said. “Surely they wouldn’t be intending to test a genetically engineered virus, some new and deadly organism that could be used as a weapon, unless they had simultaneously developed an effective cure for it. So they had a supply of a new antibiotic or serum to guard against just such an accident. If they contaminated us, they also cured us.”
Ernie said, “It sounds right, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s all starting to fall together, piece by piece.”
Dom disagreed. “It still doesn’t explain what happened on that Friday night, what we saw that they didn’t want us to see. It doesn’t explain what made the whole damned diner shake or what blew out the windows—either on that first night or again last night.”
“And it doesn’t explain the other weird stuff,” Faye said. “Like all those paper moons whirling around Dom in Lomack’s house. Or Father Wycazik’s claim that this young priest’s been performing miracle cures.”
They looked at one another, waiting in silence for someone to put forth an explanation that would tie biological contamination with those paranormal events, but no one had an answer.
Less than three hundred miles west of the Tranquility Motel, in another motel in Reno, Brendan Cronin had gone to bed and turned out the lights. Although it was only a few minutes after nine o’clock, he was still functioning on Chicago time, so for him it was after eleven.
However, sleep eluded him. After checking into the motel and having dinner at a nearby Bob’s Big Boy, he had telephoned St. Bette’s rectory and had spoken with Father Wycazik, who had told him of the call from Dominick Corvaisis. Brendan was electrified by the news that he was not the only one caught up in this mystery. He considered calling the Tranquility, but they already knew he was on his way, and whatever they could say on the phone could be said better in person, tomorrow. Thoughts of tomorrow and speculations about what might happen were what kept sleep at bay.
He had lain awake less than an hour and his thoughts had drifted to the eerie luminescence that had filled his rectory bedroom two nights ago, when suddenly that phenomenon appeared once more. This time, there was no visible source of light, not even one so unlikely as the frost-moon upon the window from which the uncanny radiance had sprung last Friday night. Now, the glow appeared above him and on all sides, as if the very molecules of the air had acquired the ability to produce light. It was a lunar-pale, milky shimmer at first, growing brighter by the second, until it seemed as if he must be lying in an open field, under the looming countenance of a full moon.
This was different from the peaceful golden light that was featured in his recurring dream, and as it had done two nights ago, it filled him with conflicting emotions—horror and rapture, fear and wild excitement.
As in his rectory bedroom, the lactescent light changed color, darkening to scarlet. He seemed suspended in a radiant bubble of blood.
It’s inside me, he thought, wondering what that meant. Inside me. The thought reverberated in his mind. Suddenly he was cold with fear.
His thundering heart seemed about to explode. He lay rigid. In his hands, the rings appeared. Throbbing.
2. Monday, January 13
When they gathered in Ernie and Faye’s kitchen for breakfast the next morning, Dom was excited to learn that the previous night had been an ordeal for most of them. “It’s unraveling the way I hoped it might,” he said. “By gathering together here, by re-creating the group that was gathered here that night, and by working together to get at the truth, we’re putting constant pressure on the memory blocks that’ve been implanted in us. And now, that barrier is crumbling a bit faster.”
Last night, Dom, Ginger, Ernie, and Ned experienced exceptionally vivid nightmares of such similarity that they were surely fragments of forbidden memories. In every case they had involved being strapped to motel beds and tended by men in decontamination suits. Sandy had a pleasant dream, although it lacked the clarity and detail of the others’ nightmares. Faye was the only one who did not dream at all.
Ned had been so disturbed by his nightmare that on Monday morning, when he and Sandy arrived from Beowawe for breakfast, he announced they were moving into a room at the motel for the duration. “During the night, after the dream woke me, I couldn’t get back to sleep. And while I was laying there, I got to thinking how lonely it is at our trailer, empty plains all around.... Maybe this Colonel Falkirk will decide to kill us like he wanted to do in the first place. And if he comes for us, I don’t want me and Sandy to be alone out there at the trailer.”
Dom sympathized with Ned because these dark and vivid dreams were new to the cook. Over recent weeks, Dom, Ginger, and Ernie had learned a little about coping with the frighteningly powerful nightmares, but Ned had developed no armor, so he was badly shaken.
And, of course, Ned was well advised to fear Falkirk. The closer they came to exposing the conspiracy and learning the truth, the more likely they were to become targets of a preemptive strike. Dom did not think Falkirk would make a move until Brendan Cronin, Jorja Monatella, and perhaps other victims had gathered at the Tranquility. But once they were in one place, they would need to be prepared for trouble.
Now, in the Blocks’ kitchen, Ned Sarver picked at his breakfast without appetite as he spoke of the images that had disturbed his sleep. At first he had dreamed of being held prisoner by men in decontamination suits, but later they had worn either lab coats or military uniforms, an indication that the biological danger had passed. One of the uniformed men had been Colonel Falkirk, and Ned described that officer in detail: about fifty years old, black hair graying at the temples, gray eyes like circles of polished steel, a beakish nose, thin lips.
Ernie was able to confirm the word-portrait that Ned painted, for Falkirk had also been in his nightmare. The amazing coincidence of the same man appearing in both Ned’s and Ernie’s dreams made it clear that his face was not merely a figment of imagination but a memory of a real face that both Ernie and Ned had seen two summers ago.
“And in my nightmare,” Ernie said, “another Army officer referred to Falkirk by his first name. Leland. Colonel Leland Falkirk.”
“He’s probably stationed at Shenkfield,” Ginger said.
“We’ll try to find out later,” Dom said.
The barriers to memory were definitely crumbling. That prospect boosted Dom’s spirits higher than they had been in months.
In Ginger’s nightmare, which she recounted for them, she had not been the only person being brainwashed in Room 5, the room she had occupied that summer and which she now occupied again. “There was a rollaway bed in one corner, and the redhead in it was someone I’d never seen before. She was about forty years old. They had her connected to her own IV drip and EKG machine. She had that ... vacant stare.”
Just as Ernie and Ned had shared a new development—the appearance of Colonel Falkirk—in their nightmares, Dom and Ginger had shared this other discovery. In Dom’s dream, there had been a rollaway bed, flanked by an IV stand and an EKG monitor, and in the bed had been a young man in his twenties with a pale face, bushy mustache, and zombie eyes.
“What does it mean?” Faye Block asked. “Did they have so many subjects for brainwashing that they more than filled all twenty rooms?”
“But,” Sandy said, “the registry showed only eleven rooms rented.”
Ginger said, “There must’ve been people on the interstate, in transit, who saw what we saw. The Army managed to stop them and bring them here. None of their names would appear on the registry.”
“How many?” Faye wondered.
“We’ll probably never know for sure,” Dom said. “We never actually met them; we only shared rooms with them while we were drugged. We might eventually remember the faces of those we saw, but we can’t possibly remember names and addresses we never knew in the first place.”
But at least those reprogrammed memories, those tissues of lies, were dissolving, allowing the truth to show through. Dom was grateful for that much. In time, they would uncover the entire story—i
f Colonel Falkirk did not first come after them with heavy artillery.
Monday morning, while the group at the Tranquility ate breakfast, Jack Twist was being escorted to a safe-deposit box in a vault of a Fifth Avenue branch of Citibank, in New York. The attending bank employee, an attractive young woman, kept calling him “Mr. Farnham,” for that was the false identity under which he had acquired the box.
After they used their separate keys to remove the box from the wall of the vault, when he was alone with it in a cubicle, he opened the lid and stared in shock at the contents. The rectangular metal container held something that he had not put there, which was an impossibility since only he knew about the box and possessed the only master key.
It should have contained five white envelopes, each filled with five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar and twenty-dollar bills, and indeed that money appeared to be untouched. This was one of eleven emergency caches he kept in safe-deposit boxes all over the city. He had set out this morning to remove fifteen thousand dollars from each, a total of $165,000, which he intended to give away. He opened each of the five envelopes and counted the contents with trembling hands. Not a single bill was missing.
Jack was not even slightly relieved. Though his money was still there, the presence of the other object proved that his false identity had been penetrated, his privacy violated, and his freedom jeopardized. Someone knew who “Gregory Farnham” really was, and the item that had been left in the box was a bold notification that his elaborately constructed cover had been penetrated.
It was a postcard. There was no writing on the back, no message; the presence of the card itself was message enough. On the front was a photograph of the Tranquility Motel.
The summer before last, after he and Branch Pollard and a third man had burglarized the Avril McAllister estate in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and after Jack paid a profitable visit to Reno, he rented a car and drove east, stopping the first night at the Tranquility Motel along Interstate 80. He had not thought about the place since, but he recognized it the instant he saw the photograph.
Who could possibly know he had stayed at that motel? Not Branch Pollard. He’d never told Branch about Reno or about his decision to drive back to New York. And not the third man on the McAllister job, a guy named Sal Finrow from Los Angeles; Jack had never seen him again after they had split the take from that sour job.
Then Jack realized that at least three of his phony IDs had been penetrated. He rented this safe-deposit box as “Farnham” but he stayed at the Tranquility Motel as “Thornton Wainwright.” Both noms de guerre were now blown, and the only way anyone could have linked them was by connecting Jack with his “Phillipe Delon” identity, under which he resided at his Fifth Avenue apartment, so that name was blown as well.
Jesus.
He sat in the bank cubicle, stunned but thinking furiously, trying to decide who his enemy might be. It could not be the police or the FBI or any other legitimate authority, for they would simply have arrested him once they had accumulated this much evidence; they would not play games. Nor could it be any of the men with whom he ever worked on a heist, for he took great care to keep his acquaintances in the criminal underworld well out of his life on Fifth Avenue. None of them knew where he really lived; in the event they scouted a job requiring his planning skills and special knowledge, they could reach him only through a series of mail drops or through a chain of pseudonymously listed phone numbers backed up by answering machines. He was confident of the effectiveness of those precautions. Besides, if some hoodlum had gotten into this box, he would not have left the twenty-five thousand bucks untouched; he would have taken every dollar of it.
So who’s on to me? Jack wondered.
He focused on the fratellanza warehouse robbery that he and Mort and Tommy Sung had pulled off December 3. Was the mafia after him? When they wanted to find someone, those boys had more contacts, sources, determination, and sheer perseverance than the FBI. And the fratellanza would most likely not have taken the twenty-five thousand, leaving it as an ominous notice that they wanted more than the money he had stolen from them. It was also in character for the fratellanza to leave a teaser like the postcard, because those guys enjoyed making a target sweat a lot before they finally pulled the trigger.
On the other hand, even if the mob tracked him down, then somehow searched back through his criminal career to see who else he had hit, they would not have gone to the trouble of acquiring cards from the Tranquility Motel just to put the fear of God in him. If they had wanted to leave an upsetting teaser in the safe-deposit box, they would have left a photo of the warehouse that he had robbed in New Jersey.
So it was not the mafia. Then who? Damn it, who?
The tiny cubicle began to seem even smaller than it was. Jack felt claustrophobic and vulnerable. As long as he was in the bank, there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He stuffed the twenty-five thousand into his overcoat pockets, no longer intending to give away any of it; suddenly, it had become his escape money. He put the postcard in his wallet, closed the empty box, and rang the buzzer for the attendant.
Two minutes later, he was outside, drawing deep breaths of the freezing January air, studying the people on Fifth Avenue for one who might be tailing him. He saw no one suspicious.
For a moment he stood rocklike in the river of people that flowed around him. He wanted to get out of the city and the state as quickly as possible, flee to an unlikely destination, where they would not look for him. Whoever they were. Yet he was not entirely sure that flight was necessary. In Ranger training, he had been taught never to act until he understood why he was acting and until he knew what he hoped to achieve by his actions. Besides, fear of his faceless enemy was outweighed by curiosity; he needed to know who he was up against, how they had broken his various covers, and what they wanted from him.
Outside the Citibank Building, Jack hailed a cab and went to the comer of Wall Street and William Street, in the heart of the financial district, where he had six safe-deposit boxes in six banks. He went to five of them, from each of which he collected twenty-five thousand dollars and a postcard of the Tranquility Motel.
He decided to stop after the fifth, because his coat pockets were already bulging with $125,000, a sufficiently dangerous sum to be carrying, and because, by now, he knew beyond a doubt that his other six phony identities and clandestine safe-deposit boxes had been found out as well. He had enough money with which to travel, and he was not particularly worried about leaving the remaining $150,000 in the other six boxes. For one thing, Jack had four million in his Swiss accounts; and for another thing, the distributor of the postcards would already have taken the available money if that had been his intention.
By now, he’d had time to think about that motel out in Nevada, and he had begun to realize something was strange about the time that he had spent at the place. He had remained there for three days, relaxing, enjoying the quiet and the scenery. But now, for the first time, it seemed to him that he would have done no such thing. Not with so much cash in the trunk of his rental car. Not when he had already been away from New York (and Jenny) for two weeks. He would have driven straight home from Reno. Now that he was forced to contemplate it, the three-day stay at the Tranquility Motel did not make much sense.
Another taxi conveyed him to his Fifth Avenue apartment building, where he arrived shortly before eleven. He promptly telephoned Elite Flights, a company that chartered small jets, with whom he had dealt previously, and he was relieved to discover that, fortuitously, they had an unbooked Lear available for departure at his convenience.
He took the twenty-five thousand from the secret compartment in the back of his bedroom closet. With the funds he had removed from the safe-deposit boxes, he now had $150,000 in immediate operating capital, enough to deal with virtually any contingency that might arise.
He hurriedly packed three suitcases, distributing a few clothes in each, but leaving most of the space for other items. He stowed away t
wo handguns: a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum, chambered for the .357 Magnum cartridge but also capable of firing .38 Special cartridges with considerably less kick; and a .32 Beretta Model 70, its stubby barrel grooved to accept a screw-on, pipe-type silencer, of which Jack included two. He also took an Uzi submachine gun, which he’d illegally modified for full automatic fire, plus plenty of ammunition.
Jack’s newly acquired guilt had substantially transformed him during the past forty-eight hours, but it had not overwhelmed him to such an extent that he was incapable of dealing violently with those who might deal violently with him. His determination to be an honest and upstanding citizen did not interfere with his instinct for self-preservation. And considering his background, no one was better prepared to preserve himself than Jack Twist.
Besides, after eight years of alienation and loneliness, he had begun to rejoin society, had begun to hope for a normal life. He would not let anyone destroy what might be his last chance for happiness.
He also packed the portable SLICKS computer, which he had used to get through the armored transport’s sophisticated electronic lock the night before last in Connecticut. In addition, he decided he might need a Police Lock Release Gun, a tool that could instantly open any type of pin-tumbler lock—mushroom, spool, or regular—without damaging the mechanism, and which was sold only to law-enforcement agencies. And a Star Tron MK 202A, a compact, hand-held “night vision” device that could also be rifle-mounted. And a few other things.
Although he distributed the heaviest weapons and equipment equally among the three large suitcases, none of the bags was light when he finally closed and locked them. Anyone who helped him with his luggage might wonder about the contents, but no one would ask embarrassing questions or raise an alarm. That was the advantage of leasing a Lear jet for the journey: He would not be required to pass through airport security, and no one would inspect his baggage.
From his apartment, he taxied to La Guardia.
The waiting Lear would take him to Salt Lake City, Utah, the nearest major airport to Elko, a shade closer than Reno International, and a lot closer if you considered the necessity of overflying to Reno and then doubling back in a conventional-engine commuter plane to Elko. Elite Flights had told him that Reno was anticipating a major snowstorm that might close them down later in the day, and the same was true of the two smaller fields in southern Idaho that were capable of handling Lear-size jets. But the weather forecast for Salt Lake City was good throughout the day. At Jack’s request, Elite was already arranging the lease of a conventional-engine plane from a Utah company to carry him from Salt Lake to the little county airport in Elko. Although it was in the eastern-most fourth of Nevada, Elko was still within the Pacific time zone, so he would benefit from a gain of three hours, though he did not think he would arrive in Elko much before nightfall.
That was all right. He’d need darkness for what he was planning.
To Jack, the taunting postcards, retrieved from his safe-deposit boxes, implied there were people in Nevada who had learned everything worth knowing about his criminal life. The cards seemed to be saying that he could reach those people through the Tranquility Motel or perhaps find them in residence there. The postcard was an invitation. Or a summons. Either way, he could ignore it only at his peril.
He did not know if he was being followed to La Guardia; he did not bother looking for a tail. If his apartment phone was tapped, they knew he was coming the moment he called Elite Flights. He wanted them to see him approaching openly, for then they might be off-guard when, on arrival in Elko, he suddenly shook loose of them and went underground.
Monday morning, after breakfast, Dom and Ginger went into Elko, to the offices of the Sentinel, the county’s only newspaper. The biggest town in the county, Elko boasted a population of less than ten thousand, so its newspaper’s offices were not housed in a gleaming glass high-rise but in a humble one-story concrete-block building on a quiet street.
Like most papers, the Sentinel provided access to its back-issue files to anyone with legitimate research needs, though permission for the use of the files was granted judiciously.
In spite of the financial success of his first novel, Dom still had difficulty identifying himself as a writer. To his own ears, he sounded pretentious and phony, though he realized his uneasiness was a holdover from his days as an excessively self-effacing Milquetoast.
The receptionist, Brenda Hennerling, did not recognize his name, but when he mentioned the title of his novel that Random House had just shipped to the stores, she said, “It’s the book-club selection this month! You wrote it? Really?” She had ordered it a month ago from the Literary Guild, and it had just arrived in the mail. She was (she said) an avid reader, two books a week, and it was truly a thrill to meet a genuine novelist. Her enthusiasm only added to Dom’s embarrassment. He was of a mind with Robert Louis Stevenson, who had said, “The important thing is the tale, the well-told tale, not he who tells it.”
The Sentinel’s back-issue files were kept in a narrow, windowless chamber. There were two desks with typewriters, a microfilm reader, a file of microfilm spools, and six tall filing cabinets with oversize drawers containing those editions of the newspaper that had not yet been transferred to film. The exposed concrete-block walls were painted pale gray, and the acoustic-tile ceiling was gray, too, and the fluorescent lights shed a cold glare. Dom had the odd sensation that they were in a submarine, far beneath the surface of the sea.
After Brenda Hennerling explained the filing system to them and left them alone to do their work, Ginger said, “I’m so caught up in our problems that I keep forgetting you’re a famous author.”
“So do I,” Dom said, reading the labels on the filing cabinets that held issues of past Sentinels. “But of course, I’m not famous.”
“Soon will be. It’s a shame: With all that’s happening to us, you’re getting no chance to savour the publication of your first novel.”
He shrugged. “This isn’t a picnic for any of us. You’ve had to put an entire medical career on hold.”
“Yes, but now I know I’ll be able to go back to medicine once we’ve dug to the bottom of this,” Ginger said, as if there was no doubt they would triumph over their enemies. By now, Dom knew that conviction and determination were as much a part of her as the blueness of her eyes. “But this is your first book.”
Dom had not yet recovered from his embarrassment at being treated like a celebrity by the receptionist. Now Ginger’s kind comments kept a blush on his cheeks. However, this was not the mark of embarrassment; it was an indication of the intense pleasure he took in being the object of her concern. No woman had ever affected him as this one did.
Together, they went through the file drawers and removed the pertinent back issues of the Sentinel. They would not need to use the microfilm reader, for the newspaper was running two years behind in the transferral to film. They withdrew a full week’s editions, beginning with Saturday, July 7, of the summer before last, and took them to one of the desks, where they both pulled up chairs.
Although the unremembered event that they had witnessed, and the possible contamination, and the closure of I- 80 had happened on Friday night, July 6, the Saturday paper carried no report of the toxic spill. The Sentinel was primarily a source of local and state news and, though it included some national and international material, was not interested in fast-breaking stories. Its halls would never ring with that dramatic cry, “Stop press!” There would be no last-minute recomposition of the front page. The pace of life in Elko County was rural, relaxed, sensible, and no one felt a burning need to be breathlessly up-to-the-minute on anything. The Sentinel was put to bed late in the evening, for distribution in the morning; therefore, since no Sunday edition was published, the story of the toxic spill and the closure of 1-80 did not appear until the edition of Monday, July 9.