Dark Rivers of the Heart (58 page)

“I think. Tell me what to do.”

Three minutes later, the first of the photographs appeared on the video display of the computer in her lap. Spencer leaned across the narrow aisle from his seat, and she angled the attaché case so they both could see the screen.

“That’s my living room,” he said.

“You’re not deeply interested in decor, are you?”

“My favorite period style is Early Neat.”

“More like Late Monastery.”

Two men in riot gear were moving through the room quickly enough to be blurred in the still shot.

“Hit the space bar,” Spencer said.

She hit the bar, and the next photograph appeared on the screen. They went through the first ten shots in less than a minute. A few provided a clear image of a face or two. But it was difficult to get a sense of what a man looked like when he was wearing a riot helmet with a chin strap.

“Just shuffle through them until we see something new,” he said.

Ellie rapidly, repeatedly tapped the space bar, flipping through the photos, until they came to shot number thirty-one. A new man appeared, and he was not in riot gear.

“Sonofabitch,” Spencer said.

“I think so,” she agreed.

“Let’s see thirty-two.”

She tapped the space bar.

“Well.”

“Yeah.”

“Thirty-three.”

Tap.

“No doubt about it,” she said.

Tap. Thirty-four.

Tap. Thirty-five.

Tap. Thirty-six.

The same man was in shot after shot, moving around the living room of the cabin in Malibu. And he was the last of the five men they had seen getting out of this very helicopter in front of the Hallmark card store a short while ago.

“Weirdest thing of all,” Ellie said, “I’ll bet we’re looking at his picture on
his
computer.”

“You’re probably sitting in his seat.”

“In his helicopter.”

Spencer said, “My God, he must be pissed.”

Quickly they went through the rest of the photographs. That pudgy-faced, rather jolly-looking fellow was in every shot until he apparently spit on a piece of paper and pasted it to the camera lens.

“I won’t forget what he looks like,” Spencer said, “but I wish we had a printer, could get a copy of that.”

“There’s a printer built in,” she said, indicating a slot on the side of the attaché case. “I think there’s a supply of maybe fifty sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven bond paper. I sort of remember that’s what Danny told me about it.”

“All I need is one.”

“Two. One for me.”

They picked the clearest shot of their benign-looking enemy, and Ellie printed out twice.

“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 whose 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.