by Farris, John
"They're private detectives," Betts explained, deciding it was time for her next Merit. She was wondering how rough it was going to be, a nonsmoking hop to Heathrow Airport in London. Nine and a half hours? But two martinis before dinner, then a prescription sleeping pill and a snooze in roomy first class with her feet up should see her through a no-nicotine stretch.
"You two were in Vegas recently? Would you believe I've never been? I hear they have some great shows."
"Speaking of luck," Pinky said, revisiting a favorite theme, for the moment distracting herself, "we got tickets to see Lincoln Grayle! I mean, not only that, we met him." She glanced again at the professional-looking men in gray suits. Private detectives? Did that mean—bodyguards? Obviously there was more to Betts Waring than met the eye. And then Pinky got it, the last name belatedly making a connection in her memory. Wasn't that also the name of the girl who had been in the news months ago, warning a stadium full of graduates and parents that a DC-10 was about to crash just where they were sitting? Pinky felt the downy hair on her forearms standing up.
"Grayle? That name's familiar," Betts said with polite interest.
"The magician. He's done TV specials. Maybe you saw the one; he escaped from a drone airplane that was blown up in midflight?"
"Most incredible illusion I've ever seen," Frank commented. "He definitely was put aboard that plane, wrapped in chains, and handcuffed. The door was welded shut, mind you, and the camera never cut away as the plane took off, rose to two thousand feet, and blooey! Then the camera panned to a rescue truck racing to the scene, and the first man off the back of the truck, dressed in a fireman's coat and helmet, was Grayle."
"Incredible," Pinky seconded. "But I believe his Vegas show is better than anything he's done on TV. The Lincoln Grayle Theatre is a show itself. Like a glass palace, halfway up the mountain, whatchamacallit, five hundred feet above the desert." Pinky gestured theatrically herself, in the manner of a magician about to produce a palm tree from a top hat, her rings glittering in another burst of lightning just outside the shivering window wall.
"Drawback is," Frank said, "Grayle's theatre isn't in one of those posh hotels on the Strip. It's almost a twenty-buck cab ride west if you miss one of his free buses, which we did?"
"But worth every penny," Pinky assured Betts. "When the Grayle Theatre is lit up at night and the fountains are going, they say airline pilots can see it a hundred miles away."
Pinky's gaze shifted and she smiled fitfully at a man in a United captain's uniform helping himself to coffee not far away. He also smiled and nodded as Pinky hitched herself a little closer to Betts. The lights in the lounge dimmed following a crescendo of thunder. Pinky shuddered superstitiously, glancing over one shoulder at the torrent outside, the unnatural daytime darkness between flashes.
"I've heard," Pinky confided to Betts, "that other illusionists—you know, all the big names like Copperfield, Lance Burton, Siegfried and Roy good as they are, even they can't figure out how Grayle performs some of his illusions."
"If they are illusions," Frank said darkly.
Pinky finger-polished her crucifix again, nibbled at her plump under lip.
Frank scoffed at her expression. "Oh, now, that's pure showbiz baloney, angel. I was just getting a rise out of you. It's all part of Grayle's mystique, his image. He doesn't have supernatural powers. You're just supposed to believe he does. Takes a lot of the old snake oil to pack the house night after night."
"On the subject of Grayle, 'fess up, Pinky. You were just a little smitten with the guy." Frank held a thumb and forefinger half an inch apart, prompting his highly colored wife to blush a shade of red that almost erased her freckles. "Don't fret, pet. I'm not jealous."
"Oh, Frank." She looked at Betts. "Did I mention that we had a chance to meet him after the show?"
"Lucky Ticket holders," Frank said, now rubbing that thumb and forefinger together. "Which entitled us to a grand tour backstage after the show, by the man himself."
"He's nothing like his stage persona. Very handsome, of course; but so down-to-earth."
"A more affable guy I never hope to meet" Frank agreed. "And you can imagine, the demands of doing a couple of shows a night, probably didn't feel all that much like entertaining a couple of nobodies from Santa Rosa. But you'd never have known it. He showed us his gym where he works out, all the ways he has of rejuvenating himself between shows."
"Colored light therapy" Pinky said.
"How's that?" Betts asked.
"The technical name is spectrochrome therapy," Frank explained. "'SCT' for short. But it's really very low-tech. How it works, Grayle stretches out on an ordinary massage table and for fifteen minutes he projects full-spectrum light through a set of about a dozen colored filters onto various parts of his body. The pineal gland, for instance. Or the navel or, um, his testicles. What he told me, the lights restore the proper balance in the body's complex electrical field. I tried it myself. I was feeling a little frazzled, fighting off a head cold. See, you have to be completely naked to realize the full benefit of the therapy. But doggone if I didn't feel great after my session. Rarin' to go."
"You sure were," Pinky said, giving Frank a sly satisfied look that implied a hot-wired libido had been one of those benefits. Frank sat back with a smug expression.
"Then I got up at five-thirty and played eighteen holes of golf. Fact is, since that little session in Grayle's gym I've had more energy than a pack of foxhounds on the scent." He gave Pinky a nudge. "By the way, you never have told me what you and Grayle talked about while I was getting my batteries recharged."
"Scuba diving, I think. He's an accomplished diver, and he's been everywhere. The Great Barrier Reef, the Caymans, Corsica. That's right. We talked about scuba diving." But Pinky appeared to be a little perplexed. Her gaze made a slow tour of the lounge. Her lips were apart, as if she'd fallen into a mild trance. But faces were vivid to her—the private detectives who apparently were there as protection for Betts (why she needed bodyguards at all was an unanswerable question); the airline captain, graying and with a brushy mustache, standing against one wall while drinking his coffee and idly playing with a gold cigarette lighter in his other hand; a Pakistani businessman and his wife; a Japanese couple, quietly but expensively dressed; and—Pinky felt no surprise, only a strange sense of melancholy and, perhaps, dread—Lincoln Grayle himself, sitting in a corner with a tropical fish tank behind him. He was looking right at her, smiling. It was true; she had developed a bit of a crush during their time alone in his quarters at the crystal palace, reflecting the lights of the universe in its dark mountain setting.
Pinky smiled shyly at what her rational mind quickly told her must be a hallucination. As was the artifact Grayle held, uncovered during one of his diving expeditions in the warm seas of Bimini. A small skull of blood-red crystal. Unique in all the world, as old as the earth itself.
This artifact was the last thing Pinky recalled thinking about, before the sky outside the terminal exploded brilliantly once again. A one-hundred-million-volt discharge that dazzled and made her jump and bite her tongue, just as the window wall behind them collapsed in a sparkling avalanche.
After he learned that Betts Waring was planning a trip to Kenya, presumably to join her elusive adopted daughter there, the Assassin had four days to make his own plans.
Betts would be spending a week in England to visit a half sister long unseen. The reunion would take her to the rural Lake Country. The Assassin briefly thought about following her to England, where probably she would no longer be needing the Blackwelder Organization to keep the still-avid tabloid press and fringe lunatics from hounding her. But unfamiliar territory, he realized, would leave him at a critical disadvantage. No, he had to make sure that Betts didn't board the London plane. If he didn't have control over subsequent events, if every move that Eden Waring made in search of her mother was not orchestrated by him up to the very moment he broke her lovely neck while watching life fade from her eyes, his
chances of success diminished by every unforeseen occurrence.
And Eden Waring did have, of course, certain abilities that had to be accounted for in his planning. An affinity for miracles, perhaps, including the most miraculous act of all: resurrection. He had killed her once, he was certain of that, because he never missed. Yet she lived. Inviting him to try a second time. An invitation that couldn't be refused.
In spite of the success of his subsequent assignment, staging the death of Rona Harvester to look like an accident (thereby elevating the former First Lady, like MM and Princess Di, to elite status in the common people's pantheon of trash mythology: he watched his Rona tapes nearly every day; loved a splashy funeral), his slate, obviously, still was not clean enough for Impact Sector. There had been changes in the high command, but the FBI remained paranoid about psychics. It was Impact Sector's responsibility to deal with them. The Assassin had no illusions about his doubtful standing. He would be welcomed back only if he made up for his galling failure.
The Assassin was, in his covert profession, a genius: he had killed thirty-seven men and one woman without leaving a single clue to his identity. Four months ago he had boldly taken both Betts Waring and her husband Riley hostage in anticipation of Eden's arrival at the lake house in northern California. Now, although he stood barely twenty feet from Betts in the first-class lounge, wearing a United Airlines captain's uniform, she had not shown the slightest awareness of him. This was another and possibly most important aspect of his genius: the art of disguise. His face had been reduced to ruin by a splash of lye from his psychotic stepfather when he was twelve. Thereafter, unable to grow hair or eyebrows through scar tissue, with him looking like a poster child for defective genes, his high IQ was easily transmuted into psychopathology.
Only the Assassin's eyes had been spared. In order to go out, even for a visit to the post office or pharmacy, he routinely devoted an hour and a half to building a new face for himself: nose, ears, eyebrows, hair. For most of his adult years he had been a profitable club act in Vegas, doing female impersonations. A serious disagreement he'd had at the FBI's Sacramento field office, resulting in crippling injuries to two agents, had temporarily made it unwise for him to pursue his art in the limelight.
He was sure that Impact Sector would square that account for him, once Eden Waring had unwittingly helped him clean the last trace of tarnish from his slate.
The Assassin always worked alone. Betts Waring's itinerary had been a cinch to obtain from her travel agent's computer files. Offing Eden's adoptive mom would have been mere exercise for a man with his skills. On most assignments he preferred daytime, and crowds. A busy airport, in spite of the appearance of massive security, was ideal. Airport security was only as strong as the weakest link, and there were plenty of those, all working for just above minimum wage, high school diplomas but no real education, birdseed for brains.
But snatching Betts from under the noses of Blackwelder pros, most of whom were former Treasury Department or FBI agents, required rethinking of his usual routines.
He had spent the better part of three days prowling San Francisco's international airport in various faces of altered dimension and contours to avoid a biometric matchup from a three-dimensional scan of his bedrock face, available from FBI files. He had tickets for various destinations, hand luggage filled with mundane traveler's needs. With the aid of a tiny digital camera in one earpiece of a CD player and a scarce, very expensive black market device called "Open Sesame"—concealable beneath a Band-Aid—that instantly deprogrammed and sprang locks ordinarily accessible only to magnetic-striped key cards, he probed SFO's security. One of the call girls who worked an airport hotel where international crews stayed provided him with a stolen pilot's ID, which he transformed into an authentic badge of his own. At three A.M. he was virtually invisible as a stoop-shouldered Hispanic man vacuuming the carpets in United's first-class lounge.
There was no need to leave bodies at the scene of the abduction. He didn't want it to look as if Betts had been kidnapped; he had enough problems with the Bureau already.
Or was he still keeping score in a game he had lost a long time ago?
It was the occasional flash of rationality that caught him unaware, that made him pause while staring at his raw scarred face repeated in the cruelly revealing makeup mirrors. A cave-in around his heart while confidence vanished from his undertaker's eyes. A time when his mind, like the Badlands he came from, was a sparsely settled place. If he didn't look away quickly from the bright mirror-trap at these times his body became catatonic, death collecting in his throat.
Now he was looking, not into a mirror, but a wall of tempered glass, glazed with faces like the dead from his past, among them himself.
The thunderstorm that had shut down operations at the airport was unforeseen, but it would be useful. A gift from the gods.
Betts Waring had been heavier, with frizzy-tizzy hair, a few months ago but had tamed the mop and made herself over, into a hard old beaut of a woman with hair now a natural wolf-gray, short and stiff as the bristles of a military hairbrush. She'd done it for him, the Assassin thought, recalling with affection how Betts had cooked breakfast for him at the lake house, played the piano, eager to please and keep him happy, her fear evident in throbbing pulses.
Betts was about to make him happy all over again.
He wasn't quite ready to make his move when the window wall shattered from concussion, but he adjusted smoothly to this diversion. Everyone was on their feet with jangled nerves as rain poured in. During his tour as a janitor in the wee hours two nights ago, the Assassin had prepared the carpet, seeding it with a chemical that reacted with water to produce a colorless but noxious gas. No need now to use the laser in his gold cigarette lighter to activate the sprinkler system in the lounge; the rain blowing in would do.
The Assassin pressed a mask concealed in the palm of one hand against his false nose and waited, eyes on Betts and the Blackwelder ops. The two dozen people in the lounge were scrambling, grabbing hand luggage, purses, laptops, and heading for the door. Confusion, but no panic. Then the gas rising from the soaked carpet hit them like a fast-moving medieval plague.
Coughing, choking, vomiting. Half blinded by their tears and disabled by retching, the two men from the Blackwelder Organization lost contact with Betts Waring, who was in no better shape, down on one knee, unable to breathe.
The Assassin pulled her to her feet with his free hand and walked her to the emergency exit, Betts stumbling, red-faced, gasping, puking.
The alarm went off when he opened the door, as if it mattered. Down two flights of iron stairs then, using both hands to keep Betts from falling.
"I'm with the airline. We're trained for emergencies. Had to get you out of there."
Betts, desperately sucking cleaner air, didn't argue or resist him. He opened a door at field level. Two tugs and a van with a bar of yellow lights on the roof were parked beneath a metal canopy. Rain lashed them as he pulled Betts to the van and seated her inside. She was rubbing at her eyes, still choking. He went around, got in behind the wheel, took a syringe from his shirt pocket. Betts's distress had lessened, but she didn't see it coming. Jumped and tried to pull away from him at the sting of the needle in the neck muscle. Looked at him, momentary fear in her eyes because of the syringe; and he was holding her very tight. Then she lost focus, went slack in his grip. Thirty seconds, and Betts was out.
Solicitously he cleaned vomit from her chin with a baby wipe and sprayed scent in the cab of the van so he wouldn't smell her until he had the opportunity to clean her more thoroughly. He drove at a leisurely pace beneath the belly of a parked 747, seeing the lights of emergency vehicles heading toward him. He used an exit gate near the freight terminal. Four minutes later he lifted Betts from the airport van and put her into a rental car he'd left behind the Dumpsters of a fast-food place on route 82 in Burlingame.
The rain had let up some. The Assassin smiled at Betts, who snored mildly in the seat
beside him. He noticed then that she'd lost a shoe somewhere. No matter. He already was anticipating home-cooked meals in their hideaway. Waiting for Eden Waring to come to Betts's rescue, and at last reveal her secrets to him. For months (with the ardor of a stifled romantic who had conceived his unobtainable woman and kept her in a hollow of the heart, consumed her in a lifetime of longing) the Assassin had yearned for the return of Eden.
But the question remained: how did one lay a ghost for good?
Chapter 5
LAKE NAWASHA,KENYA
OCTOBER 13
1145 HOURS ZULU
Six of them made the short trip from Shungwaya to the Naivasha Country Club for Sunday brunch: Tom Sherard, Bertie, Eden, and Jean-Baptiste, her date for the afternoon, in Tom's Discovery, with Etan Culver and his model wife Pegeen following in a Land Cruiser.
Sunday brunch at the club was always an event in their neighborhood. From the terrace, past pink clouds of bougainvillea and pastel jacaranda, there was a view of the lake and water-skiers raising graceful plumes in the afternoon sun. Celebrity-spotting on the terrace was a discreet but popular sport. Movie and rock stars, the occasional crowned head. Today they had a junketing U.S. Senator and his entourage, the old boy half drunk and loud and oblivious of the excellent food and calm beauty of their surroundings. There were also a Swedish ballerina and a magician, with whom Eden made unintentional eye contact. He smiled, seemed to wonder momentarily where he knew her from; then his attention was engaged by a member of his party.
"Illusionist," Bertie said. "Name's Lincoln Grayle." She was alert to something in Eden's expression. Bertie leaned over and whispered in Eden's ear while Jean-Baptiste was looking the other way, talking to Pegeen. "Want to meet him?"