The Fury and the Terror (23 page)

"Walter Parks. Dixie Bob Del Valle. Jake Glaze. Troy Emmons the Third. Harry. Harry something.
Binks
. Harry Binks."

"What are you doing?" Geoff said irritably.

"No, there were two Harrys." Haman seemed agitated. "Who was the other one?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I need to remember them, all of their names."

"Whose names?"

"Because they're who I've been. They deserve my loyalty. The girls, Tina, Dolly, Liza, Rona, that's just my feminine half, honey, my bombshell superstar creative self. I talk it, walk it, strut the stuff. I'm a Vegas-style, gettin'-it-on glitzaholic. I don't know if I could do a job as a woman. There's such a thing as too much panache. While the girls are taking stage, the Face just waits. The Face knows it'll come. The next delivery. The little package with the new name. Another death, his rebirth. Face would do them for nothing if they asked him; just keep the new names coming. Harry Ludlow! That's the other Harry. Ludlow. Dusseldorf. Six years ago. He uses a single-edged razor blade. One swipe, clean through the carotid artery. Walk right on by, disappear into the crowd while the subject sits there on the park bench spouting his newspaper red, he can't believe it, his throat's been cut. The average healthy human heart will empty the body of blood through a severed artery in just under five minutes."

Geoff didn't let Haman see him shudder. "Don't you wear disguises? No offense, but as far as looks go you're one of a kind."

"The Face is an asset. The Face doesn't invite casual inspection. It's a great blob of deadness. It isn't remembered because no one wants to remember. The Face was born to be shunned."

"Who are you, really?"

Geoff got a look in return for his question. A bolt of a look shot from the depths of a collapsed mind. A look, a grin—no mere nightmare could have done the moment justice.

"Someone who's hurtin' for a little fun. Surveillance is not Phil Haman's game. Haman is not the quiet surreptitious type like Ludlow or Belzoni. The Face has already grasped that. Haman wants action. Those folks down there, waiting on Eden. They'll have to go, sooner or later. Might as well be sooner. After the fun part."

SAN FRANCISCO • MAY 29

T
om Sherard and Bertie Nkambe had just emerged into the garden of the double-size lot on Russian Hill when Danny Cheng's house blew up.

Part of it, anyway. The side facing east, where the black helicopter had appeared framed in the bay window of Danny Cheng's study. They were jarred by the concussion, but nothing came flying their way. Sherard looked around but didn't see the helicopter. Bertie was in shock. She wanted to go back.

"Chien-Chi!"

Sherard grabbed her by the arm and pushed her through an arbor of climbing roses toward a wooden gate in the seven-foot stone wall.

"We can't afford to be found here."

There was a padlock on the gate. He opened an unlocked tool shed a few feet away, picked up a nine-pound sledge, and with a couple of overhand swings knocked the rusty hasp from the wood.

He looked back again. The house from their perspective was dark. There was a suggestion of smoke in the air. A persistent flicker in one upstairs window, as if a streamer of flame were unrolling across the ceiling.

They went out through the gate to the street behind Cheng's house. Cars were closely parked along the curb on their side. There were two men with dogs on leashes under a streetlamp down at the corner, looking at the side of Danny Cheng's house where the explosion had occurred. A cloud of smoke boiled slowly above the treetops. They heard a siren. They walked the other way, toward the top of the hill.

A curbside door of a tan Lexus opened eight feet away. A man came up out of the backseat, turning toward them. Sherard saw distant light reflected from the thick lenses of the man's glasses. He wore a brown corduroy jacket that hung badly on him. He raised a hand in their direction, palm out, demonstrating, perhaps, peaceable intent. But that was as far as he got.

Bertie reacted before Sherard could close to within striking distance with his lion's-head cane. The hand that the man had partly raised flew up into his face, knocking his glasses askew. He fell back against the door of the Lexus, writhing. Bertie, who was no closer to the man than Tom was, kept him pinned to the door. Conscious but in pain, an acute state of helplessness.

"No! Oh, God,
please
don't do that! I work for Hannafin! I work for Sen—"

"Ease up, Bertie," Sherard said, glancing at her. Controlled savagery in her face. Her eyes were scary, on a level of imminent apocalypse. He put a hand on her arm. She released the man with a shrug of contempt.

"He was on the plane with us. Told you then I should have fixed him."

"Whetstone! Name's Whetstone. Just call me Rory." Rory Whetstone was finding it difficult to straighten up from an invalid's brittle slump. He tried to adjust his glasses, doing little shuffling dance steps while maintaining his balance. He discovered that his nose was trickling blood, and unthinkingly wiped it on a sleeve of his jacket. "Is
that
what it's like, getting brain-locked?"

"You don't know the half of it," Bertie told him. "I let you off. Complete polarity reversal of the brain, recovery time can be three to six weeks. For those who recover at all." She looked around at the smoke hazing the streetlights. The sirens were wailing closer. The neighborhood had come uneasily awake. And everybody had a dog.

"You've been following us. Did you see it, Whetstone? Who did this to Danny Cheng?"

"Better get in the Lex," Whetstone gasped. "We should whisk ourselves away from here. Senator Hannafin's waiting. Urgently needs to speak to you, Mr. Sherard."

"What the hell," Sherard said with an amazed smile. "Why didn't we just arrange for a black tie reception at Moscone Center? Meet all the interesting locals."

There were flashing blue lights down Russian Hill, prowl cars coming on the fly.

"But not the cops. Tom, I'm nervous."

"Yeah, okay. Let's get out of here."

"Tell Whetstone not to mess with my
chi
."

"He knows, Bertie."

MOBY BAY • MAY 29 • 2:46 A.M. PDT

E
den Waring woke up in Chauncey's bedroom at a quarter to three. Someone was sitting on the edge of the bed watching her, but it wasn't her new friend Chauncey.

"Not
again
."

"If you're going to be hateful."

"I didn't send for you. How could I? I was sound asleep."

"Here I am anyway. So something's bothering you. I can't just switch universes willy-nilly when all is peaceful in your psyche."

The only illumination in the bedroom came from the surface of the sea, bright as steel plate scoured with a grinding wheel, and from the screen of

Chauncey's laptop computer. Chauncey was deeply dreaming in her sleeping bag on an inflatable camp mattress, sibilance from her parted lips as she breathed contentedly.

Eden studied her doppelganger, who was wearing a Mighty Ducks hockey jersey, part of the wardrobe Chauncey had loaned to Eden. The dpg was picking at one of her toenails that needed trimming. Eden had split a nail walking in open-toed sandals on the beach. Usually she took great care of her feet, but tonight she'd been too tired.

Eden yawned, still tired. "Where are you, when you're not here?"

"I'm right beside you. Just a smidge beyond the sense barrier. Faithfully mimicking your every move."

"Do
you
have a doppelganger?"

"What would be the point of that?"

"None, I suppose. I'm just making conversation."

"Well, that's something. We're having a conversation." The dpg glanced at Chauncey's laptop. "Nothing new from the folks?"

"They're up at Greenwood Lake. Dad's back is out, but he's okay. I'll go in the morning."

"You haven't told them where you are."

Eden said after a long hesitation, "No. I'm not all that sure of where I am."

"But that's not the only reason."

"Well—"

"Who sent the E-mail?"

"Betts."

"What else did she say, was she chatty as usual?"

"Not so much. I mean, all through college we E-mailed each other a dozen times a day. Back and forth. I was thinking about you. Remember to stop by Circle K on your way home. Gossip and jokes. Did you hear the one about the door-to-door Bible salesman and the housewife who liked to vacuum in the nude?"

"No jokes tonight?"

"It wasn't that."

"What was it, then?"

"A billion E-mails, Betts always signed off the same way. Every time. 'Cheerio, dear one.'"

"Bible salesman, housewife with a vacuum cleaner."

"It's a limerick."

"Oh. What does 'vacuum' rhyme with?"

"Try 'Hoover.' Salesman's name was 'Coover.' Otherwise I don't remember how the damn thing goes, but the punch line's filthy."

"So tonight Betts didn't conclude with 'Cheerio, dear one.'"

"No."

"Bothers you."

"A lot."

Chauncey, in the sleeping bag, turned over on her side. The dpg studied her, picking at the damaged toenail.

"You trust her?"

"Yes. Sure. Chauncey's been real sweet to me. She's driving me up to the lake tomorrow. Better leave that toe alone, it'll get infected."

"Not if yours doesn't."

"What happens to me happens to you?"

"That's the big picture."

"But—I sprained my foot in the first half of the San Jose State game. Swelled up like a toad. Huff wrapped it, but there was no way. Couldn't put my heel down. Without me at point they'd have killed us in the second half. I was all by myself in the training room crying my eyes out when I realized, how strange, my navel's buzzing like there's a tiny bee inside. It tickled. Same as tonight. Buzz, buzz, woke me up."

"If we remember our physics correctly, at the subatomic level it's called a 'Kondo resonance.'"

"I hated physics."

"But it's quantum physics that makes our—your—duplication possible. You're the reflector, and I'm the—"

"Girl from my dreams."

"Quick off the dribble, deadly with the left-handed jumper. Twenty points in the second half. Destroyed San Jose."

"What happens to me happens to you.
Your
foot must've been sprained too. I've always wondered, how did you—"

"I could have explained a lot of things, if you'd devoted a little time to developing the relationship."

"It isn't as if we're actually related," Eden said with a slight shudder.

"You're a—"

"Doppelganger, I know. What difference does it make how many times I come to the rescue? Cotton pickers on de old plantation got more respects than does de lowly dpg."

"Sorry. It's still a learning situation for me."

"
De nada
. To answer your question about the sprained foot: I am who you are, but I can't feel what you feel. Doesn't work quite that way in reverse. If I get a whack on the head, you get a headache. Paradox. I can mimic your emotions, but what good is that? I'd like to try sex myself sometime. But it might not be much more than a helluva pelvic girdle workout if the emotional content is missing. Unless—until you give me a name and set me free, old massa."

"Back to that?"

"Blame me for asking?"

"I guess not, I just get the creeps. If you're 'free,' as you put it, someone else with my face and body and DNA, what do I do for a doppelganger?"

Chauncey spoke unintelligibly in her sleep, as if the question had been addressed to her. Eden looked at Eden. Only one of them had a worried face.

SAN FRANCISCO • MAY 29

A
tall man with silver hair aglow in the moonlight was walking a marble cake Great Dane across the Golden Gate Bridge at three in the morning. Offshore in the Pacific there was a fogbank nearly as high as the bridge towers.

Rory Whetstone drove the Lexus past the man with the dog and stopped. Tom Sherard and Bertie Nkambe got out of the backseat and waited for Buck Hannafin. The Great Dane's ears quivered and she looked up at the senior Senator from California.

"Friends," Hannafin said to the dog. He was smoking a cigar and carrying a revolver butt-forward in a western-style holster beneath his Burberry. A walnut grip of the wheelgun showed some dark old notches.

"Hello, Buck," Sherard said.

"Hello, Tom. Haven't seen you since, what, the service for Gillian at St. Bartholomew's?"

"I think so."

"Brings you to San Francisco?"