‘This is just a whole lot of babble to me, Dr. Tucker, a whole lot of nothing — like healing with crystals and channelling spirits and little grey men kidnapping people in flying saucers.’
‘Don’t just look. See.’
Through the red lenses of his defensive anger, Joe perceived her calmness as a tool of manipulation. He got up from his chair, hands fisted at his sides. ‘What were you bringing to L.A. on that plane, and why did Teknologik and its friends kill three hundred and twenty people to stop you?’
‘I’m trying to tell you.’
‘Then tell me!’
She closed her eyes and folded her small brown hands, as though waiting for this storm in him to pass — but her serenity only fed the winds of his tempest.
‘Horton Nellor. Once your boss, once mine. How does he figure in this?’ Joe demanded.
She said nothing.
‘Why did the Delmanns and Lisa and Captain Blane commit suicide? And how can their suicides be murder like you say? Who’re those men upstairs? What the hell is this all about?’ He was shaking. ‘Where is Nina?’
Rose opened her eyes and regarded him with sudden concern, her tranquility at last disturbed. ‘What men upstairs?’
‘Two thugs who work for Teknologik or some secret damn police agency, or someone.’
She turned her gaze toward the restaurant. ‘You’re sure?’
‘I recognized them, having dinner.’
Getting quickly to her feet, Rose stared at the low ceiling as though she were in a submarine sinking out of control into an abyss, furiously calculating the enormity of the crushing pressure, waiting for the first signs of failure in the hull.
‘If two of them are inside, you can bet others are outside,’ Joe said.
‘Dear God,’ she whispered.
‘Mahalia’s trying to figure a way to slip us past them after closing time.’
‘She doesn’t understand. We’ve got to get out of here now.’
‘She’s having boxes stacked in the receiving room to cover the entrance of the elevator—’
‘I don’t care about those men or their damn guns,’ Rose said, rounding the end of the table. ‘If they come down here after us, I can face that, handle that. I don’t care about dying that way, Joe. But they don’t really need to come after us. If they know we’re somewhere in this building right now, they can remote us.’
‘What?’
‘Remote us,’ she said fearfully, heading toward one of the doors that served the deck and the beach.
Following her, exasperated, Joe said, ‘What does that mean —remote us?’
The door was secured by a pair of thumb-turn deadbolts. She disengaged the upper one.
He clamped his hand over the lower lock, preventing her from opening it. ‘Where’s Nina?’
‘Get out of the way,’ she demanded.
‘Where’s Nina?’
‘Joe, for God’s sake—’
This was the first time that Rose Tucker had seemed vulnerable, and Joe was going to take advantage of the moment to get what he most wanted. ‘Where’s Nina?’
‘Later. I promise.’
‘Now.’
From upstairs came a loud clatter.
Rose gasped, turned from the door, and pressed her gaze upon the ceiling again as if it might crash down on them.
Joe heard voices raised in argument, filtered through the elevator shaft — Mahalia’s and those of at least two or three men. He was sure that the clatter was the sound of empty packing crates and pallets being dragged and tossed away from the cab door.
When the men in the leather jackets discovered the elevator and knew there was a lower floor to the building, they might realize that they had left an escape gate open by not covering the beach. Indeed, others might even now be looking for a way down the sheer forty-foot bluff, with the hope of cutting off that route.
Nevertheless, face to face with Rose, recklessly determined to have an answer at any cost, fiercely insistent, Joe pressed his question: ‘Where’s Nina?’
‘Dead,’ she said, seeming to wrench the word from herself.
‘Like hell she is.’
‘Please, Joe-’
He was furious with her for lying to him, as so many others had lied to him during the past year. ‘Like hell she is. No way. No damn way. I’ve talked to Mercy Ealing. Nina was alive that night and she’s alive now, somewhere.’
‘If they know we’re in this building,’ Rose repeated in a voice that now shook with urgency, ‘they can remote us. Like the Delmanns. Like Lisa. Like Captain Blane!’
‘Where is Nina?’
The elevator motor rumbled to life, and the cab began to hum upward through the shaft.
‘Where is Nina?’
Overhead the banquet-room lights dimmed, probably because the elevator drew power from their circuit.
At the dimming of the lights, Rose cried out in terror, threw her body against Joe, trying to knock him off his feet, and clawed frenziedly at the hand that he had clamped over the lower deadbolt.
Her nails gouged his flesh, and he hissed in pain and let go of the lock, and she pulled open the door. In came a breeze that smelled of the ocean, and out went Rose into the night.
Joe rushed after her, onto a twenty-foot-wide, eighty-foot-long, elevated wood deck overhung by the restaurant. It reverberated like a kettle drum with each footfall.
The scarlet sun had bled into a grave on the far side of Japan. The sky and the sea to the west were raven meeting crow, as feathery smooth and sensuous and inviting as death.
Rose was already at the head of the stairs.
Following her, Joe found two flights that led down fourteen or sixteen feet to the beach.
As dark as Rose was, and darkly dressed, she all but vanished in the black geometry of the steps below him. When she reached the pale sand, however, she regained some definition.
The strand was more than a hundred feet across at this point, and the phosphorescent tumble of surf churned out a low white noise that washed like a ghost sea around him. This was not a swimming or surfing beach, and there were no bonfires or even Coleman lanterns in sight in either direction.
To the east, the sky was a postulant yellow overlaid on black, full of the glow of the city, as insistent as it was meaningless. Cast from high above, the pale yellow rectangles of light from the restaurant windows quilted part of the beach.
Joe did not try to stop Rose or to slow her. Instead, when he caught up with her, he ran at her side, shortening his stride to avoid pulling ahead of her.
She was his only link to Nina. He was confused by her apparent mysticism, by her sudden transit from beatific calm to superstitious terror, and he was furious that she would lie to him about Nina now, after she had led him to believe, at the cemetery, that she would ultimately tell him the full truth. Yet his fate and hers were inextricably linked, because only she could ever lead him to his younger daughter.
As they ran north through the soft sand and passed the corner of the restaurant, someone rushed at them from ahead and to the right, from the bluff, a shadow in the night, quick and big, like the featureless beast that seeks us in nightmares, pursuer through corridors of dreams.
‘Look out,’ Joe warned Rose, but she also saw the oncoming assailant and was already taking evasive action.
Joe attempted to intervene when the hurtling dark shape moved to cut Rose off — but he was blindsided by a second man who came at him from the direction of the sea. This guy was as big as a professional football linebacker, and they both went down so hard that the breath should have been knocked out of Joe, but it wasn’t, not entirely — he was wheezing but breathing — because the sand in which they landed was deep and soft, far above the highest lapping line of the compacting tide.
He kicked, flailed, ruthlessly used knees and elbows and feet, and rolled out from under his attacker, scrambling to his feet as he heard someone shout at Rose farther along the strand — ‘Freeze, bitch!’ — after which he heard a shot, hard and flat. He didn’t want to think about that shot, a whip of sound snapping across the beach to the growling sea, didn’t want to think about Rose with a bullet in her head and his Nina lost again forever, but he couldn’t avoid thinking about it, the possibility like a lash burn branded forever across the surface of his brain. His own assailant was cursing him and pushing up now from the sand, and as Joe spun around to deal with the threat, he was full of the meanness and fury that had gotten him thrown out of the youth-boxing league twenty years ago, seething with church-vandalizing rage — he was an animal now, a heartless predator, cat-quick and savage — and he reacted as though this stranger were personally responsible for poor Frank being crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, as if this sonofabitch had worked some hoodoo to make Frank’s joints swell and deform, as if this wretched thug were the sole perpetrator who had somehow put a funnel in Captain Blane’s ear and poured an elixir of madness into his head, so Joe kicked him in the crotch, and when the guy grunted and began to double over, Joe grabbed the bastard’s head and at the same time drove a knee upward, shoving the face down into the knee and jamming the knee up hard into the face, a ballet of violence, and he actually heard the crunch of the man’s nose disintegrating and felt the bite of teeth breaking against his knee cap. The guy collapsed backward on the beach, all at once choking and spitting blood and gasping for breath and crying like a small child, but this wasn’t enough for Joe, because he was wild now, wilder than any animal, as wild as weather, a cyclone of anger and grief and frustration, and he kicked where he thought ribs would be, which hurt him almost as much as it hurt the broken man who received the blow, because Joe was only wearing Nikes, not hard-toed shoes, so he tried to stomp the guy’s throat and crush his windpipe, but stomped his chest instead — and would have tried again, would have killed him, not quite realizing that he was doing so, but then he was rammed from behind by a third attacker.
Joe slammed facedown onto the beach, with the weight of this new assailant atop him, at least two hundred pounds pinning him down. Head to one side, spitting sand, he tried to heave the man off, but this time his breath was knocked out of him; he exhaled all of his strength with it, and he lay helpless.
Besides, as he gasped desperately for air, he felt his attacker thrust something cold and blunt against the side of his face, and he knew what it must be even before he heard the threat.
‘You want me to blow your head off, I’ll do it,’ the stranger said, and his reverberant voice had a ragged homicidal edge. ‘I’ll do it, you as**ole.’
Joe believed him and stopped resisting. He struggled only for his breath.
Silent surrender wasn’t good enough for the angry man atop him. Answer me, you bastard. You want me to blow your damn head off? Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Going to behave?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m out of patience here.’
‘All right.’
‘Sonofabitch,’ the stranger said bitterly.
Joe said nothing more, just spit out sand and breathed deeply, getting his strength back with his wind, though trying to stave off the return of the brief madness that had seized him.
Where is Rose?
The man atop Joe was breathing hard too, expelling foul clouds of garlic breath, not only giving Joe time to calm down but getting his own strength back. He smelled of a time-scented cologne and cigarette smoke.
What’s happened to Rose?
‘We’re going to get up now,’ the guy said. ‘Me first. Getting up, I got this piece aimed at your head. You stay flat, dug right into the sand the way you are, just the way you are, until I step back and tell you it’s okay to get up.’ For emphasis, he pressed the muzzle of the gun more deeply into Joe’s face, twisting it back and forth; the inside of Joe’s cheek pressed painfully against his teeth. ‘You understand, Carpenter?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can waste you and walk away.’
‘I’m cool.’
‘Nobody can touch me.’
‘Not me, anyway.’
‘I mean, I got a badge.’
‘Sure.’
‘You want to see it? I’ll pin it to your damn lip.’
Joe said nothing more.
They hadn’t shouted Police, which didn’t prove that they were phony cops, only that they didn’t want to advertise. They hoped to do their business quickly, cleanly — and get out before they were required to explain their presence to the local authorities, which would at least tangle them in inter-jurisdictional paperwork and might result in troubling questions about what legitimate laws they were enforcing. If they weren’t strictly employees of Teknologik, they had some measure of federal power behind them, but they hadn’t shouted FBI or DEA or ATF when they had burst out of the night, so they were probably operatives with a clandestine agency paid for out of those many billions of dollars that the government dispensed off the accounting books, from the infamous Black Budget.
Finally the stranger eased off Joe, onto one knee, then stood and hacked away a couple of steps. ‘Get up.’
Rising from the sand, Joe was relieved to discover that his eyes were rapidly adapting to the darkness. When he had first come
out of the banquet room and run north along the beach, hardly two minutes ago, the gloom had seemed deeper than it was now. The longer he remained night blind to any degree, the less likely he would be to see an advantage and to be able to seize it. Although his rakish Panama hat was gone, and in spite of the darkness, the gunman was clearly recognizable: the storyteller. In his white slacks and white shirt, with his long white hair, he seemed to draw the meagre ambient light to himself, glowing softly like an entity at a séance.
Joe glanced back and up at Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea. He saw the silhouettes of diners at their tables, but they probably couldn’t see the action on the dark beach.
Crotch-kicked, face-slammed, the disabled agent still sprawled nearby on the sand, no longer choking but gagging, in pain, and still spitting blood. He was striving to squeeze off his flow of tears by wheezing out obscenities instead of sobs.
Joe shouted, ‘Rose!’
The white-clad gunman said, ‘Shut up.’
‘Rose!’
‘Shut up and turn around.’
Silent in the sand, a new man loomed behind the storyteller and, instead of proving to be another Teknologik drone, said, ‘I have a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum just one inch from the back of your skull.’
The storyteller seemed as surprised as Joe was, and Joe was dizzied by this turn of events.