Dark Rivers of the Heart (45 page)

“EPA employee? But it’s the middle of nowhere,” Hyckman said. He seemed stuck on that phrase, as though repeating the haunting lyrics of an old song. “Middle of nowhere.”

“Curiously enough,” Roy said with a warm smile that took the sting out of his sarcasm, “a lot of environmental research is done in the field, right out there in the
environment,
and you’d be amazed if you knew how much of the planet is in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yeah, maybe so. But if it was somebody legitimate, a scientist or something, why terminate contact so fast, before doing anything?”

“Now
that
is the first shred of meat you’ve provided,” Roy said. “But it’s not enough to nourish a certainty.”

Hyckman looked bewildered. “What?”

Instead of explaining, Roy said, “What’s with the bull’s-eye? Targets are always marked with a white cross.”

Grinning, pleased with himself, Hyckman said, “I thought this was more interesting, adds a little fun.”

“Looks like a video game,” Roy said.

“Thanks,” Hyckman said, interpreting the slight as a compliment.

“Factoring in magnification,” Roy said, “what altitude does this view represent?”

“Twenty thousand feet.”

“Much too high. Bring us down to five thousand.”

“We’re in the process right now,” Hyckman said, indicating some of the people working at the computers in the center of the room.

A cool, soft, female voice came from the control-center address system:
“Higher-magnification view coming up.”

The terrain was rugged, if not forbidding, but Valerie drove as she might have driven on a smooth ribbon of freeway blacktop. The tortured Rover leaped and plunged, rocked and swayed, bounced and shuddered across that inhospitable land, rattling and creaking as if at any moment it would explode like the overstressed springs and gearwheels of a clockwork toy.

Spencer occupied the passenger seat, with the SIG 9mm pistol in his right hand. The Micro Uzi was on the floor between his feet.

Rocky sat behind them, in the narrow clear space between the back of the front seat and the mass of gear that filled the rest of the cargo area all the way to the tailgate. The dog’s good ear was pricked, because he was interested in their lurching progress, and his other ear flapped like a rag.

“Can’t we slow down a little?” Spencer asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the tumult: the roaring engine, the tires stuttering across a washboard gully.

Valerie leaned over the steering wheel, looked up at the sky, craned her head left and right. “Wide and blue. No clouds anywhere, damn it. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to make a run for it until we had clouds again.”

“Does it matter? What about the infrared surveillance you were talking about, the way they can see through clouds?”

Looking ahead again as the Range Rover chewed its way up the gully wall, she said, “That’s a threat when we’re sitting still, in the middle of nowhere, the only unnatural heat source for miles. But it’s not much good to them when we’re on the move. Especially not if we were on a highway, with other cars, where they can’t analyze the Rover’s heat signature and distinguish it in traffic.”

The top of the gully wall proved to be a low ridge, over which they shot with sufficient speed to be airborne for a second or two. They slammed front-tires-first onto a long, gradual slope of gray-black-pink shale.

Slivers of shale, spun up by the tires, showered against the undercarriage, and Valerie shouted to be heard above a hard clatter as loud as a hailstorm: “With a sky that blue, we have more to worry about than infrared. They have a clear, bare-eyed look-down at us.”

“You think they’ve already seen us?”

“You can bet your ass they’re already
looking
for us,” she said, barely audible because of the machine-gun shatters of shale that volleyed beneath them.

“Eyes in the sky,” he said, more to himself than to her.

The world seemed upside down: Blue heavens had become the place where demons lived.

Valerie shouted: “Yeah, they’re looking. And for sure, it won’t be much longer till we’re spotted, considering we’re the only moving thing, other than snakes and jackrabbits, for at least five miles in any direction.”

The Rover roared off the shale onto softer soil, and the sudden diminution of noise was such a relief that the usual tumult, which had earlier been so annoying, now seemed by comparison like the music of a string quartet.

Valerie said, “Damn! I only up-linked to confirm that it was clear. I didn’t really think they’d still be there, still tying up a satellite for a third day. And I sure as hell didn’t think they’d be locking on incoming signals.”

“Three days?”

“Yeah, they probably started surveillance before dawn Saturday, as soon as the storm passed and the sky cleared. Oh, man, they must want us even worse than I thought.”

“What day is this?” he asked uneasily.

“Monday.”

“I was sure this was Sunday.”

“You were dead to the world a lot longer than you think. Since sometime Friday afternoon.”

Even if unconsciousness had healed into ordinary sleep sometime during the previous night, he had been pretty much out of his head for forty-eight to sixty hours. Because he valued self-control so highly, the contemplation of such a lengthy delirium made him queasy.

He remembered some of what he’d said when he’d been out of his head. He wondered what else he had told her that he couldn’t recall.

Looking at the sky again, Valerie said, “I
hate
these bastards!”

“Who are they?” he asked, not for the first time.

“You don’t want to know,” she said, as before. “As soon as you know, you’re a dead man.”

“Looks like there’s a good chance I’m already a dead man. And I sure wouldn’t want them to whack me and never know who they were.”

She mulled that over as she accelerated up another hill, a long one this time. “Okay. You’ve got a point. But later. Right now, I’ve got to concentrate on getting us out of this mess.”

“There’s a way out?”

“Between slim and none—but a way.”

“I thought, with that satellite, they were going to spot us any second now.”

“They will. But the nearest place the bastards have any men is probably back in Vegas, a hundred and ten miles from here, maybe even a hundred twenty. That’s how far I got Friday night, before I decided that staying on the move was making you worse. By the time they get a hit squad together and fly in here after us, we’ve got two hours minimum, two and a half max.”

“To do what?”

“To lose them again,” she said somewhat impatiently.

“How do we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space, for God’s sake?” he demanded.

“Boy, does
that
sound paranoid,” she said.

“It’s not paranoid, it’s what they’re
doing.
”

“I know, I know. But it sure sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” She adopted a voice not dissimilar from that of Goofy, the Disney cartoon character. “Watching us from outer space, funny little men in pointy hats, with ray guns, gonna steal our women, destroy the world.”

Behind them, Rocky woofed softly, intrigued by the Goofy voice.

She dropped the funny voice. “Are we living in screwed-up times or what? God in Heaven, are we ever.”

As they crested the top of the long hill, giving the springs another hard workout, Spencer said, “One minute I think I know you, and the next minute I don’t know you at all.”

“Good. Keeps you alert. We need to be alert.”

“You suddenly seem to think this is funny.”

“Oh, sometimes I can’t
feel
the humor any more than you’re able to right now. But we live in God’s amusement park. Take it too seriously, you’ll go nuts. On some level, everything’s funny, even the blood and the dying. Don’t you think so?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Then how do you ever get along?” she asked, but not in the least flippantly, with total seriousness now.

“It hasn’t been easy.”

The broad, flat top of the hill featured more brush than they had yet encountered. Valerie didn’t let up on the accelerator, and the Rover smashed through everything in its way.

Spencer persisted: “How will we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space?”

“Trick ’em.”

“How?”

“With some clever moves.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He wouldn’t relent: “When will you know?”

“I sure hope before our two hours are up.” She frowned at the odometer. “Seems like we ought to’ve gone six miles.”

“Seems like a hundred. Much more of this damn bouncing, and my headache’s going to come back hard.”

The broad top of the hill didn’t drop off abruptly but melted into a long, descending slope that was covered with tall grass as dry, pale, and translucent as insect wings. At the bottom were two lanes of blacktop that led east and west.

“What’s that?” he wondered.

“Old Federal Highway Ninety-three,” she said.

“You knew it was there? How?”

“Either I studied a map while you were out of your head—or I’m just dead-on psychic.”

“Probably both,” he said, for again she had surprised him.

Because the view from five thousand feet didn’t provide adequate resolution of car-size objects at ground level, Roy requested that the system focus down to one thousand feet.

For clarity, that extreme degree of magnification required more than the usual amount of image enhancement. The additional processing of the incoming Earthguard transmission required so much computer capacity that other agency work was halted to free the Cray for this urgent task. Otherwise, more minutes of delay would have occurred between receipt of an image and its projection in the control center.

Less than a minute passed before the cool, almost whispery, female voice again spoke softly from the public-address system:
“Suspect vehicle acquired.”

Ken Hyckman dashed away from the control console into the two rows of computers, all of which were manned. He returned within another minute, boyish and buoyant. “We’ve got her.”

“We can’t know yet,” Roy cautioned.

“Oh, we’ve got her, all right,” Hyckman said excitedly, turning to beam at the wall display. “What other vehicle would be out there, on the move, in the same area where somebody tried to up-link?”

“Could still be some EPA scientist.”

“Suddenly on the run?”

“Maybe just moving around.”

“Moving
real
fast for the terrain.”

“Well, there aren’t any speed limits out there.”

“Too coincidental,” said Hyckman. “It’s her.”

“We’ll see.”

With a ripple, beginning at the left and moving to the right across the wall display, the image changed. The new view shifted, blurred, shifted, cleared, shifted, blurred, cleared again—and they were looking down from one thousand feet onto rough terrain.

A vehicle of unidentifiable type and make, obviously with off-road capability, raced across a table of brush-covered land. It was still a woefully tiny object seen from that altitude.

“Focus down to five hundred feet,” Roy ordered.

“Higher-magnification view coming up.”

After a brief delay, the display rippled left to right again. The image blurred, shifted, blurred, cleared.

Earthguard 3 was not directly over the moving target but in a geosynchronous orbit to the east and north. Therefore, the target was observed at an angle, which required additional automated processing of the image to eliminate distortions caused by the perspective. The result, however, was a picture that included not only the rectangular forms of the roof and hood but a severe angular view of one flank of the vehicle.

Although Roy knew that an element of distortion still remained, he was half convinced that he could see a couple of brighter spots glimmering in that fleet shadow, which might have been driver’s-side windows reflecting the morning sun.

As the suspect vehicle reached the brink of the hill and began to descend a long slope, Roy peered at the foremost of those possible windows and wondered if, indeed, the woman waited to be discovered on the other side of a pane of sun-bronzed glass. Had they found her at last?