Dark Rivers of the Heart (80 page)

“A year after
that,
I’ll have mourned a decent length of time,” she told Roy. “Don’t you think a year?”

“More than decent. Especially as the public will love you so much and want happiness for you.”

“And then I can marry the heroic FBI agent who tracked down and killed that escaped maniac, Steven Ackblom.”

“Four years until we’re together forever,” Roy said. “Not so long, really. I promise you, Eve, I’ll make you happy and do honor to my position as First Gentleman.”

“I know you will, darling,” she said.

“And by then, anyone who doesn’t like
anything
you do—”

“—we shall treat with utmost compassion.”

“Exactly.”

“Now let’s not talk anymore about how long we have to wait. Let’s discuss more of your wonderful ideas. Let’s make
plans.
”

For a long time they talked about uniforms for a variety of new federal organizations they wished to create, with a special focus on whether metal snaps and zippers were more exciting than traditional bone buttons.

SIXTEEN

In the broiling sun, hard-bodied young men and legions of strikingly attractive women in the briefest of bikinis soaked up the rays and casually struck poses for one another. Children built sand castles. Retirees sat under umbrellas, wearing straw hats, soaking up the shade. They were all happily oblivious of eyes in the sky and of the possibility that they could be instantaneously vaporized at the whim of politicians of various nationalities—or even by a demented-genius computer hacker, living in a cyberpunk fantasy, in Cleveland or London or Cape Town or Pittsburgh.

As he walked along the shore, near the tide line, with the huge hotels piled one beside the other to his right, he rubbed lightly at his face. His beard itched. He’d had it for six months, and it wasn’t a scruffy-looking beard. On the contrary, it was soft and full, and Ellie insisted that he was even more handsome with it than without it. Nevertheless, on a hot August day in Miami Beach, it itched as if he had fleas, and he longed to be clean-shaven.

Besides, he liked the appearance of his beardless face. During the eighteen months since the night on which Godzilla had attacked the ranch in Vail, a superb plastic surgeon in the private-pay sector of the British medical establishment had performed three separate procedures on the cicatrix. It had been reduced to a hairline scar that was virtually invisible even when he was tanned. Additional work had been done on his nose and chin.

He used scores of names these days, but neither Spencer Grant nor Michael Ackblom was one of them. Among his closest friends in the resistance, he was known as Phil Richards. Ellie had chosen to keep her first name and adopt Richards as her last. Rocky responded as well to “Killer” as he had to his previous name.

Phil turned his back to the ocean, made his way between the ranks of sunbathers, and entered the lushly landscaped grounds of one of the newer hotels. In sandals, white shorts, and a flamboyant Hawaiian shirt, he resembled countless other tourists.

The hotel swimming pool was bigger than a football field and as freeform as any tropical lagoon. Artificial-rock perimeter. Artificial-rock sunning islands in the center. A two-story waterfall spilling into one palm-shaded end.

In a grotto behind the cascading water, the poolside bar could be reached either on foot or by swimmers. It was a Polynesian-style pavilion with plenty of bamboo, dry palm fronds, and conch shells. The cocktail waitresses wore thongs, wraparound skirts made from a bright orchid-patterned fabric, and matching bikini tops; each had a fresh flower pinned in her hair.

The Padrakian family—Bob, Jean, and their eight-year-old son, Mark—were sitting at a small table near the grotto wall. Bob was drinking rum and Coke, Mark was having a root beer, and Jean was nervously shredding a cocktail napkin and chewing on her lower lip.

Phil approached the table and startled Jean—to whom he was a stranger—by loudly saying, “Hey, Sally, you look fabulous,” and by giving her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He ruffled Mark’s hair: “How you doing, Pete? I’m going to take you snorkeling later—what do you think of that?” Vigorously shaking hands with Bob, he said, “Better watch that gut, buddy, or you’re going to wind up looking like Uncle Morty.” Then he sat down with them and quietly said, “Pheasants and dragons.”

A few minutes later, after he had finished a piña colada and surreptitiously studied the other customers in the bar to be sure that none of them was unusually interested in the Padrakians, Phil paid for all their drinks with cash. He walked with them into the hotel, chatting about nonexistent mutual relatives. Through the frigid lobby. Out under the porte cochere, into the stifling heat and humidity. As far as he could tell, no one was trailing or watching them.

The Padrakians had followed telephone instructions well. They were dressed as sun-worshipping tourists from New Jersey, although Bob was pushing the disguise too far by wearing black loafers and black socks with Bermuda shorts.

A sightseeing van with large windows along the sides approached on the hotel entrance drive and stopped at the curb in front of them, under the porte cochere. The current magnetic-mat signs on each of its front doors declared
CAPTAIN BLACKBEARD’S WATER ADVENTURES
.
Under that, above a picture of a grinning pirate, less bold letters explained
GUIDED SCUBA TOURS, JET-SKI RENTALS, WATER-SKIING, DEEP-SEA FISHING.

The driver got out and came around the front of the van to open the sliding side door for them. He wore a stylishly wrinkled white linen shirt, lightweight white ducks, and bright pink canvas shoes with green laces. Even with dreadlocks and one silver earring, he managed to look as intellectual and dignified as he had ever been in a three-piece suit or in a police captain’s uniform, in the days when Phil had served under him in the West Los Angeles Division of the LAPD. His ink-black skin seemed even darker and glossier in the tropical heat of Miami than it had been in Los Angeles.

The Padrakians climbed into the back of the van, and Phil sat up front with the driver, who was now known to his friends as Ronald—Ron, for short—Truman. “Love the shoes,” Phil said.

“My daughters picked them out for me.”

“Yeah, but you like ’em.”

“Can’t lie. They’re cool gear.”

“You were half dancing, the way you came around the van, showing them off.”

Flashing a grin as he drove away from the hotel, Ron said, “You white men always envy our moves.”

Ron was speaking with a British accent so convincing that Phil could close his eyes and see Big Ben. In the course of losing his Caribbean lilt, Ron had discovered a talent for accents and dialects. He was now their man of a thousand voices.

“I gotta tell you,” Bob Padrakian said nervously from the seat behind them, “we’re scared out of our wits about this.”

“You’re all right now,” Phil said. He turned around in his seat to smile reassuringly at the three refugees.

“Nobody following us, unless it’s a look-down,” Ron said, though the Padrakians probably didn’t know what he meant. “And that’s not very likely.”

“I mean,” Padrakian said, “we don’t even know who the hell you people are.”

“We’re your friends,” Phil assured him. “In fact, if things work out for you folks anything like the way they worked out for me and for Ron and his family, then we’re going to be the best friends you’ve ever had.”

“More than friends, really,” Ron said. “Family.”

Bob and Jean looked dubious and scared. Mark was young enough to be unconcerned.

“Just sit tight for a little while and don’t worry,” Phil told them. “Everything’ll be explained real soon.”

At a huge shopping mall, they parked and went inside. They passed dozens of stores, entered one of the less busy wings, went through a door marked with international symbols for rest rooms and telephones, and were in a long service hallway. They passed the phones and the public facilities. A stairway at the end of the corridor led down to one of the mall’s big communal shipping rooms, where some smaller shops, without exterior truck docks, received incoming merchandise.

Two of the four roll-up, truck-bay doors were open, and delivery vehicles were backed up to them. Three uniformed employees from a store that sold cheese, cured meats, and gourmet foods were rapidly unloading the truck at bay number four. As they stacked cartons on handcarts and wheeled them to a freight elevator, they showed no interest in Phil, Ron, and the Padrakians. Many of the boxes were labeled
PERISHABLE, KEEP REFRIGERATED,
and time was of the essence.

At the truck in bay number one—a small model compared with the eighteen-wheeler in bay four—the driver appeared from out of the dark, sixteen-foot-deep cargo hold. As they approached, he jumped down to the floor. The five of them climbed inside, as though going for a ride in the back of a delivery truck was unremarkable. The driver closed the door after them, and a moment later they were on the road.

The cargo hold was empty except for piles of quilted shipping pads of the kind used by furniture movers. They sat on the pads in pitch blackness. They were unable to talk because of the engine noise and the hollow rattle of the metal walls around them.

Twenty minutes later, the truck stopped. The engine died. After five minutes, the rear door opened. The driver appeared in dazzling sunshine. “Quickly. Nobody’s in sight right now.”

When they disembarked from the truck, they were in a corner of a parking lot at a public beach. Sunlight flared off the windshields and chrome trim of the parked cars, and white gulls kited through the sky. Phil could smell sea salt in the air.

“Only a short walk now,” Ron told the Padrakians.

The campgrounds were less than a quarter of a mile from where they left the truck. The tan-and-black Road King motor home was large, but it was only one of many its size that were parked at utility hookups among the palms.

The trees lazily stirred in the humid on-shore breeze. A hundred yards away, at the edge of the breaking surf, two pelicans stalked stiffly back and forth through the fringe of foaming water, as if engaged in an ancient Egyptian dance.

Inside the Road King, Ellie was one of three people working at video-display terminals in the living room. She rose, smiling, to receive Phil’s embrace and kiss.

Rubbing her belly affectionately, he said, “Ron has new shoes.”

“I saw them earlier.”

“Tell him he really has nice moves in those shoes. Makes him feel good.”

“It does, huh?”

“Makes him feel black.”

“He is black.”

“Well, of course, he is.”

She and Phil joined Ron and the Padrakians in the horseshoe-shaped dining nook that seated seven.

Sitting beside Jean Padrakian, welcoming her to this new life, Ellie took the woman’s hand and held it, as if Jean were a sister whom she hadn’t seen for a while and whose touch was a comfort to her. She had a singular warmth that quickly put new people at ease.

Phil watched her with pride and love—and with not a little envy of her easy sociability.

Eventually, still clinging to a dim hope that he could someday return to his old life, unable to fully accept the new one that they were offering him, Bob Padrakian said, “But we’ve lost everything. Everything. Fine, okay, I get a new name and brand-new ID, a past history that no one can shake. But where do we go from here? How do I make a living?”

“We’d like you to work with us,” Phil said. “If you don’t want that…then we can set you up in a new place, with start-up capital to get you back on your feet. You can live entirely outside of the resistance. We can even see that you get a decent job.”

“But you’ll never know peace again,” Ron said, “because now you’re aware that no one’s safe in this brave new world order.”

“It was your—and Jean’s—terrific computer skills that got you into trouble with them,” Phil said. “And skills like yours are what we can never get enough of.”

Bob frowned. “What would we be doing—exactly?”

“Harassing them at every turn. Infiltrating their computers to learn who’s on their hit lists. Pull those targeted people out of harm’s way
before
the axe falls, whenever possible. Destroy illegal police files on innocent citizens who’re guilty of nothing more than having strong opinions. There’s a lot to do.”

Bob glanced around at the motor home, at the two people working at VDTs in the living room. “You seem to be well organized and well financed. Is foreign money involved here?” He looked meaningfully at Ron Truman. “No matter what’s happening in this country right now or for the foreseeable future, I still think of myself as an American, and I always will.”

Dropping the British accent in favor of a Louisiana bayou drawl, Ron said, “I’m as American as crawfish pie, Bob.” He switched to a heart-of-Virginia accent, “I can quote you any passage from the writings of Thomas Jefferson. I’ve memorized them all. A year and a half ago, I couldn’t have quoted one sentence. Now his collected works are my bible.”

“We get our financing by stealing from the thieves,” Ellie told Bob. “Manipulate their computer records, transfer funds from them to us in a lot of ways you’ll probably find ingenious. There’s so much unaccounted slush in their bookkeeping that half the time they aren’t even aware anything’s been stolen from them.”

“Stealing from thieves,” Bob said. “What thieves?”

“Politicians. Government agencies with ‘black funds’ that they spend on secret projects.”

The quick patter of four small feet signaled Killer’s arrival from the back bedroom, where he had been napping. He squirmed under the table, startling Jean Padrakian, lashing everyone’s legs with his tail. He pushed between the table and the booth, planting his forepaws on young Mark’s lap.

The boy giggled delightedly as he was subjected to a vigorous face licking. “What’s his name?”

“Killer,” Ellie said.

Jean was worried. “He’s not dangerous, is he?”

Phil and Ellie exchanged glances and smiles. He said, “Killer’s our ambassador of goodwill. We’ve never had a diplomatic crisis since he graciously accepted the post.”

For the past eighteen months, Killer had not looked himself. He wasn’t tan and brown and white and black, as in the days when he had been Rocky, but entirely black. An incognito canine. Rover on the run. A mutt in masquerade. Fugitive furball. Phil had already decided that when he shaved off his beard (soon), they would also allow Killer’s coat to change gradually back to its natural colors.