Dark Rivers of the Heart (68 page)

At the window with the artist, Roy watched the limousine as it headed back to the county road and away. It would return for them after the drama of the night had been played out.

They were standing in the front room of the converted barn. The darkness was relieved only by the moonlight that sifted through the windows and by the green glow of the security-panel readout next to the front door. With numbers that Gary Duvall had obtained from the Dresmunds, Roy had disengaged the alarm when they’d come in, then had reset it. There were no motion detectors, only magnetic contacts at each door and window, so he and the artist could move about freely without triggering the system.

This large first-floor room had once been a private gallery where Steven had exhibited the paintings that he favored among all those that he had produced. Now the chamber was vacant, and every faint sound echoed hollowly off the cold walls. Sixteen years had passed since the great man’s art had adorned the place.

Roy knew this was a moment he would remember with exceptional clarity for the rest of his life, as he would remember the
precise
expression of wonder on Eve’s face when he had granted peace to that man and woman in the restaurant parking lot. Although the degree of humanity’s imperfection ensured that the ongoing human drama would always be a tragedy, there were moments of transcendent experience, like this, that made life worth living.

Sadly, most people were too timid to seize the day and discover what such transcendence felt like. Timidity, however, had never been one of Roy’s shortcomings.

Revelation of his compassionate crusade had earned Roy all the glories of Eve’s bedroom, and he had decided that revelation was called for again. Journeying across the mountains, he had realized that Steven was perfect in some way few people ever were—although the nature of his perfection was more subtle than Eve’s devastating beauty, more sensed than seen, intriguing, mysterious. Instinctively Roy knew that Steven and he were simpatico to an even greater extent than were he and Eve. True friendship might be forged between them if he revealed himself to the artist as forthrightly as he’d revealed himself to the dear heart in Las Vegas.

Standing by the moonlit window, in the dark and empty gallery, Roy Miro began to explain, with tasteful humility, how he had put his ideals into practice in ways that even the agency, for all its willingness to be bold, would have been too timid to endorse. As the artist listened, Roy almost hoped that the fugitives would not come that night or the next, not until he and Steven were granted sufficient time together to build a foundation for the friendship that surely was destined to enrich their lives.

Outside Hamlet Gardens in Westwood, the uniformed valet brought Darius’s VW Microbus from the narrow lot beside the building, drove it into the street, and swung it to the curb at the front entrance, where the two Descoteaux families waited, fresh from dinner.

Harris was at the rear of their group, and as he was about to step into the Microbus, a woman touched his shoulder. “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”

He wasn’t surprised. He didn’t back off, as he had done in the men’s room at the theater. Turning, he saw an attractive redhead in high heels, an ankle-length coat in a shade of green complementary to her complexion, and a stylishly wide-brimmed hat worn at a rakish angle. She appeared to be on her way to a party or a nightclub.

“If the new world order turns out to be peace, prosperity, and democracy, how wonderful for us all,” she said. “But perhaps it will be less appealing, more like the Dark Ages if the Dark Ages had had all these wonderful new forms of high-tech entertainment to make them tolerable. But I think you’d agree…being able to get the latest movies on video doesn’t fully compensate for enslavement.”

“What do you want from me?”

“To help you,” she said. “But you have to want the help, have to know you need it, and have to be ready to do what needs done.”

From inside the Microbus, his family was staring at him with curiosity and concern.

“I’m no bomb-throwing revolutionary,” he told the woman in the green coat.

“Nor are we,” she said. “Bombs and guns are the instruments of last resort. Knowledge should be the first and foremost weapon in any resistance.”

“What knowledge do I have that you could want?”

“To begin with,” she said, “the knowledge of how fragile your freedom is in the current scheme of things. That gives you a degree of commitment that we value.”

The valet, though standing just out of earshot, was staring at them oddly.

From a coat pocket, the woman extracted a piece of paper and showed it to Harris. He saw a telephone number and three words.

When he tried to take the paper from her, she held it tightly. “No, Mr. Descoteaux. I would prefer that you memorize it.”

The number was designed to be memorable, and the three words gave him no difficulty, either.

As Harris stared at the paper, the woman said, “The man who has done this to you is named Roy Miro.”

He remembered the name but not where he had heard it before.

“He came to you pretending to be an FBI agent,” she said.

“The guy asking about Spence!” he said, looking up from the paper. He was suddenly furious, now that he had a face to put on the enemy who had thus far been faceless. “But what in the hell did I do to him? We had the mildest disagreement over an officer who once served under me. That’s all!” Then he heard the other part of what she had said, and he frowned.
“Pretended
to be with the FBI? But he was. I checked him out between the time he made the appointment and when he came to the office.”

“They are seldom what they seem to be,” the redhead said.

“They? Who are
they
?”

“Who they have always been, through the ages,” she said, and smiled. “Sorry. No time to be other than inscrutable.”

“I’m going to get my house back,” he said adamantly, although he did not feel as confident as he sounded.

“But you won’t. And even if the public outcry was loud enough to have these laws rescinded, they’d just pass new laws giving them other ways to ruin people they want to ruin. The problem’s not one law. These are power fanatics who want to tell everyone how they should live, what they should think, read, say, feel.”

“How do I get at Miro?”

“You can’t. He’s too deep-cover to be easily exposed.”

“But—”

“I’m not here to tell you how to get Roy Miro. I’m here to warn you that you must not go back to your brother’s tonight.”

A chill shimmered through the chambers of fluid in his spine, working up his back to the base of his neck with a queer, methodical progression like no chill he had ever felt before.

He said, “What’s going to happen now?”

“Your ordeal isn’t over. It isn’t ever going to be over if you let them have their way. You’ll be arrested for the murder of two drug dealers, the wife of one, the girlfriend of the other, and three young children. Your fingerprints have been found on objects in the house where they were shot to death.”

“I never killed anyone!”

The valet heard enough of that exclamation to scowl.

Darius was getting out of the Microbus to see what was wrong.

“The objects with your prints on them were taken from your home and planted at the scene of the murders. The story will probably be that you disposed of two competitors who tried to muscle in on your territory, and you wiped out the wife, girlfriend, and kids just to teach other dealers a hard lesson.”

Harris’s heart was pounding so fiercely that he would not have been surprised to see his breast shuddering visibly with each hard beat. Instead of pumping warm blood, it seemed to be circulating liquid Freon through his body. He was colder than a dead man.

Fear regressed him to the vulnerability and helplessness of childhood. He heard himself seeking solace in the faith of his beloved, gospel-singing mother, a faith from which he had slipped away through the years but to which he now suddenly reached out with a sincerity that surprised him: “Jesus, dear sweet Jesus, help me.”

“Perhaps He will,” the woman said as Darius approached them. “But in the meantime, we’re ready to help as well. If you’re smart, you’ll call that number, use those passwords, and get on with your life—instead of getting on with your death.”

As Darius joined them, he said, “What’s up, Harris?”

The redhead returned the slip of paper to her coat pocket.

Harris said, “But that’s just it. How can I ever get on with my life after what’s happened to me?”

“You can,” she said, “though you won’t be Harris Descoteaux anymore.”

She smiled and nodded at Darius, and she walked away.

Harris watched her go, overcome by that here-we-are-in-the-magic-kingdom-of-Oz feeling again.

Long ago those acres had been beautiful. As a boy with another name, Spencer had been especially fond of the ranch in wintertime, swaddled in white. By day, it was a bright empire of snow forts, tunnels, and sled runs that had been tamped down with great care and patience. On clear nights, the Rocky Mountain sky was deeper than eternity, deeper even than the mind could imagine, and starlight sparkled in the icicles.

Returning after his own eternity in exile, he found nothing that was pleasing to the eye. Each slope and curve of land, each building, each tree was the same as it had been in that distant age, but for the fact that the pines and maples and birches were taller than before. Changeless though it might be, the ranch now impressed him as the ugliest place that he had ever seen, even when flattered by its winter dress. They were harsh acres, and the stark geometry of those fields and hills was designed, at every turn, to offend the eye, like the architecture of Hell. The trees were only ordinary specimens, but they looked to him as though they were malformed and gnarled by disease, nurtured on horrors that had leached into the soil and into their roots from the nearby catacombs. The buildings—stables, house, barn—were all graceless hulks, looming and haunted, the windows as black and menacing as open graves.

Spencer parked at the house. His heart was pounding. His mouth was so dry and his throat was so tight that he could hardly swallow. The door of the pickup opened with the resistance of a massive portal on a bank vault.

Ellie remained in the truck, with the computer on her lap. If trouble came, she was on-line and ready for whatever strange purpose she had prepared. Through the microwave transceiver, she had linked to a satellite and from there into a computer system that she hadn’t identified to Spencer and that could be anywhere on the surface of the earth. Information might be power, as she had said, but Spencer couldn’t imagine how information would shield them from bullets, if the agency was nearby and lying in wait for them.

As though he were a deep-sea diver, encased in a cumbersome pressure suit and steel helmet, burdened by an incalculable tonnage of water, he walked to the front steps, crossed the porch, and stood at the door. He rang the bell.

He heard the chimes inside, the same five notes that had marked a visitor’s arrival when he’d lived there as a boy, and even as they rang out, he had to struggle against an urge to turn and run. He was a grown man, and the hobgoblins that terrorized children should have had no power over him. Irrationally, however, he was afraid that the chimes would be answered by his mother, dead but walking, as naked as she’d been found in that ditch, all her wounds revealed.