Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  “That was fourteen months ago?” he asked. “And the agency’s still this hot to get you?”

  “I have some significant codes they don’t know I have, things Danny and I memorized…a lot of knowledge. I don’t have hard proof against them. But I know everything about them, which makes me dangerous enough. Tom will never stop looking, as long as he lives.”

  Like a great black wasp, the helicopter droned across the Nevada badlands.

  Roy was still wearing the telephone headset with the saucer-size earphones, blocking out the engine and rotor noise to concentrate on the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The loudest sound in his private realm was the slow, heavy thudding of his heart.

  When Ackblom’s secret work had been exposed, Roy had been only sixteen years old and still confused about the meaning of life and about his own place in the world. He was drawn to beautiful things: the paintings of Childe Hassam and so many others, classical music, antique French furniture, Chinese porcelain, lyrical poetry. He was always a happy boy when alone in his room, with Beethoven or Bach on the stereo, gazing at the color photographs in a book about Fabergé eggs, Paul Storr silver, or Sung Dynasty porcelains. Likewise, he was happy when he was wandering alone through an art museum. He was seldom happy around people, however, although he wanted desperately to have friends and to be liked. In his expansive but guarded heart, young Roy was convinced that he had been born to make an important contribution to the world, and he knew that when he discovered what his contribution would be, he then would become widely admired and loved. Nevertheless, at sixteen and bedeviled by the impatience of youth, he was enormously frustrated by the need to wait for his purpose and his destiny to be revealed to him.

  He had been fascinated by the newspaper accounts of the Ackblom tragedy, because in the mystery of the artist’s double life, he had sensed a resolution to his own deep confusion. He acquired two books with color plates of Ackblom’s art—and responded powerfully to the work. Though Ackblom’s pictures were beautiful, even ennobling, Roy’s enthusiasm wasn’t aroused only by the paintings themselves. He was also affected by the artist’s inner struggle, which he inferred from the paintings and which he believed to be similar to his own.

  Basically, Steven Ackblom was preoccupied with two subjects and produced two types of paintings.

  Although only in his mid-thirties, he had been obsessed enough to produce an enormous body of work, consisting half of exceptionally beautiful still lifes. Fruit, vegetables, stones, flowers, pebbles, the contents of a sewing box, buttons, tools, plates, a collection of old bottles, bottle caps—humble and exalted objects alike were rendered in remarkable detail, so realistic that they seemed three-dimensional. In fact, each item attained a hyperreality, appeared to be more real than the object that had served as the model for it, and possessed an eerie beauty. Ackblom never resorted to the forced beauty of sentimentality or unrestrained romanticism; his vision was always convincing, moving, and sometimes breathtaking.

  The subjects of the remainder of the paintings were people: portraits of individuals and of groups containing three to seven subjects. More frequently, they were faces rather than full figures, but when they were figures, they were invariably nudes. Sometimes Ackblom’s men, women, and children were ethereally beautiful on the surface, though their comeliness was always tainted by a subtle but terrible pressure within them, as if some monstrous possessing spirit might explode from their fragile flesh at any moment. This pressure distorted a feature here and there, not dramatically but just enough to rob them of perfect beauty. And sometimes the artist portrayed ugly—even grotesque—individuals, within whom there was also fearful pressure, though its effect was to force a feature here and there to conform to an ideal of beauty. Their malformed countenances were all the more chilling for being, in some aspects, lightly touched by grace. As a consequence of the conflict between inner and outer realities, the people in both types of portraits were enormously expressive, although their expressions were more mysterious and haunting than any that enlivened the faces of real human beings.

  Seizing on those portraits, the news media had been quick to make the most obvious interpretation. They claimed that the artist—himself a handsome man—had been painting his own demon within, crying out for help or issuing a warning regarding his true nature.

  Although he was only sixteen, Roy Miro understood that Ackblom’s paintings were not about the artist himself, but about the world as he perceived it. Ackblom had no need to cry out for help or to warn anyone, for he didn’t see himself as demonic. Taken as a whole, what his art said was that no human being could ever achieve the perfect beauty of even the humblest object in the inanimate world.

  Ackblom’s great paintings helped young Roy to understand why he was delighted to be alone with the artistic works of human beings, yet was often unhappy in the company of human beings themselves. No work of art could be flawless, because an imperfect human being had created it. Yet art was the distillation of the best in humanity. Therefore, works of art were closer to perfection than those who created them.

  Favoring the inanimate over the animate was all right. It was acceptable to value art above people.

  That was the first lesson he learned from Steven Ackblom.

  Wanting to know more about the man, Roy had discovered that the artist was, not surprisingly, extremely private and seldom spoke to anyone for publication. Roy managed to find two interviews. In one, Ackblom held forth with great feeling and compassion about the misery of the human condition. One quotation seemed to leap from the text: “Love is the most human of all emotions because love is messy. And of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.”

  Ackblom had pleaded guilty to the murders of his wife and forty-one others, rather than face a lengthy trial that he couldn’t win. In the courtroom, entering his plea, the painter had disgusted and angered the judge by saying, of his forty-two victims: “They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died.”

  Roy began to understand what Ackblom had been doing in those rooms under the barn. In subjecting his victims to torture, the artist was trying to focus them toward a moment of perfection, when they would briefly shine—even though still alive—with a beauty equal to that of inanimate objects.

  Purity and beauty were the same thing. Pure lines, pure forms, pure light, pure color, pure sound, pure emotion, pure thought, pure faith, pure ideals. However, human beings were capable of achieving purity, in any thought or endeavor, only rarely and only in extreme circumstances—which made the human condition pitiable.

  That was the second lesson he learned from Steven Ackblom.

  For a few years, Roy’s heartfelt pity for humanity intensified and matured. One day shortly after his twentieth birthday, as a bud suddenly blossoms into a full-blown rose, his pity became compassion. He considered the latter to be a purer emotion than the former. Pity often entailed a subtle element of disgust for the object of pity or a sense of superiority on the part of the person who felt pity for another. But compassion was an unpolluted, crystalline, piercing empathy for other people, a perfect understanding of their suffering.

  Guided by compassion, acting on frequent opportunities to make the world a better place, confident of the purity of his motivation, Roy had then become a more enlightened man than Steven Ackblom. He had found his destiny.

  Now, thirteen years later, sitting in the back of the executive helicopter as it carried him toward Utah, Roy smiled at the photograph of the artist in swarming shadows.

  Funny how everything in life seemed connected to everything else. A forgotten moment or half-remembered face from the past could suddenly become important again.

  The artist had never been so central a figure in Roy’s life that he could have been called a mentor or even an inspiration. Roy had never believed that Ackblom was a madman—as the media had
portrayed him—but saw him as merely misguided. The best answer to the hopelessness of the human condition was not to grant one moment of pure beauty to each imperfect soul by the elevating effect of severe pain. That was a pathetically transient triumph. The better answer was to identify those most in need of release—then, with dignity and compassion and merciful speed, set them free of their imperfect human condition.

  Nevertheless, at a crucial time, the artist had unknowingly taught a few vital truths to a confused boy. Though Steven Ackblom was a misguided and tragic figure, Roy owed him a debt.

  It was ironic—and an intriguing example of cosmic justice—that Roy should be the one to rid the world of the troubled and thankless son who had betrayed Ackblom. The artist’s quest for human perfection had been misguided but, in Roy’s view, well meaning. Their sorry world would inch closer to an ideal state with Michael (now Spencer) removed from it. And pure justice seemed to require that Spencer be removed only subsequent to being subjected to prolonged and severe pain, in a manner that would adequately honor his visionary father.

  As Roy took off the telephone headset, he heard the pilot making an announcement on the public-address system. “…according to Vegas control, allowing for the target’s current speed, we’re approximately sixteen minutes from rendezvous. Sixteen minutes to the target.”

  A sky like blue glass.

  Seventeen miles to Cedar City.

  They began to encounter more traffic on the two-lane highway. Ellie used the horn to encourage slow vehicles to get out of her way. When the drivers were stubborn, she took nail-biting risks to get around them in no-passing zones or even passed them to the right when the shoulder of the highway was wide enough.

  Their speed dropped because of the interference that the traffic posed, but the need for increased recklessness made it seem as though they were actually going faster than ever. Spencer held on to one edge of his seat. In the back, Rocky was bobbing his head again.

  “Even without proof,” Spencer suggested, “you could go to the press. You could point them in the right direction, put Summerton on the defensive—”

  “Tried that twice. First a New York Times reporter. Contacted her on her office computer, had an on-line dialogue and set up a meeting at an Indian restaurant. Made it clear if she told anyone, anyone at all, my life and hers wouldn’t be worth spit. I got there four hours early, watched the place with binoculars from the roof of a building across the street, to be sure she came alone and there wasn’t any obvious stakeout. I figured I’d make her wait, go in half an hour late, take the extra time to watch the street. But fifteen minutes after she arrived…the restaurant blew up. Gas explosion, so the police said.”

  “The reporter?”

  “Dead. Along with fourteen other people in there.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Then, a week later, a guy from the Washington Post was supposed to meet me in a public park. I actually set it up with a cellular phone from another rooftop overlooking that site, but not obvious enough to be seen. Made it for six hours later. About an hour and a half go by, and then a water department truck pulls up near the park. The work crew opens a manhole, sets out some safety cones and sawhorses with flashers on them.”

  “But they weren’t really city workers.”

  “I had a battery-powered multiband scanner with me on that roof. Picked up the frequency they were using to coordinate the phony work crew with a phony lunch wagon on the other side of the park.”

  “You are something else,” he said admiringly.

  “Three agents in the park, too, one pretending he’s a panhandler, two pretending to be park-service employees doing maintenance. Then the time comes and the reporter shows up, walks to the monument where I told him we’d meet—and the sonofabitch is wired too! I hear him muttering to them that he doesn’t see me anywhere, what should he do. And they’re calming him, telling him it’s cool, he should just wait. The little weasel must’ve been in Tom Summerton’s pocket, called him up right after talking to me.”

  Ten miles west of Cedar City, they pulled behind a Dodge pickup that was doing ten miles per hour under the legal limit. At the rear window of the cab, two rifles hung in a rack.

  The pickup driver let Ellie pound on the horn for a while, mule-stubborn about pulling over to let her by.

  “What’s wrong with this jerk?” she fumed. She gave him more horn, but he played deaf. “As far as he knows, we have someone dying in here, needs a doctor fast.”

  “Hell, these days, we could be a couple of lunatic dopers just spoiling for a shootout.”

  The man in the pickup was moved by neither compassion nor fear. Finally he responded to the horn by putting his arm out the window and flipping Ellie the finger.

  Passing to the left was impossible at the moment. Visibility was limited, and what highway they could see was occupied by a steady stream of oncoming traffic.

  Spencer looked at his watch. They had only fifteen minutes left from the two-hour safety margin that Ellie had estimated.

  The man in the pickup, however, seemed to have all the time in the world.

  “Jackass,” she said, and whipped the Rover to the right, trying to get around the slow vehicle by using the shoulder of the highway.

  When she pulled even with the Dodge, it accelerated to match her speed. Twice Ellie pumped more juice to the Rover, twice it leaped forward, and twice the pickup matched her new pace.

  The other driver repeatedly glanced away from the road to glare at them. He was in his forties. Under a baseball cap, his face revealed all the intelligence of a shovel.

  Clearly, he intended to pace Ellie until the shoulder narrowed and she was forced to fall in behind him again.

  Shovelface didn’t know what kind of woman he was dealing with, of course, but Ellie promptly showed him. She pulled the Rover to the left, bashing the pickup hard enough to startle the driver into shifting his foot off the accelerator. The pickup lost speed. The Rover shot ahead. Shovelface jammed the pedal again, but he was too late: Ellie swung the Rover onto the pavement, in front of the Dodge.

  As the Rover lurched left then right, Rocky yelped with surprise and fell onto his side. He scrambled into a sitting position again and snorted in what might have been either embarrassment or delight.

  Spencer looked at his watch. “You think they’ll hook up with local cops before they come after us?”

  “No. They’ll try to keep locals out of it.”

  “Then what should we be looking for?”

  “If they fly in from Vegas—or anywhere else—I think they’ll be in a chopper. More maneuverability, flexibility. With satellite tracking, they can pinpoint the Rover, come right in over us, and blow us off the highway, if they get a chance.”

  Leaning forward, Spencer peered through the windshield at the threatening blue sky.

  A horn blared behind them.

  “Damn,” Ellie said, glancing at her side mirror.

  Checking the mirror on his side, Spencer saw that the Dodge had caught up with them. The angry driver was pounding his horn as Ellie had pounded hers earlier.

  “We don’t need this right now,” she worried.

  “Okay,” Spencer said, “so let’s see if he’ll take a rain check on a shootout. If we survive the agency, then we’ll come back and give him a fair whack at us.”

  “Think he’d go for that?”

  “Seems like a reasonable man.”

  Pressing the Rover as hard as ever, Ellie managed to glance at Spencer and smile. “You’re getting the attitude.”

  “It’s contagious.”

  Here and there, scattered along both sides of the highway, were businesses, houses. This wasn’t quite yet Cedar City, but they were definitely back in civilization.

  The slug in the Dodge pickup pounded on the horn with such enthusiasm that every blast must have been sending a thrill through his groin.

  On the display screen in the open attaché case, relayed from Las Vegas, was the view from Earthgu
ard, enormously magnified and enhanced, looking down on the state highway just west of Cedar City.

  The Range Rover was pulling one reckless stunt after another. Sitting in the back of the chopper, with the open case on his lap, Roy was riveted by the performance, which was like something out of an action movie, though seen from one monotonous angle.

  No one drove that fast, weaving lane to lane, sometimes facing down oncoming traffic, unless he was drunk or being pursued. This driver wasn’t drunk. There was nothing sloppy about the way the Rover was being handled. It was rash, daredevil driving, but it was also skillful. And from all appearances, the Rover was not being chased.

  Roy was finally convinced that the woman was behind the wheel of that vehicle. After being alarmed by the satellite trace-back to her computer, she would never take comfort from the fact that no pursuit car was racing up her tailpipe. She knew that they either would be waiting ahead for her at a roadblock or would take her out from the air. Before either of those things happened, she was trying to get into a town, where she could blend into a busy flow of traffic and use whatever architecture of the urban landscape might help her to escape their eyes.

  Cedar City wasn’t nearly large enough, of course, to provide her with the opportunities she needed. Evidently she underestimated the power and clarity of surveillance from orbit.

  At the front of the chopper’s passenger compartment, the four strike force officers were checking their weapons. They distributed spare magazines of ammunition in their pockets.

  Civilian clothing was the uniform for this mission. They wanted to get in, nail the woman, capture Grant, and get out before Cedar City law enforcement showed up. If they became involved with the locals, they would only have to deceive them, and deception involved the risk of making mistakes and being unmasked—especially when they had no idea how much Grant knew and what he might say if the cops insisted on talking to him. Besides, dealing with locals also took too much damn time. Both choppers were marked with phony registration numbers to mislead observers. As long as the men wore no identifying clothing or gear, witnesses would have little or nothing useful to tell the police later.