His direct and piercing stare, the firm set of his mouth, his aristocratic features, and even his deceptively casual posture seemed to reveal a man who had never known self-doubt, depression, or fear. He was more than merely confident and self-possessed. In the photo, he projected a subtle but unmistakable arrogance. His expression seemed to say that, without exception, he regarded all other members of the human race with amusement and contempt.
Yet he remained enormously appealing, as though his intelligence and experience had earned him the right to feel superior. Studying the photograph, Roy sensed that here was a man who would make an interesting, unpredictable, entertaining friend. Peering out from his shadows, this singular individual had an animal magnetism that made his expression of contempt seem inoffensive. Indeed, an air of arrogance seemed right for him—just as any lion must walk with feline arrogance if it was to seem at all like a lion.
Gradually, the spell cast by the photograph diminished in power but didn’t altogether fade. The kitchen reestablished itself from the mists of Roy’s fixation, as did the window and the eucalyptuses.
He knew this man. He had seen him before.
A long time ago…
Familiarity was part of the reason that the picture affected him so strongly. As with the woman, however, Roy was unable to put a name to the face or to recall the circumstances under which he had seen this person previously.
He wished the photographer had allowed more light to reach his subject’s face. But the shadows seemed to love the dark-eyed man.
Roy placed that photo on the kitchen table, beside the snapshot of the mother and her son at poolside.
The woman. The boy. The barn in the background. The man in the shadows.
At a full stop on Las Vegas Boulevard South, confronted by armed men in front of and behind him, Spencer pounded the horn, pulled the wheel hard to the right, and tramped on the accelerator. The Explorer rocketed toward the amusement park, Spaceport Vegas, pressing him and Rocky against their seats as if they were astronauts moonward bound.
The cocksure boldness of the gunmen proved that they were feds of some kind, even if they used fake credentials to conceal their true identity. They would never ambush him on a major street, before witnesses, unless they were confident of pulling rank on local cops.
On the sidewalk in front of Spaceport Vegas, on their way from casino to casino, pedestrians scattered, and the Explorer shot into a driveway posted for buses only, though no buses were in sight.
Perhaps because of the February cold snap and the pending storm, or maybe because it was only noon, Spaceport Vegas wasn’t open. The ticket booths were shuttered, and the thrill rides that were high enough to be seen behind the park walls were in suspended animation.
Nevertheless, neon and futuristic applications of fiber optics throbbed and flashed along the perimeter wall, which was nine feet high and painted like the armored hull of a starfighter. A photosensitive cell must have switched on the lights, mistaking the midday gloom of the advancing storm for the onset of evening.
Spencer drove between two rocket-shaped ticket booths, toward a twelve-foot-diameter tunnel of polished steel that penetrated the park walls. In blue neon, the words TIME TUNNEL TO SPACEPORT VEGAS promised more escape than he needed.
He flew up the gentle ramp, never tapping the brakes, and raced unheeding through time.
The massive pipe was two hundred feet long. Tubes of brilliant blue neon curved up the walls, across the ceiling. They blinked in rapid sequence from the entrance to the exit, creating an illusion of a funnel of lightning.
Under ordinary circumstances, patrons were conveyed into the park on lumbering trams, but the half-blinding surges of light were more effective at greater speed. Spencer’s eyes throbbed, and he could almost believe that he had been catapulted into a distant era.
Rocky was doing the head-bobbing bit again.
“Never knew I had a dog,” Spencer said, “with a need for speed.”
He fled into the far reaches of the park, where the lights had not been activated like those on the wall and in the tunnel. The deserted and seemingly endless midway rose and fell, narrowed and widened and narrowed again, and repeatedly looped back on itself.
Spaceport Vegas featured corkscrew roller coasters, dive-bombers, scramblers, whips, and the other usual gut churners, all tricked up with lavish science fiction facades, gimmicks, and names. Lightsled to Ganymede. Hyperspace Hammer. Solar Radiation Hell. Asteroid Collision. Devolution Drop. The park also offered elaborate flight-simulator adventures and virtual-reality experiences in buildings of futuristic or bizarrely alien architecture: Planet of the Snakemen, Blood Moon, Vortex Blaster, Deathworld. At Robot Wars, homicidal machines with red eyes guarded the entrance, and the portal to Star Monster looked like a glistening orifice at one end or the other of an extraterrestrial leviathan’s digestive tract.
Under the bleak sky, swept by cold wind, with the gray prestorm light sucking the color out of everything, the future as imagined by the creators of Spaceport Vegas was unremittingly hostile.
Curiously, that made it appear more realistic to Spencer, more like a true vision and less like an amusement park than its designers ever intended. Alien, machine, and human predators were everywhere on the prowl. Cosmic disasters loomed at every turn: The Exploding Sun, Comet Strike, Time Snap, The Big Bang, Wasteland. The End of Time was on the same avenue of the midway that offered an adventure called Extinction. It was possible to look at the ominous attractions and believe that this grim future—in its mood if not its specifics—was sufficiently terrifying to be one that contemporary society might make for itself.
In search of a service exit, Spencer drove recklessly along the winding promenades, weaving among the attractions. He repeatedly glimpsed the Chevy and the Chrysler between the rides and the exotic structures, though never dangerously close. They were like sharks cruising in the distance. Each time he spotted them, he whipped out of sight into another branch of the midway maze.
Around the corner from the Galactic Prison, past the Palace of the Parasites, beyond a screen of ficus trees and a red-flowering oleander hedge that were surely drab compared with the shrubs that grew on the planets of the Crab Nebula, he found a two-lane service road that marked the back of the park. He followed it.
To his left were the trees, aligned twenty feet on center, with the six-foot-high hedge between the trunks. On his right, instead of the neon-lit wall that was featured in the public portions of the perimeter, a chain-link fence rose ten feet high, topped with coils of barbed wire, and beyond it lay a sward of desert scrub.
He rounded a corner, and a hundred yards ahead was a pipe-and-chain-link gate, on wheels, controlled by overhead hydraulic arms. It would roll out of the way at the touch of the right remote-control device—which Spencer didn’t possess.
He increased speed. He’d have to ram the gate.
Reverting to his customary prudence, the dog scrambled off the passenger seat and curled in the leg space before he could be thrown there by the upcoming impact.
“Neurotic but not stupid,” Spencer said approvingly.
He was more than halfway to the gate when he caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his left eye. The Chrysler erupted from between two ficus trees, tearing the hell out of the oleander hedge, and crashed into the service way in showers of green leaves and red flowers. It crossed Spencer’s wake and rammed the fence so hard that the chain-link billowed, as if made of cloth, to the end of the lane.
The Explorer trailed that billow by a split second and hit the gate with enough force to crumple the hood without popping it open, to make Spencer’s restraining harness tighten painfully across his chest, to knock the breath out of him, to clack his teeth together, to make his luggage rattle under the restraining net in the cargo area—but not hard enough to take out the gate. That barrier was torqued, sagging, half collapsed, trailing tangles of barbed wire like dreadlocks—but still intact.
He shifted gears a
nd shot backward as if he were a cannonball returning to the barrel in a counterclockwise world.
The hitmen in the Chrysler were opening the doors, getting out, drawing their guns—until they saw the truck reversing toward them. They reversed too, scrambling inside the car, pulling the doors shut.
He rammed backward into the sedan, and the collision was loud enough to convince him that he’d overdone it, disabled the Explorer.
When he shifted into drive, however, the truck sprang forward. No tires were flat or obstructed by crumpled fenders. No windows had shattered. No smell of gasoline, so the tank wasn’t ruptured. The battered Explorer rattled, clinked, ticked, and creaked—but it moved, with power and grace.
The second impact took down the gate. The truck clambered over the fallen chain-link, away from Spaceport Vegas, into an enormous plot of desert scrub on which no one had yet built a theme park, a hotel, a casino, or a parking lot.
Engaging the four-wheel drive, Spencer angled west, away from the Strip, toward Interstate 15.
He remembered Rocky and glanced down at the leg space in front of the passenger seat. The dog was curled up, with his eyes squeezed shut, as if anticipating another collision.
“It’s okay, pal.”
Rocky continued to grimace in anticipation of disaster.
“Trust me.”
Rocky opened his eyes and returned to his seat, where the vinyl upholstery had been well scratched and punctured by his claws.
They rocked and rolled across the eroded and barren land, to the base of the superhighway.
A steep slope of gravel and shale rose thirty or forty feet to the east-west lanes. Even if he could find a break in the guardrail above him, no escape could be found—and certainly no salvation—on that highway. The people who were seeking him would establish checkpoints in both directions.
After a brief hesitation, he turned south, following the base of the elevated interstate.
From the east, across the white sand and the pink-gray slate, came the mold-green Chevrolet. It was like a heat mirage, although the day was cool. The low dunes and shallow washes would defeat it. The Explorer was made for overland travel; the Chevrolet was not.
Spencer came to a waterless riverbed, which the interstate crossed on a low concrete bridge. He drove into that declivity, onto a soft bed of silt, where driftwood slept and where dead tumbleweeds moved as ceaselessly as strange shadows in a bad dream.
He followed the dry wash under the interstate, west into the inhospitable Mojave.
The forbidding sky, as hard and dark as sarcophagus granite, hung within inches of the iron mountains. Desolate plains rose gradually toward those more sterile elevations, with a steadily decreasing burden of withered mesquite, dry bunchgrass, and cactus.
He drove out of the arroyo but continued to follow it upslope, toward distant peaks as bare as ancient bones.
The Chevrolet was no longer in sight.
Finally, when he was sure that he was far beyond the casual notice of any surveillance teams posted to watch the traffic on the interstate, he turned south and paralleled that highway. Without it as a reference, he would be lost. Whirling dust devils spun across the desert, masking the telltale plumes cast up behind the Explorer.
Although no rain yet fell, lightning scored the sky. The shadows of low stone formations leaped, fell back, and leaped again across the alabaster land.
Rocky’s cloaks of courage had been cast off as the Explorer’s speed had fallen. He was huddled once more in folds of cold timidity. He whined periodically and looked at his master for reassurance.
The sky cracked with fissures of fire.
Roy Miro pushed the troubling photographs aside and set up his attaché case computer on the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin. He plugged it into a wall outlet and connected with Mama in Virginia.
When Spencer Grant had joined the United States Army, as a boy of eighteen, more than twelve years ago, he must have completed the standard enlistment forms. Among other things, he’d been required to provide information about his schooling, his place of birth, his father’s name, his mother’s maiden name, and his next of kin.
The recruiting officer through whom he had enlisted would have verified that basic information. It would have been verified again, at a higher level, prior to Grant’s induction into the service.
If “Spencer Grant” was a phony identity, the boy would have had considerable difficulty getting into the army with it. Nevertheless, Roy remained convinced that it was not the name on Grant’s original birth certificate, and he was determined to discover what that birth name had been.
At Roy’s request, Mama accessed the Department of Defense dead files on former army personnel. She brought Spencer Grant’s basic information sheet onto the display screen.
According to the data on the VDT, Grant’s mother’s name, which he had given to the army, was Jennifer Corrine Porth.
The young recruit had listed her as “deceased.”
The father was said to be “unknown.”
Roy blinked in surprise at the screen. UNKNOWN.
That was extraordinary. Grant had not simply claimed to be a bastard child, but had implied that his mother’s promiscuity had made it impossible to pinpoint the man who fathered him. Anyone else might have cited a false name, a convenient fictional father, to spare himself and his late mother some embarrassment.
Logically, if the father was genuinely unknown, Spencer’s last name should have been Porth. Therefore, either his mother borrowed the “Grant” from a favorite movie star, as Bosley Donner believed she’d done, or she named her son after one of the men in her life even without being certain that he had fathered the boy.
Or the “unknown” was a lie, and the name “Spencer Grant” was just another false identity, perhaps the first of many, that this phantom had manufactured for himself.
At the time of Grant’s enlistment, with his mother already dead and his father unknown, he had given his next of kin as “Ethel Marie and George Daniel Porth, grandparents.” They had to be his mother’s parents, since Porth was also her maiden name.
Roy noticed that the address for Ethel and George Porth—in San Francisco—had been the same as Grant’s current address at the time that he’d enlisted. Apparently the grandparents had taken him in, subsequent to the death of his mother, whenever that had been.
If anyone knew the true story of Grant’s provenance and the source of his scar, it would be Ethel and George Porth. Assuming that they actually existed and were not just names on a form that a recruitment officer had failed to verify twelve years ago.
Roy asked for a printout of the pertinent portion of Grant’s service file. Even with what seemed to be a good lead in the Porths, Roy wasn’t confident of learning anything in San Francisco that would give more substance to this elusive phantom whom he’d first glimpsed less than forty-eight hours ago in the rainy night in Santa Monica.
Having erased himself entirely from all utility-company records, from property tax rolls, and even from the Internal Revenue Service files—why had Grant allowed his name to remain in the DMV, Social Security Administration, LAPD, and military files? He had tampered with those records to the extent of replacing his true address with a series of phony addresses, but he could have entirely eliminated them. He had the knowledge and the skill to do so. Therefore, he must have maintained a presence in some data banks for a purpose.
Roy felt that somehow he was playing into Grant’s hands even by trying to track him down.
Frustrated, he turned his attention once more to the two most affecting of the forty photographs. The woman, the boy, and the barn in the background. The man in the shadows.
On all sides of the Explorer lay sand as white as powdered bones, ash-gray volcanic rock, and slopes of shale shattered by millions of years of heat, cold, and quaking earth. The few plants were crisp and bristly. Except for the dust and vegetation stirred by the wind, the only movement was the creeping and slithering of scorpions, s
piders, scarabs, poisonous snakes, and the other cold-blooded or bloodless creatures that thrived in that arid wasteland.
Silvery quills and nibs of lightning flashed continually, and fast-moving thunderheads as black as ink wrote a promise of rain across the sky. The bellies of the clouds hung heavy. With great crashes of thunder, the storm struggled to create itself.
Captured between the dead earth and tumultuous heavens, Spencer paralleled the distant interstate highway as much as possible. He detoured only when the contours of the land required compromise.
Rocky sat with head bowed, gazing at his paws rather than at the stormy day. His flanks quivered as currents of fear flowed through him like electricity through a closed circuit.
On another day, in a different place and in a different storm, Spencer would have kept up a steady line of patter to soothe the dog. Now, however, he was in a mood that darkened with the sky, and he was able to focus only on his own turmoil.
For the woman, he had walked away from his life, such as it was. He had left behind the quiet comfort of the cabin, the beauty of the eucalyptus grove, the peace of the canyon—and most likely he would never be able to return to that. He had made a target of himself and had put his precious anonymity in jeopardy.
He regretted none of that—because he still had the hope of gaining a real life with some kind of meaning and purpose. Although he had wanted to help the woman, he had also wanted to help himself.
But the stakes suddenly had been raised. Death and disclosure were not the only risks he was going to have to take if he continued to involve himself in Valerie Keene’s problems. Sooner or later, he was going to have to kill someone. They would give him no choice.
After escaping the assault on the bungalow in Santa Monica on Wednesday night, he had avoided thinking about the most disturbing implications of the SWAT team’s extreme violence. Now he recalled the gunfire directed at imagined targets inside the dark house and the rounds fired at him as he had scaled the property wall.