Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  “Water level drops fast when the rain stops. And this ground, deep sand—it dries out quick. Say…seven or eight last night.”

  Standing deep inside the rock-walled passage, gazing up at the Explorer, Roy said, “Grant could’ve climbed down and walked away before the other vehicle got here.”

  “Fact is, you’ll see some vague footprints that don’t belong to the first group of my hopeless asshole assistants who tramped up the scene. And judging by ’em, you might make a case that a woman drove in here and took him away. Him and the dog. And his luggage.”

  Roy frowned. “A woman?”

  “One set of prints is of a size that you know it’s got to be a man. Even big women don’t often have feet as big as would be in proportion to the rest of ’em. The second set is small prints, which might be those of a boy, say ten to thirteen. But I doubt any boy was drivin’ on his own out here. Some small men have feet might step into shoes that size. But not many. So most likely it was a woman.”

  If a woman had come to Grant’s rescue, Roy was obliged to wonder if she was the woman, the fugitive. That raised anew the questions that had plagued him since Wednesday night: Who was Spencer Grant, what in the hell did the bastard have to do with the woman, what sort of wild card was he, was he likely to screw up their operations, and would he put them all at risk of exposure?

  Yesterday, when Roy had stood in Eve’s bunker, listening to the laser-disc recording, he’d been more baffled than enlightened by what he’d heard. Judging by the questions and the few comments that Grant managed to insert into Davidowitz’s monologue, he knew little about “Hannah Rainey,” but for mysterious reasons, he was busily learning everything he could. Until then, Roy had assumed that Grant and the woman already had some kind of close relationship; so the task had been to determine the nature of that relationship and to figure how much sensitive information the woman had shared with Grant. But if the guy didn’t already know her, why had he been at her bungalow that rainy night, and why had he made it his personal crusade to find her?

  Roy didn’t want to believe that the woman had shown up here in the arroyo, because to believe it was to be even more confused. “So you’re saying what—that he called someone on his cellular and she came right out to get him?”

  Tavelov was not rattled by Roy’s sarcasm. “Could’ve been some desert rat, likes living out where there aren’t phones, electricity. There are some. Though none I know about for twenty miles. Or it could’ve been an off-roader, just having himself some fun.”

  “In a storm.”

  “Storm was over. Anyway, the world’s full of fools.”

  “And whoever it is just happens to stumble across the Explorer. In this whole vast desert.”

  Tavelov shrugged. “We found the truck. It’s your job, making sense of it.”

  Walking back to the entrance of the rock-walled sluiceway, staring at the far riverbank, Roy said, “Whoever she was, she drove into the arroyo from the south, then also drove out to the south. Can we follow those tire tracks?”

  “Yep, you can—pretty clear for maybe four hundred yards, then spotty for another two hundred. Then they vanish. The wind wiped ’em out in some places. Other places, ground’s too hard to take tracks.”

  “Well, let’s search farther out, see if the tracks reappear.”

  “Already tried. While we were waiting.”

  Tavelov gave an edge to the word “waiting.”

  Roy said, “My damn pager was broken, and I didn’t know it.”

  “By foot and chopper, we pretty much had a good look-around in every direction to the south bank of the wash. Went three miles east, three south, three west.”

  “Well,” Roy said, “extend the search. Go out six miles and see if you can pick up the trail again.”

  “Just going to be a waste of time.”

  Roy thought of Eve as she had been last night, and that memory gave him the strength to remain calm, to smile, and to say, with characteristic pleasantness, “Probably is a waste of time, probably is. But I guess we’ve got to try anyway.”

  “Wind’s picking up.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Definitely picking up. Going to erase everything.”

  Perfection on black rubber.

  Roy said, “Then let’s try to stay ahead of it. Bring in more men, another chopper, push out ten miles in each direction.”

  Spencer was not awake. But he wasn’t asleep, either. He was taking a drunkard’s walk along the thin line between.

  He heard himself mumbling. He couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. Yet he was ever in the grip of a feverish urgency, certain there was something important that he must tell someone—although what that vital information was, and to whom he must impart it, eluded him.

  Occasionally he opened his eyes. Blurry vision. He blinked. Squinted. Couldn’t see well enough to be sure even if it was daytime or if the light came from the Coleman lantern.

  Always, Valerie was there. Close enough for him to know, even with his vision so poor, that it was her. Sometimes she was wiping his face with a damp cloth, sometimes changing a cool compress on his forehead. Sometimes she was just watching, and he sensed that she was worried, though he couldn’t clearly see her expression.

  Once, when he swam up from his personal darkness and stared out through the distorting pools that shimmered in his eye sockets, Valerie was turned half away from him, busy at a hidden task. Behind him, farther back under the camouflage tarp, the Rover’s engine was idling. He heard another familiar sound: the soft but unmistakable tick-tickety-tick of well-practiced fingers flying over a computer keyboard. Odd.

  From time to time, she talked to him. Those were the moments when he was best able to focus his mind and to mumble something that was halfway comprehensible, though he still faded in and out.

  Once he faded in to hear himself asking, “…how’d you find me…out here…way out here…between nothing and nowhere?”

  “Bug on your Explorer.”

  “Cockroach?”

  “The other kind of bug.”

  “Spider?”

  “Electronic.”

  “Bug on my truck?”

  “That’s right. I put it there.”

  “Like…you mean…a transmitter thing?” he asked fuzzily.

  “Just like a transmitter thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you followed me home.”

  “When?”

  “Tuesday night. No point denying it.”

  “Oh, yeah. Night we met.”

  “You make it sound almost romantic.”

  “Was for me.”

  Valerie was silent. Finally she said, “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “Liked you right off.”

  After another silence, she said, “You come to The Red Door, chat me up, seem like just a nice customer, then you follow me home.”

  The full meaning of her revelations was sinking in gradually, and a slow-dawning amazement was overtaking him. “You knew?”

  “You were good. But if I couldn’t spot a tail, I’d have been dead a long time ago.”

  “The bug. How?”

  “How did I plant it? Went out the back door while you were sitting across the street in your truck. Hot-wired somebody’s car a block or so away, drove to my street, parked up the block from you, waited till you left, then followed you.”

  “Followed me?”

  “What’s good for the goose.”

  “Followed me…Malibu?”

  “Followed you Malibu.”

  “And I never saw.”

  “Well, you weren’t expecting to be followed.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I climbed your gate, waited till all the lights were out in your cabin.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Fixed the transmitter to the undercarriage of your truck, wired it to work off the battery.”

  “You just happened to have a transmitter.”

  “You’d be surprised
what I just happen to have.”

  “Maybe not anymore.”

  Although Spencer didn’t want to leave her, Valerie grew blurrier and faded into shadows. He drifted into his inner darkness once more.

  Later he must have swum up again, because she was shimmering in front of him. He heard himself say, “Bug on my truck,” with amazement.

  “I had to know who you were, why you were following me. I knew you weren’t one of them.”

  He said weakly, “Cockroach’s people.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Coulda been one of them.”

  “No, because you’d have blown my brains out the first time you were close enough to do it.”

  “They don’t like you, huh?”

  “Not much. So I wondered who you were.”

  “Now you know.”

  “Not really. You’re a mystery, Spencer Grant.”

  “Me a mystery!” He laughed. Pain hammered across his entire head when he laughed, but he laughed anyway. “Least you have a name for me.”

  “Sure. But no more real than those you have for me.”

  “It’s real.”

  “Sure.”

  “Legal name. Spencer Grant. Guaranteed.”

  “Maybe. But who were you before you were a cop, before you went to UCLA, way back before you were in the army?”

  “You know all about me.”

  “Not all. Just what you’ve left on the records, just as much as you wanted anybody to find. Following me home, you spooked me, so I started checking you out.”

  “You moved out of the bungalow because of me.”

  “Didn’t know who the hell you were. But I figured if you could find me, so could they. Again.”

  “And they did.”

  “The very next day.”

  “So when I spooked you…I saved you.”

  “You could look at it that way.”

  “Without me, you’d have been there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When the SWAT team hit.”

  “Probably.”

  “Seems like it’s all sort of…meant to be.”

  “But what were you doing there?” she asked.

  “Well…”

  “In my house.”

  “You were gone.”

  “So?”

  “Wasn’t your place anymore.”

  “Did you know it wasn’t my place anymore when you went in?”

  The full meaning of her revelations kept giving him delayed jolts. He blinked furiously, vainly trying to see her face clearly. “Jesus, if you bugged my truck…!”

  “What?”

  “Then were you following me Wednesday night?”

  She said, “Yeah. Seeing what you were all about.”

  “From Malibu…?”

  “To The Red Door.”

  “Then back to your place in Santa Monica?”

  “I wasn’t inside like you were.”

  “But you saw it go down, the assault.”

  “From a distance. Don’t change the subject.”

  “What subject?” he asked, genuinely confused.

  “You were going to explain why you broke into my house Wednesday night,” she reminded him. She wasn’t angry. Her voice wasn’t sharp. He would have felt better if she’d been flat-out angry with him.

  “You…you didn’t show up at work.”

  “So you break into my house?”

  “Didn’t break in.”

  “Have I forgotten that I sent you an invitation?”

  “Door was unlocked.”

  “Every unlocked door is an invitation to you?”

  “I was…worried.”

  “Yeah, worried. Come on, tell me the truth. What were you looking for in my house that night?”

  “I was…”

  “You were what?”

  “I needed…”

  “What? What did you need in my house?”

  Spencer wasn’t sure whether he was dying from his injuries or from embarrassment. Whatever the case, he lost consciousness.

  The Bell JetRanger transported Roy Miro from the dry wash in the open desert straight to the landing pad on the roof of the agency’s high rise in downtown Las Vegas. While a ground and air search was being conducted in the Mojave for the woman and the vehicle that had taken Spencer Grant away from the wreckage of his Explorer, Roy spent Saturday afternoon in the fifth-floor satellite-surveillance center.

  While he worked, he ate a substantial lunch that he ordered from the commissary, to compensate for missing the lavish breakfast about which he’d fantasized. Besides, later he would need all the energy that he was able to muster, when he went home with Eve Jammer again.

  The previous evening, when Bobby Dubois had brought Roy to that same room, it had been quiet, operating with a minimal staff. Now every computer and other piece of equipment was manned, and murmured conversations were being conducted throughout the large chamber.

  Most likely, the vehicle they were seeking had traveled a considerable distance during the night, in spite of the inhospitable terrain. Grant and the woman might even have gotten far enough to pick up a highway beyond the surveillance posts that the agency had established on every route out of the southern half of the state, in which case they had slipped through the net again.

  On the other hand, perhaps they hadn’t gotten far at all. They might have bogged down. They might have had mechanical failure.

  Perhaps Grant had been injured in the Explorer. According to Ted Tavelov, bloodstains discolored the driver’s seat, and it didn’t appear as if the blood had come from the dead rat. If Grant was in bad shape, maybe he’d been unable to travel far.

  Roy was determined to think positively. The world was what you made it—or tried to make it. His entire life was committed to that philosophy.

  Of the available satellites in geosynchronous orbits that kept them positioned over the western and southwestern United States at all times, three were capable of the intense degree of surveillance that Roy Miro wished to conduct of the state of Nevada and of all neighboring states. One of those three space-based observation posts was under the control of the Drug Enforcement Administration. One was owned by the Environmental Protection Agency. The third was a military venture officially shared by the army, navy, air force, marines, and coast guard—but it was, in fact, under the iron-fisted political control of the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  No contest. The Environmental Protection Agency.

  The Drug Enforcement Administration, in spite of the dedication of its agents and largely because of meddling politicians, had pretty much failed in its assigned mission. And the military services, at least in these years following the end of the Cold War, were confused as to their purpose, underfunded, and moribund.

  By contrast, the Environmental Protection Agency was fulfilling its mission to an unprecedented degree for a government agency, in part because there was no well-organized criminal element or interest group opposed to it, and because many of its workers were motivated by a fierce desire to save the natural world. The EPA cooperated so successfully with the Department of Justice that a citizen who even inadvertently contaminated protected wetlands was at risk of spending more time in prison than would a doped-up gangsta dude who killed a 7-Eleven clerk, a pregnant mother, two nuns, and a kitten while he was stealing forty dollars and a Mars bar.

  Consequently, because shining success bred increased budgets and the greatest access to additional off-budget funding, the EPA owned the finest of hardware, from office equipment to orbital surveillance satellites. If any federal bureaucracy were to obtain independent control of nuclear weapons, it would be the EPA, although it was the least likely to use them—except, perhaps, in a turf dispute with the Department of the Interior.

  To find Spencer Grant and the woman, therefore, the agency was using the EPA surveillance satellite—Earthguard 3—which was in a geosynchronous orbit over the western United States. To seize complete and uncontested us
e of that asset, Mama infiltrated EPA computers and fed them false data to the effect that Earthguard 3 had experienced sudden, total systems failure. Scientists at EPA satellite-tracking facilities had immediately mounted a campaign to diagnose the ills of Earthguard 3 by long-distance telemechanical testing. However, Mama had secretly intercepted all commands sent to that eighty-million-dollar package of sophisticated electronics—and she would continue to do so until the agency no longer needed Earthguard 3, at which time she would allow it to go on-line again for the EPA.

  From space, the agency could now conduct a supra-magnified visual inspection of a multistate area. It could focus all the way down to a square-meter-by-square-meter search pattern if the need arose to get in that tight on a suspect vehicle or person.

  Earthguard 3 also provided two methods of highly advanced night surveillance. Using profile-guided infrared, it could differentiate between a vehicle and stationary sources of radiant heat by the very fact of the target’s mobility and by its distinct thermal signature. The system also could employ a variation on Star Tron night-vision technology to magnify ambient light by a factor of eighteen thousand, making a night scene appear nearly as bright as an overcast day—although with a monochromatic, eerie green cast.

  All images were automatically processed through an enhancement program aboard the satellite prior to encoding and transmission. And upon receipt in the Vegas control center, an equally automated but more sophisticated enhancement program, run on the latest-generation Cray supercomputer, further clarified the high-definition video image before projecting it on the wall display. If additional clarification was desired, stills taken from the tape could be subjected to more enhancement procedures under the supervision of talented technicians.

  The effectiveness of satellite surveillance—whether infrared, night-vision, or ordinary telescopic photography—varied according to the territory under scrutiny. Generally, the more populated an area, the less successful a space-based search for anything as small as a single individual or vehicle, because there were far too many objects in motion and too many heat sources to be sorted through and analyzed either accurately or on a timely basis. Towns were easier to observe than cities, rural areas easier than towns, and open highways could be monitored better than metropolitan streets.