Cowboy would kill the Seppanens that day, and leave them where they'd never be found.

* * *

With the ravens gone, Tuuli and Martti set out again. The trail dropped down off the crest along a tilted unconformity, a ledge widened by Barney's pick and shovel till it reached a slope less precipitous. Then it wound down into a broad cove that fanned into a set of descending draws divided by low broken ridges. Martti and Tuuli were far below the rim now, and the morning was no longer chill. In places the ground was clothed with brush, and there were piles of boulders. Once they startled a small bevy of mule deer, and once a family of desert bighorns that clattered noisily away across a scree slope. Lizards scooted out of their way. Twice they found their path dead-ending: They'd gone astray onto a game trail—deer or bighorn or wild burro—and had to backtrack.

Finally they came to a sandy canyon bottom, nearly level among towering rocks, and as narrow as an alley. After a little, it opened onto a low dune, with the Colorado River surging past, wide and powerful, a violent, booming rapids not far upstream. They stood on the dune, watching, holding hands again. After a minute, Martti looked at Tuuli.

"Shall we eat lunch?"

She nodded, smiling. Lunch might not have been the best word for it—her watch said 10:14—but they'd started at daybreak. When they'd eaten, they lay down to rest before beginning the steep hike back. Then she grinned, run her fingers along his thigh and kissed him, and instead of napping, they made love on a poncho, the sun warm on their limbs and bodies.

Afterward they lay there for a bit, Martti looking at her covertly. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted and smiling. She'd definitely changed. When she'd first come back from Long Valley, he'd thought it wouldn't last, but it had. She didn't get mad as easily; he wasn't sure she got mad at all anymore. And he—somehow he didn't put his foot in his mouth as much as he used to. It was as if her new patience, her new tolerance, had rubbed off on him.

Except it wasn't patience or tolerance; not with her. It was more basic than that, he told himself. It was as if—as if she had a new viewpoint. That almost whatever he did was fine with her. Like his flareup at the ranger, the day before. She laughed more these days, too, a lot more. She was more demonstrative, and more admiring in a comfortable way. Certainly she was more affectionate. A year earlier she'd never have initiated sex on a sand dune.

Sex was better too, their foreplay more relaxed, more loving. He felt less urgent, and . . . It was as if she could read his sensations as well as her own, building him, holding him, even slacking him a bit till she was ready, then—crescendo and climax! It seemed to him now that that, in fact, was exactly what she did—read his sensations.

After a few minutes they dressed again, then shouldered their packs and started back. Soon they were climbing. It was hot, 5,000 feet below the rim, perhaps 90 or 95 degrees, and they sweated. But it wasn't a problem. Mostly they were shaded by the rim high above, the humidity was low, and he kept to a pace that it seemed to him they could hold all the way, given occasional breaks.

At one point, hiking along a winding stretch through thick patchy brush, they rounded a turn to find five wild burros staring intently at them, not a hundred feet distant. For several seconds both sides stood unmoving, then the jack snorted and wheeled, and all five galloped off, disappearing into the brush.

It was on the easier stretches, topographically speaking, that Martti had the most difficulty. These tended to be brushy and have numerous game trails, making it harder to distinguish the trail proper. Often he wasn't sure, and on several occasions they'd cliffed out or otherwise dead-ended, having to backtrack.

They were perhaps halfway up, and he was beginning to feel he was off the trail for sure, when he topped a rise and saw the proper trail well off to his left. With a seated rifleman watching it, some hundred yards from where he stood! Martti hissed for silence, holding his hand back to warn Tuuli as he knelt, then slowly lowered himself onto his belly. The man, a black, was downslope of them and a dozen yards to their side of the trail, sitting against a tan rock, inconspicuous in a khaki shirt and faded jeans. He was watching downtrail, his rifle across his knees. From where he sat, he must have seen them half a mile back, hiking along a ledge there, and was waiting for their reappearance at much closer range. Even here they were within his peripheral field of vision. If his attention hadn't been so strongly on the trail, he might well have spotted Martti.

Lucky I lost it, Martti thought. He examined the terrain above the man, for the possibility of bypassing him. There wasn't any. Whether deliberately or by chance, the man was well situated to prevent it. Behind him the east wall of the canyon became too steep to walk on, except for the trail itself.

Besides, Martti told himself, he's not here alone. Not if he's mafia. There'll be more of them above, probably two or three more, probably watching our van.

The van! He'd left his gun in it! He was so used to carrying his Walther, it was natural to react as if armed. He tapped Tuuli's shoulder and they backed away on their bellies till they could stand unseen. The rifleman must expect them any minute, would soon get restless, perhaps start looking around.

Martti removed his pack, took out his binoculars, and looked the man over, then put them back.

"We need to go back to the river," he murmured, "and see if we can get out of here by working our way along the shore. We're not going to bypass this guy. The tricky part will be that ledge section we crossed back there. He'll see us for sure, and we'll be going the wrong direction for him. And his rifle's got a scope and silencer." In answer, Tuuli took off her pack and, reaching inside it, brought out her Lady Colt. Martti stared, not at it but at her. She'd never liked carrying it, yet here, where it was against the law . . .

He took it, ejected the magazine and checked it. It was full, seven rounds, and there was another in the chamber. But it was a minimal weapon, small caliber, short barrel, low muzzle energy—a weapon intended for close quarters, for intimidation as much as violence.

"Thanks." He paused for a moment as a plan took form, then handed his own pack to Tuuli. "Go back to that rocky hump," he said, pointing in the direction they'd come from. "Then crawl up on the top till you can see him—him and the slope in back of him. I'm going to work my way as far past him as the terrain allows, then try to close in on him from behind. When I can't get any closer safely, I'll wave to you. When you see me, wait a couple of seconds, then yell that the trail has disappeared. He'll think I'm somewhere behind you. That's when I'll move in on him, close enough for a good shot."

She doesn't even look frightened for me, he thought. Attentive, serious, but not frightened.

She turned away and started walking, crouching a bit. Martti went the other way. After a long bypass, he crawled to the crest again and peered over. He'd worked his way past and above the rifleman, who was again some hundred yards distant but facing somewhat away. The biggest danger was that the man would hear his approach.

Martti slipped over the crest and began his stalk, keeping the rifleman in sight. He too would be visible, if the man turned, but more or less obscured by branches and brush.

At 50 yards he reached his last cover. There, standing where Tuuli should see him, he waved his arms, then stepped back into cover. Short seconds later he heard her voice, distant but more clearly than he'd expected, and through a screen of branches saw the man move a few yards—enough that there was brush between him and the location of Tuuli's voice. He was on one knee, rifle ready, prepared to fire or move.

Crouching only slightly, Martti advanced across the open slope, silently cursing the slight hiss of sand moving beneath his boots. The Lady Colt was clenched in his right fist. At 25 yards he saw the man's head start to turn his way, and launched himself. The response was immediate; the man began to rise, turning. Martti's first shot missed, and his second. The rifleman was still pivoting, rifle butt under his arm as he fired off balance toward Martti, the sound harsh but not loud, muffled by the silencer. Martti's third shot hit him high in the chest, knocking him on his back, feet in the air, sending the rifle's second shot skyward. Martti's fourth missed. His fifth struck the sprawling gunman in the left calf, plowing upward into the knee, and Martti heard him roar. On his back, rifle barrel between his knees, the man got off a third round. By that time, Martti was only 8 or 10 yards away, dodging to his right, and the little Colt's sixth round took the rifleman through the temple. He went slack.

Martti straightened, breathing hard, as much from spent tension as from running. From the hole in the man's head, he was clearly dead. Looking up, he saw Tuuli and waved, then walked over to the second man he'd ever killed, the first since he was sixteen and killed his parents' murderer. He found himself calm, and wondered if it would hit him later.

The dead man lay within plain sight of the trail. Martti stripped to avoid getting blood on his clothes, then lugged the corpse over the little ridge from which he'd first seen him, leaving it in the draw on the other side. Vultures and ravens would find it, but well out of sight of anyone on the trail. Next, the two of them picked up the spent cartridge cases, all except two of Martti's which they couldn't find. Then, while Tuuli spread dust over the blood where the rifleman had died, Martti picked up the rifle, using his shirt to avoid leaving his prints on it, and left it by the body. Finally, with branches cut from a shrub well away from the trail, they brushed out the signs of disturbance as best they could. The site wouldn't stand a close inspection, but it was a dozen yards from the trail. A passing hiker would notice nothing.

* * *

When they'd finished, they discussed their next action. Tuuli recognized the dead man as someone she'd seen in the Visitors' Center. He'd been with other people, including a woman. Except for the woman, that fitted Martti's theory that the rifleman was part of a hit team. The others, presumably waiting on the rim, might well have heard the shots from the little Colt. For which he had only two rounds left; Tuuli had brought no extra cartridges. He'd thought of taking the dead man's big .44, but decided not to. Best not to have it, especially as conspicuous as it was. If the body was found, let its weapons be with it.

At any rate, it seemed out of the question to hike up and confront the others on the rim. He and Tuuli would be exposed and helpless on the last leg of the trail.

On the other hand, he suspected that the people after him had expended their one trail-wise man. They were almost certainly inner-city people, and unless one of them had been in the military—the infantry or marines—they'd be unlikely to venture far down the trail looking for him. Not if they'd read the warning sign.

So they started back down toward the river. If they could find no way to follow the shore, they'd hide out there. Perhaps some rafters would come along and pick them up, though it might be too late in the season for rafters. Otherwise they'd wait as long as they dared without food, then he'd hike out.

37

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

OF THE WORST KIND

Though the canyon bottom was in shadow, it was still daylight when they reached the river. Reached it to find a rafting party policing up the foot of the dune, the beach so to speak, after taking a break there. Feigning a limp, Martti went to the man in charge. After a short discussion and the exchange of a fifty-dollar bill, Tuuli joined the group on one raft and Martti those on the other. Less than an hour later they were let off near the mouth of Bright Angel Creek.

From there it was only a few minutes' hike to Phantom Ranch, with a lodge and cabins. The last string of saddle mules had started up the Bright Angel Trail three hours earlier.

Again Martti and Tuuli consulted. To set out for the south rim this late, even on the well-marked, well-maintained Bright Angel Trail, seemed ill-advised. It would be dark long before they reached the Tonto Platform, halfway up, and they'd already hiked a lot of miles, including halfway back up the Barney Trail.

So Martti used one of the ranch's public phones and called Joe's home, while Tuuli stood by to ward off anyone who might otherwise overhear. It was 6:10, Pacific Daylight Time, but Joe wasn't in yet. She expected him any time now, Eleanor said. Martti left the phone number, and ten minutes later Joe called back. Martti explained the situation to him, all of it, pointing out that it wouldn't be safe to try reaching the car without an armed escort. And with the dead man in Barney Canyon, he didn't want to involve the police. It would complicate things all to hell.

Joe called up the Department of Justice atlas on his computer, and found a solution: He'd phone the Coconino County Sheriff's Department—presumably they'd have a floater within reasonable distance of the park—and ask them to pick the two of them up at Phantom Ranch. They could drop them off at Tusayan Flight Services, just south of the park boundary. The justification would be that Martti was urgently needed in L.A. There'd been an unexpected development in an investigation he'd been working on.

Meanwhile Joe would send a party of security men there in a skyvan from L.A., not to bring them home but to help them recover their car. They could overnight at Tuba City, twenty minutes away by skyvan, an hour and a half by road, then rent a road vehicle in the morning, and the whole party would come back for the travel van. Hoping the hit team hadn't trashed it.

It turned out to be not quite that simple. The sheriff's department had to get Park Service permission to fly into the canyon and pick them up. But that took only minutes, and it was still dusk when the floater arrived. Fifteen minutes after that they were at Tusayan Flight Services.

* * *

Harley Suk O'Connel pulled the roadvan up in front of Tusayan Flight Services, and stopped. The five of them got out and walked to the door. Jamaal started to open it, then closed it again and stepped back.

"They're here!" he hissed. "Both of them!" He shooed the others away with flapping gestures.

"Who?" O'Connell asked.

"Seppanen! And his wife!"

"Shit!" grunted Lionel.

"How did they get here?" Naylene asked.

"How would I know?"

For a long moment, all Jamaal could think was: Cowboy's dead all right! That and his quarries' escape and presence here, broke his confidence that he could kill them quietly. Then from somewhere, some hidden level, a purpose clicked in. The bottom line was to kill Seppanen; that was clear and compelling. And obviously Seppanen was armed. He'd have the pistol they'd heard in the canyon, and Cowboy's too now.

"Back to the car," he said.

He opened the luggage compartment, then a locked chest that sat in it. Inside were four Uzi submachine guns. He handed one to Lionel, then took out another. "Harley, with Cowboy gone, one of these is yours."

"I don't need it. I got my heart gun." He patted his jacket, over the snubnosed .32 concealed in a shoulder holster.

"Take it!" Lionel said, and pushed the Uzi at him. "I know you just hired on to drive, but I'm not leaving them a crack to get out of. There's got to be a back door to this place. I want you there to cover it."

"What about the pickup you called for?"

"I'm calling Terence to cancel it. We'll kill everyone here, then you'll fly one of those. By yourself." He thumbed toward three charter skyvans parked at the end of the building. "Let them think we left in it. The rest of us will drive back."

"There's going to be roadblocks on every . . ."

"God DAMN your black ass, O'Connell! Do what I tell you!"

The intensity of Jamaal's sudden anger, and the illogic of his decision, shocked O'Connell. Jamaal had always been a cool head, always thinking, rarely making a mistake. But this? No way in hell they'd get away with it. He reached and accepted the Uzi, thinking that when it was over, maybe he'd sneak off in the dark. He'd have a better chance hitchhiking, for chrissake. Naylene could fly, if that's what Jamaal wanted, though whether she could navigate was another matter.

Naylene could also shoot, and that's what Jamaal was interested in now. She'd been included to make them more convincing as tourists, but she could kill without scruple. She'd proven that in the past, and they'd all been checked out on the Uzis. Jamaal waited till O'Connell had disappeared around the back corner, then he led the other two toward the door.

* * *

The terminal's waiting room was 80 by 40 feet, with restrooms, an office-ticket area, and the baggage room at one end. At the other was a food service, closed at this hour.

The only scheduled flights this late in the season were daylight sightseer flights over the canyon, and this evening there was only one employee on duty. Counting Martti and Tuuli, the number of nonemployees was four, all awaiting pickups.

They might have napped, but the seats weren't well suited to it, so they simply sat, talking occasionally in murmurs. Silently Martti puzzled over who'd put out a contract on him, and why. After a little the door opened, catching Tuuli's attention, turning her eyes to it before it closed.

"Martti!" she hissed, "they're here!"

He looked at her.

"A man just looked in the door, then closed it. He was in the park information center with the gunman in the canyon!"

"You're sure?"

She nodded vigorously.

He patted his jacket pocket, feeling the Lady Colt there. Two rounds.

"Should we sneak out the back?" she asked.

This, he thought, would be a good time for her psychic ability to turn on and come up with something. He shook his head. "They may have someone outside the door, waiting to blow our brains out." Getting to his feet, he walked over to the service counter, Tuuli following, and spoke to the night agent.

"Do you have a gun?" he murmured softly.

"A gun?"

Martti grabbed a handful of shirtfront and jerked, hushing the man. "Christ, man! Keep it down! A guy just looked in the door, then backed out—a member of the black mafia in L.A. I'm an investigator. It's likely they're looking for me, and they won't be leaving witnesses."

The man stared, paling. "You serious?" he whispered.

Martti hissed his answer: "Goddamn it! Do you have a fucking gun?!"

Eyes large, the man shook his head.

"Great. Mine will have to do then." Martti gestured toward the other waiting couple, who sat next to each other, reading. "Get them in the baggage room and on the floor. Quietly! Hon, you too."

He took the pistol from his jacket pocket and stood with his back to the counter, both doors within his peripheral vision. The night agent hustled the other couple into the baggage room, Tuuli following. When nothing happened right away, Martti wondered if he'd done right not to try the back door. Another minute passed. Then the front door opened and Jamaal stepped in, Uzi poised. The empty seats held his attention for a moment, and perhaps, coming in from the dark, the light was a problem. Martti drew down on him. "Drop it," he said.

Jamaal blinked as if confused, then jerked his weapon toward Martti, who fired. The Uzi spewed a short burst that chewed the floor as Jamaal fell. A muffled scream from the baggage room didn't register on Martti's attention. Naylene stepped in behind the fallen Jamaal, and while her eyes sought a target, Martti shot her too. Even so, she fired a short burst that splintered the counter beside him.

The Colt empty, he'd started toward them to get a fresh weapon when Lionel came in, stepping over the bodies. "Shark," he said smirking, "you a dead muhth . . ."

There was a shot from the back door, just one, and Lionel fell too, a bullet through the middle of his forehead. The Uzi fell from his hands unfired. Martti spun. Harley Suk O'Connell stood there, his .32 caliber lowered. He beckoned. Martti went over to him, unsure what the situation was.

"That's all of them," O'Connell said. Then, "I owed you, Seppanen. I'm out of here now. Tell the blues it was you killed them. I mean it! I'm staying clear of L.A. after this, but even so, if Terence finds out what I did, I'm a dead man."

He turned and disappeared. Martti started over to the three on the floor. "Tuuli!" he called, "you can come out now! All of you can; it's . . ."

Suddenly his jaw dropped, then his face contorted in pain, and with a terrible grunting cry he fell to his knees, clutching at his chest, and pitched forward onto the floor. Tuuli rushed toward him screaming; a slashing, thrusting knife of sound: "OUT! OUT! OUT!" Dropping to her knees beside him, she cradled Marti's head in her lap. After a minute he opened one eye and looked at her. "Look who loves me," he murmured, and chuckled, then shuddered and closed the eye again. "Just let me lay here a few minutes and I'll be all right."

* * *

A sky ambulance arrived from Grand Canyon Village about five minutes later and took Naylene away, unconscious and in critical condition. She wouldn't live to answer questions. By that time Martti was walking around, no longer even shaky. Martti, Tuuli, and the night agent stayed to wait for the sheriff's deputy.

38

CLOSURE

Their three-man security escort arrived from L.A. while the deputy was still asking questions. When the deputy left for Flagstaff, they drove to Tuba City with their escort, and checked in at a motel room. Physically and emotionally spent, they fell asleep without rehashing the events. The next day their escort drove them back to the park as planned, where they found the travel van undamaged, though the car gun was gone. From there, Martti and Tuuli drove south to Williams, then west and north to discover Las Vegas.

On the road, Martti asked questions. The first was: Why had she taken her Colt into Barney Canyon with her? At best she didn't like to carry it, and in the park it was illegal.

She hadn't even thought about it at the time, she said. Probably it was a psychic impulse acting subliminally.

He mulled that over, unsure that something acting subliminally qualified as psychic, then decided he might be placing improper constraints on the concept.

He remembered vaguely her crying "OUT! OUT!" during his seizure at Tusayan. What, he asked, had she meant by that?

There'd been a being, she said, someone not in a body, enveloping Martti, stopping his heart. An enraged someone. She'd attacked it, thrown her intention at it like a war axe, and it had withdrawn as if snapped back to its body by some great rubber band. She'd gotten a sense of someone insane, whether chronically or in temporary rage she didn't know.

"Could it come back and attack one of us again?" The thought made him uncomfortable.

"Possibly, but not soon."

He wondered how she could sound so sure of herself, but didn't question her on it. Again he brought up the psychic photographer in North Hollywood, and the picture she'd gotten of him with the spirit behind him. And what she'd said about someone acting through her when she took it. Some woman, physically small. Had that someone been Tuuli?

Tuuli laughed. It could have been, she said, she could have been acting subliminally. She'd like to meet this psychic photographer.

He'd driven nearly to Hoover Dam before he asked the next question: Could anyone learn to be psychic like she was? Perhaps by going to Spirit Ranch and being taught there?

She shook her head. Even if everyone had the potential, which she wasn't sure of, it didn't seem doable yet to teach it broadly. Besides, in his way he was already psychic. Look at the "coincidences" and "lucky hunches" that had been so important in his life.

He left it at that. It made as much sense to him as any of the rest of it. He thought about asking her whether she read his sensations when they were making love, but decided not to. Best not to mess with a good thing. Maybe that was subliminal too, and talking about it might kill it.

* * *

Two nights and a day in Las Vegas were enough for both of them. Martti was no gambler, but he'd urged Tuuli to try, wondering if her psychic power would bring a payoff. She was willing; willing and curious. She made a bit on the slots, a bit on the wheel, and somewhat more on the crap tables—enough to cover room and meals, but not a lot more. Nothing conspicuous.

* * *

They spent a short day driving to Tahoe, and a night there at Rollins' Casino Hotel. They liked the lake best, and the forest and mountains.

* * *

Yosemite was beautiful, even the thick flurry of snow—great wet flakes that met them on the pass, pelting their windshield, melting on the highway. The stands of red fir, so straight and clean, so uniform and dense, were the most handsome forest he thought he'd ever seen. When they visited Tuolumne Meadow, late that day, Tuuli said there'd been a strong but peaceful spirit living there in the past, but it had left. She didn't say how she knew, but he decided that if she said so, it was probably true.

For some reason he wondered about later, he asked if the trees and mountains had spirits of their own. She said they did, but those she sensed here were simple spirits of little force or reach, not the sort that had dwelt in the valley, or in Humphrey Peak or Sipapu.

* * *

The next afternoon they were driving west on Highway 46, through the hills and vineyards southwest of Paso Robles, when they saw a funeral procession approaching. A small one: a hearse and four cars. Tuuli was at the wheel, and pulled off on the shoulder to watch it pass, regarding it thoughtfully.

Martti saw the goose bumps on her forearms, and when the procession had passed, asked "Why the stop?"

"I needed to see that," she said. "That funeral procession. It's the reason I wanted to take the coast route south, instead of I-5."

He remembered their discussion about the route, before they'd left Yosemite. They'd decided on I-5, then somehow ended up on this road. "And you knew there'd be this funeral procession?"

"Not consciously."

Subliminal again.

"I remember thinking at the time," she went on, "that my reasons felt like rationalizations, and I wondered what the real reason was."

"Who died?"

"Ask me who killed him."

"Who?"

"I did. At least I caused the shock that killed him. I think his health was already weak though."

Martti stared at her.

"You asked whether the spirit that attacked you at Tusayan might attack one of us again. He won't."

He. "You mean . . . That was him? In the hearse?"