by Dean Koontz
She sat for a while, staring at her own hands. Then she got up and went to the laptop, which was still plugged in and connected to the modem. She switched it on.
He followed her to the desk. “What’re you doing?”
“What’s the address of the ranch?” she asked.
It was a rural address, rather than a street number. He gave it to her, then again after she asked him to repeat it. “But why? What’s this about?”
“What’s the name of the offshore company?”
“Vanishment International.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“And that’s the name on the deed now—Vanishment International? That’s how it would show on the tax records?”
“Yeah.” Spencer pulled up another chair beside hers and sat on it as Rocky came sniffing around to see if they had more food. “Ellie, will you open up?”
“I’m going to try to crack into public land records out there,” she said. “I need to call up a parcel map if I can get one. I’ve got to figure out the exact geographic coordinates of the place.”
“Is all that supposed to mean something?”
“By God, if we’re going in there, if we’re taking a risk like that, then we’re going to be as heavily armed as possible.” She was talking to herself more than to him. “We’re going to be ready to defend ourselves against anything.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Too complicated. Later. Now I need some silence.”
Her quick hands worked magic on the keyboard. Spencer watched the screen as Ellie moved from Grand Junction to the courthouse computer in Vail. Then she peeled the county’s data-system onion one layer at a time.
Wearing a slightly large suit of clothes provided by the agency and a topcoat identical to those of his three companions, in shackles and handcuffs, the famous and infamous Steven Ackblom sat beside Roy in the back of the limousine.
The artist was fifty-three but appeared to be only a few years older than when he had been on the front pages of newspapers, where the sensation mongers had variously dubbed him the Vampire of Vail, the Madman of the Mountains, and the Psycho Michelangelo. Although a trace of gray had appeared at his temples, his hair was otherwise black and glossy and not in the least receding. His handsome face was remarkably smooth and youthful, and his brow was unmarked. A soft smile line curved downward from the outer flare of each nostril, and fans of fine crinkles spread at the outer corners of his eyes: None of that aged him whatsoever; in fact, it gave the impression that he suffered few troubles but enjoyed many sources of amusement.
As in the photograph that Roy had found in the Malibu cabin and as in all the pictures that had appeared in newspapers and magazines sixteen years ago, Steven Ackblom’s eyes were his most commanding feature. Nevertheless, the arrogance that Roy had perceived even in the shadowy publicity still was not there now, if it ever had been; in its place was a quiet self-confidence. Likewise, the menace that could be read into any photograph, when one knew the accomplishments of the man, was not in the least visible in person. His gaze was direct and clear, but not threatening. Roy had been surprised and not displeased to discover an uncommon gentleness in Ackblom’s eyes, and a poignant empathy as well, from which it was easy to infer that he was a person of considerable wisdom, whose understanding of the human condition was deep, complete.
Even in the limousine’s odd and inadequate illumination, which came from the recessed lights under the heel-kicks of the car seats and from the low-wattage sconces in the doorposts, Ackblom was a presence to be reckoned with—although in no way that the press, in its sensation seeking, had begun to touch upon. He was quiet, but his taciturnity had no quality of inarticulateness or distraction. Quite the opposite: His silences spoke more than other men’s most polished flights of oratory, and he was always and unmistakably observant and alert. He moved little, never fidgeted. Occasionally, when he accompanied a comment with a gesture, the movement of his cuffed hands was so economical that the chain between his wrists clinked softly if at all. His stillness was not rigid but relaxed, not limp but full of quiescent power. It was impossible to sit at his side and be unaware that he possessed tremendous intelligence: He all but hummed with it, as if his mind was a dynamic machine of such omnipotence that it could move worlds and alter the cosmos.
In his entire thirty-three years, Roy Miro had met only two people whose mere physical presence had engendered in him an approximation of love. The first had been Eve Marie Jammer. The second was Steven Ackblom. Both in the same week. In this wondrous February, destiny had become, indeed, his cloak and his companion. He sat at Steven Ackblom’s side, discreetly enthralled. He wanted desperately to make the artist aware that he, Roy Miro, was a person of profound insights and exceptional accomplishments.
Rink and Fordyce (Tarkenton and Olmeyer had ceased to exist upon leaving Dr. Palma’s office) seemed not to be as charmed by Ackblom as Roy was—or charmed at all. Sitting in the rear-facing seats, they appeared uninterested in what the artist had to say. Fordyce closed his eyes for long periods of time, as though meditating. Rink stared out the window, although he could have seen nothing whatsoever of the night through the darkly tinted glass. On those rare occasions when a gesture of Ackblom’s rang a soft clink from his cuffs, and on those even rarer occasions when he shifted his feet enough to rattle the shackles that connected his ankles, Fordyce’s eyes popped open like the counterbalanced eyes of a doll, and Rink’s head snapped from the unseen night to the artist. Otherwise they seemed to pay no attention to him.
Depressingly, Rink and Fordyce clearly had formed their opinions of Ackblom based on what drivel they had gleaned from the media, not from what they could observe for themselves. Their denseness was no surprise, of course. Rink and Fordyce were men not of ideas but of action, not of passion but of crude desire. The agency had need of their type, although they were sadly without vision, pitiable creatures of woeful limitations who would one day inch the world closer to perfection by departing it.
“At the time, I was quite young, only two years older than your son,” Roy said, “but I understood what you were trying to achieve.”
“And what was that?” Ackblom asked. His voice was in the lower tenor range, mellow, with a timbre that suggested he might have had a career as a singer if he’d wished.
Roy explained his theories about the artist’s work: that those eerie and compelling portraits weren’t about people’s hateful desires building like boiler pressure beneath their beautiful surfaces, but were meant to be viewed with the still lifes and, together, were a statement about the human desire—and struggle—for perfection. “And if your work with living subjects resulted in their attainment of a perfect beauty, even for a brief time before they died, then your crimes weren’t crimes at all but acts of charity, acts of profound compassion, because too few people in this world will ever know any moment of perfection in their entire lives. Through torture, you gave those forty-one—your wife as well, I assume—a transcendent experience. Had they lived, they might eventually have thanked you.”
Roy was speaking sincerely, although previously he had believed that Ackblom had been misguided in the means by which he had pursued the grail of perfection. That was before he had met the man. Now, he felt ashamed of his woeful underestimation of the artist’s talent and keen perception.
In the rear-facing seats, neither Rink nor Fordyce evinced any surprise or interest in anything that Roy said. In their service with the agency, they had heard so many outrageous lies, all so well and sincerely delivered, that they undoubtedly believed their boss was only playing with Ackblom, cleverly manipulating a madman into the degree of cooperation required from him to ensure the success of the current operation. Roy was in the singular and thrilling position of being able to express his deepest feelings, with the knowledge that Ackblom would fully comprehend him even while Rink and Fordyce would think he was engaged only in Machiavellian games.
Roy did n
ot go so far as to reveal his personal commitment to compassionate treatment of the sadder cases that he met in his many travels. Stories like those about the Bettonfields in Beverly Hills, Chester and Guinevere in Burbank, and the paraplegic and his wife outside the restaurant in Vegas might strike even Rink and Fordyce as too specific in detail to be impromptu fabrications invented to win the artist’s confidence.
“The world would be an infinitely better place,” Roy opined, restricting his observations to safely general concepts, “if the breeding stock of humanity was thinned out. Eliminate the most imperfect specimens first. Always working up from the bottom. Until those permitted to survive are the people who most closely meet the standards for the ideal citizens needed to build a gentler and more enlightened society. Don’t you agree?”
“The process would certainly be fascinating,” Ackblom replied.
Roy took the comment to be approving. “Yes, wouldn’t it?”
“Always supposing that one was on the committee of eliminators,” the artist said, “and not among those to be judged.”
“Well, of course, that’s a given.”
Ackblom favored him with a smile. “Then what fun.”
They were driving over the mountains on Interstate 70, rather than flying to Vail. The trip would require less than two hours by car. Returning across Denver from the prison to Stapleton, waiting for flight clearance, and making the journey by air would actually have taken longer. Besides, the limousine was more intimate and quieter than the jet. Roy was able to spend more quality time with the artist than he would have been able to enjoy in the Lear.
Gradually, mile by mile, Roy Miro came to understand why Steven Ackblom affected him as powerfully as Eve had affected him. Although the artist was a handsome man, nothing about his physical appearance could qualify as a perfect feature. Yet in some way, he was perfect. Roy sensed it. A radiance. A subtle harmony. Soothing vibrations. In some aspect of his being, Ackblom was without the slightest flaw. For the time being, the artist’s perfect quality or virtue remained tan-talizingly mysterious, but Roy was confident of discovering it by the time they arrived at the ranch outside Vail.
The limousine cruised into ever higher mountains, through vast primeval forests encrusted with snow, upward into silvery moonlight—all of which the tinted windows reduced to a smoky blur. The tires hummed.
While Spencer drove the stolen black pickup east on Interstate 70 out of Grand Junction, Ellie slumped in her seat and worked feverishly on the laptop, which she had plugged into the cigarette lighter. The computer was elevated on a pillow that they had filched from the motel. Periodically she consulted a printout of the parcel map and other information that she had obtained about the ranch.
“What’re you doing?” he asked again.
“Calculations.”
“What calculations?”
“Ssshhhhh. Rocky’s sleeping on the backseat.”
From her duffel bag, she had produced diskettes of software which she’d installed in the machine. Evidently they were programs of her own design, adapted to his laptop while he had lingered in delirium for more than two days in the Mojave. When he had asked her why she had backed up her own computer—now gone with the Rover—with his quite different system, she had said, “Former Girl Scout. Remember? We always like to be prepared.”
He had no idea what her software allowed her to do. Across the screen flickered formulas and graphs. Holographic globes of the earth revolved at her command, and from them she extracted areas for enlargement and closer examination.
Vail was only three hours away. Spencer wished that they could use the time to talk, to discover more about each other. Three hours was such a short time—especially if it proved to be the last three hours they ever had together.
FOURTEEN
When he returned to his brother’s house from his walk through the hilly streets of Westwood, Harris Descoteaux did not mention the encounter with the tall man in the blue Toyota. For one thing, it seemed half like a dream. Improbable. Besides, he hadn’t been able to make up his mind whether that stranger had been a friend or an enemy. He didn’t want to alarm Darius or Jessica.
Late that afternoon, after Ondine and Willa returned from the mall with their aunt and after Darius and Bonnie’s son, Martin, came home from school, Darius decided that they needed to have a little fun. He insisted on packing everyone—the seven of them—into the VW Microbus, which he had so lovingly restored with his own hands, to go to a movie and then to dinner at Hamlet Gardens.
Neither Harris nor Jessica wanted to go to movies and dinners in restaurants when every dollar spent was a dollar that they were mooching. Not even Ondine and Willa, as resilient as any teenagers, had yet bounced back from the trauma of the SWAT attack on Friday or from having been put out of their own home by federal marshals.
Darius was adamant that a movie and dinner at Hamlet Gardens were precisely the right medicines for what ailed them. And his persistence was one of the qualities that made him an exceptional attorney.
That was how, at six-fifteen Monday evening, Harris came to be in a theater with a boisterous crowd, unable to grasp the humor in scenes that everyone else found hilarious, and succumbing to another attack of claustrophobia. The darkness. So many people in one room. The body heat of the crowd. He was afflicted, first, by an inability to draw a deep breath and then by a mild dizziness. He feared that worse would swiftly follow. He whispered to Jessica that he had to use the bathroom. When worry crossed her face, he patted her arm and smiled reassuringly, and then he got the hell out of there.
The men’s room was deserted. At one of the four sinks, Harris turned on the cold water. He bent over the bowl and splashed his face repeatedly, trying to cool down from the overheated theater and chase away the dizziness.
The noise of the running water prevented him from hearing the other man enter. When he looked up, he was no longer alone.
About thirty, Asian, wearing loafers and jeans and a dark-blue sweater with prancing red reindeer, the stranger stood two sinks away. He was combing his hair. He met Harris’s eyes in the mirror, and he smiled. “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”
Harris recognized the question as the very one with which the tall man in the blue Toyota had initially addressed him. Startled, he backed away from the sink so fast that he crashed against the swinging door at one of the toilet stalls. He tottered, almost fell, but caught the hingeless side of the jamb to keep his balance.
“For a while the Japanese economy was so hot that it gave the world the idea that maybe big government and big business must work hand in glove.”
“Who are you?” Harris asked, quicker off the mark with this man than he had been with the first.
Ignoring the question, the smiling stranger said, “So now we hear about national industrial policies. Big business and government strike deals every day. Push my social programs and enhance my power, says the politician, and I’ll guarantee your profit.”
“What does any of this matter to me?”
“Be patient, Mr. Descoteaux.”
“But—”
“Union members get screwed because government conspires with their bosses. Small businessmen get screwed, everyone too little to play in the hundred-billion-dollar league. Now the secretary of defense wants to use the military as an arm of economic policy.”
Harris returned to the sink, where he had left the cold water running. He turned it off.
“A business-government alliance, enforced by the military and domestic police—once, this was called fascism. Will we see fascism in our time, Mr. Descoteaux? Or is this something new, not to worry?”
Harris was trembling. He realized that his face and hands were dripping, and he yanked paper towels from the dispenser.
“And if it’s something new, Mr. Descoteaux, is it going to be something good? Maybe. Maybe we’ll go through a time of adjustment, and thereafter everything will be delightful.” He nodded, smiling, as if considering that possib
ility. “Or maybe this new thing will turn out to be a new kind of hell.”
“I don’t care about any of this,” Harris said angrily. “I’m not political.”
“You don’t need to be. To protect yourself, you need only to be informed.”
“Look, whoever you are, I just want my house back. I want my life like it was. I want to go on just the way everything was.”
“That will never transpire, Mr. Descoteaux.”
“Why is this happening to me?”
“Have you read the novels of Philip K. Dick, Mr. Descoteaux?”
“Who? No.”
Harris felt more than ever as if he had crossed into White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat territory.
The stranger shook his head with dismay. “The futuristic world Mr. Dick wrote about is the world we’re sliding into. It’s a scary place, this Dicksian world. More than ever, a person needs friends.”
“Are you a friend?” Harris demanded. “Who are you people?”
“Be patient and consider what I’ve said.”
The man started for the door.
Harris reached out to stop him but decided against it. A moment later he was alone.
His bowels were suddenly in turmoil. He hadn’t lied to Jessica after all: He really did need to use the bathroom.
Approaching Vail, high in the western Rockies, Roy Miro used the phone in the limousine to call the number of the cellular unit that Gary Duvall had given him earlier.
“Clear?” he asked.
“No sign of them yet,” Duvall said.
“We’re almost there.”
“You really think they’re going to show?”
The stolen JetRanger and its crew had been found in the Colorado National Monument. A call from the woman to the Grand Junction police had been traced to Montrose, indicating that she and Spencer Grant were fleeing south toward Durango. Roy didn’t believe it. He knew that telephone calls could be deceptively routed with the assistance of a computer. He trusted not in a traced call but in the power of the past; where the past and the present met, he would find the fugitives.