Roy glanced at the portrait of Spencer Grant. He was beginning to think that this man was not merely mentally disturbed, but something far darker than that. An actively evil person. Anyone this obsessed with his privacy was surely an enemy of the people.
Chilled, Roy returned his attention to the computer.
When Mama undertook a search as extensive as the one that Roy had requested of her and when that search was fruitless, she didn't give up. She was programmed to apply her spare logic circuits—during periods of lighter work and between assignments—to riffle through a large store of mailing lists that the agency had accumulated, looking for the name that couldn't be found elsewhere. Name soup. That was what the lists were called. They were lifted from book and record clubs, national magazines, Publishers Clearing House, major political parties, catalogue-sales companies peddling everything from sexy lingerie to electronic gadgetry to meat by mail, interest groups like antique-car enthusiasts and stamp collectors, as well as from numerous other sources.
In the name soup, Mama had found a Spencer Grant different from the others in the Internal Revenue Service records.
Intrigued, Roy sat up straighter in his chair.
Almost two years ago, this Spencer Grant had ordered a dog toy from a mail-order catalogue aimed at pet owners: a hard-rubber, musical bone. The address on that list was in California. Malibu.
Mama had returned to the utility companies' files, to see whether services were maintained at that address. They were.
The electrical connection was in the name of Stewart Peck.
The water service and trash collection account was in the name of Mr. Henry Holden.
Natural gas was billed to James Gable.
The telephone company provided service to one John Humphrey. They also billed a cellular phone to William Clark at that address.
AT&T provided long-distance service for Wayne Gregory.
Property tax records listed the owner as Robert Tracy.
Mama had found the scarred man.
In spite of his efforts to vanish behind an elaborate screen of multifarious identities, though he had diligently attempted to erase his past and to make his current existence as difficult to prove as that of the Loch Ness monster, and though he had nearly succeeded in being as elusive as a ghost, he had been tripped up by a musical rubber bone. A dog toy. Grant had seemed inhumanly clever, but the simple human desire to please a beloved pet had brought him down.
NINE
Roy Miro watched from the blue shadows of the eucalyptus grove, enjoying the medicinal but pleasant odor of the oil-rich leaves.
The rapidly assembled SWAT team hit the cabin an hour after dawn, when the canyon was quiet except for the faintest rustle of the trees in an offshore breeze. The stillness was broken by shattering glass, the whomp of stun grenades, and the crash of the front and back doors going down simultaneously.
The place was small, and the initial search required little more than a minute. Toting a Micro Uzi, wearing a Kevlar jacket so heavy that it appeared to be capable of stopping even Teflon-coated slugs, Alfonse Johnson stepped out onto the back porch to signal that the cabin was deserted.
Dismayed, Roy came out of the grove and followed Johnson through the rear entrance into the kitchen, where shards of glass crunched under his shoes.
"He's taken a trip somewhere," Johnson said.
"How do you figure?"
"In here."
Roy followed Johnson into the only bedroom. It was almost as sparsely furnished as a monk's cell. No art brightened the roughly plastered walls. Instead of drapes or curtains, white vinyl blinds hung at the windows.
A suitcase stood near the bed, in front of the only night-stand.
"Must have decided he didn't need that one," said Johnson.
The simple cotton bedspread was slightly mussed—as if Grant had put another suitcase there to pack for his trip.
The closet door stood open. A few shirts, jeans, and chinos hung from the wooden rod, but half the hangers were empty.
One by one, Roy pulled out the drawers on a highboy. They contained a few items of clothing—mostly socks and underwear. A belt. One green sweater, one blue.
Even the contents of a large suitcase, if returned to the drawers, would not have filled them. Therefore, Grant had either packed two or more suitcases—or his clothing and home-decorating budgets were equally frugal.
"Any signs of a dog?" Roy asked.
Johnson shook his head. "Not that I noticed."
"Look around, inside and out," Roy ordered, leaving the bedroom.
Three members of the SWAT team, men with whom Roy had not worked before, were standing in the living room. They were tall, beefy guys. In that confined space, their protective gear, combat boots, and bristling weapons made them appear to be even larger than they were. With no one to shoot or subdue, they were as awkward and uncertain as professional wrestlers invited to tea with the octogenarian members of a ladies' knitting club.
Roy was about to send them outside when he saw that the screen was lit on one of the computers in the array of electronic equipment that covered the surface of an L-shaped corner desk. White letters glowed on a blue background.
"Who turned that on?" he asked the three men.
They gazed at the computer, baffled.
"Must've been on when we came in," one of them said.
"Wouldn't you have noticed?"
"Maybe not."
"Grant must've left in a hurry," said another.
Alfonse Johnson, just entering the room, disagreed: "It wasn't on when I came through the front door. I'd bet anything."
Roy went to the desk. On the computer screen was the same number repeated three times down the center:
31
31
31
Suddenly the numbers changed, beginning at the top, continuing slowly down the column, until all were the same:
32
32
32
Simultaneously with the appearance of the third thirty-two, a soft whirrrrr arose from one of the electronic devices on the large desk. It lasted only a couple of seconds, and Roy couldn't identify the unit in which it originated.
The numbers changed from top to bottom, as before: 33, 33, 33. Again: that whispery two-second whirrrrr.
Although Roy was far better acquainted with the capabilities and operation of sophisticated computers than was the average citizen, he had never seen most of the gadgetry on the desk. Some items appeared to be homemade. Small red and green bulbs shone on several peculiar devices, indicating that they were powered up. Tangles of cables, in various diameters, linked much of the familiar equipment with the units that were mysterious to him.
34
34
34
Whirrrrr.
Something important was happening. Intuition told Roy that much. But what! He couldn't understand, and with growing urgency he studied the equipment.
On the screen, the numbers advanced, from top to bottom, until all of them were thirty-five. Whirrrrr.
If the numbers had been descending, Roy might have thought that he was watching a countdown toward a detonation. A bomb. Of course, no cosmic law required that a time bomb had to be triggered at the end of a countdown. Why not a countup? Start at zero, detonate at one hundred. Or at fifty. Or forty.
36
36
36
Whirrrrr.
No, not a bomb. That didn't make sense. Why would Grant want to blow up his own home?
Easy question. Because he was crazy. Paranoid. Remember the eyes in the computer-generated portrait: feverish, touched with madness.
Thirty-seven, top to bottom. Whirrrrr.
Roy started exploring the tangle of cables, hoping to learn something from the way in which the devices were linked.
A fly crept along his left temple. He brushed impatiently at it. Not a fly. A bead of sweat.
"What's wrong?" Alfonse Johnson asked. He loomed at Roy's side—abnormal
ly tall, armored, and armed, as if he were a basketball player from some future society in which the game had evolved into a form of mortal combat.
On the screen, the count had reached forty. Roy paused with his hands full of cables, listened to the whirrrrr, and was relieved when the cabin didn't blow up.
If it wasn't a bomb, what was it?
To grasp what was happening, he needed to think like Grant. Try to imagine how a paranoid sociopath might view the world. Look out through the eyes of madness. Not easy.
Well, all right, even if Grant was psychotic, he was also cunning, so after nearly being apprehended in the assault on the bungalow Wednesday night in Santa Monica, he had figured that a surveillance unit had photographed him and that he had become the subject of an intense search. He was an ex-cop, after all. He knew the routine. Although he'd spent the past year performing a gradual disappearing act from every public record, he hadn't yet taken the final step into invisibility, and he'd been acutely aware that they would find his cabin sooner or later.
"What's wrong?" Johnson repeated.
Grant would have expected them to break into his home in the same manner as they had broken into the bungalow. An entire SWAT team. Searching the place. Milling around.
Roy's mouth was dry. His heart was racing. "Check the door frame. We must've set off an alarm."
"Alarm? In this old shack?" Johnson said doubtfully.
"Do it," Roy ordered.
Johnson hurried away.
Roy frantically sorted through the loops and knots of cables. The computer in action was the one with the most powerful logic unit among Grant's collection. It was connected to a lot of things, including an unmarked green box that was, in turn, linked to a modem that was itself linked to a six-line telephone.
For the first time he realized that one of the red power-on lights gleaming in the equipment was actually the in-use indicator on line one of the telephone. An outgoing call was in progress.
He picked up the handset and listened. Data transmission was under way in the form of a cascade of electronic tones, a high-speed language of weird music without melody or rhythm.
"Magnetic contact here on the doorsill!" Johnson called from the front entrance.
"Visible wires?" Roy asked, dropping the telephone handset into the cradle.
"Yeah. And this was just hooked up. Bright, new copper at the contact point."
"Follow the wires," Roy said.
He glanced at the computer again.
On the screen, the count was up to forty-five.
Roy returned to the green box that linked computer and modem, and he grabbed another gray cable that led from it to something that he had not yet found. He traced it across the desk, through snarled cords, behind equipment, to the edge of the desk, and then to the floor.
On the other side of the room, Johnson was ripping up the alarm wire from the baseboard to which it was stapled, and winding it around one gloved fist. The other three men were watching him and edging backward, out of the way.
Roy followed the gray cable along the floor. It disappeared behind a tall bookcase.
Following the alarm wire, Johnson reached the other side of the same bookcase.
Roy jerked on the gray cable, and Johnson jerked on the alarm wire. Books wobbled noisily on the next to the highest shelf.
Roy looked up from the cable on which his attention had been fixed. Almost directly in front of him, slightly higher than eye level, a one-inch lens peered darkly at him from between the spines of thick volumes of history. He pulled books off the shelf, revealing a compact videocamera.
"What the hell's this?" Johnson asked.
On the display screen, the count had just reached forty-eight at the top of the column.
"When you broke the magnetic contact at the door, you started the videocamera," Roy explained.
He dropped the cable and snatched another book from the shelf.
Johnson said, "So we just destroy the videotape, and no one knows we were here."
Opening the book and tearing off one corner of a page, Roy said, "It's not so easy as that. When you turned on the camera, you also activated the computer, the whole system, and it placed an outgoing phone call."
"What system?"
"The videocamera feeds to that oblong green box on the desk."
"Yeah? What's it do?"
After working up a thick gob of saliva, Roy spat on the page fragment that he had torn from the book, and he pasted the paper to the lens. "I'm not sure exactly what it does, but somehow the box processes the video image, translates it from visuals to another form of information, and feeds it to the computer."
He stepped to the display screen. He was less tense than he had been before finding the camera, for now he knew what was happening. He wasn't happy about it—but at least he understood.
51
50
50
The second number changed to fifty-one. Then the third.
Whirrrrr.
"Every four or five seconds, the computer freezes a frame's worth of data from the videotape and sends it back to the green box. That's when the first number changes."
They waited. Not long.
52
51
51
"The green box," Roy continued, "passes that frame of data to the modem, and that's when the second number changes."
52
52
51
"The modem translates the data into tonal code, sends it to the telephone, then the third number changes and—"
52
52
52
"—at the far end of the phone line, the process is reversed, translating the encoded data back into a picture again."
"Picture?" Johnson said. "Pictures of us?"
"He's just received his fifty-second picture since you entered the cabin."
"Damn."
"Fifty of them were nice and clear—before I blocked the camera lens."
"Where? Where's he receiving them?"
"We'll have to trace the phone call the computer made when you broke down the door," Roy said, pointing to the red indicator light on line one of the six-line phone. "Grant didn't want to meet us face-to-face, but he wanted to know what we look like."
"So he's looking at printouts of us right now?"
"Probably not. The other end could be just as automated as this. But he'll stop by there eventually to see if anything's been transmitted. By then, with a little luck, we'll find the phone to which the call was placed, and we'll be waiting there for him."
The three other men had backed farther away from the computers. They regarded the equipment with superstition.
One of them said, "Who is this guy?"
Roy said, "He's nothing special. Just a sick and hateful man."
"Why didn't you pull the plug the minute you realized he was filming us?" Johnson demanded.
"He already had us by then, so it didn't matter. And maybe he set up the system so the hard disk will erase if the plug is pulled. Then we wouldn't know what programs and information had been in the machine. As long as the system's intact, we might get a pretty good idea of what this guy's been up to here. Maybe we can reconstruct his activities for the past few days, weeks, even months. We should be able to turn up a few clues about where he's gone—and maybe even find the woman through him."
55
55
55
Whirrrrr.
The screen flashed, and Roy flinched. The column of numbers was replaced by three words: THE MAGIC NUMBER.
The phone disconnected. The red indicator light on line one blinked off.
"That's all right," Roy said. "We can still trace it through the phone company's automated records."
The display screen went blank again.
"What's happening?" Johnson asked.
Two new words appeared: BRAIN DEAD.
Roy said, "You sonofabitch, bastard, scar-faced geek!"
Alfonse Johnson backed off a step,
obviously surprised by such fury in a man who had always been good-natured and even-tempered.
Roy pulled the chair out from the desk and sat down. As he put his hands to the keyboard, BRAIN DEAD blinked off the screen.
A field of soft blue confronted him.
Cursing, Roy tried to call up a basic menu.
Blue. Serene blue.
His fingers flew over the keys.
Serene. Unchanging. Blue.
The hard disk was blank. Even the operating system, which was surely still intact, was frozen and dysfunctional.
Grant had cleaned up after himself, and then he had mocked them with the BRAIN DEAD announcement.
Breathe deeply. Slowly and deeply. Inhale the pale-peach vapor of tranquility. Exhale the bile-green mist of anger and tension. In with the good, out with the bad.
* * *
When Spencer and Rocky had arrived in Vegas near midnight, the towering ramparts of blinking-rippling-swirling-pulsing neon along the famous Strip had made the night nearly as bright as a sunny day. Even at that hour, traffic clogged Las Vegas Boulevard South. Swarms of people had filled the sidewalks, their faces strange and sometimes demonic in the reflected phantasmagoria of neon; they churned from casino to casino and then back again, like insects seeking something that only insects could want or understand.
The frenetic energy of the scene had disturbed Rocky. Even viewing it from the safety of the Explorer, with the windows tightly closed, the dog had begun to shiver before they had gone far. Then he'd whimpered and turned his head anxiously left and right, as if certain that a vicious attack was imminent, but unable to discern from which direction to expect danger. Perhaps, with a sixth sense, the mutt had perceived the fevered need of the most compulsive gamblers, the predatory greed of con men and prostitutes, and the desperation of the big losers in the crowd.
They had driven out of the turmoil and had stayed overnight in a motel on Maryland Parkway, two long blocks from the Strip. Without a casino or cocktail lounge, the place was quiet.
Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart Page 18