(Rona flew to Washington and did the tour. She was twenty-one. Much of the White House was unavailable to tourists, but the effluence of power was everywhere. It gave Rona a permanent low-grade fever. That night, alone in her cheap hotel room miles from monuments with the antique glow of lanterns and that famous address where all of the hard-traveled roads converged in her imagination, she wept bitterly, certain that she did, as the dreams had foretold, belong there. No idea of how to make it happen. So many loose ends in her life.
(With a little thought she hit upon politics as the nexus. Money begat power, but politics sustained it. Rona made some assessments. Bill Frederics was ambitious, to a point. He wanted to be California's attorney general, a modest pinnacle but probably the best he could hope for. But that lay well in the future. He didn't have a legacy, and there was [as Rona had discovered six months into her first pregnancy] Bill's craving to swing both ways. A stronger desire than either ambition or money. San Francisco gays were beginning to come down with a puzzling and fatal wasting illness doctors couldn't name.
(Rona handed her two-year-old son Joshua over to her mother to raise; packed up her new college degree in political science, and moved to L.A. This time she was after a gold-rush grubstake. A couple of million would do.)
"I've seen enough," Rona said to Victor Wilding. "It's great. Just what we need. Turn it off."
Wilding removed the disk from the DVD player.
"The girl we talked about. She's on my mind."
"Oh, yes. Eden, isn't it?"
"I've got Homefolks all over the place."
"Homefolks" was MORG's domestic operations division. "Innisfall. She hasn't showed up yet. She didn't go home. Staying with a friend, we believe. Family's not at home either. There were people camped in front of the house all night, it's taken on the nature of a religious vigil is what I hear. Sixty-eight Deep Creek Road is becoming a shrine for the nebulous, the credulous, and the half-bright."
"Eden will turn up. Casey left a message on her answering machine. I invited Eden to call me. Who could refuse an opportunity like that?"
"I've been looking into Eden Waring's background. She's adopted. Illegitimate. Born in a Provencal village in the hills above St. Raphael. Mother was a French adolescent, fifteen years old, confined to a sanitarium of considerable reputation: for a hundred and fifty years they've catered to the needs of royal nutcases and addicts. Eden's birth date was November 7, 1979."
"Should I be interested in where she came from?"
"Yes. The mother's name was listed on the birth document as Beaulieu. One of the more common names in the L'Esterel region, the other being Bellaver."
Rona nodded slowly, waking up to his pitch.
"Expensive place, you said. So the mother came from wealth. I thought the Bellavers were English."
"Anglicized French."
"You believe that Eden's mother could have been Gillian Bellaver?"
"I know that Robin Visited Gillian in a Connecticut village called Mt. Carmel the night before he went completely crazy. Destroyed poor Gwyneth, climbed out on that icy roof in the storm. By then he thought he was immortal. Wouldn't listen to anything
I
said."
"I know, you've told me a hundredâHow do you mean, 'visited'? Teleported himself?"
"Not even Robin Sandza could do that. Only dpg's have the ability. Visualize a place, the next instant we're there. It isn't one of the talents you get to keep, once you're set free. The rest of it just fades away as we get older. All I have of Robin anymore are his memories.
All
of his memories, which are now my nightmares. He made me a man, but left too much of himself in me."
"Don't go there. Look at Rona, darling. Think about who
we
are, what we've become. I me you we us."
"All right. I'm sorry. You know I haven't slept since you left."
"That night in Connecticut. What happened? How could Robinâ"
"Conceive a child? He couldn't, not in the Astral. He needed a surrogate to accomplish that. His own father. Peter Sandza was right there, asleep beside Gillian. Robin took possession of his father. While Robin made love to Gillian in the Astral, Peter did the same to Gillian on the earthly plane. And remembered none of it when he woke up in the morning. This was in early February, 1979. Almost exactly nine months later Eden was born. Who knows what this girl is really like, what she's capable of."
(So she heard this resonant voice unmarred by the slightly tinny amplification of the fairgrounds sound system and was drawn to it through the dust and flies and pods of horseshit, walking around family groups all dressed in range wear down to the toddlers in their sun shaded strollers, dodging sweet pink clouds of cotton candy, and came to the bunting-draped bandstand populated by a western swing band, local politicians, rivals for bigger and better state jobs sitting in a row of wooden folding chairs.
(Clint Harvester was a tall man in tight-fitting twill trousers and a tan jacket with western-style leather darts on the pockets. He was blond with a widow's peak. He had blue eyes that could only be described as winsome and a sharply angled jawline. He stood out against the clouds. Other men behind him seemed dull and muddied in his brilliant wake. Rona had only to listen for a couple of minutes to understand that Clint Harvester had vision. She loved visionaries. They flew to the heights. They dealt in grand concepts. They tended to be vague or stupid about everything else. He spoke without a text during his allotted ten minutes, rambling, his humor wry and dry, winning laughter and cheers from his twenty-odd supporters in patriotic sashes and buttons with Clint's face on them. More than half of Clint's claque were young women.
(Rona insinuated herself among them and stood, taller than most, beaming up at the country-squire spellbinder on the platform. He couldn't avoid seeing her. Her smile was constant, encouraging, approving. He looked at her more and more often, ran over his time, and had to be cut off. Rona was offered a
Clint When It Counts
button. She put it on, then walked around to the back of the platform where Clint Harvester was leaning against a pickup truck, a white-faced calf tethered in the bed. Clint wearing a tan Stetson now, having a beer with campaign workers and a dark-haired woman. Pretty, diamonds flashing as she drank from a tall paper cup, but her skin had been sunwrecked in a country of stark weathers. Rona took her to be his wife. Rona stood ten feet away from the group with the unnerving self-possession of the inspired and righteous until Harvester, sensing an irresistible force, looked her way again.
(Looked Rona's way, and never looked back.)
GREENWOOD LAKE ⢠MAY 29 ⢠10 A.M. PDT
T
he sun came up. The man temporarily known as Phil Haman expressed interest in getting some breakfast. Betts was hobbled, her mouth sealed with duct tape, but he'd left her hands free to play show tunes, sight-reading from sheet music he took from one of two custom-designed titanium suitcases that traveled everywhere with him. The other contained components of various weapons socketed in dark gray foam rubber. Airport security never troubled the assassin. He traveled by corporate jet or, if there was no time constraint, in his own star bus, a thirty-six-foot motor home.
Haman had taken Geoff's Glock from him and used more duct tape, twisted like rope, to hog-tie him on the floor next to the sofa on which Riley lay face down with his own hands taped behind his back. They could watch television by raising their heads, but neither man chose to. Riley's mouth also was taped shut.
Having secured everyone to his satisfaction, the assassin yielded to Face, who passed the time until dawn working up a likeness of Rona Harvester, using the breakfast bar as a makeup table and many photographs of the First Lady to guide him. He talked exclusively to Betts, praising her for her deft piano work, explaining as he went along what he was doing to transform Face into Rona.
"Complete Concealer hides the little imperfections. Then I use foundation, of course, and after that a light powder. Now we dust the lid and brow with ivory, umm-hmm! There. I'm going to use a number four brush with cocoa shadow and draw a
big
curve along the lashes, then fill in the crease. After that I think we'll go with a creamy pink shimmer, but I'm open to suggestions. It's possible with theatrical lighting that 'wild white' might be the thing. Just jump right in and nod or shake your head, doll. I can see you in my mirrors."
When Betts required a break from rippling the ivories Face turned on his micro tape recorder and listened to Rona Harvester's voice. The First Lady had taken elocution lessons and knew how to make the most of a clear pleasant soprano, but she had toned down or eliminated vocal tics, space fillers, and the like, and there was no strong regionalism in her voice for a mimic to exploit. She did have some pet expressions. "End of story, no tears." "Change the tune and we'll tango." And, "Don't try to sell me
that
," usually spoken with an exasperated leer and the Rona
look
.
Face demonstrated
the look
. If Betts hadn't been in a state of terror, her blood pressure maintaining in the mid two hundreds, she might have laughed.
The look
was an arms-folded, head-cocky, sideways glance of utter disbelief. Face had Rona Harvester cold.
By the time his cheese omelette was crisp at the edges the First Lady, with the addition of false eyelashes, had come alive, slightly caricatured but full of sass in the house overlooking the lake. He hadn't brought an appropriate wardrobe with him, but Face had scrounged a pair of heels in a bedroom closet that didn't cramp his feet. He'd found a bra in a dresser drawer that he wore, stuffed with wadded tissues, over his sleeveless undershirt. That, and Jockey shorts, were all he was wearing. Pale hairless hide from the neck down, a carnival head complete with ash-blond wig floating above the vaguely feminine body.
Face made Betts sit on the floor where he could keep an eye on all three of them while he buttered toast and ate his omelette. He watched TV. In one of the world's fleapits with unpronounceable names ancient grudges had flared again. Unshaved paramilitaries in a ruined square fired automatic rifles into the air with a lot of snaggle-toothed grinning and gusto. It was something to do. There was a plague of locusts somewhere else. Seething miles of insects. In only a few moments they covered the lens of the cameraman sent to record their devastation. Five boys who attended an exclusive prep school in Connecticut admitted bringing down a 747 with a surface-to-air missile crafted in a basement workshop. It had been something to do. Four women held for a year and a half as love slaves in a remote Ontario farmhouse had been rescued by provincial police. The black-bearded slave master had shot himself as the doors were battered down. Face helped himself to a second cup of coffee. The women taken from the farmhouse wrapped in blankets had the look most often seen on the faces of death-camp survivors. Wincing in the wan northern light. Not believing in their freedom. Not sure they wanted it. Life owed them an explanation.
On a breezy Washington morning Rona Harvester crossed the south lawn of the White House toward a waiting helicopter. Pard, the Harvesters' Border collie, walked beside her on a leash. There was a white patch the size of a playing card on Rona's forehead, souvenir of the ruckus on Ala Moana Boulevard. But there she was, in a pink churchgoing suit, on her way to visit and pray with her husband at Camp David. She acknowledged remote cheers from passersby outside the iron gates. Face got down from the breakfast bar stool and wandered closer to the TV, watching as Rona handed the collie over to a Marine at the foot of the helicopter steps and turned, smiling, with the exuberant, fists-in-the-air gesture that she had quickly made her signature. Face set his coffee mug down and mimed the smile, the gesture. Reminded himself to buy a pair of white gloves like those Rona was wearing.
Geoff McTyer thrashed violently and made incoherent sounds, trying to get his attention. With the First Lady off the screen Face finally looked at Geoff in annoyance, squatted in the high heels beside him, and ripped two layers of duct tape half off, uncovering Geoff's mouth.
Geoff gasped. "Told you . . . my father . . . FBI Director . . . let me go, orâ"
"Still trying to sell me
that
?" Face said in Rona Harvester's voice, with a sideways twist of his torso, accentuating the lift of the falsies, pointed like the noses of bird dogs. His long eyelashes fluttered mockingly. "Anyway, I don't have anything to do with it. Talk to
him
. Phil, you know. What's-his-name."
"Haman you goddamn moronic bastard I'm trying toâ"
"End of story, no tears." Face replaced the metallic gray tape, then slapped Geoff hard in the mouth to make sure the tape stuck. He looked up at Betts, whose eyes, reddened and frantic, were fixed on something else. Outside a motorboat was gunned across the wisping surface of the lake. They all heard another sound, inside the house, the cocking of the H and K machine gun as it was readied to fire.
"Is that all there is to it?" Eden Waring's voice shocked them all. "Pull back this little lever? Then what? Start shooting, I guess."
Face rose slowly to his feet, looking toward the breakfast bar where he had carelessly left the gun, entrusted to him by the man temporarily known as Phil Haman, beside his plate.