Dark Rivers of the Heart (66 page)

The limousine cruised into ever higher mountains, through vast primeval forests encrusted with snow, upward into silvery moonlight—all of which the tinted windows reduced to a smoky blur. The tires hummed.

While Spencer drove the stolen black pickup east on Interstate 70 out of Grand Junction, Ellie slumped in her seat and worked feverishly on the laptop, which she had plugged into the cigarette lighter. The computer was elevated on a pillow that they had filched from the motel. Periodically she consulted a printout of the parcel map and other information that she had obtained about the ranch.

“What’re you doing?” he asked again.

“Calculations.”

“What calculations?”

“Ssshhhhh. Rocky’s sleeping on the backseat.”

From her duffel bag, she had produced diskettes of software which she’d installed in the machine. Evidently they were programs of her own design, adapted to his laptop while he had lingered in delirium for more than two days in the Mojave. When he had asked her why she had backed up her own computer—now gone with the Rover—with his quite different system, she had said, “Former Girl Scout. Remember? We always like to be prepared.”

He had no idea what her software allowed her to do. Across the screen flickered formulas and graphs. Holographic globes of the earth revolved at her command, and from them she extracted areas for enlargement and closer examination.

Vail was only three hours away. Spencer wished that they could use the time to talk, to discover more about each other. Three hours was such a short time—especially if it proved to be the last three hours they ever had together.

FOURTEEN

When he returned to his brother’s house from his walk through the hilly streets of Westwood, Harris Descoteaux did not mention the encounter with the tall man in the blue Toyota. For one thing, it seemed half like a dream. Improbable. Besides, he hadn’t been able to make up his mind whether that stranger had been a friend or an enemy. He didn’t want to alarm Darius or Jessica.

Late that afternoon, after Ondine and Willa returned from the mall with their aunt and after Darius and Bonnie’s son, Martin, came home from school, Darius decided that they needed to have a little fun. He insisted on packing everyone—the seven of them—into the VW Microbus, which he had so lovingly restored with his own hands, to go to a movie and then to dinner at Hamlet Gardens.

Neither Harris nor Jessica wanted to go to movies and dinners in restaurants when every dollar spent was a dollar that they were mooching. Not even Ondine and Willa, as resilient as any teenagers, had yet bounced back from the trauma of the SWAT attack on Friday or from having been put out of their own home by federal marshals.

Darius was adamant that a movie and dinner at Hamlet Gardens were precisely the right medicines for what ailed them. And his persistence was one of the qualities that made him an exceptional attorney.

That was how, at six-fifteen Monday evening, Harris came to be in a theater with a boisterous crowd, unable to grasp the humor in scenes that everyone else found hilarious, and succumbing to another attack of claustrophobia. The darkness. So many people in one room. The body heat of the crowd. He was afflicted, first, by an inability to draw a deep breath and then by a mild dizziness. He feared that worse would swiftly follow. He whispered to Jessica that he had to use the bathroom. When worry crossed her face, he patted her arm and smiled reassuringly, and then he got the hell out of there.

The men’s room was deserted. At one of the four sinks, Harris turned on the cold water. He bent over the bowl and splashed his face repeatedly, trying to cool down from the overheated theater and chase away the dizziness.

The noise of the running water prevented him from hearing the other man enter. When he looked up, he was no longer alone.

About thirty, Asian, wearing loafers and jeans and a dark-blue sweater with prancing red reindeer, the stranger stood two sinks away. He was combing his hair. He met Harris’s eyes in the mirror, and he smiled. “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”

Harris recognized the question as the very one with which the tall man in the blue Toyota had initially addressed him. Startled, he backed away from the sink so fast that he crashed against the swinging door at one of the toilet stalls. He tottered, almost fell, but caught the hingeless side of the jamb to keep his balance.

“For a while the Japanese economy was so hot that it gave the world the idea that maybe big government and big business must work hand in glove.”

“Who are you?” Harris asked, quicker off the mark with this man than he had been with the first.

Ignoring the question, the smiling stranger said, “So now we hear about national industrial policies. Big business and government strike deals every day. Push my social programs and enhance my power, says the politician, and I’ll guarantee your profit.”

“What does any of this matter to me?”

“Be patient, Mr. Descoteaux.”

“But—”

“Union members get screwed because government conspires with their bosses. Small businessmen get screwed, everyone too little to play in the hundred-billion-dollar league. Now the secretary of defense wants to use the military as an arm of economic policy.”

Harris returned to the sink, where he had left the cold water running. He turned it off.

“A business-government alliance, enforced by the military and domestic police—once, this was called fascism. Will we see fascism in our time, Mr. Descoteaux? Or is this something new, not to worry?”

Harris was trembling. He realized that his face and hands were dripping, and he yanked paper towels from the dispenser.

“And if it’s something new, Mr. Descoteaux, is it going to be something good? Maybe. Maybe we’ll go through a time of adjustment, and thereafter everything will be delightful.” He nodded, smiling, as if considering that possibility. “Or maybe this new thing will turn out to be a new kind of hell.”

“I don’t care about any of this,” Harris said angrily. “I’m not political.”

“You don’t need to be. To protect yourself, you need only to be informed.”

“Look, whoever you are, I just want my house back. I want my life like it was. I want to go on just the way everything was.”

“That will never transpire, Mr. Descoteaux.”

“Why is this happening to me?”

“Have you read the novels of Philip K. Dick, Mr. Descoteaux?”

“Who? No.”

Harris felt more than ever as if he had crossed into White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat territory.

The stranger shook his head with dismay. “The futuristic world Mr. Dick wrote about is the world we’re sliding into. It’s a scary place, this Dicksian world. More than ever, a person needs friends.”

“Are you a friend?” Harris demanded. “Who are you people?”

“Be patient and consider what I’ve said.”

The man started for the door.

Harris reached out to stop him but decided against it. A moment later he was alone.

His bowels were suddenly in turmoil. He hadn’t lied to Jessica after all: He really did need to use the bathroom.

Approaching Vail, high in the western Rockies, Roy Miro used the phone in the limousine to call the number of the cellular unit that Gary Duvall had given him earlier.

“Clear?” he asked.

“No sign of them yet,” Duvall said.

“We’re almost there.”

“You really think they’re going to show?”

The stolen JetRanger and its crew had been found in the Colorado National Monument. A call from the woman to the Grand Junction police had been traced to Montrose, indicating that she and Spencer Grant were fleeing south toward Durango. Roy didn’t believe it. He knew that telephone calls could be deceptively routed with the assistance of a computer. He trusted not in a traced call but in the power of the past; where the past and the present met, he would find the fugitives.

“They’ll show,” Roy said. “Cosmic forces are with us tonight.”

“Cosmic forces?” Duvall said, as if playing into a joke, waiting for the punch line.

“They’ll show,” Roy repeated, and he disconnected.

Beside Roy, Steven Ackblom sat silent and serene.

“We’ll be there in just a few minutes,” Roy told him.

Ackblom smiled. “There’s no place like home.”

Spencer had been driving for nearly an hour and a half before Ellie switched off the computer and unplugged it from the cigarette lighter. A dew of perspiration beaded her forehead, although the interior of the truck was not overheated.

“God knows if I’m mounting a good defense or planning a double suicide,” she said. “Could go either way. But now it’s there for us to use if we have to.”

“Use what?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said bluntly. “It’ll take too much time. Besides, you’d try to talk me out of it. Which would be a waste of time. I know the arguments against it, and I’ve already rejected them.”

“And this makes an argument so much easier—when you handle both sides of it.”

She remained somber. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll have no choice but to use it, no matter how insane that seems.”

Rocky had awakened in the backseat a short while ago, and to him, Spencer said, “Pal, you’re not confused back there, are you?”

“Ask me anything else but not about
that,”
Ellie said. “If I talk about it, if I even think too much about it, then I’ll be too damn scared to do it when the time comes,
if
the time comes. I hope to God we don’t need it.”

Spencer had never heard her babble before. She usually kept tight control of herself. Now she was spooking him.

Panting, Rocky poked his head between the front seats. One ear up, one down: refreshed and interested.

“I didn’t think you were confused,” Spencer told him. “Me, I’m twice as befuddled as a lightning bug bashing itself to bits to get out of an old mayonnaise jar. But I suppose that higher forms of intelligence, like the canine species, would have no trouble figuring out what she’s ranting about.”

Ellie stared at the road ahead, rubbing absentmindedly at her chin with the knuckles of her right hand.

She had said that he could ask her about anything except
that,
whatever
that
might be, so he took her up on it. “Where was ‘Bess Baer’ going to settle down before I mucked things up? Where were you going to take that Rover and make a new life?”

“Wasn’t going to settle again,” she said, proving that she was listening. “I gave up on that. Sooner or later, they find me if I stay in one place too long. I spent a lot of the money I had…and some from friends…to buy that Rover and the gear in it. With that, I figured I could keep moving and go just about anywhere.”

“I’ll pay for the Rover.”

“That’s not what I was after.”

“I know. But what’s mine is yours anyway.”

“Oh? When did that happen?”

“No strings attached,” he said.

“I like to pay my own way.”

“No point discussing it.”

“What you say is final, huh?”

“No. What the dog says is final.”

“This was Rocky’s decision?”

“He takes care of all my finances.”

Rocky grinned. He liked hearing his name.

“Because it’s Rocky’s idea,” she said, “I’ll keep an open mind.”

Spencer said, “Why do you call Summerton a cockroach? Why does that annoy him particularly?”

“Tom’s got a phobia about insects. All kinds of insects. Even a housefly can make him squirm. But he’s especially uptight about cockroaches. When he sees one—and they used to have an infestation at the ATF when he was there—he goes off the deep end. It’s almost comic. Like in a cartoon when an elephant spots a mouse. Anyway, a few weeks after…after Danny and my folks were killed, and after I gave up trying to approach reporters with what I knew, I called old Tom at his office in the Department of Justice, just rang him up from a pay phone in midtown Chicago.”

“Good grief.”

“The most private of his private lines, the one he picks up himself. Surprised him. He tried to play innocent, keep me talking until he could have me whacked right at that pay phone. I told him he shouldn’t be so afraid of cockroaches, since he was one himself. Told him that someday I’ll stomp him flat, kill him. And I meant what I said. Someday, somehow, I’ll send him straight to Hell.”

Spencer glanced at her. She was staring at the night ahead, still brooding. Slender, so pleasing to the eye, in some ways as delicate as any flower, she was nevertheless as fierce and tough as any special-forces soldier that Spencer had ever known.

He loved her beyond all reason, without reservation, without qualification, with a passion immeasurable, loved every aspect of her face, loved the sound of her voice, loved her singular vitality, loved the kindness of her heart and the agility of her mind, loved her so purely and intensely that sometimes when he looked at her, a hush seemed to fall across the world. He prayed that she was a favored child of fate, destined to have a long life, because if she died before he did, there would be no hope for him, no hope at all.