“You’ve never seen him before, huh?” Spencer asked.
“Never.”
“Well, I suspect we’ll be seeing him again.”
Ellie closed out Illinois Bell and returned to Mama’s seemingly endless series of menus. The depth and breadth of the megabitch’s abilities really did make her seem omnipotent and omniscient.
Settling back into his seat, Spencer said, “Think you can give Mama a terminal stroke?”
She shook her head. “No. Too many redundancies built into her for that.”
“A bloody nose, then?”
“At least that much.”
She was aware of him staring at her for the better part of a minute, while she worked.
Finally he said, “Have you broken many?”
“Noses? Me?”
“Hearts.”
She was amazed to feel a blush rising in her cheeks. “Not me.”
“You could. Easy.”
She said nothing.
“The dog’s listening,” he said.
“What?”
“I can only speak the truth.”
“I’m no cover girl.”
“I love the way you look.”
“I’d like a better nose.”
“I’ll buy you a different one if you want.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“But it’s only going to be different. Not any better.”
“You’re a strange man.”
“Besides, I wasn’t talking about looks.”
She didn’t respond, just kept poring through Mama.
He said, “If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.”
When she was finally able to take a breath, she said, “As soon as they give up on Earthguard, they’ll try to get control of another satellite and find us again. So it’s time to drop below radar and change course. Better tell the flyboys.”
After a hesitation, which might have indicated disappointment in her failure to respond in any expected fashion to the way he had bared his feelings, he said, “Where are we going?”
“As near the Colorado border as this bucket will take us.”
“I’ll find out how much fuel we have. But why Colorado?”
“Because Denver is the nearest really major city. And if we can get to a major city, I can make contact with people who can help us.”
“Do we need help?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“I’ve got a history with Colorado,” he said, and an uneasiness marked his voice.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Quite a history.”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe,” he said, and he was no longer romancing her. “I guess it shouldn’t. It’s just a place….”
She met his eyes. “The heat’s on us too high right now. We need to get to some people who can hide us out, let things cool off.”
“You know people like that?”
“Not until recently. I’ve always been on my own before. But lately…things have changed.”
“Who are they?”
“Good people. That’s all you need to know for now.”
“Then I guess we’re going to Denver,” he said.
Mormons, Mormons were everywhere, a plague of Mormons, Mormons in neatly pressed uniforms, clean-shaven, clear-eyed, too soft-spoken for cops, so excessively polite that Roy Miro wondered if it was all an act, Mormons to the left of him, Mormons to the right of him, both local and county authorities, and all of them too efficient and by-the-book either to flub their investigation or to let this whole mess be covered over with a wink and a slap on the back. What bothered Roy the most about these particular Mormons was that they robbed him of his usual advantage, because in their company, his affable manner was nothing unusual. His politeness paled in comparison to theirs. His quick and easy smile was only one in a blizzard of smiles full of teeth remarkably whiter than his own. They swarmed through the shopping center and the supermarket, these Mormons, asking their oh-so-polite questions, armed with their small notebooks and Bic pens and direct Mormon stares, and Roy could never be sure that they were buying any part of his cover story or that they were convinced by his impeccable phony credentials.
Hard as he tried, he couldn’t figure out how to schmooze with Mormon cops. He wondered if they would respond well and open up to him if he told them how very much he liked their tabernacle choir. He didn’t actually like or dislike their choir, however, and he had a feeling that they would know he was lying just to warm them up. The same was true of the Osmonds, the premier Mormon show-business family. He neither liked nor disliked their singing and dancing; they were undeniably talented, but they just weren’t to his taste. Marie Osmond had perfect legs, legs that he could have spent hours kissing and stroking, legs against which he wished that he could crush handfuls of soft red roses—but he was pretty sure that these Mormons were not the type of cops who would enthusiastically join in on a conversation about that sort of thing.
He was certain that not all of the cops were Mormons. The equal-opportunity laws ensured a diverse police force. If he could find those who weren’t Mormons, he might be able to establish the degree of rapport necessary to grease the wheels of their investigation, one way or another, and get the hell out of there. But the non-Mormons were indistinguishable from the Mormons because they’d adopted Mormon ways, manners, and mannerisms. The non-Mormons—whoever the cunning bastards might be—were all polite, pressed, well groomed, sober, with infuriatingly well-scrubbed teeth that were free of all telltale nicotine stains. One of the officers was a black man named Hargrave, and Roy was positive that he’d found at least one cop to whom the teachings of Brigham Young were no more important than those of Kali, the malevolent form of the Hindu Mother Goddess, but Hargrave turned out to be perhaps the most Mormon of all Mormons who had ever walked the Mormon Way. Hargrave had a walletful of pictures of his wife and nine children, including two sons who were currently on religious missions in squalid corners of Brazil and Tonga.
Eventually the situation spooked Roy as much as it frustrated him. He felt as if he were in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Before the city and county patrol cars had begun to arrive—all well polished and in excellent repair—Roy had used the secure phone in the disabled helicopter to order two more customized JetRangers out of Las Vegas, but the agency had only one more at that office to send him. “Jesus,” Ken Hyckman had said, “you’re going through choppers like they’re Kleenex.” Roy would be continuing the pursuit of the woman and Grant with only nine of his twelve men, which was the maximum number that could be packed into the one new craft.
Although the disabled JetRanger wouldn’t be repaired and able to take off from behind the Hallmark store for at least thirty-six hours, the new chopper was already out of Vegas and on its way to Cedar City. Earthguard was being retargeted to track the stolen aircraft. They had suffered a setback, no argument about that, but the situation was by no means an unmitigated disaster. One battle lost—even one more battle lost—didn’t mean they would lose the war.
He wasn’t calmed by inhaling the pale-peach vapor of tranquility and exhaling the bile-green vapor of rage and frustration. He found no comfort in any of the other meditative techniques that for years had worked so reliably. Only one thing kept his counterproductive anger in check: thinking about Eve Jammer in all her glorious sixty-percent perfection. Nude. Oiled. Writhing. Blond splendor on black rubber.
The new helicopter wouldn’t reach Cedar City until past noon, but Roy was confident of being able to tough out the Mormons until then. Under their watchful eyes, he wandered among them, answered their questions again and again, examined the contents of the Rover, tagged everything in the vehicle for impoundment, and all the while his head was filled with images of Eve pleasuring herself with her perfect hands and with a variety of devices that had been designed by sexually obsessed inventors w
hose creative genius exceeded that of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein combined.
As he was standing at a supermarket checkout counter, examining the computer and the file box of twenty software diskettes that had been removed from the back of the Range Rover, Roy remembered Mama. For one frantic moment of denial, he tried to delude himself into remembering that he had switched off or unplugged the attaché case computer before he had departed the chopper. No good. He could see the video display as it had been when he’d put the workstation on the deck beside his seat before he had hurried to the cockpit: the satellite look-down on the shopping center.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed, and every Mormon cop within hearing twitched as one.
Roy raced to the back of the supermarket, through the stockroom, out the rear door, through the milling strike force agents and cops, to the damaged helicopter, where he could use the secure phone with its scrambling device.
He called Las Vegas and reached Ken Hyckman in the satellite-surveillance center. “We’ve got trouble—”
Even as Roy started to explain, Hyckman talked over him with pompous ex-anchorman solemnity: “We have trouble here. Earthguard’s onboard computer crashed. It inexplicably went off the air. We’re working on it, but we—”
Roy interrupted, because he knew the woman must have used his VDT to take out Earthguard. “Ken, listen, my field computer was in that stolen chopper, and it was on-line with Mama.”
“Holy shit!” Ken Hyckman said, but in the satellite-surveillance center, there were no Mormon cops to twitch.
“Get on with Mama, have her cut off my unit and block it from ever reaccessing her. Ever.”
The JetRanger chattered eastward across Utah, flying as low as one hundred feet above ground level where possible, to avoid radar detection.
Rocky remained with Ellie after Spencer went forward to oversee the crew again. She was too intensely focused on learning as much as she could about Mama’s capabilities to be able to pet the pooch or even talk at him a little. His unrewarded company seemed to be a touching and welcome indication that he had come to trust and approve of her.
She might as well have smashed the VDT and spent the time giving the dog a good scratch behind the ears, because before she was able to accomplish anything, the data on the video display vanished and was replaced by a blue field. A question flashed at her in red letters against the blue: WHO GOES THERE?
This development was no surprise. She had expected to be cut off long before she could do any damage to Mama. The system was designed with elaborate redundancies, protections against hacker penetrations, and virus vaccines. Finding a route into Mama’s deep program-management level, where major destruction could be wrought, would require not merely hours of diligent probing but days. Ellie had been fortunate to have the time necessary to take out Earthguard, for she could never have achieved such total control of the satellite without Mama’s assistance. To attempt not merely to use Mama but to bloody her nose had been overreaching. Nevertheless, doomed as the effort was, Ellie had been obliged to try.
When she had no answer for the red-letter question, the screen went blank and changed from blue to gray. It looked dead. She knew there was no point in trying to reacquire Mama.
She unplugged the computer, put it in the aisle beside her seat, and reached for the dog. He wiggled to her, lashing his tail. As she bent forward to pet him, she noticed a manila envelope on the deck, half under her seat.
After petting and scratching the pooch for a minute or two, Ellie retrieved the envelope from under the seat. It contained four photographs.
She recognized Spencer in spite of how very young he was in the snapshots. Although the man was visible in the boy, he had lost more than youth since the days when those pictures had been taken. More than innocence. More than the effervescent spirit that seemed evident in the smile and body language of the child. Life also had stolen an ineffable quality from him, and the loss was no less apparent for being inexpressible.
Ellie studied the woman’s face in the two pictures that showed her with Spencer, and was convinced that they were mother and son. If appearances didn’t deceive—and in this instance she sensed that they did not—Spencer’s mother had been gentle, kind, soft-spoken, with a girlish sense of fun.
In a third photo, the mother was younger than in the two with Spencer, perhaps twenty, standing alone in front of a tree laden with white flowers. She appeared to be radiantly innocent, not naive but unspoiled and without cynicism. Maybe Ellie was reading too much into a photo, but she perceived in Spencer’s mother a vulnerability so poignant that suddenly tears welled in her eyes.
Squinting, biting her lower lip, determined not to weep, she was at last forced to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand. She wasn’t moved solely by Spencer’s loss. Staring at the woman in the summer dress, she thought of her own mother, taken from her so brutally.
Ellie stood on the shore of a warm sea of memories, but she couldn’t bathe in the comfort of them. Every wave of recollection, regardless of how innocent it seemed, broke on the same dark beach. Her mother’s face, in every recaptured moment of the past, was as it had been in death: bloodied, bullet-shattered, with a fixed gaze so full of horror that it seemed as if, at the penultimate moment, the dear woman had glimpsed what lay beyond this world and had seen only a cold, vast emptiness.
Shivering, Ellie turned her eyes away from the snapshot to the starboard porthole beside her seat. The blue sky was as forbidding as an icy sea, and close beneath the low-flying craft passed a meaningless blur of rock, vegetation, and human endeavor.
When she was certain that she was in control of her emotions, Ellie looked again at the woman in the summer dress—and then at the final of the four photographs. She had noted aspects of the mother in the son, but she saw a much greater resemblance between Spencer and the shadow-shrouded man in the fourth picture. She knew this had to be his father, even though she didn’t recognize the infamous artist.
The resemblance, however, was limited to the dark hair, darker eyes, the shape of the chin, and a few other features. In Spencer’s face, there was none of the arrogance and potential for cruelty that made his father appear to be so cold and forbidding.
Or perhaps she saw those things in Steven Ackblom only because she knew that she was gazing at a monster. If she had come upon the photo without reason to suspect who the man was—or if she had met him in life, at a party or on the street—she might have seen nothing about him that made him more ominous than Spencer or other men.
Ellie was immediately sorry that such a thought had occurred to her, for it encouraged her to wonder if the kind, good man she saw in Spencer was an illusion or, at best, only part of the truth. She realized, somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to doubt Spencer Grant. Instead, she was eager to believe in him, as she had not believed in anything or anyone for a long time.
If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.
Those words had been so sincere, such an uncalculated revelation of his feelings and his vulnerability, that she had been left briefly speechless. Yet she hadn’t possessed the courage to give him any reason to believe that she might be capable of reciprocating his feelings for her.
Danny had been dead only fourteen months, and that was, by her standards, far too short a time to grieve. To touch another man this soon, to care, to love—that seemed to be a betrayal of the man whom she had first loved and whom she would still love, to the exclusion of all others, were he alive.
On the other hand, fourteen months of loneliness was, by any measure, an eternity.
To be honest with herself, she had to admit that her reticence sprang from more than a concern about the propriety or impropriety of a fourteen-month period of mourning. As fine and loving as Danny had been, he never would have found it possible to bare his heart as directly or as completely as Spencer had done repeatedly since she’d driven him out of that dry wash in the
desert. Danny had not been unromantic, but he had expressed his feelings less directly, with thoughtful gifts and kindnesses, rather than with words, as if to say “I love you” would have been to cast a curse upon their relationship. She was unaccustomed to the rough poetry of a man like Spencer, when he spoke from his heart, and she was not sure what she thought of it.
That was a lie. She liked it. More than liked it. In her hardened heart, she was surprised to find a tender place that wasn’t merely responsive to Spencer’s forthright expressions of love but that longed for more. That longing was like the profound thirst of a desert traveler, and she now realized it was a thirst that had been in need of slaking all her life.
She was reluctant to respond to Spencer not primarily because she might have grieved too short a time for Danny but because she sensed that the first love of her life might eventually prove not to be the greatest. Finding the capacity to love again seemed like a betrayal of Danny. But it was far worse—cruel rejection—to love another more than she had loved her murdered husband.
Perhaps that would never happen. If she opened herself to this still mysterious man, perhaps she would ultimately discover that the room he occupied in her heart would never be as large or warm as the one in which Danny had lived and would always live.
In carrying her loyalty to Danny’s memory so far, she supposed that she was allowing honest sentiment to degenerate into a sugary pudding of sentimentality. Surely no one was born to love but once and never again, even if fate carried that first love to an early grave. If creation operated on rules that stern, God had built a cold, bleak universe. Surely love—and all emotions—were in one regard like muscles: growing stronger with exercise, withering when not used. Loving Danny might have given her the emotional strength, in the wake of his passing, to love Spencer more.
And to be fair to Danny, he had been raised by a soulless father—and a brittle, socialite mother—in whose icy embrace he’d learned to be self-contained and guarded. He had given her all that he could give, and she had been fortunate and happy in his arms. So happy, in fact, that suddenly she could no longer imagine going through the rest of her life without seeking, from someone else, the gift that Danny had been the first to give her.