the pilot or the copilot looked to the right and at the bluff top instead of at the searchlight-splashed sand below, discovery could not be avoided.
The upper landing was surrounded by a six-foot-tall, wrought-iron, gated security fence with a sharply inward-angled, spiked top to prevent unwanted visitors from gaining access by way of the beach below. It had been erected long ago, in the days when the Coastal Commission didn’t control such things.
The helicopter was now little more than a hundred yards to the south, moving forward slowly, all but hovering. Its screaming engine and clattering rotors were so loud that Joe could not have made himself heard to his companions unless he shouted.
There was no easy way to climb the fence, not in the minute or two of grace they might have left. Joshua stepped forward with the doorbuster Desert Eagle, fired one round into the lock, and kicked the gate open.
The men in the helicopter could not have heard the gunshot, and it was unlikely that the sound was perceived in the house as anything more than additional racket caused by the aircraft. Indeed, every window was dark, and all was as still as though no one was home.
They passed through the gate into an expansive, estate-size property with low box hedges, formal rose gardens, bowl fountains currently dry, antique French terra-cotta walkways lit by bronze-tulip path lights, and multilevel terraces with limestone balustrades rising to a Mediterranean mansion. There were phoenix palms, ficus trees. Massive California live oaks were underlit by landscape spots: magisterial, frost-and-black, free-form scaffoldings of branches.
Because of the artfulness of the landscape lighting, no glare spoiled any corner. The romantic grounds cast off tangled shawls of shadow, intricate laces of soft light and hard darkness, in which the four of them surely could not be seen by the pilots even as the helicopter now drew almost even with the bluff on which the estate made its bed.
As he followed Rose and Mark up stone steps onto the lowest terrace, Joe hoped that security-system motion detectors were not installed on the exterior of the enormous house, only within its rooms. If their passage activated kleigs mounted high in the trees or atop the perimeter walls, the sudden dazzle would draw the pilots’ attention.
He knew how difficult it could be even for a lone fugitive on foot to escape the bright eye of a police search chopper with a good and determined pilot—especially in comparatively open environs such as this neighborhood, which didn’t offer the many hiding places of a city’s mazes. The four of them would be altogether too easy to keep pinpointed once they had been spotted.
Earlier, an onshore breeze had come with the grace of gull wings from the sea; currently, the flow was offshore and stronger. This was one of those hot winds, called Santa Anas, born in the mountains to the east, out of the threshold of the Mojave, dry and blustery and curiously wearing on the nerves. Now a loud whispering rose from the oaks, and the great fronds of the phoenix palms hissed and rattled and creaked as though the trees were warning one another of gales that might soon descend.
Joe’s fear of an outer security line seemed unwarranted as they hurriedly climbed another short flight of stone steps to the upper terrace. The grounds remained subtly lighted, heavily layered with sheltering shadows.
Out beyond the bluff’s edge, the search chopper was parallel with them, moving slowly northward. The pilots’ attention remained focused on the beach below.
Mark led them past an enormous swimming pool. The oil-black water glimmered with fluid arabesques of silver, as though schools of strange fish with luminous scales were swimming just beneath the surface.
They were still passing the pool when Rose stumbled. She almost fell but regained her balance. She halted, swaying.
“Are you all right?” Joe asked worriedly.
“Yes, fine, I’ll be okay,” she said, but her voice was thin, and she still appeared to be unsteady.
“How badly were you hurt back there?” Joe pressed as Mark and Joshua gathered around.
“Just knocked on my ass,” she said. “Bruised a little.”
“Rose—”
“I’m okay, Joe. It’s just all this running, all those damn stairs up from the beach. I guess I’m not in as good a shape as I should be.”
Joshua was talking sotto voce on the cell phone again.
“Let’s go,” Rose said. “Come on, come on, let’s go.”
Beyond the bluff, above the beach, the helicopter was almost past the estate.
Mark led the way again, and Rose followed with renewed energy. They dashed under the roof of the arched loggia against the rear wall, where they were no longer in any danger of being spotted by the chopper pilots, and then to the corner of the house.
As they moved single file along the side of the mansion on a walkway that serpentined through a small grove of shaggy-barked melaleucas, they were abruptly pinned in the bright beam of a big flashlight. Blocking the path ahead of them, a watchman said, “Hey, who the hell are—”
Acting without hesitation, Mark began to move even as the beam flicked on. The stranger was still speaking when Mark collided with him. The two men grunted from the impact.
The flashlight flew against the trunk of a melaleuca, rebounded onto the walkway, and spun on the stone, making shadows whirl like a pack of tail-chasing dogs.
Mark swiveled the startled watchman around, put a hammerlock on him, bum-rushed him off the sidewalk and through bordering flower beds, and slammed him against the side of the house so hard that the nearby windows rattled.
Scooping up the flashlight, Joshua directed it on the action, and Joe saw that they had been challenged by an overweight uniformed security guard of about fifty-five. Mark pressed him to his knees and kept a hand on the back of his head to force his face down and away from them, so he couldn’t describe them later.
“He’s not armed,” Mark informed Joshua.
“Bastards,” the watchman said bitterly.
“Ankle holster?” Joshua wondered.
“Not that, either.”
The watchman said, “Stupid owners are pacifists or some damn thing. Won’t have a gun on the place, even for me. So now here I am.”
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Mark said, pulling him backward from the house and forcing him to sit on the ground with his back against the trunk of a melaleuca.
“You don’t scare me,” the watchman said, but he sounded scared.
“Dogs?” Mark demanded.
“Everywhere,” the guard said. “Dobermans.”
“He’s lying,” Mark said confidently.
Even Joe could hear the bluff in the watchman’s voice.
Joshua gave the flashlight to Joe and said, “Keep it pointed at the ground.” Then he produced handcuffs from a fanny pack.
Mark directed the guard to reach in back of himself and clasp his hands behind the tree. The trunk was only about ten inches in diameter, so the guard didn’t have to contort himself, and Joshua snapped the cuffs on his wrists.
“The cops are on the way,” the watchman gloated.
“No doubt riding Dobermans,” Mark said.
“Bastard,” said the watchman.
From his fanny pack, Mark withdrew a tightly rolled Ace bandage. “Bite on this,” he told the guard.
“Bite on this,” the guard said, indulging in one last bleat of hopeless bravado, and then he did as he was told.
Three times, Joshua wound electrician’s tape around the guard’s head and across his mouth, fixing the Ace bandage firmly in place.
From the watchman’s belt, Mark unclipped what appeared to be a remote control. “This open the driveway gate?”
Through his gag, the watchman snarled something obscene, which issued as a meaningless mumble.
“Probably the gate.”
To the guard, Joshua said, “Just relax. Don’t chafe your wrists. We’re not robbing the place. We’re really not. We’re only passing through.”
Mark said, “When we’ve been gone half an hour, we’ll call the cops s
o they can come and release you.”
“Better get a dog,” Joshua advised.
Taking the watchman’s flashlight, Mark led them toward the front of the house.
Whoever these guys were, Joe was glad that they were on his side.
The estate occupied at least three acres. The huge house was set two hundred feet back from the front property wall at the street. In the eye of the wide, looping driveway was a four-tier marble fountain: four broad scalloped bowls, each supported by three leaping dolphins, bowls and dolphins diminishing in scale as they ascended. The bowls were full of water, but the pump was silent, and there were no spouts or cascades.
“We’ll wait here,” Mark said, leading them to the dolphins.
The dolphins and bowls rose out of a pool with a two-foot-high wall finished with a broad cap of limestone. Rose sat on the edge—and then so did Joe and Mark.
Taking the remote control they had gotten from the watchman, Joshua walked along the driveway toward the entrance gate, talking on the cellular phone as he went.
Dogs of warm Santa Ana wind chased cat-quick leaves and curls of papery melaleuca bark along the blacktop.
“How do you even know about me?” Rose asked Mark.
“When any enterprise is launched with a one-billion-dollar trust fund, like ours,” Mark said, “it sure doesn’t take long to get up to speed. Besides, computers and data technology are what we’re about.”
“What enterprise?” Joe asked.
The answer was the same mystifying response that Joshua had given on the beach, “In finna face.”
“And what’s that mean?”
“Later, Joe,” Rose promised. “Go on, Mark.”
“Well, so, from day one, we’ve had the funds to try to keep track of all promising research in every discipline, worldwide, that could conceivably lead to the epiphany we expect.”
“Maybe so,” Rose said, “but you people have been around two years, while the largest part of my research for the past seven years has been conducted under the tightest imaginable security.”
“Doctor, you showed enormous promise in your field until you were about thirty-seven—and then suddenly your work appeared to come almost to a complete halt, except for a minor paper published here or there from time to time. You were a Niagara of creativity—and then went dry overnight.”
“And that indicates what to you?”
“It’s the signature pattern of a scientist who’s been co-opted by the defense establishment or some other branch of government with sufficient power to enforce a total information blackout. So when we see something like that, we start trying to find out exactly where you’re at work. Finally we located you at Teknologik, but not at any of their well-known and accessible facilities. A deep subterranean, biologically secure complex near Manassas, Virginia. Something called ‘Project 99.’”
While he listened intently to the conversation, Joe watched as, out at the end of the long driveway, the ornate electric gate rolled aside.
“How much do you know about what we do on Project 99?” Rose asked.
“Not enough,” Mark said.
“How can you know anything at all?”
“When I say we track ongoing research worldwide, I don’t mean that we limit ourselves to the same publications and shared data banks that any science library has available to it.”
With no animosity, Rose said, “That’s a nice way of saying you try to penetrate computer security systems, hack your way in, break encryptions.”
“Whatever. We don’t do it for profit. We don’t economically exploit the information we acquire. It’s simply our mission, the search we were created to undertake.”
Joe was surprised by his own patience. Although he was learning things by listening to them talk, the basic mystery only grew deeper. Yet he was prepared to wait for answers. The bizarre experience with the Polaroid snapshot in the banquet room had left him shaken. Now that he’d had time to think about what had happened, the synesthesia seemed to be but prelude to some revelation that was going to be more shattering and humbling than he had previously imagined. He remained committed to learning the truth, but now instinct warned him that he should allow the revelations to wash over him in small waves instead of in one devastating tsunami.
Joshua had gone through the open gate and was standing along the Pacific Coast Highway.
Over the eastern hills, the swollen moon ascended yellow-orange, and the warm wind seemed to blow down out of it.
Mark said, “You were one of thousands of researchers whose work we followed—though you were of somewhat special interest because of the extreme secrecy at Project 99. Then, a year ago, you left Manassas with something from the project, and overnight you were the most wanted person in the country. Even after you supposedly died aboard that airliner in Colorado. Even then…people were looking for you, lots of people, expending considerable resources, searching frantically for a dead woman—which seemed pretty weird to us.”
Rose said nothing to encourage him. She seemed tired.
Joe took her hand. She was trembling, but she squeezed his hand as if to assure him that she was all right.
“Then we began to intercept reports from a certain clandestine police agency…reports that said you were alive and active in the L.A. area, that it involved families who’d lost loved ones on Flight 353. We set up some surveillance of our own. We’re pretty good at it. Some of us are ex-military. Anyway, you could say we watched the watchers who were keeping tab on people like Joe here. And now…I guess it’s a good thing we did.”
“Yes. Thank you,” she said. “But you don’t know what you’re getting into here. There’s not just glory…there’s terrible danger.”
“Dr. Tucker,” Mark persisted, “there are over nine thousand of us now, and we’ve committed our lives to what we do. We’re not afraid. And now we believe that you may have found the interface—and that it’s very different from anything we quite anticipated. If you’ve actually made that breakthrough…if humanity is at that pivot point in history when everything is going to change radically and forever…then we are your natural allies.”
“I think you are,” she agreed.
Gently but persistently selling her on this alliance, Mark said, “Doctor, we both have set ourselves against those forces of ignorance and fear and self-interest that want to keep the world in darkness.”
“Remember, I once worked for them.”
“But turned.”
A car swung off Pacific Coast Highway and paused to pick up Joshua. It was followed through the gate and along the driveway by a second car.
Rose, Mark, and Joe got to their feet as the two vehicles—a Ford trailed by a Mercedes—circled the fountain and stopped in front of them.
Joshua stepped from the passenger door of the Ford, and a young brunette woman got out from behind the steering wheel. The Mercedes was driven by an Asian man of about thirty.
They all gathered before Rose Tucker, and for a moment everyone stood in silence.
The steadily escalating wind no longer spoke merely through the rustling foliage of the trees, through the cricket-rasping branches of the shrubbery, and through the hollow flute-like music issuing from the eaves of the mansion, for now it also enjoyed a voice of its own: a haunted keening that curled chillingly in listening ears, akin to the muted but frightful ululant crying of coyote packs chasing down prey in some far canyon of the night.
In the landscape lights, the shuddering greenery cast nervous shadows, and the gradually paling moon gazed at itself in the shiny surfaces of the automobiles.
Watching these four people as they watched Rose, Joe realized that they regarded the scientist not solely with curiosity but with wonder, perhaps even with awe, as though they stood in the presence of someone transcendent. Someone holy.
“I’m surprised to see every one of you in mufti,” Rose said.
They smiled, and Joshua said, “Two years ago, when we first set out on this mission, we were rea
sonably quiet about it. Didn’t want to excite a lot of media interest…because we thought we’d largely be misunderstood. What we didn’t expect was that we’d have enemies. And enemies so violent.”
“So powerful,” Mark said.
“We thought everyone would want to know the answers we were seeking—if we ever found them. Now we know better.”
“Ignorance is a bliss that some people will kill for,” said the young woman.
“So a year ago,” Joshua continued, “we adopted the robes as a distraction. People understand us as a cult—or think they do. We’re more acceptable when we’re viewed as fanatics, neatly labeled and confined to a box. We don’t make people quite so nervous.”
Robes.
Astonished, Joe said, “You wear blue robes, shave your heads.”
Joshua said, “Some of us do, yes, as of a year ago—and those in the uniform pretend to be the entire membership. That’s what I meant when I said the robes are a distraction—the robes, the shaved heads, the earrings, the visible communal enclaves. The rest of us have gone underground, where we can do the work without being spied on, subjected to harassment, and easily infiltrated.”
“Come with us,” the young woman said to Rose. “We know you may have found the way, and we want to help you bring it to the world—without interference.”
Rose moved to her and put a hand against her cheek, much as she had touched Joe in the cemetery. “I might be with you soon, but not tonight. I need more time to think, to plan. And I’m in a hurry to see a young girl, a child, who is at the center of what is happening.”
Nina, Joe thought, and his heart shuddered like the shadows of the wind-shaken trees.
Rose moved to the Asian man and touched him too. “I can tell you this much…we stand on the threshold you foresaw. We will go through that door, maybe not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or next week, but in the years ahead.”
She went to Joshua. “Together we will see the world change forever, bring the light of knowledge into the great dark loneliness of human existence. In our time.”
And finally she approached Mark. “I assume you brought two cars because you were prepared to give one to Joe and me.”
“Yes. But we hoped—”
She put a hand on his arm. “Soon but not tonight. I’ve got urgent business, Mark. Everything we hope to achieve hangs in the balance right now, hangs so precariously—until I can reach the little girl I mentioned.”
“Wherever she is, we can take you to her.”
“No. Joe and I must do this alone—and quickly.”
“You can take the Ford.”
“Thank you.”
Mark withdrew a folded one-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to Rose. “There are just eight digits in the serial number on this bill. Ignore the fourth digit, and the other seven are a phone number in the 310 area code.”
Rose tucked the bill into her jeans.
“When you’re ready to join us,” Mark said, “or if you’re ever in trouble you can’t get out of, ask for me at that number. We’ll come for you no matter where you are.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “We’ve got to go.” She turned to Joe. “Will you drive?”
“Yes.”
To Joshua, she said, “May I take your cell phone?”
He gave it to her.
Wings of furious wind beat around them as they got into the Ford. The keys were in the ignition.
As Rose pulled the car door shut, she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and leaned forward, gasping for breath.
“You are hurt.”
“Told you. I got knocked around.”
“Where’s it hurt?”
“We’ve got to get across the city,” Rose said, “but I don’t want to go back past Mahalia’s.”
“You could have a broken rib or two.”
Ignoring him, she sat up straight, and her breathing improved as she said, “The creeps won’t want to risk setting up a roadblock and a traffic check without cooperation from the local authorities, and they don’t have time to get that. But you can bet your ass they’ll be watching passing cars.”
“If you’ve got a broken rib, it could puncture a lung.”