Fury and the Power (36 page)

"I'm sure he noticed. What of it?"

"Then he ran into your doppelganger in the lobby of the Excelsior, took her to dinner—"

"Where he would have found Gwen to be right-handed," Sherard said. "And that little weakness when your left eye turns in when you're stressed? Gwen's eye was turning in before she left on her date. The right eye, naturally. Eden and Gwen, mirror images."

"Thanks for reminding me. So he had her pegged for a dpg, then arranged to have her kidnapped off the streets of Rome? Suppose I buy that. What can he do with her? Incorporate her into his act?"

"Or," Leoncaro said, "he may have in mind sending her to Georgia in July of '26 in order to spirit his soul mate away from the chain gang in spite of the guards and the dogs."

"Doppelgangers can travel anywhere," Bertie said to Eden, "in parallel universes. You told me that yourself."

"Only if that's what I want her to do. But I don't. And it's me, not Grayle, who is in control of Gw—damn, I almost said it. Excuse me, Your Holiness."

"I prefer that my friends address me as Sebastiano. If you wouldn't mind, Eden."

"Thank you."

Sherard said after a short silence, "I don't want to see the two of you at risk again." He was looking at Leoncaro.

"Yes, it is a very great risk to approach Mordaunt," the Pontiff admitted. "Or Lincoln Grayle, as he now represents himself." He took time to think about this, drinking some of the tea Tom had brought him. "But wouldn't it be more of a risk to wait for him to seek you out again? He will, you know."

More silence. Eden shifted restlessly in her chair, then abruptly got up and walked away from Leoncaro's desk, from all of them, seeking isolation in the confined study.

"I know I don't want to be hunted anymore," she said. "But I can't destroy another human being, no matter what. From everything Bertie's said, the two of us together can't handle Grayle's were-beast. His stand-in for stud purposes." In spite of the heat in the study she was shuddering. "
Ugh
." She turned to face Leoncaro, longing for words to release her from her dilemma and her misery.

All he could say was, "It is a very grave predicament, I know."

The teacup and saucer on his desk moved inches away from his hand. Leoncaro studied it, amused, looked up into Eden's resentful, rebellious smile.

"That's about how powerful I am, Sebastiano.
Avatar?
Please. I've learned to move a teacup with my mind. Is that any better than an armless man who can shuffle a deck of cards with his toes? Okay, Bertie can brain-lock just about anything that has a brain, I guess."

"I wouldn't want to throw my
chi
at Grayle. I have a hunch I'd get it right back, like a live wire across my face. He'd laugh."

Eden spread her hands. "And that's where we are."

"I believe you both underestimate yourselves," Leoncaro said. "There was, I believe, an incident involving a nuclear device surrounded by a highly charged electrical field?"

Eden was surprised, again, that he knew so much about her.

"Okay, that. No idea how I managed it. I don't think I could do it again if I lived a thousand—"

"It's simply that you don't
want
to do these things, because they frighten you. As for your powers, Eden:
 
they exist. Dormant most of the time, behind barriers you've erected. But both you and Bertie are, at unpredictable and highly stressed times, capable of tapping into the Dark Energy and focusing it."

"Dark Energy? What's that?"

"The Energy that expands the universe and keeps it humming. That builds galaxies, and tears them apart. A force that even Mordaunt is helpless to deal with."

Leoncaro beckoned the three of them to step around behind his desk with him. From a drawer he withdrew a small but heavy bronze casket that looked as if it might be three thousand years old. Placed it on his desk blotter and invited Eden to raise the lid.

Lying on faded velvet inside were two small chunks of a dark dense metallic substance.

"Each little piece you see here may have traveled for a billion light-years through the firmament before reaching Earth. And each retains a portion of the Dark Energy that formed it—let us say, one-millionth of the power necessary for a firefly to light up its behind."

They all smiled, even Leoncaro. Then he turned serious again.

"Nevertheless, even an infinitesimal residue of Dark Energy can be useful to you, as a means of controlled contact with the entire celestial reservoir through which these bits of metal once traveled for eons. There is one for each of you. Mount them in some manner so that you may always wear them in contact with your bodies." His green-eyed gaze was almost unnerving. "They will work for you, when you most need their help. And, Tom?"

"Yes, Sebastiano?"

"I have not forgotten about you."

Leoncaro rose from his chair and opened a nearby armoire, reached down from a shelf a long bubble-wrapped and taped package that he handed over to Sherard.

"Your lion's-head walking stick, for your continued protection. I know how responsible you feel for the lives of these young women. I couldn't ask you to go in harm's way with nothing more substantial than a side arm."

"But I thought—"

"It was decided to remove your stick from the body of the shape-shifter once a similar length of
mopane
wood, suitably sharpened and consecrated, was also driven through the remains. And of course those remains are now entombed in stone, never to be disturbed."

"By the way" Bertie asked, "what happened to her—husband, the one who fainted?"

"He was easily persuaded, once he recovered part of his faculties, to undertake a lifetime of prayer and silent contemplation in an old cloister that overlooks what I am told is one of the loveliest fjords in all Norway."

"What we don't understand," Sherard said, "is how Mordaunt, or Grayle, is turning out shape-shifters to do his killing for him."

"Wouldn't we all like to know?" Leoncaro said thoughtfully. He looked at Eden. "Possibly you could find out for us. Remember that there is not so much to fear while he is in human form. That is when Mordaunt is most vulnerable; when he believes he is in control of you."

The old rotary-style white telephone on the Pope's desk rang twice:
 
a discreet reminder.

"I'm afraid that I have backlogged my appointments until well past the dinner hour." He smiled in apology. "Tomorrow's dinner, very likely."

Eden, holding the bronze casket under one arm, looked at Bertie with a fateful smile.

"Let's go to Las Vegas."

"I will be praying for you," Leoncaro said. "Go with God and in full confidence of your great strength."

L
eoncaro arose from his prie-dieu in what had been, moments before, the solitude of his Spartan bedroom. Now that his prayers were done, the room began to fill up.

"Let's make it brief" he grumbled. "I still have a lot of work left today."

The Caretaker who until recently had been known as Pledger Lee Skeldon said, "What's this about 'Dark Energy,' Sebastiano?"

"I remembered the term from an article on stellar dynamics I read in
Scientific American
."

"And pieces of meteorite?" said the white-bearded Rebbe from Brooklyn.

"Who knows? They might well have been from the engine block of a Jeep the Germans eighty-eighted, or a tank tread. Leoncaro picked them up in a rubbled lot when he was a boy. They looked interesting, so I have kept them all of these years."

"Telling whoppers to innocent young things" the Buddhist nun Ling Qi chided him.

"I'm surprised at all of you," Leoncaro said. "Have none of you seen one of my favorite Disney movies? The one about the baby circus elephant with extremely large ears? So large he couldn't walk without tripping over them. That, and the laughter of the other elephants, was very hard on the youngster's confidence?'

"Dumbo the flying elephant," said the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church.

"
That
movie. Well, poor Dumbo was shunned and frustrated because he didn't look like the other baby elephants. But he did have this wise-guy little mouse friend—"

"I loved that part" Ling Qi confided to the group of Caretakers.

"—Mouse friend," Leoncaro continued, frowning at her, "who convinced Dumbo that as long as he had a certain 'magic feather' with him he could fly, flapping his large ears and soaring through the sky with a gaggle of reprobate crows."

"Isn't it 'gaggle of geese'?" said the prominent Islamic Imam and scholar who had just popped in.

"Don't know. Anyway, there was nothing magical about the feather, of course. Dumbo could fly perfectly well without it. The feather was just a—"

"Confidence-builder," the currently unemployed Caretaker concluded for him. "Smart, Sebastiano."

"Can't hurt. Those girls will need all the confidence they can muster." He looked hard at the Caretaker, who was loafing around now that Pledger Lee had been laid to rest. "Don't you think you ought to be on your way to Las Vegas yourself? No need to fully assimilate another persona. Just move in temporarily and as unobtrusively as possible on someone in a position to keep an eye on the situation."

"Been there," the Caretaker replied agreeably. "About to do that. I've already located just the guy. You know, it was a heck of a long time for me between visits out there. Pledger Lee was a child evangelist doing revival meetings in that shabby tent of his in those days. Brother, you don't know how hot it can get until you've done Vegas in the summertime. Hell hath no fury. Anyway, little Pledger Lee was just across the street from where Mickey Cohen was putting up the Flamingo—the Mick was Jewish, but one night he—"

"
Go
," Leoncaro said, in his most commanding voice.

"It's a good story, Sebastiano."

"Some other time. May we know who you've chosen to co-opt while you're out there again?"

"He's a vacationing cop from Atlanta. Small coincidence. He worked my—I mean—Pledger Lee's case. What I could tell him."

"No, you won't."

"And he has a gorgeous girlfriend."

"I'm sure that had nothing to do with your choosing him."

"Yes, it did."

MOUNT CHARLESTON, NEVADA

OCTOBER 24

1:15 P.M. PDT

"H
ow do you feel?" Lincoln Grayle said to Eden Waring's doppelganger.

"Not any better than I did last night. Like I tried taking a shortcut through a demolition derby. My bones feel soft and my joints ache. Could you
please
turn that horrible light off for a little while?"

"I'm afraid I can't do that. Not until we've reached a level of mutual trust that I'm hoping is not too far in the future—"

"Trust?! You had me kidnapped and a man was shot, probably killed!"

He adjusted the bullet-shaped head of the slender black standing lamp that had been aimed at the middle of his bed where Gwen was sprawled, wearing a pair of the magician's pj's, her weakened body covering the gold script
G
on the black silk coverlet. The bed was about the size of a badminton court. Everything else in the bedroom, including the walls and the smoke-toned mirrored ceiling, was either gold or black. As was the magician himself this afternoon. He wore black loafers without socks, black jeans, a harlequin-style black-and-gold cashmere turtleneck sweater, glasses with elliptical black metal frames and gold-tinted lenses. He straddled a lacquered black Chinese Chippendale chair and smiled ruefully at her.

"I regret the violence. But I had no time to waste. If you'd returned to your homebody, then I might never have had this opportunity."

"I had you
so
wrong! What a bastard you are. Smuggling me aboard your plane in a theatrical trunk—I could've smothered."

"But doppelgangers, I am told by an expert, can't die:
 
only cease to exist. Something of a paradox, but we'll pass over it for now. The trunk seemed to be the best way to get you out of Italy, with all of the added security at the airport prompted by Al Qaeda and their Italian friends."

A few tears leaked from Gwen's reddened eyes. She barely had the strength to blink. "What do you want? I'm not Eden! Why don't you just let me go!?"

"I've always known that you weren't Eden, since I was allowed that glimpse of you on the street in Nairobi. I suppose you were just feeling playful that day, but I was inspired to speculate about the possibilities you presented. Doppelgangers have long been an interest of mine. Now I have one."

"I won't talk to you anymore if you're going to continue t-torturing me!"

Sunlight slanting through the solar-gain windows of Grayle's Mount Charleston hacienda made the light from the hundred-watt ultraviolet bulb in the bullet lamp all but invisible; its power to render a doppelganger nearly helpless was not diminished.